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A few years ago I did a book on “burnout” among clergy. Why, having once put their hands to the plow, do some quit?

A man who had counseled troubled pastors in Texas declared to me, after many years’ observation, that no one should go into the pastoral ministry who had previously been a professional photographer. His theory: If you have a need to look at the world through a small aperture, if you need to get everyone fixed, in focus, you will be miserable in ministry. People just won’t stand still. You think you have got them pinned down, in focus, and then they move.

There is much I do not understand about the faith and its practice (as any of you who are familiar with my work can attest). Yet after twenty years, I do know one thing: There is no way to be a pastor and to be neat.

The neatest pastor I ever knew was a Lutheran who served with me in a small town. He was excessively neat, always cleaning up after everyone, pencils all sharpened in a row on his desk, a personality like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby who “wants the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.”

I considered his ministry an affront to the blessed memory of his alleged spiritual forebear, Martin Luther, who, if his sermons are a fair indication of the mind of the man, was not the sort to be troubled by socks lying about the bedroom floor.

You will be pleased to hear that this fastidious, anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive pastor had a complete nervous breakdown and was forcibly taken from his church while screaming something about “The Lutheran Women’s League will never hold another supper in our kitchen.”

My biggest jolt my first year out of seminary was the gap between my seminary-acquired categories of humanity and the rather haphazard way God had actually constructed people. Why was it that, in my congregation, I had people whose social attitudes were all cleaned up, progressive, forward thinking (similar to my own), whom I would not have trusted with my laundry, much less my life? And why were those whose values were antediluvian, saints? It wasn’t what I had been led to expect by the kind of ideological pigeonholing I had been taught in seminary.

“I tell you, give ’em a job digging ditches or picking up garbage, and if they don’t take it, let ’em starve.”

I could hear him shouting to the gaggle of men outside my door that Sunday as I looked over my sermon, a sermon entitled, “Our Duty as Christians to Care for the Less Fortunate.”

Now here’s a fine state of affairs, I thought to myself. I’m preparing to preach the unadulterated gospel, and these hooligans in the church office are forming a lynching party for the poor. I’m going out there and give that deadbeat a piece of my mind.

I opened my door and called to the outer office, “Harry, come in here, I need to speak to you.”

“Yea, preacher,” Harry said, “I need to speak to you, too.”

In my office he said, “Are you aware of what’s going on in Haiti right now?”

“Haiti? Why no … “

“Well they’ve had a terrible swine epidemic. All their pigs died. Maybe you didn’t know it, but I’ve spent two of my last vacations down there helping those people build a clinic.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, thinking of the beach where I had spent my last vacations.

“Without pigs, they’ll starve. So Martha and I have taken $5,000 out of our savings, and we want you to challenge the church to raise $5,000 more so we can send breeder pigs to folk in Haiti.”

I looked at his check. I recalled his comments only a minute before.

“Now, Preacher, what was it you wanted to tell me?”

I forgot my typological theology, took the check, and ran.

A mess! I can’t be a pastor and be neat.

People asked Jesus, “Show us the Father,” and in response, he portrayed a messy, divine recklessness at the very heart of reality:

A farmer went out to sow and he … carefully prepared the soil, removing all rocks and weeds, marking off neat rows, placing each seed exactly six inches from the other, covering each with three-quarters of an inch of soil?

No. This sower just began slinging seed. Seed everywhere. Some fell on the path, some on rocks, some in weeds, and some, miraculously, fell on good soil, took root, and rendered harvest. That’s what the Word of God is like, said Jesus.

A farmer (as I recall, it was the same farmer) had a field. The servants came running in breathlessly: “Master, there’s weeds coming up in your new wheat.”

“An enemy must have done this!” cries the farmer.

Enemy, my eye. You get this sort of agricultural mess when you sow seed with such abandon.

“Do you want us to go out and carefully root up those weeds from your good wheat?” asked the servants.

“No, let ’em grow. I just love to see stuff grow. We’ll sort it all out in September.”

And Jesus said, “That’s God’s kingdom.”

In his commentary on these parables, Calvin sees clearly that they are meant for clergy, concluding his interpretation by warning that it is vain to seek a church free from every spot.

So much for all thinking that is categorical; let go all theology that presumes to be systematic but is an affront to the way this God runs a farm.

Just when I get my church all sorted out, sheep from the goats, saved from the damned, hopeless from the hopeful, somebody makes a move, gets out of focus, cuts loose, and I see why Jesus never wrote systematic theology.

So you and I can give thanks that the locus of Christian thinking appears to be shifting from North America and Northern Europe where people write rules and obey them, to places like Africa and Latin America where people still know how to dance.

And I think it’s wonderful that most of us have spent time learning Greek, a marvelously useless language. You can’t use Greek to build a “megachurch,” nor will it fold out into a bed. Seminaries make us learn Greek not because knowing Greek has anything to do with successful Christian ministry, but in the hope that we will thereby be rendered so impractical that, having wasted so much time with a dead language, we may not balk at wasting an afternoon with an 80-year-old nursing home resident, or spending a Saturday listening to the life of a troubled teenager, or taking hours to write a sermon that no more than twenty will ever hear. It takes a good seminary about three years to break us of our pragmatic, neat utilitarianism.

You can’t be a pastor and be neat.

“She could have gone to law school. Best undergraduate I ever taught,” he said, as we veered off the main highway and made our way down a narrow country road in West Virginia. We pulled up before the little white frame Presbyterian church, with the sign hanging from a rusted chain, peeling paint, with the name of the church and, underneath, painted poorly, “The Rev. Julie Jones–Pastor.”

And my friend said, “What a waste.”

But the reckless farmer who slung the seed and the woman who pulled up her carpet and moved the living room furniture into the yard in pursuit of her lost quarter, the giver of the banquet for the forgotten, and the shepherd who threw away his life for the sheep, laughed with disordered gospel delight.

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William H. Willimon is dean of the chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.