Seminary trains you to be resilient in ministry. Professors are good about not overly idealizing ministry, it's unrewarding, day-to-day grudges, nor the really hard stuff. The muck and mess of ministry is not withheld in the seminary classroom.
Which means I cannot blame my professors for the romanticism I harbor. I cannot blame my parents, grandparents, or any other wise elder in my life, for that matter; they consistently remind me that life is tough and nothing comes easily.
No, the romanticism came and comes all on its own; or at the very least is a work of the devil. "You should fall in love with ministry," he says. "You should fall in love with the day-to-day tasks of drudgery, with sickness, weakness, and mean-spiritedness. You should learn to make meaning in them, homemade-meaning in order to make sense out of the world."
When you are sent into the hospital room of a very sick baby, when you are called to the bedside of yet another dying parishioner, when you are stuck between a rock and a hard place on a decision that really doesn't matter, but how you respond to it does, when you are chastised yet again because someone is afraid of the loss they will experience because of some change you've introduced; these are the things you should fall in love with, or so says that old, hopeless romantic, Satan.
"Love it or leave it," the popular aphorism goes. And some days, it's just about enough to make you want to pack it all in and escape somewhere else. There will be days, we were told in seminary, when you will just simply want to get the hell out. Perhaps it could have been better said that there will be moments in every day that you will just simply want to get the hell out.
It's an odd vocation: the demands are great and the tasks are either ridiculously mundane or exceedingly strenuous. To top it off, during all of those tasks the devil likes to come and tell you to look for the silver lining. "It's there," he says, "you just have to look hard enough for it."
It's enough to make you want to cry out in lament with Job, "Do not human beings have a hard service on earth, and are not their days like the days of a laborer? Like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages, so I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me. When I lie down I say, 'When shall I rise?' But the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn. My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt; my skin hardens, then breaks out again. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and come to their end without hope," (Job 7:1-6).
A little righteous indignation on the part of a blameless and upright God-fearer like Job does my soul well in those moments of every day that just seem to boil over with either frustration or apathy. It really is a jolting pendulum swing, from frustration to apathy in the course of an hour or two. The devil gives you two options when the pendulum is swinging; "Love it or leave it," the devil says. The devil wants you to leave it, of course. After all, who would want a preacher of God's good news in Jesus Christ when the romantic attraction of escapism is waiting behind her deep, rose-colored curtain?
But if God has called you to a place, and if God has sent you as a preacher, then the devil at least wants you to make some kind of meaning out of it all. He takes pleasure in the romantic attraction of homemade-meaning, luring you with illusions of something good that can be found in sickness and sadness. "There must be something good here," the devil teases. "Look hard and you will find it."
The devil likes easy answers; he likes dichotomies and either-or's. "Love it or leave it," says Wisdom, the devil's seductive mistress.
When God calls you into the mess, God is not certainly calling you to love it; nor is God calling you to leave it. So, what is man to do?
"But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake, or be roused out of their sleep." As mortal men dry up like rivers and lakes because we cannot love it, nor can we leave it, where will there be the water of life?
"I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth," (Job 19:25). Martin Luther's explanation to the Second Article of the Apostle's Creed: "He [Jesus] has redeemed me, a lost and condemned human being. He has purchased and freed me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver but with his holy, precious blood and with his innocent suffering and death" (SC:15).
I have been redeemed from the devil's power, from his empty tricks, and from the lure of his mistress, Wisdom. I have been redeemed from the seduction of loving it or leaving it.
Job says to God, "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. 'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?' Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. 'Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me [God says].' I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes," (Job 42:2-6).
It is easy to be romanced by the devil's ideal life of ministry. It is easy to, "love it or leave it." The harder thing is to hear by the hearing of the ear without seeing with our eyes the promise that God has for us. We see it only hidden in bread and wine, in water and Word. We see it with veiled faces, but soon we will see face-to-face the majesty of God who has made it all and redeems it all.
"And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before," (Job 42:10).
So, I'll pray for my friends; I will pray for my church; I will pray for my enemies. I will pray in the mundane and in the extreme of ministry. I will pray in the muck and the mess. I will pray in every moment of every day. In the muck and mess of ministry, that old romantic Satan will not have any lure and I will not be tempted to be romantic about it all. Instead, with a little righteous indignation and prayer, God will restore my fortunes and I will once again see these tasks of ministry with renewed hope in God, my Redeemer.
P.S. I'm excited that Job appears in the lectionary for this Sunday!
