Overwhelmed

Calm in the Storm

Pastor’s Epistle—February 2020

I am often overwhelmed at the task set before us.

We are called—as Christians, as human beings—to know and love and worship God, by being Christ for our neighbor: by teaching and preaching and healing and feeding and giving and forgiving and liberating and truth-telling. We, who are called by grace, are to be the Body of Christ for the world, so that all peoples and all of Creation may know God, may know His grace and His mercy and His blessings, know His infinite creative power and His omnibenevolent plans for our flourishing. And this can be daunting indeed.

As a pastor, I’ve had opportunity to read and to study and, to a certain extent, to live out the great spiritual and religious traditions of our faith. I’ve learned languages and histories, theologies, philosophies, music and art, science and literature, Scripture, liturgy, pastoral care, family systems theory, comparative religion, meditation—on and on and on, an ocean of tradition so broad and so vast that no one person or group could ever hope adequately to plumb its depths.

And the whole idea of pastors studying all this is so that we can pass it along, to our congregations, our communities, our neighbors. But more than this, we are to help people to commune directly with God, in Word and in Sacrament, in feasting and in fasting, in silence and in prayer. Yet in a world inundated with white noise, with frantic demands for our attention, with limitless opportunities for entertainment and worry and distraction, how can we help people to find the still, small voice of God in the silence?

I often fear that my own efforts are not nearly enough. I so desperately want our worship to express the reality that God Himself descends from Heaven to become the Body and Blood of Christ upon our altar. I want our Confirmands to taste the breadth and depth of the Christian tradition, thousands of years of richest thought and holy practice. I want every person who attends St Peter’s to find solace and challenge and adventure in the pages of the Bible, not only on Sundays but on each and every day of the week.

And I’m not sure that I’m doing that—at all. I’m not sure that I’m doing justice to the duties and the privileges of the office so graciously entrusted to myself and to my colleagues. How can I make people to see the astonishing riches offered in and through and to God’s Church? How can I adequately express the world-shattering liberation won for all of Creation through Christ’s victory upon the Cross? How, in short, can I give the world Jesus?

And that’s usually when I stop and realize just how often I’ve been using words like “I” and “me,” and just how foolish that all must sound. I am not called to pour out infinity into the world, as though I were the bridge between the mundane and transcendent. It’s not my vocation to make Jesus Christ the central pillar of life for every believer and for every human being. I cannot save a single hair upon my head, let alone the whole of Creation. That’s not my job.

It’s His. It’s Jesus’ job.

In a society that constantly reminds us of our shortcomings, of our failures, of our inability to hit an ever-rising bar, Christ enters in and makes His presence known in the most unexpected and wondrous of ways. He comes to us in the stranger, in the loved one, in the silence, in our wounds. He comes to us and pours out grace upon grace, mercy upon mercy: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Here is the long and the short of it: Christ is God, come down to us, to heal and forgive and raise us up from the dead. His victory is already won; it was won long ago on that Cross atop Golgotha. And someday the Resurrection begun at His empty tomb will spread like fire to encompass the whole of the world, the whole of the cosmos. And then God will be All in All: all Goodness, all Truth, all Beauty, forever. And every wound will be healed, and every tear wiped away, and every wrong impossibly made right.

So please, dear Christian, do not be like me. Do not be overwhelmed at the plight of the world and the sheer magnitude of the salvation that God offers through us. Rather, be like Christ. Be humble and gentle and life-giving. Do the good that is set before you. Care for the neighbor who lives beside you. Do not fret about what you will eat or what you will wear or what your social media profile says about you as a person.

Know that behind it all, beneath it all, before it all is God. And God is Love. And Love wins. Everything else will sort itself out. Have faith in Christ, for He is with you always. And thus are we still the Church for the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.