Advent Lutheran Church

"Ordination of Brenda Crossfield"

                Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            Well, Brenda, you certainly draw a crowd from far-flung places!  Just look who’s turned out to cheer you on as you enter the ranks of pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: The good people of St. John’s in Russell, your internship site, have sent a delegation; St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal, another parish where you assisted with worship, had planned to send some representatives but had to change those plans at the last minute, but they’re surely here in spirit; the faithful folks of Faith Lutheran Church in Prairie Village, who have opened themselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and have been guided to you; and of course the people here at Advent, who have been privileged to be in on your formation as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

            The people of Advent will have to be forgiven if we have a swelled chest today.   We are indeed proud, because today we are able to return a favor.  In the early 1980s this congregation was formed by the inspired efforts of a handful of people who were members of Faith Lutheran Church in Prairie Village.  They were living here in southern Johnson County at the time and felt God’s call to establish a church in this growing corner of God’s kingdom.  So with the blessing of Faith Lutheran, and after much hard work and submission to the Spirit’s guidance, Advent Lutheran Church was born.  And so, Faith Lutheran, today, at last, we are able to say “Thank You” by sending you a pastor.

            And not just any pastor.  The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has been ordaining women for quite a few years now, but it’s still the courageous congregation that actually calls one.  It reminds us of the Lutheran church that voted, almost unanimously, to call a lady pastor.  I say “almost” because out of the entire congregation there were only two “no” votes.  Sven and Ole.  They just didn’t think it was right to have a lady pastor.  So they voted no.

            But everybody else voted “yes,” so the lady pastor was called.  The first week she was in town, after she had gotten settled in, Sven and Ole decided that they would be generous, magnanimous, and invite the lady pastor to go fishing with them so they might get to know her.  She readily accepted their invitation, so on Saturday morning they all met at the dock, piled all their gear into the boat, got in and headed out to Sven and Ole’s favorite fishing hole.

            The got to the spot, dropped the anchor and were about to get the fishing poles ready when they realized that they had forgotten the bait back on the dock.  “Oh nuts,” Ole said.  “There’s nothing to do but go back and get it.”  So Sven started pulling up the anchor, but the lady pastor said, “Oh, there’s no need for you guys to go to all that trouble.  Just wait right here; I’ll get the bait and be right back.”  And with that, she stood up, stepped out of the boat and started walking on the water, back to the dock.

            In the boat, silence as they watched her go.

            Finally, Ole spoke up.  “Well, would you look at that,” he said.  “Send a woman to do the job, and she can’t even swim!”

            Don’t worry, Brenda; you don’t have to walk on water, and I have it on good authority that Sven and Ole do not belong to Faith Lutheran Church in Prairie Village.

            Last Monday, when Brenda announced the news of her coming ordination on Facebook, she began with the traditional phrase: “By the Grace of God and the call of the Church, I will be ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church … .”  The order of that announcement is exactly right.  Your ministry begins with and by the grace of God and the call of the Church.  You have been blessed with the gifts and graces for ministry and have heard the call, so what will shape your response? 

            In a few moments we will hear how the Church expects you to respond.  We will hear that the pastor is to, among other things, preach and teach in accordance with the Scriptures, the creeds and the Lutheran Confessions; to feed and strengthen the Church with God’s Word and Holy Sacraments; to lead Christians by example in faithful service and holy living; to tend and protect the flock; to give faithful witness to Christ in the world. 

That’s what we are supposed to “do” as pastors, but we do well to remember that the power for all of that “doing” comes not from us but from the One who calls us into service.  There’s no clearer window into that power than the Word of God itself.  Through the prophet Isaiah God says that God’s people will not fail because the One who powered Creation at the beginning is the One who powers the people now.  It is promised.  The choir just sang of the psalmist’s awe and wonder at a Creator whose knowledge, power and protection are without limit, and whose intention for us is only good.  It is promised.  The apostle Paul tells the church that the community of faith is populated by people who have been blessed with a wide and glorious variety of gifts, and that the living out of those gifts is how we experience our new life in Christ.  It is promised.  We believe in a God who makes and keeps promises.

And it is in the Parable of the Sower that God’s promise comes to fullest expression.  It’s important to remember that this is a parable, and in the hands of Jesus a parable does not deliver prepackaged truth; it does not spoon-feed us with a single, timeless definition.  Rather, it invites reflection.  Jesus’ parables are constructed of ordinary events that lead to extraordinary endings; they invite the listeners to enter into the story and participate in deciding what it means for the hearer’s own time and place.

Jesus tells his listeners a story that begins in the everyday experience of the ancient world.  Following common agricultural practice of the day, the farmer first broadcasts the seed and then plows it under.  The farmer fully expects that some of the seed will be eaten by birds; some will settle on soil where rocks are too numerous to allow for the roots to grow; and some will land among thistles.  He accepts these as the normal risks of raising crops, knowing that the loss of the seed will be more than compensated for by the harvest that he knows will emerge from the good soil.  In fact, if he works hard and the weather is favorable, he can expect a yield of 10 to 12 times what he has planted.

Jesus’ hearers know all this.  So far, nothing surprising in the story.  The listeners wait, and then comes the tipping point: The harvest from the good soil, Jesus says, will yield thirty and sixty and a hundredfold!  At this, you can almost see some in the crowd indeed tip; they turn and walk away, shaking their heads at this foolish man who obviously knows nothing about farming, nothing about how the world really works.  A yield of 12-fold?  Very possible.  But a yield of a hundredfold?  That’s just plain crazy. 

And yet there are others in the crowd who don’t shake their heads and walk away; they stay, because they recall a story about a similar harvest back in the middle of the book of Genesis, when God blessed the planting efforts of Isaac.  There was a yield of a hundredfold.  A harvest like that doesn’t happen every day, but it’s not completely unheard of, not in the world of the Bible, in the world of God’s providence.  It could happen.

So Jesus leaves his hearers in the First Century and the 21^st Century with an intriguing question: Is the real world the world of everyday experience and our expectations that arise from that experience; or, is the real world the world where we expect God to operate with unrestrained goodness and wellbeing beyond our experience? 

I wonder how many times Jesus told this story.  It’s a good one; Matthew and Luke took enough of a shine to it that they included it in their accounts of Jesus’ ministry.  I can’t imagine he told it only once; can’t imagine Jesus was that stingy with a story this good.  Maybe on another occasion when he told it he focused more on application.  “The hard-beaten path where the seed was snatched away by Satan?  Well,” Jesus might have said, “I was thinking of the Pharisees, the scribes, the people in power who are desperate to stay there.  The rocky ground?  Actually, Simon Peter, you came to mind, with your quick eagerness to follow.  But just wait; the withering heat of oppression is right around the corner, and your eagerness will not endure.  The thorny soil?  Remember the rich man who ran up to me and asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life?  He was sorry that he didn’t like my answer; but he had so much stuff, and was so attached to it, that it kept him from actually doing what his instincts told him was right. 

“And then there’s the good soil.  The woman with that 12-year-long flow of blood – she stepped out in faith in order to help herself; that synagogue leader who was so overwhelmed with grief over his daughter’s illness – he was at the end of his rope, and that’s where he found me; he stepped out in faith in order to help his daughter.  That crazy guy in the cemetery who kept busting out of his chains until I freed him from a demon – after it was all over he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about what I’d done for him, told everybody.  All of those people are people of faith, people who acted on their faith, people who didn’t keep it to themselves; these are the people in whom the word produces an almost unbelievable harvest.  Good soil does not know an easy life,” Jesus might have said, “but it’s where I work best.”

Now, if you’re doing morning devotions at camp and use this parable, you usually focus on the productivity of the soil, like it’s an achievement contest.  So the question that you usually ask after you finish the story is this: “Well, which kind of soil are you?”  Being Lutherans who tend to shy away from audacity, we don’t want to publicly grab for the status of good soil (somebody might be paying attention and hold us accountable later), so we often fess up to being the rocky soil.  It’s a safe choice.  But one could argue persuasively that we are, in fact, each of those types of soil at one time or another.  Each of us knows moments of great faithfulness and great faithlessness.  But is this story primarily about us?  Let’s remember the focus Jesus provides when he begins: “Listen!  A Sower went out to sow … .”  Maybe it’s primarily about the Sower.

What’s so striking about the Sower as Jesus describes his actions is his exhuberant generosity; his extravagance is simply part of his nature.  And Brenda, that is why you’re going to need this parable, as a reminder, a touchstone, during your ministry.  You are about to join your brother and sister pastors in doing ministry in a particularly challenging context, and it has a name: Recession.

Recession.  Pastors all over this country are sitting with families, caring for them as they weep over and sometimes rage about lost jobs, homes that have been foreclosed upon, life savings depleted, retirement dreams shattered.  There are places all over the land where church councils gather in agonized meetings to hash out painful decisions: Should we pay the electricity bill with the money set aside for the food pantry, or do we cancel the youth mission trip to Appalachia?  Whose position should we eliminate from the budget, the quarter-time youth worker, or the quarter-time secretary?  Where can we cut, where can we save?  Recession, a time of anxiety and scarcity, a season of winnowing and fire.

In a season like that, we must do all we can, each of us and all of us, to be good stewards of the resources that are entrusted to us, to not squander or take for granted; to reduce, recycle, reuse.  Yes, in a recession there is a need to tighten up, to scrimp and conserve, maybe circle the financial wagons – sometimes these actions are absolutely necessary.  Yes.  But the great temptation in a recession is to allow that mentality of physical and financial scarcity to bleed into our heart for ministry, to let anxiety over physical resources become paralyzing, so that we allow God’s love to grow cold.  Even in a recession – and maybe most of all in a recession – we must remember that the story isn’t primarily about us; it’s about the Sower.

Notice what he doesn’t do?  The Sower doesn’t calculate, doesn’t compute; he isn’t careful.  Just the opposite!  He reaches deep into his bag, hauls out a big handful of seed and flings it!  He doesn’t care where it lands!  If a seed ends up in somebody’s eye or gets stuck in somebody’s craw, well, he’ll deal with that later; right now, there’s an inexhaustible supply of seed to toss!

Yes, this is a metaphor for the work of the pastor, and by extension the work of the local parish.  In a time of recession, a time of winnowing and fire and anxiety, the church – you, dear people of God – stand as beacons of the outlandish good news of the love of God.  Nowhere else – nowhere else – will people receive the assurance of God’s unconditional love that is the only food that will satisfy their deepest hunger.  Nowhere else will they receive the recognition of their own supreme value.  Nowhere else will they hear the voice of the One who reaches back into today from the end of time and says, “Behold, I make all things new, and I do it every day; the newness never runs out, ever!”

Brenda, this is not the time to preach a sermon series on God’s plan for living within your means.  In fact, if there is one place in our society where we refuse to live within our means, it should be when we worship God.  And that doesn’t happen just on Sunday mornings or whenever we gather as a community to sing, pray, hear a sermon, receive communion; worship is how we live in the world: we worship God in our forgiveness of one another, in our encouragement of one another, in our consoling of one another, in our announcement of grace.  Again, it isn’t primarily about us; it’s about the Sower, the One who acts with extravagant generosity.

The author Annie Dillard has written some provocative things about the craft of writing.  She says this: “One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all.  Shoot it, play it, lose it, all of it, right away, every time, all.  Do not hoard what seems good for later.  Give it, give it all, give it now.  The impulse to save something good for later is the signal to spend it now.  Something else will arise for later, something more, something better.  These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.  Similarly, the impulse to keep what you have learned for later is not only shameful, it’s destructive.  Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.  You open your safe and find ashes.”

I think her comments apply equally well to the work of the pastor, the one who is entrusted with the call to proclaim God in the world.  This applies to the work of the local parish, too.  We could say it this way: One of the few things I know about the incredible privilege of ministry is this: Spend it all.  Shoot it, play it, lose it, all of it, right away, every time.  When it comes to showing mercy, announcing forgiveness, calling to higher purpose, announcing salvation by grace through faith in Christ, give it, give it all, give it now, every time, all.  The impulse to save any good news for later is the signal to spend it now.  More will arise for later.  The supply never runs out, ever.  And the abundant harvest is already promised.  That’s the real world!

Brenda, reach deep down into that bag, pull out a big handful of seed and fling it!  If a seed ends up in somebody’s eye or gets stuck in somebody’s craw, well, deal with it later.  Right now there’s good news to announce with your life, so let ‘er rip!  Let that seed fly among the good people of Faith Lutheran, so much so that they’ll want to go out and do some flinging themselves! 

And may God keep you always in the palm of his ever-loving hand.  Amen.