Prophets of a Future Not Our Own
Pentecost as a call to pray "like" Oscar
There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried - Oscar Romero
I’m taking a class this week on Pastoral Leadership in a Post-Christian context in which I was reminded of the quote above from the martyred Salvadoran Archbishop, Oscar Romero. The class is drawing me to reflect on how often our perspective on Pastoral Leadership is shaped by pragmatic concerns which, while having a place, tend to obscure the pastoral calling. In contrast, San Romero points us towards the heart of compassion, empathy and pain that is present in truly pastoral leadership.
I think what stirs in me is that Romero names something that is foundational to a spirituality for leadership.1 It’s present from Pentecost as Willie James Jennings brilliantly observes in Acts 2,
Those gathered in prayer asked for power. They may have asked for the Holy Spirit to come, but they did not ask for this. This is real grace, untamed grace. It is the grace that replaces our fantasies of power over people with God’s fantasy for desire for people.2
God’s desire for people. This is what Pentecost calls Jesus’ disciples to be captured by. It’s why Jesus told Peter to “Feed my sheep”. But I think we need to hold this carefully here. Jesus doesn’t say “Feed your sheep, like I feed my sheep.” Likewise, Pentecost isn’t telling us to have a desire for people like God has a desire for people. The Spirit wants to draws us into God’s desire for people.
On the day of Pentecost, God placed his kingdom in the midst of humanity and the kingdom of God has to be built on Earth.
Oscar Romero - Pentecost homily 1978
Pastoral Leadership is derailed when our pragmatic concerns overwhelm this work that the Spirit encountered at Pentecost wants to do in us. It would be easy to be reductionist here and draw simple binary lines between what is “pastoral” and what is “pragmatic”, and I don’t want to do that. I simply want to point at what Pentecost draws our attention to - that the work of the Spirit in the pastoral calling will not be ours, but God’s. We are cogs in mechanism that is God’s heart.
I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me
Robin Noel Pecknold - Helplessness Blues
The tears that Romero imagines are not rooted in the anxieties of comparison, the fear of failure, or other modern malaise that haunt Pastors today. Rather he imagines a pastoral life that is held in God, that suffers alongside the suffering, weeps with the grieving, that is present to the ignored. When the pressure on the pastor is not to be some sort of unique phenomenon but rather to take our place as a cog in God’s kingdom, I wonder if we can then be the pastors Christ calls us to be. Pastors with tears.
A prayer I turn to regularly to help me with all this is, ironically, the so-called Romero Prayer.3
The prayer was written by Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw for Cardinal John Dearden in 1979. Oscar Romero died a few months later never, as best as can be understood, having prayed the prayer. But even Pope Francis in 2015 noted the prayers connection to the Salvadoran Archbishop.4 It seems Basil Hulme misattributed the prayer to Romero in 1997.
And it stuck.
Authorship issues aside, it’s not hard to imagine why Cardinal Hulme mis-identified the prayer. It sounds like something Romero would pray. It sounds like something he’d tell us to pray. Regardless, it’s definitely something we should pray.
I do. Often.
It doesn’t actually need any commentary.
It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts; it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.
A phrase from Christopher Beeley - https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Leading_God_s_People/JcYMC5ZVZ4IC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA28&printsec=frontcover
Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, p. 28 - https://a.co/ea8gJso