Advent 3 | Ministry Sunday 1997 | God's Helpers

I think some of you might have been disappointed in my last sermon because you expected me to preach from the Book of Mormon, which I did not do. So I apologize if you feel slighted, just preaching from the Bible as I did last time. So mundane! Well, I hope to make it up to you this week by beginning this homily with a verse from the Koran.

It is a verse about Jesus, which might surprise some of you, if you didn't know that there were lots of Jesus stories in the Koran. Muslims in fact accept Jesus as a prophet on par with Moses and Mohammed. They think we Christians blaspheme by calling him God, but then I know a few Christians who feel the same.

The Koran says: Believers, be God's helpers. When Jesus the son of Mary said to the disciples, "Who will help me on the way to God?" they replied, "We are God's helpers."

Now, as a Christian, I look at this verse and what immediately strikes me is the thought that God needs our help! Some of us may balk at this, after all, God is omnipotent, almighty, omniscient. God does not NEED us any more than he needs an apolstured sofa.

But scripture tells us differently. Scripture implores us throughout to be God's servants, to be a watchman, to "go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways." Like all healthy relationships, it is reciprocal. We need God, and God needs us.

Alfred North Whitehead's Process Theology emphasizes the extent of this relationship. God depends on us daily to make responsible choices, whether or not to love, to reach out, to comfort, to heal, or to be God's agent in the world. According to Process Theology, God is incapable of coercion. God can only love, and prod, and persuade. The decision of whether or not we are going to help God is ours. And God is waiting for our reply, because God desperately needs our help.

"This sounds like blasphemy," you might say. Yet every day you see children homeless and starving on the street, you see the people who are falling through the cracks; you see sensitive people around being trammeled on by the powerful and heartless, you see corporations taking over the soul of America. This is not God's will. Why doesn't God just reach out and fix it? Very well, here are God's hands. Why doesn't God just reach out and fix it? Why don't I? Why don't you? Are we not the body of Christ in this world?

God implores us in Holy Scripture to upset the systems of injustice, to feed the hungry, to befriend to lonely, to visit the sick--to be overflowing wells of compassion in a cold world where compassion is not on the top of the corporate climber's list. Friends we are not called to be corporate climbers, we are not called to be social bigwigs. We are called to be the hands and feet and voice and healing touch of Jesus to the people we meet around us every day. "Who will help me on the way to God?" Jesus asks. And God anxiously awaits our answer.

This week we are celebrating the sacred ministry. Now, I used to think ministry meant ordination. So when my first bishop Timothy Barker and I were discussing the possibility of my being ordained for his jurisdiction, he said that I would need to start my formal ministry immediately. Now for me, ministry meant preaching and presiding at the Mass, providing pastoral care for a parish, and so on. Bishop Tim shook his head and said, "No. Ministry isn't about ordination. It's about helping people, and you don't need my hands on your head to do that."

And so I went forth and put an ad in the paper, and rented a conference room, and began the Concord chapter of Fundamentalists Anonymous. And the people came. Baptists and Catholics, and Jehovah's Witnesses, and Assembly of Godders, and Hare Krishnas. They came, and shared their stories, and their pain, and as I watched, magic happened. As they told their stories, they began to heal each other. I didn't have to do anything but provide a time and a place and a friendly word of encouragement, and redemption HAPPENED.

I didn't need ordination to be God's helper. Because deep down I knew the truth: I already was a priest.

The great insight of the Reformation was the radical notion of the priesthood of the believer. The doctrine of the priesthood of the believer means that when Jesus said that we would do greater works that he, he was not talking about bishops or cardinals or deacons or priests. He was talking about all of us. Each of us is called by God to--in our own idiosyncratic fashions--to incarnate the Word in our lives, to be Jesus' hands in this hurting world.

You don't need to preach sermons, or to preside at a liturgy, or even to go out and start a support group to be a minister. You are a priest already. You don't need Richard and I to mediate grace to you, because you are mediators of grace to everyone with whom you come in contact. Don't be stingy, because the more grace you give, magically, the more grace there is to go around.

Church is not a place, as some have come to think of it, as a place where Christians come to be ministered to. That is not really my job. My job is to support you, emotionally, educationally, and sacramentally, in YOUR ministry. Church is an assembly of ministers. We meet to support each other, to build one another up for the work of the Gospel. We go to classes and hear sermons so that we can better articulate God's concern for the world. We partake at this table not just to feed our own souls, but so that "we who share Christ's body might share his risen life; we who drink his cup bring life to others; we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world."

Richard and I are part of a support network to help YOU be a support network for your neighborhood, and together with Catholics and Lutherans and Baptists and even Muslims and Jews, we form a support network for a planet in the agony of labor. We work to give birth to a new kind of society, where none are outcast, or needy or forgotten or unloved or hungry or stigmatized. There is not division of ministry folks. We are all Christ's ministers. The formal ministry of pastors and priests exists only to serve you, to help you prepare for your important ministries. God can't do it alone, Richard and I can't do it alone. You, me, Richard and God are all on the same team, and in our imperfect ways we all struggle together in incarnate the Word in our communities.

The sacred ministry we celebrate today is yours. "Who will help me on the way to God?" Jesus asks you. It is my prayer that we shall all reply, "We are God's helpers."

Let us pray.

Thou, O child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest:
for thou shalt go before the face of the LORD to prepare his ways.
To give knowledge of salvation unto his people.

Holy and living God, you call us out of the world, to be free from "the system" to live by a new law: to love our neighbors as ourselves. Help us to understand our personal lives as ministries. Ministries to the people we live with, ministries to our friends and loved ones, ministries to those whom we work and play with, ministries to those whom we do not know, and perhaps will never see. Call us, each one of us, to a special ministry: a ministry of cooking, or a ministry of encouragement, or a ministry of prayer, or a ministry of letter writing to prisoners, a ministry of creating Zen moments. You have created us all with unique skills and talents and ways of communicating your love and concern. Help us to discover, and to be active as ministers of your grace and peace to a world so in need of grace and peace, as only you--through us--can give it. Fill us with your spirit, who with you and your holy Word, lives and reigns One God, forever and ever. Amen.