Ministry this year

Sermon at the Institute for Liturgical Studies, Valparaiso University, April 4, 2005

Part of my job as a professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago is to interview seniors in the ELCA process that leads to approval of candidates for ordination. In addition to evaluating students' internship experience and their understanding of Lutheranism, we ask them about their understanding of ordination and the pastoral office.

Over the years I have found it helpful to give students a list of synonyms for the pastoral office and ask them to expound on why this particular "take" is attractive to them. The list goes something like this: prophet (most take this in a social justice sense), priest (confession and absolution, presider at the font and table), pastor (usually understood in the pastoral-care dimensions of ministry), playing coach (a frequent favorite, especially with male candidates, perhaps because they suspect it will please me). Also included in the list, though never chosen by the students, are two understandings high on my own list: official spokesperson for the apostolic faith (after all, we're always only a generation away from docetism, Gnosticism, pelagianism, and even Manichaeism), and rabbi (I wish more pastors coveted the role of expert in the church's Scripture, tradition, and even dogma).

This conference of the Institute for Liturgical Studies is attending to ministry this year, with explicit connection to mass (last year) and mission (next year). Of course, I have not yet mentioned those many ministries, other than the pastoral office, richly represented in this audience, some of which are rostered while others are not. I speak especially of cantors and church musicians, who share their musical gifts in composing, arranging, performing, and getting the rest of us who don't breathe right to make acceptable, even wondrous, music of praise and thanksgiving.

I think too of youth ministers and of Christian educators, both so central to the church's present relevance and future survivability. Other ministers perform their ministries in the church in the form of administration or serving as church secretaries. Still others perform word and service instead of word and sacrament. They may be community organizers, social workers, chaplains, or midwives. The titles of these ministries are varied: deacons and deaconesses, diaconal ministers, associates in ministry; some even lack titles or rostered status. All these ministers are essential to the church's health and wholeness.

And when it comes to ministry, I have so far omitted the 95 percent of those faithful ministers whose ministry is ministry in daily life, those dear brothers and sisters who are neither rostered nor paid by the church but who volunteer for the church's programs and who live out the gospel as computer programmers, nurses, farmers, parents and other caregivers, university professors, truck drivers, children, retirees, citizens, and thousands in other roles and occupations.

These three categories of ministers--ordained, rostered lay ministers, and ministers in daily life--are what will occupy us in the three days of this conference, as they will continue to occupy us when we return home to the mass and mission in our home towns and in the world. All of these ministries are fed and nurtured by mass, by font and table; all of them lead to mission to, in, and for the world.

As I began to work on this sermon I was shocked to see the Gospel lesson that was picked for this occasion. The passage from Matt 10:24-42, of course, has a great deal to say about ministry and even mission since it reports the selection of the twelve apostles and their dispatch into ministry and mission. But it has nothing to do with Easter, celebrated eight days ago, and it is divided up into two Sundays, Propers 7 and 8, of Year A in the three-year cycle. Many of the presuppositions in this passage do not apply to the church of the twenty-first century. Consider the following eight disconnects:

1. The mission in this chapter is only to Israel. In the Jewish-Christian dialogues that I have been part of over the years, that is a definite no-no. Targeting of Jews in mission work is seen as a sure sign of supersessionism and denial of the ongoing validity of the Old Testament covenant promises. While there might be disagreement among us about the appropriateness of an ongoing mission to Israel, we all would agree that such a mission is not the exclusive, let alone the primary, mission of the church of the twenty-first century in North America. Rather, we have been trying to break out of the North European box, already exclusively gentile, and we have been making strenuous and appropriate efforts to include people of color and people whose primary language is other than English in our ministries and in our mission. But Matthew 10 requires that the mission be only to Israel.

2. The central pronouncement of Jesus in this passage is shocking and countercultural: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Yet we hail Jesus as the Prince of Peace, and was it not yesterday's Gospel that found Jesus in the locked room with the disciples saying "Peace be with you"? Christians have always worried about whether they could ever serve as soldiers, and many of us in the last two years have--in the name of Christ--opposed the ventures of the United States in Iraq and the ever-expanding "defense" budget. How out of touch this word of Jesus seems to be when he says he comes not to bring peace, but a sword.