“Weak Force” – An Installation Sermon by Tony Hoshaw
Source: Adam Walker Cleaveland
Yesterday, I was installed as Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Church here in Ashland, Oregon. In addition, I had the privilege of hearing my good friend Tony Hoshaw preach at my installation. For those of you who have been following my ordination journey since the beginning, you’ll remember that my initial invitation of Tony to preach at my ordination is what set things in motion for my ordination to be cancelled in 2008 and led to my transfer from Kendall Presbytery to the Presbytery of San Francisco.
So it was as if things had come full circle, and it was great for Tony to be welcomed to preach at First Presbyterian Church yesterday and for him to join the celebration. Below you will find both the audio of his sermon, as well as the text. I appreciated his message and his challenge to me through the sermon, and I offer it to you here. The three texts for the sermon were Isaiah 56:1-8, Romans 15:1-6 and Mark 9:33-37 (you can look at the complete bulletin here).
Purpose Statement:
I propose to preach that weak force, the rejection of the politics of self-preservation for a messianic politics of weakness, is the way of life of all those seeking to faithfully discharge the office of pastor. I preach this to the end that hearers will be just, that is, be weak and welcome the weak - as the messiah Jesus was weak and welcomed the weak.
I.
John Calvin is right. In one of his commentaries, he states: “Today hardly one in a hundred considers how difficult and arduous it is faithfully to discharge the office of pastor. Hence many are lead into it as something trivial and not serious.” It is, perhaps, due to a certain thoughtlessness about what it means to be a pastor and, therefore, about why being a pastor is difficult and arduous, that the institutional Church in the United States manages to produce “pastors” who are often merely defenders of the status quo. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this church and its leadership well. In his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” King writes, “The contemporary church…[i]s so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.” King continues, “If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning…I am meeting young people every day whose disappointment with church has risen to outright disgust.” The institutional Church’s loyalty to the status quo is, it seems to me, the effect of, to borrow a phrase from contemporary theologian Theodore Jennings, Jr., the long standing “Constantinian alliance with wealth and power.”
II.
“Mark’s” Jesus is not at all interested in producing disciples, that is, ministers of the Word and Sacrament, that defend the status quo. The text read to us moments ago is embedded in a context of intense and difficult teaching. Beginning at Mark 8:27 and continuing through Mark 10, Jesus offers the disciples an intensive course in what I am calling (to borrow an idea from Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin) weak force, that is, the political and subversive act of being weak and embracing and standing with the weak and the vulnerable.
Mark 8:27 marks a dramatic shift in Mark’s gospel; here, for the first time, one of Jesus’ disciples identifies him as the messiah. Soon after Peter makes his dramatic confession, Jesus speaks about his death - a speech he will formally deliver three times, in three slightly different ways, before all is said and done. Jesus tells the disciples, “The Son of Man [or as one commentary puts it: the human one] must undergo great suffering and be rejected by [the clergy] and be killed, and after three days rise again.” (v 31). The texts tells us that Jesus proclaims “all this quite openly.” (vv 32, 34) You know the rest of the story: Peter is scandalized by Jesus’ speech, and he rebukes Jesus. In response, Jesus insults Peter by identifying Peter with Satan.
Jesus’ full response to Peter or Satan gives us some indication of what Satan stands for. Jesus proclaims, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.” He continues, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their lives for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” (vv 34-35)
If Jesus is pressing his disciples to truly live, that is, to live in such a way that does not avoid the cross (the wealthy and powerful’s weapon of mass destruction), what can Satan stand for other than death? True life, to Jesus’ mind, is risking one’s life for the sake of the poor and vulnerable - being willing to put it all on the line for those commonly dismissed, bullied, and disappeared by the wealthy and powerful. The disciples must be willing to be weak, to be crucified, for the sake of the weak and vulnerable. This is precisely what Satan, here represented by Peter, cannot stomach. This is also why Jesus resists the politics of self-preservation or death.
Jesus speaks about his death for the second time at Mark 9:30. Jesus tells his disciples, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” (v 31) The disciples do not understand Jesus’ message and are afraid (and rightly so) to ask Jesus any questions. (v 32) Their lack of understanding is emphasized beginning at v 33, the first verse of the passage read to us earlier.
How do the disciples respond to Jesus’ second speech regarding his death? They argue about which of them is the greatest! Peter’s rebuke of Jesus is simply repeated by the disciples, but it is their collective response that ads content to Peter’s rebuke. Satan is not willing to be a slave; Satan wants to enslave. Satan wants to be great - like those in power, like the clergy and the politicians. Jesus tells them, “Whoever wants to be first, must be last of all and slave [diakonos] of all.” (v 35)
At this point Jesus finds a child, puts the child among them, and then he embraces the child. We might imagine Jesus picking up little Caleb Walker Cleaveland and saying, “Whoever welcomes one such child [the weak and vulnerable par excellence] in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (v 37). Now who would not understand such a clear message? Jesus’ message here is as difficult as those we hear during the children’s time in our services. Not surprisingly, it is the disciples who don’t get it. Immediately after this lesson, just a few verses beyond those read to us, the disciples stop someone from healing others; they stop him because he is not following them. Again, for the disciples, it’s all about them, that is, their egos, their prestige and their authority. Jesus, however, makes it clear: everyone who is not against the healing of the sick and the possessed, whether they are members of the church or not, are being loyal to the messiah.
Children are emphasized again at Mark 10:13. The disciples are being rude to folk who are bringing their children to Jesus for a blessing. Jesus tells the disciples where to go, and he essentially repeats what he had just taught them: “the kingdom of God” belongs to children and, in the words of the text, “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (v 14, 15)
All this talk about children may lead us to believe that Jesus is something like those politicians (and their religious counterparts) we have been hearing from recently. We must remember, however, these discourses on children are set within a context that is adamantly opposed to traditional marriage and family values. The traditional family and the traditional home, we must recall, are often the most dangerous places for children. At any rate, the traditional family is simply one of the many versions of the sovereign self; it is family that often cuts us off from others, that causes us to play it safe, that causes us to withdraw from the cross. The traditional family is a power mechanism of the empire: it keeps us line. Home and family in the Gospel of Mark are not the traditional home and the traditional family. The family and the home in Mark are associated with vulnerable friendship - not property rights and biological kinship.
Jesus delivers his familiar speech one final time beginning at Mark 10:32: “See, we are going to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the [clergy], and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will [torture and] kill him, and after three days he will rise again.” (vv 33-34) By now one would think the disciples understand what Jesus is saying. However, immediately after delivering his speech for the third time, James and John step up and forcefully ask, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left hand, in your glory.” (v 37) As it turns out, they don’t get it. But I think we get what the disciples want. The disciples want to be powerful - as the emphasis on greatness and glory attest. They want to be like the leaders of the empire. They want to take Satan up on his offer; they want a certain Kingdom; they want to rule in power and glory. Jesus brings this home at 10:42: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.” Jesus is adamantly opposed to this way of life, and he, once again, emphasizes, in the words of the text, “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your slave [diakonos], and whoever wishes to be first among you must be a slave [doulos] of all.” (v 43) This is the way of the messiah, who came not to be a ruler but a weak slave; this is the way of the messiah who came not as a lord, but as a child (weak and vulnerable) - to give his life for many. (v 45)
III.
“Mark’s” teacher is undoubtedly the Apostle Paul. Romans is the apostle’s letter to, according to the text, “God’s beloved [agapētois Theou] in Rome” - to those living at the center of the empire (1:7). Beginning at Romans 12, the apostle is concerned with how messiah loyalists live together in and toward the world. At the outset, Paul hopes that the comrades of the messiah will resist being, in Paul’s words, “conformed to this world [that is, the Roman empire]” and strive to be “transformed” by a new thinking that leads to a new bodily being together in the world and a new bodily being toward the world. (v 2) What is this new way thinking? Paul writes, “I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of yourselves than you ought to think.” (v 3)
Paul brings this way of thinking directly to bear on conflict, congregational, if you will, conflict - beginning at chapter 14. “Welcome,” Paul writes, “those who are weak in faith.” (14:1) The issues addressed here may strike us as somewhat trivial. People seem to be quarreling over food (what may be eaten) and certain days (which days are holy). We should remind ourselves, however, that a great deal of blood has been shed over food and days.7 These issues are not trivial to those engaged in these debates, to those who think that even national security depends on judgements about what or who is clean and unclean, what or who is holy and unholy.
This discussion is bracketed by two significant theological points. First, Paul asserts, “God has welcomed [the weak]. Who are you to pass judgements on slaves [oiketēn] of another.” (vv 3-4) Then, a few verses beyond those read to us from Romans 15, Paul admonishes the believers, “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” (v 7) The messiah imitates God, and messiah loyalists are to imitate the messiah. The messiah Jesus came, as we heard from the Gospel of Mark, not to enslave, but to be a slave - to give his life to others. This is precisely what Paul asks his friends in Rome to do. As Paul rather jarringly puts it, “We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Each of us must please our neighbor and not please ourselves. Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. For Christ did not please himself.” (vv 1-3) In other words, Paul is arguing that the strong must be weak, as the messiah was weak, willing to give up their lives for the sake of the weak.
Paul is not suggesting, it seems to me, that we all just get along. We can certainly have disputes (and we certainly will have disputes) - but we must always keep in mind that our neighbors are more important than our disputes, than our traditions, polity, and theological positions. Now I know we can get lost here sometimes. We are often not terribly clear about what it means to live in a way that is best for our neighbors and not ourselves. What often happens is that living for our neighbors becomes another way of living for ourselves, of deciding what is best for our neighbors. Whatever complications are introduced here, it seems to me that if our doctrinal commitments or our sense of what is clean and holy results in a high rate of teen suicide, increases bullying or makes it “religiously” acceptable, prevents our fellow neighbors from gaining access to basic resources, straps our neighbors with higher costs of living, and/or presents the fires of hell to those who disagree with our perspective - then we cannot possibly think that we are pleasing our neighbor and not ourselves. We please our neighbor and not ourselves only when we, like the messiah, as Paul teaches elsewhere, empty ourselves. (Philippians 2:7)
IV.
Paul, in the passage read to us, argues, in his words, “whatever was written in the former days was written for our instruction, so that by the steadfastness and by encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” (15:4) “Mark” understands this well and cites Isaiah 56:7 in chapter 11. There, in the midst of causing quite a ruckus in the temple, turning over tables and chasing people around, Jesus asserts, in the words of Isaiah 56:7, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations[.] [And Jesus continues] But you have made it a den of robbers.” (v 17) Of course, this really upsets the clergy, and the text tells us, they keep looking for a way to assassinate Jesus. (v 18)
Isaiah 56:1-8 constitutes the remarkable opening of what biblical scholars often call Third Isaiah. These few verses offer a grand vision of a just society, that is, of a society that extends hospitality to the stranger and the strange: to “foreigners” and to “eunuchs.” V 1 of our texts makes it clear that what we are dealing with is the word of the Lord - a word regarding the future or the salvation to come - and the main theme is justice or doing what is right. “Happy is the mortal,” (any mortal) the texts tells us, who is just, which seems to entail keeping the Sabbath and refraining from ra‘ or evil. In Third Isaiah, evil is a term one finds in the context of shedding innocent blood (59:7) and the people’s rejection of God. (65) Evil has to do with cutting off, rather than welcoming, the stranger and the strange.
The term stranger or, in the text, foreigner [bēn-hanēkār], is somewhat clear to us. These are the non-Israelites who are joined to the Lord’s people. It’s not terribly clear why they fear, as the text tells us, being cut off from the Lord’s people - but that is their fear: that, on the basis of their ethnicity, they will somehow ultimately be excluded by the Lord from the Lord’s future people. What we are to make of those identified by the Hebrew sārîsîm, translated by the Greek eunuch, however, may not be terribly clear to us. They, too, fear being cut off from the Lord’s people - but in a way, it seems, profoundly different from that of the foreigner. The strangers are at a disadvantage because they are not “natural born citizens,” if you will, but why are the sārîsîm at a disadvantage?
The concern of the sārîs is stated at v 3: “I’m just a dry tree.” This phrase, dry tree [yābēs ēts], also occurs in Ezekiel 17:24, a text that is near and dear to the line of thought I am pursuing today. In the words of the text, “All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.” It seems that the sārîsîm cannot have children; they are, for some reason, dry. This makes sense of the Lord’s promise to those sārîsîm who do what is just and refrain from evil: “I will give, in my house and within my walls, a place and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give sārîsîm an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” (v 5) The sārîsîm, we might say, are those (especially males) who are either 1) unable or 2) unwilling to have children. And in a time and place where children represented the people’s future, the sārîsîm fear being cut off from God’s future people. In any case, the foreigners joined to the Lord and the “eunuchs” joined to the Lord are, though in their own ways, impotent rather than omnipotent.
The logic of Isaiah is not new to us. In the words of the text, “Thus says the Lord, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.” (v 8) God gathers the weak and the vulnerable and welcomes them into God’s house; that’s what it means to be a God of justice: to ensure the weak an everlasting place. Thus God demands that mortals (anyone at all) maintain justice and observe the Sabbath - which Luther and Calvin understand as assisting one’s neighbor. That’s what it means to do what is right. Theologically we may assert that God, the strong, knows what it is not only to, as Paul says, “put up with the failings of the weak,” but also to become weak. We are called to participate in God’s life - to drop our swords and, armed only with our vulnerable bodies and a good sense of humor, welcome the weak. This way of life or politics is weak force - our distinctive way of resisting the empire’s politics of death.
V.
Faith is our ordination; we are, all of us, ministers. All that I have said applies, therefore, not only to the Rev. Adam Walker Cleaveland, but to each one of us. Today, however, is also about the Rev. Adam Walker Cleaveland. I recall that when we were at Whitworth College (now Whitworth University) Adam was looking for a church. In those days, I was greatly perplexed by people “looking for a church.” I felt that if one moved, one simply found the nearest Presbyterian Church (USA) and started attending. Of course, my view was not terribly popular. In the end, however, Adam found his way to and into the Presbyterian Church (USA), and I found my way out of it.
When I was in high school, I was ordained an elder, and I was given responsibility for the buildings and grounds of Homedale, Idaho’s First Presbyterian Church. After school, I would often go to the building - not to work - but to take a nap, directly on the floor in front of the communion table - under the dim rays of the late afternoon sun. Of course, I could have gone home to take a nap, but it, for some reason, made more sense to me to rest in the building where I worshiped on Sundays. In college, and especially in seminary, however, I began to realize just how many people are not given the keys to the Church. Thus today I think there is good reason to celebrate my friend Adam’s installation as a pastor of this congregation and in this presbytery and, to be frank, I think there is good reason to be concerned for Adam, a messiah loyalist.
We should celebrate because I think Adam will take being a pastor seriously. I have known for some time that Adam’s ministry is genuine, sincere, and seasoned…seasoned with a bit of non-awkward corniness, and said corniness gives his ministry the right amount of levity and energy. If anyone can help the church become a place where children and youth can and feel like they should take a nap in front of the communion table - it’s Adam.
Adam, as I am sure you already know, has a certain ability to connect with people. His relational arsenal is quite extensive: multiple blogs, websites, Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on and so forth. In fact, I take credit for his love of blogging. After some post-college fatigue, our friendship was re-kindled as a result of our discovery of post-modern thought. We gathered at Idaho’s Monastery of the Ascension to talk about our mutual interest, and of course, we decided we would write a book about postmodern thought and ministry. I suggested that we blog in order to share our ideas across the several thousand miles separating Wendell, Idaho from the great city of Chicago. Adam’s popular blog, Pomomusings, was one of the outcomes of our conversations. Needless to say, Adam uses social media in an admirable way, that is, he uses social media to welcome as many as possible into his life and into the life of the church. I am even more impressed, however, by how often Adam sits down to have coffee with folk - to engage in face-to-face conversation. Adam’s ministry is most certainly serious.
I am also aware that Adam knows that being a pastor is difficult and arduous. Over the years, Adam has demonstrated a willingness to negotiate and to work with others on any number of sensitive and potentially divisive issues. Adam is committed, like all serious Reformed folk, to sharing his theological reasoning (rather than enforcing it) and to persuading others of his positions (rather than demanding compliance). Rev. Walker Cleaveland’s ability to absorb strange accusations and intentional misunderstandings without becoming defensive only helps him to remain open, calm, and focused on others. Adam, in other words, cultivates a certain weakness, that is, he is unwilling to assert himself in ways that are unwise and unhelpful, and he is willing to put a great deal on the line for the weak and vulnerable. And here’s my concern for Adam: the institutional Church, often the defender of the status quo, does not make it easy, to put it mildly, to be weak or to welcome the weak.
The texts read to us today are difficult. Each texts admonishes us to avoid self-preservation, self-reliance, greatness, and prestige because these temptations ultimately require handing the messiah over to be killed by human hands. The alternative to these temptations is not an easy one. The powers that be will threaten you with death: the death of your career, your happiness, your well-being, or even your very body. But there is a problem for these powers - for the powers that seek to knock the weak aside, to disappear the weak and vulnerable. “Mark’s” Jesus mentioned it three times and on the third day God accomplished it. The problem for the empire is simply the resurrection of the dead. The Son of Man, God’s Messiah Jesus has unleashed the weak power of life, and those who seek to lord their power over the weak can knock the weak down and even kill the weak - but not for long. The weak will rise again.
You know, Adam, the words of the Creed: “I believe in…the resurrection of the dead.” I know you believe in the resurrection. Therefore, I believe you will faithfully discharge the office of pastor - armed only with your vulnerable body, a great many people who love you and upon whom you may rely, and a good sense of humor. Amen and Amen.
