Good to Go: Collected, Connected, Commissioned
The following sermon was delivered August 14 at the annual meeting of the American Baptist Churches’ Ministers Council Senate, at Green Lake Conference Center, Green Lake, Wisc. The Ministers Council sponsors the Together in Ministry Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project.
I Kings 19
Back when I first became involved in the Ministers Council there was much talk of the organization as a labor union, a description some still repeat and believe. To be totally honest, I do recall early 1980s Senate discussion about the advisability of adversarial action, such as striking for adequate compensation. I also remember thinking what an incredibly naïve impulse that was.
But that was then and this is now. The Ministers Council is and has been since its founding in 1935 our professional association of American Baptist pastoral leaders, governed and funded by us, not a part of the denominational structure or participant in its mission revenue stream. It has always been up to us to determine the Ministers Council’s direction to serve pastoral leaders, and to some degree our destiny in ministry through it.
These days the energizing conviction of the Ministers Council is this: excellence requires a deep understanding of and participation in the kind of covenantal faithfulness that all professions must honor. It is our job to create for ourselves systems that strengthen that covenantal faithfulness and relationships that support it, so that our constituents know that we are people of our word, and we are able to be that.
When the Ministers Council Executive Committee met last February 14, Valentines Day, their hearts were definitely full of love—for you, and for all our colleagues in ministry throughout American Baptist land. During that meeting, they planned this meeting as a space for appreciation of your ministries and renewal of your spirits, in the hope that you would take back home the passion to provide the same for members of your constituent Ministers Councils. They gave the meeting the theme “Good to Go: Collected, Connected, Commissioned,” based on the structure of the theme Scripture they had chosen, I Kings 19. Their conviction is that we need one another to serve God faithfully and effectively. It is not good for the clergyperson to be alone.
By now, the last day of this year’s Ministers Council Senate, it will not have escaped your notice that Senate 2007 has been shaped on the theme of Elijah’s experiences in ministry. Elijah of course was a prophet in ninth century Israel, called to summon God’s people back to the covenant. The point of the summons was to make real God’s sovereignty through becoming a holy people walking together in God’s ways without limping like a bird between two branches at once — in other words, moving forward firmly committed to God’s covenant as a whole people.
I hope by now it is clear that our focus on Elijah has a point. What are we to make of this character? On one hand, he dared to challenge Ahab’s apostasy, raised the dead, brought down fire from heaven and was carried up into heaven in a chariot of fire. What a hero! On the other hand, he cowered from Jezebel, essentially tried to commit suicide by exhaustion and dehydration in the desert, confronted God with the conviction that he alone was zealous for the Lord, and, we might conclude, intended to die so that nobody would be left to bear God’s Word to God’s people. What a mess! In a heartbeat, the man full of faith was transformed into a man full of fear; from responding to the call to the response “I quit!”
Is it not often thus with God’s leaders, alternately called to and capable of great things; then burnt out and bitter, pessimistic and self-important? According to James, “Elijah was a human being like us” (5:17). Perhaps at times you see Elijah in yourself. I know that I do, now and again. It is all such a paradox, indeed, a downright mystery.
Which is what Martin Buber named his play about the prophet, Elijah: A Mystery. We know Buber in shorthand as the “I-thou” theologian, arising from his conviction that Israel or any people cannot become a people of God without faith between and among human beings. His philosophy of dialogue urges us both to meet others and to hold our ground, the very dynamics that allow a people to live together in a covenant relationship of equals.
The British theologian Paul Fiddes in his eloquent explorations of covenant among Baptists uses that same concept of mystery to explain how it all works: “In some mysterious way,” he says, “this eternal covenant, made from God’s side and by God’s own initiative, became actual in time and space when believers bound themselves to each other in faithful fellowship.” Later he continues the thought by suggesting that “covenant and communion in God are in fact mysteriously intertwined in both time and eternity, and that in this interaction there is a distinctive Baptist theme” (Doing Theology in a Baptist Way: Paper Two: Theology and a Baptist Way of Community, pp. 10, 11).
So let us consider the drama of Elijah in light of that mystery, and in the process consider our own dramas as well, in awareness that narrative structures life and guides behavior. In fact, researchers find strong correlation between what is going on in your current life and the story you tell about your past. Adults who are resilient, energetic, and committed to benefit others tend to see events of life in reverse order, so linked by themes of redemption that each difficult experience is seen as exactly what leads to a better next stage (Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). The story that we live by determines much about the shape our lives will bear, as individuals and as organizations.
Back to Elijah: in literary terms, the structure of Elijah’s story recorded in I Kings 19 is called a chiasm. Without reiterating the content of our Old Testament 101 courses, we know that the chi is a Greek letter shaped like an X and the chiastic structure of a piece of literature presents story elements in a sequence moving toward the central point which is the main point, then resolves the elements by reversing direction from that center until the story reaches its consummation.
After stunning success Elijah runs in terror from Jezebel, fleeing his ministry and even his world; he encounters the loving sustenance of the God who has cared for him every step of the way from the very beginning; once physically fortified he journeys 40 days and 40 nights to stand on Mt. Horeb—think Mt. Sinai, in a replication of Moses’ 40 days and 40 nights on that very same mountain, to receive the stipulations of the covenant of God with humanity; God asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?;” Elijah speaks the truth as he sees it — “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
Now note here the echo of God’s words from the very first human drama, with that identical Hebrew word for “alone:” “It is not good that Adam (the earth creature fashioned from Adamah, the earth) should be alone…” (Genesis 2:18).
Elijah truly believes that he is in that not good state of aloneness. You know how it goes, when you are working day and night to serve God and it feels as if nobody is there to lend a hand, nobody there to shoulder the burden with you, nobody there who even understands. It is not good for the human creature, the prophet of God, the clergyperson to be about God’s work alone, lest one end up fed up and burnt out and ready to resign, perhaps even ready just to give up and die.
In Martin Buber’s drama, Elijah, taking his final leave from the world, tells Elisha, the one who will carry on his work, “No one ripens into a prophet who does not learn to bear loneliness.” What we do with our loneliness in ministry will determine our capacity to stick with it.
At the central point of the I Kings 19 chiastic structure God appears to Elijah in what we call a theophany, an appearance of God to a human being. God appears not in wind or earthquake or fire but in a still, small voice. In that intimately present form, God once again asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?;” and yet again, even in the powerful yet personal presence of Yahweh, Elijah complains, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
Whereupon God recommissions Elijah to his call, sending him back into the world and the ministry he had fled, to anoint others to continue the work. God sends him with the pointed statement that 7,000 faithful are left in Israel who will be redeemed. In fact Elijah may feel lonely but he is not alone, except in his own imagination. He has simply failed to perceive the companions of the journey all around him. He has shut himself off from the companionship that would make the journey bearable.
I am intrigued by the Jewish custom even today of having a chair set aside for Elijah at every circumcision so that he will be a witness of the baby boys whose bodies are marked with the sign of the covenant. Elijah, who told God twice that no other Israelites were upholding the covenant, that he alone was left, is given the opportunity in tradition to be reminded over and over and over at each circumcision that, far from alone, he is surrounded by a faithful cloud of witnesses extending through the ages and eternally. Not to mention all the baby girls also joined in God’s covenant…
In the fullness of time, in the center of time and of all our stories, there has come the most powerful theophany ever, in Jesus Christ. At the heart of the chiastic structure of all history stands a personal God whom we can see and feel and touch, whose story grabs hold of human imaginations, whose very Spirit stirs within human spirits. This God has come among us to draw us near, through the intimacy of a tiny baby wrapped in the human condition and of a suffering Servant nailed to a cross. This God resolves the elements of creation’s drama by redemptively wrapping up all the story lines from that center onward until the plot reaches its consummation. Even now that great reversal is moving forward toward its final outcome.
Yet we too can at times feel as lonely as Elijah and can be just as blind to the faithful all around.
But God does not leave us without witnesses whom we can see and feel and touch at any time. At the center of our stories every day, God is incarnated in those friends who structure their lives on Christ’s story and who are animated by Christ’s Spirit. Look around you, Sisters and Brothers, they are here in the Ministers Council, Senators gathered with you. They are here in the colleagues scattered across the United States and Puerto Rico. They are here in your Ministers Councils at home. We simply need eyes to see them and ears to hear them and hands to touch them, to save us and them from our loneliness and futility.
Perhaps like me, you have spent time reading the Harry Potter saga, which culminated this summer in the seventh and final book. Trust me, I won’t spoil the ending if you have not read it. But it will come as no surprise that, no matter how his story ends, Harry is, of course, the hero, even and especially as he endures the loneliness of not knowing whom to trust. Harry is a hero, yet not without all his friends: Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom, Luna Lovegood — all remaining to the end loyal to Harry although such loyalty threatens their own lives. It is not an overstatement to say that even the hero could not have made it without a lot of help from his friends.
Here is the mystery that you and I inhabit, the narrative that structures our days, the tension that Elijah seems unable to manage. Yes, called by God to heroic endeavors, to minister to folk in the midst of sometimes nearly intolerable grief or in postmodern contexts that call for new ways to mediate the Old, Old Story, we do feel lonely, often. Yet, there are those 7,000 or so American Baptist colleagues in the ministry, not to mention those in other faith communions. God is incarnated there in holy friendships when we draw near to one another and share our stories in the midst of laughter and tears and, being Baptist, often a good meal that seems Eucharistic because God is so powerfully present in it. It is not good to be alone — but we are never alone, no matter how lonely we may at times feel.
- Through the Ministers Council we are in covenant with colleagues in ministry.
- Through the Together in Ministry collegial covenant group project, we have the opportunity to inhabit exactly the sort of intimate holy friendships where God speaks most powerfully to us.
- Through the new Together in Ministry grant we have the wherewithal to strengthen our constituent Councils as agents for effectively bonding pastoral leaders and buttressing them against unbearable loneliness even as they are strengthened for covenantal faithfulness.
So the question for each of us as we return home to our places of ministry is this: What story will we live by there, what narrative will we tell and believe about our lot as American Baptist leaders? Remember the words of Paul Fiddes, how he discerns that in some mysterious way, this eternal covenant, made from God’s side and by God’s own initiative, becomes actual in time and space when believers bind themselves to each other in faithful fellowship.
We have the privilege and the responsibility of choosing the perspective that frames our stories. Each of us can recommit here and now to take our place in the great cloud of witnesses who are our colleagues in the Ministers Council and summon others to join us there — or stand aloofly alone. More depends on that decision than just the faithfulness of an organization. At stake is our faithfulness in ministry as well as the faithfulness of our colleagues and, it is not too much to claim, the future faithfulness of the Church.
Scripture leaves the conclusion of Elijah’s story somewhat ambiguous, as is fitting. Some commentators see him totally renewed and recommitted for ministry as he leaves Horeb with God’s new set of instructions, while others perceive that God has essentially accepted Elijah’s resignation so that what he goes forth to do, and does only incompletely at that, is all about succession and passing on the ministry.
As individuals and as a professional association, how will our ministry dramas play out in the days and years ahead?
My prayer as we wrap up Senate 2007 is that any such ambiguities among us are resolved — that each one of us is prepared to return home Good to Go: Collected, Connected, Commissioned to togetherness in ministry as our way of life.
Amen.
The Rev. Kate Harvey is executive director of the Ministers Council, American Baptist Churches USA, and project director of Together in Ministry, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program. For more information on the Ministers Council, visit their Web site.
