Two years ago I was introduced to the author Eugene Peterson by a friend so I ordered the four books he suggested but have only completed three so far savoring them like quality ice cream after an tasty meal (actually ice cream is welcome here anytime) . And to think I had been incorrectly assuming all along, he had only written The Message! No longer! I find it noteworthy and indicative of the wordsmith he was, that Peterson once commandeered a key word phrase associated with atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche – that the only way to live life is to find a standard and stick to it – and repurposed it to be about following Jesus nonetheless! Peterson literally stole the nonbeliever’s catchphrase, “a long obedience in the same direction,” and made it the name of his own best-selling Christian book first released in 1980.
What makes Peterson’s message so unique today is that he exudes the bedrock transformation of redemption as offered humanity by Jesus Christ. Most believers today view the Nietzsche / Marxist deception that we are now experiencing in America, as being much more sinister in its influence than merely words and ideas behind the smoke and mirrors that lead to the eventual death and destruction of its adherents. Take note, in that The Message, Eugene’s paraphrase of the Bible, has transformed the dusty, ancient Christian scriptures of “faith lived” into imaginative literature for contemporary readers seeking truth for living forgiven and empowered lives today.
While I was reading this chapter 14 (which I’ve summarized below – now with the Preface (verbatim) over 3000 words long; perhaps you can read it in installments while rationing out your ice cream) when I just laughed out loud thoroughly enjoying the lead off hospital incident. The truths of this Kelly parable and the pollster’s definitive “frivolous” report resonates with me as I too at times can mistake a sore throat for a descent into hell. (“Peterson, pray for me!”) Perhaps the best possible antidote is when we can combine an accurate memory of God’s ways with a lively hope in his promises, the essence of Psalm 132 as printed below:
1 O God, remember David,
remember all his troubles!
2 And remember how he promised God,
made a vow to the Strong God of Jacob,
3 “I’m not going home,
and I’m not going to bed,
4 I’m not going to sleep,
not even take time to rest,
5 Until I find a home for God,
a house for the Strong God of Jacob.”
6 Remember how we got the news in Ephrathah,
learned all about it at Jaar Meadows?
7 We shouted, “Let’s go to the shrine dedication!
Let’s worship at God’s own footstool!”
8 Up, God, enjoy your new place of quiet repose,
you and your mighty covenant ark;
9 Get your priests all dressed up in justice;
prompt your worshipers to sing this prayer:
10 “Honor your servant David;
don’t disdain your anointed one.”
11 God gave David his word,
he won’t back out on this promise:
“One of your sons
I will set on your throne;
12 If your sons stay true to my Covenant
and learn to live the way I teach them,
Their sons will continue the line —
always a son to sit on your throne.
13 Yes — I, God, chose Zion,
the place I wanted for my shrine;
14 This will always be my home;
this is what I want, and I’m here for good.
15 I’ll shower blessings on the pilgrims who come here,
and give supper to those who arrive hungry;
16 I’ll dress my priests in salvation clothes;
the holy people will sing their hearts out!
17 Oh, I’ll make the place radiant for David!
I’ll fill it with light for my anointed!
18 I’ll dress his enemies in dirty rags,
but I’ll make his crown sparkle with splendor.”
(from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.)
20th– Anniversary Preface.. (verbatim, not summarized)
As I sat down to revise A Long Obedience In The Same Direction I was prepared to do a lot of changing. I have hardly done any. It turns out there are some things that just 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 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 prayer life 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 (No wonder I missed the boat spiritually so long. Only recently did I begin to read the Psalms).
But the people I was around didn’t pray the Psalms. That puzzled me; Christians have always prayed the Psalms; and why didn’t my friends and neighbors? Then I realized it was because the language, cadenced and beautiful and harmonious, seemed remote from their jerky and messy and discordant everyday lives. I wanted to translate these fifteen Psalms 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 Song of the Ascents, and then all the Psalms and then the NT 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.
Chapter 14. Obedience: (summarized by merlin)
An incident took place a few years ago that has acquired the force of a parable for me. I had a minor operation on my nose and was in my hospital room recovering. Even though the surgery was minor, the pain was great and I was full of misery. Late in the afternoon a man was assigned to the other bed in my room. He was to have a tonsillectomy the next day. He was young, about twenty-two years old, good looking and friendly. He came over to me, put out his hand and said, “ Hi, my name is Kelly. What happened to you?”
I was no mood for friendly conversation, did not return the handshake, grunted my name and said that I had gotten my nose broken. He got the message that I did not want to talk, pulled the curtain between our beds and let me alone. Later in the evening his friends were visiting, and I heard him say, “There’s a man in the next bed who is a prizefighter; He got his nose broken in a championship fight.” He went on to embellish the story for the benefit of his friends.
Later in the evening, as I was feeling better, I said, “Kelly, you misunderstood what I said. I’m not a prizefighter. The nose was broken years ago in a basketball game, and I am just now getting it fixed.”
“Well, what do you do then?”
“I’m a pastor.”
“Oh.” he said and turned away; I was no longer an interesting subject.
In the morning he awoke me: “Peterson, Peterson – wake up.” I groggily came awake and asked what he wanted. “I want you to pray for me; I’m scared.” And so, before he was taken to surgery, I went to his bedside and prayed for him.
When he was brought back a couple of hours later, a nurse came and said, “Kelly, I am going to give you an injection that should take care of any pain you might have.”
In twenty minutes or so he began to groan, “I hurt. I can’t stand it. I’m going to die.”
I rang for the nurse and, when she came, said “Nurse, I don’t think that shot did any good; why don’t you give him another one?” She didn’t acknowledge my credentials for making such a suggestion, told me curtly that she would oversee the medical care of the patient, turned on her heel and, a little too abruptly I thought, left. Meanwhile Kelly continued to vent his agony.
After another half hour he began to hallucinate, and having lost touch with reality, began to shout, “Peterson, pray for me; can’t you see I’m dying! Peterson, pray for me!” His shouts brought the nurses, doctors, and orderlies running. They held him down and quieted him with the injection I had prescribed earlier.
The parabolic force of the incident is this: when the man was scared he wanted me to pray for him, and when the man was crazy he wanted me to pray for him, but in between, during the hours of so-called normalcy, he didn’t want anything to do with a pastor. What Kelly betrayed in extremis is all many people know of religion: a religion to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of; a religion made of moments of craziness but that is remote and shadowy in the clear light of the sun and routines of every day. The most religious places in the world, as a matter of fact, are not churches but battlefields and mental hospitals. You are much more likely to find passionate prayer in a foxhole than in a church pew, and you will certainly find more otherworldly visions and supernatural voices in a mental hospital than you will in church.
Stable, Not Petrified
Nevertheless we Christians don’t go to either place to nurture our faith. We don’t deliberately put ourselves in places of fearful danger, and we don’t put ourselves in psychiatric wards so we can be around those who clearly see visions of heaven and hell and distinctly hear the voice of God. What most Christians do is come to church, a place that is fairly safe and moderately predictable. For we have an instinct for health and sanity in our faith. We don’t seek our death-defying situations, and we avoid mentally unstable teachers. But in doing that we don’t get what some people want very much, a religion that makes us safe at all costs, certifying us as inoffensive to our neighbors and guaranteeing us as good risks to the banks. We want a Christian faith that has stability but is not petrified, that has vision but is not hallucinatory. How do we get both a sense of stability and a spirit of adventure, the ballast of good health and the zest of true sanity? How do we get the adult maturity to keep our feet on the ground and retain the childlike innocence to make the leap of faith?
What would you think of a pollster who issued a definitive report on how the American people felt about a new television special, if we discovered later that he had interviewed only one person who had seen only ten minutes of the program? We would dismiss the conclusions as frivolous. Yet that is exactly the kind of evidence that too many Christians accept as the final truth about many much more important matters-matters such as answered prayer, God’s judgment, Christ’s forgiveness, eternal salvation. The only person they consult is themselves, and the only experience they evaluate is their most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, particularly the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the Church and our local congregation, as well as the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experiences of the past week.
A Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch every day and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, perhaps even starting over. A Christian with a good memory avoids repeating old sins and should know the easiest way through complex situations. So instead of starting over each day, we continue building on prior victories as well as forgiven defeats.
You ever notice for all its interest in history, the Bible never refers to the past as “the good old days.” The past is not, for the person of faith, a restored historical site that we tour when we are on vacation; it is a field we plow, disc, harrow and plant, fertilize, lovingly work to insure a bountiful harvest.
Christians who master Psalm 132 will be protected from one danger, at least, that is always a threat to our obedience: the danger that we should reduce our Christian existence to ritually obeying a few commandments that are congenial to our temperament and convenient to our standard of living. It gives us, instead, a vision into the future so that we can see what is right before us. If we define the nature of our lives by our mistake of the moment, or the defeat of the hour, or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give our obedience ballast and breadth just as we need a vision of the future to give our obedience both direction and goal.
If we never learn to do this – to extend the boundaries of our lives beyond the dates merely enclosed by our birth and death, and actually acquire an understanding and appreciation of God’s way as something larger and more complete than those anecdotes in our private diaries – we will forever be missing the point of things, by making headlines out of something that ought to be tucked away on page 97 in section C of the newspaper, or putting into the classified ads something that should be getting a full page color advertisement – perhaps mistaking a sore throat for a descent into hell! (“Peterson, pray for me!”) For Christian faith is a full revelation of a vast creation and a grandly consummated redemption. I prefer to define my faith, or your faith, by witnessing our obedient actions in the same direction, as led by the Holy Spirit
Christian living demands that we keep our feet on the ground, but it also asks us to make a leap of faith. A Christian who stays put is no better than a statue, waiting to be pulled down when the opinion poll tides change. A person who leaps about constantly is under suspicion of being not a man but a jumping jack or worse. Our obedience requires we possess the strength to stand as well as a willingness to leap, and the good sense to know when to do which. Which is exactly what we get when our accurate memory of God’s ways are combined with a lively hope in his promises.