nakedpastor

On Monday night I watched the season finale to “Grey’s Anatomy”. I’ve NEVER watched the show before, but for some reason I watched this particular episode. At one point in the show, a heart surgeon is performing a heart-transplant on a patient. The heart has been successfully sewn into the patient’s chest and the patient seems to be doing well. Now the heart has to be massaged or shocked into action. She massages the heart. They shock the heart. Nothing. Massage some more. Nothing. Shock some more. Nothing. The attending surgeons and doctors and nurses all give up. They start folding things up. The heart-surgeon says, “Wait!” Give it time. Wait! The monitor continues flat-lining. It’s just impossible that this heart is going to work again. Impossible! Too much time has lapsed. I even say in my mind, “He’s dead!” Then, just when it is certain that the heart has failed and the patient is dead, the heart throbs and begins beating! Success. The wisdom and experience of the heart-surgeon produced a faith that truly believed this heart would live again.

I immediately applied it to the personal lives of people in our congregation, and even to the life of our church. There are many people who have consigned us to death; many who have given up and folded up, certain that there is no life left in us. We’ve been both massaged with love and tenderness, and shocked with tragedy and forceful words, but nothing has seemed to work. Nothing. It was a good try and we gave it everything we had, but all for nothing.

However, I feel like that skillful heart-surgeon: I am waiting! Just wait! True resurrection only comes after true death. True death! It can’t be feigned or approximate. It must be true death. Jesus was dead and buried. It wasn’t feigned or approximate. It was total. Everyone had given up and thrown in the towel. The Spirit says, “Wait! Wait! Wait!” I wait. I have an inexplicable certainty that this church WILL beat with life again! I can’t give you facts or data or even experience to support my suspicion. But I believe in the resurrection. I believe in it, and so I have to trust God for it.

So I wait. My God, I prayerfully wait.

I’m reading Miroslav Volf’s FREE OF CHARGE: GIVING AND FORGIVING IN A CULTURE STRIPPED OF GRACE (Zondervan, 2005). So far so good. Here’s a couple of related quotes that I think are quite profound. First: “…our images of God are rather different from God’s reality… God is different from what we conceive… we unwittingly reduce God’s ways to our ways and God’s thoughts to our thoughts. Our hearts become factories of idols in which we fashion and refashion God to fit our needs and desires…

“Slowly and imperceptibly, the one true God begins acquiring the features of the gods of this world. For instance, our God simply gratifies our desires rather than reshaping them in accordance with the beauty of God’s own character” (p. 22).

If I remember correctly, I think Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, mentioned a conversation had with Abraham Heschel, the Jewish scholar. They were commenting on the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20: 3). Heschel said that this was the very first commandment because this is the first step into sin, or the central sin of humanity.

I think the church, as it has been through all the ages, is especially vulnerable to idol-making. We don’t collect gold from our jewelry boxes, throw them into a kiln and pour the molten metal into molds to make a statue that we can bow down before and worship. I haven’t lately anyway, nor do I know anyone who has. BUT! I am susceptible to the bad habit of collecting tidbits of “truth” from here and there, the little golden nuggets of my ideas, my desires, my longings and passions, even my resentments and wounds, mixing them in together to come up with some kind of an integration of thought. Then, what happens next is most interesting and dangerous: I pour this concoction into a pre-made mold, which is what I would want God to be, the shape I would most like him to take. Then, when the process is complete, I can exclaim like Aaron: “I threw it (gold) into the fire, and out came this calf!” (Ex. 32: 24), like it’s a total self-revelation of God himself and not a god of my own making.

How can any of us be exempt from this kind of error? It requires constant effort, brutal self-criticism, and open-minded study. Beware, because even the elect can be deceived!

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I’ve just finished an awesome book I highly recommend called Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder. It is the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who would “cure the world”. He specializes in infectious diseases and labors tirelessly to rid the whole world of such diseases as AIDS and TB. Profound and moving, I couldn’t put it down and found all kinds of inspiration to live a good life of service.

At one point he is questioned about the logic of spending so much time, effort and money on one young patient knowing that the likelihood of his survival is slim at best. Buried in his response to that query was this:

“How about if I say, I have fought for my whole life a long defeat. How about that? How about if I said, that’s all it adds up to is defeat?… I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory…”

He continues discussing how we talk about “winning”, and how we who are born with certain advantages that automatically qualify us to be winners in a winning society (first world), and how we say we want to be on the side of the losers needs to be critically examined with brutal honesty. He says, “We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat” (p. 288).

I love this passage because it reminds me of how I’ve felt about the church and pastoring for years. Just because we do what we feel is right doesn’t grant us automatic success. In fact, I have clung tenaciously to my convictions about certain things, hoping they’d pay off with success, only to experience a “long defeat”. Does this mean I switch my strategy, compromise my conscience, injure my own integrity, in order to experience success?

Farmer’s convictions to serve the poor, especially in Haiti but also other places around the world, met with opposition and criticism of all kinds. But he pressed on convinced that he was doing the right thing. This book helped me to continue doing what I feel is right, inspite of the consequences, inspite of the criticism, inspite of the opposition, inspite of the long defeat, not only because we sometimes see victories, but simply because it is right!