I could scarcely believe my ears!
Last week I took advantage of a denominationally sponsored pre-retirement seminar for clergy that was hosted at our church. It was interesting in a number of ways but never more so than when one instructor, a retired pastor, spoke about how to cope with the painful memories of ministry: those hurts, feelings of having been betrayed, let down, and “done in” by some people we encounter as we serve the Lord. Although he retired seven years ago, the pain in the speaker’s eyes testified that here was someone who had been in the trenches. He reported that many pastors retire so broken by their experiences that they drop out of church altogether!
At first, I was shocked. “Why would we need time given to this topic in a pre-retirement seminar?” I asked myself. “What is the church coming to?” As I reflected on his words later, however, I found myself revisiting quiet conversations with a number of retired clergy and their wives whom I’ve known over the years. They each recounted their own disappointments with people who let them down or in some other way made life harder than it needed to be. One pastor’s wife whom I knew could not bring herself to attend church for the last several years of her husband’s ministry. There’s something wrong here, isn’t there? But it’s not something new!
Paul, the apostle, lived in those trenches, too. He alerts his young preacher friend Timothy: “Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm. May the Lord repay him according to his works. You also must beware of him, for he has greatly resisted our words” (2 Tim. 4:14-15).
Apart from these words, we know nothing else about Alexander the coppersmith. It seems that in some way he and Paul had some disagreement. Perhaps Alexander resisted Paul’s ministry. Maybe he brought intentional harm to Paul. Who knows what it was? Could it be that Alexander was an intentional mischief-maker, an agent of the great enemy of every gospel preacher? Perhaps Alexander was a former friend who broke a confidence that gave Paul’s enemies information leading to his arrest. The apostle is, after all, writing these words from prison.
Whatever it was, clearly Alexander is not one of Paul’s faith heroes. Paul is pained, also, moreover, that Alexander doesn’t stand alone: “Demas deserted me” (4:10) and Paul grieves that at his first trial in Rome, “no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me” (4:16).
Are you surprised? Don’t be. A study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, released in June 2006, revealed that Americans have less people they can confide in than past generations. In 1985, the average American had three people in whom to confide matters that were important to them. In 2004, that number dropped to two.
