Years ago, I went to the local hospital to visit a church member who had been admitted into the ICU (intensive care unit). As per protocol, I went into the waiting room and dialed the nurses’ station to be admitted. The person on the other end asked me what my relationship was to the patient. I said I was his pastor.
After I hung up, someone in the waiting room immediately sought me out. “I’ve always wondered,” she said, “what does the word ‘pastor’ mean?” The answer, of course, is “shepherd.”
The pastor is the shepherd of the flock. Yes, I know, it sounds a bit clichéd, if not cornball, but it has real import. The shepherd is called not only to feed the sheep, but to protect them.
In verse 4 of the famed 23rd Psalm, we read, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
The rod and staff, it should be noted, were not just to guide the sheep from here to there. They also were used as weapons to ward off the sheep’s natural predators.
If nothing else, this passage would seem to suggest that life is filled with dangers, natural or otherwise. And it is the Good Shepherd, God, who seeks to protect us.
But, alas, this is not how much of modern-day theology works.
This morning I read an article in our local paper about a mainline church nearby that’s called a new pastor. The title was “New Pastor Drawn to [name of the church} by Compassionate Congregation.”
In the article, the new pastor speaks in florid terms of the church’s commitment to “missions and outreach” and names several of its ongoing efforts.
At considerable risk of sounding downright curmudgeonly (my defense is that I’ve been around the block more than a few times), my first reaction was one of apprehension. Which is not to say that “missions and outreach” are wrong, or that being “compassionate” is in any way unchristian. They’re anything but.
It’s just that (and hopefully I’m wrong in this instance) we in the church too often betray the subtle message that we, by definition, are givers and others are recipients of our largess (we have our act together, in other words, and, as such, are prepared to fix what ails you).
Years ago, I went on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic. The American Baptist Church had partnered with a Haitian immigrant who’d started a church in the city of La Romana. A bunch of us from several area churches decided to go down there to help build a hospital the Dominican church had ambitiously embarked upon.
Prior to leaving, we all gathered for an orientation session. Divided up into separate groups, we were asked to discuss what we hoped to accomplish on the trip.
I was amazed at the responses. You’d have thought we were going there to save the world. And in a week’s time! When it was my turn, I said I was going to sling cement. I would be a mule. The job of savior, I submitted, had already been taken.
There is a natural tendency in affluent America for the church to view the relationship between giver and receiver as unequal. We give, they receive.
What I discovered on that trip was that, if anything, we received far more than we could have hoped to give. Certainly, we had money, building and medical supplies, as well as manpower, but they had an incomparable faith, unlike anything I’d ever seen, both then and now.
I vividly recall, for instance, receiving communion from an old, hunched-over man with a deeply lined, sun-beaten face whom I would guess was well into in his 80s. It was part of a service held in a dilapidated “church,” which was nothing more than a wooden shack with dirt floors and a rusted, leaky roof made of corrugated steel.
The church was situated in one of the bateys, or sugar cane villages that dot the Dominican countryside, where appalling slave conditions exist. Most people, despite working 12-hours a day or more, can’t afford a single pair of shoes.
In any event, as the old man bent over to offer me the “bread,” which consisted of saltine crackers broken up into tiny pieces about the size of one’s fingertip, I witnessed a level of devotion and decorum one might use when handling rare precious gems or fragile crystal glass. The reverence he showed was stunning. I will never forget it. I was completely humbled.
Because I was a pastor, I was invited to say a few words, though I felt conspicuously unworthy of the honor. Employing short phrases, as my words were translated into Creole, I said, “Most of us Americans think when we come down here we’re the ones helping you. In reality, it’s you who offer us far more than we could ever possibly give you – your extraordinary faith and the example it sets before us.”
We gave from our abundance. They gave from their poverty. And what they offered was a spiritual power that spoke directly to heart and soul.
As I say, what I see all too often in our mainline churches is an insistent, unwavering obsession with the Social Gospel. For all the good it seeks to do, it tacitly presumes, often unwittingly, that we somehow have it all together, and that our job, as such, is to bequeath to others what we already possess.
I hate to say it, but it’s arrogant. And unrealistic.
Psalm 23, among other things, portrays the harsh realities of life. It assumes earthly life is tough, and that all human beings invariably face hardship (the valley of the shadow of death). The good news is that God walks with us as we pass through.
Whenever I was searching for a new church, I would fill out a “Ministerial Profile” provided by my denomination (U.C.C.). One section asks the candidates to choose from a long list the twelve “gifts” that best represent his or her ministry.
The one that seemed especially important to search committees, I discovered, was this: “Preaching that relates the gospel to everyday living.”
Now there’s more to this than meets the eye. What people really want, and need, is a message that relates to the timeless and unfathomable depths of the human condition. Only then does its relationship to the specific events of the day make any sense at all.
From the dawn of time, human beings have struggled with what it means to be human. This struggle is based on the existential challenges wrought by pain and suffering, by the intractable, mysterious presence of evil in our world. It is the struggle to obtain salvation amid the forces that would destroy us, to overcome the vicissitudes of living in a world that is heartachingly beautiful and heartachingly tragic.
The meta-narrative of human existence, the human story, as reflected in art, music, drama, and storytelling, both ancient and modern, faithfully charts the struggle of the hero to rise above the forces that would annihilate. We instinctively connect with these stories because we sense, even unconsciously, that this is our story as well. (N.B., the classic Disney movies and children’s fairy tales.)
An indisputable fact of life is that evil exists. The Christian story assures that the believer shall find victory over this same evil, even as Jesus rises victoriously from the dead. This is not some frivolous, manufactured fiction, but exists at the very core of human aspiration.
Modern-day theology, however, implicitly rejects this noble, time-honored story, along with its intractable truths. In fact, the mainline church today tends to deny, ignore, and/or downplay any real need for the heroic struggle against the evils of our fallen world.
And that’s because the focus of their Social Gospel is on fixing the world, as if evil shall not stand against its beneficent, reformist ministrations.
Thus, rather than fortifying and equipping the human soul to face the inevitable struggles wrought by evil, the Social Gospel acts as if evil shouldn’t exist.
If managed properly and intelligently, that is, life should be struggle-free. The world can and must be rearranged so that no human being should ever have to suffer. Injustice and hardship are illusions that, by means of proper moral tending, can be excised from human existence.
Teaching people how to achieve salvation in the midst of life’s inevitable struggles, therefore, is rendered meaningless, for it betrays a willful failure on our part to fix what ails us. The focus should be on eliminating the very conditions that cause hardship in the first place! Our return to the Garden awaits.
Here, the purpose of pastoral ministry is not to shepherd the flock through the valley of the shadow of death, but to abolish the valley altogether. That the valley exists is both unfair and unjust.
Yet in the end, no matter how much we seek to effect change in our world, evil will exist. And as long as it does, we will require a gospel that speaks to us in, of all places, the valley of the shadow of death.
For as the old saw goes: if it doesn’t play in the cancer ward, it’s not the gospel.