::
Peterson Quotes::
He is a pastor that really inspires me. |
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:: Tuesday,
December 3, 2002 :: The
pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the
shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeepers'
concerns--how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from
competitors down the street. ... Three pastoral acts are so basic, so
critical, that they determine the shape of everything else. The acts are
praying, reading Scripture, and giving spiritual direction. Besides being
basic, these acts are quiet. They do not call attention to themselves and are
not often attended to. In the clamorous world of pastoral work nobody yells
at us to engage in these acts. Everybody
treats us so nicely. No one seems to think that we mean what we say. When we
say "kingdom of God," no one gets apprehensive, as if we had just
announced (which we thought we had) that a powerful army is poised on the
border, ready to invade. When we say radical things like "Christ,"
"love," "believe," "peace," and "sin"
-- words that in other times and cultures excited martyrdoms--the sounds
enter the stream of conversation with no more splash than baseball scores and
grocery prices. Modern
success models can't match the effectiveness and self-worth provided by
Scripture. Every
congregation is a congregation of sinners. And if that weren't bad enough,
each has a sinner for a pastor. Community ... means people who have to learn how to care for each
other. Busyness
is the enemy of spirituality. It is essentially laziness. It is doing the
easy thing instead of the hard thing. It is filling our time with our own
actions instead of paying attention to God's actions. It is taking charge. Human
need is always more apparent than God's presence for the same reason that the
earth always looks flat. The human need is very visible in the sickness, the
loneliness, the boredom, and the busyness, while all the signs and symbols of
God's word and presence are several miles away in the church sanctuary. That
is why so many of us perform more like psychological therapists than
Christian priests when we are out of the pulpit. Our awareness of human need
crowds out and then takes precedence over our attentiveness to God's
presence. Among the apostles, the one absolutely stunning success was Judas,
and the one thoroughly groveling failure was Peter. Judas was a success in
the ways that most impress us: he was successful both financially and
politically. He cleverly arranged to control the money of the apostolic band;
he skillfully manipulated the political forces of the day to accomplish his
goal. And Peter was a failure in ways that we most dread: he was impotent in
a crisis and socially inept. At the arrest of Jesus he collapsed, a hapless,
blustering coward; in the most critical situations of his life with Jesus,
the confession on the road to Caesarea Philippi and the vision on the Mount
of Transfiguration, he said the most embarrassingly inappropriate things. He
was not the companion we would want with us in time of danger, and he was not
the kind of person we would feel comfortable with at a social occasion. Time,
of course, has reversed our judgments on the two men. Judas is now a byword
for betrayal, and Peter is one of the most honored names in church and world.
Judas is a villain; Peter is a saint. Yet the world continues to chase after
the successes of Judas, financial wealth and political power, and to defend
itself against the failures of Peter, impotence and ineptness. Life is
not something we manage to hammer together; it is an unfathomable gift. I'm
convinced that pastors don't give two cents about worship. They really don't.
And there's a reason for it. True worship doesn't make anything happen. It is
a losing of control, a weaning from manipulative language and entertainment.
... Pastors sense that if they really practice worship they are going to
empty out the sanctuary pretty fast. The
biggest enemy of the Church is the development and proliferation of programs
to meet people's needs. Everyone has a hunger for God, but our tastes (needs)
are screwed up. We've been raised on junk food, so what we ask for is often
wrong or twisted. When
you look at our history, it is no wonder that spirituality is so often
treated with suspicion, and not infrequently with outright hostility. For in actual
practice spirituality very often develops into neurosis, degenerates into
selfishness, becomes pretentious, turns violent. How does this happen? The
short answer is that it happens when we step outside the Gospel story and
take ourselves as the basic and authoritative text for our spirituality; we
begin exegeting ourselves as a sacred text ... True spirituality, Christian
spirituality, takes attention off of ourselves and focuses it on another, on
Jesus. The
culture conditions us to approach people and situations as journalists do:
see the big, exploit the crisis, edit and abridge the commonplace, interview
the glamorous. The Scriptures and our best pastoral traditions train us in a
different approach: notice the small, persevere in the commonplace,
appreciate the obscure. The
biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead,
communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and
villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in
them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called
"pastor" and given a designated responsibility ... to keep the
community attentive to God. Jonah
had a child-sized plan that did not pan out; God was enacting a huge destiny
that surprised everyone. The
person who looks for quick results in the seed planting of well-doing will be
disappointed. If I want potatoes for dinner tomorrow, it will do me little
good to plant them in my garden tonight. There are long stretches of darkness
and invisibility and silence that separate planting and reaping. During the
stretches of waiting, there is cultivating and weeding and nurturing and
planting still other seeds. My will
is my glory; it is also what gives me the most trouble. |
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