Here are two tales, two contrasting portraits, of the ways we can choose to live.
Story 1:
Aunt Eva was one of my grandmother’s eight siblings all born in the 19th century. She was a spinster by constitution, even if for a time briefly married to Archie. Among my great aunts, she was in body and in style the most angular. She was nice enough, but she was excessively particular about everything. Persnickety captures her.
One Sunday afternoon I was standing in Aunt Eva’s shared nursing home room alongside her small beige metal sidetable. Even as a 10-year-old, it was clear to me that Aunt Eva’s world had been compressed to the things that could be set on that very neatly ordered surface. She was highly protective of her well-ordered little world.
Fidgeting, I made my error. I picked up Aunt Eva’s metal Vaseline tube and squeezed it top to bottom, bottom to top, middle to both ends. Unashamedly, I just did it, again and again. What followed was a stern and protracted lecture from Aunt Eva about the evils of “wrinkling a Vaseline tube.” I just had not realized.
Story 2:
Lucy had served for decades as a missionary teacher of English literature in the Middle East. Her imagination and whimsy, her passion and her curiosity always made me want to nominate her to be a Christian sprite! Her never-ending passion to love and care for the unseen, the alien, and the foreigner drew me and others into relationships and experiences we might not otherwise have had.
To describe Lucy’s financial circumstances as an elderly retired missionary, “lean” would have been a generous overstatement. Estranged but not divorced from a husband I never knew or even heard much about, Lucy was vividly alive to the world at the doorstep of her small cottage in Berkeley, as well as to a world half a globe away.
One day, sitting in her very small apartment, she asked with eager joy if I would like to see her art collection. She left the room and came back momentarily with an ordinary binder. With relish, she opened it to display a lifetime collection of reproductions of classical works of art as stamps. She said, “I never had money, nor any idea how long I would be able to stay on the field teaching. But I knew if I had this, I always had a world with me.”
At the end of her days, Aunt Eva worried over wrinkled Vaseline tubes. Lucy, in contrast, was a great soul able to hold a world in wonder. Which is our trajectory, our aim for those we pastor?
It probably has a lot to do with what gets our best attention. That’s what makes Paul’s story so striking as he reflects on it from prison. The theme of his letter to the Philippians is “to discern what matters most.” In the light of the Gospel, Paul buries the story of his own perfect pedigree as though it were so many Vaseline tubes, and then calls the Philippians to dwell on what makes a world of wonder: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
Paul’s words are inspirational, but do we follow them? Do our lives look more like wonder-full Lucy or persnickety Eva? Becoming people of great soul demands we make a choice either to move one way or the other; we can’t live both stories. And the direction we choose will also influence our congregation.
Some of our most determinative moments as a pastor come when we surrender our own Vaseline tubes: letting go of our need to be right, stepping back from defensiveness, relinquishing ministries we hold dear to others, stopping being needlessly fussy over what really does not matter, realizing we don’t always need control.
Only if we practice this ourselves will we have the vision and the credibility to help others do so too. If I am a small leader, I will probably only breed small followers. That would not be to follow Jesus. When I “think about these things,” my life is set in the broad place of God’s grace, and my eyes are lifted from myself, and placed on God and the world God loves. Out of that context and experience, I can then help others lift their heart and eyes, too.
A word of caution: history, not least that of the Church, suggests we really like our Vaseline tubes. In fact, that’s part of what makes many of us less likely to follow Jesus to the margins. The Church can often seem to be nothing more than the religiously persnickety, and we forget we were made to love and marvel.
The watching world sees this pattern in the Church and then rightly asks if we have any good news to offer after all.
Becoming people of great soul demands we make a choice to move either one way or the other. We can’t live both stories.
Mark Labberton is pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California.
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