Last week, I was out in Berkeley, CA, and I attended a lecture series on the topic, "Spiritual but not Religious: Chasing the Divine." The very first speaker talked a little bit about that tagline "Chasing the Divine." And I couldn't help but think, 'Why the chase? God is here already.'We talk about following Jesus...and I suppose a chase is a frantic sort of following....trying really hard to be a good disciple.
But what if we just stop.
Take a breath.
There - right there - God in our midst.
We are with God; God is with us.
Yes, we follow, and maybe sometimes it feels a little frantic. But it seems to me that the key is to slow down - to not run so fast - to recognize that God is already with us.
So let's stop the chase and just breathe. And there God is, waiting for us.
posted by Marsha.
Hi. Stumbled on your blog with the search string "experience of the holy -land". I'm playing piano for an Evangelical Lutheran church and the pastor is an amazingly beautiful person, a tireless servant of Christ, so it's ongoing, painful, cognitive dissonance for me that he's *wired* to only *ever* picture people as being children. He reflexively reduces anyone down to, basically, a sheep in need of a shepherd. It's never occurred to him that somebody may have benefited from that shepherd and in that moment be standing on God with God doing a work through them. That doesn't ever seem to be a possibility for him, and as a result, in Bible study, enormous swatches of the Epistles just pass under his eyes unrecognized, and when I bring them out, he can only hear it as me thinking I'm perfect and don't need a Savior, even if I'm simply quoting them straight, a paragraph at a time.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm wondering if this is endemic with Lutheran pastors. So, like this post here, what you said is exactly right, and important. But look how much depends on being right about the person "trying hard to be a good disciple". If that's a mischaracterisation, then the post could be a terrible gaff. There's actually a good chance that they would *also* say, "Stop. Take a breath. There, right there...God in our midst," just like you did. They might even say it better. The pastor role seems to be the greatest danger to being a pastor.
I absolutely agree that pastors, by virtue of being ordained, do not have some special access to God. We aren't any more or less likely than anyone else to have a healthy prayer life, or a solid relationship with God. In fact, sometimes the stresses of working in a church and 'tending to the flock' can even get in the way of a healthy spirituality. When our role/title makes us see others as in anyway less than us, that is a huge problem. In my opinion, part of the role of pastor is to see all people as beloved children of God...beings with whom God has a relationship from birth until death and beyond. And, we also need to recognize our own sin and that pastors, too, are in need of our Savior.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I didn't mean to imply, by this post, that I was imparting wisdom on those that don't get it b/c they are 'chasing God.' I was, instead, attempting to reflect on a speaker I heard that claimed that we are all somehow chasing God...and that characterization didn't really resonated with my personal spirituality. But our experiences of God are all different.
Thanks for your thoughts. -Pastor Marsha