Look around you.
Billman, Kathleen
Memoirs about the pastoral vocation have become some of my favorite
theological texts. There are so many to choose from: Heidi
Neumark's Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx;
Samuel DeWitt Proctor's The Substance of Things Hoped For; Gregory
Boyle's Tattoos on the Heart; Eugene Peterson's The Pastor, to
name only four. A pastor friend told me that he once got on a plane with
Neumark's book in hand, and had to stop reading it because his
occasional bursts of sobbing were disconcerting the nearby passengers.
The stories told in the book moved him deeply--not least because they
helped him to experience anew what he holds most dear about living the
pastoral vocation.
The memoirists whose books I return to most often and encourage
seminarians to read are writers who turn their sharp powers of
observation and efforts to be honest about pastoral ministry on
themselves. One example comes from Richard Lischer's Open Secrets:
A Spiritual Journey through a Country Church. He does not hide the fact
that he felt that his first pastoral call was beneath him--that it did
not occur to him that he "needed a new education," rather than
treating his call as "an eccentric experience in ministry."
With disarming honesty he describes his first experiences of preaching
in this way:
My audience paid a heavy price for the gospel. The farmers had to
swallow my sixties-style cocktail of existentialism and psychology
before I served them anything remotely recognizable. I implicitly
required them to view their world and its problems through my eyes. All
I asked of them was that they pretend to be me.
That year some of the great Epiphany readings came from the letter
to the Ephesians, which is Paul's vision of the grandeur of the
church. Ephesians presents every small-town preacher with the marvelous
opportunity of unveiling Jesus' presence in the midst of the common
life of the congregation. "Look around you," Paul seems to
say, "the church is magnificent!" It's hard to depreciate
Paul's image of the "mystery hidden for ages" and its
"revelation in the Body of Christ," but ... I managed to
whittle it down to size.
Why couldn't I see the revelation of God in our little church?
(1)
I gravitate to this story because my own theological roots are in
just such a "country church," which was the way-station for
first and last call pastors. The pastors who looked around them and saw
"the revelation of God in our little church" inspired my life
and my love of the pastoral vocation. They were living witnesses to the
Word-become-flesh in the most unlikely and marginalized of places and
became the revelation of God.
The author of Preaching Helps for the Advent, Christmas, and early
Epiphany texts is the Rev. Dr. Seth Moland-Kovash. Seth is co-pastor,
along with his wife, the Rev. Jennifer Moland-Kovash, of All Saints
Lutheran Church in Palatine, 111. Together, they preach and lead the
congregation along with the help of their nine-year-old son Carl. I give
thanks for their vibrant ministry and for Seth's contributions to
preparing to preach these powerful texts.
Kathleen Billman. Interim Editor, Preaching Helps
(1.) Richard Lischer, Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey through a
Country Church (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 74-75.
