Thursday Theology: Ed Schroeder on Pastoral Ministry
Co-missioners,
One of us was poking around recently in a well-organized box of the late Ed Schroeder’s files. From it she extracted the sermon we send you today. Ed preached it on August 29, 2010, at St. Mark Lutheran Church in Belleville, Illinois, about fifteen miles east of St. Louis. The occasion was the retirement of St. Mark’s longtime pastor, the Rev. Ronald Neustadt. Ron had been an early graduate of Concordia Seminary in Exile (Seminex) and one of Ed’s most attentive students. The two would become friends, with Ron emerging as a stalwart supporter of Crossings, which he continues to be.
We don’t find much in Ed’s published work that speaks directly to pastoral ministry and the theology that drives it. As it happens, this sermon does just that. This is one of the reasons we’re sharing it with you. The other is its timeliness, at least in the U.S. where congregations are shaking off the summer doldrums and returning to the rhythms of parish life that prevail during the bulk of the year. Should anyone, whether pastor or parishioner, have spent the week asking “why do we keep doing these things we’ve been doing,” they’ll find the best of answers here.
We should mention in passing that St. Mark, Belleville, has been sharing a building for many, many years with St. George Episcopal Church (ECUSA). It’s an unusual arrangement that seems to work well there. Ed will play with this, as you’ll see. We think you’ll also want to know that Ron was invited to St. Mark on August 11, a week and half ago, for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of his ordination. In the course of the proceedings, the congregation named him as their Pastor Emeritus. We’re delighted they did—and we can’t help but ask the question Ed would ask in his good-humored brashness: “What took you so long?”
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Saint-Making: The Sermon at a Pastor’s Retirement
by Edward H. Schroeder
29 August 2010
Texts: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 1 Corinthians 3:1-11, John 17:6-24
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Ron, you sure picked a great day for this grand finale. August 29 in the church calendar commemorates the beheading of John the Baptist. I was tempted to go there for your swan song liturgy, but I’ll try to resist.
My next step was to go to the two saints named in the two congregations that are assembled for the liturgy this morning and have been linked here in Belleville for lo these many years. St. George Episcopal and St. Mark Lutheran. I consulted my trusty book on the saints—this one, that I’m holding right here. It comes from England, so it’s surely kosher where you Episcopalians are concerned.
It turns out that the data on both these saints is skimpy.
Mark is the name of the author of the second gospel in the New Testament, but just who he was is very fuzzy. Scholars say the best guess is that he was the one mentioned only in this gospel who shows up at the very end of the report when Jesus is taken captive in Gethsemane. “A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” St. Mark, the streaker. Can we get to Ron’s decades of pastoral work from there? I don’t think so.
How about St.George? This one is even fuzzier, as you Episcopalians doubtless know. When is the last time anybody in Belleville saw a dragon carry a maiden away and called on St. George to rescue her? I can’t think of any way to get to Ron from this story either.
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But what if we start with something that came as a surprise to me as I scanned this book about the saints?
Among the more than one thousand saints who are listed here, there is no St. Ronald. Odd! And since this is Ron’s day, at least right here, I propose that we used today’s assigned texts to correct this defect.
When I mentioned to Ron that I might take this route in the homily, he said something like this:
“O, boy, I hope you get it right. The one to celebrate on any Saint’s Day is the saint-maker.” (Parenthetically: once more Ron cheered the heart of his old teacher. Once more Ron got it right!)
What a word: Saint Maker. A strange term. We’ve already heard it three times in the opening lines of today’s Gospel. “Sanctify them in the truth,” Jesus prays. And again: “For their sake I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.” (John 17:17-19). Sanctify: it means to makea saint. That’s what God has been doing all these years with Ron and through Ron.
Today’s first two readings give us some images of what God has been aiming at. In the Old Testament reading we heard about a good shepherd. In 1st Corinthians we heard about planters and irrigators and builders. (It’s in this passage where the word “George” actually appears in the Greek text!) But before we get to these, let’s go straight to John’s Saint-Maker text for some clarity about what a saint is.
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In Biblical usage a saint is not a “goody-two-shoes.” It isn’t someone super moral, or super pious, or somebody with super-power to do what normal mortals can’t do, such as slay dragons or walk on water. Saint comes from the word “sanctus” and in Biblical language—both Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek—the word means “different, distinct.” For example, when Israel is told “You shall be holy (sanctus) as I the Lord your God am holy (sanctus),” it’s not about moral purity. It’s about who you are, not how you behave. Holy means different. “You shall be different (from other folks) as I the Lord your God am different (from the gods of those other folks).”
And how is Israel’s God different?
Here’s now: Israel’s God forgives sinners. The gods of the ancient world do not. With those gods you’ve got to pay, to sacrifice something in order to attract the deity’s favor. You’d never catch Baal, Marduk or Zeus saying “I will forgive their sins and remember their iniquities no more.”
Which then led Luther to this simple definition of saints: “Saints are nothing more than forgiven sinners.” And that’s a big difference. It’s also the clue to saint-making, to sanctifying.
What does it take to get sinners forgiven? To un-sin a sinner? Back we go to today’s Gospel. It takes a lot! It’s no snap of the fingers! It takes Jesus first of all sanctifying himself. Being a different sort of shepherd, a different Messianic leader. Laying down his life for the sheep. Not running when the wolf comes.
How does this get us connected with Saint Ron? That’s a piece of cake. We see this both in his person and in his pastoring here in Belleville for all these years.
In his person Ron is different. But not at his beginning. He came into the world, as do we all, as the offspring of Eve and Adam. Flawed, in other words. The Biblical terms is “sinner.” Sinner from the point of “origin,” as Christian language puts it. This is true of the entire human race. (By the way, if you ever meet someone who doesn’t believe in original sin, just tell them to have children.)
Now: beginning with Ron’s baptism “difference” entered his biography. He encountered God the sin-forgiver, the saint-maker—and in the ups and down, the yin and yang of his lifetime that is what made him divinely different. “Linked to my forgiveness, Ron, you are a beloved son. With you I am well-pleased.” So God said and keeps saying of him.
How about the pastoring? Has that been different? Here you people of St. Mark should take over the homily. But that would surely make this one sermon even longer. So I’ll just wing-it from today’s Bible texts based on what I do know
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Let’s start with John 17, the saint-making business.
That’s what Ron’s been up to all these years here in Belleville: to have the same difference-making, saint-making that happened with him happen with all of you too. Not only for you as receivers, but also through you as it enlists you as active saint-making agents in your own right.
And it’s all one unified operation. That repeated reference in our Gospel text to being “one” is not about simple togetherness. It’s about being “unified” in the saint-making project. It’s about getting not-yet forgiven sinners under the forgiven-sinner umbrella. And you don’t need a seminary degree to do that. If it’s happened to you, you know how to make it happen for someone else. If you know how to ride a bike, you can teach someone else how to ride a bike. You don’t have to go to Bicycle Seminary to get instruction.
The end of the line in John 17 is that the world may “believe” and “know” about this wildly different way of getting sinners healed. It happens with words! “Son, be of good cheer. Your sins are forgiven.” But, ah, there’s the rub: To believe that we really are forgiven; to trust that we really are saints in the eyes of God Clergy too sometimes mumble: “God, if you really knew what’s inside me…”
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This brings us to the big temptation—also for us saints, forgiven sinners. It’s unbelief. Not unbelief about God, but about ourselves.
The temptation is not to believe that we are what Christ the saint-maker has made us to be. Qualitatively different human beings. Different in the same way that God in Christ is different from other gods. Holy as God is holy.
Here’s the rub: when you don’t believe this, you don’t have it. I’m sure you’ve heard this before from Ron, Luther’s bon mot: “Glaubstu, hastu. Glaubstu night, hastu nicht.” When you do trust Christ’s word about yourself, you have what the word says. When you don’t trust it, you don’t have it. And you’re back to square one. No longer a forgiven sinner, but just a sinner period. It happens constantly with us. So we too need to be saint-ified repeatedly. Re-saint-ified over and over.
Re-saint-ification: That’s what St. Ron, sub-shepherd of the Good Shepherd, will be offering us shortly from this table. To be saint-ified again by Christ’s offer of himself, “Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”
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With that I take you back to something I mentioned at the beginning, about St. Paul’s metaphors for ministry.
The first two are “planter” and “waterer.” The one doing this, working through the likes of St. Ron, is God the georgos. That’s Greek for “farmer.” In this case the Farmer of Farmers.
And then there’s the metaphor of the builder, the one who works on God’s temple, God’s. very different temple where “the foundation is Jesus the Messiah,” a very different Messiah from the ones that coax us constantly these days to follow them.
St. Paul has the chutzpah to call himself a “master builder.” I’ll follow suit and say with chutzpah: St. Ron, master builder. The actual Greek terms Paul uses are “sophos architektoon”—a savvy architect. Not just skilled, but “savvy” enough to know how to work on the building project in question. That project is you members of St. Mark. You are the building Ron has been architecting all these years. And the “savvy” aspect of his work has been constantly to make sure that you are aligned with the building’s foundation. A couple of verses later, Paul will identify the building more explicitly. “You are God’s temple. Don’t you know that?” he asks. What makes you God’s temple is that God’s Spirit—God’s own breath—is what animates you. “God’s temple is holy”—there’s that word again, different—”and that temple you are.”
What sets this building apart from all others is its foundation stone. Christ Jesus is his name. “I built on that foundation,” St. Paul says. St. Ron could say it too. And in that respect, Ron is also “different” from many a pastor these days. For there are many within the Christian world who are busy building on other foundations. Even though there really is no other foundation upon which to build God’s different temple, other options are always there. So Paul’s counsel, I know, has been a major memento for Ron’s years of pastoral work: “Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.”
“With care”—you folks know better than I do the pastoral care that has taken place here at St Mark during the “savvy architect” era of St. Ron. Not only Ron’s personal care for you, but precisely in that care for you, his care to keep you building your own lives cemented to the one and only foundation that God laid down for us in Jesus Christ. Ron has been on the same page with Ezekiel, St. Paul, and yes, with Jesus too in his pastoral ministry.
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That “same page” is central to today’s texts, so let’s review it one more time—
From St. Ezekiel: Remember God the Good Shepherd promising to rescue the strays. Now think of St. Ron’s life-long work as Christ’s sub-shepherd in this very operation.
From St. John’s gospel: Remember Jesus the God-sent saint-maker transforming sinners into saints, and then sending them into “the world” to keep the project going. Now recall St. Ron playing his part in this chain-reaction, first by helping you people of St. Mark to get saint-ified by the Saint-Maker, and then by sending you “out there” week after week to keep the project going.
And from St. Paul: Remember how this first-century “savvy architect” built sinners into God’s temple by simply inviting them to move the building-blocks of their lives onto the foundation which is Jesus Christ. And now think of that equally savvy architect, St. Ron, hustling Christ’s building project for all these years he spent with you in Belleville.
With all these things in mind, join me in a closing doxology—
Praise all through whom God’s blessings flow.
Today it’s St. Ron here below.
For him, we with the heavenly host:
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Amen.