I can’t think of a better way to have spent Inauguration Day than to gather with a cohort of preachers who want to work on proclaiming our bipartisan need, the love and mercy of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.
It’s a great and invigorating privilege to serve as the Preacher-in-Residence for the Iowa Preachers Project. It’s funded by the Lily Endowment and sponsored by Mockingbird ministries. If you’re a preacher, be on the lookout to apply for the next cohort.
Here is the— powerful— sermon by the program’s director, my friend Dr. Ken Sundet Jones (aka: the Old Guy in the photo).
His text was the daily epistle passage from 1 Corinthians 3:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge— God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you. Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. He will also keep you firm to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers and sisters, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispusand Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Midway through this inaugural year of the Iowa Preachers Project it has become glaringly obvious how mistaken I was to invite you into this esteemed group. A very wealthy family with a faith commitment created a philanthropic endeavor in part to assuage the tax penalty from the sales of my personal favorite injectables, insulin and Ozempic, and other pharmaceuticals they developed. Their largesse was given in the case of our particular grant program to somehow mend some kind of short circuit in the church’s proclamation that’s led to non-compelling preaching that’s led in turn to empty pews, empty “plate,” and empty hearts that look at the church and either go “meh” or say “Get behind me, Satan.” The Compelling Preaching Initiative, which funds this project, began with the hope that you’d be getting better at the preaching game so that the broken could be fixed, to make ecclesialdom great again. And what do I find in you?
We have ten Preaching Fellows who are inept, not fully committed, and unable to create an uptick in the important metrics the world judges churches by. You miss deadlines. You forget to Zoom. You prioritize your kids rather than the Project. You ghost your Sermon Whisperers. You make Kathryn gasp monthly when she reckons our outlay for hotels and flights and meals and the director’s salary. And for what?
Our grant stipulates that we’re supposed to create some internal way to assess whether we’re advancing the goals of the initiative. In some way, it implies that the church’s declining trends and its leaders’ concomitant guilt over such can themselves be assuaged by tweaking its public proclaimers’ work with some well-placed advice and offers of techniques for attaining relevancy. Underneath it all is a veiled understanding that you are openly failing your own ordination promises, that the Holy Spirit was having an off day when it tapped you for this vocation, and ultimately that you haven’t done your part to complete Jesus’ apparently unfinished work on the cross. How dare you show up here and spend our money? I might admit to having read Jay’s Christmas sermon and to enjoying a phone call with Lara and to liking Willie’s raspberry rhubarb jam and homemade breakfast sausage, but I’m perplexed about what to say about the cohort in our annual report to the Lilly Endowment next month.
Paul’s relationship with his letters’ recipients in Corinth is an indication of how the church functions when it’s not in its ivory tower, Pollyanna mode and actually deals with the reality of sinners gathering together and having them served by bumbling, inept, self-regarding shepherds. The epistolary evidence is clear that even the best of Jesus’ followers can do little in the face of the inertia and factionalism among so-called “believers.”
A mere letter isn’t going to do it. Paul is so disgusted that he’ll only cop to baptizing Crispus and Gaius, and then going, “Oh, my bad, I forgot, there was that Stephanus family.” It’s as if he’s so had it with them that he’s ready to quote Cee-Lo Green’s glorious break-up anthem to them. There’s a reason we have a Second Corinthians, which was probably initially also letters three, four, and five. Does anyone imagine that those Christians in that Ancient Greek seaport and retirement complex for Roman soldiers got better because of some technique Paul tried out or a new program he concocted or a grant initiative he established to dole out millions of drachmas to well-intentioned but incalcitrant pew-sitters?
What we find in the appointed passage from the daily lectionary puts the lie to everything I’ve said about the grant initiative and you, for Paul calls it all into question with these words: “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In essence, Paul is saying that the whole endeavor to fix the brokenness of life in the face of sin by exerting the law and assessing its fruits through the law’s solipsistic metrics is a fool’s game for adjudicatory functionaries and grant managers to play but something for people serious about Jesus Christ and his benefits to be leery of. In other words, Paul is telling you not to buy into that garbage. It’ll perpetuate the dysfunction. It will kill your joy in ministry and maybe even be the undoing of your very existence.
In my last parish call, I faced a pair of yoked congregations with whom I found myself at odds. They didn’t pay me what they’d promised. We used up our savings in our first year there and went into debt over the next 18 months until I fled to grad school. They had secret meetings about me, and they refused to allow me the use the cemetery riding mower to tackle my hour-and-a-half lawn mowing duties at the parsonage. I spiralled down into a depression and found myself in the garage contemplating the strength of the rafters for bearing the weight at the end of a rope and in the kitchen staring at a drawer of knives wondering if they were sharp enough to open a wrist. I worked myself to despair over not despairing and became more despairing. I saw my entire performance in that call as an arc of forsakenness and desolation. I have no doubt that today I would be planted in a cemetery lying horizontal beside a church I was disgusted with if it were not for my friend and fellow pastor Steve Jacobson who recognized the death spiral in me and changed its course by saying, “You’re right, Ken, you’re not enough and never have been. But that’s not the point. There’s a doctor who is plenty good and a Lord who’s even better. Let’s get you some help.”
What I had so wrong when I started that call thirty years ago was that, when it came to ministry and the vocation of being one of the church’s public proclaimers of the gospel, I gave good homily, I mouthed law and gospel, and said nice things about grace to others, but I never believed it applied to me. And when my wife tried to preach it to me, I heard Charlie Brown’s teacher intoning. Ministry was a danger zone, and worldly metrics were this codependent legalist’s most cherished drug. Better than the nicotine I sneaked in the car on the way to visit shut-ins.
So listen to Paul again. “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Such a spiritual gift has nothing to do with charm or popularity. Still less is it connected to budgets and forms and whether the church toilets flush.
If Paul’s desire that emptying of the cross of Christ of its power is to be prevented, it means the spiritual gift the apostle speaks of earlier, that he says is not lacking in Corinth, must be both utterly limited in scope and universally applicable. If the cross of Christ is to retain its power, it means no one else is allowed to accrue power and authority themselves. When the revealing of the Lord that we await happens, every knee will bend because the bodies they’re connected to will have seen the impotence of their potential and good intentions. Their spiritual gift will be the most excellent state of being unmoving, unwilling, un functioning cadavers, in other words, being dead to themselves.
Which, of course, is good news for people like us who await the Youngest Day, fully aware that even on our best days we have one foot in the grave, with knees shaking and equilibrium lost. Wretched ones that we are, who will rescue us from this body of death? Whatever ineptitude, disquiet, or despair you bring to the table, the gospel you have been called to preach is for you, precisely you, my friends and colleagues, my beloved companions in the grave who long for the promised coming of the Lord.
If this goofy little Project out of Iowa is to be faithful to our calling and to serve as an outpost where the power of the cross is undiminished, then this gig has to be an endeavor steeped in grace, abounding in mercy, and able to rejoice in the actual people who are linked to each other through it. What’s more, if you’re to be compelling preaching lab mice, you will only become such exotic creatures if you’ve known sin, death, and the devil coming after you to aim accusations of failure your way and then, in turn, that you’ve heard that this same good news you preach is for you.
So let me tell you again: You are not lacking, for you have at your command the undiminished power of Christ’s cross that has severed you from guilt and protects you from any accuser’s slings and arrows. And when your faults are pointed out as evidence of your unworthiness, take a page from Luther’s playbook and say, “Ah, my blessed accuser. Thank you for reminding me and for sending me back to the gospel. You’re exactly right. I don’t deserve any of the panoply of blessings my Lord promises me. I belong neither to Paul nor to Apollos, and certainly not to you. I belong to him who gave me his life in my baptism. You’re just gonna have to take that up with him and let me get on with whatever paltry bit I can contribute to his mission. Let’s put a pin and this and talk later. I’m eager to see how your chat with him goes.”
When I take on Chloe’s role in my annual report next month, that’s exactly what i’ll have to say about you: “I give thanks to my God always for our cohort of Preaching Fellows because of the grace of God that has been given them in Christ Jesus, for in every way they have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind — just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you — so that they are not lacking in any spiritual gift as they wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” What a gift you are! Amen.
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