October 26, 2007, Washington, D.C.
John 21:15-19
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Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
It didn’t take long after landing at Reagan National and hitting D.C. rush hour traffic late this afternoon to realize that we weren’t in Kansas anymore! … I bring you all greetings from your brother and sister Christians at Advent Lutheran Church in Olathe, Kansas, a congregation that was as surprised by Joel Neubauer and his rabbits and his lederhosen as he was by us and our wide open spaces. It was, indeed, a surprisingly wonderful match of church and student, and made for a rich and blessed year of internship. And I bring you greetings, Joel, from your brother and sister clergy in the Kansas City area, professional church workers who came to have great affection for you and great respect for your bright theologian’s curiosity and your fine pastoral sensitivity. While they could not all be with you in person, their hearts rejoice with you tonight as you step into the ranks of ordained ministers in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. As you do, you also join in a new way your proud-as-punch mother and father and grandfather, who now face the most interesting task of dealing with you not only as an offspring but also as a colleague.
With all of this attention on you, Joel, it might be tempting to miss an essential fact, one with which you would be the first to agree: As important as you are, this is not primarily about you; it is primarily about the One whose voice you have heard through the years, in times of clarity and confusion, in times of chaos and quiet, the voice that resonated patiently through it all, the voice that said, and still says, “Follow me.”
I heard a Jewish folktale recently about ministry. According to this tale, Rabbi Ishmael encountered a man who was sick. Seeing a farmer plowing his field nearby, the rabbi called to him and asked him to summon a physician for the sick man.
“O rabbi of little faith,” the farmer said. “It is God’s will that this man has become ill. If God wants him to die, he will die. If God wants him to live, he will live.”
The rabbi responded, as rabbis do, with a question: “Farmer, what tool do you have there?”
“It is a plow, of course,” answered the farmer.
“Ah,” the rabbi said, “why do you interfere with the earth that God has created? O farmer of little faith, if God wants your crops to grow, they will grow. If God does not want your crops to grow, they will not grow. But what do you do? You enter into partnership with God in the work of creation. So it is with the physician, who is a partner with God in the work of healing. Go therefore and summon a physician.”
And so it is with the work of ministry. God summons partners to work with God in the ongoing mission of reclaiming Creation, of announcing the reality of salvation by declaring in our words and our actions that God has a never-ending love affair with God’s people.
In a few moments, we will hear precisely the call of the ordained pastor: to, among other things, preach and teach in accordance with the Scriptures, the creeds and the Lutheran Confessions; to feed and strengthen the Church with God’s Word and Holy Sacraments; to lead Christians by example in faithful service and holy living; to tend and protect the flock; to give faithful witness to Christ in the world. In other words, to partner with God in God’s mission by daily both accepting and extending Christ’s invitation, “Follow me.”
The Scripture readings for this evening reveal the richness and some of the contours of that mission.
The Psalmist sings the praises of God, who brought God’s people out of slavery in an act that was itself immensely creative. God’s agenda is clear: not simply life, but new life. The nations of the world, with their love of power and their investment in business-as-usual, would do well to tremble: The Lord of Freedom offers a radical invitation to transformation and new life.
The writer of Song of Solomon says that invitation is delivered by a God whose love for and faithfulness to God’s people are unwavering. In fact, God is enchanted – captivated, even – by the splendor and magnificence and unparalleled beauty of God’s beloved people.
That love affair will eventually result, the Revelation tells us, in a new heaven and a new earth, a New Jerusalem that will be presided over by an exalted Jesus, the One who gives Life to the River of Life as it nourishes the Tree of Life, which produces the healing, the conversion, the transformation of all of Creation.
The end is certain; what happens between now and the world to come is up to us, and it is called “mission.”
We hear much about “mission” these days. It’s a wildly popular topic in church circles, usually being trumpeted in synod assemblies and workshops with titles like “The Church in Mission” and “The Missional Church” and “The Church’s Mission.” It’s unfortunate that we don’t hear more about God’s mission, because that’s where mission really starts, not with us but with God. It’s important to get that starting point right, because faithfully identifying the starting point makes all the difference in which mission we live out.
Focusing simply on the Church’s mission easily invites a shift from a hunger for God to an obsession with popularity in the form of desperation for higher numbers, politically acceptable social statements and church advertisements like the one I saw during the halftime show at this week’s Monday Night Football game: “Become a member of our church and join a winning team.”
The countercultural nature of the Christian movement doesn’t necessarily require a desire to join a losing team, but it does reorient the conversation around the question, What is God up to in the world today? That’s the question, Jesus is the answer, and that answer says to us, as it says to each generation, Follow me. Follow me on a journey into new life.
I’ve appreciated the insights of Bible scholar Marcus Borg, who wrote in a recent issue of The Lutheran magazine that the Kingdom of God is what life would be like in this world if God were in charge and earthly rulers were not. We heard a similar perspective at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly this past summer in Chicago. Several speakers reminded us that the Church is called to stand in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, and to speak clearly on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves; that this is not a liberal issue nor a conservative issue, but a profoundly Christian issue because it cuts through partisan politics and is rooted deeply in what Jesus envisioned as the Kingdom of God. Living that reality, Jesus says, draws our attention and our commitments away from our selves and increasingly toward the physical and spiritual needs of those around us.
For example: I recently spoke with a friend of mine, an Episcopal priest working in Germany. He told me a story about his bishop. Bishops in the Episcopal tradition have considerably more authority that do Lutheran bishops; an Episcopal bishop can open a congregation, close a congregation, transfer priests from church to church. One congregation in this particular archdiocese was having horrendous trouble. Two factions of long-time members had squared off against each other over a dispute. Neither side would budge. It had gotten so bad that the two factions refused even to speak to each other. The dispute? What color to repaint the sanctuary. That wasn’t what the fight was really about, of course. It was about power, about who was going to call the shots, about who was more important. That’s what church fights are always about.
They called in the bishop to mediate the disagreement, said that whatever the bishop decided, that’s what they would do. So the bishop came one Sunday night, sat down and listened as the two sides put forth their arguments. When they were finished, everyone looked to the bishop for a resolution. The bishop rose from his chair and said, “Thank you all for coming tonight. It’s clear that both sides feel very strongly about their positions. So here’s my decision: This congregation has 90 days to raise $100,000 for missions, or I’m closing the place.” And he walked out. Stunned silence.
But sure enough, in 90 days, that congregation raised $100,000 for missions, and today that parish is the most mission-minded, mission-driven church in the entire archdiocese; now not because they have to be in order to stay alive but because they’ve experienced how life-giving it can be to shift their emphasis from internal to external; from focusing on one’s own needs and wants and positions to instead addressing the spiritual and physical needs of this world that God loves.
Follow me, Jesus says in this story of call, the epilogue to John’s gospel. Follow me on a journey into new life. Stop living as if Easter hasn’t happened, and instead cast your nets on the other side of the boat and discover how productive and joyful it can be to engage my mission.
At the heart of what you are called to do, Joel, is to embody that invitation even as your life is to embody the One who first extended it.
The task of ministry, and particularly parish ministry, can be frustrating because it can be extremely difficult to quantify, to measure. We heard some of that frustration in last Sunday’s Gospel lesson, where Jesus finishes a parable and then asks his own very honest question: “But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” How are things going? Sometimes, not even Jesus can tell.
Pastors identify with this frustration; it comes up routinely, for example, in preaching. Preachers intend to preach clearly and persuasively, but what do listeners hear? Jack comes out of the sanctuary, shakes the preacher’s hand and says, “Thanks, pastor; that one was for me,” and proceeds to recount a message that bears no resemblance to what the pastor thought he said. Is that simply sloppy communication by the preacher? Or is that Jack, listening through the filter of his own life, plucking from the pastor’s lips the Gospel he needs to hear?
I suspect this is why Jesus compares what we do in ministry to fishing and not archery. In ministry, we do not simply take aim at a target that we either hit or miss; instead, we cast our nets into deep waters and drag them around down there in places where we cannot see, uncertain of what in the world those nets will bring up this time: bruised egos, thankful hearts, wounded histories, eager faith?
Sometimes those nets come up full, packed with 153 fish, a miraculous catch, and we ministers are flushed with gratitude at the affirmation that this, praise God, is what we’re truly called to do!
Sometimes, though, as we pull with blistered hands and strained muscles and aching shoulders, those nets bring up nothing at all; and at those times we might be tempted to think that we’ve failed. But we forget the people who watch us, Sunday after Sunday, as we moor the boat, tend the nets, scrape the hull – letting our lives be shaped by the routine practice of simply showing up to fish, whether we catch anything or not.
You see, it matters to find someone like you, Joel, who will stand up and speak the truth in love; speaking a Word that really matters to God’s people; someone who will embody that Word as he visits the sick, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, works for justice, practices forgiveness. It matters to find someone who can embody that Word as only you can do it; trusting the promise, trusting that the invitation, “Follow me,” is itself a word on the way of life.
The good news in all of this is that this is not another thing you have to find the courage and the resources to do; it is something that God is already at work doing through you, making you able, fashioning you into his partner in the ongoing work of creation. God does this – calls you, equips you, and sends you out – so that Christ is not without a body in this world; and you are never without the company of God’s beloved Word, made flesh.
Amen.
