Posted: 3/02/07
CYBER COLUMN:
Awaiting spring
By John Duncan
I’m sitting here under the old oak tree, awaiting spring. The sun shines today. Birds sing the glory. And life like a river flows in the joy of ministry.
I mention the river in the flow of ministry because the life of a pastor is a life on the move, full of twists and turns, ups and downs, power-packed with the pleasant and the unpleasant. Eugene Peterson was once asked what he liked about the church, and he replied, “The mess.” C.S. Lewis says that in a Christian society there are to be “no passengers or parasites,” meaning, of course, that in the church people are Christ-followers, pilgrims on the journey, but they are not to sit idly by and watch like mere passengers but to serve and act, and, that, they are not parasites that destroy the body but “little Christs” (C.S. Lewis) who build up Christ’s body. In my years as a pastor, I have seen many passengers and parasites in the church.
We all know that Saddleback Community Church’s Rick Warren says the church is purpose-driven, and he is right. The Bible scholar Peter Stuhlmacher says, “The life of the church can and should appear as a sign of the righteousness of God.” He is right, also. “Daddy,” my youngest daughter once asked, “you’re the boss of the church. Aren’t you?”
“No,” I replied, “I have a lot of bosses.” Quickly I corrected my verbal joke by telling her, “God is the boss of the church.” That is right, too.
The writer of Hebrews speaks of the church as an assembly, not to be neglected, but tells us of Jesus, the great, sympathetic High Priest to whom we can go to find grace and mercy just in the nick of time (Hebrews 4:14-16). I find the church, really, is people in relationship with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, and because of Christ, people who relate to one another. So the church is people who have a relationship with Christ who have a relationship with each other because of Christ. Without Christ, the church goes nowhere and dies like a person infested with a fatal parasite.
As a pastor, I have the privilege of helping individuals in their relationship with Christ and their relationships people to people. One thing I find is that people need an ear on the journey, as well as a guide to lead them into Christ’s light near the cross in an hour of darkness.
Not long ago, on different days, I received two calls—one requesting a priest; the other requesting communion.
The first was a call from a lady who needed a priest. She tried for days to get the Catholic priest to come and see her, but he was too busy. I am not criticizing the priest, but merely stating the fact of her comment because I know that priests, like pastors, are busy people, and who knows but what he was ill or out of town or at the hospital visiting the sick? I listen as she talked, and she asked me to come immediately, and I did. A crisis keeps no calendar and shocks and often surprises, and Henri Nouwen, a priest himself, once said, “Interruptions are our ministry.” This told, I drove my car to her house by the lake.
I drove, got lost, called her on the phone to get the directions explained again, stopped at a convenience store to look at a map, and finally arrived at her house. Her mobile home overlooking the lake provided a picturesque scene as I knocked on the door. She opened the door, told me she was deaf and could not hear well, stated that she was 83 years of age, then finally invited me into her home and began to tell me the long story of her pain. Her house like a mural, a mosaic, colorful with old carpet and stained walls, reeked of smoke with stuff piled everywhere. I listen intently as her wrinkled faced winced and tears streamed like a dripping rain down her cheeks while her dog sat at my feet. A picture hung on the wall—a picture of Jesus with piercing eyes watched over both of us. Jesus watches with eyes wide open.
I will not tell you her long story. It is much too personal, much too sad, much too painful. She stated her case, though, as she completed her long story of sorrow in the shadows. “No one wants to listen to an old woman,” she said, “but I just need someone to hear me because I need forgiveness.”
I could tell the pain had swelled beneath her soul and she like a train chugging down the tracks of life, one carrying passengers and who knows, maybe even parasites. Like a train this elderly woman needed to blow off puffs of steam to relive the pressure inside. We prayed to Jesus who watched over us and begged forgiveness, and she cried simple, sweet, sad tears.
Life is a trinity for some, a triad of loneliness, grief, and sorrow in the world. I once sat on a bus in Cambridge, England, one cold, February day. A lady, aged and sad with lines on her faced looked at me, and spoke, “”My life is very lonely since my husband died.” Life bursts with grief, too. Christina Rossetti, the poet, wrote, “My heart dies inch by inch; the time grows old, grows old in which I grieve.” Langston Hughes once asked, “And ain’t there any joy in this town?”
I left the lady’s house. I sensed her loneliness, grief and sorrow. She needed an ear, a listening ear to find in its depth forgiveness. All I knew to do was to take her to the High Priest of forgiveness.
Then one week later, a lady called explaining that her daughter was dying and needed communion, the Lord’s Supper. “I have been trying to find a preacher in this town for days who will administer the Lord’s Supper. My daughter is dying.” I listened and felt her urgency. She pleaded with me to come, “Please come quickly!”
I loaded my Lord’s Supper supplies, which is not a common thing, because, while I have shared the Lord’s Supper at nursing homes, I never had I done so at the hospital. I arrived at the hospital, found room 112, introduced myself and saw relief wash over a mother’s face. She walked me over to her daughter, woke her, introduced me and explained that her daughter’s kidneys and liver were failing. The daughter looked gray and yellow at the same time, a mosaic of pain as she winced and moved and shifted her small frame in the bed. We prayed, took the bread and cup in Jesus’ name, and the mother wept, while the daughter acted as if she were going to throw up. She did not and quietly slipped off to sleep. The mother thanked me and thanked me and thanked me, as if gold had been given her or even as if I had delivered a new liver for her daughter. In their pain, the two ladies only wanted to be reminded of the great High Priest who once suffered pain, to feel the warmth of the one who gives comfort and sympathy by a shimmer of light from the cross, to know Jesus the bread of life and Jesus the compassionate, suffering grace-giver in death.
Ain’t there any joy in this town?
So, here I am under the old oak tree, scrambling beneath tears in the shadow of the cross. Churches find joy in forgiveness and in the cross, and people do, too. I called the lady I visited in the trailer home the other day. She seems fine, relieved from the pressures of her life. Her dog had been to the vet, and she thinks somewhere in her piles there was a card I sent. I heard, too, from the mother whose daughter was dying. She had been moved to the big-city hospital in hopes of finding a liver donor. And I talked to Jesus my High Priest. After all, where would the church be without him? And, where would I be without his forgiveness and his cross? Or you for that matter? Where would you be? There is joy in the town! The joy is in Jesus. To coin a phrase from an old Gatorade commercial, “Is it in you?” Is it?
John Duncan is pastor of Lakeside Baptist Church in Granbury, Texas, and the writer of numerous articles in various journals and magazines. You can respond to his column by e-mailing him at jduncan@lakesidebc.org.
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