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“God Gives the Growth:” A Retirement Sermon

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“I planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.”

I am honored that Dick asked me to preach on this special day. He has been my friend and colleague, mentor and frequent conversation partner for many years. I give thanks to God for him.

Dick has been a faithful minister of the Word of God among you for over two decades and now he and you come to the end of that ministry as he retires.  I have just gone through this myself, so I speak from experience when I say it is a time fraught with meaning. Like a trapeze artist who lets go of one trapeze but hasn’t quite grabbed a hold of the next, the transition from ministry to retirement can be at the same time exhilarating and frightening. And I daresay the analogy holds true for a congregation saying goodbye to their pastor and wondering about the future without him.

As we give thanks for Dick’s ministry, it might be profitable for us to consider what Christian ministry is all about. What is a minister? A minister is, quite simply, one who acts on behalf of another. We see this usage in European politics, where governments have a foreign minister or a minister of finance, for example. Such ministers represent and speak on behalf of their governments.  Their authority derives from those they represent. It is not their own.

In much the same way our ministry belongs to Jesus Christ and we represent him as his ministers. Our ministry isn’t a possession that belongs to us, but a call we obey, a service we carry out for another. It is easy to forget this, especially when one has been around as long as Dick and I have been. In our weaker moments we pastors can take on a King Louis XIV sense of self-importance. Recall how Louis said, “Après moi, le deluge: After me, the flood.” I shared with Dick some advice that your former area Minister Richard Sparrow gave me one time when I was worrying about what would happen after I left my pastorate of 22 years. He said, “Rick, it was Christ’s church when you got there, and it will be Christ’s church after you leave.”   Which was to remind me that ministry always builds on the work of others. As Paul told the Corinthians, “I planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.”

Paul was addressing divisions in the Corinthian church. Although the Greek word for “divisions” is schismata, from which we get our English word “schism,” schismata does not really mean factions or parties. More precisely it means a “tear” as in a fabric, or like a run in a stocking. It seems the Corinthians have broken into quarrelling factions around their various leaders.

Paul admonishes them to overcome their differences and become united. The Greek word translated as “united” means literally to be “knit together,” the very same word found in Mark’s Gospel (1:19) when he is describing the mending of fishing nets. So we have a vivid image here that we miss in translation, the image of the church as a torn fabric that needs to be mended.

But the disunity of the Corinthian church is more the symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself. The actual disease is their false understanding of what the church is, and what the ministry is.

Paul gets a little sarcastic toward these followers of different leaders: “Has Christ been divided?”  He asks them. “Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

You see the problem? Have you ever known people who join a minister rather than a congregation? It happens! People join a minister because the minister is a spellbinding preacher or a compassionate pastor or an attractive personality. The problem is that when the minister in time shows the inevitable feet of clay they become disenchanted. Or when the minister moves on or retires their ties to the church are flimsy, because they have joined the leader and not the church.

That is what has happened in Corinth. Some have joined Apollos, a teacher who came after Paul in Corinth. Some have joined Peter. Some even regard Christ as their leader, as if he were just another human leader.

Some Corinthians have a magical understanding of their baptism, so that they have come to believe that the minister performing their baptism bestows more or less power depending how wise and spiritual he is. It is like someone here in Acton saying “I was baptized by Dick and not by Gail, so my baptism is better (or worse).” Or even more absurdly, somehow by baptism they would say, “I belong to Dick.” So Paul asks sarcastically, “Were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

And what is it that the Corinthians believe makes one leader better then another? The criterion seems to be the capacity to speak “eloquent words of wisdom.”  Paul founded the church in Corinth by preaching the simple good news of God’s love and mercy in Jesus Christ, the message of the cross, the message of the forgiveness of sins. Paul’s message was not Paul himself, nor was it Paul’s wisdom or Paul’s rhetorical eloquence. His message was Jesus Christ and him crucified.

But the Corinthians have mistaken their leaders for the traveling sages of the time who were known for the beauty and cleverness of their speech. Paul wants to distance himself from these wise men, and he wants the Corinthians to know, by contrast, who he is, which is a minister of Jesus Christ.

“I am merely a messenger,” he says. “Don’t mistake the messenger for the message.” Don’t look to Paul’s eloquence or Paul’s wisdom, but to the Gospel. For the power of the cross is a power made perfect in weakness, a power that might be obscured by eloquence and human wisdom, but one that is brought to light by the miracle of being shown as powerful even in the weakness of the messenger, just as God displayed his awesome power in the weakness of the crucified one, who died on the cross for us.

There are still all manner of attractive and eloquent purveyors of religion and philosophy around. You only need a TV remote to find good examples. And truth to tell, even in the church we are tempted to run after the wisdom of the age.

But if the church of Jesus Christ is to have vitality, integrity, and unity it will come out of its own life, not from the wisdom of the age, but from the power of the message God has given to us. And you and I and others like us in local congregations, in all our weakness, will be the bearers of that message and the living embodiment of its power. That is what a congregation is, for better or worse, the living embodiment of the Gospel.

Many people, perhaps all of us on some level, come to church to be taken care of, to be told what to do: by the Bible or the bishop or the pope or the newest book, somebody. If only the right leader would come along. But we see in the scriptures today that even the Apostle Paul struggled to get it across that it isn’t the messenger– it is the message, and it isn’t the leader– it is the church, the body of Christ, where the power of God resides through grace and the gifts of the Spirit. Paul had every right to be proud of the Corinthian church. After all he was the founding pastor. When he says, “I planted,” he means just that. But that is not all he says. He says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.”  He knew the power was God’s power through the Gospel and not Paul’s power through personality, talents or training.

That has been one of the gifts you have been given in Dick Olmsted, a gifted leader who has never forgot for a minute that it isn’t his Yale Ph.D. or his keen intelligence or any other human attributes or endowments that have made him a good minister of the Word of God.

As today’s political consultants would say, he has stayed on message. And Dick is well aware that the message applies to him as well as to you. To understand means to “stand under”, and Dick had stood under the Word of God, and preached to you as one forgiven sinner to another. He never forgot the great Reformation insight that we are at the same time sinners and justified before God, which is why he ministered to each and all of you without fear or favor. Because he knows that he is a minister, one who represents another, and a messenger, one who brings good news, and a witness, one who is always pointing beyond himself.

In 1995 my family and I traveled to Colmar, France to see Matthias Grünwald’s painting of the crucifixion in the famous Isenheim altarpiece triptych. A reproduction of this masterpiece hung over Karl Barth’s desk as he wrote his Church Dogmatics. One hangs over my desk, and one hangs over Dick’s desk. I chose it as the cover of my little book on the cross and atonement. It is not a pretty picture, but it is a powerful one.

In the painting John the Baptist points at the crucified Christ. Now this is not realism or historical accuracy, as we know that John had lost his head long before Good Friday. But Grünwald is trying to convey a deeper truth than the facts. He is depicting John as the witness to Jesus Christ. John’s pointing finger is strangely elongated, to draw your eyes to it and then to where it points.

Grünwald shows John as the representative Christian, the one who always points beyond himself or herself to Christ. And the Christ he points to is not Christ the teacher, Christ the prophet, or Christ the moral example, but the crucified Christ. For whatever else we might say about Jesus Christ, the one thing we must say is that he was crucified for us, and was raised on the third day as a divine vindication of the power of his weakness. Christ’s atoning death does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, freeing us from sin and death. To be a witness to the crucified Christ is to insist that God’s love is stronger than human hate, and God’s grace is greater than human sin.  That truth remains a scandal now as it was then, because it challenges the wisdom of this age as to what constitutes real power and authority.

Because in the topsy-turvy values of the Gospel the first shall be last and the last first, the exalted will be humbled, and the humble exalted, the poor will be filled and the rich sent empty away. In God’s economy power is made perfect in weakness, and for all our accomplishments, in the end we have nothing to offer to God but our sins. These are not the values of Donald Trump’s Apprentice, to say the least. And neither is it the wisdom of the age, but it is the message of the gospel, the message that a minister of the Word of God is called to deliver.

So you can see that this ministry of witness to Christ can be very frustrating in human terms. Which is why I took up cooking years ago as a hobby, because when you cook you see results right away. The meal either comes out or it doesn’t.  When people enjoy it you feel satisfaction and you get compliments. But being a minister of the Word of God isn’t like this. This pointing to Christ doesn’t usually manifest in immediate results. It’s more like being a gardener, a matter of planting and watering, and letting God use what you have done for his purposes, which remain mysterious. For you never know what seeds you sow, or who is ready to hear what word and when, a word that might even change their life.

In Stephen Ministry we teach that ministry is process-oriented and not results-oriented, and at first this really frustrates the Stephen ministers. Because we Americans are not good at waiting for God to give the growth. We want dominion and power and control. We want to force our will on things. The wisdom of this age demands results, and even ministers give up and give in and talk about our congregation’s attendance, or our budgets, or our additions, or our programs, or our new members. And don’t get me wrong, I am always grateful for any visible signs of vitality in Christ’s church.

But the truth about the church is that we can have the most beautiful building, and the biggest endowment, and the most eloquent preacher with a string of degrees after his name, and we can be so friendly we will melt the snow right off the roof, but if the message of Jesus Christ and him crucified, the message that God loves and forgives us, isn’t preached and heard and lived it all counts for nothing.  “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

And in each generation, God raises up witnesses, messengers, ministers, like Dick Olmsted, for which we give thanks. Some will plant, others will water, but it is God who gives the growth.  Amen.

(The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Floyd, Pastor Emeritus of First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Congregational, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on June 19, 2005 at the Acton Congregational Church, on the occasion of the retirement of the Reverend Dr. Richard Olmsted.)

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“God is our Refuge and our Strength”: My Post 9/11/01 Sermon

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(I preached this sermon on the Sunday after the 9/11 attacks.  In it I said: “Let us not dignify this event with the term ‘war.’  These terrorists are not soldiers, but criminals and murderers and should be dealt with as such by the constitutional processes of sovereign states and international law.  What we need here is not revenge, but justice.”  I wonder what the world would look like today if our leaders had not thought of it as a war?)

God is our Refuge and our Strength

This is the third time I have been called upon to speak this week, to try to put into words what we are thinking and feeling in response to the extraordinary events of last Tuesday. We had an ecumenical service Tuesday evening at First Baptist Church sponsored by the Pittsfield Area Council of Churches, and on Friday we had a service of prayer and mourning at noon here at First Church in response to President Bush’s declaration of that day as a national day of remembrance.  I will say today what I have said on both those occasions, that it is good you are here!  It is good to be together with our neighbors and fellow citizens at a time like this, and it is good to be quite intentionally in the presence of God in public worship.

To be together in community and before God is a healthy response.  Abraham Lincoln once spoke of the “better angels of our nature.”  I think being together before God is responding to the better angels of our nature, and it is my fervent prayer that we Americans will continue to respond to what is best in us, as opposed to what is worst.

We have seen extraordinary acts of courage and heroism in these days.  But we have also seen acts of cowardice and mean–spiritedness. Since Tuesday New York City firefighters and police have responded to over ninety false alarms and bomb scares a day in contrast to the typical seven.  Throughout our country mosques have been stoned and vandalized.  Our Arab–American neighbors fear for their security and safety.

It is often true in history that evil begets evil, and I worry about that now.  Hate can spawn more hate.  A time such as this is a critical time for us all, individually and as a nation.  It is, among other things, a holy time, in that it is a time when we can be in touch with what is deepest and most abiding in our lives.  We are at a tipping point that can determine both the path and the direction we will go.  Billy Graham at the service on Friday at the National Cathedral said that we can either implode as a nation our show strength.  I think that is the choice.  And I trust as people of faith we will have the resources that can help us choose the good and not the evil, and to be on the side of life and not death.

We have looked evil in the face this week.  We have seen the slaughter of innocents in the thousands.  As Mayor Guiliani said on Tuesday night, when the death toll is finally counted “it will be more than we can bear.”   It is hard to take in the damage that this act of terrorism has caused, and hard as well, to accept the impetus behind it.  It is hard to accept that there are people out there who hate us and want to kill us.

I don’t know about you, but I found it difficult to get much done this week.  I found myself in a daze.  I kept returning again and again to the TV.  I was both repulsed and transfixed by the unfolding events.  I couldn’t take my eyes off it.  How many times have we seen the pictures of that second plane crashing into the World Trade Center?  There have been times when I find myself suddenly choked up, or silently weeping.  Wednesday night on TV I saw the changing of the guard a Buckingham Palace, and the British military band was playing the Star Spangled Banner.  I completely lost it.

So before we do much else, we all have to somehow take in this act of terror, and acknowledge it and the feelings that go with it.  It will require some time, but unless we do take time to absorb the shock of it, we will not be able to do what we are called to do next, whatever that is.

Nancy Taylor, our new Conference Minister and President of the Massachusetts Conference, wrote to all the clergy on Tuesday.  Among her reassuring words were these: “I encourage you to pause in the face of the enormity of what our country and our world is just now trying to comprehend.  Take time to talk to each other about your feelings; to share how you will address the events of this day with your children; and to allow yourself to cry, pray, and cling to each other and to the God whose heart was the first to break when the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City . . . and whose heart is breaking still.”

Take time, she says, and she is wise in saying this.  I want to tell you how much her new ministry has meant to me this week.  I have never met her, but within hours of the first crash, I had from her a thoughtful pastoral letter, with scripture and prayer.  She has been a parish minister and brings those good pastoral instincts to her new position.  So I share with you what she shared with me, the admonition to take the time to really face what has happened, and to do it in the context of faith, with scripture and prayer as resources.  The scripture Nancy Taylor sent me was the 46th Psalm, which I had already been reading.  It is one of my favorites.

“God is our refuge and strength,” it begins, and then it goes on to say, that because God is our refuge and our strength, “we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.”    Well, the earth has changed, the strong towers have fallen, the nations are in an uproar . . . but WE WILL NOT FEAR!

How can we say that?  Only faith can say, “We will not fear.”  This is not wooly–headed optimism, or denial of harsh reality, but faith.  The reality is that the world is a dangerous place, bad things not only do but have happened to innocent people, the ordinary rhythms of life have been shattered by an extraordinary act of evil, and it is not over.  So fear is the sane, natural and honest response to such earth–shattering and life–changing events, and we have known fear, and we have felt fear, felt it in our gut along with anger, sadness, and pain.

So how can faith say, “we will not fear?”  We can only say “we will not fear,” if we can say “God is our refuge and our strength”  Therefore! We will not fear.  The setting of Psalm 46 is a world turned upside down:

“Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.”

This is not just trouble, this is TROUBLE with a capital T.  The language of the psalm is the language of cosmic upheaval. The waters are the waters of the firmament above and beneath the earth; they are the primordial waters, the symbol of chaos, the tohu wabohu of nothingness.  And the mountains that shake into the heart of the sea are not just any mountains, but the thresholds and foundations that hold up the world.  In the psalm’s vision the waters above and the waters below, the waters that God pushed back on the third day of creation, threaten to flood back in.  The roaring and foaming waters are more than a storm, they are chaos, a sign of all that threatens God’s order.

Many Biblical scholars think Psalm 46 may have been written when the Assyrian King Sennacherib came to conquer Jerusalem in 701, but it hardly matters what the original catastrophe was, the psalm speaks to every catastrophe which is earth-shattering and fear–inducing.  The mythologized cosmic TROUBLE  of the Psalm is of a kind with all the trouble we see, whether it is Sennacherib at your gates with his whole army or terrorists flying jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Trouble is often where faith is born. We find faith in a God who is our refuge and strength, because only in trouble do we need a God who is our refuge and strength. Frequently it is only when we have our confidence knocked out from under us, that we are we ready for the Word of God.

And so it is that the therefore that comes before “we will not fear” refers to God our refuge and strength.  Our lack of fear is conditional; it is trust in God alone, rather than some easy calm of our own devising.  It is not the false security of walls or weapons.  No missile shield defense system can give us this kind of confidence.

This confidence in God is captured in Martin Luther’s hymn based on Psalm 46: “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” which was then put into English by Thomas Carlyle as “A safe stronghold our God is still” and, better known in America, as “A Mighty Fortress is our God” by Frederick Hedge.  In any version of the hymn, God the fortress stands in contrast to all strongholds built with human hands.  Listen to this: “And though this world with devils filled, should threaten to undo us.  We will not fear, for God has willed His truth to triumph through us.  The prince of darkness grim, We tremble not for him, His rage we can endure, For lo! his doom is sure, One little word shall fell him.”

We see in Psalm 46 another vivid contrast, that between the roaring, tumultuous waters of chaos and the “river whose streams make glad the city of God.”  Where before God restrains the water, here God sends the water for a life–giving purpose.  God tames the waters of chaos and makes them bring forth life and peace.

What is the alternative vision to chaos, disruption and desolation?  Listen with me: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.  God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved.”  How like John the Divine’s vision of the river of life describes it as flowing from the throne of God  and the Lamb.  “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.” (Revelation  22:1, 2a)

Nancy Taylor writes, “It seems to me that we Christians, above all other people, are equipped to face the evil and the terror that have befallen us, because we know that there is another world beyond this world, where all weeping and pain shall cease, where evil does not reign, and where we will find ourselves in the warm embrace of our God.”

But God does not ignore evil.  At the center of our faith is the symbol of the cross.   How significant that our most important Christian symbol is not the scales of justice, nor the tablets of the law, but the cross on which we human beings crucified the Lord of Glory.  And it is at the foot of the cross that we can best understand this evil act, for the cross addresses human beings not at our best but at our worst.  There, at the cross human evil collided with divine love.  There, Jesus stretched out his arms and died, with forgiveness on his lips, that the whole world might come into his loving embrace.

And there, at the cross of Christ, is the power that created and sustains the universe.  A power more powerful than evil and hate.   Evil and hate killed Jesus, but he didn’t stay dead!  Osama bin Laden is a formidable adversary, a rich powerful man bent on evil, but as Luther said of the evil one, “we tremble not for him,” nor for any other terrorist.

Let us be clear about what happened on Tuesday.  Terrorists committed mass murder on innocent civilians.  There is a lot of talk about war, and it feels like war, and the pictures from the devastation look like war, and it may take the resolve of war to address terrorism. But if this is a war it is only a war in the metaphorical sense of say, the war on poverty or the war on drugs.  Let us not dignify this event with the term “war.”  These terrorists are not soldiers, but criminals and murderers and should be dealt with as such by the constitutional processes of sovereign states and international law.  What we need here is not revenge, but justice.

Their intention was to create terror, to destroy our way of life.  And their act of evil can only threaten our way of life, our free institutions, our capacity to travel and meet, and go about our business without fear, if we let them!  If we let them make us hate and fear they win.  But we will not let them.  Because “God is in the midst of the city, it shall not be moved.”  God is with the innocent victims in New York and Washington, God is with the relief workers, and God is with us, right here, right now, with you and me in our broken-heartedness, as we face a world forever changed.  But we can face it, and we will face it, with character and courage and faith, for God is in the midst of us, our refuge and strength; therefore we will not fear.”   Amen.

A sermon preached at the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on September 16, 2001.  This sermon was also published in “He Comes, the Broken Heart to Bind:” Reflections on September 11, 2001. Edited by Frederick R. Trost, Confessing Christ. 2001.