"Do you believe in the supernatural?"
"Yes," I said. "Sometimes I think it's all that I believe in."
"I mean all of it-virgin birth and bodily resurrection?" – "Yes."
"The soon coming of our Lord and signs and wonders? Healing and prophecy? Miraculous visions and dreams?"
"Yes, yes, and yes. And also walking on water and feeding the hungry."
This conversation was taking place in the living room of a man and woman who had visited the congregation I serve. They had recently moved into the area, had visited the church, and had asked me to come to their home to talk. They were frank in telling me that they were shopping around for the "right church." They liked what they had seen in our church but needed to make sure about me. They wanted badly to verify my belief in the supernatural.
I was and am sympathetic to their concern. If I was new to an area and looking for a place to worship, I would certainly want a pastor who embraced the supernatural. I would want a spiritual leader who believed that God was alive and active, who did things past understanding, who spoke from the whirlwind and parted the waters.
I would be very unhappy if I found that behind the conventions of cross and altar my pastor was mostly concerned with plotting strategies for increasing the Sunday offerings. I would be furious if I discovered that when my pastor prayed for me, he had no expectation that God would do something neither of us could do for ourselves but was only working a therapeutic technique that would calm me down and make me feel better. I would feel thoroughly gypped if my pastor used the pulpit as a counter from which to hand out aspirin advice and candy-striper inspiration when what I had come for was prophetic surgery and a kerygmatic resurrection.
If I were in their place, I also would want a pastor who believed in the supernatural. Why else would I bother with church? God is doing a lot more things in this world than get reported in the newspapers and verified in the laboratories; I would want a pastor who helps me see and name them. God has many more things yet to do in me and my friends than he has done; I would want a pastor who keeps me ready and responsive for whatever they are.
If I had the slightest suspicion, I would certainly ask, "Do you believe in the supernatural?" And I wouldn't be satisfied with a stingy, minimalist supernatural-I would want something embracing and robust, risking foolishness.
But as the conversation developed that evening on Foxcroft Drive, it turned out that we had different ideas of how this belief in the supernatural was worked out in the congregation. They had in mind demons shouted down, converts glamorized, and miracles advertised. The supernatural for them was excitement and glitter; they wanted to know if I would serve as ringmaster.
I realized that given their expectations, simply saying that I believed in the supernatural would be misleading and would very soon disappoint them. I asked if I could tell them a story. They gave permission. The story didn't convince them, for they never came back to church. But for this pastor it is still the truth of the matter, so I am going to tell it again.
The Poisoning of "Pastor"
Pastor was a ruined word for me before I became one. The term did not release adrenalin into my bloodstream; it designated nothing to which I aspired.
Surprisingly, the Christian community itself, in which pastors did their work, was wholly positive for me. I came to know the person of Jesus at an early age, learned the Scripture stories, and entered quite freely into the way of life that developed out of Jesus and the stories. My home had a rich texture and much love in it. It always seemed far more interesting and colorful than the homes and families of my friends.
The small, sectarian church to which we belonged was an exciting place to grow up. Spring and autumn revivalists wound our emotional clocks with equinoctial regularity.
"Characters" predominated this working-class congregation, untouched by the homogenization of mass culture. Itinerant eccentrics brought the latest news in about-to-be-fulfilled prophecies of Gog and Magog. Misfits found space into which they didn't have to fit. The wild weeping of Jephthah, the wanton beauty of Bathsheba, the ruined hulk of Samson-these were familiar sights and sounds in our congregation.
Every Sunday, Sister Leiken, a shrunken replica of St. Luke's Anna and well into her tenth decade, recounted the vision in which the Lord promised that she would not die but be caught up with the saints in the air at his Second Coming. That kept me on my eschatological toes!
The men and women I saw in church on Sundays were redolent with story, with Bible story. While in later years I would struggle to get the "two horizons" into hermeneutical harmony, for the years of my formation in the faith there was a single horizon, no gap between the Bible stories I was told in church and the people stories I carried home from church.
A most biblical community it was. By "biblical" I don't mean well-behaved or holy-it tended more to the Corinthian side of things-but it was sin-conspicuous and God-aware.
The miracle Sven Olsen reported when his cucumbers were preserved from a mid-summer frost was of a piece with the water turned into Cana wine.
The suicide by hanging of 18-year-old Jess Fletcher in the barn at the end of our alley after he had been discovered in sexual congress with one of the barn animals paralleled Judas at Akeldama. It also prompted my first reading of Leviticus.
The arrival of Stephanie, a young Polish refugee, and her later marriage to a chubby middle-aged bachelor made Ruth the Moabitess audio-visual (but unfortunately cast a shadow of doubt on the long-term happiness of life with Boaz).
But in this extravagant mix of love and laughter, sacrificial beauty and dark sexuality that I felt so at home in, so biblically at home, there was one person who did not fit-the pastor. Our mountain valley attracted hunters and fishermen, some of whom posed as pastors, coming and going with regularity. I don't know when it occurred to me that they were frauds, but it was well before adolescence.
I assume that most of them were good people personally, but vocationally they were dishonest, ego-driven, and more interested in the religious effects they could produce and profit from than in God.
They entered our town, grabbed the wilderness ecstasy and emotional loot, and were on their way again. I sensed they were not telling the truth from the pulpit, that it was propagandistic manipulation and spiritual blackmail. They all made extravagant claims for the supernatural. I never had a pastor I respected.
It is a marvel to me now as I look back how little difference that made to my feelings about God. In one sense, the pastors were conspicuous-they took up a large amount of space on the Sunday stage-but their effect on me was marginal. They never managed to interfere with the faith itself, my sense of God and salvation. They were important in a kind of external way, but they never penetrated my psyche. What they did was insure that I would never for a moment think of becoming a pastor.
In my late adolescence and approaching adulthood, I more or less drifted into the mainline churches. I was looking for a spirituality that also embraced the life of the mind and had roots in history, and found it-found minds that were robustly sane in thinking to the glory of God, found roots that penetrated one-generation experiences down into the centuries-deep soil of lived faith.
But in those churches where I found access to theology and tradition, I was no more fortunate than before in my pastors. If my earlier pastors had been cheap parodies of sideshow barkers, these later ones were dull parodies of corporation executives. They had been institutionalized into blandness, turned into religious businessmen who worked hard for the Company. Their enthusiasm in running an efficient religious store did not excite my admiration.
All the while I was looking for work to do, hoping I could find something that would have to do with God and the Scripture and the church. Teaching seemed to be the thing. I was good at books and loved them. I would teach theology, Scripture, and languages-this material and experience I found so congenial. Eventually I arrived on a seminary faculty.
I was now married, with a child coming. My salary was insufficient for expansion into the family way. I realized that if I did not find a way to supplement my income, I would soon be putting the promise of the first Beatitude to the test. I then discovered that I was more interested in teaching the Bible than living out one of its less congenial details and went looking for a part-time job.
The only thing offered was pastor-an assistant pastor, but still pastor. I took it reluctantly, conscious of something vocationally dishonest in doing so, for I was not a pastor and never intended to become one. I entered the ranks of the mercenaries.
The Power of the Pastorate
After a few weeks it dawned on me that this pastor to whom I reported as an assistant was unlike any pastor I had known before. I was 27 years old and for the first time next to a pastor whom I respected as a man of God and of integrity. I most certainly had been in the vicinity of such pastors before, but because of my hardened prejudices was unable to see who they were. But now as I saw who this pastor was, what he was doing, and how he went about doing it, I remember saying to my wife, "This is what I have always wanted to do; I just never knew there was a job for it."
I liked the seminary teaching and would not have been unhappy doing it the rest of my life, but what I was now experiencing was touching me at my vocational center: this is what I was made for. I loved being in on those junctures where life was being formed: birth and death, doubt and belief, joy and pain, healing and salvation-the ten thousand interstices of life that don't show up on schedules or agendas but that pastors happen onto. I loved being in on these risky ventures into hope and love, the shaping of holiness in these lives.
What I loved most was the sense of working at the borderland of the supernatural: God alive and active in mercy and grace, love and salvation, invading, penetrating, surprising whatever we had gotten used to calling merely "natural." As a professor I had been talking about what had happened; here I was in on the happening. I felt like a poet in the making of a poem, except that what was being made was life, a salvation life.
Over the course of the next two years I revised my vocational identity from professor in the academy to pastor in the parish. As the old imprisoning stereotypes receded, I became free for the vocation of pastor. I had been let over the wall in a basket.
Pastor: that was who I was. This was the life I would lead. I saw that it was possible to be a pastor and not manipulate people under cover of the supernatural, possible to be a pastor and not take charge of a religious business. There was a way of being a pastor that took people with supreme seriousness in the place they were, respecting all the contingencies of that time and place. And there was a way of being a pastor that let God's Word be the shaping, saving, determining word that I could simply proclaim and trust, and not use.
Bridging Nature and Supernature
I went about my work and then found I had a foot in both worlds, natural and supernatural, and that keeping my balance was difficult. Sin splits natural and supernatural apart. We winners take up residence on one side of the split and have as little to do with the other as possible. When we become pastors, the old residential habits continue.
But the gospel doesn't permit it; the gospel puts the split-apart worlds together again: "The Word (supernature) became flesh (nature)." I soon found this miracle of Incarnation at the very core not only of the gospel but of the pastoral vocation. "On earth as it is in heaven" became my vocational text.
I found that I was better at the "heaven" part than the "earth." I was more or less at home with the supernatural; it was the natural that set me my largest challenge. I began to think that maybe this was the very genius of pastoral work-to take earth with as much seriousness as heaven but always working and praying "as it is in heaven."
Pastoral work is heaven's work on earth. Pastoral work is local, earthy. The difficulty is that we have an eternal message that has to be worked into a limited place and scheduled times. We are eloquent with the message, but grow peevish with places and times. We work under the large rubrics of heaven and hell, and then find ourselves in a town of 3,000 people on the far edge of Kansas, in which the library is underbudgeted, the radio station plays only country music, the high school football team provides all the celebrities the town can manage, and a covered dish supper is the high point of congregational life.
It is hard for a person who has been schooled in the supernatural urgencies of apocalyptic and with an imagination furnished with saints and angels to live in this town very long and take part in its conversations without getting a little impatient and pretty bored.
Our voices take on a certain stridency as our disappointment at being stuck in this place begins to leak into our discourse. Fed up with the two-year losing streak of the football team, we compensate by fantasizing signs and wonders in the sanctuary.
Now is the time to rediscover the meaning of the local, what "on earth" means. All pastoral work takes place geographically. Every detail of the supernatural gets worked out in the natural, which is every bit as important and God-created as the supernatural. "If you would do good" wrote William Blake, "you must do it in Minute Particulars."
The gospel is emphatically geographical. Place names-Sinai, Hebron, Machpelah, Shiloh, Nazareth, Jezreel, Samaria, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Bethsaida-are embedded in the gospel. All theology is rooted in geology. Pilgrims to biblical lands are sometimes surprised to find that the towns in which David camped and Jesus lived are no better or more beautiful than the hometowns they left behind.
If the fallout of our belief in the supernatural is a contempt for these one-horse towns and impatience with their dull-spirited citizens, we had better reexamine what we say we believe in. For supernatural in the biblical sources is not a spectacularly colored hot-air balloon floating free of awkward contingencies but a servant God with basin and towel washing dusty and calloused feet.
Congregational Topsoil
The gospel is local intelligence, locally applied, and plunges with zest into flesh, matter, place. It accepts whatever happens to be on the premises as material for the kingdom. One of the pastor's continuous tasks is to make sure that these conditions are honored: this place just as it is; these people in their everyday clothes.
Wendell Berry is a farmer from whom I have learned much in these matters. Besides being a farmer plowing fields, planting crops, and working horses, Berry writes novels, poems, and essays. The importance of place is a recurring theme for him-place embraced and loved, understood and honored. Whenever Berry writes "farm," I substitute "congregation." The substitution works for me every time.
One major thing I have learned under Berry's tutelage is how on guard I need to be against invoking the supernatural out of disgust or frustration with the natural. There is a kind of modern farmer, Berry tells me, who is impatient with the actual conditions of any farm and brings in large scale equipment to eliminate what is distinctively local so that the machines can do their work unimpeded by local quirks and idiosyncrasies. They treat the land not as a resource to be cared for but as loot.
But a farm, Berry contends, is a small-scale ecosystem, everything working with everything else in precise rhythms and proportions. The farmer's task is to understand the rhythms and proportions, then nurture their health, not to bully the place and decide that it is going to function on his rhythms and according to the size of his ego. If the farmer is only after profit, he will not be reverential of what is actually there but only greedy for what he can get out of it.
The parallel with my parish could not be more exact. I hear Berry urging me to be reverent before my congregation. These are souls, divinely worked on souls, whom the Spirit is shaping for eternal habitations. Long before I arrive on the scene, the Spirit is at work. I must accommodate myself to the supernatural that is already in process. I have no idea yet what is taking place here: I must study the contours, understand the weather, know what kind of crops grow in this climate, be in awe before the complex intricacies between past and present, natural and supernatural.
Wendell Berry has taught me a lot about topsoil. I had never paid attention to it before. I was amazed to find that this dirt under my feet that I treat like dirt is a treasure: millions of organisms constantly interacting, a constant cycle of death and resurrection, the source of most of the world's food. There are a few people who respect and nourish and protect topsoil. There are many others who rapaciously strip-mine it. Still others are merely careless and out of ignorance expose it to wind and water erosion.
Even as I write, I look across the road from my study window and see large earthmovers rearranging the surface of eight acres of farm land in preparation for building a school. The topsoil is in the way and so it is scraped off, leaving the hard and level clay. The topsoil will be replaced by brick and cement and asphalt.
Congregation is the topsoil in pastoral work, the material substance in which all the Spirit's work takes place-these people, assembled in worship, dispersed in blessing. They are so ordinary, either unobtrusively inoffensive or stubbornly obstructive, that it is easy to lose respect for them as I become preoccupied in building my theological roads, mission constructs, and parking lot curricula. Before I know it, I am treating this precious congregational topsoil as something dead and inert to be bulldozed to the sidelines in order to make room for something eye-catchingly supernatural.
This is highly effective for developing a religious organization. People can be motivated to do fine things, join meaningful causes, contribute to wonderful funds. The returns in numbers and applause are considerable. But in the process we find ourselves dealing more and more in causes and generalities and abstractions, judging success by numbers, having less and less energy for particular people, and a blurred memory of the complex interactions and crisscrossed histories that come partially into view each Sunday morning.
"The devil's work" says Berry, "is abstraction-not the love of material things, but the love of their quantities-which, of course, is why 'David's heart smote him after he had numbered the people' (2 Sam. 24:10). It is not the lover of material things but the abstractionist who defends long-term damage for short-term gain, or who calculates the 'acceptability' of industrial damage to ecological or human health, or who counts dead bodies on the battlefield. The true lover of material things does not think in this way, but is answerable instead to the paradox of the parable of the lost sheep: that each is more precious than all."
Why do we pastors so often treat congregations with the impatience and violence of developers building a shopping mall instead of the patient devotion of a farmer cultivating a field? The shopping mall will be abandoned in disrepair in fifty years; the field will be healthy and productive for another thousand if its mysteries are respected by skilled farmers. Pastors are assigned to care for congregations, not exploit them, to gently cultivate plantings of the Lord, not brashly develop religious shopping malls.
The congregation is topsoil, seething with energy and organisms that have incredible capacities for assimilating death and participating in resurrection. Pastors who realize this are understandably wary of false advertising in spurious accounts of the supernatural, which sow seeds of unrest in these fields of precious topsoil or divert precious energy from their daily cultivation.
Where most of us need help is not in working up a marketing plan for the supernatural yet to come but in acquiring an appreciation for the supernatural that is present and already far exceeds our capacity to take in. We pastors need help in recovering the biblical stance of awe so that we work "on earth as it is in heaven," healing the split between nature and supernature, not driving additional wedges between them. When we see what is before us, really before us, we will take off our shoes before the Shekinah of congregation.
The God of the List
A number of years ago these two pastoral essentials-the natural (deliberate immersion in ordinary everyday place and people) and the supernatural (prayerful expectation of the invading, miraculous Spirit who heals and saves) came apart on me. I found myself frazzled, disconcerted, irritable.
Things came to a head on Easter Sunday. Coming home after leading worship, I said to Jan, my wife, "Let's get out of here. I can't handle this any more."
Several things that had required sustained attention and intensity were finished. There was a feeling of let-down: Lent was over; I had just completed a book manuscript and had it ready for the publisher; my confirmation class was over and the seven young people confirmed; I had just finished teaching a course at the University, and the final exams were graded.
I had loved doing each of these: leading the congregation deeper and further into Lenten worship, getting to know these youth and sharing the faith with them, writing the book, teaching the university students. It was all good work, exhilarating work, but also demanding work, and I was exhausted.
We talked of how we could get away for a couple of days. We decided to go to Assateague Island first thing in the morning. Assateague is a designated wilderness seashore, a barrier island off the Maryland coast along the Atlantic Ocean. Sand dunes, wild ponies, gulls and terns, and surf breaking in on the long beaches. And no people for miles and miles and miles. We got out our backpacking tent and sleeping bags, gathered a few groceries in a box, threw some outdoor clothes together.
Assateague is about a three-hour drive away, an adequate buffer, we thought, from the hassle so that we could recover our spiritual stability. But getting out of town wasn't simple.
There were still a number of things to get done: stop at the post office to mail the just completed book manuscript; stop at the University to leave my class grades at the registrar's office; make two telephone calls to straighten out the nursery schedule for Sunday worship. I had a list. I was anxious to get away. I was checking items off the list so that I could get away from the odds and ends disorder and accumulating fatigue.
The last item on the list was "Murray-St. Anthony Hospital, Room 522." Murray was scheduled for surgery the next day; a pastoral visit was required. But Murray was not a person I took any delight in being a pastor to-whining about his wife, quarrelsome with his children, tedious. I anticipated the scenario of the visit: I would enter his room to bring a ministry of healing and hope and comfort; he would supply the context: a litany of discontent into which I would attempt to insert my antiphons of gospel grace. I didn't look forward to making the visit, but there was no avoiding it.
I completed my visit. It went as anticipated. I came off the elevator with my list in hand and looked it over to make sure everything was done. Murray's name, the last on the list, was crossed off. I crumpled the list in my fist, threw it with some ferocity at a waste can, and got into my car feeling free, having cut the last of the Lilliputian strings that confine my giant spirituality to the petty rounds of niggling parish detail.
We arrived at Assateague, set up our North Face tent, cooked a macaroni and cheese supper, and walked the smooth beach, marveling at the seabirds, emptying ourselves into the emptiness, taking in the long, easy rhythms of surf and tide.
That night we slept with the tent flaps tied open. It was early spring and the air was cool, verging on cold. The moon was just past full, and the skies cloudless. All night long the breeze poured through our tent, purging the fatigue, cleaning out the dust of anxiety.
And I dreamed. I dreamed a wonderful dream. The moment I woke and realized what I had dreamed, I knew it was a gift dream, the kind of dream that locates God's actual presence in my actual experience-a Bethel dream.
In my dream I walked into a Baltimore bookstore and saw at the entrance a stack of books with the title, Lists. Alongside the display there was a reprint from the New York Times bestseller list showing that this book was the number one bestseller for that week. The book's author was Geri Ellingson.
I knew Geri Ellingson; I had known her for thirty-five years. She had married a good friend of mine, and we had been neighbors for several years. I was excited-Geri Ellingson the author of a bestseller! I had no idea that she wrote books. I ran to the telephone booth and called her home in Montana: "Geri, I just saw your book; a bestseller! I didn't know you were a writer."
"Didn't you?" she said. "I've been writing that book almost daily for most of my life."
"Wow," I said, "I had no idea." Here was a woman whom I had identified in common, everyday terms as the wife of my friend, a neighbor, a housewife, mother of four kids. I had watched her scrub her kitchen floor, saw her with her head bowed in prayer in church on Sundays, picked up groceries for her in emergencies. And now it turned out she was the author of a New York Times number one bestseller.
"Well," I said, "Congratulations. I can hardly wait to read it."
I left the telephone booth, went back to the bookstore, and bought a copy of Geri Ellingson's new bestseller, Lists. I opened it and started to read: it was a compilation of lists. That's all, lists. Grocery list, laundry list, fix-up list, Christmas card list, bill-paying list, shopping list. No text, no narrative, no explanation, no commentary. Just lists.
I woke and knew immediately the meaning of my dream: lists are bestseller material. In my hurry to recover a sense of the supernatural in my life, an aliveness to the presence of the Lord and his miracle-making Spirit, I had thrown away the raw material for it: my list. The items I thought were interfering with the holiness of my vocation were the materials of its holiness.
Leading a congregation in worship was glorious-this weekly gathering of hungry and thirsty people around the bounteous mysteries of Word and Sacrament. But telephoning a couple of forgetful sinners to straighten out a misunderstanding on the nursery schedule was a triviality I resented.
Teaching university students was a high calling. One student who entered the class an atheist had become a Christian-a great thrill. But getting the grades to the registrar's office was an irritation.
Writing a book was satisfyingly creative. Getting the manuscript packaged and mailed was beneath the dignity of my office.
Praying for God's healing and love as I laid on hands and anointed with oil was a priestly honor. But listening to the whine and resentment of an unattractive man was something I would delegate to my deacons next time around.
And then the dream showed me that each of these items was bestseller material, grist for the supernatural: grading exams, standing in the post office line, putting up with inconvenient emotions, telephoning forgetful mothers.
I had treated each item as garbage, waste. As soon as possible I got them out of sight, throwing the debris into the waste can.
I told my wife the dream. I thought about it. While on the island I had a couple of days of non-list making to assimilate its significance.
I realized how much of my life consisted in paying as little attention as possible to details that didn't seem important so I could be free to attend to the big things, the important things, the spiritual things, the supernatural.
When I got home again, the first thing I did was call up Geri Ellingson and thank her for the book. She didn't remember writing it and hadn't received any royalty checks. I assured her it was real enough and told her my dream.
Next I bought a notebook and started keeping a journal. At first, and for a long time, my journal contained only lists: people to see, letters to write, visits to make, errands to run. I put them in the journal rather than on scraps of paper to give them some dignity, some semi-permanence. I call my journal "My Eschatological Laundry List." And I pray my lists, this bestseller material.
This is my pastor work, giving loving and leisurely attention to every natural detail in my congregation and at the same time living in urgent openness to the supernatural so my work "on earth" will connect "as it is in heaven."
Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
