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Text: Jeremiah 26:8-15 (Luke The Very "Worst" Preachers Are Often the Best In the name of the Word made flesh, dear friends in
Christ: You are probably aware that our
church body is facing an increasing shortage of ordained pastors to serve all
of its congregations. It’s a situation
that doesn’t promise to get better right away.
In rough figures, for each of the past several years we’ve been losing
about 400 active pastors, and replacing them at the rate of somewhere around
200. Now, there has been some
improvement with seminary enrollment for the past couple of years – but even
with it, and assuming all those who begin the program will finish it (bad
assumption, by the way), it’s still far short of the number required to replace
the losses. Why are so many pastors leaving
the ministry? Retirement is the biggest
reason. Our church body enjoyed a growth
boom the 1950s, and 60s and to fill the rising need young men flocked to the
Seminaries. For a while back then we had
more pastors than we did pulpits. They
had trouble placing all the seminary graduates in congregations. Some were simply assigned a location and told
to go start a church there. Well, now
all those pastors are retiring after forty or fifty years of service. And we’re losing active ministers for other
reasons, of course. Some are dropping
out due to poor health – and you’re probably aware that some leave the ministry
each year due to … uh, what shall we say?
Moral conduct not consistent with the office? No surprise here: people rightly have higher behavioral
expectations for their pastor than say for their plumber … or their
President. And there’s another big
reason pastors are quitting: there’re
burned out. The ministry can be a very
stressful job, and we live in a consumer driven culture that tells us that we
have a right to “have it our way”, and that if we don’t like what we’re
watching, we can flip the channel and see something else. With that in mind, everyone knows that the
“perfect pastor” is 30 years old or less, he has 20 years or more of parish
experience, he has a wife who loves to play the organ, and precisely the number
of wonderfully obedient children to fill but not overflow the
parsonage. Additionally, he has a sixth
sense so that he knows when people are sick and injured so he can be already
waiting at the hospital before they arrive, he knows how to keep the youth of
the congregation active and involved in everything that goes on at church, and his
sermons are always interesting, informative, inspiring, humorous – and most
importantly, less than twelve minutes in length. And for those few pastors out there who
aren’t perfect, sometimes it’s easier to throw in the towel than to face
constant criticism for falling short of perfection. So, that’s why they’re leaving …
the other question is why are so few coming in?
Some of it has to do with the increasing secularization of our
culture. These days there just aren’t as
many people taking matters of faith seriously.
It also happened throughout the very materialistic 80s and 90s that
fewer men wanted to commit themselves to the relatively modest means to which
most pastors are confined. If your goal
is to make your first million by age 35 and retire before 50, then the parish
ministry will not be on your list of potential careers. There also used to be a high number of
pastors’ sons who would follow in their fathers’ footsteps. That source of new pastors has been
increasingly drying up as families have been getting smaller and more young men
are saying that there’s no way they would want to spend their lives facing the
frustrations they watched their fathers endure. With all
that having been said, I want to make it clear that what follows is not specifically
a recruiting message; but it happens that today’s three Scripture lessons all
touch on the subject of the pastoral ministry.
And the way I’ve got it figured is that if you’re a member of the
Christian church, either you are a
pastor, you have a pastor, or you are looking for a pastor – so it’s a
subject that touches all of us, and so we ought to spend some time hearing what
God has to say about it. And if, by
chance, anything I say today helps motivate someone to consider a career in the
ministry – or in any of the other careers related to the church such as
parochial teacher, director of Christian education, missionary, church
musician, deaconess, parish nurse – well, then so much the better. Now, I know
that lot of people reject out of hand the idea of going into the ministry of
the church. “I couldn’t be a pastor”,
they say,” why, I’m just a normal
person.” What does that make
pastors? Abnormal? No, I think the thought behind such
statements is the perception that men who become pastors are especially
“religious” people who have somehow managed to keep themselves insulated from
the “real” world. They don’t know what
it’s really like out there; and so as not to shock them, you have to behave
around them sort of like you drive your car when you know a policeman is
watching. The truth is, of course, that
there is no fifth dimension of reality from which pastors come (though, to be
fair, I have met a few I’ve wondered about).
No, the men God calls come from all sorts of backgrounds and walks of
life. Moses, for example, was in the
livestock business when God called him.
The prophet Amos was a farmer. He
was literally out plowing his wheat field when God tapped him on the
shoulder. And in the New Testament era,
Jesus chose men who were working as fishermen, IRS agents … he even called one
guy who, if he were around today, would be a member of terrorist group
something like the PLO. The point is
that they were all just regular guys doing regular things before they went into
the ministry. And I hasten to add that
age is not a factor. On the young end,
Jeremiah, whom we heard about in today’s Old Testament reading, was a preteen
when God called him. The prophet Samuel
was younger still. On the older side,
Moses was forty when he got started; Abraham was seventy-five; and the prophet
Elijah … well we don’t know how old he was when he started, but everything we
do know about him all happened in the last four years of his life on
earth. It would seem that it’s not so
important how much or how little time you have to serve – it‘s what you do with
it. Still, I know the biggest
objection has to do with the performance of the duties themselves. Almost everyone says, “Oh, I could never do
that: stand up in front of people and preach. Why, I’m a terrible public speaker; besides,
I wouldn’t know what to say.” That’s
exactly what both Moses and Jeremiah said when God called them. And that’s when the Lord let them in on the
preacher’s secret: You don’t have to be
a great speaker, and it’s actually better if
you don’t know what to say. The job
is not to be a powerful or eloquent orator, nor is it to come up with clever
and wise things to say to inspire people.
The preacher’s task is simply to say what the Lord says – and nothing
more than that. Because of this, it
turns out that some of the very worst preachers are the best. They know that they haven’t got anything to
say that’s worthwhile, so they listen to what God says, let the power of his
Word and Spirit work on them, and then repeat what they’ve heard in a way that
people can understand it and apply to their lives. If you look at it that way, you see that it’s
one of the easiest jobs in the world.
The only one I can think of that might be easier is that one I heard
about a year or so ago: a candy company
was hiring someone to travel around the world tasting chocolates to see which
was best. I think I could do that. Such a job would have some
interesting perks, wouldn’t it? But that
leads me to what might be considered the downside of the minister’s
calling. If you’re one of those “bad”
preachers who only repeat what God has to say, the likelihood is that you’ll
pay for it. People usually don’t like
what God says. More often than not, it
makes them angry. And they usually take
out their anger on the messenger. Of the
men whom God appointed as his spokesmen or preachers, the writer of Hebrew
says, “[Some] were tortured … Some faced jeers and flogging, while still
others were chained and put in prison.
They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the
sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted, and
mistreated …” and it keeps on going like that. Serving as a pastor can be hazardous. And today’s
Old Testament reading is a case in point.
In it we heard how the people who were worshipping at God’s How can
things get so turned around? How can
God’s people be so resistant to God’s message?
The answer is really quite simple, and it has to do with the message
itself. When we hear what God has to
say, we want to hear good things about ourselves. We want our self-esteem built up. We want to be praised for our talents, hard
work, and contributions. We would also
like to hear that God’s standards have been relaxed: that what used to be called sin just isn’t
that big a deal any more. We see it
today with things like divorce and remarriage, church discipline, cohabitation,
and several other things – right now it’s homosexual
marriage (which is an oxymoron if ever there was one). Oh, and we also want to be entertained. It’s always got to be new, exciting, and
innovative; not just the same old stuff.
We want to come to church to have a pleasant worship experience so that
we can go home thinking, “My, wasn’t that
uplifting and inspiring? Surely God must
be pleased with the way we worshipped him today.” And we want
to feel good about ourselves regardless of what we do. So we don’t want any depressing talk of
sin—unless, of course, it’s somebody else’s sin, then it’s
okay. We don’t want hear about sacrifice
or discipline. We don’t want to hear
about doctrines or creeds; after all, they just drive wedges between people. It’s much easier simply to “agree to
disagree”; besides, “doctrine isn’t important
anyway: what matters is how you feel in
your heart.” And there are other
things God says that we don’t want to hear:
we don’t want to hear about judgment, death, Hell, and damnation. And above all, we most certainly do not want
to hear about stewardship. And by
giving us exactly what we want, and avoiding those things that we don’t, many
preachers are doing quite well for themselves by the world’s standards. But unfortunately, they’re doing nothing
constructive for God or for the congregations he has called them to serve. They are, as Paul says in today’s Epistle
lesson, only serving their own stomachs.
They say what will please people in order to ensure they keep getting
paid. As good as their words sound,
they’re worthless. No, if a preacher is
faithfully delivering God’s Word, he’s going to say things that we don’t want
to hear. The
faithful preacher’s goal is to say what God says: it’s to call people to repentance; and the
only way he can do that is by shining the light of God’s truth on our sin
blackened hearts. Such a messenger will
use the sword of the Word to expose the cancers on our souls: the selfish desires, the lusts; the anger,
hate, and jealousy we feel towards others ... And he’ll do it without any
anesthetic to dull the pain that will cause us.
He wants it to hurt. That’s what
Jeremiah did, and that’s how he got himself in so much trouble. And that’s
also why God’s people of all ages have struck out against his true
spokesmen. We don’t want to hurt like
that. We want affirmation, not
confrontation. So our initial impulse is
to reject message and shoot the messenger.
Or a subtler form is to intimidate the messenger into silence. That’s what’s going on in today’s Gospel
reading when some Pharisees warn Jesus about Herod’s plot to kill him. They aren’t concerned about Jesus’ safety;
they just want to silence him. Herod has
just recently executed John the Baptist, who was another one of God’s
messengers who told it like it was and paid for it. He told Herod that he’d stepped out of line
when he enticed his brother’s wife away from him and married her. John said it set a bad example for the rest
of his subjects. Those words cost John
his head. And now the Pharisees hope to
frighten Jesus into silence by telling him that he’s next on Herod’s list. But Jesus
will not be intimidated. He has a job to
do and a message to deliver. His goal is
to heal people. That is the mission of
all God’s preachers: to heal people—not
primarily their mortal bodies, but rather their eternal souls. That’s why Jeremiah
preached such a scathing message in the And sadly, when we do that, we miss the miracle of God’s
grace and forgiveness. God’s goal is not
to make you miserable or unhappy. He
wants to heal you, and to do that he needs to show you that you need to be
healed. So he sends his messengers to
point out your sin because God has planned something better for you than the
life you are living right now. His goal
is not to apply something superficial and cosmetic that will mask the symptoms
and make you feel good about yourself; he wants to bring you to perfection. This isn’t something we will find in
ourselves, however hard we try to look for it there. The calling of the faithful spokesman for God
is to cause you to despair of finding anything good or worthy within you so
that you will be forced to cry out to God for help. It’s at that point when you’re ready to
receive the cure. That’s when you’re ready to hear about the miracle of God’s
salvation: How in the person of his Son,
he became one of us. How he taught God’s
Word and healed sick bodies and souls.
How he was rejected and condemned to die because people didn’t want to
hear his message. How he suffered and
died for our sin. And
how he was raised in again in glory so that we could be declared righteous
before God. It’s when we reach
out and cling to this powerful good news that God changes us, and continues the
process of bringing us to perfection.
It’s a process that began when he gave us birth in Holy Baptism,
continues throughout our life in Christ in this world, and will come to
completion when we are raised to eternal life in heaven. A
preacher’s calling is to proclaim the whole counsel of God, the part that kills
our old sinful flesh, and the part that gives birth to the children of
God. His goal is to present all of
Christ Jesus: crucified for our sin, and
raised for our justification. So he must
wear the black hat and be the bad guy, doing the painful work of “ministry that brings death” precisely so
that he can switch to the white hat and perform the “glorious ministry that brings righteousness”. By so doing, with the power of God’s Word, he
will bring us the peace of God that passes all understanding. And that’s why it’s the worst preachers who
often turn out to be the best. May our
gracious heavenly Father inspire and send many such bad preachers serve his
people and to fill our church’s current need.
In the holy name of Jesus, Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |
