Category Archive: Theology – Pastoral
Leithart Wedding Sermons
Every time I read a wedding sermon by Peter Leithart, I look forward to what he’s going to preach on June 25. Here is his latest wedding sermon. Enjoy!
Of Preaching and Newspapers
Sermons are rarely more tiresome than when they strive for relevance. Drawing from the latest headlines transforms the preacher into a one-man MacLaughlin Group, a Crossfire without the cross though perhaps with some of the fire, and leaves the congregation thinking, “If I wanted Meet the Press, I could have stayed in bed.” I spent some time once searching for the source of the exhortation, “Preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” My search was unsuccessful, which is doubtless just as well, else I might be tempted to follow an uncharitable impulse to construct a contemporary Purgatorio in which the author of that statement was forced to listen, unto ages of ages, to some of the sermons he inspired. — Peter Leithart, “Of Preaching and Newspapers.”
The whole essay is worth reading, as is Tim‘s “Plea for Impractical Preaching.”
Simeon & Suffering
Here’s a quotation my father passed on to me recently. It’s from Charles Simeon, who struggled against great opposition in his ministry:
My dear brother, we must not mind a little suffering for Christ’s sake. When I am getting through a hedge, if my head and shoulders are safely through, I can bear the pricking of my legs. Let us rejoice in the remembrance that our holy Head has surmounted all His suffering and triumphed over death. Let us follow Him patiently; we shall soon be partakers of His victory.
Permission or Remission?
When God, through His grace, grants us forgiveness of sins without our merit, so that we need not purchase it or earn it ourselves, we are at once inclined to draw this reassuring conclusion and to say: Well, so we need no longer do good! — Therefore, in addition to teaching the doctrine of faith in His grace, God must constantly combat this notion and show that this is not at all His meaning. Sins are assuredly not forgiven in order that they should be committed, but in order that they should stop; otherwise it should more justly be called the permission of sins, not the remission of sins (Luther, Sermons on Romans, Chapter 8, cited in Thomas Oden, Classical Pastoral Care, vol. 2: Ministry Through Word and Sacrament, pp. 149-150).
Uniform
I’ve decided to dress up as a minister today. Oh, wait! That’s how I dress every day.
Charity
Later on in his handbook to Charles Williams’ novels, Thomas Howard writes (still summarizing Williams’ vision),
Saints experience as bliss the very same thing that damned souls hate. Vexing necessities like waiting at red lights or fetching cups of cold water turn out to have been early lessons in joy. For joy is the final fact. It is the way things are, whereas hell is the way things aren’t. If, for example, I can just try getting this cup of water in the middle of the night for my spouse, who is thirsty, even though God knows I am too sleepy to budge, I will have gone through a very small lesson in Charity…. I may of course refuse, in which case I will have missed one lesson. The difficulty here is that this refusal turns out to be more serious than my merely having missed a lesson. I have lost ground. I am not where I was. I am a step back. Or, put another way, I am now less prepared to pass the next lesson since I have contributed by my refusal to an inclination, already too strong, to pass up the lessons. It is so much easier just to stay in bed here. It is much, much nicer. How comfortable and warm it is here. Let my spouse fend for herself. I’ll just doze a bit more…
… and wake up in hell, says Williams. Not that he supposes I will be damned for a small thing like that. On that fierce accounting we are all lost. Rather, it is a matter of realizing that whatever I do is going to nourish either selfishness or charity in me. There is no third category.
Williams might say that Lesson Two in this Cup-of-Water-in-the-Middle-of-the-Night section might be that I learn how to do it in such a way that my spouse will conclude that it is no trouble at all for me. A small self-deprecating jest goes a long way here. And of course the point for Williams would be that by my at least making the attempt to do it lightly and good-humoredly I will find that I have come upon one of the keys to joy. It may look rather small and doubtful right now, but it is a hint of what the City of God is made of. Selfishness and sloth, on the other hand, cannot even imagine, much less want, this joy.
Williams might go on to suggest that Lesson Three could very well be my learning to receive such a cup of water, or to allow my spouse to get up and get one for herself without a lot of fuss and protestation, if that seems the best and least troublesome thing for both of us. Charity is not bondage and fuss. The giving and receiving fall into place when done properly, like the advancing and retreating steps in a well-executed dance (pp. 27-28).
Pastors in Chains
Here’s part of Peter Leithart’s “Against Ethics” section from his new Against Christianity. He’s speaking about rampant sin in the church and the need for pastors to serve as guardians of the boundaries:
… this dimension of pastoral ministry has all but evaporated. Pastors see themselves as proponents of Christianity, teaching “religious” things or assisting people on their personal spiritual journeys. Pastors have lost any sense that they are overseers of a new city and that they therefore have responsibilities for governance.
In part, this is an effect of the degeneration of the notion of pastoral vocation. If the tension between duty and desire has lost its existential edge in the twenty-first century, it is not because desire has become more vigorous. Instead, the tension has eased because duty has been collapsed into desire. Since Hume, moderns have been forbidden to derive an “ought” from an “is,” but it has become second nature to derive an “ought” from a “feels.” The consequences lie strewn on the surface of today’s social landscape, too obvious to require enumeration.
Historically, a pastoral candidate’s desires often had little to do with the Church’s call to serve in pastoral office. Far from seeking out positions of leadership, the greatest of the church fathers resisted with all their strength. Augustine had to be dragged into the cathedral for his ordination to the bishopric of Hippo. When he was a deacon, John Chrysostom made a pact with a friend that they would enter the priesthood together, but when the friend went forward John was nowhere to be found. Martin of Tours was carried from his cell and conducted to his ordination under guard. Gregory the Great, so we are told by his earliest biographer, fled from Rome to hide in the woods when rumors began to circulate that he was being considered for bishop. A humble anchorite saw in a vision where Gregory was hiding, and the Romans trooped out to bring him back for ordination. Calvin was persuaded to remain in Geneva only because Farel’s warnings made leaving even more terrifying than staying. So common was such resistance to ordination that as late as the nineteenth century the patriarchs-elect of Alexandria were led to their ordination wearing shackles.
In the modern church, calling has been reduced to little more than a strong desire to hold a position of ecclesiastical leadership. The terror of responsibility for the Church described by many of the leading pastoral writers of earlier centuries is seldom expressed during ordination exams. Candidates with even slight reservations about entering the ministry are treated with more than a little suspicion.
This dramatic shift in the Church’s understanding of calling is part and parcel of what David F. Wells has identified as the professionalization of the clergy, the reduction of ministry to technical and managerial competence. Pastoral ministry, Wells charges, has been detached from its theological moorings, and has become another career option for the upwardly mobile “helping professional.” One might well recoil from a duty imposed by divine vocation; but one aggressively markets oneself for a career. It is no accident that so many pastors disdain the clerical collar, which is, after all, the collar of the slave.
The Church will find herself in a healthier, if more intense and serious, condition when pastoral candidates begin again to appear for their ordination exams wearing chains (pp. 116-118).
Face to Face
I’ve recently started reading Steve Wilkins’ Face to Face: Meditations on Friendship and Hospitality. The first chapter is full of great stuff about the necessity of friendship.
The Bible teaches us that “A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire, and rages against all wise judgment” (Prov. 18:1). But God puts the solitary in families (Ps. 68:6). As Wilkins writes, “God, in His mercy, does not save us in isolation from other people but rather in community with other people” (p. 11).
The book opens with this analysis of our culture and its crying need for true friendship:
The clearest evidence that we live in a degenerate culture is the fact that we practice so little genuine biblical friendship; even the word friend itself has become a hollow term, drained of its biblical content and weight. This is precisely what we should expect as the influence of God’s covenant wanes in a culture — the culture gradually becomes more brutal and more barbaric, and true friends become hard to find. In the fourth chapter of Ecclesiastes, Solomon laments for the oppressed, because they cry out and there is no one to comfort them. Here is a lonely barbarity, without comfort or companion. Contemporary culture is like those oppressed people, a slave to sin and with no friend to turn to. Society and community begin to die out, because sin isolates men from one another. Sin by its very nature is a proud, selfish insistence on going one’s own way, and as such it cuts a man off from everyone around him. Whenever a society tolerates sin and covenant-breaking, loneliness becomes a common problem within that society, and its citizens begin to think of true friends as a luxury, not as a necessity (p. 9).
As I read that opening paragraph, I recalled what Dick pointed out recently. Dick runs a concrete company, and he’s noticed that, while his Christian workers generally eat together, the unbelievers often prefer to sit in their individual trucks all by themselves.
It figures. We were created in the image and likeness of the Triune God, who is Himself a society and the source of all society, all unity, and all diversity. But the farther we distance ourselves from Him, the less of His likeness we reflect. There’s no true society in sin. Sin isolates, and isolation is death.
Reflected Glory
Two more quotations from Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus:
The mission of the church … can be summed up in the phrase “reflected glory.” It is precisely through engaging in the christological task, focusing on Jesus and allowing our picture of God to be shaped thereby not as a detached intellectual exercise but as the very heart of our worship, our praying, our thinking, our preaching and our living, that we are enabled to reflect that glory. When we see, as Paul says, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and when we discover the length and breadth of what that phrase means, we see and discover this not for our own benefit but so that the glory may shine in us and through us, to bring light and life to the world that still waits in darkness and the shadow of death (pp. 124-125).
And toward the end of the book:
But if we are to be kingdom-announcers, modeling the new way of being human, we are also to be crossbearers. This is a strange and dark theme that is also our birthright as followers of Jesus. Shaping our world is never for a Christian a matter of going out arrogantly thinking we can just get on with the job, reorganizing the world according to some model that we have in mind. It is a matter of sharing and bearing the pain and puzzlement of the world so that the crucified love of God in Christ may be brought to bear healingly upon the world at exactly that point. Because Jesus bore the cross uniquely for us, we do not have to purchase forgiveness again; it’s been done. But because, as he himself said, following him involves taking up the cross, we should expect, as the New Testament tells us repeatedly, that to build on his foundation will be to find the cross etched into the pattern of our life over and over again (pp. 188-189).
Following
I’ve been reading N. T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus and came across this paragraph on the relationship between Jesus’ death and our vocation:
When we speak of “following Christ,” it is the crucified Messiah we are talking about. His death was not simply the messy bit that enables our sins to be forgiven but that can then be forgotten. The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God; the more we learn about the cross in all its historical and theological dimensions, the more we discover about the One in whose image we are made and hence about our own vocation to be the cross-bearing people, the people in whose lives and service the living God is made known. And when therefore we speak … of shaping our world, we do not — we dare not — simply treat the cross as the thing that saves us “personally,” but which can be left behind when we get on with the job. The task of shaping our world is best understood as the redemptive task of bringing the achievement of the cross to bear on the world, and in that task the methods, as well as the message, must be cross-shaped through and through (pp. 94-95).
Pastoral Joy
While reading through Thomas Oden’s Becoming a Minister, I came across this quotation from Martin Luther:
Unless those who are in the office of preacher find joy in him who sent them, they will have much trouble. Our Lord God had to ask Moses as many as six times. He also led me into the office in the same way. Had I known about it beforehand, he would have had to take more pains to get me in. Be that as it may, now that I have begun, I intend to perform the duties of the office with his help. On account of the exceedingly great and heavy cares and worries connected with it, I would not take the whole world to enter upon this work now. On the other hand, when I regard him who called me, I would not take the whole world not to have begun it (Table Talk, LW 54, #113, pp. 12-13).
Hospitality
Last night, I finished reading James Jordan‘s The Sociology of the Church, a book I deeply enjoyed. I found Jim’s treatments of the nature of conversion and of Pentecostalism and the gift of tongues very helpful and very balanced. The book is quite challenging, and there’s a lot in it that I’ll need to think through some more, but I highly recommend it.
I may post some more quotations from this book later on. But here, from an essay entitled “God’s Hospitality and Holistic Evangelism,” is a quotation about the eldership:
Rule in the church is to be by means of footwashing (hospitality) as much as by giving orders (Mark 10:42-45; John 13). Christ rules by being present with us, by being our Host and having us over to His house for dinner, even by being our Servant! The elders, who are to imitate Christ, must do the same (pp. 235-236).