“2 For you yourselves know, brothers, that our coming to you was not in vain. 2 But though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we had boldness in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict. 3 For our appeal does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive, 4 but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts. 5 For we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor with a pretext for greed—God is witness. 6 Nor did we seek glory from people, whether from you or from others, though we could have made demands as apostles of Christ. 7 But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. 8 So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. 9 For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil: we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. 10 You are witnesses, and God also, how holy and righteous and blameless was our conduct toward you believers. 11 For you know how, like a father with his children, 12 we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. 13 And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. 14 For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind 16 by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!” (1 Thess 2:1-16 ESV)

Any vocation talk delves into the unattractiveness of Christian ministry: it isn’t an Ambitious calling. It isn’t a particularly Seductive calling. Properly understood, Christian ministry is a bit like all systems were go until… until the Enlistment, the Drafted in nature, the Wave that overwhelms a community: this is all-hands-on-deck war.

So to the Calvinist, quite certain that no calling or vocation is better than another, that each person is to do whatsoever their dear hand finds to do in this hayride or rollercoaster ride called Life: to this theologian, this common-man with theological ideas, we only wish to emphasize that we Need Pastors. We need those who really put aside the Love for the Game—a certain type of Game—and enter in, adopt, accept a New Manner of doing game. The manner of pleasantly taking our head out of the labors of another calling, and seeing if we—strong man, strong woman, numero uno on the scene—whether first we can find such a scene (unambitious to find our “set” or hang with the “cool kids”) and whether we can be Receptive, Certain we are no less sinner than our Ministry Field’s citizens. We find a scene that, surprise surprise, is in fact the “cool kids”, and we had no idea but that we are one as well!

But to the strong man, strong woman motif: society as it crumbles and is bombed on all sides, needs strong hands and a shoulder to rest on; God’s patient Son witnessed His carpentry—a fine trade, in some regards if we are all honest, preferable to hanging around town with some devils and little ostracized prayer team—His carpentry go No Time to indulge: He was Missional, and all that Mission can dispel in a moment’s doubt, it is all castles in the sky, it is all walking on imagined water. 

It is not that God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, didn’t Love the disciples twelve, or the healing recipients, the demons cast-out recipients, the Fine Words of counsel recipients: it is that the ball bearings grated and the joints needed oil badly and the Everything was luminescent in some devilish cloud cover of Pained Life, of Cruciform Life, of Taking the Burden on one’s own shoulders Life. It was Necessity, not Choice, on display.

God needed His Son to be simply Kosher by and large, and copacetic, and Agreeable, His Son’s daily fare somehow—pulling in exasperated fashion figs from a tree, “Is this all you want me to be doing? Talking to these here disciples and fussing over feeding the crowds…?”. The plain sense of Bliss—the Bliss of life Together, of a day’s work just getting by, it was not a Respectable Calling. God the Father, He loved the disciples, He wept with Christ as He was on the Cross: God the Father Wept! God the Father had pangs of doubt, that is, if we Believe Christ doubted, we believe God Himself showed the way, was on that Tree. God Doubted!

The fruition of lazy theologian’s unlazy military Service, is a sense of a Nirvana and Eden we will one day return to, all changed because of the fallout of the War; not that we won’t Win, just that there are levels of victory, and Satan is intent on ruining the peace as much as goading the War. We only know, not all things will be saved, but all things will be Changed. Yet to Fight, to March, to Hike, to do Checkpoint and Community Involvement, friends on the ground and in the alien Community: to do all this is to be that “numero uno” on the scene, able and Competent to be a firm hand or shoulder to lean on. Our calling all of us share, to “Do Ministry”, is a calling really quite Special, because it is boring, because it is unsexy, because it is Duty-Minded rather than Likable. Only we get to Like it, if only we aren’t faulted for the perambulatory walk around town, the lazy begging for a dollar even, and watching as the working classes waltz by morning, lunchtime, and evening. God puts us in Safehouses for a time, and we putter about with little to do Except: to Pray, to give Thanks, to Anticipate a Return to life as we once imagined it, with loved ones around us and More. We are taken out of our comfort zone in order to visualize the unspoken Coming Together called Ultimate. Called Ultimate Reality. Called Distant, almost Illegal, Hope, because it is so optimistic. An optimism that drives folks crazy. Because our Religion is not works-righteous, rather it is birthed in Exclusion, Rejection, sad things we would—minus our Calvinistic calling to the ministry all of us—try to Escape via head-down laboring in the fields. Our labor is spiritual, our safehouse is bearing Fruit, our Friends… they are witnessing a dreamt-over Upwards Tilt, heavenward and optimistic.