Being one, I like to defend ministers whenever and wherever possible. Our “too too solid flesh” is subject to considerable frailty, but in a Presbyterian pulpit there is little excuse for blatant and pompous stupidity. Listening to a Christmas sermon our family learned a painful lesson in the hermeneutics of suspicion. The text was “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God” (Isaiah 40:1). According to the preacher, God is a mighty fortress and this verse encourages God’s people to “come to the fort!” By then our first son had some awareness of etymology, and began serious squirming until he could check whether the word “comfort” had anything to do with “coming to the fort.”
Most pastors see their role as comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has lots of both so there is plenty to do. Amid the myriad tragedies of our lives, we all need real comfort. Surely among the most gut-wrenching, heart-breaking events in a pastor’s life is the first visit to a woman whose baby was still born. The happy miracle of birth often reminds us that terrible tragedy is never far away and this earth is not our final home.
In my third month of seminary my home pastor learned that the daughter of a college friend had just lost her baby in the city where my divinity school was located. When my pastor telephoned, I am certain it never occurred to him to ask me to call on the grief-stricken couple. They needed a real, tried and true minister of the gospel – not a first year seminarian scared out of his wits by self doubt and vicarious pain.
I was requested to ask one of my seminary professors to call on the young wife and husband. For this service I recognized there would be no honorarium. Moreover, some of the professors teaching pastors had never themselves been pastors. Some professors exuded such an aura of busy importance that I could not imagine asking them to include on their agenda what might be the order of the day only for God. Some were so sharply academic that I could not envision them as other than helpless in a hospital room with a woman who was expecting for nine months and had been denied motherhood on the last day.
The one professor I felt confident in asking to call was a man lightly esteemed in the seminary community and whose theological position I strongly rejected. Within the hour he was at her bedside in the hospital. That day brought home to me Kierkegaard’s admonishment concerning the professor so enamored with the mind full of the intricacies of theological reflection that he had never experienced a heart full encounter with the risen Christ.
In later years I never had any trouble weeping with those who weep nor rejoicing with those who rejoice (Romans 12:15). The former was especially easy. It is simply not true that men and boys don’t cry. For that reason, I really appreciated the bracing comment of a colleague who observed to me, “You cannot comfort anyone when you are slobbering all over them.”
Long after I had graduated and been a practicing minister for some years, I stood in the rain with a young couple beside a tiny hole in the ground that would soon contain their baby’s body. With the heavens above us, and our hearts within us, weeping, the memory of my humble and faithful old professor came unbidden to my mind. I hoped to God I was now a real minister exactly like that reverend professor whose theological views I still oppose. Surely no one is less likely than I to tergiversate on the value of worshipping God with the mind (Luke 10:27). Still, there are times when people do not care what you know; they need to know that you care.
I learned that lesson not by explanation but by example.
charlesbpartee 