Sunday Devotions: In Appreciation of Pastors

Hebrews 10

Later this morning my friend Andy will be installed as the rector of an Anglican congregation in the Twin Cities. To be a Christian minister in any tradition is a challenging vocation, and I want to use the occasion to express my appreciation for all the women and men who accept pastoral calls.

For I’m sure that most Christian clergy, at some point, feel like their forebears described in the opening verse of today’s New Testament reading:

…every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins.

Hebrews 10:11

I don’t mean that what Christian priests and pastors do is pointless. It could never be such, not when they proclaim the gospel of the Christ who “offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins” (v 12), rather than a law that “has only a shadow of the good things to come” and so could “never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach” (v 1).

But the “day after day” and “again and again”-ness of pastoral labor must lead its practitioners to question their routines. Done out of faith — “the conviction of things not seen” (11:1) — sermons and sacraments, prayers and pastoral counseling don’t always provide visible evidence of their effectiveness. And I suspect that it’s especially hard in this moment, when so many pastors are witnessing firsthand all the problems that I can write about at a distance: the numerical decline of shrinking congregations; or worse, the spiritual decline of even large churches conforming to the political, economic, and cultural patterns of our troubled world.

I wonder if Vincent van Gogh thought about his preacher father — or his own time as an evangelist — when he painted “Shepherd with a Flock of Sheep” in 1884… - Wikimedia

At the same time, I suspect that Andy would tell me that to put on his stole this morning is to know again that Jesus’ yoke is easy, and his burden light. For whatever the challenges they face, he and other pastors I know seem to respond to their calling “with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (10:22). Whether out of exuberant anticipation or weary faithfulness, pastors are shepherds who continue — “day after day… again and again” — to meet together with their flocks, “encouraging one another” and provoking their sisters and brothers “to love and good deeds” (10:24-25).

So I pray that they will receive assurance of the things they hope for in their ministry. That they will not only write their sermons as John Ames does in Gilead (“in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true”), but that us parishioners will actually “pay greater attention to what we have heard” and not “drift away” (2:1). That when they “approach the throne of grace with boldness” this morning as priests under Jesus, the high priest, they will receive the same mercy and find the same grace that they pray for the rest of us (4:16).

That in the midst of any uncertainty about how to proceed or any doubts about their effectiveness, they will “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful” (10:23). Amen.

Next week’s lectionary readings: 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 132; John 18:33-37; Revelation 1:4b-8.