Collect
Great King of
Kings, Your word promises that master craftsmen will be the servants of kings.
Grant us grace that we might seek not so much to rise to great places of
service as to raise to greatness those whom we serve. And this we pray in the
name of the One who rose by descending, Your Son, Our Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.
Left Panel: The World
I once heard
William Willimon, the great Methodist preacher, admit that he does not
especially like the book of Proverbs. He likened it to a long road trip with your
mother: a constant barrage of sage advice that you know is generally sound but
that you'd rather not hear. He called it the Bible's version of "Hints for
Homemakers."
I get his point.
That mighty Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says that Proverbs is the
book of orientation - the place where all the landmarks stay put and the divine
cause-and-effect operates predictably. The Psalter, Brueggemann insists, is the
book of disorientation that thus holds out hope for growth, for a reorientation
based on a richer understanding of God's character. In short, the three friends
of Job love Proverbs while Job himself is a man for Psalms.
Still, Proverbs
is in the canon. The Church in her wisdom, and the ancient Hebrews before that,
heard the voice of divine inspiration here. If the Proverbs do not tell us the
way things always are, they tell us the way things always should be and thus
give us at least a baseline from which to judge when things go wrong. If their
truth is statistical rather than particular, it at least provides a set of
actuarial tables for mapping out general trends. If they do not remove the
gamble inherent in facing the future, they at least provide us with an accurate
point-spread when placing our bets.
Right Panel: Christ in
the Text
Take for instance
the proverb we just read. It is part of a longer collection, so the scholars tell
us, that runs from 22.17-23.11. Much of this same material appears in an
Egyptian book of wisdom sayings that probably dates back three hundred years
before Solomon's court gave it its current form. Those Hebrew scribes organized
it into seven sections, a very Israelite kind of spirituality, but the basic
message remains: Here's how to comport oneself around the king. It's
essentially all those things my mother used to include under the heading of,
"Act like you've been somewhere," hissed at my brother and sister and
me as we entered someone's home.
And in that
setting we find this single, rather isolated idea: Good workers get great gigs.
The idea itself
is not hard to grasp. "Skilled" comes from the Hebrew maher, meaning swift or speedy. (It appears in what
has to be the greatest name in all the Bible, Isaiah 8.3, where the prophet,
acting under divine orders, names his kid Mahershalalhashbaz,
"The spoil speeds, the prey hastens.") It is not so much the idea of
hurry, however, as of readiness or aptitude. It's opposite appears in Proverbs
18.9 to describe one who is "slack
in his work."
The
term "work" contrasts with other Hebrew nouns that mean toil or
hardship. This word is work considered from the standpoint of its product and
of the knowledge it takes to produce that product. In Exodus 31.3, God uses
this word to say that he has filled Bezalel, the architect of the tabernacle,
with wisdom in "craftsmanship."
We
all recognize this quality and, as the proverb promises, we all value it. John
Steinbeck captures this universal feeling in his novel Of Mice and Men as he describes the first appearance of Slim, the
top muleskinner on a California ranch. The narrator tells us that Slim "moved into the room. . .with a majesty
achieved only by royalty and master craftsmen."
Right Panel: The Church
So "skilled
in his work" means being good at your job; and your particular job, your
calling, your vocation, your craft, is pastoral ministry in some form or other.
And you are here at Logsdon Seminary at the South Texas School of Christian
Studies to become "skilled" at that "work." In some ways it
is an utterly unique calling, but in at least one way, the way described here,
it is the same as any calling from preaching to plumbing: It is work that
involves knowledge, experience, instincts, and the use of a certain set of
tools.
Do
not, to quote a former President of the United States, do not misunderestimate
the importance of those skills. Sometimes people think that because the call to
ministry comes from God and cannot be generated or denied by human agency, so
the skills of ministry come by direct divine download. God may in fact do this
- what may God not do? - but that is not the normal process. If ours is indeed
a higher calling, why should we, God's pastors, get a free ride where those of
"lesser" vocations must struggle to become skilled in their work?
When you step into the pulpit or the hospital room, when you lead the coffin to
the grave or the groom to the altar, make sure you have paid the price that
lets you move "with
a majesty achieved only by royalty and master craftsmen."
But
what I really want to focus on is the promise contained in this proverb:
"He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men." The
meaning seems obvious: Do your work well and you can expect a steady series of
promotions until you find patronage among the highest levels of society. That
is probably what the verse says at the literal level and I do not want to be
guilty of eisogeting it, of leading meaning into
the text instead of out of it. I
do worry, however, that this reading could do considerable damage to
seminarians in the current climate of American evangelicalism.
Because that
climate is a little bit too tropical - overheated with ambition and lush with luxurious
vines of fame and power. Megachurch ministries and podcast pulpits have created
a class of super-pastors whose clientele include Fortune 500 CEO's, famous
athletes, and stars of the silver screen both large and small. This proverb
could be used (and no doubt has been used in at least one church-growth school
or leadership conference or another) to sanctify the idea that a minister
should expect regular advancement from a small seminary pastorate to a stable
county-seat First Baptist and ultimately to multi-campus megadom, or perhaps
the mustard seed morphing of a living room church plant to a power pulpit. And
while I am not condemning these developments as signs of a sold-out ministry, I
am dismissing them as the defining marks of successful ministry.
I want to suggest
instead that the mark of successful ministry - and I prefer the term
"faithful ministry" - is not that the minister rise to the level of
working for royalty, but that the minister raise those with whom she works to
the level of kings. Perhaps the goal is not for me to advance in my ministry,
but for my congregation to advance under my ministry. Perhaps the people are
not the tools of my trade, but those whom my tools shape into the likeness of
Christ by skilled craftsmanship.
I want to
interpret this verse in terms of George Macdonald's He that will be a hero,
will barely be a man; he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure
of his manhood." In the same way, that minister who sets out to be famous
will barely be a minister at all, but that minister who will be nothing but a
skilled doer of pastoral work is sure of hearing, "Well done, thou good
and faithful servant."
I want to
interpret this verse in light of C. S. Lewis' observation in his essay,
"The Inner Ring:" "If in your working hours you make the work
your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle
in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen,
and other sound craftsmen will know it." In the same way, the seminarian
dedicated to doing well the pastoral work of preaching, teaching, praying, and
caring, will be ministerial royalty, and her fellow-royalty will recognize the
fact, even though the domination and the newspapers and the business community
probably will not.
Conclusion
In the end, after
all, we all wear crowns (Rev 4.4), and in the end, after all, we all take them
off (Rev 4.10). On that great and glorious day, the only one left wearing a crown
will be the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. May God make us skilled in our
work, diligent in our business, craftsmen in our calling, that we might stand
before that King on that day, and that on that day we might stand among those
before whom we have stood.
No comments:
Post a Comment