ken wilson online

Your job, young pastor, is to maintain a non-anxious presence within the church you pastor.  Knowing that we live in a time when anxiety is everywhere–a time when religion, in particular, has been whipped into a paralyzing frenzy of anxiety by those who are served by fear.  Easier said than done, maintaining a non-anxious presence.  Where to begin?  Befriend the book of Psalms.

Yes, I know we all have favorite books of the Bible to which we turn in a pinch and to which we return often. And yours may not be the book of Psalms.  But I’m going to dare say that you’re going to need this friend whether you’re drawn to him or not.

Pastoring is an immersion in the human–your own and others.

Jesus immersed himself in humanity by virtue of being born a human, by virtue of his stepping into the waters of baptism–a baptism of repentance for sinners, no less–and by making friends with the book of Psalms.

The psalms are an exploration of what it means to be a human being before God: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful and everything in between.  Angry human, fearful human, crowing human, vulnerable human, righteous human, thankful human,  sinful human, happy human, complaining human, praising human.  Because God wants to be near all of it, and it’s a good thing that he does, because it’s the only way the likes of us will ever be near God.

But you, as a pastor, will be tempted to be other than what you are.  You will be tempted to be what your are supposed to be before God, or what your fellow believers want you to be before God.  Which means that you will often be missing from God, hiding behind one of these personas.

The psalms, over time, will break you of that habit.  When you wish to be refined, a psalm will be vulgar–in it’s brazen hostility toward others, for example, or in its willingness to complain loudly.  Most of the time, the psalms will be more human than you are, or wish to be before God.

I spent a great deal of time arguing with the psalms and the tone they adopt, but I’ve given that up mostly and just accept the reality that they represent me better than I might wish to be represented.  It’s a humbling thing to realize that you need to enter the prayers of someone else to learn how to be yourself.

Over time, the psalms train us to accept our humanity as God apparently does. Which means they train us, over time, to accept people as they are, including ourselves.  And they lead us into the posture that Jesus had toward us fellow human beings: sympathy.

If we can only learn to be our human selves before God as the psalmists learned to be their human selves before God, we can begin to maintain a non-anxious presence before God.  We can learn to accept ourselves, in other words.  And there’s no maintaining an non-anxious presence before others without that.

I’ve found a wonderful way to cozy up to the psalms.  It’s called The Paraclete Psalter.  O my goodness, stop, drop and buy this thing.  It’s only thirteen bucks on Amazon– thin and leather bound, too.  It’s the product of an ecumenical community called The Jesus Community—survivors [Yes! Survivors!] of the Jesus movement that began in the late 1960’s.  When you can find a group, an organized group of Jesus freaks who have survived the turmoil that we baby boomers imposed on the Jesus movement, you know you have found something worth noticing.  These men and women have been praying the psalms daily for a long time and the psalms have become embedded in their spirituality, and this Psalter [collection of psalms] is the by-product.

I’ve been using this for the past month instead of The Divine Hours–the most accessible form of fixed hour prayer available.  I’ll go back to using The Divine Hours, but I’ll also return to this Psalter for a month at a time–or who knows, maybe I’ll just stick with it and The Divine Hours.

There’s just something about pausing to use these prayers of the insistently-human-before-God through the day, when you’re actually going about your can’t-be-anything-but-human business, that makes you realize God might want to be near this mess.

Tags: anxiety, bible, Edwin Friedman, human, prayer, the jesus community, The Paraclete Psalter. book of psalms

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 6:20 pm and is filed under advice to young pastors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.