Seasons of Uselessness

“He’s in your hands,” King Zedekiah said, “for the king can do nothing to stop you.” So they seized Jeremiah, threw him into the cistern of the royal prince Malchiah, within the prison quarters, and lowered him down by ropes. Now there wasn’t any water in the cistern, only mud, and Jeremiah began to sink into the mud. (Jeremiah 38:5-6, CEB translation)

“I am not doing anything for God here. I am being wasted. I think I need to leave.”

I was talking with a woman who is early in the process of exploring a call to ministry. She is full of enthusiasm and feels a great urgency to use every bit of what time she has in her life to give to Jesus. I am terribly excited for her. I totally get that impulse, and I feel it too. And she may be right, she may need to look at being involved at a different church while she makes her way through the process.

Or she may need to think seriously about whether she is called to be a pastor. Because if you can’t handle being trapped in a place where you are useless, may I suggest a different path for your life?

The passage I have pulled above is a smidge of the section where Jeremiah is under attack. Basically, he has done what God has asked him to do and, you know, been a prophet. No one likes a prophet. I take that back: God and people who are oppressed like a prophet. People with earthly power, not so much. So, angry with Jeremiah and his prophetness, some people in power have dropped him down a well to sink into the mud, and probably wither and die.

I have been in that mud. Every pastor I have ever known who has served any length of time has been in that mud. Certainly any pastor who has known it was time to leave and serve elsewhere has been in that mud.

That mud is an awful place to be. To be stuck, immobile. But also to be dying of thirst and starvation. That is what it feels like when you know you can no longer make a difference with the people you are assigned to serve. Or when God has put a new call on your life, but the denominational structure either does not recognize such a call or is not agile enough to respond to it, and so you are stuck. Or when you have outgrown where you are planted, and your roots are banging against brick, threatening to rip up foundations if something doesn’t give soon. You are deep in the dirt, but also pinned in and going mad from it.

But surely Jeremiah gets relief, right? Yes, Ebed-melech (a non-Israelite, by the way – a Cushite even) makes a plea to the king. He sees the desperate situation Jeremiah is in, and he advocates for him. So the king lets him free Jeremiah from the mud by tying rags together to make a rope to pull Jeremiah out… to remain in prison. Seriously?!?!? Okay, yes, Jeremiah won’t starve to death now, but he isn’t free either! He goes from one imprisonment to another. Where is the relief?

I feel this double pain for my friends and colleagues, and especially for those of us in the United Methodist Church right now. We are heading into appointment season. I have some friends who KNOW they need to move. They also know that moves will come few and far between as the powers that be try to hold a very tentative system in place by rocking as few boats as possible. We have little confidence in creative vision, even as we see and feel that the Holy Spirit is begging us to break things wide open. Many of my colleagues fear that they will be pulled from the mud to be put in prison. Part of that is because there is little trust in the system right now. And part of that is because we have no idea what will be on the other side of May – will we be a denomination we can serve, or will we be trapped in something we feel required to prophesy against? See above for how it goes for prophets….

And to add insult to injury, here we sit in the season of Advent. A season of waiting. A season when we are all painfully aware that God’s vision for the world has not come to fruition. Things do not work the way God would have them work. Plus, waiting. Waiting is that state between appointments. For the ones who know they will move, the wait is in revealing where their next destiny lies. For the ones who do not know if they will move, but either hope or dread it, it is still a season when nothing can happen. You can’t start anything new for fear of being unable to see it through. But you also can’t end anything either, for fear that you will need to continue on where you are. It is maddening. It is frustrating. It feels useless.

Seasons of uselessness. That’s what these are. Seasons when purpose is gone, when good work is constricted, when the Holy Spirit is questioned or ignored. Seasons when we know there is good we could be doing; it just isn’t here. And we can see there. But we are mired in the mud and can’t get there.

In seasons like this, I look for God. I try to see what God sees. Where God is. And what greater good can come from these moments. I see one thing: we are all of us collectively prophetic. As many of us watch more and more of our church lay members leave because they are frustrated with this or that, we continue to stand and hold. We are enacting a metaphor of faith for our people. And sure, there are different stakes for us. When our lay people leave, they go to another church and can go right along with their journey as God has called them. We leave, and we are stripped of our orders. We can no longer live out our call, and that is its own muddy cistern.

I also know that God can use such seasons to burn off the excess. To trim our fat so that we can be lean and strong for the next place we serve. There can still be moments of purpose in prison.

I also think that remembering how this feels is good for us as pastors. Our people go through these seasons too. Just because they have different ways to respond to such seasons than we sometimes do does not make them any less painful or maddening. Hopefully it renews in us a drive to stay focused on meaningful connections between God and our people.

But maybe there is no purpose. Maybe it is a sign of our brokenness. Maybe it is just an out and out corruption of God’s will for a moment. And maybe we will all pay for that. Maybe we are paying for it now. Maybe every time we bind up God’s people, we keep the reign of God from fully breaking through. The only comfort I take in that is that God will send Ebed-melech to rescue us, though that rescue, which still happens in a broken context, may not be all it is cracked up to be.

Whatever is at work here, if you want to be a pastor, be ready to go through such a season at least one time (and probably multiple times) in your ministry. And for all of you in the midst of your latest, not as glamourous as it sounds mud treatment, you are in my prayers. May someone throw you a ragged rope soon.