With the vastness of the heavenly invasion and the urgency of the faith decision rolling into our consciousness like thunder and lightning, we cannot stand around on Sunday morning filling the time with pretentious small talk on how bad the world is and how wonderful this new stewardship campaign is going to be.
The adjective apocalyptic is not commonly found in company with the noun pastor. I can’t remember ever hearing them in the same sentence. They grew up on different sides of the tracks. I’d like to play Cupid between the two words and see if I can instigate a courtship.
Apocalyptic has a wild sound to it: an end-of-the-world craziness, a catastrophic urgency. The word is used when history seems out of control and ordinary life is hopeless. When you aren’t sure whether it is bombs or stars that are falling out of the sky, and people are rushing toward the cliffs like a herd of pigs, the scene is apocalyptic. The word is scary and unsettling.
Pastor is a comforting word: a person who confidently quotes the Twenty-third Psalm when you are shivering in the dark shadows. Pastors gather us in quiet adoration before God. Pastors represent the faithfulness and love of the eternal God and show up on time every Sunday to say it again that God so loves the world. Pastors build bridges over troubled waters and guide wandering feet back to the main road. The word accumulates associations of security and blessing, solidity and peace.
But I have a biblical reason for bringing the two words together. The last book of the Bible was written by a pastor. And the book he wrote was an apocalypse. The St. John who gave us the last words of the Bible was an apocalyptic pastor.
I am misunderstood by most of the people who call me pastor. Their misunderstandings are contagious, and I find myself misunderstanding: Who am I? What is my proper work? I look around. I ask questions. I scout the American landscape for images of pastoral work. What does a pastor do? What does a pastor look like? What place does a pastor occupy in church and culture? I get handed a job description that seems to have been developed from the latest marketing studies of religious consumer needs. But there are no images, no stories. St. John gives me an image and a story and a blessedly blank job description. He is my candidate for patron saint for pastors.
St. John is the kind of pastor I would like to be. My admiration expands: he is also the kind of pastor I would like my colleagues to be. As I look to him, searching for the energy source that makes him a master and not one more religious hack, I find it is the apocalyptic element that is critical.
Ernst Käsemann captured what many think is the unique biblical stance in his sentence: Apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology. Perhaps, then, the grandmother of all Christian pastoral work. Early church Christians believed that the resurrection of Jesus inaugurated a new age. They were in fact but against appearances living in God’s kingdom, a kingdom of truth and healing and grace. This was all actually present but hidden from unbelieving eyes and inaudible to unbelieving ears.
Pastors are the persons in the church communities who repeat and insist on these kingdom realities against the world appearances, and who therefore must be apocalyptic. In its dictionary meaning, apocalypse is simply revelation, the uncovering of what was covered up so that we can see what is there. But the context in which the word arrives adds color to the black-and-white dictionary meaning, colors bright and dark crimson urgency and purple crisis. Under the crisis of persecution and under the urgency of an imminent end, reality is revealed suddenly for what it is. We had supposed our lives were so utterly ordinary. Sin-habits dull our free faith into stodgy moralism and respectable boredom; then crisis rips the veneer of cliché off everyday routines and reveals the side-by-side splendors and terrors of heaven and hell. Apocalypse is arson it secretly sets a fire in the imagination that boils the fat out of an obese culture-religion and renders a clear gospel love, a pure gospel hope, a purged gospel faith.
I have been a pastor for thirty years to American Christians who do their best to fireproof themselves against crisis and urgency. Is there any way that I can live with these people and love them without being shaped by the golden-calf culture? How can I keep from settling into the salary and benefits of a checkout clerk in a store for religious consumers? How can I avoid a metamorphosis from the holy vocation of pastor into a promising career in religious sales?
Here is a way: submit my imagination to St. John’s apocalypse the crisis of the End combined with the urgencies of God and let the energies of the apocalyptic define and shape me as pastor. When I do that, my life as pastor simplifies into prayer, poetry, and patience.
Apocalyptic Prayer
The apocalyptic pastor prays. St. John’s pastoral vocation was worked out on his knees. He embraced the act of prayer as pivotal in his work, and then showed it as pivotal in everyone’s work. Nothing a pastor does is different in kind from what all Christians do, but sometimes it is more focused, more visible. Prayer is the pivot action in the Christian community.
After a few introductory sentences in the Revelation, we come upon St. John in the place and practice of prayer (1:9-10). The place: on the island called Patmos. The practice: in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. In the intricate task of being pastor to his seven congregations, which in the case study we have before us involves composing this theological poem, The Revelation, he never leaves the place of prayer, never abandons the practice of prayer. At the end of the book he is still praying: Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! (22:20). St. John listens to God, is silent before God, sings to God, asks questions of God. The listening and silence, the songs and questions are wonderfully in touch with reality, mixing the sights and sounds of Roman affairs with the sights and sounds of salvation angels and markets and Caesars and Jesus. St. John doesn’t miss much. He is an alert and alive pastor. He reads and assimilates the Scriptures; he reads and feels the impact of the daily news. But neither ancient Scripture nor current event is left the way it arrives on his doorstep; it is all turned into prayer.
St. John lives on the boundary of the invisible world of the Holy Spirit and the visible world of Roman times. On that boundary he prays. The praying is a joining of realities, making a live connection between the place we find ourselves and the God who is finding us.
But prayer is not a work that pastors are often asked to do except in ceremonial ways. Most pastoral work actually erodes prayer. The reason is obvious: people are not comfortable with God in their lives. They prefer something less awesome and more informal. Something, in fact, like the pastor. Reassuring, accessible, easygoing. People would rather talk to the pastor than to God. And so it happens that without anyone actually intending it, prayer is pushed to the sidelines.
And so pastors, instead of practicing prayer, which brings people into the presence of God, enter into the practice of messiah: we will do the work of God for God, fix people up, tell them what to do, conspire in finding the shortcuts by which the long journey to the Cross can be bypassed since we all have such crowded schedules right now. People love us when we do this. It is flattering to be put in the place of God. It feels wonderful to be treated in this godlike way. And it is work that we are generally quite good at.
A sense of apocalypse blows the whistle on such messianic pastoring. The vastness of the heavenly invasion, the urgency of the faith decision, the danger of the impinging culture with these pouring into our consciousness accompanied by thunder and lightning, we cannot stand around on the street corners of Sunday morning filling the time with pretentious small talk on how bad the world is and how wonderful this new stewardship campaign is going to be.
If we have even an inkling of apocalypse, it will be impossible to act like the jaunty foreman of a home-improvement work crew that is going to re-landscape moral (or immoral) garden spots. We must pray. The world has been invaded by God, and it is with God we have to do.
Prayer is the most thoroughly present act we have as humans, and the most energetic: it sockets the immediate past into the immediate future and makes a flexible, living joint of them. The Amen gathers what has just happened into the Maranatha of the about to happen and produces a Benediction. We pay attention to God and lead others to pay attention to God. It hardly matters that so many people would rather pay attention to their standards of living, or their self-image, or their zeal to make a mark in the world.
Apocalypse opens up the chasm of reality. The reality is God: worship or flee.
Apocalyptic Poet
The apocalyptic pastor is a poet. St. John was the first major poet of the Christian church. He used words in new ways, making (poétes in Greek is maker) truth right before our eyes, fresh in our ears. The way a pastor uses the language is a critical element in the work. The Christian gospel is rooted in language: God spoke a creation into being; our Savior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a relationship, shape beauty, form truth. This is St. John’s work; it is every pastor’s work.
I do not mean that all pastors write poems or speak in rhyme, but that they treat words with reverence, stand in awe before not only the Word, but words, and realize that language itself partakes of the sacred.
If St. John’s Revelation is not read as a poem, it is virtually incomprehensible, which, in fact, is why it is so often uncomprehended. St. John, playful with images and exuberant in metaphor, works his words into vast, rhythmic repetitions. The gospel has already been adequately proclaimed to these people to whom he is pastor; they have become Christians through preaching and teaching that originated with Peter and Paul, and was then passed on by canonical Gospel writers along with unnumbered deacons, elders, and martyrs. But there is more to St. John’s work than making a cognitive connection with the sources. As pastor he re-speaks, re-visions the gospel so that his congregations experience the word, not mere words. To do that he must be a poet.
The pastor’s task is to shape the praying imagination before the gospel. This revelation of God to us in Jesus is a fact so large and full of energy, and our capacities to believe and love and hope are so atrophied, that we need help to hear the words in their power, see the images in their energy.
Isn’t it odd that pastors, who are responsible for interpreting the Scriptures, so much of which come in the form of poetry, have so little interest in poetry? It is a crippling defect and must be remedied. The Christian communities as a whole must rediscover poetry, and the pastors must lead them. Poetry is essential to the pastoral vocation because poetry is original speech. The word is creative: it brings into being what was not there before perception, relationship, belief. Out of the silent abyss a sound is formed: people hear what was not heard before and are changed by the sound from loneliness into love. Out of the blank abyss a picture is formed by means of metaphor: people see what they did not see before and are changed by the image from anonymity into love. Words create. God’s word creates; our words can participate in the creation.
But poetry is not the kind of language that pastors are asked to use, except in quotation at funerals. Most pastoral work erodes poetry. The reason is obvious: people are not comfortable with the uncertainties and risks and travail of creativity. It takes too much time. There is too much obscurity. People are more comfortable with prose. They prefer explanations of Bible history and information on God. This is appealing to the pastor, for we have a lot of information to hand out and are adept at explanations. After a few years of speaking in prose, we become prosaic.
Then a dose of apocalyptic stops us in mid-sentence: the power of the word to create faith, the force of imagination to resist the rationalism of evil, the necessity of shaping a people who speak and listen personally in worship and witness. The urgencies of apocalyptic shake us down to the roots of language, and we become poets: pay attention to core language, to personal language, to scriptural language.
Not all words create. Some merely communicate. They explain, report, describe, manage, inform, regulate. We live in an age obsessed with communication. Communication is good but a minor good. Knowing about things never has seemed to improve our lives a great deal. The pastoral task with words is not communication but communion the healing and restoration and creation of love relationships between God and his fighting children and our fought-over creation. Poetry uses words in and for communion.
This is hard work and requires alertness. The language of our time is in terrible condition. It is used carelessly and cynically. Mostly it is a tool for propaganda, whether secular or religious. Every time badly used and abused language is carried by pastors into prayers and preaching and direction, the word of God is cheapened. We cannot use a bad means to a good end.
Words making truth, not just conveying it: liturgy and story and song and prayer are the work of pastors who are poets.
Apocalyptic Patience
The apocalyptic pastor is patient. St. John identified himself to his parishioners as your brother, who shares with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance (1:9). The patient endurance, what the Greeks called hypomone the hanging in there, the sticking it out is one of the unexpected but most notable achievements of apocalyptic.
The connection is not obvious. After all, if everything is falling apart, and the world about to come to an end, doesn’t that mean the end of patience? Why not cut and run? Why not eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die? Bastard apocalyptic, apocalyptic that has no parentage in biblical sources or gospel commitments, does promote a progeny of irresponsibility (and the brats are noisily and distressingly in evidence on every American street), but the real thing, the conceived-in-holy-wedlock apocalyptic, develops communities that are passionately patient, courageously committed to witness and work in the kingdom of God no matter how long it takes, or how much it costs. Typically, marginal, oppressed, and exploited groups are nurtured on apocalypse.
St. John is terrifically urgent, but he is not in a hurry. Note his unhurried urgency in the book he wrote. It takes a long time to read The Revelation. It cannot be read quickly and requires repeated rereadings to enter into the subtle and glorious poem-vision. St. John works with vast and leisurely repetitions, pulling us into ancient rhythms. An impatient person never finishes this book. We learn patience in the very act of reading/listening to St. John’s Apocalypse. If St. John would have been impatient, he would have given us a slogan on a decal.
The reason St. John insists on patience is that he is dealing with the vast mysteries of God and the intricacies of the messy human condition. This is going to take some time. Neither the mysteries nor the mess is simple. If we are going to learn a life of holiness in the mess of history, we are going to have to prepare for something intergenerational and think in centuries. The apocalyptic imagination gives us a facility in what geologists call deep time a sense of ages that transcends the compulsions of time-management experts and at the same time dignifies the existence of the meanest fossil.
But the working environment of pastors erodes patience and rewards impatience. People are uncomfortable with mystery (God) and mess (themselves). They avoid both mystery and mess by devising programs and hiring pastors to manage them. A program provides a defined structure with an achievable goal. Mystery and mess are eliminated at a stroke. This is appealing. In the midst of the mysteries of grace and the complexities of human sin, it is nice to have something that you can evaluate every month or so and find out where you stand. We don’t have to deal with ourselves or with God, but can use the vocabulary of religion and work in an environment that acknowledges God, and so be assured that we are doing something significant.
With programs shaping the agenda not amazing grace, not stubborn sin the pastor doesn’t have to be patient. We set a goal, work out a strategy, recruit a few Christian soldiers, and go to it. If, in two or three years the soldiers haven’t produced, we shake the dust off our feet and hire on as captain to another group of mercenaries. When a congregation no longer serves our ambition, it is abandoned for another under the euphemism of a larger ministry. In the majority of such cases, our impatience is rewarded with a larger salary.
Apocalypse shows this up as inexcusable exploitation. Apocalypse convinces us that we are in a desperate situation, and in it together. The grass is not greener in the next committee, or parish, or state. All that matters is worshiping God, dealing with evil, and developing faithfulness. Apocalypse ignites a sense of urgency, but it quenches shortcuts and hurry, for the times are in God’s hands. Providence, not the newspaper, accounts for the times in which we live.
Impatience, the refusal to endure, is to pastoral character what strip mining is to the land a greedy rape of what can be gotten at the least cost, and then abandonment in search of another place to loot. Something like fidelity comes out of apocalyptic: fidelity to God, to be sure, but also to people, to parish to place.
St. John was patient, teaching the Christians in his seven less-than-promising congregations to be patient. But it is an apocalyptic patience not acquiescence to boredom, not doormat submissiveness. It is giant sequoia patience that scorns the reduction of a glorious gospel to a fast-food religion. Mount Rainier patience that mocks the fast-lane frenzy for a weekend with the Spirit. How long did it take to grow the sequoia? How long did it take to build Rainier? Apocalypse ushers us into the long and the large. We acquire, with St. John and his congregations, fidelity to place and people, the faithful endurance that is respectful of the complexities of living a moral, spiritual, and liturgical life before the mysteries of God in the mess of history.
American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarrassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition. None of these marks is remotely biblical. None is faintly in evidence in the gospel story. All of them are thoroughly documented diseases of the spirit. Pastors are in great danger of being undetected carriers of the very disease we are charged to diagnose and heal. We need the most powerful of prophylactics something like the apocalyptic prayer and poetry and patience of St. John.
Copyright ©1989 Christianity Today
