Someone once asked me, “What’s it like to be a pastor?”
“It’s a mess,” I said.
I didn’t think about my reply, it came out before I could think. The other person was shocked into silence. I tend to do these things, shock people with honesty.

I gathered my wits and said, “It’s a beautiful mess in the same way a forest is. The natural beauty and unruliness of nature. As a pastor, I’m always outside of my comfort zone, always confronted with new stories. New ways to live. New perspectives on the world. New family systems. The mess of people being born, living, and dying. I have a front row seat to it all. It is a mess, but it’s a beautiful mess.”

I stand by those words. Being a pastor is messy.

And life in general is messy. It’s hard to untangle all of the mess sometimes. Sometimes I will be angry or impatient for no reason. Often times, I don’t explore my feelings or pray about things as often as I should. I fail a lot and one day I might fail you in my rush. I am a work in progress.

There are things that happen to us that stay with us that we need to explore through prayer. Writer Rob Bell talks about journaling in times like these. One day Rob went surfing with a friend who is more skilled than he. Rob likes to surf five to six foot waves. As he’s paddling out with his friend he asks, “How big are we surfing today?” “Nothing too big,” his friend replies. “Just 10 footers.”

This is double than what Rob is used to. A day or so after this, Rob starts waking up at 4 in the morning with a start. This continues for the next few days. As Rob prays and journals about this, he starts to connect the 10 foot waves to his body’s response. Rob thinks that the terror of the 10 foot waves was still in his body and his body is saying, “Look man, we need to talk about this.”

I believe each of us carry things like this around. We are messy. When we enter into community we are messy. Nothing is cut and dry, there’s always a deeper mystery and sometimes we discover what it is. Often times though, we are too busy. I like the saying often attributed to St. Francis de Sales, “Spend half an hour of prayer every day, except when you are busy—then pray an hour.”

We are messy and we bring our messy into community. Community is messy.

I mentioned Bowen Family Systems Theory in my last sermon. This way of thinking states that you aren’t just an individual, but an individual with a history, a story given to you by your own family system. This story is not taught but caught in the day-to-day living. You can apply this to your own life as well as community life. I had my misgivings about this theory. I was trained in Family Systems by the Next Generation Leadership Initiative put on by the Pension Boards. I was learning this because I had to and I was skeptical until I heard this story the teacher told.

Our teacher uses Bowen Family Systems to consult with churches in conflict. He gets a call from a pastor in New England. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.” were the first words out of the mouth of this pastor. My teacher is hired and starts digging and finds that the first pastor, way back in the 1800s, on the first Sunday the church was to worship, was hit by a train and died.

This is hard to believe. Even my teacher is skeptical. He continues to research and finds that sometime in the early 1900s, a pastor’s family is on their way to this church when they are hit and killed by a train.

Two events in the life of the congregation. Two events long forgotten until they were uncovered decades later. Those events were still in the congregation. The congregation never dealt with those feelings, so they never left the system, they were still in there for more than 100 years and these feelings lead that pastor in 2008 to say, “I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.”

Life is messy. Community is messy. The Bible is messy.

If I were to ask you to turn to the oldest part of your Bible, where would you turn? Many of us would start at the beginning, we would turn to Genesis 1. We would be wrong, but it is a good guess. I had to look this up and found that parts of Job, The Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 and the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 are thought to be the oldest as they use archaic forms of Hebrew.[1]

Genesis 1 is the priestly tradition of creation. It is one of two creation stories in Genesis, the second is the story of Adam and Eve in Chapter 2. In Genesis 1, God does not have a proper name. This name is a bland form of God, “Elohim” meaning “Spirit.” God’s name is not revealed in this tradition until Exodus 6 when God says to Moses, “I am YHWH.” Often pronounced Yahweh, which means “I am what I am.” Or “I am who I will be.” Or “I am who is.” This depends on where one puts the vowels.

Now this is also a messy name. It’s really no name for a god. A proper god-name should tell you what the god does. Like Poseidon. We know that guy is all about the water and sea because it’s in the name. It means “master of waters” in Greek.[2]  Or Jupiter which means “sky, heaven, god.” Or Thor which means “Thunder.” The name tells you what the god is in charge of. This is not the god Moses finds. What God says to Moses is, “I am bigger than anything you have ever known and beyond even what you think you know. I cannot be contained. I have no limits. I am what I will be.”

This is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The God of the Israelites. The God of the prophets. The God of Jesus Christ, our lord and savior who was born into this religion. The Gospel of Matthew takes great pains to place Jesus in this tradition. We see this at the start of the Gospel but we are now at the end. The resurrected Christ tells his disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded to you.”

I hear God saying, “Go. Go out into the mess. Go out into what I have created and called good. Go to other people whom I have called very good.” When God creates humans, the repeated adjective in Genesis switches from “good” to “very good” did you catch that switch?

God has called us very good. Yet life doesn’t feel very good often. There’s a lot of pain in the world. We are a mess of pain. Our lives, our communities, our Bible. You may feel like you’ve been hit by a train. Writer Glennon Doyle Melton teaches us that pain is not a game of hot potato.

Often times we feel pain and it’s too hot to handle. We just want to get rid of it so we pass it along. Then the next person does the same, and this goes on for generations. Yet Glennon instructs us to quit playing hot potato with pain.

She likes to think of pain as a traveling professor. It knocks on everybody’s door and the wisest ones invite pain in and ask pain to, “Come in, sit down, and teach me what I need to learn.” And from that pain, is our strength. As the Apostle Paul wrote, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Causing Paul to conclude, “When I am weak, then I am strong.”

It is not out of our successes that we often find our life’s purpose, but in our pain. The good news is that God has entered into our pain. God meets us in our nothingness. We are created from words from God. Our very creation is rooted in God and God is not some removed watchmaker, who crafted laws and set them in motion. This is a God who is involved and is co-creating with us! Who has entered into our lives and knows pain as the risen Christ still bore the scars of Good Friday.

It is as Paul writes in Philippians, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who through he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself and became obedient to the point of death.”

You can participate in the life of God. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. That’s why we baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! The Participatory Trinity!

Jesus who is the first born of the dead, who came back from the grave but still bore the scars of the experience. God learns from pain and we can too. Let’s stop spreading pain around. No more hot potato. For life was created good, and you were created Very Good by the One who is without limits! The ground and source of our mess, who entered into our mess and blessed it. Keep this cosmic love story going and spread the good news of grace and peace and not pain and death.

[1] According to my Old Testament notes from Lancaster Seminary as well as David Lipovitch, a professor of Hebrew Bible public lecturer in a presentation given in May 2013.
[2] According to Martin Nilsson in Wikipedia contributors, “Poseidon,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poseidon&oldid=778261450 (accessed May 10, 2017).