Time Well Spent

March 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

Time Well Spent

Pastor Adam Keath
March 17, 2020

Pizza parties. Ice cream socials. Dormitories. Rejection. Racquetball. Discipleship. For a few years, shortly after I graduated from James Madison University in 2001, I served on campus ministry staff with The Navigators at Ohio State and Penn State Universities (We Are!, btw).

Some of you may know The Navigators as a military and/or campus ministry missions organization. It is that and quite a lot more actually. The one thing you might not immediately associate with The Navigators is The Message translation of the Bible by Eugene Peterson.

Navpress is the publisher of The Message, and in the early 2000’s, when it was completed, it was a big deal for Navpress (it still is!). So, at every training conference or seminar I attended during those years, it seemed there was a free copy or two laying on my chair. It’s good marketing, right?! Between my wife and I, we probably had a dozen copies, none of which we ever paid for.

But in my younger, more arrogant and immature mind, The Message wasn’t a real Bible. Real Christians used the NASB (Navigator All Star Bible) or the ESV (Extra Spiritual Version). And I was a real Christian! I don’t want people to see me reading this fluffy modern day translation of scripture! Yeah, I’ve grown a bit since then. Praise God!

I still use the ESV most of the time now, but just this year I saw The Message with new eyes. A few copies have been on my shelves for a long time collecting dust. But then we put forward a different kind of daily Bible reading for 2020 at King Street Church. It is New Testament focused and presented in very short chunks of scripture, and I immediately wanted to try and seize the opportunity to encourage more Bible reading in my family, particularly with my 4 teenage boys (results have been, uh……mixed).

What better way to help young men know God in His word than in short form and digestible language. So, I encouraged them to read in The Message and committed to read along with them.

But for me, I was having a lot of trouble with the short segments of scripture, and since January have found myself taking in chapters at a time, just reading; not studying, but just reading. I have rediscovered, maybe discovered, a gift in The Message, and am thankful for the free copies I had laying around.

There was one particular passage that ministered to me and someone I was pastoring that just made me say “Wow!” So timely, and so rich. Matthew 10:21-23,

When people realize it is the living God you are presenting and not some idol that makes them feel good, they are going to turn on you, even people in your own family. There is a great irony here: proclaiming so much love, experiencing so much hate! But don’t quit. Don’t cave in. It is well worth it in the end. It is not success you are after in such times but survival. Be survivors! Before you’ve run out of options, the Son of Man will have arrived.

Perhaps those words aren’t as timely for you today as they were for me then. But WOW, right?!

Why am I telling you so much about The Message? This isn’t a book review. Navpress has not offered to pay me. I’m telling you this because as I have been reading, I wanted to know more about the man who gave many of his later years in ministry to translate from scratch, from original languages, the entire Bible.

Eugene Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor, has been a joy to my soul these last few weeks as one with the same title (but not nearly the accomplishments!). There are many things I could write about how he is ministering to me, but just Monday night, hours after a national shutdown due to COVID-19 precautions, I was reading and I thought of you.

I thought about, with Eugene’s help, how I as a “pastor” and you as teacher, custodian, coach, server, engineer, receptionist, artist are not different. He says it so well,

“One of the achievements of the Protestant Reformation was a leveling of the ground between clergy and laity. Pastors and butcher had equal status before the cross. Homemakers were on par with evangelists. But…that level ground eroded as religious professionals claimed high ground, asserted exclusive rights to “full-time Christian work,” and relegated the laity to part-time work on the weekends…”

If there was ever a time that we all need to realize that we are all ministers of reconciliation, ambassadors for Christ, it is now. Because, folks, the church won’t be doing what the church normally does for the next little while. Of course, I mean programs, in-person worship services, group meetings, etc. For the common good and witness to our community, church life will be certainly be taking a different tack due to COVID-19.

But is it all bad? I say no. We are all pastors. We all have neighbors and friends who need hope in a dark time, help when they are vulnerable, encouragement when they are afraid, the Gospel when they are hopeless. I’m a pastor by title. It’s my job to bring those things. But you are a child of God, just like me. It’s your job too. Each of you is uniquely positioned with the great intentionality of an all-knowing Father to minister, to preach, to pray and to love in your context. Hear an excerpt from Pastor Eugene written in an article to his congregation many years ago,

“Most of what Jesus said and did took place in a secure workplace in a farmer’s field, in a fishing boat, at a wedding feast, in a cemetery, at a public well asking a woman he didn’t know for a drink of water, on a country hillside that he turned into a huge picnic, in a court room, having supper in homes with acquaintances or friends. In our Gospels, Jesus occasionally shows up in a synagogue or temple, but for the most part he spends his time in the workplace. Twenty-seven times in John’s Gospel Jesus is identified as a worker: ‘My father is still working, and I also am working’ (Jn. 5:17) Work doesn’t take us away from God; it continues the work of God. God comes into view on the first page of our scriptures as a worker. Once we identify God in his workplace working, it isn’t long before we find ourselves in our workplaces working in the name of God.”

Yes, ironic I know, given the circumstances. Some of you are bus drivers, servers, bartenders, barbers and you may not have gone to work today. Others of you are nurses, first responders, call center reps, leaders and work seems anything but normal.

But no matter your vocation, I believe all of us are looking at some downtime ahead. And we need the rest! My encouragement in writing this to you is that you will use whatever rest you have (or whatever time you time you save not watching sports or traveling) to invest as a pastor in the lives of those in your path because that’s what you are. Is it family for you? Is it neighbors? Is it an online community?

Use your time to ask God to renew your vision for your vocation when things return to normal. I can only speak for myself, but even just in the last few days, I have had more time to pray, read scripture, talk to my wife and invest in my kids. I trust God will speak to me, answer a lot of my questions, challenge a lot of my assumptions and show me his mercy as I reorient my time to focus more on Him.

We all have the opportunity to mess with our routine. In many ways, it is being forced upon us. Let’s not get mad. Let’s be the church, even if we’re not at the church, and let God teach us what that means in our lives when we get back to normal.

It may be a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Whatever it is, when you go back to work or work returns to what it was before, even if you’re retired, unemployed or you stay at home (you don’t have to get paid to have a purpose!), I pray that God will have renewed your vision during this strange new reality that we are living in. Please take the time (you have it) and let Him speak.

Eugene Peterson says, “Much (most?) pastoral work takes place when we don’t know we are being pastors.”

Get after it, Pastor!

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