12th Sunday

12^th Sunday

What it is to minister.

Jer. 20.7, 10-13; Rom. 5.12-15; Mt. 10.26-33

The gospel reading is a continuation of the famous sermon on the ministry, that Matthew put together as a kind of job description if you will of what it is to minister. And as I said last week I think we have real reason to be concerned about what the would be ministers of the church are coming to when 90% of them see orthodoxy as primary before any kind of other religious allegiance, any other basis for religious allegiance. For reading those statistics and for a variety of other reasons, I have been thinking a great deal the last few weeks about the question of ministering. And I'd like to talk about it some more today and next week too, when we reach the conclusion of this passage.

The rubric for talking about this comes from a phone conversation I had two or three weeks ago with a woman who is sort of on the edge of the church, as many of us feel ourselves to be. The reason she is on the edge of the church is this: she felt that church membership, and the character of church throughout the world, is often enough defined by inoffensiveness. To be a Christian is to be inoffensive, she said. That's kind of the eleventh commandment. "Thou shall not be offensive." " Thou shall be innocuous." She didn't think that squared with the gospel and I think she's dead right. And this great sermon on ministry exactly lays that out.

It's too bad that they skip the 10 or so verses that preceded this passage that I read today because without them, ministry sounds safe and abstract. "Don't be afraid." "Oh, okay. Thanks." No, what is going on in the 10 verses is the detailing of the reasons for being afraid. In other words, this injunction not to be afraid is not some sort of abstract comforting but rather it is a response to the fear that is engendered, according to John, that's called forth by the message itself, by the proclamation of the message itself: you will be rejected. And so suffering is at the very heart of the consequence of preaching the gospel. And this is, note, Jesus' injunction to the preachers, to the ministers, to the apostles: suffering is essentially attendant on ministry; they will hate you, father will betray child, child will betray father. Read the tenth chapter of Matthew today if you get a chance. It's fairly grim stuff.

So the question has to be asked, "Why?" Certainly suffering and rejection cannot arise from one’s being inoffensive. It certainly cannot arise from being innocuous, being adjusted. And more than that, although these words are addressed to ministers and provide the shape of ministry, as we know, all this is not uncharacteristic of the gospel at large. Paul will say: with Christ I am nailed to the cross of the world, and the world is nailed to me. That stunning passage in the letters to the Galatians. Now Paul may have spelt this out in very large letters in his own life but anybody who has read the gospel knows that the carrying of the cross, the dying of the seed, the losing of one's life is at the heart of the lived reality of the Christian life. I've said this over and over through the years And the longer I live, the more I'm persuaded, the two things that the church, ours and everybody else's, seem to sidestep are the matters of suffering and of poverty. And the two are obviously interconnected. We don't do very well. We don't proclaim that. We do proclaim a kind of anodyne, pacifying Christianity and we do that fairly well. But in doing that it is possible that we have denatured the message.

Finally, I'd just like to finish with a set of questions. How does one sell Jesus? How does one promote Jesus? Not like selling cars or pantyhose or headache remedies. How does one sell Jesus? I mean this is not just a question for me as an ecclesiastical bureaucrat. It’s a question for everybody. If we are to try and find some integrity for ourselves, for our lives, not just our preaching but for our lives, how does one sell Jesus?

This inevitably puts us back to why do I believe at all? Why do I believe at all? I bring all this out because it is central. Not because it just showed up in the reading, but this is a central issue. A central issue. How do I promote the cause of Jesus? God knows Jesus has been sold along with snake oil and all kinds of devious things. But how do we sell the real Jesus? The Jesus who says you will suffer, you will pay dearly for this kind of commitment. And so I think about that and it's not just because I am a cleric. It's everybody's job. It's everybody's job. Although it is supposedly addressed to the apostles, it is addressed by implication to all of us.

A footnote on suffering and ministry.

Jesus talks about the penalty for pronouncing the gospels. But all this is not supposed to be some sadomasochistic thing. He doesn't say that. But He does say that you must make some discrimination. For example, you go to a place and if they can't hear, you leave. And that is a theme in the gospel. If you go someplace and you make a judgement that you can't be heard, then using the Semitic metaphor, you shake the dust of that town off your feet and you go away. So, rejection is not some kind of indiscriminate suffering. That's the kind of church I grew up in: if you felt bad it had to be useful…religiously, you know.

No, no. That's not what he is talking about. He's saying you have to make prudential judgements as to whether you can be heard or not. If you can't be heard, then you leave. You leave. That's part of the ministry and that's part of the suffering too.

In fact, it just occurred to me, as I was preparing for this sermon for this week, that there is one passage in the gospel which is never preached on, either by me or anyone I’ve heard. Now hear it again in the context of what this lady said, "Thou shall not be offensive." There is Jesus’ line, "Don’t cast your pearls before swine." Fierce language. Now, it's very difficult, because, our self-interest being such as it is, we are too ready to declare "swine" those people that simply don't take to us. But that does not invalidate Jesus’ words. You have to use your brains when you are proclaiming, when you are ministering the gospel, when you're trying to say the word. If you can't be heard, you leave.

So, this is a crucial part about talking about ministry and talking about rejection. And we have to think about it in those terms because that's the punishment of this message, which we don't like to think about, because we don't like to be offensive. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Not me. I want to be nice. Well, Jesus was not nice otherwise he wouldn't have ended up on the cross. In the immortal words of Daniel Barrigan "To be a Christian, you have to look good on wood."

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