Living Wittily

Guest Post on Eugene Peterson 3: The Pastor

Eugene Peterson, The Pastor: An Appreciation

 

There are only two books that I have read more than twice. The first is Middlemarch by George Eliot and the second is The Pastor by Eugene Peterson. I was introduced to the work of Peterson by Rev Dr Will Storrar at a Retreat he led for Aberdeen University candidates for the ministry and their wives at Carberry Tower in 1995. Later, in 1997, it was my privilege to meet Eugene at another Retreat held in Crieff.

My appreciation of Peterson knows no bounds. I read his trilogy of pastoral theology (Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work; Working the Angles; Under the Unpredictable Plant) first when I was a student at Aberdeen in the mid 90s, and again when I spent a short sabbatical at the Royal Scots College in Salamanca in 2009. These books formed my pastoral vision and shaped the ministry I was given among the people of Cupar where I served as minister. I was and I remain a committed Petersonite.

I always wanted to know more about the man who had inspired me so much. Peterson’s autobiography appeared in 2011 and I devoured it in three evenings when I was in Pittsburgh studying for my DMin. Later, when I came home, I read it again deliberately and then again slowly.

Perhaps more than anything else Peterson, especially in The Pastor, provided me with an honest,  realistic yet wonderful vision of the church and the calling I had received to get to know people and recognise them as participants in the story of God. He provided me with a new way of seeing people and a new understanding of church. In this way, he recalibrated my expectations of others and helped me appreciate and understand the calling I had received to be a pastor of a congregation of saints and sinners. Peterson facilitated a fundamental paradigm shift in the way I looked at the world so that I slowly began to recognise that grace is everywhere. He also gave me a love and a fascination of stories, the stories of people’s lives and the place we hold in the story of God.

Eugene was and will always remain among the most significant people in my life. Everyone who is called to be a pastor should take time to enjoy the company of this wise and gracious companion.

Rev Dr Ken Jeffrey, Co-ordinator Centre for Ministry Studies, University of Aberdeen

Paul Ellingworth: An Exponent of Godliness and Good Learning.

Now and again we come across people who are impressively self-deprecating, and effective in accomplishment without having to advertise the results. By that I mean, there are some rare people who have remarkable abilities, and who use them faithfully, conscientiously and therefore fruitfully in areas of life that are often hidden.

Paul Ellingworth was that kind of person. We heard yesterday that Paul died early on Sunday morning, (Nov 25), full of years, and at peace. I first met Paul in 1984 and and after that our paths crossed regularly when we shared conversations about biblical exegesis, the artistry of Wesley's hymns, the strengths and reluctantly acknowledged weaknesses of Wesleyan theology and spirituality, and latterly the shared concerns about life, health and family.

I want to say a little more about Paul, because he is a representative of a generation of Christian scholars who dedicated gifts of intellect to the nourishment of the heart, and for whom translation and exegesis of the biblical text was an ecclesial and only then an academic responsibility. He and Professor Howard Marshall were friends, academic colleagues, both of them Methodists with an old fashioned Arminian slant to their theology, and both of them unashamed Evangelicals. Between the two of them the Methodist church in Scotland had a deep reservoir of biblical learning and exegetical expertise.

Paul Ellingworth was a Bible translator. Much of his life he worked for the United Bible Societies. His gifts as a linguist owed much to a patient temperament, a meticulaous attention to detail, a passionate care for words and their right use, and all of this an expression of his vocation as a Christian academic. His magnum opus was his magisterial Commentary on Hebrews. Prior to the publication of this, he had produced The Translator's Handbook on Hebrews, and following it a much more accessible and briefer commentary on Hebrews.

The word magisterial is overused these days, applied promiscuously to far too many scholarly achievements. It is a word that should be used only when it bears its literal meaning of carrying full authority, the earned authority of someone who has mastered his subject or, in the case of Paul Ellingworth, one who speaks out of the humility of knowing the subject has mastered him. The NIGTC commentary needs no recommendations here as to its authority, nor its usefulness as an exegetical guide replete with learning and the wisdom of one whose life has been given to the translation of the Greek Testament. It is a magisterial commentary, distilled out of careful scholarship funded by a mind soaked in the text. It is a gift to the church of enduring importance. And on the shelves of Aberdeen's Sir Duncan Rice Library are boxes heavy with hundreds of articles and essays gathwred over a lifetime, and kept together in the Paul Ellingworth collection.

Paul was a Methodist circuit preacher, a faithful and devoted member of the local Methodist church, a fine organist deeply knowledgeable of hymnology and church music. Those who knew Paul recognised, and admired his quiet courtesy, enjoyed his gentle erudition and came within range of an old fashioned and deeply dyed Wesleyan spirituality in which the great Methodist focus on holiness as perfect love was kept clear and sharp.

The combination of text critic, church organist, Wesleyan piety, Arminian theology, and humble spirit of service, meant that Paul, like his namesake, had learned to be content as the servant of His Lord, and of the church, and of the text that bears witness to the Word become flesh. We will miss his quiet presence, and I will personally miss those moments of personal conversation when amongst the matter shared is the heart that informs the mind, and the mind that nourishes the heart.

Well done good and faithful servant...who now stands alongside and amongst that great cloud of witnesses, having persevered in his race, his eyes now and finally fixed on Jesus the author and perfecter of his faith.

Standing at the Cross in a Car Park

In different ways, and with several different people, I've spent time this week exploring brokenness, accompanying heavy heartedness, finding no easy answers, and humbled by the trust of other people who share from the deep places.

Walking through the car park in Inverurie earlier today, a car's headlights highlighted the worn parking markings. On a cold, dark, November evening, a broken cross, became a reminder of Someone Else who explored our brokenness, accompanies the heavy hearted, found no easy answers, and humbled himself to win the trust of those he always comes looking for.

Haiku about Standing in a Car Park in the Rain

Strange epiphany
of that other place and time
God touched the broken.

Guest Post on Eugene Peterson 2. The Contemplative Pastor

                               Eugene Peterson: The Contemplative Pastor

Peterson is unafraid to confront our habits and assumptions. He tackles busyness head-on: we are busy because we are vain, and because we lack the discipline required to take control of our time. “How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion?” I may always struggle with this, but Peterson nudges me back in the life-giving direction of reflection and retreat, ‘deliberate withdrawal’.

He celebrates the ‘ministry of small talk’ – attention to the ‘everyday texture’ of people’s lives. As a part-time, small-town minister who feels a bit lacking in lofty thoughts, this was reassuring. My blethering is not without purpose; my Facebook interactions not entirely pointless! I am reaching out to feel those textures, to check the weather in the lives of church members.

Peterson makes space for other voices, so that the reader might be enriched by discovering new conversation partners. One of the highlights of this book was being introduced to the work of Annie Dillard. Her reflections on faith as polar exploration were comforting at a time when I felt disoriented and footsore.

Peterson is explicit about our subtle temptations. His image of being ‘lashed to the mast’ of Word and sacrament is powerfully evocative. It evokes the salty sting of troubling winds that regularly blow through the church. It implies the real risk of my deserting the ship or drowning in the currents. Peterson urges me to keep going, to remain faithful over the long haul, clinging to Gospel hope.

My Celtic Daily Prayer readings remind me monthly that ‘there is a contemplative / in all of us / almost strangled / but still alive’. Peterson’s pastoral wisdom helps to loosen the grip of ministry demands and allows me to breathe.

(Rev Amanda Quick, Leven Baptist Church)

Guest Post on Eugene Peterson 1. The unpredictable worm planted in my soul

This is the first of several guest contributions I requested from people whose ministry and Christian experience have been enriched by the writing of Eugene Peterson who died last month. There have been many tributes paid to the rich and enriching ministry of Peterson, especially through his writing, and in the last third of his life in his teaching to generations of theological students.

His translation of the Bible, The Message is a world best seller and has been very effective in revitalising bible reading across the churches. It has done for the 21st Century what the Good News Bible did for the second half of the 20th Century.

My own appreciation of Peterson, the responses to which suggested these further posts, can be seen in my earlier blog post over here.

The unpredictable worm planted in my soul

  I can’t recall most of the argument of Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant, but I do remember its effect. My sense God’s call on my life emerged from reading it in fresh, vibrant colours; what had felt shapeless was given crisp new outline.

His world was not mine. The way they do things in the USA was so different to how we did things in Peckham, Presbyterians are not Baptists. And yet so often in this book I felt like I was meeting myself. It is full of stories, tales from everyday ministry and pastoral encounters told with a vivid attention to detail. and it is full of scripture and lustrous unexpected readings of once familiar texts.

 The book left me with an abiding love of Jonah whose unpredictable plant gave Peterson his title. I’d read Jonah before but Peterson’s reading removed the scales from my eyes. Here was a pastor who could read, who understood how great storytelling works, who gets under the skin of a narrative and the art that creates it. It was not just Jonah I fell in love with, it was the bible as the great story of God’s pursuit of us out of his irrepressible, terrifying, persistent love. It’s narratives were no longer to be mined for doctrinal information but entered into as adventures in the greatest love story ever lived.

And the reason Peterson can do this is because he is steeped in reading, shaped by the world’s great writing - wendell Berry to Dostoevsky, Barth to Buechner: deep reading of these writers and others is woven into engagement with the greatest writing of all, scripture, giving rise to writing full of wonder and insight. And he is, therefore, wonderfully quotable and memorable. ‘Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.’ This is one of his most tweeted sayings - I wonder if he hated that as much as I think he would have!

Simon Jones, Director of Ministry Training and Formation, Spurgeon's College.

God who promises the impossible, makes all things new, and new things possible.

Having spent a while last week doing some digging into the Micah 1.1-5 text I finally preached the text yesterday morning. This isn't the text of that sermon. It is a reflection on why Micah speaks with continuing prophetic power into a world so different from eighth century BC Israel. One particular continuity with that world remains unbroken; our human predilection for power, conflict, violence and therefore war. Micah's vision of peace is as outrageous and outlandish today as it was then. Swords into ploughshares? Study war no more? National disputes settled by the principles of Torah? Don't think so. But let's see. What are we actually about in a Remembrance Day service?

Remembrance Sunday is a day of very mixed emotions for many people. Amongst the most powerful are sorrow at the loss and suffering war causes; grief and anger that war is often a failure of political moral imagination; gratitude to those who exemplified sacrifice and risked their everything to make the world better, safer, more free.

And across that wide minefield of memories of long burdened sorrow and regret, anger and grief, the preacher and minister has to make their way, hoping to avoid needless hurt, careful not to increase the weight of burdens by careless words, unthought out sentiments. Or' just as bad, indulge in banal wishful thinking that we are better, wiser, more mature than those earlier generations who, against their best intentions, found themselves caught up in historic events and social forces they couldn't control.

And yet. Such a service isn't a place for playing safe. Not if we are serious about remembering and honouring those who ventured their all; and not if we are serious about letting the weight of incalculable anguish and desolated hopes be truly felt, but not so as to crush. Into such unsafe emotional territory comes and eighth century BC prophet with his impossible promises and unimaginable reforgings of history. Because that's what Micah is about.

In the age of the great Empires he talks of a God who can make peace happen, and who forges peace out of conflict. Swords into ploughs, spears into pruning hooks, each person safe on their own farm, and military training faciilities rendered surplus to requirements in such improbable and politically impossible images,  Micah, like Isaiah, looks at reality and asks "What if..." These prophets know about the darkness, and choose to be adventurers towards the light. They are not stupid, nor are they deluded by tragedy into baking up dreams that deny the in-your-face reality of life gone wrong. Instead, they look at history, their history and the futures that might be, and they refuse to exclude God from the equation.  

What would the world of politics and military force, the same world riven by war and violence between peoples and nations look like, if the God of steadfast love and justice, the God of shalom and mercy, the God of faithfulness and holiness, were factored in as a decisive presence in our history? Amongst those who have tried that imaginative leap from reality with its determinisms and status quo, to an alternative worldview where radical reversals and transformative visions are not only possible but promised, is the apologist for agricultural and agrarian contentment, the prophet Micah.

What would it be like for farmers to keep their ploughs and mattocks and pruning hooks, and if instead of conscription of property and animals and tools, they were allowed to dwell under their own trees, on their own land, living the life of shalom? Micah argued against the elites and the military adventurers, and criticised the risks the powerful took with the lives of towns and villages, when they went to war in pursuit of territory or gains by military force. Supposing those who had power and resources gave up their fixations on political strategies towards power, and revised downwards economic grand plans towards oppression and profits, and closed the facilities where people rehearsed and resourced military tactics? And what if, instead, the politically powerful and economically ambitious and the lovers of military hardware heard and heeded what such a God as Israel's God requires?

He has shown you O Man what is good,

and what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly, and to love mercy,

and to walk humbly with your God.

What Micah said then, and still speaks now into our much changed world, are words forged from the weapons of despair into the tools of hope, the raw materials of violence hammered into the new shapes of peace. "In the lattter days..." No he isn't saying peace will just happen, or that justice has no cost, nor is he able to confirm that the powers that be won't still be harnessed to policies of oppression and fixation on power, safety and a first strike mentality. But this rural prophet has a powerful theological imagination, formed and informed by a faith in which words like covenant, faithfulness, mercy, judgement, holiness and justice are only meaningfully uttered of God, who has made a world where such moral holiness and eternal values have to be forged out of the human experience of those created in the divine image.

That divine image in each human being is the created gift of the God whose holy love will not be finally thwarted by sin. However we define that vast three lettered word 'sin', it includes as its essence the self-destructive drives which are the engines of hatred, fuelled by mistrust, lust for power, violence, greed, and an inherent over-againstness, which all taken together are the toxins of war. Micah's words in 4.1-5 are both vision for the future and antidote to all that threatens that good human future.

On Remembrance Sunday we choose to hope. Facing the calamitous costs of modern technological warfare, we hear the promised impossible. We look to darkening horizons being forced into recession by the presence and purposes of the God of Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

As Christians we are called to bear witness to hope, and to face the worst of the world as those whose faith is deeply rooted in the cross which stood on Mount Zion, and whose hope stands this side of a tomb made redundant by resurrection. We are heralds of hope, practitioners of neighbour love, ministers of reconciliation, a force for forgiveness, makers and builders and pursuers of peace.

Why? Because on Mount Zion God spoke finally, fully and faithfully – God commends his love towards us in that while we were still enemies Christ died for us. We are heralds and harbingers of hope in a fragmented, fractured, frightened and therefore hostile and divided world. Those words of Micah are now to be heard THIS side of Calvary where sin did its worst and failed, and THIS side of the empty tomb where death died and love won. The cross and the resurrection are the guarantee for Christians that God who promises the impossible, makes all things new, and new things possible.

They will beat their swords into ploughshares...and study war no more.

Walter was the last word in courtesy, a distinguished man with silver hair, knowing eyes and a tall erect frame. You wouldn't be surprised to be told he was a distinguished RAF pilot who survived the Battle of Britain and the rest of the war. His Christian faith was rooted in the life of a church community, the Boy Scouts, the church choir and a mind sharply critical and warmly appeciative at the same time when listening to sermons, or talking about practical Christian living. I met him in my thirties, and for some years he and his wife were friends of our family before they moved way down south. The words you would use to describe Walter would include modest, shrewd, disciplined, and of transparent integrity.

John Machalovich came to our house sometime in the winter of 1961. I know because I was 10 years old when we lived in that house in Ayrshire. He had a problem with his new Decca record player, one of the latest models that could play 8 records, but which would become obsolete a few years later when Hi Fi, Stereo and vinyl revolutionised the whole music industry, and with it, ushered in a whole new youth culture. But that night his problem was that his new record player kept blowing the fuses in his house. He came asking my dad for help. He was a Yugoslavian refugee, who had been part of the resistance in his homeland, and was now a tractor driver in a neighbouring farm. He became our friend for a few years before we moved, and he moved, and we lost touch.

Alistair was a small, unassuming man, who was a prisoner of war and shared a hut in a Japanese concentration camp with the great writer Sir Laurens Van der Post. To stay sane and distract him from his fears he learned to write with bamboo in calligraphic script. In later years he was the calligrapher who wrote the scrolls for the Honorary Degree Awards of the University of Aberdeen. He was a man of many interests, including ornithology, though most of his knowledge by his own admission was from his bird books - and he had some of the best and most valuable of these. I have two personally inscribed poems he did for me, and the combination of precise calligraphy and poetic virtuosity make them treasured reminders of a man who had been to dark places and survived, though not without enduring cost, and a self-imposed silence of what he witnessed.

The poppy is the clue to this post. These three men in different ways are precisely the people we refuse to forget when Remembrance Day comes round. These are men who stood against ideologies of hate, violence and oppression of the other and the vulnberable. I've never thought Remembrance Sunday need invitably be a celebration of war, nor a glorifying of the military and of conflict. These are three people who did what they did, endured what they suffered, and came home to build life again. But not without wounds of mind and body.

In the climate of contemporary Europe and North America, there are dark clouds reminiscent of those forces and ideologies that impelled the Western world towards war. Remembering those who died, and those who were wounded and went on suffering after the war, is of crucial importance to the future and the life opportunities of today's generations. The irresponsible rhetoric of division, the use of hate language, the seductive attractions of power for those fomenting nationalism, separatism and an over-against stance to all those deemed to be 'other', has to be challenged on moral grounds. Part of that challenge is to remember, and to act as reminders to others, of the human consequences of political failure, military adventures, and power sought as an end in itself.

And over and against such dangerous reductions of decency, humanity, generosity, hospitality and generous acceptance of diversity, I want to place the achievements and the sufferings of Walter, John, Alistair and countless millions more. These were decent people, men of ethical principle and responsible humanity. They didn't want to go to war. They had no pretensions to power nor were they seduced by ideology and the rhetoric of the politically overambitious. They did what they saw as their duty, and that meant they did things they found it hard to forget and harder still to forgive.

I wear a poppy to remember people like them, but also as a reminder how easy it is to unleash hell. The poppy's blood red colour far from glorifying bloodshed, symbolises the precious life of each human being, and dares us never to forget the cost and consequence of war. When I hear the shallow, strident self promotion of many of today's politicians, I refuse to be brow-beaten into accepting what they say; and I reflect on the sacrifices of so many, many people, who made possible the freedoms to speak such words. Freedom of speech is not an unconditional given, nor is it permanently guaranteed. It is a hard won privilege of free societies. People died to allow freedoms that enable people to live without fear of being silenced, or violated because they are different, or discriminated against by the powerful.

That's why at remembrance I always include the words that give moral impetus to those urgings towards the common good that underlie a society seeking shalom:

"Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream".

"They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks."

"He has shown you O man what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

One of the words made prominent in the last several years is the diametric opposite of those shalomic visions. The word is weaponise. One example. Immigration is weaponised when it is used to foment fear, anger and hate of the other, even when that other is desperate for human help. The weaponising of words has become mainstream in much political discourse. Those three men who fought for freedom of speech and thought, and to uphold human mutual respect, knew the importance of these.

It is the height of hypocrisy to wear a poppy and hate the other, demonise those we fear or dislike, or discriminate against on the basis of race, religion or other prejudices that dehumanise. The poppy is a reminder of precisely what it costs when these freedoms are abused, or co-opted into political goals pursued with damaging rhetoric and narrow self interest. Such behaviours and attitudes are, in fact, the blue touch paper that once lit have a tendency to explode.

Micah and Defence Spending

Hans Walter Wolff on reforging weapons into something else in Micah 4.1-5:
"As a Christian community we ought purposely to construct in our midst a workshop where reforging may take place. The iron rigidity we all have must be melted downand become fluid. \Then we will seek to influence public opinion in the direction of reducing the budget for military expenditures while increasing contributions for peace, health, education and social welfare. Then we will also renovate our personal budgets; we will give small and large contributions for whatever removes discord and discontent."
Preach it Hans, preach it! (Micah the Prophet, page 175)

Role model football fan.

  Walking from where I park my car, I pass the school playing fields down at the University.

Out of shot some football training or PE taking place at the goalmouth.

Those who enjoy people-watching should try going to a football match and ignoring the play on the field. The real entertainment is the emotional outpourings of spectators whose life frustrations are like heat seeking missiles looking for a legitimate, or illegitimate, target.

Indeed the synonym for illegitimate is a popular preferred term used at football matches quite inventively as an adjectival verbal participle, or more commonly a common noun used with uncommon intensity.

The cathartic surge of anger, frustration, unreasonable claims of unfairness, apopleptic name calling at the referee - these are all suggested by the performance of this crow.

Impressive balance as natural as you like on display here, as it cawed out its complaints, derision, technical instructions. Come to think of it, more reminiscent of a manager frustrated by the technical area but inhibited neither in volume nor vocabulary. It was so intent on firing abusive volleys it ignored the wee guy with the camera behind it, and not very far away!

 

Amongst my more likeable idiosyncracies is my belief that birds are funny - whether intentionally or accidentally they are nearly always fun to watch.

It was a dreich day on the shoreline yesterday. Big waves, mild but strong wind, mist and drizzle combining as mizzle.

I took time to enjoy a coffee in the Inversnecky Cafe and came out the door to see this juevnile tweenage herring gull, looking bewildered and a bit miserable.

Used to being fed by its parents it was hungry and seemed a bit put out. My guess is it was being taught lessons on independence.

Past experience has made me wary of juvenile gulls when I'm carrying food. They have laser eyesight, nil conscience and a primordial instinct for fast food for free. I remember being mugged from behind when taking the first, and last, bite of my pie in the University quadrangle.

But he's standing there for a reason, within a few feet of the rubbish bin. And actually these birds do a lot of the cleaning up behind people who throw food away.

I hope he got some supper. And learns how to survive into and to the other side of winter.