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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: The IVP Signature Collection
- Sprache: Englisch
Since Eugene Peterson first wrote this spiritual formation classic nearly forty years ago, hundreds of thousands of Christians have been inspired by its call to deeper discipleship. As a society, we are still obsessed with the immediate; new technologies have only intensified our quest for the quick fix. But Peterson's time-tested prescription for discipleship remains the same—a long obedience in the same direction. Following Jesus in this way requires a deepening life of prayer, and throughout history Christians have learned to pray from the Psalms. Peterson finds encouragement for today's pilgrims in the Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120-134), sung by travelers on their way to worship in Jerusalem. With his prophetic and pastoral wisdom, Peterson shows how the psalms teach us to grow in worship, service, joy, work, happiness, humility, community, and blessing. This special commemorative edition of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction includes a new preface taken from Leif Peterson's eulogy at his father's memorial service.
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For Lu and Petercompanions still in the long obedience
Contents
Commemorative Preface
A Eulogy for the Celebration of theResurrection of Eugene Peterson
LEIF PETERSON
Over the past few years, and especially more recently, thanks to the way social media has kept us increasingly connected, I’ve received a lot of messages from people wanting to express their appreciation for my dad. These messages, although personal and specific, are also similarly thematic.
This one, although an amalgam, is faithful to any number of notes I’ve received, some from people I remember or vaguely remember, some from people I never knew.
Dear Leif,
I heard recently that your dad is not doing well. I hope that’s not true. There is probably no one on this planet that I think of more often than your dad. He intervened on my behalf when I was fourteen. At the time I had no idea what he’d done. Even now I really don’t know any more than that he was the galvanizing force in changing the course of my life in a way that set me on a better path.
There are very few people who come to my mind as frequently as your father, not just the wisdom of his sermons, but his support of my mother that made my childhood slightly more stable, his intervention when life seemed untenable, and much more that I’m sure I have no knowledge of.
When you see him next please tell him that without his help I’m certain my life would not be the modest success that it is. And tell him thank you.
It was not uncommon in these notes to hear the words:
Your dad is the reason I became a minister.
Your dad saved my marriage.
Your dad saved my ministry.
Your dad saved my life.
The next time I would see my dad, usually on the Tuesdays I would always spend with him at the lake, I would read him these messages. After I was done reading, he would often rub his hands together and smile and nod pensively and say, “Oh, that’s good. That’s good.”
In these times of mental decline, I don’t know if he fully contextually understood who the sender was or the circumstances from the past that compelled them to write to him and convey that depth of appreciation. But I do know this: he knew that it was good. Not that he had done something good, but that when we are in relationship, with God and with others, good things inevitably happen. My dad’s message was always that the good news always plays out best in relationships. Always in relationships.
The writer of Genesis tells us that at the end of each day of creation God looked around at the work that he’d done and saw that it was good. I think my dad did that a lot. He was always looking around, at the mountains, at the flowers, at the birds, and at the relationships forming and playing out all around him, and you could tell from the twinkle in his eyes what he was thinking. “Oh man, that’s good. That’s really good.”
The writer of Genesis also tells us that on the seventh day of creation God rested from the work he’d completed. On October 22, surrounded by family, my dad reached the seventh day. And although we’re going to miss him—a lot—that too is good.
When I was in high school I used to joke with my dad that he only had one sermon. And although it was a joke between us, I believed then, as I do now, that it is largely accurate. My dad had one message.
A few years ago there was a commissioning service in Colorado for the translation of the New Testament that my dad had completed. I was invited to say a few words. In preparation I couldn’t shake that thought that for his whole life my dad only had one sermon—one message.
So I wrote a poem.
This is called “The Message.”
The Message
It’s almost laughable
how you fooled them.
How for thirty years, every week
you made them think
you were saying something new.
They thought you were
a magician. In your long black robe,
hiding so much up your ample sleeves,
always pulling something fresh
and making them think it was just
for them. And that’s just
the beginning. There was more.
Casual conversations at church picnics,
unmemorable chats at the local Denny’s
over eggs and toast. Counseling sessions
that saved marriages, maybe even lives.
And they didn’t know what
a fraud you were. They didn’t know
how simple it all was. They were blind
to your secret, only saw the magic
you performed, how you made the mysterious,
the ominous, the holy, into a cup of coffee,
how you made a cup of coffee into an act of grace,
how you could make
God into something that worked for them.
It’s so funny that they didn’t notice.
So many times I’ve wanted to
expose you. Tell them all what you’ve
been up to. And now you’re doing it
again. You’ve got this new group fooled
into thinking you’re worth millions.
They’re printing it on T-shirts, coffee mugs,
message pads, a new version every week,
for some new flock. But, I must say this,
they’ve widened your audience. Now you’re fooling
them all over the world, in churches, schools, homes,
and prisons. It’s so funny.
Only my inheritance keeps me
from giving you away.
Because I alone know your secret.
I alone know what you’ve been doing.
How you’ve fooled them all, taking something
so simple, something a child could understand
and making it into a career, a vocation, an empire.
I know.
Because for fifty years you’ve
been telling me the secret. For fifty
years you’ve stealed into my room
at night and whispered softly to my
sleeping head. It’s the same message
over and over and you don’t vary
it one bit.
God loves you.
He’s on your side.
He’s coming after you.
He’s relentless.
First Presbyterian Church, Kalispell, Montana
November 3, 2018
20th-Anniversary Preface
In the twenty years since I first wrote this book, enormous changes have taken place across the board all over the world and throughout the church. I find myself being told constantly and from almost every direction that I am in danger of becoming irrelevant if I don’t stay current with the latest developments in computers and appliances and transportation and the media. And so as I sat down to revise A Long Obedience in the Same Direction for this twentieth-anniversary edition, I was prepared to do a lot of changing.
I have done hardly any. It turns out that there are some things that don’t change. God doesn’t change: he seeks and he saves. And our response to God as he reveals himself in Jesus doesn’t change: we listen and we follow. Or we don’t. When we are dealing with the basics—God and our need for God—we are at bedrock. We start each day at the beginning with no frills.
So the book comes out in this new edition substantially as I first wrote it. I added an epilogue to reaffirm the ways in which Scripture and prayer fuse to provide energy and direction to those of us who set out to follow Jesus. A few celebrity names have been replaced by new ones (celebrities change pretty rapidly!), and I have changed a few references to current affairs. But that’s about it. It is reassuring to realize once again that we don’t have to anxiously study the world around us in order to keep up with God and his ways with us.
The most conspicuous change has been the use of a fresh translation of the Holy Scriptures, The Message, that I have been working on continuously since the publication of A Long Obedience. In fact, the fifteen Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120—134) that provide the text here for developing “discipleship in an instant society” provided the impetus for embarking on the new translation. All I had in mind at first was translating the Psalms into the idiomatic North American language that I heard people using on the streets and in the shopping malls and at football games. I knew that following Jesus could never develop into a “long obedience” without a deepening life of prayer and that the Psalms had always been the primary means by which Christians learned to pray everything they lived, and live everything they prayed over the long haul.
But the people I was around didn’t pray the Psalms. That puzzled me; Christians have always prayed the Psalms; why didn’t my friends and neighbors? Then I realized that it was because the language, cadenced and beautiful and harmonious, seemed remote from their jerky and messy and discordant everyday lives. But when these Psalms were first prayed and written by our Hebrew ancestors, they were every bit as jerky and messy and discordant as anything we experience today. I wanted to translate them from their Hebrew original and convey the raw, rough and robust energy that is so characteristic of these prayers. I wanted people to start praying them again, not just admiring them from a distance, and thereby learn to pray everything they experienced and felt and thought as they followed Jesus, not just what they thought was proper to pray in church.
And so it happened that the unintended consequence of the writing of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction was this new translation of the Songs of Ascents, and then all the Psalms and the New Testament (and eventually the whole Bible). The inclusion of that translation in this new edition completes the book in a way I could not have anticipated twenty years ago.
1
DISCIPLESHIP
“What Makes You Think You Can Race Against Horses?”
If you’re worn out in this footrace with men, what makes you think you can race against horses?
JEREMIAH 12:5
The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
This world is no friend to grace. A person who makes a commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior does not find a crowd immediately forming to applaud the decision or old friends spontaneously gathering around to offer congratulations and counsel. Ordinarily there is nothing directly hostile, but an accumulation of puzzled disapproval and agnostic indifference constitutes, nevertheless, surprisingly formidable opposition.
An old tradition sorts the difficulties we face in the life of faith into the categories of world, flesh and devil.1 We are, for the most part, well warned of the perils of the flesh and the wiles of the devil. Their temptations have a definable shape and maintain a historical continuity. That doesn’t make them any easier to resist; it does make them easier to recognize.
The world, though, is protean: each generation has the world to deal with in a new form. World is an atmosphere, a mood.2 It is nearly as hard for a sinner to recognize the world’s temptations as it is for a fish to discover impurities in the water. There is a sense, a feeling, that things aren’t right, that the environment is not whole, but just what it is eludes analysis. We know that the spiritual atmosphere in which we live erodes faith, dissipates hope and corrupts love, but it is hard to put our finger on what is wrong.
Tourists and Pilgrims
One aspect of world that I have been able to identify as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by thirty-second commercials. Our sense of reality has been flattened by thirty-page abridgments.
It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest. Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate. Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In our kind of culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty, it goes on the garbage heap. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.
Religion in our time has been captured by the tourist mindset. Religion is understood as a visit to an attractive site to be made when we have adequate leisure. For some it is a weekly jaunt to church; for others, occasional visits to special services. Some, with a bent for religious entertainment and sacred diversion, plan their lives around special events like retreats, rallies and conferences. We go to see a new personality, to hear a new truth, to get a new experience and so somehow expand our otherwise humdrum lives. The religious life is defined as the latest and the newest: Zen, faith healing, human potential, parapsychology, successful living, choreography in the chancel, Armageddon. We’ll try anything—until something else comes along.
I don’t know what it has been like for pastors in other cultures and previous centuries, but I am quite sure that for a pastor in Western culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the aspect of world that makes the work of leading Christians in the way of faith most difficult is what Gore Vidal has analyzed as “today’s passion for the immediate and the casual.”3 Everyone is in a hurry. The persons whom I lead in worship, among whom I counsel, visit, pray, preach and teach, want shortcuts. They want me to help them fill out the form that will get them instant credit (in eternity). They are impatient for results. They have adopted the lifestyle of a tourist and only want the high points. But a pastor is not a tour guide. I have no interest in telling apocryphal religious stories at and around dubiously identified sacred sites. The Christian life cannot mature under such conditions and in such ways.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw this area of spiritual truth at least with great clarity, wrote, “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”4 It is this “long obedience in the same direction” which the mood of the world does so much to discourage.
For recognizing and resisting the stream of the world’s ways there are two biblical designations for people of faith that are extremely useful: disciple and pilgrim. Disciple (mathētēs) says we are people who spend our lives apprenticed to our master, Jesus Christ. We are in a growing-learning relationship, always. A disciple is a learner, but not in the academic setting of a school-room, rather at the work site of a craftsman. We do not acquire information about God but skills in faith.
Pilgrim (parepidēmos) tells us we are people who spend our lives going someplace, going to God, and whose path for getting there is the way, Jesus Christ. We realize that “this world is not my home” and set out for “the Father’s house.” Abraham, who “went out,” is our archetype. Jesus, answering Thomas’s question “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?” gives us directions: “I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me” (Jn 14:5-6). The letter to the Hebrews defines our program: “Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we’d better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in” (Heb 12:1-2).
A Dog-Eared Songbook
In the pastoral work of training people in discipleship and accompanying them in pilgrimage, I have found, tucked away in the Hebrew Psalter, an old dog-eared songbook. I have used it to provide continuity in guiding others in the Christian way and directing people of faith in the conscious and continuous effort that develops into maturity in Christ. The old songbook is called, in Hebrew, shiray hammaloth—Songs of Ascents. The songs are the psalms numbered 120 through 134 in the book of Psalms. These fifteen psalms were likely sung, possibly in sequence, by Hebrew pilgrims as they went up to Jerusalem to the great worship festivals. Topographically Jerusalem was the highest city in Palestine, and so all who traveled there spent much of their time ascending.5 But the ascent was not only literal, it was also a metaphor: the trip to Jerusalem acted out a life lived upward toward God, an existence that advanced from one level to another in developing maturity—what Paul described as “the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus” (Phil 3:14).
Three times a year faithful Hebrews made that trip (Ex 23:14-17; 34:22-24). The Hebrews were a people whose salvation had been accomplished in the exodus, whose identity had been defined at Sinai and whose preservation had been assured in the forty years of wilderness wandering. As such a people, they regularly climbed the road to Jerusalem to worship. They refreshed their memories of God’s saving ways at the Feast of Passover in the spring; they renewed their commitments as God’s covenanted people at the Feast of Pentecost in early summer; they responded as a blessed community to the best that God had for them at the Feast of Tabernacles in the autumn. They were a redeemed people, a commanded people, a blessed people. These foundational realities were preached and taught and praised at the annual feasts. Between feasts the people lived these realities in daily discipleship until the time came to go up to the mountain city again as pilgrims to renew the covenant.
This picture of the Hebrews singing these fifteen psalms as they left their routines of discipleship and made their way from towns and villages, farms and cities, as pilgrims up to Jerusalem has become embedded in the Christian devotional imagination. It is our best background for understanding life as a faith-journey.
We know that our Lord from a very early age traveled to Jerusalem for the annual feasts (Lk 2:41-42). We continue to identify with the first disciples, who “set out for Jerusalem. Jesus had a head start on them, and they were following, puzzled and not just a little afraid” (Mk 10:32). We also are puzzled and a little afraid, for there is wonder upon unexpected wonder on this road, and there are fearful specters to be met. Singing the fifteen psalms is a way both to express the amazing grace and to quiet the anxious fears.
There are no better “songs for the road” for those who travel the way of faith in Christ, a way that has so many continuities with the way of Israel. Since many (not all) essential items in Christian discipleship are incorporated in these songs, they provide a way to remember who we are and where we are going. I have not sought to produce scholarly expositions of these psalms but to offer practical meditations that use these tunes for stimulus, encouragement and guidance. If we learn to sing them well, they can be a kind of vade mecum for a Christian’s daily walk.
Between the Times
Paul Tournier, in A Place for You, describes the experience of being in between—between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith.6 It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bar and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, of extraordinary aliveness.
Christians will recognize how appropriately these psalms may be sung between the times: between the time we leave the world’s environment and arrive at the Spirit’s assembly; between the time we leave sin and arrive at holiness; between the time we leave home on Sunday morning and arrive in church with the company of God’s people; between the time we leave the works of the law and arrive at justification by faith. They are songs of transition, brief hymns that provide courage, support and inner direction for getting us to where God is leading us in Jesus Christ.
Meanwhile the world whispers, “Why bother? There is plenty to enjoy without involving yourself in all that. The past is a graveyard—ignore it; the future is a holocaust—avoid it. There is no payoff for discipleship, there is no destination for pilgrimage. Get God the quick way; buy instant charisma.” But other voices speak—if not more attractively, at least more truly. Thomas Szasz, in his therapy and writing, has attempted to revive respect for what he calls the “simplest and most ancient of human truths: namely, that life is an arduous and tragic struggle; that what we call ‘sanity,’ what we mean by ‘not being schizophrenic,’ has a great deal to do with competence, earned by struggling for excellence; with compassion, hard won by confronting conflict; and with modesty and patience, acquired through silence and suffering.”7 His testimony validates the decision of those who commit themselves to explore the world of the Songs of Ascents, who mine them for wisdom and sing them for cheerfulness.
These psalms were no doubt used in such ways by the multitudes Isaiah described as saying, “Come, let’s climb God’s mountain, go to the House of the God of Jacob. He’ll show us the way he works so we can live the way we’re made” (Is 2:3). They are also evidence of what Isaiah promised when he said, “You will sing! sing through an all-night holy feast; your hearts will burst with song, make music like the sounds of flutes on parade, en route to the mountain of God, on their way to the Rock of Israel” (Is 30:29).
Everyone who travels the road of faith requires assistance from time to time. We need cheering up when spirits flag; we need direction when the way is unclear. One of Paul Goodman’s “little prayers” expresses our needs:
On the highroad to death
trudging, not eager to get
to that city, yet the way is
still too long for my patience
—teach me a travel song,
Master, to march along
as we boys used to shout
when I was a young scout.8
For those who choose to live no longer as tourists but as pilgrims, the Songs of Ascents combine all the cheerfulness of a travel song with the practicality of a guidebook and map. Their unpretentious brevity is excellently described by William Faulkner. “They are not monuments, but footprints. A monument only says, ‘At least I got this far,’ while a footprint says, ‘This is where I was when I moved again.’”9
2
REPENTANCE
“I’m Doomed to Live in Meshech”
I’m in trouble. I cry to GOD,
desperate for an answer:
“Deliver me from the liars, GOD!
They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth.”
Do you know what’s next, can you see what’s coming,
all you barefaced liars?
Pointed arrows and burning coals
will be your reward.
I’m doomed to live in Meshech,
cursed with a home in Kedar.
My whole life lived camping
among quarreling neighbors.
I’m all for peace, but the minute
I tell them so, they go to war!
PSALM 120
Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.
MENCIUS
People submerged in a culture swarming with lies and malice feel as if they are drowning in it: they can trust nothing they hear, depend on no one they meet. Such dissatisfaction with the world as it is is preparation for traveling in the way of Christian discipleship. The dissatisfaction, coupled with a longing for peace and truth, can set us on a pilgrim path of wholeness in God.
A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquillity, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.
Psalm 120 is the song of such a person, sick with the lies and crippled with the hate, a person doubled up in pain over what is going on in the world. But it is not a mere outcry, it is pain that penetrates through despair and stimulates a new beginning—a journey to God that becomes a life of peace.
The fifteen Songs of Ascents describe elements common to all those who apprentice themselves to the Lord Christ and who travel in the Christian way. This first of them is the prod that gets them going. It is not a beautiful song—there is nothing either hauntingly melancholy or lyrically happy in it. It is harsh. It is discordant. But it gets things started.
Lies Without Error
I’m in trouble is the opening phrase. The last word is war. Not a happy song but an honest and necessary one.
Men are set against each other. Women are at each other’s throats. We are taught rivalry from the womb. The world is restless, always spoiling for a fight. No one seems to know how to live in healthy relationships. We persist in turning every community into a sect, every enterprise into a war. We realize, in fugitive moments, that we were made for something different and better—“I’m all for peace”—but there is no confirmation of that realization in our environment, no encouragement of it in our experience. “I’m all for peace; but the minute I tell them so, they go to war!”
The distress that begins and ends the song is the painful awakening to the no-longer-avoidable reality that we have been lied to. The world, in fact, is not as it had been represented to us. Things are not all right as they are, and they are not getting any better.
We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone’s fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time.
How we can keep on believing this after so many centuries of evidence to the contrary is difficult to comprehend, but nothing we do and nothing anyone else does to us seems to disenchant us from the spell of the lie. We keep expecting things to get better somehow. And when they don’t, we whine like spoiled children who don’t get their way. We accumulate resentment that stores up in anger and erupts in violence. Convinced by the lie that what we are experiencing is unnatural, an exception, we devise ways to escape the influence of what other people do to us by getting away on a vacation as often as we can. When the vacation is over, we get back into the flow of things again, our naiveté renewed that everything is going to work out all right—only to once more be surprised, hurt, bewildered when it doesn’t. The lie (“everything is OK”) covers up and perpetuates the deep wrong, disguises the violence, the war, the rapacity.
Christian consciousness begins in the painful realization that what we had assumed was the truth is in fact a lie. Prayer is immediate: “Deliver me from the liars, God! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth.” Rescue me from the lies of advertisers who claim to know what I need and what I desire, from the lies of entertainers who promise a cheap way to joy, from the lies of politicians who pretend to instruct me in power and morality, from the lies of psychologists who offer to shape my behavior and my morals so that I will live long, happily and successfully, from the lies of religionists who “heal the wounds of this people lightly,” from the lies of moralists who pretend to promote me to the office of captain of my fate, from the lies of pastors who “get rid of God’s command so you won’t be inconvenienced in following the religious fashions!” (Mk 7:8). Rescue me from the person who tells me of life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit.
The lies are impeccably factual. They contain no errors. There are no distortions or falsified data. But they are lies all the same, because they claim to tell us who we are and omit everything about our origin in God and our destiny in God. They talk about the world without telling us that God made it. They tell us about our bodies without telling us that they are temples of the Holy Spirit. They instruct us in love without telling us about the God who loves us and gave himself for us.
Lightning Illuminating the Crossroads
The single word God occurs only twice in this psalm, but it is the clue to the whole. God, once admitted to the consciousness, fills the entire horizon. God, revealed in his creative and redemptive work, exposes all the lies. The moment the word God is uttered, the world’s towering falsehood is exposed—we see the truth. The truth about me is that God made and loves me. The truth about those sitting beside me is that God made them and loves them, and each one is therefore my neighbor. The truth about the world is that God rules and provides for it. The truth about what is wrong with the world is that I and the neighbor sitting beside me have sinned in refusing to let God be for us, over us and in us. The truth about what is at the center of our lives and of our history is that Jesus Christ was crucified on the cross for our sins and raised from the tomb for our salvation and that we can participate in new life as we believe in him, accept his mercy, respond to his love, attend to his commands.
John Baillie wrote, “I am sure that the bit of the road that most requires to be illuminated is the point where it forks.”1 The psalmist’s God is a lightning flash illuminating just such a crossroads. Psalm 120 is the decision to take one way over against the other. It is the turning point marking the transition from a dreamy nostalgia for a better life to a rugged pilgrimage of discipleship in faith, from complaining about how bad things are to pursuing all things good.
This decision is said and sung on every continent in every language. The decision has been realized in every sort of life in every century in the long history of humankind. The decision is quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) announced from thousands of Christian pulpits all over the world each Sunday morning. The decision is witnessed by millions in homes, factories, schools, businesses, offices and fields every day of every week. The people who make the decision and take delight in it are the people called Christians.
