The Sermon from my Ordination
Hi folks,
Normally, I just post sermons I wrote, but this time, I'd like to share the sermon preached by my pastor, Mary Luti, at my ordination this Sunday, Oct. 8th. If you'd like to read more of her (wonderful!) sermons, go to First Church in Cambridge's website.
Enough For Me
By Rev. Dr. J. Mary Luti
Scriptures: Isaiah 55, Romans 8: 18-39, Matthew 28:5-10, 16-20
A little over seven years ago, I was jobless (I preferred to say that I was “unaffiliated”) and wrestling with whether to throw my hat in the ring for a denominational position or to apply for a local church pastorate. Both were scary possibilities, but the pastor thing was particularly scary. I’d spent years as a seminary teacher helping other people become ministers, yet I really didn’t know what it might mean to become one myself.
I consulted an old friend who’d been in pastoral ministry for forty years. Over crab cakes he lobbied hard for the parish. “Take a church,” he said. “You can get a denominational job down the road.” At first I thought he meant that I needed to pay my dues on the local level first before aspiring to a wider institutional ministry. But he wasn’t laying out a career strategy. “Take a church,” he said again, with real urgency. “You’d be a fool to pass up a chance to be loved like that.”
I was shocked, scandalized. I thought, “What an egotistical reason to become a minister!” It also seemed to ignore the evidence. Ministers irritate people. They disappoint at least one parishioner every day. They are always going too fast or too slow for congregational comfort. Not everybody loves their pastor. I was pretty peeved at my own pastor at the time.
“Don’t pass up a chance to be loved like that,” my friend pleaded. “Okay, I won’t,” I said to him. But to myself I said, “This is a problem. Because if he’s right, if being ‘loved like that’ is the reason you become a minister, I may not be suited for the parish. I have too many frailties and foibles to be the object of such affection. I’ll never be able to deserve it.”
It turns out that in the six years-plus that I have now been ordained and serving a local church, I have repeatedly experienced the love “like that” my friend was wishing for me. It’s hard to describe what it is, impossible to explain. It’s not as if these few short years on the job have been an uninterrupted love-fest in any ordinary sense. From time to time I have been either the true cause or the handy occasion of dust-ups and disagreements, anger and grievance, disappointment and frustration. Not everuone has loved this minister.
And yet, mysteriously, I can still say that my friend was right. From the very first day, when a church member who had just met me looked me in the eye and said, “My pastor,” I understood that this pastor-parish business was to be no ordinary relationship. How you can be “loved like that” even when not everyone likes you is a great mystery. A mystery akin to how much you love you parishioners even when you don’t always love them either. And I would indeed have been a total fool to pass on this experience.
If I had a confused soul in front of me vacillating about ordained pastoral ministry, I would say exactly what my friend told me. And if she should balk at such a venal, self-centered reason for becoming a minister, I would reply that in the most profound view, it is the only reason for becoming a minister. Mark Hollingsworth, who is now an Episcopal bishop in Ohio, was the deployment officer for the Massachusetts diocese. He used to tell the newly-ordained that God was sending them to the parish for their own salvation, not the salvation of the people they would serve. My old friend was right—you would be a fool to pass up the chance to be loved like that. And because love alone saves us, you would be a fool to pass up a chance to be saved like that.
But I was right too, about not being able to deserve it, I mean. Sometimes after a long day on the job, and not necessarily one of those “meaningful” days—it could even be a stupid day when I have lurched from meeting to meeting, attended too anxiously to too much petty congregational crapioca, and completely forgotten to pray—I feel inexplicably grateful, like you do when you witness an incredible sunset, or when you are out for a walk on the best fall day that ever was, and you pass a group of fellow strollers and exchange glances with them as if to say, “What did we do to deserve this?”
And the answer, of course, is nothing. You deserve it no more than you deserve the eyes of your child, or the rumble of the organ’s low notes, or a single moment of time in this fleeting life.
I do not deserve to be on the receiving end of the mysterious love that characterizes ministry in a community of faith. Neither do you, Amy. No one does. All you can do is be grateful.
“Ho! Come to the waters, everyone who thirsts,” we heard Isaiah say a few minutes ago. “Eat your fill of bread. Never mind about money. It’s free. You can’t buy what God alone can give. Don’t even try.”
“Can’t pray? Don’t know how?” we heard Paul ask in the second reading. “Not to worry. The Spirit is already in you, praying for you, a Word beyond your words, a gift beyond your efforts, a done deal before you can even ask.”
“Here is a mission impossible—go and transform the whole world simply by your testimony.” That’s Jesus talking in the gospel for today. And then he adds, “I’m going ahead of you; I’ll be with you to the end of the age.”
The readings Amy chose are luscious and lavish, but they barely scratch the surface of the biblical wonderland of grace, the divine economy in which everything is supplied, nothing is lacking, and all things are possible. Only inside this generous world does ministry make sense. And only when it operates by the mechanisms of grace is ministry worthy of the name.
Most people go into the ministry in order to help other people. Or to transform congregations. Or to heal a broken world. They intend to bring their gifts and training to bear on worthy projects, never suspecting that in the end they are the ones who will be helped, transformed, and healed. They set out to love, never suspecting that they will be the objects of inexplicable and undeserved affection.
We focus our attention—and rightly—on the proficiencies needed for effective ministry. Amy has just been through a long process of poking and prodding to be sure she has enough of them, and in high quality. We believe that she does, and that’s why we’re here ordaining her today. But I think it would be important in these long required discernment processes to give as much time to contemplating the gift of ministry as we give to scrutinizing gifts for ministry. Because even more than on character, knowledge, and know-how, ministry rises and falls on grace. Ministry is a grace, a divine gift. And if we can absorb that stubborn fact, we will not do our ministry with full and busy hands, we will receive our ministry with empty and open ones. Our confidence will reside not in knowledge, talent, method, and process, but in the gratitude, humility and amazement with which those gifts are employed.
Now, we know that Amy is not being called to a local parish like First Church. She won’t be a pastor in the typical sense. But her call to sustain and shape small communities of young adult volunteers is no less a mystery and a gift. She will spend countless hours bringing her best skills and knowledge to their service as they grow in the Christian life together. She will pastor them along the way, but as the old song says, it will be grace that brings them home. She will love them to pieces too, of that I’m sure, but what she herself will know of love when all is said and done is far too deep for words. She will be loved “like that,” and she won’t be able to explain it any more than I can. But it will be enough for her, and more than enough.
In the first part of the 16th century, St. Ignatius Loyola is said to have composed a prayer which later became the quintessential prayer of the Jesuits Order he founded. It is known as the Suscipe, after its first Latin word, “take,” or “receive.” It should also be the quintessential minister’s prayer, especially the last part which contains the phrase, et dives sum satis— “…and with these riches I am satisfied”—or more colloquially, “…they are enough for me.”
What are the riches the prayer speaks of? What is it that is enough for me, for my life, for my ministry? Listen. Here is the whole prayer, in my rough translation. A prayer for you, Amy, and a prayer with you on your ordination day—the best prayer I can offer.
And to that we say, Amen.
Normally, I just post sermons I wrote, but this time, I'd like to share the sermon preached by my pastor, Mary Luti, at my ordination this Sunday, Oct. 8th. If you'd like to read more of her (wonderful!) sermons, go to First Church in Cambridge's website.
Enough For Me
By Rev. Dr. J. Mary Luti
Scriptures: Isaiah 55, Romans 8: 18-39, Matthew 28:5-10, 16-20
A little over seven years ago, I was jobless (I preferred to say that I was “unaffiliated”) and wrestling with whether to throw my hat in the ring for a denominational position or to apply for a local church pastorate. Both were scary possibilities, but the pastor thing was particularly scary. I’d spent years as a seminary teacher helping other people become ministers, yet I really didn’t know what it might mean to become one myself.
I consulted an old friend who’d been in pastoral ministry for forty years. Over crab cakes he lobbied hard for the parish. “Take a church,” he said. “You can get a denominational job down the road.” At first I thought he meant that I needed to pay my dues on the local level first before aspiring to a wider institutional ministry. But he wasn’t laying out a career strategy. “Take a church,” he said again, with real urgency. “You’d be a fool to pass up a chance to be loved like that.”
I was shocked, scandalized. I thought, “What an egotistical reason to become a minister!” It also seemed to ignore the evidence. Ministers irritate people. They disappoint at least one parishioner every day. They are always going too fast or too slow for congregational comfort. Not everybody loves their pastor. I was pretty peeved at my own pastor at the time.
“Don’t pass up a chance to be loved like that,” my friend pleaded. “Okay, I won’t,” I said to him. But to myself I said, “This is a problem. Because if he’s right, if being ‘loved like that’ is the reason you become a minister, I may not be suited for the parish. I have too many frailties and foibles to be the object of such affection. I’ll never be able to deserve it.”
It turns out that in the six years-plus that I have now been ordained and serving a local church, I have repeatedly experienced the love “like that” my friend was wishing for me. It’s hard to describe what it is, impossible to explain. It’s not as if these few short years on the job have been an uninterrupted love-fest in any ordinary sense. From time to time I have been either the true cause or the handy occasion of dust-ups and disagreements, anger and grievance, disappointment and frustration. Not everuone has loved this minister.
And yet, mysteriously, I can still say that my friend was right. From the very first day, when a church member who had just met me looked me in the eye and said, “My pastor,” I understood that this pastor-parish business was to be no ordinary relationship. How you can be “loved like that” even when not everyone likes you is a great mystery. A mystery akin to how much you love you parishioners even when you don’t always love them either. And I would indeed have been a total fool to pass on this experience.
If I had a confused soul in front of me vacillating about ordained pastoral ministry, I would say exactly what my friend told me. And if she should balk at such a venal, self-centered reason for becoming a minister, I would reply that in the most profound view, it is the only reason for becoming a minister. Mark Hollingsworth, who is now an Episcopal bishop in Ohio, was the deployment officer for the Massachusetts diocese. He used to tell the newly-ordained that God was sending them to the parish for their own salvation, not the salvation of the people they would serve. My old friend was right—you would be a fool to pass up the chance to be loved like that. And because love alone saves us, you would be a fool to pass up a chance to be saved like that.
But I was right too, about not being able to deserve it, I mean. Sometimes after a long day on the job, and not necessarily one of those “meaningful” days—it could even be a stupid day when I have lurched from meeting to meeting, attended too anxiously to too much petty congregational crapioca, and completely forgotten to pray—I feel inexplicably grateful, like you do when you witness an incredible sunset, or when you are out for a walk on the best fall day that ever was, and you pass a group of fellow strollers and exchange glances with them as if to say, “What did we do to deserve this?”
And the answer, of course, is nothing. You deserve it no more than you deserve the eyes of your child, or the rumble of the organ’s low notes, or a single moment of time in this fleeting life.
I do not deserve to be on the receiving end of the mysterious love that characterizes ministry in a community of faith. Neither do you, Amy. No one does. All you can do is be grateful.
“Ho! Come to the waters, everyone who thirsts,” we heard Isaiah say a few minutes ago. “Eat your fill of bread. Never mind about money. It’s free. You can’t buy what God alone can give. Don’t even try.”
“Can’t pray? Don’t know how?” we heard Paul ask in the second reading. “Not to worry. The Spirit is already in you, praying for you, a Word beyond your words, a gift beyond your efforts, a done deal before you can even ask.”
“Here is a mission impossible—go and transform the whole world simply by your testimony.” That’s Jesus talking in the gospel for today. And then he adds, “I’m going ahead of you; I’ll be with you to the end of the age.”
The readings Amy chose are luscious and lavish, but they barely scratch the surface of the biblical wonderland of grace, the divine economy in which everything is supplied, nothing is lacking, and all things are possible. Only inside this generous world does ministry make sense. And only when it operates by the mechanisms of grace is ministry worthy of the name.
Most people go into the ministry in order to help other people. Or to transform congregations. Or to heal a broken world. They intend to bring their gifts and training to bear on worthy projects, never suspecting that in the end they are the ones who will be helped, transformed, and healed. They set out to love, never suspecting that they will be the objects of inexplicable and undeserved affection.
We focus our attention—and rightly—on the proficiencies needed for effective ministry. Amy has just been through a long process of poking and prodding to be sure she has enough of them, and in high quality. We believe that she does, and that’s why we’re here ordaining her today. But I think it would be important in these long required discernment processes to give as much time to contemplating the gift of ministry as we give to scrutinizing gifts for ministry. Because even more than on character, knowledge, and know-how, ministry rises and falls on grace. Ministry is a grace, a divine gift. And if we can absorb that stubborn fact, we will not do our ministry with full and busy hands, we will receive our ministry with empty and open ones. Our confidence will reside not in knowledge, talent, method, and process, but in the gratitude, humility and amazement with which those gifts are employed.
Now, we know that Amy is not being called to a local parish like First Church. She won’t be a pastor in the typical sense. But her call to sustain and shape small communities of young adult volunteers is no less a mystery and a gift. She will spend countless hours bringing her best skills and knowledge to their service as they grow in the Christian life together. She will pastor them along the way, but as the old song says, it will be grace that brings them home. She will love them to pieces too, of that I’m sure, but what she herself will know of love when all is said and done is far too deep for words. She will be loved “like that,” and she won’t be able to explain it any more than I can. But it will be enough for her, and more than enough.
In the first part of the 16th century, St. Ignatius Loyola is said to have composed a prayer which later became the quintessential prayer of the Jesuits Order he founded. It is known as the Suscipe, after its first Latin word, “take,” or “receive.” It should also be the quintessential minister’s prayer, especially the last part which contains the phrase, et dives sum satis— “…and with these riches I am satisfied”—or more colloquially, “…they are enough for me.”
What are the riches the prayer speaks of? What is it that is enough for me, for my life, for my ministry? Listen. Here is the whole prayer, in my rough translation. A prayer for you, Amy, and a prayer with you on your ordination day—the best prayer I can offer.
TAKE, Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire will. You have given all to me. Now I return it. Do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. They are enough for me. Your love and your grace—and I am full of riches, wanting and needing nothing more.
And to that we say, Amen.
posted by Amy Sens at 12:57 PM
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