NOVEMBER 22 MARKED my 11th anniversary to the gospel ministry.
Eugene Peterson in his book, Working the Angles, writes a few sentences that take me back to the trajectory of my ordination. Describing what ordination ought to mean Peterson writes:
We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don't trust ourselves--our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know that we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and that there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of word and sacrament to us in this world's life. Minister with word and sacrament to us in all the different parts and stages of our lives—in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn't the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: word and sacrament.
One more thing: we are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know that you are launched on a difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. This is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it. There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise right now that you won’t give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices. There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing—God, kingdom, gospel—we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling us the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking biblical words of command and promise and invitation.
That, or something very much like it, is what I understand the church to say to the people whom it ordains to be its pastors.
Still, no matter how impressive the ritual, no matter how sincerely the vows are given, we keep trying to untie the cords that lash us to the mast. Some of us manage to get loose and respond to other demands. When the people around us forget the terms of our ordination, forget why they asked us to be pastors in the first place, and urgently try to involve is in their newest project, we begin to lose confidence in the authority of our own hard trade. We feel left out of the mainstream and then attempt to cure our sense of exclusion, obscurity, and frustration by plunging into an action that will “make a difference.”
Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles, pp. 23-25
One more thing: we are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know that you are launched on a difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. This is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it. There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise right now that you won’t give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices. There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing—God, kingdom, gospel—we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling us the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking biblical words of command and promise and invitation.
That, or something very much like it, is what I understand the church to say to the people whom it ordains to be its pastors.
Still, no matter how impressive the ritual, no matter how sincerely the vows are given, we keep trying to untie the cords that lash us to the mast. Some of us manage to get loose and respond to other demands. When the people around us forget the terms of our ordination, forget why they asked us to be pastors in the first place, and urgently try to involve is in their newest project, we begin to lose confidence in the authority of our own hard trade. We feel left out of the mainstream and then attempt to cure our sense of exclusion, obscurity, and frustration by plunging into an action that will “make a difference.”
Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles, pp. 23-25
