Sermons

“Created, Called, Commissioned”

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22; Acts 6:1-7 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – January 10, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might listen with expectant and willing hearts for your call upon our lives and respond with joy and courage. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

Do you suppose that if Jesus hadn’t gotten baptized, the designers of the lectionary would still have found a way to encourage preachers to preach about baptism at least once a year? It does seem like a good idea, after all. But that’s not really what I want to do today, or at least not mostly. Given the lovely coincidence of this Sunday when we remember Jesus’ baptism coming right after the day when we celebrated the ordination of Sadie Cullumber, I thought that I would focus not simply on baptism, but on one of the things it leads to, namely, ministry. But I’m not going to talk about Sadie’s ministry, but rather yours and mine, and the broader context of ministry within the Disciples tradition.

So let’s start at the very beginning. I hear it’s a “very good place to start”! The beginning, for this question, is your creation. Which really is also The Creation. In the beginning, God created everything, and pronounced it good. You may not be quite that old, but this applies to you too. It may never have occurred to you that you have gifts for ministry, but you do. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God says in Jeremiah (1:5), “and before you were born I consecrated you.”

But wait, you say, that line is about Jeremiah, not me. Well, yes and no. I want to pull a lesson from our gospel passage as well. When I preached on a slightly different selection from Luke 3 a few weeks ago during the sterner season of Advent, I focused on the “winnowing fork”. This morning, I want to highlight a different part of that sentence. “His winnowing fork is in his hand,” John says, “to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary.” That means you.

There are so many gifts for ministry. Even the things you may think of as your personality flaws may be openings for God to invite you into service. (Believe me, I know this is true!) God can use all of it. I was reminded of this recently by a literal threshing floor. When we were home in Illinois last week, Todd and I had the opportunity to tour the historic Davidson barn. This barn was built was in 1839, and is considered to be the oldest surviving building in Eureka. It was built by Caleb Davidson, an ancestor of my step-dad, Steve Colburn. As one of the earliest large structures in the area, the barn served, not only as a barn, but also as a community center of sorts. It is believed that both Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone preached and led worship there, for the burgeoning community of Disciples who founded Eureka College.

Steve is working with a group of people to move the barn onto city property and restore it into a community center. It’s a huge undertaking, but once you’ve seen the barn, it’s hard not to hope they succeed. It’s really a pretty amazing structure. The barn has multiple layers. And when you’re in what is basically the basement, you can look up and see the workmanship of those layers. Specifically, Steve pointed out to us how the floorboards of the threshing floor were put together with these tongue-in-groove joints. They wanted to make sure that the floor was tight, he told us, so that none of the grain being threshed would fall through and be wasted. That’s you. Jesus doesn’t want any of the grains to be wasted. You may feel like other people’s gifts are bigger or more important, and that yours are really needed or wanted. But it’s not true. None of those gifts should be wasted; none of them can be allowed to fall through the cracks. God created you the way you are, and you have specific gifts that can be offered in ministry. The Disciples of Christ have long cherished the idea of the “priesthood of all believers” which means that all of us and each of us is part of the ministry of Jesus Christ, not just those who are set aside for ministry through ordination.

And that is what brings us back to baptism. There are a lot of questions about why Jesus got baptized. Today’s version of this story doesn’t include it, but in Matthew’s gospel, John the Baptist himself expresses confusion that Jesus would come to be baptized by him. If we think of baptism as solely about a ritual cleansing of our souls from sin, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Jesus to have done it. And despite my earlier comments, I don’t think he did it for the sake of guiding lectionary preachers to cover the basics on an annual basis. But if we think of baptism as a way of publically accepting God’s invitation into ministry, it falls into place. What’s even lovelier about seeing it that way is hearing how God calls us. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,” said the voice from heaven. That’s so much nicer than a to-do list, isn’t it? This pronouncement feels like a reiteration of that declaration at the beginning of time that God’s creation is good. As those of us who were at Sadie’s ordination yesterday witnessed, the church has managed to retain a little bit of this approach in our ceremonies for calling people into formal leadership within the church. I do believe she heard us saying, “You are God’s beloved child, with whom God is well pleased.”

But are you hearing it? Did you realize, when you were baptized, that God was saying that to you as well, and that it was an invitation to offer your gifts in service to the gospel? If you have not been baptized yet, can you imagine what it will feel like once you’re ready to take that step, to hear those precious words in your heart? Answering God’s call by being baptized is a big and beautiful thing. There is a reason that Disciples made the shift away from infant baptism early on in our tradition. It’s important to have some capacity to grasp the enormity of what we’re getting ourselves into when we enter into those holy waters. It may be different for each person, but there is something there for each of us. It may grow and change throughout our lifetime, but it’s rooted in who God created us to be from the very beginning. We have been created in love. We have been called in love.

And now we arrive at that third “C” – commissioning. And this is where it gets a little more complicated. Trying to figure out how everyone’s gifts fit together is how church gets messy. We see a little bit of that in the brief story we read from Acts 6. Throughout the gospels, we see that there are the twelve disciples, who are then referred to as the apostles. But we know that there were a lot of other disciples following Jesus around as well. As the community grew, the need for more leaders grew. As new needs arose, they devised new roles and new structures to address those needs. There was no blueprint, no bylaws or standing rules to tell them how it must be done; they just figured it out together as they went along, through prayer and discerning conversation amongst the leadership and the whole community.

I do want to make one note here, because it’s important to recognize, for the sake of half of us in the room that the translation of this passage is not as clear as it may seem. This might be a story about making sure all the widows get the food they need. But scholars have also noted that it might be about widows who are being discriminated against in the course of carrying out their own ministries. The patriarchal tendencies of translators over the ages tried to box those widows in as mere recipients of ministry, ignoring the possibility that what was being described here was discrimination against widows in the course of carrying out their ministry to others. Anyone who’s been part of a congregation for a while knows better than to dismiss the contribution of church ladies, and yet, history has continually tried to do so. It’s time for us to declare an end to that once and for all. God wants all the gifts, so we must not let any of them fall through the cracks.

I have another little quibble with this passage as well. It certainly does seem orderly to divide up the labor clearly, as the apostles attempt to do in this passage. But if you read further into the Book of Acts, you will find both Stephen and Philip acting in ways that certainly seem like more than mere “waiting at tables.” I would argue that none of us do ministry very well when we stick closely to narrowly assigned tasks. An Elder needs to be involved in what’s going on in Christian Education, for those conversations will inform how they can minister to individual members in times of need. The people making decisions about the finances and the facility need to be engaged in the spiritual conversations that happen in Elders meetings or Bible studies, so that their decisions can be shaped by the faith, rather than a strict “business” mentality. I know that I am a better preacher when I am involved in our outreach projects and meeting with you all where you are in your lives and aware of how the church is moving into the future. We may have specific assignments, but the whole of the faith is something we are all called to attend to, for it’s all connected.

The evolution of Stephen and Philip from waiters to preachers may speak to another aspect of how the church commissions our leaders that we should give some attention to. Far too often, we end up putting people into positions that are not good matches for their gifts, simply because we feel like we have to fill the slot. Being pushed into a ministry that does not match your gifts is rarely fruitful. Ever so occasionally, someone will take on what seems like a mis-matched assignment and discover unexpected talents. Far more common is that people neglect the duty and feel bad about their lack of capacity for it and resentful of being asked to do it. This is something we must avoid, both when we’re in the position of nominating leaders and if we find ourselves in that position and reluctant to become a “quitter”. Letting go of something that wasn’t a good idea in the first place is not the kind of quitting we need to avoid. It is a practice of wisdom and good stewardship. Church is messy for all sorts of reasons, so we should do our best to avoid making it worse by trapping people into commissions they’re not called to.

Another aspect of this messiness lies in figuring out the relationship between the pastors and the lay people. Because of the Disciples’ long-standing celebration of the priesthood of all believers, which is hugely influenced by the pragmatic realities of a church coming into being on the sparsely populated frontier, we have always had a strain of ambivalence about ordained ministry. If we’re all called to ministry in Jesus’ name, what does it mean to recognize some people as called into ministerial leadership? It’s one thing for an individual to hear God calling them into service; it’s a whole other thing for the church to commission and honor that call.

On the early frontier, congregations often saw an ordained pastor only every few weeks or months. They were, by necessity, led by lay people. That frontier pragmatism seems to echo what we hear from Acts 6: Here is a need, let’s find a way to fill it. It seems timely to wonder, however, if our pragmatism morphed into doctrine that has caused us to not keep up with the times. As the availability of full-time pastors increased and the amount of free time lay leaders have to offer continues to decrease, a pragmatic approach would move us in the direction of trusting our specially called leaders with some of what was accomplished by volunteers in an earlier age. In the last 50 years or so, the clergy have taken on more of the management of the congregation, often tasks formerly done by volunteers, simply because the staff are the ones who are present and able to take care of those things. In many Disciples congregations, including ours, this has revealed again tension and ambivalence about ordained ministers that comes from our long-held pride in being “lay-led” churches who firmly value the “priesthood of all believers.” Power struggles and debates about authority arise and get in the way of ministry actually happening.

What these conflicts are missing, however, is that true Christian ministry isn’t about authority. Jesus was not about wielding power or laying down the law, and his ministers shouldn’t be either. Ministry is about service. It’s about showing up and getting the job done. The authority pastors wield comes from being willing to show up, day after day, to lead the flock and take care of God’s people and God’s house. The authority lay leaders claim comes from the same thing – a willingness to serve. We don’t need to waste our time debating who should be doing what, when we could be getting together to do what needs to be done. God knows there are plenty of needs out there for us to be meeting. That is where Jesus leads us. That is how the early church called people into leadership. That is what ministry is. The submission to God’s will that is symbolized by our baptism must be present in everything we do as ministers – whether professional or lay. We were created in love. We have been called in love. Let us commission one another for ministry with that same love. Alleluia and Amen.