Reorganizing my bookshelves yesterday was a chore due
to my neglecting the task for too long, but doing so renewed vocational thanks
for my occupation. I don’t have to be a pastor. I get to be a pastor.
The hard things about the job aren’t worth complaint.
Criticisms? No one likes to be
criticized. We pastors give the impression we get more than our fair share but
that’s because we’re in our own heads a lot, this being a reflective work as
well as relational, and also because a lot of us have glass jaws—we don’t know
how to take a punch. When I think about it, the greater marvel is that I’m not
criticized more.
This is a good work, pastoral leadership. It’s a
good tired when it drains me. It’s a good burn when it frustrates me. It’s a
good grasp by the collar when it rebukes me. I would be a sorrier Christian if I
wasn’t a pastor, by which I mean I would be much more individualist than I already
am. Pastor = present to the people of God and o how I need that full-on.
I had a bad Sunday a couple weeks ago. Preaching was
fine but I was in a surly mood. I growled thanks to those who affirmed my
sermon, short-circuited greetings, kept my head down in the halls, avoided a
luncheon my family attended to go eat crap at a fast food place and feel
unjustified sorrow for myself. But you know what I actually felt sitting in
that plastic booth? Yearning for my congregation! I wanted to call everyone
back into the building, form a large circle, and spend a couple hours embracing
everyone, thanking them for the privilege of pastoring their church despite my
petulant heart. As Yogi Berra might have put it in my shoes, even the people
there I don’t like I really love. (Found my collection of Yogi Berra sayings
yesterday.)
I don’t have to be told how well I have it in my
church. I tell myself frequently. The church I deserve is not the church I pastor.
Years ago a pastor-friend passed on to me what a pastor-friend told him years
before, that there are churches unworthy of God’s servants and servants
unworthy of God’s churches. Worthiness can be a relative consideration to be
sure, and coming out of seminary I worried about landing in the unworthy church,
but now I know myself better. I would prove myself the unworthy servant far more
quickly and easily than First Evan would prove herself the unworthy church.
Even if I was serving an “unworthy church” and down
with an acutely fetid case of ecclesiasticitis this Thanksgiving, pastoring is
still the frame in which I want to leave my life portraiture. Speaking of, at
First Evan my portrait will someday augustly hang in the hall outside my office
alongside the portraits of those who occupied this stewardship before me. (Yes,
we’re that kind of church; my children wonder why the church waits to put it
there only after I’m gone or dead,
whichever comes first.) Till then—some years yet I hope—I’ll take more selfies
with the people who give me the privilege of belonging to them now and in some
sense always too, with increasing gratitude.