Another Ordained into Christian Ministry
Yesterday the Church gathered to ordain Adam Frieberg into Christian Ministry. It was a great day. I had the honor of delivering the sermon during the worship service. It was also a day to witness my peer in ministry, Bill Spangler-Dunning, preside at an ordination as Regional Minister. He was a good presence.
Adam’s family warmly welcomed me into their home this weekend. I am grateful for their hospitality, and I learned aspects of the show horse business from his maternal grandparents. Adam married Hedi last year. Her parents attended the ordination and I had the chance to meet them and learn a bit more about Hedi.
I know that Adam intends to post the audio from the ordination on his website. Below are my words. I gave Adam my original printed copy that has some hand written notes and cuts, but these are pretty close to what I said.
Ordination of Adam Frieberg
July 18, 2009
Luke 14:7-24
“On Being a Servant Leader at the Banquet Table or The Experience of Exalted Humbleness”
Good afternoon members of Norwalk Christian Church, gathered family, friends, and distinguished guests. I am grateful for the hospitality of Adam’s family. They have taken me into their home, and I feel like family. I am grateful for the hospitality of your pastors, Dayna and Amy, and this entire community. I bring greetings from your Disciple siblings in the eight Regions of the Southeast: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Northwest Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia where I am a new resident. You sisters and brothers in faith trust that you are a voice of Gospel here in this community, and stand with you through the covenant we call the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada. I serve the church through youth ministry. A part of my responsibilities when I served on Regional staff in Kentucky was to remind youth, their sponsors and youth ministers remember: we many youth groups, but one church. Today, as we gather to ordain another into Christian Ministry that notion is true as well. We are many Regions, constituency ministries, denominations, theological perspectives, but we are one church. There is no Regional leader in our denomination today that I know that lives out of this perspective like your transitional Regional Minister, Bill Spangler-Dunning whom is it my honor to claim as a peer in ministry and a friend.
Ordination into Christian ministry is something that takes all of us. The liturgy represents how we all participate in ordaining a person to represent humanity to God and God to the world. Congregations teach and nurture persons in faith and call out some who have gifts for ministry. These persons go off to seek out education and experience through college and seminary, to learn the foundational knowledge necessary to being called an ordained minister of the gospel in this historical context. During seminary, candidates for ordination meet with a committee who, on our behalf and on behalf of all of Christendom, question a candidate to determine if a person is listening to God or just talking to themselves. More importantly, the committee or commission on the ministry work to determine if a candidate is developing the skills and has the abilities for the work of representative ministry of Jesus Christ. For our expression of Christian faith this process is important, vital because we are not ordaining Adam Frieberg into ministry just for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) today. We are ordaining Adam Frieberg into the Christian Ministry to be a servant leader on behalf of Christians in all times and in all places.
Given Adam’s diverse experience and choice in scripture for today, I am not entirely sure what the theme for my words should be. Do I want to speak of the history of ordination, the theology of the priesthood of all believers, stress a traditional understanding of this ritual or parse the example of servant leadership? Not really, no. (1) Adam, in my experience the text you chose is not a typical text for a service of ordination. I looked through my files and determined that this is my first time offering thoughts about this text. Thanks a lot! You have successfully done one of the things I think ministers are supposed to do, “afflict the comfortable.” Thanks for inviting me and all of us into a conversation around the table with Jesus.
Disciples are comfortable with table talk, table language, table theology, metaphor and imagery. Much of our corporate and individual memory recalls experiences around some kind of table. Declarations signed, rights granted, recognized or taken away. Treaties signed between countries that wish to be friends or trading partners rather than enemies. Peace established or enforced around a table. The first time you received an allowance might have been at a table. You have joined study groups and done homework around a table. First communion in some settings physically takes place around the communion table. At one congregation I served during seminary the elders ate breakfast together every Sunday morning. It was their informal way of sharing congregational information and being accountable to the covenant of elder. After the meal, they prayed for members of the congregation, for their local community, their ministers, staff, and for the nations of the world in conflict. Do you remember the first time you served at the communion table as a deacon or an elder? Where you nervous? It is ok to admit that it is hard to focus on the bread and cup when you are concerned about is not falling down the steps, tripping on that one place in the rug, stopping at the right pew, or dropping a communion tray in someone’s lap. It’s ok to admit that we are nervous at that table.
You’ve celebrated birthdays, anniversaries, and heard bad news at a table. You have attended events or heard about events where there was a name card identifying your place at a table. When my extended family gathers there are many of us. I am one of 27 grand children on my mother’s side and one of 25 on my father’s side. For each side of the family there was an aura about the day you were old enough to move up from the kid’s table at a holiday or a reunion meal to the adult table. I remember that day. I was twelve. It was Easter. The first difference was the glass of sweet tea at my plate rather than soda or milk. Then I noticed the the real napkin and real silverware. After that first meal I didn’t have to sit next to a parent. And the conversations were different at the adult table. Adults listened with one ear to the kid’s table for things spilling, for the often heard, ‘stop touching me‘ or ‘do I have to eat that.’ Their response was quick problem solving with little or no input from the kids at the table unless you were one of the oldest at the table and then you heard, ‘You know better than to let this happen.’ At the adult table there was talk about all sorts of things, and no matter your age you always could speak and be heard. You were expected to speak, listen, and be heard. We solved problems, told stories, talked about nothing, held arguments, and remembered those that had gone on to be with God around the table.
On Wednesday of this week around a large and imposing table Lisa, my companion, and I signed our names more than 20 times at the closing on our home in Lynchburg, VA. Think for a moment about all the contracts, policies, applications, tax forms, promissory notes, report cards, papers from school, pledge cards, and checks that you have signed or someone has brought to a table in your life. Think about all that goes on around a table in this congregation or where you worship. Last night some of gathered here to share a meal and hear some of Adam’s thesis all around tables.
It is a belief that at table together people can see one another as something other than a label, enemies or competitors, and can find some common ground about the quality of the soup, the taste of the bread, something, anything, that will help those gathered see the other as other with the similar dreams, fears, and anything but a label: liberal, conservative, enemy or competitor.
Disciples are comfortable with all this table talk, table theology, and traditional exegesis of the banquet parable because it vindicates our understanding of the open communion table to all who confess Christ. Then Jesus shows up and we have to rethink its meaning or at least the seating chart.
The gospel of Luke provides a glimpse into a conversation that Jesus starts at the home of a leader of the Pharisees on the Sabbath. Luke is a detail driven author. It is like Adam was there with his camera capturing high speed shots so we don’t miss a moment. What we don’t know is how much Luke, without the aid of photoshop, goes back to touch up the original scenes of these three snippets, but the final words of the reading do give us a clue to how much the author airbrushed the words of Jesus for the audience, “None of those who were invited will taste my dinner.” Those are harsh words for that table. Jesus leaves polite conversation aside about the weather, the wine, the table, and goes right to religion and politics.
When guests arrived they were taking the good seats at the table. This was curious to Jesus or maybe it puzzled him. Why would guests assume the places of honor where for them? Did he miss something on his invitation about seating? I think this is one of those times when the gospel writer demonstrates a mischievous side of Jesus’ personality. The gospels often put difficult questions into the mouths of the Pharisees, and others, seeking to test or entrap Jesus in wrong answers. This seems to be an instance when the gospel writer allows Jesus to toy with the religious leaders. You know, have a little fun with them. A kind of back at you with his own question in story form. He could have just as easily come out and asked, “What does it mean to be humble? What does exalted mean to you?”
A baseball fan buys a ticket to game 4 of the World Series. He has limited resources so his seat is in the upper deck down the right field line. He arrives at the ballpark early to get a few autographs, and as the stadium is filling up he noticed that there were seats nearer the field down the left field line where no one was sitting. He stood a bit, got a hotdog, and after the first inning when no one had claimed those seats he made his way to them. No one asked to see his ticket along the way. In the fourth inning an usher, with two people standing with him, asked, “May I see your ticket please.” And I can hear Jesus say, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those that humble themselves will be exalted.”
The English words, humble and exalted, are not a part of our daily vocabulary, but they are a clue to what this table conversation is all about. We hear or use the words humility or praise which are adequate alternatives, but these do not give us the cue we need to hear this narrative from Luke in our time. Humble: courteously respectful, not proud or arrogant; modest. Exalted: to praise, and it can also mean: to stimulate the imagination.(2) We live in a hyper-stimulated culture. I indulge in it, benefit from it, and am limited by it. We all are. The always on internet, the Now network, instant news and information from the far side of the world, energy drink, Gameboy, Wii, video on demand, YouTube texting and tweeting culture stunts a part of our imagination. But not so much that the imagination can be inspired by the words, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The words and life of Jesus inspired Paul enough for him to have a moment of clarity and see in a mirror dimly, “Love is patient, kind, not envious or boastful, arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable, resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.”(3)
Jesus was sitting at table with people who were sure they were breaking bread in the kingdom or going to break bread in the kingdom of God one day. That day with the Pharisees, and here at this table Jesus asks us to in a sense ‘pay it forward.’ Jesus asks if we understand humility in our own time: the difference between living an open invitation, and rounding up the perceived ‘D’ list folks because they will appreciate the invite, the effort or have no better place to go. In our post-eschatological, post-modern world the banquet parable can be heard as a critique of how we practice an incarnational theology of invitation to knowing God. What kind of table hosts are we Christians? What kind of table hosts are we Disciples of Christ? The priesthood of all believers is comfortable with table language and table theology. It is a great step, a good evolution in theology to practice an open table policy, but to know, to practice that every seat at the table is a place of honor is a journey of faith that all of Christendom is following. Adam, it is to this continued journey that you are called, out of the priesthood of all believers to be a servant leader.
You bring many gifts to Christian ministry. When we first met, you were sitting at a table preparing power point slides for the youth program at General Assembly in Kansas City. Along the path I’ve learned some of your Disciple story, and know that you are curious about other people and their stories. Your talent behind the camera allows you see a person as he or she cannot see themselves. The Church will need you to translate that gift into your servant leadership. You’ve worked as a computer programmer, understand code, can see what the code needs to be even when it does not make sense, and can debug the system when the output is garbled, skewed, or flat out wrong. The Church will need you to translate that ability to debug the system to your servant leadership to help us learn, or remember to love God and our neighbor as ourselves.
I think it is your openness to other cultures, other ideas about meaningful living, your experience of Jesus, the foundation of your family, and your desire to participate in making justice happen that is why the banquet parable appeals to your understanding of ministry and the work of the Church. It can be messy. Relationship can be messy, but don’t let that desire fade. The Church needs a generation of ministers more than ever with this desire. Adam, in our time, many of our Christian siblings measure faith and goodness by what they don’t do, by what they deny themselves and others, by what they resist and who they exclude. Adam, the day come? Church the day is here when Christians will measure faith and goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include?(4)
I’m not completely sure, but I think this is how we learn or at least experience exalted humbleness.
Notes
1. Paraphrase of dialogue from the film, “Chocolat,” 2000.
2. From Dictionary.com and Webster’s Online.
3. I Corinthians 13:4-7, NRSV.
4. Paraphrase of dialogue from the film, “Chocolat,” 2000.