After Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in the towns of Galilee. 2 When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples 3 to ask him, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?" 4 Jesus replied, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: 5 The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. 6 Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me." — Matthew 11
Easier Said Than Done
Pastors aren’t supposed to admit this, but it is much easier to
preach the Gospel than to live it. In times of stress, doubt
creeps in and, no matter how many family and friends surround
you, you still feel completely alone and abandoned by God. When
there seems to be no hope and no way out, the silence from on
high seems deafening. Doubt tells us our faith is meaningless,
that our service has been a waste of time. Most all religion,
including Christianity, can be dismissed as a self-reinforcing
delusion. Faith, by its very nature, compensates for the lack
of empirical evidence of the existence of God or the works of
God. Ministers can encourage others in their faith but who do we
turn to in our hour of need? To whom can we confess our own
disbelief?
The truth is, sometimes God is not speaking. We look to God for
comfort, for an escape from our anxiety. It is not God Who fails
us but us whop fail God. Our anxiety, while a natural and human
response, calls God a liar. God’s peace departs from us when we
focus on our problems and situation rather than keeping our
minds focused on Him [Isaiah 26:3]. We fault God for not
speaking, but God has already spoken. He hasn’t changed. It’s
all there, in the book. We feel abandoned, but He sapid He’d
never leave us, nor forsake us [Hebrews 13:5]. Putting all of
that into practice, when faced with calamity, is a tough
proposition. Pastors are not immune to this. Pastors,. However,
often suffer that much more because they have to keep up the
good face: they can never let anyone suspect, for even one
moment, that they are questioning their faith.
God never leaves us. We leave God. Pastors and preachers, most
especially, never seem to know when to shut up. Adult human
beings have an attention span of maybe fifteen minutes. It gets
shorter every day thanks to the constant bombardment of media.
Flashes of color, a few sentences, loud music, the quick
snap-cuts to the next thing. We are a generation of people who
must be entertained at all times, our lives flooded, form waking
to rest, with images and sound. TV, internet, radio going all
day, at home, in the car, at your desk, ear buds in all the
time. We can’t heard God. We can’t even hear ourselves. There is
no quiet. And we’ve grown accustomed to instant solutions to
complex issues. So much so that, when God does not magically
appear and do our bidding, we find fault with and doubt Him.
Fifteen minutes, pastors. What do you want to do with them? Many
pastors I know squander the first fifteen minutes of their
sermon making innocuous remarks, passing on acknowledgements or
just talking to hear themselves talk. Fifteen, twenty minutes in
and they haven’t arrived at their sermon’s first point (assuming
it has one). So much so that, by the time they impart whatever
God has given them for His people, the pastor has overshot the
runway, moved past his audience’s attention span. They heard all
that blather about who you bumped into last week and that funny
story about Sister So-And-So’s cat. But they’ve tuned out Jesus.
Why? Not because God left you but because you left God. Because
you’ve been doing this too long. You’re bored, tired of the same
rigmarole week in and week out. I know pastors who are frankly
bored of the plan of salvation and forget to mention it. Bored
of preaching Jesus, so they preach obscure biblical characters
and try to impress us with their depth of knowledge of how many
spots were on the third sheep in Joseph’s flock.
God did not leave these men, they left God. Their season in that
pulpit is finished, was finished years ago. But they’re still
there. Why? They have a contract. Right off, I am suspicious of
pastors who sign legal contracts with churches. First of all,
the church offering a legal contract to a pastor is ignorant and
lost to begin with. Legal contracts between Christians are not
biblically enforceable [I Cor 6:1-8]. As Christians, our word
should mean something. If you want to type up a list of what
we’ve agreed to, that’s perfectly acceptable. But the minute you
notarize it and give it the force of law, you are in sin.
Pastors stay too long because they have a contract. They stay
too long because they like the money or just need the money.
They stay too long for ego—the praises and shouts and
Hallelujahs going forth are intoxicating to the man at the
podium; the temptations to receive them as your own, which is a
grievous sin. Many pastors are simply drunk with the adulation
and bennies of the pastorate and will not step down. Some need
to be forced down and dragged out. But, my guess would be, more
often, the church just moves away from God because Daddy won’t
buy a boat and get out of the way.
Pastors should stay as long as they are useful and productive.
As long as God is speaking to them and through them. As long as
the church is making forward progress. A pastor whose church is
withering, not moving, not progressing, pews emptying out, and
yet insists on staying in place is lost, his ego resounding off
empty pews. He is killing his own church. Not because God left
him but because he left God. Most of us are so in love with our
pastor, worship our pastor, to the point of not knowing God for
ourselves. We don’t know God, we know Pastor Jones. We don’t
read the bible, we look at that idiotic screen with the handful
of verses. We are not empowered to realize the church has become
stagnant, which only happens when the Holy Spirit departs.
But the pastor is still up there talking. What is the biblical
model? Jesus said, "Report what you see." What is the witness of
your church?
John The Baptist was in jail,
in the depths of despair, when he dispatched a couple of aids
to ask Jesus if He truly was the Christ, or should they be
looking for someone else [Luke 7:20]. This from the man who’d
exclaimed, “Behold! The Lamb of God!” and whose entire life had
been dedicated to preparing the way for the Messiah. Now, in his
hour of despair, John doubted. Are You sure You’re the one…?
In my opinion, John had been arrested because he was at the
wrong place at the wrong time. Because he had moved away from
God, unwilling to surrender the stage to Jesus Christ, the start
of Whose ministry signaled the end of John’s. John should have
bought a boat. Instead, he kept on preaching, kept on baptizing,
ultimately competing with Jesus for the multitudes now streaming
from Galilee. It is possible John was operating within God’s
permissive will—there was certainly no harm in preaching
repentance—but the perfect plan for John was to prophesy and
prepare the way for Jesus. John was like an opening act that
refused to leave the stage once Prince started singing. Dearly
beloved: we are gathered here to discuss this thing called life…
and John’s still downstage with his banjo, singing his own tune.
This is my interpretation, of course, but I believe John moved
from operating perfectly within the divine purpose to becoming
one of those pastors who doesn’t know when to shut up. He seemed
out of sync with God’s purpose. He was not following Christ but
continuing to announce the coming of Someone already there.
Moreover, John’s ministry was in the wilderness, not in the
city. And yet, by the time we arrive at Mark Chapter 6, John is
in the city, hanging out at the governor’s mansion, essentially
calling the governor’s wife a whore. The arrest disturbed John, who,
as most devout Jews did, expected the Messiah to effect
political change on earth and establish God’s kingdom. Jesus
wasn’t doing anything of the sort. John felt well within his
rights to speak truth to power, to jab an accusing finger at
Herod Antipas and poke him in the eye, because the Messiah had
come. John figured Herod’s days were numbered.
John may well have felt abandoned by God. Lost, in despair.
Things not working out the way John had imagined. John’s dungeon
was likely in the castle of Machaerus, atop a lonely ridge,
surrounded by a ravine and overlooking the Dead Sea. It was one
of the loneliest, grimmest, and most difficult to attack
fortresses in the world. And no God. His work—all those
years—apparently in vain.
John had been imprisoned for shooting is mouth off, criticizing
the governor, Herod Antipas, for divorcing his wife in order to
marry Herodias, who had been married to Herod’s brother Phillip
but was now divorced from him. Adding to the drama, Herodias was
also both Herod and Phillip’s niece. Such inter-family marriages
were seen as incest by Jewish law, which also forbid men from
marrying their brother’s wife so long as the brother was still
alive. By the numbers, John, a priest and Levite, was well
within his rights to criticize Herod. But, criticizing Herod was
not John’s mission. John’s mission was to make way for the
Messiah and, presumably, leave the stage. Branching out into
political activism was not part of John’s role. But he didn’t
know when to keep his mouth shut. Had God wanted someone to
criticize the governor,
God’s Son was in the neighborhood. Yet there is no record of
Jesus publicly criticizing political figures, the government,
or trying to change any laws. Jesus openly criticized religious
phonies, but there is no biblical example for the kind of
anachronistic, reactionary political activism so commonly
associated with Christianity these days. This was not Who Jesus
was. Michele Bachmann doing all that hollering about “taking the
country back.” Not Who Jesus was.
So, there was John: locked up, puzzled, how could this be?! And,
rather than deal with the possibility he’d wandered off-script
and begun improvising a ministry he was not called to, John
doubles down: it must be God’s fault. Maybe God pointed John to
the wrong Guy. Are You the one or should we seek another…? This
was perhaps the most pathetic and sad inquiry ever made of
Jesus, that the very prophet who heralded His arrival now
doubted Him. We doubt God when God doesn’t jump through hoops
for us. We doubt God when God does not perform to our
expectations. Mostly, we doubt God when we’ve wandered
off-script and begun improvising. When we fail to observe the
seasons change. When he stop moving within the flow of God and
instead follow our own understanding and instincts.
Christopher J. Priest
4 September 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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