Working the high wire

Sunday Evening

Jeremiah 23

high wire 2 (Photo credit: _gee_)

²⁵I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name.

Such words make me tremble.  Being a pastor is working the high wire without a net.  Into our hands is committed the responsibility to give public witness to the message/Word/Gospel of God. It is our task to help the scripture speak, to open the text so that it can work its work in its hearers. The congregation trusts us to help them hear the text as God would have them hear it.  Yes we have in our hands this brilliant record of God’s speech through the ages.  Yes we have behind us the intense education of seminary and the ongoing value of our own study. Yes we have available to us the work of many scholars through many ages and the witness of the saints and the confessions and creeds of the church. But when I rise to speak on Sunday morning there is no one there to tell me whether I have rightly captured the encounter between God and these people through this text.  And I will be held to account.

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. (James 3:1 ^nrsv  )

I will be held to account not for the size of the Sunday attendance, the success of the youth ministry, nor whether we ended the year in the black, but for whether I have spoken God’s message rather than the imaginations of my own heart, whether I have spoken God’s words or my dreams.

Whether the Gospel bears fruit in the lives of the hearers is the work of the Holy Spirit.  For that Holy Spirit I cry as I prepare, and upon that Holy Spirit I depend in speaking.  I trust that God, in his grace, can help people hear what they should hear whether or not I have said it.  But still, the Bible is in my hands and the responsibility on my shoulders.

The church is not a playground for my religious imagination. My dreams do not belong here.  My words do not carve rock from the mountains.  God’s word alone is the fire and hammer.

And when I sit in the pew as a listener, I must turn off that part of my mind that wants to think about the quality of the sermon and struggle, as we all do, to listen for God’s voice in what is said.  If God can speak to the prophet through a donkey, he can certainly use whatever preacher is in the pulpit, even me.

This is, after all, the miracle of God’s presence in the world: he uses our voices, our hands, our hearts, our kindness, our compassion, our outrage at injustice, our defense of the widow and the orphan, our speaking the word of Grace, our sharing of bread.  God is present through means: bread, wine, human words, human lives.  In that encounter between one person and another is the mystery of the divine.