Something Extraordinary

I'm about to pack up and go to the office. My wife and daughter are away until later today so I could work at home, but sometimes work requires the feel of an office. It's going to be a busy week, one that involves some rush to get things done. Or so it seems at the moment. My wife is going to an overnight retreat on Friday night which means it'll be my little girl and I until sometime Saturday evening. That means I have to have my sermon done (or at least 90% done) before Friday night. That's not how it usually works. I sort of wish the retreat was last week when, quite unexpectedly, my sermon was done just before lunch on Friday. But I have to trust that the Lord who provided then will provide this time as well. Even for a pastor, or at least this pastor, that's not always easy.

How easily our faith becomes mundane and all too ordinary, especially when we can't even muster enough trust to believe that God will help us get through a week with all its priorities and responsibilities. At our adult Bible study we were looking at Jesus' power over sin and one of the questions was: when have we questioned Jesus' power and authority? Most of us as Christians probably don't question Jesus' power and authority directly, doubting in plain sight that God can do great things. We affirm his greatness. He applaud his power. We verbally attest to our conviction that God has the authority and the power to pull off miracles. We stare in awe, blankfaced at his actions as recorded in Scripture. And then we go on living as though he can do nothing about our everyday circumstances. Our actions, as the saying goes, are more powerful than words.

If I consider that God created all the universe, that in him I live and move and have my being, how can I doubt that he can also provide me with a sermon for Sunday? If I consider that all things are made in, through, and for Christ, how can I doubt that the Lord can enable me to get through this week? How is it that we can read Scripture, with its incredible portrayal of God in all his majesty and glory, and still end up believing only what our eyes will show us? How is it that we can allow our moods and the number of hours we've had for sleep so easily determine the earnestness and persistence of our prayers? When will the scales fall from our eyes? Lord, help us see.

While I completely understand and accept that much of life is ordinary, a shopping list of duties and responsibilities, of chores and errands, must it be the case that our faith is confined by the same boundaries? I know that since much of life is this way, our faith has to make sense of and be relevant to the everydayness of our routines and schedules; but where is the sense of mystery, of transcendence, of our faith, while addressing the ordinary, being about less--or rather more--than the ordinary? Shouldn't there be a levity to faith to match the gravity of life?

I do have those moments when, for some reason, all of life's problems, while still very much there, no longer have the weight I normally assign them. I can't quite describe it, but it's as though the reality of God--though very much unseen--seems more real and powerful than the reality of everything else that I can see. And it's not a forget-your-problems-happy-escapist-sort-of-feeling. Seems to me it's a gift. I can't summon it. I can't worship myself into it. I can't pray myself to it. This makes it even more odd because knowing that I did not and cannot manufacture such a perspective means that faith itself is a gift. I can't force my faith; but I can ask for it to grow.

Now when I get to the office there will be the temptation, a temptation that forever is there, to rush ahead and dash into work. I'll want to make the phone calls I have to make. Plan. Wrack my brain for sermon ideas. Think over music for Sunday's worship. Such an attitude is, in some ways, endemic to our culture. And it's not necessarily unhealthy as far as it goes. But in ministry it can be a problem insofar as it makes it about what I do. And there is a sense in which the less I do the better. To think otherwise, that all of this pastoral work is the fruit of my labours, the result of my gifts and talents, and that if I can't pull it together out of thin air, then there is something wrong with me and I should look into another vocation or career or job, is to neglect the very reality at the heart of ministry, the reason and rationale for ministry in the first place: the reality of God. But that takes faith. And that's something only God can provide. So I have to ask for it. In other words, ministry should, though it doesn't always, begin and end and be immersed in prayer. In neglecting prayer, I allow my ministry, such as it is, to make that downward slide toward the ordinary, where mystery has been replaced by methods, transcendence by technique, and faith by sight. Only a prayerful life informed by the revelation of Scripture can find itself sure that in the midst of doctor's appointments, burnt suppers, coughs and runny noses, late night risings to calm an upset child, and feeble efforts at sermon preparation that the God who called the simplest and grandest elements of creation into being can also grant me life and faith. Only God can help me see and live in the ordinary with a faith that is more than the ordinary. That's something extraordinary.