Transcript
F: Let us pray. Gracious and loving God, how grateful we are to gather here together in your name to sing your praises and to hear your eternal word. From generation to generation you have called your people, given them and us life and breath and purpose as we strive to live in your image.
You have created the world and all that is and proclaimed it good and called us to be Your stewards. By the words of your forbearers, we have known of Your commandments and of Your faithful and steadfast love. By your prophets, You have called us to repentance. By and through Your son, You have offered us forgiveness and reconciliation and eternal life. By the power of Your
Holy Spirit, You comfort and sustain and guide us still. Here are words of thanksgiving, merciful God. And grant us courage to make our service and our praise one. To the honor and glory of Your name. Amen.
M: Let us confess our sins together.
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M: Hear the good news of assurance. If anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creature. Behold the old has passed away. All is new. Amen.
AUDIENCE: Amen.
M: It is my privilege this evening to introduce our evening preacher, President Tom Gillespie opens the institute each year and we look forward to that. He has been, shall we say, into all the world -- at least the part of the world of Asia recently. This seminary and the office of presidency intersects so much of the church around the world, and it's been his privilege to be in Korea and Japan. We welcome him this evening.
GILLESPIE: Let me add a personal word of greeting to all of you who have come from so far to be with us for the Institute of Theology this summer. I, increasingly, believe that this institute is truly one of the most important ministries which this seminary conducts. The things which happen here to ministers and to the spouses of ministers to the laity who support ministers
during these days together each summer -- is truly a healing, renewing, and redemptive experience. So, we are glad to see you and it is a great joy to stand here and look out and see faces that one has known from across the church, across the nation, and even across the world. Thank you for coming. Mrs. Gillespie and I look forward to welcoming you tomorrow night to Springdale
and we trust that we will have the privilege of greeting you in our home on that occasion. You have heard the theme for the week: "Into All the World." I have chosen tonight to address this theme by speaking to those who have gone and are going into all the world, into that
corner of the world where you labor in the Lord's vineyard, where you work God's claim upon the Earth. I have chosen to speak to all who are engaged in the paradox of the ministry. Hear, then, the word of God as it is read from the second letter of the apostle Paul to the Corinthians.
The fourth chapter reading from the first verse and, then, the sixth chapter reading from the third verse, "Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word,
but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience to the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the un-believers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the
glory of Christ who is the likeness of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord with ourselves as your servants 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 knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed,
perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.
For, while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus sake' so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh." The sixth chapter, the third verse, "We put no obstacle in anyone's way so that no fault may be found with our ministry. But, as servants of God, we commend
ourselves in every way through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watching, hunger. By purity, knowledge, forbearance, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love, truthful speech and the power of God with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left. In honor and
in dishonor, in ill repute and good repute we are treated as imposters and, yet, are true. As unknown and yet well-known, as dying and behold we live, as punished and yet not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing
and yet possessing everything." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Let the good news come now, our Father, not only in word, but in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full assurance
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Comedian George Carlin illustrates the nature of a paradox by the phrase "jumbo shrimp". The pun may not be great humor, but it does point up the fact that a paradox involves a contradiction.
Paradoxes are created by contradictions -- contradictions in logic, contradictions in expectations, contradictions in experience. So far as we know, the apostle Paul never used the Greek term paradoxus. At least, it appears nowhere in his correspondence that has been preserved in the New Testament. But as our test from his second letter to the Corinthians makes clear, Paul knew the concept.
Speaking out of his own experience, he describes the apostolic ministry of the gospel in terms of its inherent contradictions. "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of
Jesus may also be manifested in our moral bodies." Paul knew the paradox of the ministry so much so that he adds to this list of its paradoxical characteristics. "We are treated as imposters and, yet, are true, as unknown and yet well-known, as dying and behold we life, as punished and yet not killed, as sorrowful and yet always
rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing and yet possessing everything." Again, Paul is speaking out of his ministerial experience. In his book, Interpretation Theory, Paul Ricoeur notes that the miracle of human discourse permits us to communicate to one another the meaning of our experience, but not the experience itself.
In discourse, we go public with the meaning of our experience while the experience about which we speak remains private. This poses serious problems for anyone who seeks to interpret such texts as these, as are before us in 2 Corinthians. Through our knowledge of words and grammar and syntax, we can certainly comprehend the sense of these text, but those who have never experiences the paradoxes to which these texts refer will be
unable to understand, fully, the authors meaning. Reading these passages will be like knowing the words to a song without knowing the tune. Recently, our alumni and alumni gathered here on the campus for their five-, 10-, 20-, 30-, 40-, and 50-year class reunions. At the banquet on Friday night, the graduating class of 1987 was publically welcomed into the alumni and alumni association.
The Class President responded with a brief, but eloquent and impassioned statement. With a touch of good humor, he declared boldly the class of 1987 was different from all those classes that had gone before. They were, he claimed, broader in their inclusiveness and deeper in their commitment to justice issues. It was, of course, an expression of the bravado that one expects to hear from graduating seniors on such occasions.
But as he spoke, my mind flashed back to the individual class reunions that Barbara and I had attended the night before. In those smaller groups of former classmates and their spouses there was a sharing of life experiences in the work of ministry since their graduation. There were stories of successes and failures, stories of joys and sorrows, joys of victories and defeats, stories of
highs and lows in the walk of faith. As a member of the class of 1967 put it to me the next day out here on the steps of the chapel, it is amazing how much pain there has been in our class over the past 20 years. So, I sat listening to the young and able president of the class of 1987 and realized that he and his classmates know the words to the song of ministry,
but they've yet to learn the tune. As one of them -- any one of them could exegete the sense of these Pauline texts from 2 Corinthians, but few, if any of them, have yet experiences the realities of ministry to which these texts refer. But they will experience these paradoxes, even as every one of us have experienced them over the years of our own engagement in
this calling of God. I'm assuming, tonight, that you know the tune of these texts, as well as the words. I think that's a safe assumption because Paul here describes not merely his own personal experience of ministry, but the nature of ministry itself. Anyone who undertakes this task learns, in due season, the truth of these paradoxes. For the ministry
is carried out amidst the ambiguities, the contradictions, even the absurdities which characterize life lived before God and under God in the world. We address the message of God's salvation to the world, but we soon discover that the world is often less than interested in being saved. Our experience is like that of the two boy scouts who were sent out from a troop meeting to do a good deed. When they
returned it was evident that they had been in quite a fight. They were bruised, bloodied, and disheveled. "What happened to you?" the scout master demanded. "We did what you told us," they replied, "We did our good deed for the day." "Well, what good deed did you do?" "We helped an old lady across the street." "How did that result in your present condition?"
"She didn't want to go." You and I know that the world outside the church and the world inside the church doesn't always want to go the way of the gospel. And because it does not want to go that way, it provides ministers of the gospel with their experiences of affliction, perplexity, persecution, and defeat.
But at the same time, God provides his ministers of grace, which prevent them from being crushed, driven to despair, feeling forsaken, and being destroyed. The world, including the church, treats God's ministers as imposters, unknown, dying, [parry?], sorrowful, poor, and having nothing. In fact, the church sees that the latter is true. God treats his ministers as true,
well-known, living, joyful, rich, and, in Christ, possessing everything. On the side of the world, I would include all the things that we ministers do to create our own problems. Having served on the committee on ministry of two metropolitan presbyteries, I am well aware that the pain we experience is not all caused by our faithfulness.
Much of it is the fruit of our foolishness. But even then and even there, we have experienced the sustaining and the life-giving grace of God. But the truth is that, sooner or later, our experiences of the world begin to call into question our experiences of grace. For, at best, it is difficult to live for long in the midst of a paradox.
Most of us, I dare say, enter the ministry expecting God to sustain, bless, and use us in the work of ministry. Few, if any of us, expected to pay the price that the practice of ministry has required of us. More than likely, we expected God to preserve us from these ambiguities and contradictions and absurdities of life in ministry rather than
to preserve us in them. That is why the practice of ministry leads so often to a crisis of faith in the lives of ministers. In a book that has meant a great deal to me, entitled Lighten our Darkness, Douglas John Hall points out that faith is always placed in crisis when our expectations are contradicted by our experiences. When faced
with such a situation, we can do one of three things. We can deny our experiences and, thus, drift into mental illness. Or we can deny our expectations and, thus, slide into cynicism and despair. Or we can revise our expectations of God in the light of the gospel and, thus, grow in grace and in faith.
The latter choice is not easy, but it is redemptive. And our norm for such a revision is what Paul calls, in this text, "the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ". This typical example of the Pauline propensity for overusing -- the genitive construction needs to be unpacked in order to be understood. The term gospel, in the apostles usage, conveys both the notion of the content of the Christian message and the act of
proclaiming that message. The content of the gospel for Paul, put simply, is Jesus Christ -- Jesus Christ in the fullness of his reality and redemptive significance. And, thus, one of Paul's favorite phrases is simply the gospel of Christ, the gospel of Christ, the gospel of Christ. But here this simple phrase is expanded in a
most significant manner. The apostle declares that, when the gospel of Christ is proclaimed, something happens. Metaphorically speaking, light is manifested in the gospel's proclamation and the source of this light is the glory of Christ, the manifestation of the personal being of the living Lord who is the image of God. His point is that a Christophany in the preaching of the gospel. People who
hear the gospel proclaimed are confronted not by the preacher alone and not by the message of the preacher, but through that message they are confronted by the reality of Jesus Christ Himself. The further point is that the risen and living Christ who confronts us in the proclamation of the gospel is and remains the crucified Christ. According to New Testament scholarship, the Corinthian heresy against which the
apostle inveighs in his correspondence with this troubled and troublesome church was the mistaken notion that believers are lifted by the Spirit of God out of the conditions which make life a cross into the conditions of resurrection existence. Their slogan was, "All ready!" And Paul's counter slogan was, "Not yet."
Until the resurrection of the body, the Christian life is lived under the sign and under the conditions of the cross of Christ. Writing in Lighten Our Darkness, Douglas John Hall puts it this way, "The test of theological authenticity is whether we can present Jesus as the crucified. To be concrete, can one perceive in the Jesus of this theology a man who knows the
meaning of meaninglessness, the experience of negation, the anguish of hopelessness. Does he encounter the absurd and with trembling? Would a man dare to confess to this Jesus his deepest anxieties, his most ultimate questions? Would such a Jesus comprehend the gnawing care of a generation of
parents who live every day with the questions will my children be able to survive as human beings in the year 2001, 2026? Will there be enough to eat? Will they be permitted to have children? Would he, the God-man of this theology be able to weep over the dead bodies of little children in Southeast Asia and Brazil as he wept over his friend Lazarus? Could he
participate in the anguish and the anger of those who know why the little children died, how it was not their sickness unto death that cut them off so early? Could he share our doubt -- doubt about God, doubt about man, doubt about life, doubt about every absolute? Could he understand why we cling to expectations that are no longer affirmed or
confirmed by experience, why we repress the most essential questions? Would such a Christ understand failure? Could he participate in our failure or is he eternally above all that? Do we have to do with him now only as the risen and glorious one who has put all that behind him? Magnificent with answers
and Himself -- the answer has He ascended far above the misty flats of our questions. In some, the test of authenticity in theology today is, is this Jesus Christ and Him crucified? The Christ of the gospel, which you and I have been called to proclaim, is indeed
the risen and living Lord. But as the risen and the living one, He is and He remains the crucified and that is the basis of his claim to authenticity in a world that is characterized by ambiguity and negation and contradiction and absurdity. The point is that the same authenticity qualifies the gospel and those who proclaim it.
The ministry of the gospel of Christ crucified is carried out under the sign and under the conditions of the cross of Jesus. It is significant that the apostle twice in this passage speaks of Christ being manifested in and through this ministry. The first occurs in his statement that he and his colleagues refuse to practice cunning or to temper with God's word, but, rather,
commend themselves to everyone's conscience before God by the manifestation of the truth -- a phrase which the RSV renders somewhat anemically as the open statement. No, no. The manifestation of the truth -- the reference is to the proclamation of the gospel. And the truth which is manifested in preaching is nothing less than
the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. The second reference to the manifestation of Christ in and through the ministry occurs in the statement that ministers of the gospel carry in their bodies the death of Jesus. Why? So that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. The crucified Christ manifest Himself, in other words,
not only in our preaching the gospel, but in our preaching the gospel incarnationally under the sign and the conditions of the cross. Here the medium is not the message, but the message does qualify and characterize the medium. At this point, each one of us could bear witness to our own experiences of
life in ministry under the sign of the cross. I have no doubts about that. I will simply share one experience of my own. In 1975, my wife and I returned from a glorious month of travel in Europe, our first visit to Italy, Switzerland -- her father's homeland -- Austria,
and Germany. It was a magnificent trip and we returned tired, but exhilarated from it and plunged back into the work of our church. There were two marriages in crisis at the time and a ten-foot pile of mail on my desk. A week later, on a Monday, I was feeling very antsy. So, I called a friend who could resist
everything, but temptation when it comes to tennis. I said, "Do you want to play at noon?" He said, "You're on." And we went down to the local park on a very, very warm, May day -- make that a hot May day -- and played two, grueling sets of tennis. The unfortunate part of which is that I lost both sets. He, being the fanatic
that he still is about tennis, wanted to play a third set. And I, being the fool that I am, agreed to do it. When I arrived home, my wife took one look at me and she said, "You look awful." That is frequently the case, but she's not prone to saying that frequently. And I was. I was ashen. I was drained.
But I took a shower and had a coke and made a few hospital calls, came home, and sat down in the big chair for dinner and almost couldn't not get up to eat, but went to the worship commission meeting that night and came home and went to bed and the next morning walked into a Tuesday morning bible class that we conducted for the women of the church -- a very low-key, non-pressure kind of situation --
kind of a good time on Tuesday morning and walked in and said, "Good morning, let us pray." And as I started to pray, it was like there was an explosion inside my body. My doctor later told me it was an explosion of the central nervous system saying, "Too much! Too much!" And a great charge of electricity came up through my chest and
out my arms and I thought, "I'm going to die." I excused myself and walked into my study. My secretary saw me go by. She said, "Are you OK?" I said, "No." She called my colleague. He came running in, "Are you OK?" The answer was the same. "No." And I really believe that I would have been on the fifth floor of Peninsula Hospital that night, which was the psychiatric ward, or in the cardiac ward. I wasn't sure which.
My wife was called. She came, picked me up, took me to the doctor, he ruled out heart attack. I immediately felt 95% better. And, then, he sat me down and he said, "You know, forgive me for being this blunt, but you ministers are crazy. You think that because you wear a suit and sit behind a desk a good part of the day and life a sedentary life that you're not putting a strain on your
bodies." He said, "Your body just told you that's enough. No more." And he said, "It's not for me to tell you what you're going to have to do to change your life, but you're going to have to change your life." Well, the next day I went back to the church, but you know what happened? From that day on for the next three years,
every time I stood up in front of a group or mounted the steps of the pulpit I had an anxiety attack like you would not believe. The psychologists call it the fear of fear. I was afraid it would happen again because it happened the first time when I stood before a group. And the pressures of standing before a group and speaking to a group were too much. And I would stand there, literally,
on Sunday morning and grab the pulpit with both hands and put my head down and read and pray to God that I wouldn't bolt for the door. And there would be a great rise of anxiety come up within me and I would simply hang on until it passed away. I really believed that my ministry had ended because I could not image going through that agony every time I stood up to speak or to preach.
And it was though God had taken what had always been, for me, the easy part. I was born into a family that never had an unexpressed thought in its life. I had what my father called "the gift of gab". Speaking in front of people had always been the easiest thing I was ever called upon to do. And now, suddenly, it was the impossible for me to do.
And if you think that the good Lord and I did not go round and round and round on that one, you think wrongly. For what had been my strength was now my weakness. And I discovered that verse in Paul, in 2 Corinthians -- "My strength is made strong in
weakness." Knowing that is one thing, living that is another. It was during this period of my life that I first read Lighten Our Darkness by Douglas John Hall, a Canadian. It was a source of insight and of great encouragement to me, particularly these lines, "The theology of the cross is, first of all, a way of speaking about the
character of God's entry into the sphere of human history. It is not merely a statement about the death of Jesus, but about his life and the meaning of his life for our lives. It is not merely a statement about the human condition. It is testimony to the assumption of the human condition by the one who created and creates out of something. The basic point of this theology is not to reveal that our condition is one of darkness and death. It is to reveal to us the one who
meets us in our darkness and death. It is theology of the cross not because it wants to put forward this ghastly spectacle as a final statement about life and the world, but because it insists that God, who wills to meet us, love us, redeem up, meets, loves, and redeems us precisely where we are in the valley of the shadow of death. The theology of the cross declares,
'God is with you. Emmanuel. He is alongside you in your suffering. He is in the darkest place of your dark night.'" I don’t know what the darkest place of your dark night is, but I am confident that you have them. And I can tell you that the truth of these words has been confirmed
in my experience of ministry over and over again. But that is how it is in the paradox of the ministry. And my earnest prayer tonight is that you have experienced or will yet experience that same confirmation in your life and in your ministry.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
F: Let us all stand and affirm our faith.
AUDIENCE: We believe in God who has created and is creating, who has come in the truly human Jesus to reconcile and to make new, who works with us and others by the Spirit, we trust God who calls us to be the church, to celebrate life and its fullness, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil, to proclaim Jesus,
crucified and risen, our judge and our hope. In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us. We are not alone. Thanks be to God. Amen. Please be seated.
F: Let us pray. Oh, God of light, we sit in silence with Your word resounding in our hearts and our minds, illuminating for us Your truth. We are the privileged ones gathered for a time of rest and refreshment. Our lives are full and our concerns
are many and we are grateful for a time to be challenged and renewed and encouraged in our task. We trust those whom we have left behind in Your care and trust You will move mightily in each of our lives in these weeks. We are grateful for ministries with all their paradoxes, for the good and for the bad, for the rough and the smooth. And
we are ever mindful of our dependency on You for wisdom and insight, patience and endurance, and always, o God, for your grace. Even as we acknowledge the gift of ministry and our limitations as earthly vessels, we give you thanks for our talents and for the opportunities before us. We lift before you those tonight for whom ministry is a foreign word
and the experience of love is unknown. We hold before you those who did not know Your name, who have never Your word, or experienced Your healing presence. We pray for those who have heard and have not responded and for those who have been hurt by or pushed out of the fellowship with those of us who call ourselves by Your name. We pray for Your love to show through us
so that it will conquer all that divides and separates us from others. On this night, O Lord, when we recognize the gifts which you have given us, we pray for the poor, for the down-trodden, for those who have no voice, who have no advocates, who have no hope. And we pray for the rich and the powerful
who have opportunities to affect change, who have voices that count in the councils, and we pray that their hope is firmly rooted and grounded in Your word and in Your will. We pray for those who are discouraged and disheartened, disgusted and despairing. We pray for those who are energetic and engaging and encouraging. We pray for all of us, praying
knowing that You hear our prayers from the bottom of our hearts spoken and unspoken. We pray because we trust you, o Lord, because you have promised that where two or three are gathered in your name, you will hear us and be with us. And, so, we offer our prayers. Hear them as we offer them to You in silence.
It is with grateful hearts, o Lord, that we offer these prayers to you and trust that all your promises are true. And we offer now the prayer, which Jesus taught us, saying, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth
as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen."
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GILLESPIE: Go in peace and the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
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