Although Ma and Pa Curmudgeon were both U.S. Foreign Service officers, talk of embassies takes me not back to my childhood and the gruntwork of American diplomatic relations, but to my own calling as a pastor. After all, we are ambassadors of Christ, pleading with all men to be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:20).
And therein lies the strangeness of our embassy. As any child of a Foreign Service officer could tell you, an embassy is an outpost of the home nation on foreign soil; in theory, it is a extension of the nation itself. However, its sovereignty extends only as far as its walls, outside of which is the foreign land. Any ambassador who wandered the streets of his host nation recruiting its citizens to come over the wall and become citizens of our country wouldn't hold his post for very long.
But that is exactly what we do. In Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's narrator speaks of the privilege we ministers have of blessing people, and how odd it is that the literature on pastoral work speaks so little of this. That is true, and it is odd. We are ambassadors from the heavenly Kingdom, and we do not merely speak for our King, we have the special duty of bringing them out of this world and into the next through the imposition of our hands and the pouring of water. It is a rare and peculiar embassy, and we would do well to spend more time meditating upon and being astounded by this privilege.
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