Last weekend I had the privilege of addressing graduates at the North Park Theological Seminary commencement. The following is a lightly edited version of my sermon.

Introduction

There is something pastors are prone to mutter under their breath when encountering an unexpected ministry challenge: “They didn’t teach me about this in seminary.” This could be an old boiler that finally gives up the ghost the night before the coldest Sunday of the winter. It could be glancing at your social media feed to discover two church members feuding about partisan politics. It could be the bride and groom of the first wedding you officiate informing you that their dog will be their ring-bearer. That last one happened to me and when I asked the bride-to-be if the dog would behave during the service she replied by nodding toward the best man and saying, “It’s not the dog you have to worry about; it’s the best man.” Thankfully both the dog and the best man were on their best behavior during the wedding.

But of all the unexpected challenges that seminary is unable to prepare ministers for, the Apostle Paul lifted up what I consider to be the most important unexpected challenge in his letter to the church in Corinth. Described by Paul as “infants in Christ,” (3:1), the Corinthian church worried the apostle. One of the congregation’s troubling tendencies gave rise to Paul’s response in 2:1-5, where he addressed what few of us are prepared for as we enter ministry. You see, the Christians in Corinth, like their Greek and Roman neighbors, placed a high value on inspiring speakers and leaders. As far as the Corinthians were concerned, the more spectacular the messenger, the more convincing their message. But, in these five verses, Paul reminded the church that his message about the crucified Christ was proclaimed in weakness.

Weakness, for Paul, was not a metaphor. Weakness is a visceral word: frailty, feebleness, sickness. Weakness manifests in bodies which fail us and minds which trouble us. Weakness is the story of trauma roiling beneath your seemingly in-control life. Weakness, for some, is transmitted through the warped expectations and belittling assumptions exerted by a society infected with racial supremacy and gender bias.
 
And while weakness is an inescapable characteristic of the human condition, for Paul there is something particular about weakness and his vocation as one sent to proclaim the gospel. More than standard-issue human vulnerabilities, this weakness was chosen, one to which the apostle submitted himself. We hear an echo of these verses in the testimony of Julia A. J. Foote, an early missionary in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Having discerned a call to vocational ministry, Foote responded, “No, Lord, not me… I thought it could not be that I was called to preach–I, so weak and ignorant. Still, I knew all things were possible with God, even to confounding the wise by the foolish things of this earth.” How many of us have known the evangelist’s trembling acceptance of God’s call?

What I want to suggest this afternoon is that Paul’s testimony, like Julia Foote’s, is paradigmatic for ministers of the gospel. To be called to vocational ministry is to be called to a particular sort of cross-shaped vulnerability. Whether with words or disposition, we admit to those to whom we have been called, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Now, there is a way that this confession sounds exhilarating. You can imagine Paul’s words rendered in an edgy font and printed across the back of a youth ministry t-shirt. But there are among us today those who understand that the call to gospel weakness is not a slogan; it is a lived experience transmitted through tender emotions and strained minds. We feel this weakness in our bodies, fragile, as Paul says elsewhere, like jars of clay. (2 Corinthians 4:7) And for all of the ways that your professors and fellow seminarians have prepared you for ministry, this lesson cannot be taught; it can only be humbly received as we accept the call from Jesus Christ and him crucified.

This is discouraging-sounding stuff for what ought to be a celebratory day, so let me offer what I understand to be the promise this passage offers to you today: Christ is present in your weakness. The call to pastoral weakness is more than an invitation to proclaim Christ or to embody the cruciform nature of Christ’s redemption. It is also an invitation for you to know the presence of your Savior. To accept this tender invitation is to accept Jesus himself, the God who, as Dean Edwards has written, “by humbling himself to the point of death…communicates divine, self-sacrificial love.” Because Christ is present in your weakness, you can accept the call to go to your places of ministry in weakness.

With this promise in mind, then, here is what I understand to be the expression of pastoral weakness and the experience of pastoral weakness. The expression of our weakness can be summarized as irrelevancy and the experience as release.

Irrelevancy: The Expression of Pastoral Weakness

Ministers serving in contemporary America quickly come to understand the expectations others have for us to be relevant. After all, in some places, people have only the vaguest idea of what a pastor does. Years ago, my wife and I visited a friend who lived in another city. This woman had recently started dating and, as we crossed a busy intersection on our way to dinner, her new boyfriend turned to me and, in all earnestness said, “A pastor, huh? Is that still a job?” In moments like these I’m tempted to prove that my work matters. I want to compare my ministerial call to a career with more cultural cache. I want, in other words, to be relevant.

But more than responding to societal unfamiliarity with our vocation, the attraction of relevancy mostly shows up in our churches. For many decades, the streams of American Christianity that have shaped most of us have searched for ways to remain important and interesting to our society. The people who attend our churches may not know what a pastor does, but they know about CEOs, brand specialists, tech entrepreneurs, event publicists, and product marketers. Pastors quickly learn that, in order to appear significant to their congregations, they will need to adopt as many of these skills as possible.

It wasn’t Corinthian society which expected superior speech or wisdom from Paul. No, the anticipation of cultural relevancy came from the church. While there will be plenty of moments in which your quiet and contemplative calling will seem insignificant in the eyes of a society obsessed with spectacle, your most regular temptations toward relevancy will come from the church itself. A Christianity that has appropriated the tools of consumer capitalism expects measurable and impressive results from its ministers. I say you will be tempted because the promise of cultural relevancy is the lie that you can be more than yourself– that you can always preach powerfully; always have pearls of wisdom to share at any time, day or night; always lead with the sort of authority that attracts a crowd and silences dissent.

Against these temptations, Gregory the Great reminds us that those who went faithfully before us in this work, “are not remembered because they were rulers of men, but because they were shepherds of flocks.” To become a shepherd is to turn away from the sorts of metrics the world understands. It is to follow the way of the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. (John 10:11) It is to decide, even when no one is asking it of us, to know nothing among those we serve except Jesus Christ and him crucified. It is, in other words, to embrace irrelevance.
 
Release: The Experience of Pastoral Weakness

Cicero, reflecting on Roman capital punishment, wrote, “the very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things but the very mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen.” Cicero’s instincts about the offense of the cross remain relatable. To choose the way of the cross is to walk in weakness, fear, and much trembling.

There is nothing impressive about this. Choose the way of cruciform irrelevance and it’s entirely possible that today’s commencement will be your peek; from here on out it’s a descent into the strange obscurity of your shepherding call.

Does this sound like a sort of death? Well, of course: Jesus Christ and him crucified. But, having stumbled along this pastoral calling for a couple of decades, I am a witness that this death, like each death on the other side of the cross, is a beginning rather than the end. If the expression of pastoral weakness is irrelevance, the experience of it, for the minister, is release.

Because it turns out that the search for relevancy is unending and exhausting. Ministries which compete for a market share of overly entertained, endlessly marketed to people will always be striving but never succeeding, always rushing but never resting. Such ministries and their wearied ministers are prone to treating the image-bearers they’ve been called to shepherd as resources to use in pursuit of their vision of success. A man I know, clearly gifted and called for pastoral ministry, admitted to me his fear that he will never measure up to the spectacular preachers whose sermon snippets fill his social media feed.

But something wonderful happens when a pastor turns away from the algorithm and embraces irrelevancy. No longer burdened with expectations of superior speech and dazzling wisdom; or of numerically astounding worship services and impressive organizational success; or of the perfectly crafted sermon and then, the next Sunday, another perfectly crafted sermon; the irrelevant pastor finds they have been released.

Released from the expectations of those who fear weakness but also released from the need to control. Relevancy requires that we assert power; those who do not actively contribute to our vision must be moved out of the way. A minister who can embrace gospel weakness moves differently. With an openness to their grasp, they can explain that their embrace of irrelevancy is “so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” And does anyone know that the power of God is a much better foundation for anyone’s faith that whatever slick speech or nuggets of wisdom we will ever offer?

In a sermon preached in 1951, Howard Thurman asked rhetorically, “Is this the kind of universe where somehow you can garner up enough of pure desire and great singleness of mind, that you can hold that desire and singleness of mind at dead center until the most stubborn and unyielding aspects of your life or the life of the world will take the objective shape of your inward desire?” The minister who embraces their weakness has been released to admit the absurdity of anything other than a cheerful “no” to Thurman’s question. And once we can confess our inability to change even our own lives, we can set down any delusion of changing, in Thurman’s words, “the life of the world.”

This is the great joy of cruciform weakness. Though expressed in our efficient and competitive world as irrelevance, from the inside we experience the release of the expectations we can never meet, the demands we should never fulfill, and the compromises that worldly acclaim always requires.

To experience the release of pastoral weakness looks like sitting quietly with a hospitalized member of the congregation whose days of societal accomplishment have long past them by. It looks like organizing the church’s priorities around Jesus’ assertion that the children are first in line in the kingdom of heaven. Being released into the pastoral mode of our crucified Savior can look like visiting the imprisoned. For some of our colleagues, these days have required organizing on behalf of those neighbors who have been slandered, harassed, and abused by the federal government. As we live through an era of increasing disenfranchisement and racial discrimination, embracing pastoral weakness for some looks simply like insisting on the truth despite the accusations of partisanship. For all of us, this release includes ensuring that the logic of Jesus Christ and him crucified runs through each sermon, each spiritual direction conversation, each confession when we’ve succumbed to the allure of relevancy.

Conclusion

There will be plenty of moments in the days ahead when the call to pastoral weakness feels too costly. It will appear more effective to lay down the cross and pick up the sorts of tools which promise societal respect. You’ll be tempted, like the rest of us, to rely on the force of your will, the attractiveness of your personality, the charisma of your gifts. There will be few people asking you to do otherwise.

We remember, then, that cruciformity is not a method. Pastoral weakness is not something we put on and take off situationally. No, to accept this call is to accept the presence of Christ to each of those he calls to minister to his church. The crucified and resurrected Christ is communicated through your weakness, yes. But even more, the crucified and resurrected Christ is present to you in your weakness. Embracing the trembling and fearful boundaries of your humanity is not an impediment to knowing Christ; it is how we know Christ. The same power of God that is proclaimed through our frail limitations for the good of God’s people is also applied to us.

What I mean to say, is that I hope you’ll embrace the vocation-long commitment to embracing your weakness not only because it is better by far than any of this world’s superior speech or dazzling wisdom, though it is. Not only because is the way our lives harmonize with the gospel message we proclaim, though it is. No, I commend the weak way of Jesus to you because it good for you. Our Lord does not call you only to use you up. No, the call to weakness is good for you because it is the call to Christ himself.

(Photo credit: Barnabas Sani.)

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The View From Here

It was fun to share the North Park commencement with some of my favorite people: Dean Dennis Edwards (author of a recent book about humility– highly recommended), my aunt Tammy (who happens to also be the president of our denomination), and Dr. Michelle Dodson (who happens to also be our church’s associate pastor). Good people!