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| The Rev Dr Will Willimon |
The first addresses who pastors are. In light of so many pastors I meet whose personal habits become destructive of their vocation and ministry, there's this:
... when we take upon ourselves his yoke of obedience, his yoke is easy, his burden is light (Matt. 11:28-30). When is a burden light? It is when we find our burdensome lives caught up, elevated, borne aloft by something greater than our lives. Mission gives meaning. Jesus does not come to us to relieve us of all yokes or burdens; rather, he comes offering us a yoke worth wearing, a burden worth bearing. It is a great gift not to have to make your life mean something, to have your life given significance by the Lord whose cross, when taken up, takes us up as well.
Then, in light of conversations I've had over the past weekend about preaching -- wherein pastors trespass against the text in ways that flatten it into nothing more than some historical record or psychologize the text so that it says things it doesn't (mostly to affirm things we want it to affirm that it won't), there's this:
It takes great faith in Easter, particularly faith in the gift of the Holy Spirit, to be honest with our people that we have not a clue to the meaning of some biblical passage, or that we have no sense of a satisfying ending for a sermon, or that we are unsure of precisely what the congregation ought to do after hearing a given text. The most ethically dangerous time within a sermon is toward the end of the sermon, when we move from proclamation to application and act as if we know more than God.