Spitting Away From the Angels: Faith, Imagination, & the Reality of the Church

The church is a caravan. It travels in company. In one of his sermons on the nature of Christ, Saint Augustine pictures the church as being in motion. The church“which is now traveling on its journey,” he observes, “is joined to that heavenly Church where we have the angels as our fellow citizens.” Augustine is saying this not only of the saints in heaven but also of those on earth. His view was one that saw the whole church, not only across the globe but across time. Or as he put it, “from Abel the just to the end of the world.” [1]

This is not what I usually see when the congregation assembles. When I look around the church, I see the faces of strangers mixed with a handful of friends. I do not see angels. Neither do I see the “great cloud of witnesses” that both Scripture and Augustine say accompanies the church on its journey (cf. Heb. 12:1).

This vision of the church that Augustine describes is one that Robert Markus, a scholar of early Christian studies, says was typical of ancient Christianity. “So close were the angels at the community’s prayer,” Markus writes, “that monks were told to turn aside if they needed to spit, lest they spit upon the angels gathered in front of them.” Markus explains that their sense was one of living “in perpetual proximity, even intimacy” with the entire community of faith. “The saints were God’s friends, but they also remained men’s kin,” Markus explains. “Together with them, the whole community was in God’s presence.”[2] To quote Paul Simon, these ancient Christians seem to have seen “angels in the architecture.’

There is nothing especially strange about such a view. It is a reflection of the Bible’s teaching by another Paul, who taught that those who are in Christ are fellow citizens with God’s people and members of his household. They are already seated in the heavenly realms (Eph. 2:6, 19). And yet, at the same time, they are waiting for “the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Likewise, the writer of the book of Hebrews describes the church as a band of pilgrims that does not now have “an enduring city” but is “looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).

When I read these words in Scripture, I can’t help but notice how drab my view of the same spiritual landscape is by comparison. I wonder why my church seems to be so different from theirs. But I think I know the answer. It’s because I lack of imagination. “The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world–if only from time to time,” Annie Dillard writes.[3] This is also the trick of faith. Both require the use of imagination.

You might think that imagination would be antithetical both to reason and to faith. We view reason as a realm of facts, while we think of the imagined as something “made-up.” Imagination, for most us, is a matter of fantasy instead of reality. Faith also seems to us to be inconsistent with imagination. Faith, for the Christian, is a realm of truth. It is a conviction about what God has said is true.

Yet faith, imagination, and reality are intimately connected. Those who look at the world through the eyes of faith must train their vision to perceive reality as the Scriptures define it. “A Christian does not simply ‘believe’ certain propositions about God; he learns to attend to reality through them,” theologian Stanley Hauerwas explains. “This learning requires training our attention by constantly juxtaposing our experience with our vision.”[4]

The seeing that Hauerwas writes about sounds difficult. Indeed, it is, especially if this particular kind of vision is called faith. Faith, we are told in Scripture, is a gift (Eph. 2:8). When Peter made his great confession that Jesus was both Messiah and the Son of the Living God, Christ did not compliment him for his insight. Instead, he declared that Peter was “blessed” because this conviction was not an insight from common sense or even a result of careful, rational analysis. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah,” Jesus said, “for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven” (Matt. 16:17). Faith is indeed a kind of vision, but it is not ordinary sight. We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7).

Using the imagination often involves the temporary suspension of disbelief. Those who exercise their imagination train their attention on a possibility that they had not previously considered. It may even be one that they initially thought was impossible. Pausing to ask“what if” opens their eyes to a different way of seeing. Faith, however, calls us to take another step, moving from the consideration of what might be to a conviction about what is.

As Hauerwas puts it, faith is a mode of attention that has been trained by the truth to view things as God sees them. It is not, however, an exercise in magical thinking. The Bible portrays it as the opposite. It is God’s Spirit working through the truth to open our eyes to reality, just as God opened the eyes of the prophet’s servant to see the hills filled with the horses and chariots of fire that surrounded Elisha (2 Kings 6:17). Reality as the Bible defines it is more expansive that what can be seen or even experienced. Perhaps this is why the creeds require the faithful to say that they believe “in” the church rather than asking them to confess that they believe the church. It is a call to maintain a kind of double vision where the church is concerned.

I was reminded of this the other day, when I read a report by the Hartford Center for Religion Research, which said that an increasing number of pastors are considering leaving church ministry. After comparing data gathered from a survey of 1,700 religious leaders in the Fall of 2023 with earlier surveys, they concluded: “The further we are from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the more we observe larger percentages of clergy pondering alternatives to their present congregation, vocation, or both.”[5] According to the survey, over half of those surveyed reported seriously considering leaving pastoral ministry at least once since 2020. Nearly 20% more clergy reported having such thoughts than in 2021.

I confess that when I first read about this data in a report from Lifeway Research,[6] I wasn’t especially shocked. Ministerial discouragement isn’t new. It’s at least as old as Moses and Elijah (Exod. 5:22; Num. 11:11; 1 Kings 18:22). During the years I served as a pastor, I probably thought about quitting once a week, usually on a Monday.

“The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize
the actual world–if only from time to time,”
Annie Dillard

Not every pastor leaves a church because they are disappointed. Many depart for the same reasons that the members of their congregation leave. Their life circumstances change. They feel called to a different kind of work or find it necessary to move to a different location. Nor can it be denied that some have good reason to be disappointed. If Jesus wondered how long He had to put up with those he characterized as an “unbelieving and perverse generation,” I guess there is room for us to feel a little frustration now and then too.

At the same time, I wonder if this data indicates something more than the ordinary Monday blues. Idealism is one thing. So is ordinary frustration. But unhealthy perfectionism is something else. It is a strain I recognize in myself. It is the church’s destiny to be perfect, but it is not yet the church’s practice. How can it be otherwise? The fact that the church must be equipped before it can fulfill its ministry means that those who serve it must work with a church that is not yet all it should be. This will be the case as long as pastors exist because when the church is finally perfected pastors will no longer be necessary.

Idealism can take noble forms, but it often wears the mask of perfectionism in pastoral ministry. When idealism disintegrates into perfectionism, the very weaknesses that mandate our ministry blind us to its beauty. Those who have been called to love and serve the church in its weakness begin to resent and despise it. “Anyone who glamorizes congregations does a grave disservice to pastors,” the late Eugene Peterson warned. “We hear tales of glitzy, enthusiastic churches and wonder what in the world we are doing wrong that our people don’t turn out that way under our preaching.”[7]

The only way to recover a true vision of the church is through the imagination. We must train our attention to see the church with the double vision that Scripture provides. One dimension of this view is to look unflinchingly and honestly at its weaknesses and shortcomings. The other is to look beyond these imperfections to the unseen spiritual realities that shape the church. As Augustine observed, it is part of a community of faith that travels in company in a procession that has lasted from the beginning of time to the end of days. This is “the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven” and keeps company with “God, the Judge of all,” and with “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Heb. 12:23).

The ancient church looked at the world differently than we do. They were indeed idealists. Yet they were at least realistic enough to know that a monk might have to spit, even in the presence of angels.

[1] Augustine, Sermo 341.9.11 quoted by Robert Markus in The End of Ancient Christianity, (New York: Cambridge, 1990), 22.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, (New York: Harper, 1987), 20.

[4] Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, (Notre Dame: University of Nortre Dame, 191981), 46.

[5] Hartford Institute for Relgion Research, “I’m Exhausted All the Time”: Exploring the Factors Contributing to Growing Clergy Discontentment,” January, 2024, https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Clergy_Discontentment_Patterns_Report-compressed_2.pdf.

[6] Aaron Earls, “Why Are More Pastors Thinking About Quitting?,” Lifeway Research, April 10, 2024, https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Clergy_Discontentment_Patterns_Report-compressed_2.pdf

[7] Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 17.

Aging as Letting Go

grayscale photo of man sitting on brown wooden bench reading news paper during day time

May 7, 2021June 12, 2023 ~ John Koessler ~ 7 Comments

Shortly before I retired, I asked a friend to describe what the experience was like. “It’s like death,” he said. “It goes on and on.” He was joking, but I was unnerved by his reply. Something in my bones told me that he was right. For obvious reasons, the primary metaphor of retirement is rest. But rest is also a euphemism for death. The truth is that we experience many kinds of death throughout our lives.

Every new stage of life lays to rest the one that preceded it until we reach the final stage and eventually lay aside physical life itself. Every major life event, especially the happy ones, is often attended by a measure of sadness or a sense of loss. The graduate realizes that the years of preparation and childhood are over, and it’s time to look for a job. The bliss of the newly wedded couple is unsettled when they feel the chafing tug of their lost freedom. New parents feel the awful weight of responsibility for the life that has suddenly been thrust into their hands. Then they must yield that burden up with tears when the time comes for the child to leave home as an adult. Knowing that this is part of the natural order does not make it any easier to accept.

Since I retired, I find myself saying no to things that I once would have been eager to take on. I am not doing the things I thought I would do. Some of those things are no longer of interest to me. Others have grown more difficult, and I am either unwilling or unable to expend the energy. It is unnerving. I find that I am disappointed with myself for the things I no longer want to do and disappointed with God for the things He has not permitted me to do.

Change is disorienting. Those stages associated with aging are also disquieting because they usually involve the laying aside of tasks and identities that we have carried with us for decades, perhaps for most of our lives. How are we to think about ourselves now that we are no longer what we once were? The answer, of course, is that we are not what we do. Or perhaps it would be better to say that we are more than what we do. This truth is hard to accept. One of the questions people ask when they meet for the first time is “What do you do?” We define ourselves by the tasks and jobs that occupy our time. But that is not what we are. It does not help matters that the church tends to do the same. In sacred spaces, as in secular ones, we assign significance based on role, task, and return on investment. Those who perform and produce have value. But what happens when our capacity to produce begins to diminish? What value do we have then? According to 1 Corinthians 12:22, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are “indispensable.”

“To grow old is to lose our acquaintances and lifelong friends to distance, illness, and death.”
Stanley Hauerwas & Laura Yordy

Part of the work of aging is letting go. We must let go of aspects of our former identities, familiar tasks that we once enjoyed, along with the friends and colleagues that go with them. There is relief, but it is a relief tempered with a measure of sorrow. “To grow old is to lose our acquaintances and lifelong friends to distance, illness, and death,” Stanley Hauerwas and Laura Yordy remind us. “As our friends move away or die we lose the confirmation of our own life stories and identities. We are not even sure, as we grow old, that we are still the same people we were.” Perhaps we are not. But the change does not necessarily mean that we are less than we once were. We may do less. But we have not lost value, at least to God, because of the difference.

A little over a decade ago, I sent a letter to Eugene Peterson asking if he would endorse a book that I had written. A short time later, I received a gentle refusal in the return mail. “I am honored that you would trust me in the task,” Peterson wrote. “But I cannot. I am fast becoming an old man; the strength diminishes; I’m unable to do what I used to take on effortlessly.” Then, in the style that made me love him as a writer, Peterson added a brief line of poetry from Wendell Berry: “I am an old man\ but I don’t think of myself as an old man \ but as a young man with disabilities . . .”

I have often heard Christians say that the Bible does not teach retirement. This assertion, usually expressed in a condescending tone by church leaders, is meant to shame those who have pulled back from activities to reenlistment. Or it is a form of virtue signaling by those who have reached retirement age meant to highlight the fact that they have not slowed down like others they know. Ironically, the Old Testament does more than describe something that might be called a form of retirement. It mandated it, at least for the Levites. According to Numbers 8:23–26, the Levites were required to retire from tabernacle service at fifty. They were permitted (though not required) to assist their younger brothers in their duties at the tent of meeting, but they were not allowed to do the work themselves. The wisdom in this should be self-evident. Levitical work included physical labor and heavy lifting. Where the tabernacle was concerned, they were something like the team that sets up and tears down the church that meets in the school auditorium.

A secular form of the non-retirement myth often appears in television commercials, usually for companies that trade in financial planning. We see a montage of scenes that involve a stylish and attractive smiling couple in their 60s that shows how fit and active they are. They gaze happily in each other’s eyes as a tropical sun sinks below the horizon just off their yacht or their hotel balcony or the dinner table, where they clink their wine glasses together in mutual self-congratulation. The message is clear. Age brings no diminishment of power for those who take charge of their life (and use the services of this financial company). We only get better looking, wealthier, and busier in the things we love to do.

“There is no point in imagining old age, especially in its last years, to be easy.”
Maxine Hancock

Perhaps this is true for some. But it is not the case for most. “There is no point in imagining old age, especially in its last years, to be easy; nor should we expect that many of us will have a lot of ‘golden years,’” warns Maxine Hancock in an essay that describes aging as a heroic stage in one’s pilgrimage of faith. “From what I have observed, what lies ahead is more like a rockclimbing expedition, straight up a rock face, and then a slipping and sliding down through the shale on the other side to the place of our ‘crossing over.’”

But if letting go is proof of our growing weakness, it is also an act of faith. We submit to the changes that come with aging because we have no other choice. We are unable to exercise the degree of control over our lives and our energies that the detractors of retirement or the marketers would like us to think. Yet even as things that were once precious slip from our grasp, we ourselves are held fast. “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die,” Jesus promised (John 11:26). For the Christian, what may feel like a swift descent into the Valley of Shadow, turns out only to be a momentary point of departure for a different location. One where we will find brighter fields and better service.

Godspeed, Eugene Peterson

October 15, 2018 ~ John Koessler ~ 6 Comments

Today I read that Eugene Peterson has entered hospice care. Peterson may be the most influential person in my life that I’ve never actually met. Not only have his ideas about the nature of pastoral ministry profoundly reoriented my thinking, his books have introduced me to some of my favorite writers and thinkers, people like Wendell Berry and Stanley Hauerwas. I am sure that I am not alone in this. I had heard of Eugene Peterson as a young pastor but his greatest influence came when I became a professor training others for pastoral ministry. For over twenty years I have required my students to read Under the Unpredictable Plant, a remarkable book where he turns pastoral ministry on its head.

Instead of describing the pastor as someone who controls the church and shapes the lives of others, Peterson argues that congregational ministry is the place where God shapes the pastor’s soul. In the process, he takes aim at the culture of careerism which has so infected our idea of ministry. He calls career driven ministry idolatry: “The idolatry to which pastors are so conspicuously liable is not personal but vocational, the idolatry of a religious career that we can take charge of and manage.”

Peterson’s criticism came as a great relief. It explained so much about my ministry and my life. “There is much that is glorious in pastoral work, but the congregation, as such, is not glorious” he warns. “The congregation is a Nineveh like place: a site for hard work without a great deal of hope for success, at least as success is measured on the charts.” How many times since have I wished that I had heard this warning when I was first starting out in ministry? But the truth is, I doubt that I would have accepted it. Oh, I might have believed that this was true for other more ordinary sorts but not for me. I was young. I was gifted. I was destined for great things.

Peterson warns that anyone who glamorizes pastoral ministry does a disservice to pastors. “We hear tales of glitzy, enthusiastic churches and wonder what in the world we are doing wrong that our people don’t turn out that way under our preaching” Peterson observes. But the real problem is not our ministry but our expectation. We have been pursuing a fantasy. “Hang around long enough and sure enough there are gossips who won’t shut up, furnaces that malfunction, sermons that misfire, disciples who quit, choirs that go flat–and worse.” It cannot be otherwise, Peterson explains. Every congregation is a community of sinners and has sinners for pastors.

I do not think Peterson saw himself as an iconoclast so much as a witness. “It is necessary from time to time that someone stand up and attempt to get the attention of the pastors lined up at the travel agency in Joppa to purchase a ticket to Tarshish” he has written. “At this moment I am the one standing up. If I succeed in getting anyone’s attention, what I want to say is that the pastoral vocation is not a glamorous vocation and Tarshish is a lie.” For the past twenty-five years, I have tried to add my voice to his.

A few years ago I wrote to Peterson. I hoped that he would agree to write the introduction for a book I had just finished. He declined the opportunity. In a brief handwritten note, he explained that he had reached the stage in life where he had to make careful choices. He said that he was not an expert in everything and needed to stick with what he knew best. He closed with a quote from Wendell Berry. It was the kindest rejection I’ve ever experienced. Godspeed, Eugene Peterson.