Goodbye, Pastor: Eugene Peterson and the Pastor I Would Have Never Been
The morning Eugene Peterson died, before I was aware of its occurance, I started my day like any other day, the way he (and so many others) taught me: prayer and Scripture. I had read Psalm 19:
“The heavens declare the glory of God,
And the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”
-Psalm 19:1
Whenever I read this Psalm and pray through it, I think of two preachers I love: John Piper (for inspiring me to memorize it over ten years ago) and Eugene Peterson. I think of Peterson because of his translation of this verse, which I love:
“God’s glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon.”
I walked my dog that morning after I read and prayed, knowing Peterson was in hospice care (I had read this online just the week before), and prayed for him and his family. I even thought about what, if anything, I would write when his time of passing came. It was strange, then, to see as of that afternoon of that same day where all of this happened that Eugene Peterson had passed away.
There hasn’t been a more important pastor in my reading life than Peterson. Keller comes close. Without Peterson, I’m not sure I would have had a shot to be a pastor for longer than three or four years, and I certainly wouldn’t been any good. If I have any shot at being a faithful pastor, it’s because of Eugene Peterson.
What is so peculiar about Peterson is his specific mode of teaching us was his writing. Many pastors have influenced me through their preaching/teaching, maybe their social media, and also their books — their influence through various media like a soup, I’m never sure what came from where but I know it’s all in there: did I see that in a tweet, read about it, or hear them say it at some point? With Peterson, I always knew it was written down. He could have said it at some point, but it was always written, and written with such artistry and craft.
There’s a chapter I often revisit of his, and one I am led to now in light of his passing, in his memoir, The Pastor. The chapter is called “Write in a book what you see…” and it details his journey as a pastor and writer, a dual vocation he saw as inseperably one. The line, in quotes at the top of the page as the chapter begins, is from John’s Revelation. He found John’s vocation to be his also: “I realized this about myself: pastor and writer. Not writer competing for time from pastor. Not pastor struggling to integrate writer into an already crowded schedule: pastor and writer, a single coherent identity” (Peterson, The Pastor, pg. 238). If this paragraph was all Peterson gave me, it would be enough. He helped me see the pastoral vocation for what it is: artistic.
I sometimes struggle with what Peterson seemed to have put to rest. I was a writer before I was a pastor, and I sometimes see these two vocations at odds with one another. But reading Peterson puts some of this to rest. “My artistic medium was words, written and prayed and preached,” he wrote (The Pastor, pg. 240). When I would often read novelists and wish I were a novelist, or read journalists and wish I was a journalist, wishing I could spend more time writing, Peterson reminded me that the way I prayed for my people was creative, the emails I wrote mattered, the little devotional for a staff meeting was a work of art, and the sermon…my goodness, the sermon was to be crafted and cared for like a clay pot, not assembled as a piece of Ikea furnature. All of pastoral ministry is artistic, creative, and literary.
Without Peterson, I’m not sure I would have the same vision of creativity within ministry. And this is just one small aspect of what he taught me. His books on pastoral ministry (a series of four books, which sit next to each other on my office shelf) changed the trajectory of my life. Peterson was never provocative, but always prophetic, and constantly challenged the American vision of a pastor. His writings in Leadership Journal inspired me to write for them, and to do my best to join in the tradition of keeping us shepherds in line through essays.
He got away with calling American Pastors whores and called out our addiction to busyness before smartphones even existed. He challenged our addictions to being known and celebrated, and never let us sell our calling short by simply “running the damn church.” He was an earthquake and a breeze at once — somehow simultaneously thunderous, disruptive, and comforting. He never came across as a contrarion or brash, but also never lied to us. He had no room for sugarcoating and yet his prose was somehow sweet.
This was why he was perfectly suited to translate the Bible. He had, of course, done small sections of translation for his congregation, the starting place for much of his written work. These translations and other smaller efforts led to The Message, his magnum opus. The Message consumed his life for years, famously causing him to brush off a meeting with Bono in order to finish the translation of Isaiah. His mixture of conviction and encouragement in his own letters, as well as his masterful command of both ancient and new languages, led him to translate a truly remarkable version of the Bible.
It’s strange, but people think he was the only one to translate the Bible into a modern, street-level language. But these folks don’t understand the countless of terrible Bible translations that are out there — the millue or disastrous attempts to bring the word of God into the low languages (this, in fact, was the genesis of the first German Bible near the Reformation). Bibles in slang, translations for “teens,” in ebonics, for women, for men, for the “average reader,” for the artist. All of these fail to have the commanding legacy The Message has had and remains to have. It is unique in its authority and artistry, something only Peterson could do. A breeze and an earthquake at once.
“There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible — at least, in a technical way,” he once wrote. “The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people…So when we make everything academic, we lose something.”
Perhaps being a student of the ancient languages helped Peterson see this. John’s dastardly uneducated Greek, Mark’s quick and short sentences, the Hebrew storytellers’ simplicity. He saw it all for what it is: a complete disregard for the upper class. A manifesto of the poor. A document written and protected by the lowly, the simple, the unread.
This played into Peterson’s hermenuetics. Reversed Thunder (of all of wonderful titles, this one remains his best), Peterson’s commentary of Revelation, was the first of its kind: a non-hyperbolic, anti-rapture-hunting account of the Bible’s most complex book. He never saw it that way. He never saw codes or horrific allegorical readings. He saw an apocalypse, in the truest sense of the word. He saw a great hope for the future and a comfort for the afflicted, and helped you see just why John did not give one crap about dispensationalism, or whatever other words we’ve made up to categorize that which you cannot categorize.
Still, after all of this, you’ve got to think Peterson was able to do all he did because of his life of prayer. He talked about it a little (his smallest book, Answering God, is his one book solely devoted to the subject), but he lived it more, and it leaked into everything he did, from my limited window. “Prayer is like breathing,” he has said, “No one is good at it, and everyone who does it lives.” What a simple, freeing illustration. You cannot be “good at prayer,” but if you could, Peterson would be. Answering God is probably the book on prayer you haven’t heard of that you should read today. It is profoundly simple but extremly important. I could not have written my first book without it, nor would I have been inspired to do so without his theology of prayer and contemplation.
I’ll end here, with a small personal story: when I was going about the awful business of collecting endorsements for my first book, my friend, the writer Brett McCracken, wrote this as a blurb for Distant God: “With the pastoral wisdom and eloquence of a young Eugene Peterson, Nye reminds us…” and the rest of the sentence doesn’t matter. I was dumbstruck. Maybe without knowing it, Brett gave me the highest compliement of which I could only dream. He may not have thought much of it, but I thought the world of it. I remember showing the endorsement to my wife and saying, “To just remind people of Peterson is more than enough for me as a pastor and writer.”
His life, for me, was that large, powerful, prophetic, artistic, faithful, and gentle. If I could be one small fraction of the man he was, one iota of resemblance to his humility and gravitas, I would consider my life a rich success.
Rest in peace, pastor.
