The Ministry of Ceremony and Celebration
Eugene H. Peterson
One of the ironies of pastoral work is that on these occasions in our ministry when we are most visible — out in front giving invocations and benedictions, directing ceremonies, and delivering addresses — we are scarcely noticed.
Eugene H. Peterson
Pastors enter and embrace the totality of human life, convinced there is no detail, however unpromising, in people's lives in which Christ may not work his will. Pastors agree to stay with the people in their communities week in and week out, year in and year out, to proclaim and guide, encourage and instruct as God works his purposes (gloriously, it will eventually turn out) in the meandering and disturbingly inconstant lives that compose our congregations.
This necessarily means taking seriously, and in faith, the dull routines, the empty boredom, and the unattractive responsibilities that make up much of most people's lives. It means witnessing to the transcendent in the fog and rain. It means living hopefully among people who from time to time get flickering glimpses of the Glory but then live through stretches, sometimes long ones, of unaccountable grayness. Most pastoral work takes place in obscurity: deciphering grace in the shadows, searching out meaning in a difficult text, blowing on the embers of a hard-used life. This is hard work and not conspicuously glamorous.
But there are interruptions in this work, not infrequent, in which the significance blazes all of itself. The bush burns and is not quenched. Our work is done for us, or so it seems, by the event. We do nothing to get these occasions together: no prayer meeting, no strategic planning, no committee work, no altar call. They are given. They are redolent with meaning and almost always, even among unbelievers, evoke ...
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