Following Jesus In Contemporary Context - Essay Example

?I decided to choose one hour a few days before Thanksgiving to be in God’s creation; and what a divine and humbling experience it was! I gained insights and personal discoveries that added substance to my celebration of Thanksgiving Day with family and friends, mainly due to the new intellectual dimensions learned from the wisdom of the masters of pastoral leadership and Christian spirituality. Most of these lessons, I realized after much reflection, were “old” like the Gospel but, like the Gospel, “new”. What this means is that while the source of the spiritual message has been around for thousands of years, and is therefore “old” by the historical standards, the personal messages each one of us gets is a sign of the eternity of God and has been and can be applied over the centuries by generations of believers in different and always “new” ways. This applies to my experience of that hour spent in God’s creation and my renewed appreciation for the Sabbath, an old practice that has gained a new modern dimension. This experience has given me a renewed vision of God, the purpose of my life and of those around me, more especially the people who depend on me for pastoral leadership, and of what I need to do to be more effective as a follower and pastor, of one who leads others to God’s kingdom and who is led by the hand by the Divine Master. My first lesson is that of having gained a deeper understanding of the meaning of the Sabbath, a weekly reminder that God blessed and made holy this day of rest (Bass 78). Being the perfect teacher he is, God laid down in scripture that on the Sabbath day, he rested, not so much to tell us that he got tired from all that creating stuff, because God by definition does not get tired. Rather, God rested to show us how important it is to spend time, slow down, experience moments of tranquility and peace, and reflect on the important things in life. God in his divine wisdom foresaw how exciting the world would become, and how man and woman would be so caught up with the beauties and riches of this world that we forget why we are alive and how we ever get to be here at all; in a word, to “remember who we are and what is important” (Bass 88). Just looking around me and reflecting on what I witnessed that Sabbath hour, I remembered those words about Jesus looking at the people around him who went around like sheep without a shepherd, living lives devoid of meaning and purpose. We work so hard to earn money so they can enjoy life, but with the economic difficulties happening all around us, many realize that making both ends meet is not easy. Likewise, we experience that the world, limited and full of evil, only offers limited and imperfect happiness. The second series of lessons proceed from the renewed understanding of the Sabbath. Experiencing the Sabbath with a deeper and more personal and spiritual meaning made me realize that I too have been engrossed with the worldly dimension of life and even of prayer and worship. I have focused on the means and not the ends, on the form, not the substance, and on the body of faith, not in its soul. Like the religious leaders of whom Jesus warned the people to do what they preach, but not do as they do, I realized that pastors who should lead their flocks to God are focusing too much on “preaching and teaching” instead of “leading and living by doing”. Sure, one needs to preach and teach, but the best way to learn is by doing, watching and learning from the example of Jesus himself, who taught by word and example. Like most pastors, I need to hone and develop that dual vision of which Scharen and Volf (97) wrote, of seeing material things and their relation to God, as source, creator, joy, good, gift, talent, the one to which everything leads, to see the invisible God in the visible things of the material universe. A more effective pastoral leadership must be characterized by a spiritual life grounded on God through prayer and the imitation of Jesus’ life of sacrifice and love for all souls, even those who hate us. A good pastor has to be a soul of prayer and sacrifice, because the pastor’s role is to lead souls to Jesus. The human heart follows Jesus as seen through the pastor, who should refuse every vestige of cultic celebrity born of pride and self-love. People follow the Christ-in-us, because only Christ truly and perfectly attracts other souls. Any form of discipleship based on human and worldly attraction would surely be shipwrecked in the dangerous rocks of the pastor’s imperfections and sins. Although the pastor should set an example of being Christ-like, he or she must not be afraid to show imperfection, as long s there is struggle to stay true to the faith. All of us are sinners, and not one of us on earth is perfect, so while we struggle each moment to be holy and spotless in the sight of God, we must never be so proud as to think that we are perfect or that we would never fail. Sorrow for our faults and signs of our determination to struggle and persevere to the end are equally powerful forces for leading the flock to God. The Sabbath allows us an opportunity for deep introspection, not only to acknowledge faults and find ways to correct ourselves after much reflection. There is, however, a third lesson one could learn from the Sabbath: worship, like love, is shown in deeds and is not just sweet words. This third lesson gave me important insights into the value of worship, which are a foretaste of the festive character of heaven and God’s kingdom, where everyone speaks the same language of love and understanding, tolerance of diversity, forgiveness and compassion, self-denial and humility (Bass 87). Saliers (in Bass 178) wrote of “music as the language of the soul made audible” and of “human voices raised in concert in human gatherings as primary instruments of the soul”. This drove home for me the importance of hymns sung and learned and understood well. For this, hymns must be prayed about, meditated and reflected on, with practical lessons extracted, entrusted to God, and applied in daily life. Songs and prayers let us communicate with the divine, and the better we understand what we sing about, the better we understand what we say to God and what God says to us. The other deep insight I gained is a re-examination of our relationship to this world. While we should be detached from the goods of this world because love for money is the root of all evil, as Paul preached, we also need to care for the world as stewards for our generation and the coming ones to enjoy. As Stassen and Gushee (431) remind us, “we humans are a part of the family of nature” and there is a need for an ethic of creation care (435-438) that needs to be balanced among the radical extremes of anthropocentric, biocentric and theocentric dimensions. We have all been endowed with an intelligence capable of discerning how to bring this about so that we do not fall into the danger of emphasizing one over the other. This is part of the challenging role of a pastor-leader, who “stand like beggars before God, whose power to save alone sets us upon the way to life abundant” (Scharen and Volf 133). Every pastor who wishes to exercise effective leadership must always ask: What would Jesus do? If he were alive here and now, how would he lead my flock? How would he care for the whole of creation? How would he live and celebrate the Sabbath? How would he show his love and appreciation for his Father? What would he tell the investment bankers, politicians and businessmen in our midst, and how would he comfort and guide the sick and the suffering, the unemployed and homeless? How would he attract to himself the artists, pop stars and film superstars? And, perhaps more into the soul of today’s world, how would he advise the athletes and sportspeople, and how would he utilize and evangelize the Internet? There are no easy answers, and the best that a pastor-leader could ever do is to spend time each day, and at each moment, conversing with God in prayer and discovering how Our Lord would answer each of these, and more, questions in unique and exciting ways. Works Cited Bass, Dorothy C. “Keeping Sabbath” in Dorothy C. Bass (Ed.) Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (The Practices of Faith Series). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010, pp. 75-88. Saliers, Don E. “Singing Our Lives” in Dorothy C. Bass (Ed.) Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (The Practices of Faith Series). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010, pp. 177-192. Scharen, Christian and Miroslav Volf. Faith as a Way of Life: A Vision for Pastoral Leadership. Grand Rapids, IL: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008. Stassen, Glen H. and David P. Gushee. Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003. Read More