Beeson Podcast, Episode #612 Dr. Michael Knowles July 26, 2022 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Kristen Padilla: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Kristen Padilla. We are finally at the end of our summer sermon series. Next week we will begin with a brand new interview as we kick off a new season. As we were faced with the difficult task of choosing sermons to play for you this summer there were more sermons than we could choose. So, let me encourage you to head over to our YouTube Channel – Beeson Divinity to listen to other sermons from this past academic year. You can also find other excellent sermons that have been preached over the years. Next month we will begin a new chapel series here at Beeson with the fall semester called “The Life of David.” Our preachers this coming fall have all been assigned a text on the life of David to preach in chapel. Our weekly Tuesday chapel services are open to the public and we would love for you to join us. You can find the full schedule at www.BeesonDivinity.com/worship. If you’re unable to come in person you can watch and listen each week at www.BeesonDivinity.com/live. All right, our last episode in the series is actually not a sermon, but a lecture given this past academic year. Even though it’s not a sermon, it was just too good not to share with you. The lecture is called, “Preaching Crucifixion” and was given by Dr. Michael Knowles for our annual William E. Conger Jr lectures on Biblical Preaching. His lectures were theologically and pastorally rich. And some of my favorite lectures that I’ve heard at Beeson recently. So, whether you’re a pastor, preacher, or lay person, I truly believe you’re going to benefit from today’s episode. Dr. Michael Knowles is professor of preaching and a George F. Hurlburt Chair of Preaching at McMaster Divinity College. He is ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada and was a guest on the show on March 1st. So, let’s go now and hear from Dr. Michael Knowles give a lecture on preaching crucifixion. >>Knowles: So, first, let me offer a particular thanks to the academic dean who is not able to be with us. What could be more important? But anyway ... Doug Sweeney. As well as to Mike Pasquarello. For the honor of this invitation. Most of us, as you know ... I have this in my notes ... We minister in varying degrees of faithfulness in varying degrees of obscurity. These lectures are the culmination of some 45 years of Christian discipleship, nearly 40 years of ordained ministry, and 30 years, give or take, in academia. So, I’m grateful for the opportunity to sit before the church, some of what I believe the Lord has taught me. If some of what you’ve heard sounds familiar, keep in mind this is Ground Hog Day. So, that may explain it. In the crucifixion of ministry, surrendering our ambitions to the service of Christ, pastoral theologian Andrew Purves explains that there are often two seasons of crucifixion in the life of a pastor. “The first season of crucifixion typically coincides with the first year or two of ministry statistically,” he says, “about a third of new pastors quit within a year or two of graduation from seminary.” After all of those years of study and sacrifice and preparation they discover that the pastorate is not for them. “This,” he writes, “is a major death full of deep disenchantment and at times embittered recrimination. It is a personal, familial, fiscal, and ecclesiastical disaster.” But it’s not the end of the world. Before too long they pick up the pieces and they move on in the direction of a more suitable career. “The second crucifixion,” he writes, “is more subtle and less dramatic. It moves in on us more slowly and insidiously than the rapid stunning disillusionment of the first crucifixion. It is more profound and in its way more deadly.” Somewhere along the way, 10, 15, 20 years out – who knows when or what circumstances precipitate the process – a terrible awareness begins to dawn. “I can’t do this.” Some quit, I think, because of workload. Others because they and their families get frankly tired of living in the fish bowl. And others, again, because of the unrealistic expectations of congregations who are looking for salvation in all the wrong places. But my guess is that those in fact tend to be the primary causes of the first crucifixion whereas the second crucifixion is deeper and more deadly. 10, 15, 20 years into your ministry, this is a forecast, so subtly that you didn’t see it coming. You begin to lose heart. You run out of energy and ideas. You no longer care the way you once did. The needs and the sorrows of the congregation are simply too great for you to bear. Things that used to come easy no longer work the way they once did. Inwardly you grind to a halt, even though outwardly you’re still going through all the right motions. It’s not that you lose faith or that you lose sight of your goal, that would be understandable. The worst part of it is that in some sense deep down you feel that you’ve fallen out of favor with your Savior. He’s there, but he’s just not blessing the work the way that he once did. You find yourself wondering, “What went wrong?” According to Andrew Purves, all of this is normal. It’s not punishment for unfaithfulness, or a sign that you’ve fallen short. After all, since when did success in ministry depend on faithfulness of the minister? Purves would say that the Lord’s gradual and intentional withdraw, the withdraw of easy blessing, the diminishment of tangible consolations, being led into the wilderness where progress is uncertain and signposts difficult to discern – all this is in fact the reward of faithfulness. It’s a sign that the Lord is drawing us deeper, causing us to hunger for his presence; insisting that we not be satisfied with yesterday’s blessing. The Lord responds to those who truly love and serve him to be satisfied with nothing less than himself. Not more publications, if you’re an academic. Not a larger church and a bigger budget, if you’re a pastor. Even more amazing sermons, if you’re a preacher. He withdraws the obvious. And he crucifies our ambitions so that we might learn to love him the way he loves us. All in. And the only way that that will happen is for us to realize ever more deeply not how much Jesus needs us but how much we need him. Come on, we would all love to be successful preachers. We all want our congregations to grow. And would a little recognition be too much to ask? Nothing wrong with that. But the problem lies with how we want to get there. We expect that the further we go, the easier ministry will become. That we will learn from our mistakes, that we will gain new skills, and we’ll get better at what we do. Every day and every way things will get better and better. (I thought I’d throw in a Southern cultural elusion.) Again, those are reasonable goals. But the problem is that we have an incurable tendency to set ourselves up as indispensable, even for the work of Christ. The preaching of the gospel. The building up of his Church. Man’s nature, so-to-speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. (John Calvin) What Andrew Purves is telling us is that the further we proceed, the more experience we gain, the more difficult ministry is likely to become. In the precise and specific sense, that we will realize ever more deeply in ministry as in discipleship that we need Christ far more than he needs us. He wants us to be satisfied with nothing other, nothing less than himself, because he alone is the source of life. So, 10, 15, 20 years into ministry, so subtly that you wonder how you got there. All that other stuff has to go. I Timothy 2:5, “There is one God and one mediator between God and humanity. The man, Jesus Christ.” Okay, that’s a key Reformation principle. Christ, the only mediator, the only reconciler of God and humanity. But we preachers still want to be mini mediators between God and the Saints. This is the mini me of ministry. Ironic, don’t you think? Christ must disabuse us of our perpetual self importance. If we are truly to serve him we must allow him to serve us. Only then can he serve others through us. Well, it’s not difficult to imagine everyone’s reason for being here this morning. You want to be a preacher or a better preacher. Preaching is difficult. It’s difficult to keep a congregation happy. It’s especially difficult competing with all those other churches that have bigger budgets, a larger following on YouTube. Let’s be honest, ministry typically involves a whole lot more competition than collegiality. You might have noticed. And we might as well admit preaching a crucified Messiah is no way to win a popularity contest. But try, if you wish. Now, I’m conscious of my mandate and of the specific purpose of the Conger Lectureship. As you may be aware, the William E. Conger Biblical Preaching Lectures, “Are presented in the fervent prayer and hope that they shall enlighten the preacher’s skill, but above all stir the preacher’s soul. So, God himself my shine in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” So, if our souls are to be stirred for the task of preaching, we must gaze once more, more intently than before, into the face of Christ both crucified and risen. In order to see there and there only the paradoxical glory of God that promises to transform us. Paul has a lot to say about gazing into the face of Christ in his letters to ancient Corinth. He also has a lot to say about crucifixion, some of which may surprise us. Now, I know my tribe. Evangelicals prefer to think that coming to the cross of Christ happens once – at conversion. It’s “one and done.” Dying to yourself is like an initiation rite. But once you’re in it’s on to resurrection, new life, and victorious Christian living. I always want to say, “How is that working for you?” Except that our own experience, it’s hard to say this but our own experience is usually far more complex than that. And likewise, Paul’s own account of crucifixion and resurrection is considerably more nuanced and complex. So, here we go. He writes about crucifixion in four different ways. First, Galatians 2:19-20, these are all familiar texts, no surprise to anybody. But let’s put them together. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. So, of course he has a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. Paul dies to his former way of living, living unto God, and he’s now alive in Christ. This is a forensic perspective on the cross and crucifixion. Romans 4, “Jesus our Lord was handed over to death for our trespasses, raised for our justification.” I’m not pretending to teach you anything new. But being justified by faith in the Son of God is only the beginning. Romans 6, “We’ve been buried with him by baptism into death so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we might walk in newness of life. So, you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ.” In other words, our participation in the death and resurrection of Christ is not only forensic, but also ethical. And then third, like it or not we all have to die sometime. We’re going to peg out. But we have the promise if we have already died with him we will also live with him. Forensic, ethical, eschatological, each with a definitive beginning and a definitive end. Familiar, right? Ah, but there’s one more. Paul explains in II Corinthians that the death and resurrection of Jesus apply not only to conversion and holiness and future glory ... this is where preaching comes in ... “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters,” he writes, “of the affliction we experienced in Asia, for we were so utterly unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He who rescued us from so deadly a peril will continue to rescue us. On him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again.” The Lord has allowed Paul a near death experience so that he would learn to rely on God who raises the dead. And Paul fully expects the same thing to happen again, and again, and again. He will continue to rescue us, which is his source of hope, whatever the future brings, in all four ways, according to the Apostle, God treats the disciples of Jesus just as he treated his Son – by rescuing us from sin, ungodliness, weakness, affliction, self sufficiency, even death. To some of you this is new, but how well do you remember your first encounter with the synoptic problem? We once had student who said, “What synoptic problem?” That’s a different issue. When you first realize that Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell things a little differently ... slightly different details, well, in Mark 8 and Matthew 16, Jesus tells the disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” So far so good. But as Luke tells it, Jesus inserts one more critical word. “If anyone would come after me let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” Now, if I had my choice I’d go with Matthew and Mark because that makes it sound like taking up your cross is one and done. I like that. But the Apostle says it’s not so simple. “He who rescued us from so deadly a peril will continue to rescue us. On him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again.” And again. In every circumstance of life. That includes Christian ministry. The ministry of preaching, in particular. I have been crucified with Christ, he says. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. That’s not just conversion. These are the ongoing conditions of discipleship. And if they are the conditions of discipleship they are assuredly the conditions of Christian ministry. These are the conditions for preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, both crucified and risen. We live and preach by faith. I wonder what you would think if I began by confessing what I did not know and could not do. If I came to you and say, “Well, you know, I’m not very eloquent. My words are nothing fancy. I’m not actually terribly clever. I’m basically unqualified for the task to which I’ve been called.” I’m sure you’d wonder why I had been invited to give these lectures. Whether the selection committee had made a really unfortunate mistake. And how soon the coffee break was coming so that you could step away unnoticed. Yet that’s basically what the Apostle Paul says when he writes to the Church of Ancient Corinth. “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you, except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Now you’re already aware that Paul is not exactly popular in Corinth. Must like ourselves the Corinthians are mostly interested in power and authority. They want strong leadership, eloquent preaching, intellectually responsible arguments, and pastors who can present themselves well in public as a way to win the world for Christ. They like a good show and they want nothing so much as a little respect. Now, they don’t have much time for a preacher who confesses, “I came to you in weakness and in fear and in trembling.” You did not come here this morning to see me quake. A pastor who begins his ministry by saying that because he’s been crucified with Christ he has nothing of himself to offer. “I decided to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified.” But you know to a modern way of thinking and the wisdom of the world this sounds just a little pathological. Don’t you think? It’s like emotional inadequacy. The man could do with a little bit of professional therapy and a healthy dose of positive self regard. He’d be much better off for it. Yet to abide in Christ is to abide theologically, not necessarily psychologically. But to abide theologically in crucifixion. To abide in Christ is to take up our cross daily in order to follow him. Inadequacy for the task of ministry and utter dependence on the power of Christ are not the qualities we look for in ourselves, in our leaders, in our ministers. They’re the very things we do our very best to avoid. And yet, says the Apostle, they are the secret to the life of faith and the life of ministry. “My speech and my proclamation were not with words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the spirit and of power so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.” Is that not an outright contradiction? He’s just finished saying to them that he came to them in ignorance and weakness, in fear and trembling and yet now he insists that his preaching is somehow powerful. In the very next verse he goes on to say, “Among the mature we speak wisdom. God’s wisdom. Secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” The life of faith. The work of ministry – at least as Paul understands clearly do not function the way anything else in our lives functions. They are a case apart. If you want to paint a picture, you’d paint with a paint brush. If you want to write a computer program, you learn a programming language. If you plan to be a hairdresser, you learn to use scissors and electric clippers – hopefully not a chainsaw. When it comes to digging ditches, you’ll take a backhoe over a teaspoon any day. And skydiving without a parachute and a good life insurance policy never ends well. Getting the job done, whatever the job may be, requires the right skills, the right training, the right tools and timing. Are you with me? So, why is it that with all the right tools, and all the right training, and graduation from Beeson, preaching is so consistently unpredictable? Hebrews 12:4, “The Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow, it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” So far so good. If the Word of God is a two-edged sword, then as preachers we should be able to pick it up and set to work – piercing, dividing, judging thoughts and hearts. We should be able to use this mighty Word the same way we would a paint brush, a programming language, maybe even a chainsaw or a backhoe. Take up, says Paul, in Ephesians 6:17, the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, with that kind of a mighty weapon should we not be able to corral it, wrangle it, explain it, apply it? With the right strategy, the right skill set for post modern times? Consistently powerful life changing sermons should result. But my guess is that your experience of preaching is no more consistently like that than is mine. Picture young David, the shepherd boy. Weighed down to the point of immobility by the armor of Saul. Trying to swing a sword that’s far too large for him. He can barely get it off the ground. I wonder whether that is sometimes the portrait of the preacher. Weighed down by, “Seven Surefire Strategies for Sermonic Success.” Or “Twelve Proven Principles for Powerful Preaching.” Or whatever happens to be the latest trend in Popular Mechanics, I mean, popular homiletics. Because the experience shows that preaching is almost never as simple, as powerful, as predictable as all of those textbooks say it should be. I have to tell you, that’s the thing that the preaching manuals never tell you. They don’t tell you that the book doesn’t always work. It’s far more mysterious, it’s unquantifiable, it’s much more hit and miss. The sermon that you cobbled together in haste after an argument at the family BBQ turns out to be powerful beyond all expectations. People are still talking about it. And the lectures, I mean, the sermon that you worked on for weeks ... they turn out to be a dud. You know? What was that about? You thought it was wonderful and they wondered what you were on about. It’s not just hit and miss. Sometimes you can’t even tell the difference between a hit and a miss. So, you wonder what you’re doing wrong and you turn up at a preaching conference hoping that someone else from somewhere else can tell you what the mystery consists of. “I have been crucified with Christ,” says the Apostle. “It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. I decided to know nothing. Nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. My speech, my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the spirit and of power. So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ. For whenever I am weak, [whenever I am weak,] then I am strong.” I don’t know about you, I find that very disturbing. Because if that’s how the Lord works with the Apostle Paul, who are we to expect anything different? We have this treasure in clay jars. He says to the very congregants who have a dangerously low opinions of him already. “We have this treasure, this glorious gospel, in weak, fragile, easily damaged vessels. So that ...” I love purpose clauses ... So that “it may be obvious that this extraordinary power belongs to God, it does not come from us.” It sounds foolish as much to us as in ancient Corinth, “but God’s foolishness,” says Paul, “is wiser than human wisdom, God’s weakness is mightier than all human strength.” That, Paul would have us see, is the glory of God in the face of Christ. I got to tell you – it ain’t pretty. But it’s beautiful. It’s not easy, but it’s the glory of a crucified and a risen Lord. And if weakness is the qualification, we qualify it. That you have in spades. So, let us answer this invitation. Let us gaze together upon the face of Christ and learn from the Lord himself how ministry is meant to operate in the enduring weakness of human flesh and the otherworldly power of the Spirit of God. We begin with a very familiar passage from the Gospel of John. “I am the true vine,” says Jesus to us, his disciples, “and my Father is the vine grower. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” It’s a familiar passage, but straightforward as it sounds it leaves some questions in need of clarification. The obvious part is that intimacy precedes utility. In the Kingdom of God, God’s Kingdom, intimacy is the precondition for usefulness. Jesus commands us, first and foremost, to abide, to remain, to rest in him. Preaching that is not bathed in prayer and rooted in devotion is likely to be little more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. You might have heard it a few times. You might have preached it once or twice. So, we need to know what abiding or remaining in Christ looks like in practice. And for that we look oddly enough to Christ himself. Now, familiar as the image of the vine and the branches is to us, what’s less often recognized is that Jesus explains the dynamics of our reliance on him by analogy to his own reliance on the Father. Throughout John’s Gospel Jesus’ own relationship with the Father forms the model for the disciple’s relationship with Jesus. Just as his relationship with God provides the basis for his ministry, so our relationship with Jesus provides the basis for our ministry. Including above all the ministry of public proclamation. So, when Jesus tells his disciples, “Abide in me as I abide in you. Apart from me you [can’t do a thing.]” He doesn’t just tell them. He actually shows them how that works in practice. I find it striking, particularly in a gospel with such a high Christology how often Jesus confesses his own complete inability to accomplish the works of God. John 5:30, look it up, “I can do nothing on my own.” Then he repeats himself a few verses later. “The Son can do nothing on his own but only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing.” Phillip says, “Show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” Has it ever struck you what a boneheaded thing that was to say? Anyway, but this is how Jesus answers him, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I speak not on my own. But the Father who dwells in me does his works.” A few verses further on again, “I do exactly what the Father has commanded me so that the world might know that I love the Father.” Again, Jesus confesses complete inability apart from the Father. His whole ministry consists of beholding, understanding, copying, participating in something initiated and sustained by the saving will of the Father. He’s the Son of God. Yet his ministry is predicated not on ability but on willing inability and loving dependence upon the will and agency of another. And then Jesus turns to us and says, “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine neither can you unless you abide in me. Apart from me you can do nothing.” For Jesus, as much as for us, intimacy precedes utility. His ministry is simply the outflow of the relationship that precedes it. So, he explains that he yields, he relies, he depends, he follows so that (purpose clause) the world may know that I love the Father. For the Father loves the Son, John 5:20, and shows him all that he himself is doing. As we read in John 3:35, “The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands.” So, let’s pause for a moment to gaze upon the face and the ways of Christ. Let’s see if we can understand this passage, this statement, “The Father loves the Son, and has placed all things in his hands.” When we entrust a task to someone else, we usually do so not because of who we are, but because of who they are. Because they’re trustworthy or they’re competent, or maybe they owe us a favor. It’s a matter of quid pro quo. So, if we had written this verse, we would have said, “Because the Son loves the Father, the Father has placed all things in his hands.” We would have said that the Father should entrust all things to the Son because the Son can handle them. He deserves them. He can be trusted with them. Because he’s earned it by demonstrating his devotion and his competence. But the Father places all things in the hands of the Son because the Father loves the Son. Not because the Son loves the Father. Even if that’s the case, the Father chooses to rely on the Son even when reliance is unnecessary. It’s an expression of the Father’s love and favor, not of dependence or necessity. The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands. Then Jesus says to his disciples and he says to us, “As the Father has loved me, so I love you. Remain in my love.” The same way that the Father loves and trusts him is the way that he loves and trusts us. Not because of who we are. God help us if that’s the case. But because of who he is. We are deeply conscious of our responsibility as teachers and preachers of the gospel – present and future. “Let not many of you become teachers,” says the Apostle James, “for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. That prospect weight heavily on our shoulders. And I want to tell you, the older you get, the more final judgment becomes an imminent prospect. Most of the time we are as conscious of our liabilities for ministry as we are of our abilities. And we truly wonder how the two halves of the equation will balance out in practice. But according to Jesus, our lives and especially the ministries entrusted to us are not expressions either of our personal worth or of our unworthiness. If Jesus loves us the same way that the Father loves him, they are in the first instance expressions of Christ’s love for us, not our love for him. It’s not that our trustworthiness inspires Christ to trust us, but the opposite. It is Christ’s trust in me that inspires me to become trustworthy. I want to love him the way he loves me. And I’m astonished that he would trust me. He makes me trustworthy by calling me to himself. This is the bad news that turns out to be astonishingly good news after all. Christ doesn’t love us because we’re inherently loveable. I have news – you’re not. Just the opposite. Neither does he commission us to preach on account of our education, our eloquence, our excellence, our ability to command the attention of others, or obedience. What qualifies us to preach is the excellence of the one whom we preach. Not the excellence of the one who preaches. Sometimes we forget that. We forget that we have this treasure in weak, fallible, sinful, fragile, wounded vessels. We would dearly love to leave crucifixion in the past. In 1894, at the age of 62, Hudson Taylor, the pioneer English missionary to 19th century China wrote this, “God chose me because I was weak enough. God does not do his great works by large committees. He trains somebody to be quiet enough, and little enough, and then he uses them.” One year earlier in 1893 an astonishingly courageous English woman by the name of Lilias Trotter, who had given up a promising career as an artist to preach the gospel in Algeria wrote this in her diary, “Oh, God has been good to us through these months. On July 12th he gave me this promise – he shall come down like rain upon the mown grass. And he has made it true, hallelujah, for I was feeling mown in body and spirit, now he has begun to show me how all of this must be brought down into the dust of death before living out the life of Jesus can be anything more than an intermittent thing.” I like Eugene Petersons’ paraphrase of the Beatitudes, “Arriving at the quiet place Jesus sat down and taught his climbing companions, this is what he said, you’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you, there’s more. More of God in his rule. You’re blessed when you’ve lost what’s most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the one most dear to you. You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are, no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God, he’s food and drink for the best meal you’ll ever have. Blessed are the poor and the poor in spirit. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. We are blessed when we mourn and grieve. When we’re meek and weak. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness because we have none of our own. And the evidence for that is overwhelming. Blessed are the merciful and the simple, the peacemakers, and the crucified. Blessed are the crucified.” You know, the world doesn’t need our eloquence and our excellence. There will always be somebody better and certainly better looking on YouTube. The world doesn’t need us to get things done. If the congregation needs to get stuff done, there’s always more congregants than even the largest pastoral staff. Jesus doesn’t turn to us, he doesn’t call us into ministry, doesn’t work through us, because we have something to offer him. But because of what he offers us. He calls us, he loves us, he equips us to preach not by giving us gifts, he gives us himself. All in. How did we ever imagine that salvation on the one hand and ministry on the other could somehow work by different sets of rules? Salvation, in this is love, not that we love God but that God loved us and sent his Son to be the sacrifice for our sins. We get that. Ministry, for what we preach is not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Not ourselves, but Christ as Lord. Paul, not Paul, but the grace and mercy of God. Paul who’s history as a persecutor of the church weighs like a millstone around his neck. We have this ministry by the mercy of God, he says. Imagine that. You have your ministry as an expression of his mercy. Had you thought of that? When we pause to consider for even a moment the vastness of our inadequacy, beside the immeasurable sufficiency of Christ, we know that’s true of us. We have this glorious treasure. The good news of Jesus Christ. Not because we are intermediaries. Not because we’re able to diminish, to distribute, to demonstrate divine mercy, but because we’ve received what we did and did not and could not ever deserve. “As the Father has loved me,” says Jesus, “so have I loved you. Remain in my love. Those who remain in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” Now, I realize that any intelligent person will balk at what I’m saying. It goes against all our instincts. Not least our instincts of self preservation. Sometimes my students complain in their course evaluations, and oh they hurt, but anyway ... you know ... about the negative tone of cruciform theology. They had hoped, I suspect, for something more cheerful, more energetic, more uplifting. You probably know the story, possibly apocryphal about Teresa of Avilla who complained to God about her many trials. The Lord said to her, “Teresa, that is how I treat my friends.” She shot back, “No wonder you have so few.” (laughs) “And do you not know, sisters,” she writes to her fellow nuns, “that the life of a good religious, who wishes to be among the closest friends of God, is one long martyrdom.” She goes on to say that at least decapitation would be easier, it would be over quicker. Not lacking a sense of humor, that one. So, let us gaze once more into the face of Jesus, as we join the remaining disciples in the upper room in the days following his unjust execution. At this point one of their number has committed suicide. The disciple who thought himself closest to Jesus has denied knowing him. Not once but three times in a row. And the rest have simply faded away in order to avoid arrest. That is why the door is barred and shut. Yet Jesus still shows up. Not only does he meet them at their lowest, bless them, breathe the Holy Spirit on them, grant them authority to forgive sins, maybe they should start with one another. In addition to all that he commissions them at this the most implausible of all moments. “As the Father has sent me,” he says, “so I send you.” The very apostles who have failed him, fallen asleep when he needed them, denied him, abandoned him, disbelieved in him, he commissions and sends in his name. “Just as the Father has sent me, so I send you.” We already know from John that the Father sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved. We already know that the Father sent the Son into the world not to conquer the world by coercion and force, to force it into believing, he sent the Son into the world to be crucified by it. To yield so fully to the Father that the Father alone remained the sole source of his life and strength and ministry. “As the Father has sent me,” he says, “so I send you.” I leave you to draw your own conclusions. This much I will say, and I’ve said it already, the fact that Christ commissions us, sends us, entrusts us with the care of his people is only ever proof of his sufficiency, not ours. His power, his purpose, not ours. Since only his grace is sufficient for the needs of the world and for the ministry of preaching. Christ treats us exactly as the Father has treated him. “Apart from union with Christ,” says Andrew Purves, “ministry is cast back on us to achieve. This,” he writes, “is a recipe for failure. For we all fall short of the glory of God. The understanding and practice of pastoral work in this case is a burden too heavy to bear and follows a path that denies the gospel. We do not heal the sick. Comfort the bereaved. Accompany the lonely. Forgive sins. Raise up hope of eternal life. Or bring people to God on the strength of our piety and pastoral skill. To think that these tasks are ours to perform is not only hubris but a recipe for exhaustion and depression in ministry.” Well, you and I know, I mean come on, we know. We’re not bright enough, good enough, sufficiently sanctified to do the work of a holy God. This strange and paradoxical part is that our inadequacy, our inability is in fact no disqualification, as much as when we were first converted our need for Christ and his grace is what qualifies us as ministers of the Word of God. By which we point beyond ourselves to the one true living Word of God. His love. His power. Not ours. Are the foundation of ministry. “I will not venture to speak of anything, says the Apostle Paul, “except what Christ has accomplished through me.” We come to preaching conferences, even if you’re students and you kind of have to be here ... we come hoping to be strengthened for ministry. We yearn for our souls to be stirred for the task of preaching. So, here’s my confession. I cannot stir your souls anymore than you can stir mine. But I know the one who can. I know the one who simply waits for us to wait on him. Is it possible, do you think, that the real challenge of preaching is not that we are not powerful enough in the pulpit, not faithful enough, not wise enough, but that we are not weak enough? Nor willing to be sufficiently foolish with the folly and abysmal weakness of a shamefully crucified Lord? Tomorrow, we will say more about what it means. I guess that’s the royal “we.” We will speak more about what it means to take up the Word of God in a manner that is faithful and wise, even powerful and persuasive. But the first step is one of yielding, letting go, even dying in the sure conviction that only those with empty hands are able to receive. Only the lowly can be lifted up. And as I said yesterday, only the truly dead require a real resurrection. As a spiritual director of my acquaintance has been known to say, “Unless you are least, little, last, lost, or dead, there’s not much Jesus can do for you.” Thank you. Amen. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.