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The Calling of Disciples: A Sermon on Vocation

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Ghirlandaio

John 1:29-42

 What is vocation? We typically think of vocation as our job or profession, but the idea is much larger and richer than that, so let’s take a look at it, starting with a little word study.

Vox is the Latin word for “voice,” as in Vox Populi, the “voice of people.” The Latin verb “to call” is vocare, as it still is in Italian. The noun form is vocatio.

There is a whole cluster of English words that have these Latin words as their root, words that refer to voice, to speaking and calling. For example, when we “speak out” we are being “vocal.” The whole collection of words we use to speak is our “vocabulary.” And, of course, a person’s calling is his or her “vocation.”

In Christianity (and its mother Judaism) our God is a God who has a voice, a God who speaks and calls.

But God’s speaking is different than our human speaking in an important way. We make a distinction between human speech and action.

But for God there is no such distinction: the Word of God doesn’t just say something, it does something. So, for example, in Genesis 1, God creates the worlds with a word. Recall how God said, “Let, there be light! And there was light.”

And recall also how God says in Isaiah 55, “My word will not return to me empty, but will accomplish that which I purpose.” Isaiah himself is an example of a prophet, a person called by God to speak for Him, so that when the prophet speaks, his words are heard by the people as the Word of God.

Likewise in John’s Gospel, we see that Jesus is called “the Word of God.”  John 1: “In the beginning was the Word” intentionally mirrors Genesis 1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

But to say that Jesus is “the Word of God” is to say more than that he speaks the Word of God, as Isaiah did or the other prophets did.

No, in Jesus, we see this intimate connection between speech and act, between word and deed. Because Jesus is both the one who speaks the Word of God, and he is also the one who accomplishes it, by his life death, and resurrection.

And so we see in today’s Gospel from John, at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the calling of the first disciples, which sets in motion the drama of the rest of the Gospel.

Why does Jesus call disciples? To answer that we need some background on what Jesus’ ministry was all about. First of all, Jesus comes into a time and place where God was expected. The people had been waiting, longing, hoping for the coming of God’s reign in the form of his anointed one, which is the word “messiah” in Hebrew, and “Christ” in Greek.

The role of John the Baptist in the story is important because many at the time thought that John the Baptist was a figure like Elijah. Elijah was often thought to be the one who would come before the messiah, a forerunner figure.

Many people saw John the Baptist in this same light, and his appearance in the wilderness raised expectations for the coming of the Messiah. When Jesus shows up preaching and teaching many thought he was the expected One.

In our reading today the evangelist describes Andrew and Peter as disciples of John the Baptist, who leave him to follow Jesus.

So Jesus calls disciples for a very particular reason, which is hinted at by his calling twelve of them. This mirrors the twelve tribes of Israel. This is just one of many indications that Jesus understood himself to be the carrier of God’s special calling of Israel.

And what was Israel’s special calling? We get an inkling of it in our Old Testament reading today, where God says to Israel, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:1-7)

In theological terms we refer to this special calling as “election.” In the Bible election is never for itself. No, election is always to accomplish the purposes of God.

The “chosen people,” whether we are referring to Israel or the church or both, are not called because they are better than others, but because God has use for them. And if we pay careful attention to the stories of the people God calls in scripture, it becomes quite clear that God doesn’t call the qualified, but rather qualifies the called. Think of Abraham and Sarah, well past their prime, Jacob, the liar and thief, Moses, the murderer, and Mary the poor teenage unwed mother. These are people like us and people we know.

So once again, you may be thinking, “Well, that’s really interesting Rick, and we’re glad you got to use your high school Latin, but what’s all this got to do with us?”

And the answer to that is that it has everything to do with our identity as a congregation and our understanding of our mission. In other words, our vocation informs both “who we are” and “what we do.”

I am talking about our vocation as church. We don’t just come to church, we are called to be the church. There’s a difference.

Here’s a hint about our calling. In the Call to Worship for this morning I referenced the UCC Statement of Faith several times. Twice it refers to God’s call. The first call is in the beginning: “God calls the worlds into being.” There’s Genesis 1 again.

The second call from God is through Jesus, “He calls us into his church to accept the cost and joy of discipleship.”

So the church is called as an instrument of God’s purposes, and those purposes are the same as in the original creation.

To begin to think about ourselves that way, as being called for God’s purposes, will change both our identity and mission. We are not merely a voluntary association of individuals with a benevolent and spiritual focus, although we are that.

But we are more than that, we are called, we have a vocation.

This concept of vocation was very important to our Puritan forbearers here in New England. We talked about this in our Men’s Book Group on Wednesday. Before the Reformation vocation was understood to be only for the religious life, for the monk, nun, or priest.

The Reformers changed that. Luther and Calvin believed that there was a general calling to repentance and a godly life for all Christians, and there were particular callings to life’s several vocations, as we understand them today.

So calling was no longer just for the clergy, and it still isn’t. Calling is for us all, and what are we called to be? Disciples of Jesus. And what is a disciple? A disciple is quite simply a follower or a student. One who hears the call of Jesus.

Jesus called those first disciples by asking them, “What are you looking for?” And later he invites them to “Come and see!”

And they might not have known what they were looking for, as many of us do not, but they knew it when they saw it. And they said, “We have seen the Messiah.”

They heard the call and answered it.

I want to talk now about the power of words as it relates to our callings, and I can think of no better example than Martin Luther King, who was a very important influence on me, and on my own call to ministry.

I was fourteen when Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream Speech” in Washington, D.C. at the Lincoln Memorial. I was there last month and felt as if I was standing on holy ground.

I had grown up in the church, but in Dr. King’s speech I heard a new power in some familiar words. Dr. King’s father was a minister, and Martin grew up in the thought-world and language-world of the church.

The African-American church had retained the moral grammar of the faith that had been largely lost in the mainline church, the language of justice and righteousness, and in the civil rights movement Dr. King and others gave it back to the whole country as a gift in their words.

When I first heard Dr. King’s words they rang true. They had behind them such moral force. His use of familiar scripture, such a Isaiah 40, “Every valley shall be exalted,” and of shared national language such as the words of “My Country ‘tis of Thee” re-awakened the moral imagination of much of the country.

In Dr. King’s speech fifty years ago I became awakened to the power of words to shape the life of individuals and societies, and years later I discerned a call, there’s that word again, a call to the ordained ministry.

And throughout my long ministry I have often pondered the power of words, to heal or hurt, to inspire or dampen the spirit, to free or repress. And I believe that a society that de-values words is at risk, because it ceases to know when it is lying to itself, and can’t recognize truth when it hears it.

But the right word at the right time can change a life or change a society.

I invite you to recall such moments in your own life. Perhaps you were listening to a sermon, or the words to a hymn, or a scripture reading, and suddenly those words were not something you were just overhearing, but words that were addressed to you.

And it is in such moments that “vocation” takes place; when you hear the voice of God calling. And when that happens there is no turning back, because the Word of God has a life of its own in your life.

You know how Brent (our pastor) often begins worship with the words “No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.” This language is part of what we in the United Church of Christ call “the extravagant welcome of our God.”

These are good words. The purpose of this welcoming language is to create no barriers that will keep people away from our life together here, and several people have told me how reassuring it is to them.

But, in the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you there is danger in all this extravagant welcome, and it should come with a warning label.

Because once you say to yourself, “I feel welcome here. This could be my church,” a new thing may happen. You are very likely to have one of those moments I just described, when the words you hear become the Word of God that feel as if they were directly addressed to you. Then you hear the call of God and recognize your vocation. Then you move from attendance to discipleship, from observing Jesus to following him. Then you accept “the cost and joy of discipleship.”

Those moments will change your life.

So what is God calling you to do? Who is God calling you to be?

What is God calling us to do? Who is God calling us to be?

And let the people say: Amen.

I preached this sermon at my home congregation, the First Congregational Church (UCC) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on January 19, 2014.

(Picture: The Calling of the Apostles by Ghirlandaio)

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My Top Ten Posts from 2013

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cropped-winter-11 As the old year passes and the new year beckons, it is my custom to look back at the popular posts of the year. Here are the most visited posts from 2013: Saving Thanksgiving from the Retailers An Ordination Sermon: The Secret Sauce of Ministry. A Recipe in Two Parts Unity in The United Church of Christ: A Theological Reflection Clergy Evaluations and Why They are a Bad Idea Ministry is not a Commodity and Ministers are not Appliances: An Installation Sermon Hearing God’s Word From Unexpected Places “What’s the Point?” Reflections on Christian Eschatology “From Here to There and Back Again” The Journey from Text to Sermon “The Towers we Build? or God our Strong Tower? A Sermon on Psalm 46 “We Give Thee but Thine Own” A Stewardship Sermon And these were the top ten posts of all time: Confused? Interpreting Your Congregation’s Numbers Why did Jesus refer to Herod as “That fox” in Luke 13:13-32 Prayer for a Retired Pastor “Rejoice! Rejoice!” A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent “God Gives the Growth.” A Retirement Sermon There is Nothing to be Afraid of!” A sermon on Psalm 27:1-2 “Behind Locked Doors” A Sermon on John 20:24-29 A book review of Elizabeth Strout’s “Abide with Me” The Lord Will Provide.” A Sermon on Genesis 22 The Ministry and its Discontents: Pastors in Peril Thanks for dropping by, and keep visiting in 2014.

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“We Give Thee but Thine Own” A Stewardship Sermon

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Wheat“The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” (Psalm 24:1)

In late summer Brent (Damrow, our pastor) called me and ask me to preach today as “a witnessing steward.” He said the concept, which was used at Old South Church when he was there, was to have someone with an outsider’s view help the congregation think about stewardship.

I said I would glad to do it, but I didn’t know how much of an outsider’s view it would be since Martha and I had decided to join the church the next time new members were received. Brent assured me that it would be all right, but little did I know it would be on the very same day. Later in this service I will remove my robe and join the other new members. So in these last minutes of my outsider status let me share with you some thoughts about stewardship.

I have preached many stewardship sermons, but this is the first time I have ever preached one where I wasn’t the pastor, and I have to tell you it is very liberating. Since the pastor’s salary is typically one of the largest items in a congregation’s budget, as it should be, we ministers sometimes feel sheepish about preaching on stewardship, as if people might think we have an ulterior motive. So here I am; I don’t need a job or seek a raise. I come to you as one without guile.

But I do have an agenda, and since I come without guile, I’ll tell you what it is. I want to accomplish two things in this sermon. The first thing I want to do is give you a clear understanding of what Christian stewardship is. And the second thing I want to do is to share ideas that will help you be a Christian steward.

So, first things first. What is stewardship? Both Claire and Joanne, in their eloquent testimonies the past two Sundays about what this congregation means to them, expressed that their dictionaries weren’t much help in explaining stewardship. I figured out the problem: they needed a Bible dictionary, and I just happen to have one, two, actually.

Here’s what I found. The principal Greek word for steward is oikonomos. It has the same root from which we get our English words “economy” and “economics.”

The oikonomos was the servant, typically a slave in Jesus’ time, who took care of any household of note. He was entrusted to take care of what belonged to the master. In the Book of Genesis Joseph was steward to Potiphar’s household in Egypt. Everyone in Jesus’s day would have known the term, a house manager who takes care of what belongs to the master.

Now our English word steward is what we call a dynamic equivalent translation. There wasn’t a word in English that meant exactly what oikonomos meant in Greek. So when Tyndale and the other early translators of the Bible were casting about for an equivalent they came up with steward, which originally comes from the Old English “stie-weard.”  “Sty” is the pen where the pigs were kept, pigsty being one of my mother’s favorite metaphors for my room when I was a teenager. And we know “ward” from words like warden, the one in charge. So “a sty-ward,” a steward is literally “the keeper of the pigpen” Not very elegant, but there it is.

Are you still with me?  Good! So we’ve established that the steward is entrusted to look after the master’s possessions. A Christian steward is entrusted with the things that belong to God.

So what belongs to God? This is where we need a good refresher course in theology 101, and especially a good doctrine of creation. And here I turn to the beginning of Psalm 24. “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.” Or for you old timers who grew up on the King James Version, as I did, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” Either way, what belongs to God? (Someone shouts out “everything!”) That’s right, everything!

The great creeds of the church say the same thing, “We believe in God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible.”

So you see the weight of these important words, steward and stewardship. They mean the taking care of everything of God’s, and I could preach a whole sermon on the environmental and ecological implications of Christian stewardship, but that’s a sidebar for you to muse on. I expect Brent will do that at some point.

I want to say one more thing about stewardship before I get practical with you and it is this. The steward is expected to make good use of the things with which he or she is entrusted. The keeper of the pigs doesn’t just sit there and watch them in the pigsty. No, the steward must feed them, protect them from predators, and see that they are healthy.

There is an active quality to stewardship. We see that in the reading you just heard, the Parable of the Talents. The servant who buried his money in a field was untrustworthy, not worthy of trust, because he passively protected the money and didn’t actively seek to make it prosper.

So stewardship is the active tending of everything God entrusts to us, which is everything.

And the steward is the one who does it.

You can see it’s a pretty big job! So Part Two of this sermon is to give you some guidance on how to be a trustworthy steward.

But you may be asking, “OK, Rick, I get it, but if stewardship is such a big category and means taking care of everything of God’s, the air, the water, the earth, our health, why in the church does it always lead to talking about money?”

And that’s a great question. And I have a great one-word answer for that: Jesus.

Did you know that Jesus talked about money more than any other topic except the kingdom of God. Why do we think that is? Because he knew the symbolic power of money, and its perils and risks for the disciple. “You can’t serve God and money,” he once said, and he meant not just the physical money, but mammon, who is the personification of wealth, the god of money.

Because Jesus knew money could be an idol. Remember the rich young ruler who went away sorrowful from Jesus because he was too attached to his money, and the rich fool who built bigger barns to store his wealth? These stories and parables Jesus tells are warnings about spiritual health. Because he knew that money can be a bar to discipleship.

Or it can be a bridge. Jesus also said, “Where you treasure is there will your heart be also.” So we have too often sold stewardship backwards when we say, “the church needs your money,” since the more important need is for you to give money to the church.

So the crucial stewardship question for each of us is not, “How much of what I possess shall I give to God?” The crucial stewardship question for each of us is, “How much of everything God has entrusted to me will I keep for myself?.”

And I promised you I would help you with some ideas on how to be a Christian steward, and now I will.  Let us think on what are the values or attributes of Christian stewardship that we find in the Bible. I can identify several:

  • Christian stewardship is intentional. You need a plan. If you wait to look into your purse or wallet in the parking lot to see what’s in there for God, you need to work on that. That is why we will provide you with a pledge card that is simply a written record of your intention for the year.
  • Christian stewardship is regular. Now you have a plan, you need to follow it. To give each week in worship will also remind you of what you are doing; you are being a trustworthy steward.
  • Christian stewardship is generous. In many mainline churches such as our UCC the average pledge is somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of income. It will be hard for a congregation to flourish with poor stewardship like that, and again, I’m not talking about the budget, but about the level of discipleship. Whatever your level of giving it needs to be generous.
  • Christian stewardship means giving God our best: the first fruits of what we have received. We don’t give to God the leftovers; we give off the top. In the agricultural world of the Bible the first fruits meant bringing the early crop to God as a thanksgiving, and a reminder where it had come from. The farmers consecrated the crop before God, and likewise we can consecrate our life and work before God. The great J. S. Bach wrote the Latin words soli Deo Gloria on every piece of music he ever wrote, sacred or secular, because to him his work was for the glory of God. He consecrated his work before God.
  • Christian stewardship is proportional. Remember the widow’s mite? Nowhere in the Bible does it say, “Give fifty-two bucks.” What it does say is “give in proportion to what you have received.” The Biblical tithe, or ten percent, is the most obvious example, but for some a tithe would be easily done and for others, impossible. Whatever we give it should be proportional to our ability to give and to that which God has entrusted to us.
  • I saved the best for last.  Christian stewardship is cheerful. “The Lord loves a cheerful giver.” (2 Corinthians 9:7) When we change the way we think about stewardship from a theology of scarcity to a theology of abundance, something mysterious happens. Giving becomes a personal act of faith for each of us, and a shared act of the compassionate community for all of us. God has provided us with plenty. And if we can enlarge the pie of our available resources by faithful stewardship we can then do more for the glory of God, more for our church, more for our communities, and more for the world. Because God wants more for us and for this congregation than mere survival. God wants us to flourish, and has provided us with more than enough to do so.

So, in conclusion, if I’ve done my job here, you know what a steward is, and you know how to be one. I invite you to enjoy the process of thinking and praying about how you will use all that the master has given.

And as you do so, recall those words that Jesus said the master spoke to the good stewards: ‘Well done, good and trustworthy servants. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ Amen.

I preached this sermon at First Congregational Church UCC, Stockbridge, Massachusetts on October 27, 2013.

(Photo: R.L. Floyd. Somewhere in NW Iowa)

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Saving Thanksgiving from the Retailers

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TurkeyThanksgiving is the only holiday that Americans of all religions can share, because it isn’t a religious holiday, although one can celebrate it as such if you choose. It is also the one holiday that many Americans gather as extended families. It is the only holiday on which I see my brother and sister and their families, along with my own children and their significant others.

But what if you have to work on Thanksgiving? More and more retailers, not content with the immense profits they make on so-called “Black Friday,” are opening on Thanksgiving. You and I can choose not to shop on Thanksgiving, but the workers in these stores won’t have that choice. Yesterday I received a letter from a UCC colleague in which she addressed this issue. I have asked her if I can share it on this blog, and she has given me permission:

Dear Group:

While driving down the road and listening to WBZ the other day, I heard a story from the consumer reporter. The reporter said that this year we will have a record number of retailers open on Thanksgiving…”no longer do we have Black Friday but now we will have Black Thursday.” This has just irritated me to no end. Yesterday, I asked the members of my congregation to send letters to our local retailers letting them know that Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks, spend time with our families and reflect upon the goodness of life and the bounty of our earth. Thanksgiving is not a time to shop. I asked my congregation to consider all of the people who will not be able to spend time with their children and families because Macy’s, Walmart, J.C.Penney’s, Target ( just to name a few) will be requiring their workers to be on the job. Jesus calls us to be disciples and to speak up and be people of faith. Therefore, I am asking all of you to consider joining me and my congregation in writing letters to retailers to politely let them know that you will not be shopping on Thanksgiving, instead you will be giving thanks with your family and friends. Please invite them to honor this holiday by doing the same. We have lost Sundays to soccer, football, basketball  etc……let’s not simply stand by and  let Thanksgiving become another casualty.

Peace: Victoria

Rev.Victoria Snow
First Congregational Church
Sutton, Massachusetts

Victoria’s got it just right, that it will take pressure from consumers to keep us from losing this holiday to the idol of consumerism. Let’s push back.

(Photo: R.L. Floyd, who also cooked the turkey)

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The Towers we build? or God our Strong Tower? A Sermon on Psalm 46

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strong towerGod is our refuge and strength,

a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear . . .  (Psalm 46)

 In ancient Israel strong fortifications offered security against the inevitable sweep of vast armies attacking from the North.  For hundreds of years Israel knew a succession of invaders:  Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans.  Years or even decades of peace could not erase the memories of long generations who knew what it meant to suffer at the hands of an invading army, or the fear that attends such memories.

Around 700 B.C. King Hezekiah of Judah created an alliance among his fortified cities with the help of Phoenician, Philistine and South Syrians states to stand up to the Assyrian King Sennacherib.  In preparation for the inevitable response Hezekiah beefed up his fortifications and even drilled a tunnel for the stream of Siloam to bring water to Jerusalem in case of a siege.

When Sennacherib did finally come in 701 the coastal cities fell quickly to his powerful army and he was soon able to bring the full power of his wrath to bear on Jerusalem.  This was during the time of the Prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem and you can read about this episode in the first part of the Book of Isaiah and also in the eighteenth and nineteenth chapters of the Book of Kings.

At the worst hour Jerusalem was completely surrounded by the enemy and the people were full of fear. Their official spokesman, standing on the wall talking to the Assyrian emissaries, begged them to speak in Aramaic rather than in the Hebrew that could be understood so as not to demoralize the doomed people within the walls.  It was dawning on many of them that their strong towers had failed to provide the security that had been promised.

But when morning dawned the Assyrian army was gone, vanished, leaving only thousands of their dead at the camp.  How they died remains a mystery.  Somehow, by the grace of God, Jerusalem had been saved just as Isaiah had prophesied.  “God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns.” (Psalm 46:5)

This event has traditionally been thought to be the original setting for Psalm 46, although it is always tricky to try to reconstruct a genuine historical setting from a psalm, “as if one could write the history of England on the basis of the Methodist hymn book!” (Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture,Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979, 509.)

Whatever its original setting this psalm speaks to our perennial human inclination to rely on strong towers of our own making rather than on God, who is “our  refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” No one builds a tower without counting the cost, said Jesus, but, O, the cost of these towers we build, from the tower of Babel to the tower of Siloam that fell and killed eighteen men. (Genesis 11:4–5; Luke 14:28; Luke 13:4)  So Hezekiah was neither the first nor the last to attempt to secure himself from harm by fortifying his defenses, as booming gun sales will confirm in our day.

That his provisions failed Israel but that God’s did not, may or may not have been the occasion for Psalm 46, but such an event is typical of Israel’s experience of the living God who provides the only real security they ever knew.  Many Psalms reflect this faith.  Gerhard Van Rad called his work on the Psalms Israel’s Answer to indicate that the Psalter is the community of faith’s response to it’s ongoing relationship to the living God.

The setting of the Psalm 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!  The language is the language of cosmic upheaval.  The waters above and the waters below that God pushed back on the third day of creation threaten to flood back in. “Water,” writes Karl Barth,

has a part in all the force of the human world which is hostile to Israel and therefore opposes the interests and glory of Israel’s God, but which is nevertheless ruled and guided and used by Him.”. . . [The existence of the waters of the upper as well as the lower cosmos] “demonstrates that the will of God will be fulfilled in a history which takes place in the sphere of His creation, and that what God does with the waters is no more and no less than a preliminary indication, indeed an anticipation of this history in its character as a divine triumph.” (Church Dogmatics,3.1, 149)

The roaring and foaming waters are more than a storm, they are chaos, a sign of all that threatens God’s order.

Likewise the mountains that shake in the heart of the sea are not just any mountains but the mountains which hold up the world, the foundations which are being shaken.  This mythologized cosmic TROUBLE is of a kind with all the trouble that “flesh is heir to”:  the test reports come back positive; an earthquake or riot shakes your neighborhood; you lose your job, or your spouse, or your faith, or your self–respect; Sennacherib and all his army waits outside your gates.

Trouble is often the beginning of faith in God who is our refuge and strength, for only when we have the “props of self–assertion” (Barth) knocked out from under us are we ready for the Word of God.  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.  Hear Calvin on this, in his commentary on Psalm 46:

It is an easy matter to manifest the appearance of great confidence, so long as we are not placed in imminent danger: but if, in the midst of a general crash of the whole world, our minds continue undisturbed and free of trouble, this is an evident proof that we attribute to the power of God the honor which belongs to him.  When the sacred poet says, “We will not fear”, he is not to be understood as meaning that the minds of the godly are exempt from all solicitude or fear, as if they were destitute of feeling, for there is a great difference between insensibility and the confidence of faith. John Calvin, “Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Volume 2”, Calvin’s Commentaries, Volume 5, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House,1979, 196.

This confidence of God is captured in Martin Luther’s marvelous 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 hands.

We see in the Psalm another 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.  Like Ezekiel 47:1-12, where a river is described that encircles the temple and gets deeper and deeper, bringing forth trees “whose leaves do not fade nor fruits fail” till finally it reaches the Dead Sea and desalinates it, here in Psalm 46 is a river of life.  These passages “speak of a river of life which first blesses the earthly sanctuary chosen and established by God, and then the whole face of the earth, fructifying it, quenching its thirst, healing its wounds, refreshing and renewing all creation.  This is what has become of the universally destructive chaos–element of water in the second creation saga.  This is what it now attests and signifies.  It is no longer the water averted and restrained but the water summoned forth by God.  It is no longer now the suppressed enemy of man but his most intimate friend.  It is no longer his destruction but his salvation.  It is not a principle of death, but of life.” (Barth, CD 3.1,280)

This river of life is now no longer geographically localized in Jerusalem, just as God’s dwelling place gets unfixed from the earthly Zion.  The statements in the Psalms about the dwelling place or throne of God are made of the place which can not be found on any map.

So where can God, who is our refuge and strength, be found?  In the Old Testament there is, of course, always a dwelling place that can be found on a map, but the freedom of God prohibits a simple equation of God with any place.  This is the point of Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman (John 4:20), when she notes that the Jews worship in Jerusalem and the Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim.   Jesus’s declaration to her that God is to be worshipped “in Spirit and in truth” and that he himself is the expected Messiah who will “tell us all things” shows us where God has now chosen to reside:

“The opposite of Jerusalem and Gerizim and all temples made with hands—and we can apply it and say the opposite of Rome, Wittenberg, Geneva, and Canterbury—is not the universe at large, which is the superficial interpretation of Liberalism, but Jesus.” (Barth, CD, 2.1, 481)

What Israel once looked for in Zion is now found in Jesus Christ, the one Word of God. The God who speaks this Word in the flesh of Jesus is the One who calls back the waters of chaos and calls forth the waters of life; who conquers the forces of evil, the sources of trouble (“one little word shall fell him”, Luther says of the devil”) who “makes wars to cease to the end of the earth”

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)

Although the heavenly city can not be strictly identified with any earthly city, those who pray daily, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”  do well to practice its life–giving imperatives in every earthly city, even the contemporary cities of wrath where the enemy lies not without the walls but within.  The one who piles up the weapons for burning (Psalm 46:9) reminds us to “Be still, and know that I an God!  I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.”

Commentator J. Clinton McCann, Jr. suggests that “Be still, and know that I am God!” is not a good translation. “Contemporary readers almost inevitably hear it as a call to meditation or relaxation, when it should be heard in light of verse 9 as something like ‘Stop!’ or ‘Throw down your weapons!’ In other words, depend on your God instead of yourselves.”

Depend on God, our refuge and strength, a fortress never failing. A strong tower, God causes the towers built by our hands to fall, as in this Easter poem by Arnold Kenseth:

On Easter the great tower of me falls.

I had built it well; my mind had planned it

After being schooled; my will had special wit

To dig me deep foundations, solid walls,

Blocks of moral toughness, windows to see

The enemy, the friend; large rooms, I thought

For light; and storey upon storey me

I raised, and famously my fame I sought.

So driven to prove the world with my estate.

I had not heard Christ on Good Friday die,

His body crooked, broke, and all friends fled.

I had not wept his cause in my carouse.

But now bold bells scatter against the sky,

And Christ is shattering my death, my pride;

As walls, blocks, windows, rooms, my silly penthouse

Spill into the dust I am, my narrow fate.

At last set free from virtue, knowledge, strife,

I mourn, then praise my God, and enter life.

“Easter” by Arnold Kenseth

The Ritual Year, Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 1993

I preached this on April 8, 1994 at First Church of Christ (UCC) in Pittsfield, Massachusetts 01201.

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“From Here to There and Back Again” The Journey from Text to Sermon

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On the other hand

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

   and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

   giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

   it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

   and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”  (Isaiah 55:10-11)

The title for today’s gathering was announced as “Getting from There to Here.” As I reflected on it I wondered if perhaps “getting from here to there” might be more apt. “Here” being the text in front of you, to “there, ” the sermon. That works.

But as I thought more about it I saw the wisdom of  “from there to here.” From “there,” “the strange new world of the Bible,” to “here,” the world we live in. And I thought of some of the various locutions we have used over the years to capture this movement from text to sermon, such as “from text to context” or “from Word to world.”

Then I considered the many ways I have approached the writing and preaching of sermons, and I realized this movement from text to sermon was more dialectical and less linear than any of these ways of speaking about it.

As I thought about it, the more I liked the sub-title of The Hobbit, which as you may know is “There and back again.” So perhaps “here to there and back again” is more like it.

From here to there and back again describes a journey that is not just a straight line, but rather more like a journey without a  map or even a predetermined end. And I like this way of thinking, because it captures how I have experienced sermon preparation in my four decades as a preacher.

I start with a Biblical text, and then I live with that text throughout the week on my journey, revisiting it and wrestling with it and worrying it until I begin to hear something of the voice of God in it, and by then the contours of the journey begin to show themselves, as do even the purpose of the journey and it’s destination.

The process seems to take on a life of its own, which is another way of saying that the Word of God is alive. I like today’s Isaiah text where God uses the agricultural metaphor of rain and snow watering the earth and making it produce to describe the way his Word works, “It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

And I want to say a bit about what I mean when I say “the Word of God,” which can mean one thing or another, even sometimes one thing and another, or even three things depending on the context.

One way of thinking about this that has helped me comes from Karl Barth. He wrote about the threefold understanding of the Word of God.  First, there are the written words of the Bible, then there are the spoken words of the preacher, and finally, and most importantly, there is the living Word, Jesus Christ.

This living Word is mediated through both the written words and the spoken words. The prayer I began my sermon with today is based on this idea: “Through the written word, and the spoken word, may we behold the living Word, even Jesus Christ our Lord.”

And that is not to say every text needs to be understood Christologically (although it can be), as in the text we have from Isaiah today. But to say there is a living Word is to say that whenever we hear the Word of God as direct address to us, it is the same Word of the same God, who came to us and for us and became the Word made flesh.

So when I talk about the Word of God in sermon preparation, it may be a reference to the text itself, the words, or to the proclamation in the form of a sermon, the Word preached, or to both, but the goal of the journey is, through the finite human words of the text, and the finite human words of the preacher, to transcend this finitude to hear the living Word of God. And I believe this is the primary task and challenge of preachers, and of the church, for that matter.

Let me say a little bit more about the words of the text and the words of the preacher as the Word of God. I think of them by analogy to the doctrine of the two natures of Christ. Jesus is truly human and truly divine, not half and half or some other percentage.

And in much the same way (although not identically) the words of our Scriptures, the Old Testament and the New Testament, are truly human and truly divine. Human in every way, written (and edited) by human beings, and truly divine through the agency of the Holy Spirit of God who inspired the writers to write them, the same Holy Spirit the church invokes when we read them.

And the same thing can be said about the words of the preacher. A sermon is not written in some special spiritual words, but in the same human words that we use in everyday speech. Since everyone in this room is a preacher I don’t have to belabor the point that we are all human, even all-too human. Yet the Holy Spirit that inspired the writers of Scripture is the same Holy Spirit that inspires the preacher, and the same Holy Spirit that the church invokes and invites as it prepares to hear the Living Word of God from the frail words of scripture and the frail words of the preacher.

This is admittedly a high view of preaching, and some might say it claims too much for the preacher. I would say quite the opposite. It is the views of preaching that put emphasis on the personality and performance of the preacher that claim too much for the preacher.

The claim that the preacher is to be a minister of the Word of God is much like the church’s understanding of the celebrant at the eucharist. The principal was established early in the church during the Donatist controversy. The Donatists were heretics, so the question arose whether the baptisms they performed were valid. And the church agreed that “the efficacy of the sacrament does not depend on the sanctity of the celebrant.” So the preacher may be more or less gifted with the homiletical arts, but it is not those gifts that are decisive. What is decisive for the preacher is that he or she has been set apart to deliver the church’s proclamation, so that the church may hear in it the living Word of God. It is not about the preacher. It is about the church hearing the Word of God.

This is a (nearly) sacramental view of preaching, that the preacher should say what the sacrament shows. And in both cases neither the preacher nor the celebrant has control over the Holy Spirit of God, as if we somehow could control God. No, Christ is not truly present in the sacrament nor truly alive in the preached Word because we invoke his name, but rather because he himself commanded us to do these things and promised to be present with us when we did.

So with this high view before us, and a text in front of us, how do we get from there to here or from here to there and back again?

The first thing I want to say about approaching a text is the expectation that God will speak through it. Which is to say that the high view I propose operates out of trust. I think it was Richard Hayes who wrote about a “hermeneutic of trust.” For decades we have been talking and hearing about “a hermeneutic of suspicion,” and that has had its place as an corrective to the Scriptures being misused as instruments of oppression and injustice, “texts of terror,” as my teacher Phyllis Trible so eloquently called them. But there has been a heavy price to pay for the widespread “hermeneutic of suspicion” that has so pervaded the academy for decades, in that many preachers now reflexively distrust the texts.

And I think it is sometimes necessary and appropriate to distrust a text, but it shouldn’t be where we start. Sometimes distrusting a text along the way will lead you to the Word of God.

So the text is in front of us. Perhaps it is an assigned text from the lectionary. I like that, because I can be a lazy sinner who is inclined to make my favorite texts do tricks for me, but that is just me.

Perhaps the Bible is open on our desk, perhaps it is on our computer screen or smartphone, but there it is. First things first: read the text.

Read it in expectation that God’s Word can be heard in it, but don’t rush to decide what it means or even what it has to say. Texts need time. They need to be listened to. I have always described my sermon preparation as inhabiting a text. Living in it.

Another good way to think about it is to “stand under” the text so as to understand it. And the preacher stands under the text along with the rest of the church.

I am really talking about hermeneutics now more than the homiletical side of things. So you all know the various ways to worry a text into view. Read it in the original languages if you have them. Read it in several translations. Look up any key words or phrases in a Bible Dictionary. Take a stroll through some commentaries. Find out its genre and its original context. In other words do your homework. I once preached a sermon that involved Herod, and added “you remember him from the Christmas story.” My dear friend Luther Pierce, a retired UCC minister, shook my hand at the door and said, “Good sermon, Rick, but you conflated Herod the Great with Herod Antipas. Different Herod.” Oops!

So once you’ve done your due diligence and you have the text in your grasp, reflect on the context. Those of you who were preaching in the weeks after 9/11 may recall that the Common Lectionary texts were from Jeremiah and Lamentations, texts we had all avoided in the past because they are horrible cries of despair for the destruction of Jerusalem. All of a sudden after 9/11 texts about the city of devastation and the burning tower became eerily contemporary.

Which is to say contexts change. The immediate context of any preacher is the life of the congregation, and when I talk of inhabiting a text, I am referring to going about one’s pastoral duties with the text in mind. From here to there and back again.

Then there are the larger contexts of the communities in which we live and the country and world we are a part of. Sometimes contexts demand our attention.

We rarely get the kind of compelling clarity about the relationship between text and context that we got after 9/11, but keeping the text in mind as we think about the multiple contexts will often show us the way to go, the particular context that needs to be addressed by the Word of God.

The dialectic of the journey of text to context and context to text means straddling two worlds with the hope we can find in them the same story.

I had the privilege of preaching my daughter’s ordination sermon back in June, and afterwards Mary Luti said, “I like the way you went back and forth from the story in the scriptures to your story now.” And her comment made me realize that I preach that way because to me it is the same story.

I immediately thought of Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, a wonderful and important book. Frei’s thesis is that prior to the Enlightenment Christians inhabited the Biblical Story. They understood it as their story. They were part of it. The Enlightenment changed that as we held the story at arm’s length like any other observable phenomenon.

The task of the preacher is to repair the breach; to make the Christian Story our story again. I am reminded of Bruno Bettelheim’s book, The Uses of Enchantment, where he argues for the re-enchantment of the world for children through fairy tales.

Letting the words of scripture and the words of the preacher be the Word of God for God’s people requires a similar kind of re-enchantment. It means the church realizing that the Story isn’t just back there, but is still going on and we are characters in it.

Let’s look quickly at our Isaiah text for today to see how this might be done. The text is from Isaiah of the Exile and the context is a people who have no reason to be hopeful, since they have lost the three pillars of their identity, their temple, their land and their nation.

The promises made to their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob seem null and void. Their prospects seem dim, their possibilities few.

Into this context God speaks through the prophet. “My ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts.” “You know that rain and snow we sometimes get in the desert? That is what my word is like. It will not come up empty. It will make happen that which I promised.”

And that is what the Word of God sounds like.

And when we hear this story, can it speak to us, where our prospects seem dim and our possibilities few? Can it speak to a declining church too often eager to call it a day? Can it speak to a nation full of grave injustices and inequalities? Can it speak to a world of death and terror?

When Isaiah speaks the Word of God to the exiles he lets them see what can’t be seen, and makes them believe what they can only know by trust in the one who speaks to them. The Word makes them part of the story again, the story that began at the beginning when God said “light” and there was light, the story that saw their ancestors freed from bondage, the story that seemed to come to an end, but now God says to them, “No, it’s not ending. Not at all. I will lead you through the desert of your journey into my own future.” And what will it be like? It will be like this:

“You shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

And let the people say: Amen.

I preached this sermon at the New England Pastor’s Meeting of Confessing Christ, West Boylston, Massachusetts, on September 26, 2013.

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“Hearing God’s Word from Unexpected Places”

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Celtic cross

 But the Lord said to me: Do not say ‘I am only a boy; for you shall go to all whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you.’  Jeremiah I.7

It is good to be back with you. I so enjoyed being here on Epiphany Sunday for Pastor Mike’s installation. It was cold then. It is not cold today. I have a small confession to make. Mike e-mailed me “We don’t wear robes in the summer.” And I e-mailed him back, “Can I wear one. I’m kind of a robe guy.” So I brought a robe and a stole up here to Dover, but then I realized I was preaching about opening oneself to new experiences and insights, so I’ve decided not to wear one. You know, to walk the walk as well as to talk the talk. I am also wearing a blue shirt for the first time in forty years, because I’m kind of a white shirt guy, too. So I’m really being daring today.

Will you pray with me:

Gracious God, through the written word, and through the spoken word, may we behold the Living Word, even your Son our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen

I was just twenty-six years old when I graduated from seminary and became the pastor of the Congregational Churches of West Newfield and Limerick, Maine, just over the border and up the road about an hour from here. That was nearly forty years ago.

I grew a beard to look older and wiser than my years, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t fool anyone. I’ve learned a thing or two about the ways of the world and the church and myself, but when it comes to the ways of God I still stand in awe before the mystery of it all as much as I did back then.

But I will tell you one thing I have learned. You have to be open to hearing the voice of God from unlikely people and in unexpected situations. This is a humbling truth, and there is a kind of Socratic inversion about it. Remember how Socrates said of himself: “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

Likewise, the people who think they always know what God is saying tend to be the ones least open to hearing from God, and are therefore the least knowledgeable.

Because if we decide in advance where and when and through whom God will speak, we severely limit our capacity to hear from God.

There are many reasons we close our minds and hearts to those through whom God speaks.

Perhaps we think someone is too young to speak for God. In our Old Testament reading today, Jeremiah tells God just that, that he is too young to be a prophet. God rebukes him, saying: “Do not say ‘I am only a boy; for you shall go to all whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you.’” Jeremiah I.7

I remember when I was young being frustrated that older people often found it hard to see me as someone with something to say because of my age. Now that I am not so young, I have to resist the impulse to dismiss the insights and wisdom of the young, and to tell the truth, I find myself more and more learning from those who are younger, which is an ever-expanding group.

My twenty-nine year old daughter, Rebecca, was just ordained to the ministry in June. I have heard her preach several times now, and, if I do say so myself, she is pretty good. But sometimes when I am listening to her, my mind is saying, “How can this be? Is this my daughter? I remember the day she was born as if it were yesterday.”

And you have a daughter of this church being ordained soon, Emily Goodnow, a schoolmate of my daughter’s from Yale Divinity School. And perhaps some of you who watched her grow up in this congregation wonder, “How can this be? I remember when she was just a girl in Sunday school.”

Recall when Jesus went to his home synagogue to preach his hearers said, “Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.” (Mark 6:3)

His youth and their familiarity with him kept them from hearing him.

What else keeps us from hearing God speak to us? It wasn’t so very long ago that the conventional wisdom in the church was that preaching the Word of God was a man’s vocation. There are still Christians that believe that.

When I was growing up there were no women ministers in my church or in my experience. When I was at Andover Newton one of my teachers, Emily Hewitt, was one of the first 11 women ordained in the Episcopal Church. It caused quite a stir at the time.

As I was preparing this sermon I wondered what she was doing. So I Googled her, and I discovered that she later went to Harvard Law School, became a lawyer, and is now the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims. Why would the church want to deprive itself of the talent of someone like her?

But for a long time we did keep women from using their gifts and talents. It was a widely accepted convention.

For example, and I am really dating myself now, but when I started my ministry in Maine, there were only male deacons, who served communion. The women, called deaconesses, set up the communion and cleaned up after. That was the way it had always been and it was accepted. But we went through a change. We saw the basic unjustness of this arrangement, and we changed it.

And so we changed our ideas about who could preach the Word of God, and now women ministers, and very talented ones like Rebecca and Emily, are a commonplace in our churches.

When John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrims in Leyden, addressed them before they shipped off to the New World, he preached a sermon to them. And in that sermon he said, “God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his Holy Word.”

This openness to new light and truth is very biblical. Our God was always doing the unexpected. Even the people God chose to speak on his behalf or to carry out his plans were seldom what one would expect.

Think about some of them with me: Jacob was a liar, a cheat, and general scoundrel. He tricked his father, stole his brother’s birthright, and had to leave town in the dark of night. Yet he became the Father of a Nation and was given the name Israel.

Moses, God’s spokesman, said, “Not me, Lord, I’m not a good speaker. God said, “I’ll send your brother Aaron with you. He can do the talking.”

The prophet Jeremiah, who we heard about today, said, “I’m just a boy.”

And Mary, the mother of our savior, was a humble unmarried teenage mom.

These instruments of God go against our human expectations, but God uses all sorts and conditions of men and women to speak and act on his behalf.

And so we have had to expand the circle of those who preach, bringing in women within the lifetimes of many of us in this room.

And we are continuing to expand the circle. For example, in the church where I worship our pastor is gay. And he is married. And he and his husband just last week adopted a baby boy.

And that is new to me. And because of that it have been a bit of a challenge for me to get my mind around, because even a decade ago a gay, married pastor with a child was not part of my experience, or the experience of many for that matter.

Last year, during our interim period, I was praying for God to send us a faithful pastor and preacher. And God did, because this pastor is a rock-solid Christian, born and raised in the church, and I never hear a sermon of his without hearing something of the voice of God in it.

The world around us changes. The contexts in which we preach and hear changes. I am reminded of the story about Will Campbell, the white civil rights leader who marched with Martin Luther King. He was a Southern Baptist, and he was asked if he believed in infant baptism. “Believe in it? I’ve even seen one!”

So once again we have had to expand our thinking about who we think we might hear God’s Word from. We have had to expand the circle.

Because God calls a variety of men and women to speak on his behalf, and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, races, tongues, and sexual orientations. And the truth is we need to hear from them all.

Because the Word of God doesn’t just drop from the sky. The Christian faith is a mediated faith, coming to us through the words of others. We have the words of the Bible, and the Word of God can be discerned in them, but they themselves are not the Word of God. No, to hear the Word of God we need human interpreters, which is one of the tasks of the church.

One way of thinking about this that has helped me was put forth by the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. He wrote about the threefold understanding of the Word of God.  First, there are the written words of the Bible, then there are the spoken words of the preacher, and finally, and most importantly, there is the living Word, Jesus Christ.

This living Word is mediated through both the written words and the spoken words. The prayer I began my sermon with is based on this idea: “Through the written word, and the spoken word, may we behold the living Word, even Jesus Christ our Lord.”

So we need people in the church to mediate the Word of God to us, to make it real for us. And this happens in community and in relationships with real people living real lives, with real talents and struggles. We need all kinds of people, so that you can even hear a sermon from someone like me with a brain injury.

Those of you who were here for Mike Bennett’s installation in January will remember that I preached a sermon called “Ministry is not a Commodity and Ministers are not Appliances.” And in that sermon I said this: “Mike embodies what the great preacher Gardner Taylor was after when he advised preachers “to look beyond the peripheral signs of preaching greatness to the real source of pastoral insight–the common bond with one’s hearers provided by suffering.” And I would expand Taylor’s words to include not only suffering, but all manner of shared life-experience, the kind that happens in community, the kind that happens day to day in the church.

And I said this to you: “If you let him, Mike will share your lives, will rejoice when you rejoice and weep when you weep, and will become your pastor.”

And by all indications it seems that, nearly a year into your relationship together, you are finding that to be true.

But the very best preacher in the world does not make the Word of God alive by himself or herself. For that you also need good hearers, ones open to hearing things that they may not have heard before, that may challenge them, prod them, even make them unhappy or angry.

But by being open to the unexpected, hearers may well hear things that please and delight them, things that make them wiser and stronger and more faithful. And may open them to larger truths, to new wonders, and, above all, to the amazing grace and the vast love of God for us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I preached this sermon on August 25, 2013 at the First Parish Church, Congregational (UCC) in Dover, New Hampshire.

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An Ordination Sermon: The Secret Sauce of Ministry. A Recipe in Two Parts

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Laying on of hands

The Secret Sauce of Ministry
A Recipe in Two Parts

Hebrews 12:1-2
Philippians 2:1-11

As some of you know I like to cook. This time of year, when the weather gets fine, I fire up my grill and do some grilling and barbecuing. And I love to sit on my back porch near the grill with a cold beverage and read cookbooks, of which I have many, or as Martha would say, “too many.”

Many of these grilling and barbecuing books contain recipes for a “secret sauce.” I have been noticing lately that the term “secret sauce” has migrated from its culinary context and is now being employed as a metaphor for that special something that makes things work properly.

For example, I recently heard a journalist talking about “the secret sauce” that would create “a grand bargain” to overcome the Congressional budget impasse. Good luck with that.

So I started to wonder, “ What’s the secret sauce of ministry?”  If I had to come up with a simple recipe for what makes ministry faithful and effective what would it be?

So here’s my recipe, which comes in two parts, which I hope you will take away with you today for your own ministry, whether lay or ordained.

1. The first part of the secret sauce is this: You can’t do it alone. Rebecca couldn’t have come to this day alone, and she can’t do her ministry alone. No one does it alone.

How does one come to know God? And to love God? And to want to serve God?

When I look out at this congregation I see so many here today who have helped to shape and influence Rebecca. I am reminded of the scripture from Hebrews we just heard that says we are “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.” The image is from the ancient stadium where the races were held, and the cloud of witnesses are the spectators who cheer the racers on.

This great crowd includes both the living and the dead, “the church militant” and “the church triumphant.”

So among the crowd present in the congregation today are many members of Rebecca’s family, let’s call them “the crowd of the proud.”

In addition to Martha and myself, are Rebecca’s brother Andrew and his wife, Jessica. Rebecca’s maternal grandparents, Art and Marianne Talis, are here. As are several assorted aunties, an uncle, and a cousin.

These family members represent a great line going back through generations of Talises and Beers, Floyds and Laffoons, and, let me tell you, there is a lot of church in these families.

We represent a great ecumenical melting pot, from the Greek Orthodox faith of Rebecca’s grandfather’s forbears, to the German Protestantism of her grandmother.

My mother’s father, Bill Laffoon, a descendant of French Huguenots, was a deacon at his Congregational Church in Wichita, Kansas. His schooling ended with the 6th grade, but saw to it that his two daughters went to college during the height of the Depression.

Granddaddy read his Bible every day, and his speech was sprinkled with scripture verses.

So when I was growing up my mother also had a scripture for every occasion, I thought she was so wise, she’d say, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” And, “Do not cast your pearls before swine.” When I went to seminary I discovered that they weren’t original with my mother, but came from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

Years later, Rebecca had the same experience at Yale when she learned where all my wise sayings came from.

On the other side of the family, I think today also of Martha’s grandmother, Marta Beer, which in our family is a family name and not a beverage. My Martha is named after her. She raised three daughters by herself in wartime Germany, and was another great churchwoman.  How proud she would be.

This rich ecclesiastical family DNA has helped to shape and form Rebecca into a minister. They are all part of this congregation today, a part of the cloud of witnesses.

But there’s more. For as grand as Rebecca’s family legacy of ministry is, and as important as family support and nurture is, family alone cannot make a minister.

And so I look around this room and I see many people from Rebecca’s past, a number of the good people of the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, where Rebecca was baptized and confirmed. I see some of her Sunday School teachers, youth group leaders, mentors and supporters, who have made the trip down here today from the Berkshires.

And when I look around today I also see many other friends, Pittsfield neighbors, UCC and ecumenical colleagues, and folks from the Berkshire Association, who have been part of Rebecca’s life.

I see some of her Wellesley College roommates up in the balcony. I see Yale classmates and New Haven friends, and, of course, all of you from Green’s Farms Church, members and staff, who have so warmly embraced Rebecca in your community, and are now such an important part of this most recent chapter in her life.

There are others, too, I must mention, who are neither related to Rebecca nor have ever met her, who she knows from the books she loves and the scriptures she studies. Those many other witness, men and women of the church:  prophets, apostles, martyrs, evangelists, theologians, reformers, writers and thinkers down through the ages. They are part of this great crowd, too. They were all witnesses to God, and to God’s vast love for us in Jesus Christ.

So all of you here, and all the unseen but present, make up the great cloud of witnesses, who cheer us all on as we go about our several ministries, and especially cheer Rebecca on today. I thank God, for you and for them.

So to take nothing away from Rebecca, who as you know, is a remarkable young woman and certainly gets much of the credit for us being here today, she hasn’t done it alone. Because this ministry business is a team sport, and I have just described to you just how really big the team is.

Nobody gets to ministry alone, and nobody does ministry alone, because you can’t do it alone.

So that’s the first part of the recipe for the secret sauce of ministry.

2. The second part of the recipe for the secret sauce of ministry is this: It’s not about you. To do ministry in the name of Jesus Christ you have to get out of your own way.

What does this mean? Recall how Jesus was always confusing the disciples by saying things like “the one who would gain his life must lose it.” And “The one who exalts herself will be humbled, but the one who humbles herself will be exalted.”

And the disciples never quite understood what he was trying to teach them until after Easter. Their hopes had been dashed on Good Friday as they fled from him and his cross. But after Easter all those things he said made sense. He was showing them a way, a way of selflessness, of servant-hood, a way to be a person for others.

And recall also how our brother Paul kept writing to churches that were fighting, and saying in one form or another, “It’s not about you!”

To the Corinthians he wrote, “What we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake (2 Cor. 4,5). And a couple of lines later in that same letter he wrote them, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Cor. 4:7).

What was he trying to tell them about ministry? That “it’s not about you.” To be a minister you have to get out of your own way. And the reason that you have to get out of your own way is first to make space for God to work in and through you. And you have to get out of your own way, secondly, to make space for the other, the ones you minister to.

I was with Mary Luti at a meeting the week before last and I told her how excited I was that she would be laying holy hands on Rebecca and doing the prayer of ordination today. I said to Mary, “It is so fitting because it was under your ministry that Rebecca started discerning her call.”

And Mary demurred and said, “I really didn’t do that much.” And I thought she was just being humble. But as I started pondering the recipe for the secret sauce of ministry, I realized she was quite right.

And you know why she was right? Because it wasn’t Mary who called Rebecca into the ministry. Mary was just doing her job, which is how ministry works. Rebecca was a questioning young woman in a pew in Cambridge, and Mary was doing her job, which was to share the God she knows and loves. And Rebecca was in the right time and the right place with the right person, and God’s Holy Spirit works like that, in what seems mundane, but can at the same time be quite marvelous.

Our society cultivates a cult of personality, a cult of celebrity, but ministry is not about that. There are celebrity ministers, but the good ones, the faithful ones, know it is not about them.

The word minister actually means one who represents another. The Europeans use it this way in describing their government officials: the minister for finance, or the foreign minister. These are the ones who represent the government in their particular area of expertise

Likewise, a Christian minister is one who represents Jesus Christ. And representing Jesus Christ means taking the form of a servant. Jesus once told his disciples, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mt 20:25-28.)

Not to be ministered to, but to minister. Not to be served but to serve.

This is counter-cultural in our self-obsessed society. To tell people to get out of their own way for God and for others is not a particularly popular philosophy today. When I peruse the magazines at the super-market checkout there are titles such as Self, Us, People (meaning famous self-absorbed people) but I don’t see Servant or Ministry magazine.

There was a fascinating interview with director Sofia Coppola in last Sunday’s New York Times about her new movie, The Bling Ring. The movie is based on a true story about five teenagers from the San Fernando Valley in California, who were so obsessed with the culture of personality and the trappings of celebrity that they started breaking into celebrity’s homes and stealing stuff.

They would often just walk in through an unlocked front door, or climb in an open window. They robbed people like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.

In the course of a nine-month spree they looted more than 3 million dollars worth of jewelry and designer clothes. I found the story shocking, but part of it got me chuckling to myself. Apparently they broke into Paris Hilton’s home six times before she even noticed. “She had so much stuff that it took awhile for her to realize someone had broken in.”

Have you seen the bumper sticker that says, “The one who dies with the most stuff wins?” A better, truer one would say, “The one who dies with the most stuff dies.”

Sofia Coppola said she chose this subject for her movie because she has two small daughters, and she fears for them growing up in this glittery world of celebrity culture, a culture that sends the message that it really is all about you and your stuff. She describes hearing some of her daughter’s 6 year-old friends talking about what they wanted to be when they grew up, and a couple of them said, “I want to be famous.” She asks, “Where does that come from?” I don’t think we knew about that when we were six years old.”

And that is a challenge for ministry these days. I am particularly thinking of parents and youth ministers. How do we raise our children in a society that tells them it really is all about us?

When we were driving through the countryside in France we would sometimes see vast fields of sunflowers as far as the eye could see. The sunflowers would be facing East toward the rising sun in the morning, and as the sun moved through the sky the sunflowers would turn toward it, so that at dusk they would have turned completely toward the West. In fact the French world for sunflower is tournesol, which literally means “turn to the sun.”

Sunflowers do this because they are heliotropic; they need the sun to live. By analogy, we are theotropic, we need God to live, and we are made to bend our love toward God and others. But we too often bend our love toward ourselves, and that is where we get in trouble, for instead of living for God and others we try to love ourselves and control things as if we were God.

And that is what is so beautiful about our second reading today from Philippians; it turns the equation entirely upside down. God in Christ bends toward us, and shows us what love looks like.

The late British theologian Colin Gunton said,

 Sin is for the creature to think and act as if it were the creator. But here in Philippians 2 Jesus is godlike precisely in going the other way.

Here Jesus empties himself even of his divinity to become a servant, “a man for others” as Dietrich Bonheoffer described him.

And it is this humility, this self-emptying, this relinquishing of privilege, that Paul wants the church in Philippi to emulate. He writes them to “let the same mind be among you that was in Christ Jesus.”

The church in Philippi was having one of those squabbles that have been known to happen in congregations, even in our own time. Paul admonishes them to get out of their own way, and have the very same mindset as Jesus, the mindset that led him to empty himself, and in humility take the form of a servant, the mindset that ultimately led to his death on the cross.

But it’s not so easy to have the same mindset as Jesus. Remember those WWJD bracelets, that stood for “what would Jesus do?” Some people criticized those WWJD bracelets for being overly simplistic. Because asking, “What would Jesus do? doesn’t really solve the problem. It usually isn’t that hard to know what Jesus would do. People talk about the hard passages in the Bible, and there are some, but the parts that really challenge and convict me aren’t the parts I don’t understand, but the parts I do. “Love your enemies.” “Feed the hungry.” “Welcome the stranger.”  “Share your possessions.” “Turn the other cheek.” “Take up your cross and follow me.” Just to name a few.

So the hard part, after you figure out what Jesus would do, is doing it.

To “practice what we preach,” to “walk the walk as well as talk the talk” is where we pretty consistently fail, and why we need grace and forgiveness to keep trying. And the good news is that is exactly what we get from our God, grace and forgiveness.

In the cross of Jesus Christ, God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and saves us from ourselves, among other things, such as sin and death.

All ministers, you and me, lay or ordained, even Rebecca, fail at being consistently Christ-like. But the wisest ministers know that our ministry is at its most faithful when we realize that it is not about us, when we get out of our own way, as Jesus did, to be a servant, as he was a servant, to serve as he served, to love as he loved, and to be a person for others.

And here’s the beautiful thing: if you follow this recipe you don’t really lose yourself at all, you will actually find yourself. Only the empty can be filled with the new life God wants for us. Jesus said, “I came that you might have life, and have it in abundance.” (John 10:10)

Because this self- emptying doesn’t mean we lose our personalities or our personal identities. On the contrary, when our love bends toward God and others, as those sunflowers bend toward the sun, when we lose ourselves in service, when we live for others, we are most ourselves, our own true best selves as God intended us to be.

Just as Jesus’ exalted lordship is ultimately revealed in his humble servant-hood.

Let us listen to it again:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a servant

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.”

And let the people say: Amen.

I preached this sermon at the Ordination of my daughter, Rebecca Megan Floyd, on June 9, 2013, at the Green’s Farms Congregational Church, UCC, in Westport, Connecticut.

Unknown's avatar

Roast Pork Loin a la Nottingham Drive

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Pork roast

 

So my local grocery store had a sale on whole and half pork loins, and I thought what a great item for the rotisserie on my grill for Memorial Day weekend. But then the weather got weird, so I roasted this one inside in the oven, and I commend it to you.

I used convection roast, and if you have that capability I recommend it, but this will work fine in a conventional oven.

Recipe

For the rub:

2 tsp. ground thyme or thyme leaves

1 tsp. allspice

1 tsp. ground cloves

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. nutmeg

1 tsp.paprika

Salt and pepper to taste.

The meat:

1 3-4 lb. boneless or 4-5 lb. bone-in pork loin roast.

How to do it:

Mix the spices together, and rub generously over the roast. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Place the roast fat side up on a broiling pan (you are not going to broil it, but the broiling pan will keep the juices and fat from splattering better than an open roasting pan) Score the top of the roast with a sharp knife with shallow 1/2 inch diagonal cuts.

Place the roast in the oven (if using convection roast on the bottom rack, if not in the bottom third of the oven). Cook at 425 for 15 minutes, and then reset the oven to 325 degrees. Cook to an internal temperature of 145 (if you like some pink) to 150 degrees (if you don’t) and let sit for 10 minutes before carving. Cut in straight thin slices like a jelly roll.

Serve with baked beans and applesauce. We had a lovely Portuguese Dao with it, but any light red will do.

Enjoy.

 

Unknown's avatar

Clergy evaluation committees and why they are a bad idea

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multiple fingers pointing blame at man

Every relationship needs thoughtful reflection and mutual careful feedback, and the relationship between a clergy person and a congregation is no different from any other in this respect. But stand-alone committees formed only for the purpose of evaluating clergy are a bad idea. I call such a committee a posse, by analogy with those hastily gathered bands of citizens that helped the sheriff look for the fleeing miscreants in old Westerns.

Most clergy have existing structures within which mutual conversation and evaluation can take place. They may be parish councils, diaconates, elders, vestries, consistories, or whatever depending on one’s denomination and its polity. The one thing that separates these from the clergy evaluation committee is that they have other work they do, and collaborate with the clergy person in doing it. Around that work mutual trust is formed, and so the evaluative function is just one of many and not the sole focus of the committee.

I have written elsewhere about the commodification of ministry, and the poor models for ministry that come more and more out of the corporate world with little theological undergirding or even much thought.

It is true that the relationship between the ordained leader of a congregation and that congregation partakes of some of the same dynamics as a business relationship, accountability, transparency, trust, but at its best is more like a marriage than a job. As in a marriage there is an “us-ness” about the enterprise, the old word is covenant, and the relationship is characterized by mutuality, forgiveness, affection, and grace. You don’t work for each other but with each other.

So the clergy evaluation committee, the posse, invites trouble because it has no other function than to criticize the clergy person, and, as we all know, an “idle mind is the Devil’s playground.”

If there is nothing for them to do things will find them. In any congregation there are disgruntled people, and a constant stream of criticism is corrosive to clergy morale and not helpful in assessing what is really going on in the congregation. Thus begins what I call “death by a thousand cuts.” The posse is a bad model. It just is.

By way of illustration, try setting up an evaluation committee for your spouse and let me know how that works out for you.

A better model is to let the appropriate body, which shouldn’t be too big, have regular mutual conversations about what each party needs more or less of to make the congregation and its leader flourish. Then the focus is off real and imagined wrongs and shortcomings, and on the task of assessing the mission and ministry of the congregation.

The very worst model is when the posse gets formed to address “a crisis” with the clergy person. This is usually the beginning of the end of the relationship, and often signals that they want you gone, but are too ashamed of their part in the dysfunction to tell you the truth. The signs of this are demands for micro-bookkeeping, and regular “progress” reports. It is akin to getting to the marriage counselor so late that the only task left is amicable divorce.

If you see this beginning to happen to you, a new committee forming to “help” you, please protest right away and find a better model. Because (Floyd’s axiom): Once the posse gets formed, you will never outrun them.