Immanuel, God with Us

 

When I was a new pastor serving a church in a rural area of the United States, I needed to make pastoral calls. Since I was a shy person at heart, I found it difficult to make some of those calls. When I looked at all I needed to do in a week, I found other tasks rising to the top over the task of calling on people pastorally.  When I would stop to ask myself why it was that these times were difficult for me, I realized that it had to do with my lack of an answer to this question, "What am I really doing when I make a pastoral call?”

That question had confronted me on the first day already after I was ordained as a pastor. I was sitting in my study that morning, and a disheveled man came to my door. He asked if I was busy, which I was not. After all, I was still asking myself how it could be that God had called me to be a pastor. I had been educated in some fine schools, I had answered all the difficult questions that came my way concerning my theological understanding of the Word of God, and finally I had been ordained. Now I was a pastor. But what did that mean? I wondered what it really meant when life met up with theology.  And here was a man sitting in front of me and asking, are you busy? Could we pray for a while?

He wanted to pray for his son who had fallen into a temptation and had gotten in trouble with the Law. He was now in jail in a faraway place and his dad was concerned. So, could we pray? Before we prayed, he looked me in the eye and asked, I need to know when to give up on my son. I have prayed for him again and again over the years, but he seems determined to go off with his friends who get him in trouble. So, at what point should I just give up on him and let him go?

At that point, what he was asking, I believe, is what does God say about how long I keep being concerned for my son? What does God say to me? He wanted to have me be an ambassador for God, to speak for God to him in the midst of his troubles. He had come asking what could God possibly have to say to me in this sad situation. When do I simply give up on my son?

Now you have to understand, I had done really well in all my courses, I had answered all the theological questions to the satisfaction of my questioners, but when faced with a question like this one. It was no longer just a theological question, this was a question that arose from a broken heart. He loved his son with a deep fatherly love, but might it be, he asked, that I should just forget about loving my son anymore? That is what being a pastor is that is so different from being a student.

So for the next few years, I continued to struggle with the question, what does it mean to be a pastor in the moment of deep crisis? What does it mean to be called to minister to people whose lives are shaken to the core? What might I have to learn to do and to be so that when I showed up, my people would not wonder if I would do them any good?

After a few years, I moved to a different church. I was still asking those difficult questions of myself. But I found that when I had moved to this new church in a big city, that a nearby hospital was wanting to put together a team of local pastors who would be chaplains for that hospital. I decided that this would be an opportunity for me to have a community of caregivers among whom I could ask the deep question of, What exactly are we doing here?  On a monthly basis, we would all spend a morning together discussing the role of the chaplain in a hospital setting. Also, we set up a schedule by which we would provide a daily chaplain for the patients in the hospital. Every patient who was admitted got a visit from one of us. We had some standard questions we would ask - Do you have a pastor whom you would like us to notify of your presence here? Do you have a faith that you practice?  and always we asked if they wanted to have us pray with them.

So I became the chaplain for the hospital every other Saturday morning.  I'd arrive once the morning meal had been served and make the rounds of all the new patients as well as those who had requested the presence of a chaplain from one of my colleagues previously. So I got a great deal of practice at making hospital calls. And in the process I began to discern what the pastor, the chaplain was doing. When I came in the door, it was as one whose very presence communicated this idea, "God is with you.” I came to realize that in a very real way, I was called by God to be the visible, in the flesh, evidence of Immanuel to those who were facing a crisis of health large enough to be confined to a hospital bed. I came to realize that, as James R Kok would put it in one of his delightful books, 90% of caring is just showing up. It is our presence that communicates our caring. But even more so, it is our presence that communicates God's presence among us. As Jesus said, Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. So it is that when the chaplain showed up in that hospital room that Saturday morning as I made my rounds, it made for many opportunities where the two of us knew that Jesus was there among us. And that in itself brought a measure of healing that cannot be denied.

Immanuel, God with Us.

That is the heart of what a chaplain does, no matter what the venue is for the interaction we bring to the place. It is God's presence we represent. Once I learned that, I discovered that my pastoral care of my own parishioners improved as well. That is when I truly discovered that anyone who is a follower of Jesus is able to bring the presence of God into any situation. We just need to be authentically ourselves as Jesus followers.

As we move our way through this course, I intend to come back to this thought again. It is the heart of the matter as far as I am concerned about chaplaincy. God with us. Yes, God with us in the depths of our hurt, in the depths of our betrayal, in the pain of a disease, we come back again and again to the thought, Immanuel, God with us. When our world is falling apart and a Jesus follower comes on the scene, may we look for the ways in which we will faithfully represent our Lord and become the holy presence of Jesus for those to whom we minister.  

Last modified: Tuesday, August 7, 2018, 10:09 AM