Frail Vessels and Excellent Treasure
The following is adapted from a sermon delivered by Bishop Kenneth L. Carder at the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Forum, August 7, 2007, in Indianapolis, Ind.
II Corinthians 4:1-12
I would like to revisit an image and incident that I wrote about a few months ago in the SPE newsletter. As I explained then, I had asked students in my class, “The Local Church in Ministry to God’s World,” to select a metaphor that best describes the local church to which they are related. It was striking that most of the images portrayed the local churches as weak, fragile, and dying. The most graphic came from a student pastor of a small rural congregation. He said, “You’ve seen road-kill, haven’t you? The animal has just been hit and is barely clinging to life, quivering ever so slightly. That’s my church!”
Other class members initially laughed but most began to identify with the characterization. I asked, “If the congregation is road-kill, what metaphor best describes your role?” There was a long, nervous silence. I asked, “Are you the driver of the next vehicle that has the option of putting the animal out of its misery or perhaps the driver who swerves to miss it, eager to get on your way? Or, are you the highway clean up crew? Perhaps a veterinarian who will rescue the victim? Maybe you are simply an animal lover who stops and pauses briefly to pay respects?”
After several minutes of discussion, a pensive student responded, “I must be honest. I feel like I’m part of the road-kill. I feel inadequate and weak and I’m expected as a pastor to rescue frail and dying churches. We are told in seminary that the future of the church depends on us. Well, I don’t feel that I can carry that load.”
She passionately expressed the dilemma posed by current images of the church and its ministry. The prevailing rhetoric indicates that the contemporary church is quivering between life and death, bruised, weak, and frail. And, we must have skilled, imaginative, vibrant, agile, smart, “excellent” pastors who will rescue a “road-kill” church.
Such rhetoric belies Paul’s radical theology of ministry as expressed in his Corinthian correspondence, especially 2 Corinthians 1-7. In Paul’s images, it isn’t about the strength and vitality of the congregation or the excellence of the leader. “Excellent” isn’t used to modify or describe the church. Rather, the church and its ministry are frail, vulnerable, weak, foolish. Excellence lies with the treasure of which the congregation is a vessel.
The emphasis in Paul is not on the impact and dependence of the vessel on the treasure! Rather, the vessel is dependent upon the treasure. The treasure transforms and gives life to the vessel. The treasure is the primary agency of pastoral excellence, rather than excellent pastors being the primary agency of the treasure’s vitality and power. Now, that is a radical notion for Sustaining Pastoral Excellence.
Excellent ministry takes place, then, at the intersection of the frailty of the vessels and the excellence of the treasure: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels (Goodspeed ‘frail vessels’) to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.”
What is this excellent treasure? It is wrapped up in Paul’s soteriology. God has in Jesus Christ reconciled, transformed the whole creation. God has resurrected “road kill.” All things, in heaven and on earth, have been reconciled to God. As at the dawn of creation, God “made light to shine out of darkness,” God has brought life out of death, hope out of despair, reconciliation out of brokenness in Jesus Christ. All things have been made new!
Jesus, who is God’s treasure, identified the treasure as “the kingdom of God,” a “treasure hidden in the field,” a “pearl of great price.” This new world of God’s reign of compassion, justice, generosity, peace, and joy is more than a message, a theological abstraction to be studied and described. It is a reality loose in the cosmos, a power at work in human hearts, communities, institutions, and the world. A new creation has come into being and Jesus Christ is the firstborn of that new creation!
That Treasure, the power and presence of God to reconcile and transform, came wrapped in frailty. It was hidden in a vulnerable baby, born among the homeless in a barn of a peasant, unmarried teenager. He spent his early months as an immigrant (undocumented alien) in Egypt, grew up in a working class family, associated with the despised and powerless, entrusted the treasure to little children, died as a criminal, the victim of another culture’s brutal capital punishment, was buried in a borrowed grave—treated as “road kill.” But God raised the “Road Kill” to life. That is the excellent treasure. We call it the Gospel, the Good News. It is the treasure in frail, earthen vessels.
We get in touch with the Treasure by entering the world’s frailty, our own and others. God has chosen precisely frail, weak, vulnerable, “foolish” vessels to reveal, communicate, mediate, embody, experience the Treasure. The key is to so value the Treasure—the new creation—that life is transformed by it. The vessel takes on the qualities of the Treasure.
True pastoral excellence is being transformed by the Treasure. As Jesus affirmed, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). Vessels transformed by the Excellent Treasure is the secret to faithful ministry. Pastoral excellence is impossible apart from understanding of, commitment to, and relationship with the One who is the embodiment of God’s Excellent Treasure, Jesus Christ.
How are vessels transformed by the Treasure? The focus must remain on God. Ministry is first and foremost about the Triune God—who God is, where God is, what God is doing, and our relationship with God. Ministry isn’t first about the institutional church. It is about the present and coming reign of God. The church isn’t the Treasure, rather it is a frail vessel of the Treasure. Theology, therefore, is the primary stuff of ministry. We cannot, we must not, presume the theological foundation of Sustaining Pastoral Excellence. A presumed theology is, inevitably, a subsumed theology. Without explicit grounding in the presence and reality and purposes of the Triune God, our efforts at sustaining pastoral excellence will be an expensive exercise in futility.
Many of the SPE participants are discovering the power of the Treasure as they recover such historic practices as Sabbath, prayer, lectio divina, meditation, retreat, Sacraments, personal and corporate worship, and peer relationships. The annual reports contain many stories of transformation as pastors get in touch with their own frailty and vulnerability in community with peers. As they worship together, pray together, laugh and weep together, literally thousands of pastors are finding that the Excellent Treasure is transforming the frail vessels.
But there is an ancient, indispensable practice that is all too frequently ignored or neglected. It is as essential to excellent ministry as biblical exegesis, private and corporate worship, peer groups, and all acts of piety. That is intentional involvement and community with the frail, the vulnerable, the marginalized, those whom the Old Testament refers to as “the orphans, the widows, and the strangers” and Jesus calls “the least of these.”
As I understand the Biblical witness and the Incarnation, we simply cannot know the God of the Exodus and of Jesus Christ apart from ongoing friendship with the impoverished, the suffering, the oppressed, the sick, the imprisoned, the abused, the dying—those whom the world treats as “road kill”.
It appears to me that the SPE programs are doing well in developing community with peers, and when those groups express their own feelings of “road kill.” But those groups that have moved beyond homogeneity and comfort zones and entered into community with “the least of these” have found the “more excellent way” of an exceptional Treasure hidden in frail vessels.
Back to my class on the mission of the church and the image of road kill. One of the class requirements was that each student had to spend 10 to 12 hours in an “immersion experience” among the invisible people in their communities—inmates in a local jail or prison, patients in an HIV/AIDS facility, the homeless, residents of public housing and/or mobile home communities, etc. They were asked to do theological reflection on their experience and determine how they would lead a congregation to be in ministry among and with those currently on the margins. Among the questions they were encouraged to reflect on were these: Where did you experience the presence and power of God among the people you visited? What are the opportunities for and barriers to ministry with them? What difference, if any, did the experience make in your image of ministry?
The metaphors for the church changed rather dramatically from frailty, weakness, and death to signs of life, vitality, and hope. Students experienced in concrete, incarnational ways the reality of “prevenient grace” as they discovered the power and presence of God alive among “the least of these.” The image of road-kill resurfaced. But this time the frail, wounded, quivering life-form was giving birth. Out of frailty and death was emerging a new creation. Road-kill was being resurrected. The excellent Treasure of God’s new creation was transforming the frail vessels.
“We have this treasure in clay jars (frail vessels), so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” Excellent treasure in frail vessels! Excellence is in the Treasure; otherwise, we might assume we are the treasure!
Kenneth L. Carder is professor of the practice of pastoral formation at Duke Divinity School and a senior fellow with Pulpit & Pew: The Duke Center for Excellence in Ministry. He was bishop of the Mississippi Area of the United Methodist Church from 2000 to 2004 and the Nashville Area of the UMC from 1992 to 2000.
