John 10: 1-10
Acts 2: 42-47
For Family of Christ Presbyterian Church, Greeley, CO. May 15, 2011
Now that you’ve heard the Acts’ text, I wonder if any of you are expecting to give you a sermon about how you need to rush out from here and sell all your goods and possessions and give the proceeds to any who have need.
Just go and sell your stuff, get rid of all you own. Why not? Especially if the billboards are to be believed and the world is going to end next Saturday.
Well, you can relax; I’m not here to preach that sermon. There’s really no way to preach that sermon, at least not without a long period of preparation and care, by which time, I imagine, it might be redundant.
As one writer pointed out as I was researching this text, the unheard of level of communal sharing here was not a cause, but rather an effect. It came about as a result of that community's earlier actions. “They devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers”
You can relax, then, about my haranguing you to sell everything you own.
But then, what I am going to talk about might actually make some of us squirm just as much.
I’m going to sneak up on it though, in the hope of luring you in. It can be a touchy subject and many people turn off and turn away just from hearing it named. Especially when they hear it named as something they are going to be asked to do.
“That’s something that ministers do, not people like me; ministers have special training, they know how,” they’ll say. Or, “I couldn’t do that; I’d just make things worse.”
Any guesses?
In the Gospel text, Jesus talks about the role of the good shepherd. He goes into the sheepfold, “And the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he’s brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”
Jesus knew all about. . .I’m going to name it now, so brace yourselves. . .Pastoral Care.
There I said it, and no one has bolted for the door.
Pastoral care is indeed a touchy subject, and I want to be clear as I go into this, I’m one of those people who would be inclined to bolt for the door why the subject was brought up.
“I can’t do pastoral care, I don’t know anything about caring for people, I wouldn’t know what to say.” I’d think. Or, “somebody else could do it so much better, I’m good at some things in the church, but let the people who are gifted for that part of ministry do it, and I’ll be over here teaching Sunday school or leading worship.” Then I went to seminary and things changed.
A few weeks ago, during a session meeting, the subject of pastoral care and enlisting the help of more of the congregation to that end came up and somebody said something to the effect of “I don’t feel comfortable with doing that myself, I don’t have the special training that you ministers have.”
When I heard that, I started to laugh and thought to myself, “If only you knew. . .”
Yes I took a Pastoral Care class in seminary, and in there we learned things about psychology, family systems, praxis and the clinical method. There was a lot of good information in that class that I am glad to have learned. It gave us a lot of tools for pastoral care. But there’s one thing that it didn’t do, and that’s why I started laughing in the session meeting. What Pastoral Care class didn’t teach us was how to do pastoral care.
Let me say that again, Pastoral Care class does not teach you how to provide pastoral care.
No one can teach you how to do pastoral care. The only way to learn it is to do it. The real training in pastoral care that ministers receive is very similar to the old method of teaching someone to swim by tossing them into a lake.
In the summer between my middler and senior years at seminary, before I had even take the pastoral care class, I went through a unit of what is known as CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education.
I spent the summer as a chaplain intern at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. We started with our orientation a week before Memorial Day, and then they threw us into the lake. We came in, we met our fellow interns and our supervisors and we were given our assignments, and we were also told that first day that we would be starting on rounds immediately and within the week we would begin our rotation of overnight shifts where we would be the only chaplains in the hospital. Gulp.
At the end of the summer I wrote this abut the experience and asked myself the question what did I need to learn at seminary to be a pastor?
As a chaplain intern I was responsible for visiting people in a couple of wards; one was general medical and the other Neuro-ICU. Once every six days I also had to work an overnight call shift. When I was on call, I was the only chaplain in the hospital, responsible for answering any chaplain requests that came in. Chaplain requests ranged from a nurse on 6A calling to say that a patient had requested a Bible to being asked by a doctor to go with her as she told a mother that they had not been able to resuscitate her five month old baby.
It was on the second kind of call that I found my answer. When I went into those waiting rooms and sat with those families who were just learning of the death of a loved one, whether it was a child or a parent, whether it was a sudden death or the death of a loved one who had lingered on for weeks, I went in there with nothing. That I knew the difference between a Qal perfect waw consecutive and a Hiphil imperfect or that I had read Cur Deo Homo really didn’t matter. The fact that I have passed the Bible Content Exam or that I know the Book of Order backward and forward, gave me nothing when it came to helping these families in the throes of deepest grief.
I knew as little about how to minister to these broken people as Cyrus knew about the Torah. All I could do was sit with them, be there with them. Sometimes I would read some scripture, but not always. Sometimes we would pray, but not always. Mostly we would just sit.
But somehow ministry happened in those rooms. Somehow, the simple fact of my presence, as clumsy and awkward as I was, somehow that helped them. Over and over again as we parted, people would thank me for all I had done for them, when I knew I had not done anything. God had moved in that place, through me, to help those people, just as God had moved through Cyrus to free the Israelites, and we were both equally clueless.
Somehow ministry happens, somehow pastoral care happens. That’s what I want to tell you about pastoral care today. I want to let you in on the secret of ministry: it happens whether we know what we’re doing or not, it happens by our being there and by God working through us. It’s what seminarians call the “ministry of presence” and it’s the hardest thing in the world to learn and to believe in.
In most parts of our lives we want be in control, we want to have a plan, to know that if I do A then B will happen.
None of that works with pastoral care. You can’t go in with a plan, with a preconceived idea of what you’re going to do, because when you do that, when you try to force the situation to fit your needs and desires, then what’s happening becomes about you and not about the people in the room.
Ministry of presence happens when we’re not trying, it happens when we are just being. It happens when we just sit with someone. It happens when we don’t know what to say, so we just say nothing. It happens when we stop trying to do things for people and we start to try to be with people.
Look back at the Acts passage. Look at the way the members of the early church ministered to each other by sharing all that they had, and remember what I said earlier about that being an effect and not a cause.
They didn’t start out with the idea or the plan that that was what they were going to do. They started out with being together. They studied together, they broke bread together, they prayed together. “They spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people.”
Is it just me, or don’t those things sound easy? As hard as it is to teach or to learn pastoral care, the actual doing of it is easy. Spend time together, eat together with glad and generous hearts, praise god. I know that all of us can do those things, whether we’ve been to seminary or not.
The hardest part of pastoral care is learning that those easy things are all that you have to do. That those easy things work.
Yes, ministers receive special training in pastoral care, but what we struggle so hard to learn, and it is a struggle, trust me. What we struggle to learn is not how to DO pastoral care, but that what we can do, what all of us can do, is enough.
Family of Christ is entering a time when fellowship and pastoral care are going to be very important for all of us. We are all facing loss, facing sadness and we will all be in need of care. More care is going to be needed than Nate and Jenn can provide, more than the few of us who have had “special seminary training” can provide. We’re going to need all the care that all of us can provide.
I wrote this sermon to let you know that you have all the knowledge and skills you could possibly need to be a pastoral care expert, all you need is to trust in that. I would love to be able to give you a definitive rule about how to care for one another, but I can’t, all I can say is that we need to know that God is working, God is working when we know it and when we don’t, God is working when we can see it and when we can’t even imagine that it is possible.
See it when you can. Imagine it when you can’t. And let others know when they can’t. And together, maybe, awe will come upon all of us, because of the many wonders God has done through us.
Excellent!
Posted by: Nancy | May 16, 2011 at 06:07 AM