Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

Sunday, October 16, 2022 | 4:00 p.m.

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Jeremiah 31:31–34
Luke 18:1–8

In the spring of 2003 I flew from New Jersey, where I was in seminary, to Wichita, to participate in the presbytery where I was to be received as a candidate for ordination to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament. That’s a lot of Presbyterian-speak, but the rub of it is that, for the first time, the notion that I was going to be a pastor was going to be publicly validated by the church.

Maybe because I had a lot on my mind already with a full load of classes, or maybe because I was stressed about the logistics of landing at the airport an hour before the meeting and then getting myself there by taxi, I didn’t think much about how that moment was going to go before I found myself in the middle of it.

If you’ve never seen this, what basically happens is that the chair of the committee that has been meeting with you for over a year invites you to come to the front, and they ask you a series of questions in front of a hundred ministers and elders or more. Here’s the very first question that person asks:

“Do you believe yourself to be called by God to the Ministry of the Word and Sacrament?”

I think I froze. The seriousness of it hit me as if for the first time, and I needed a moment to really think about the question; do I believe myself to be called by God . . . to the Ministry . . .

Who in their right mind can believe such a thing about themselves?

Well, because there was a room full of people staring at me, I snapped out of it and answered, “I do.”

I’m not sure I could have done that without the other people in the room.

I made a pledge in that moment to prepare myself for ministry. A pledge is simply a promise. You can promise someone that you’re going to do something—that you’re going to take your daughter out for ice cream, for example—and whether or not you keep that promise is between the two of you. But a pledge feels like a more public kind of promise.

If you’ve ever taken marriage vows, you have “pledged your troth,” as the saying used to go, in front of other people, perhaps in a church (a wedding is a worship service) or maybe just in front of one other person. But you can’t get married without at least one other person to hear your marriage vows.

We make public pledges to God and to the church at important moments of transition. I love when we do this.

I find it moving to stand shoulder to shoulder with women and men of faith and to pledge ourselves to fulfill our responsibilities to a newly baptized person. But we make pledges on lots of occasions, like when we ordain church officers—deacons and elders and ministers.

Officers are asked, “Will you fulfill your ministry in obedience to Jesus Christ, under the authority of Scripture, and be continually guided by our Confessions?” Then the congregation also makes a pledge to “accept [them] as elders and deacons, . . . to pray for them, to encourage them, to respect their decisions, and to follow as they guide us.”

Making a pledge to one another and to God is a powerful experience of worship.

And this is what is happening in the story we heard from the book of Joshua just now. The people of Israel are pledging to serve the Lord and to obey the Lord in a moment of transition.

Joshua, Moses’ successor, the leader who has brought them across the Jordan into the Promised Land, is at the end of his life, and their life as a people in this new land is changing from one of conquest led by a military commander (him) to one of coexistence with “foreign” peoples who have other gods, led by elders, judges, and officers.

And so in this moment Joshua invites them to make a pledge: revere the Lord. Serve God honestly and faithfully. And so they do. And when Joshua tells them he doesn’t think they can actually do it, they double down. “No,” they say. “The Lord is the one we will serve!” It’s as powerful an example of a pledge of faith as we find in all of Scripture.

The problem — as I’m sure you’re aware — is that they aren’t going to keep it. Joshua is actually right to doubt them. When he says, “You can’t serve the Lord,” he’s not wrong.

This is how the rest of this story will play out in the remaining pages of the Hebrew scriptures: the people repeatedly breaking the promise they made to serve the Lord.

Instead, they will serve other gods. They will demand to have a king — though God doesn’t want that for them — just so they can be like those “other nations.” They will enter into military alliances against their prophets’ council to protect themselves from threat. It will all end in exile, as Israel and Judah are conquered by invading empires, and the prophets will say the people brought it on themselves—by breaking their pledge to God.

We know this is where the story is going. Even as we voice this full-throated pledge — ”The Lord is the one we will serve!” — we already know that we won’t.

We know that we break promises, don’t we. Raise your hand if you’ve never broken a promise.

We pray a prayer of confession each week admitting to God that, in essence, we don’t do the things we pledge to do, and we do all kinds of things that are at odds with our pledge to love and serve God.

We don’t fulfill our pledges, and we break our promises. I, like some of you, took ordination vows to “trust in the Lord Jesus Christ my Savior,” and I have to admit that I have not always done that. I do not always do that. I have not always been a “friend among my colleagues in ministry” or “loved my neighbors” or “worked for the reconciliation of the world.” I fail to “further the peace, unity, and purity of the church” and to “pray for and seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.”

Though I pledged to do all those things when I was ordained as a pastor, I fail at them. And I knew I would fail at them when I said “I do” and “I will” to them.

But I said it anyway, and that was the exact right thing to do.

The certainty of failure should not prevent us from making promises. Faith compels us to make promises, even when we know we can’t fully keep them.

Because our pledges are not meant to be a sign of our own virtue — say our dependability or our moral fortitude. Our promises point to something bigger than us. They point to God, who makes promises to us before we know anything of it.

“For you Jesus Christ came into the world” is how one of the church’s baptismal liturgies puts it.

“For you he lived and showed God’s love;
for you he suffered the darkness of Calvary
and cried at the last, ‘It is finished’;
for you he triumphed over death and rose in newness of life;
for you he ascended to reign at God’s right hand.
All this he did for you
before you knew anything of it.”

Friends, hear the good news of the gospel: All this is for you before you knew anything of it.

Joshua gathered all the people together and told them, “Thus says the Lord: ‘I took your ancestor Abraham from the other side of the Euphrates before you knew anything of it. I brought you out of Egypt before you knew anything of it. I brought you into a good and broad place before you knew anything of it. I rescued you before you knew anything of it.’”

This is the good news that precedes the pledge and on which our pledge is based. We can pledge our faithfulness to God because it wasn’t our sword or bow or our resourcefulness or our reliability that brought us to now. It was God.

We are living on land for which we didn’t toil and enjoy the produce of vineyards we didn’t plant. The fruit is here on this table, for us. It was here before we knew anything of it. We didn’t have to earn it or make it, and our failures can’t forfeit it, because the promises we make to God and one another stand on the promise God made to us before we knew anything of it.

It is the sacramental infrastructure that supports our life in God. Meditating on these words of Joshua these weeks I couldn’t help but remember the 2012 presidential campaign when President Obama upset some people by talking about physical infrastructure. Do you remember this? He said, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

This is exactly what Joshua is saying to the Israelites in their new situation, what he is saying to all people of faith in every situation—that the life we have in God runs on infrastructure that we didn’t build but that we are called upon to use for the good of others—for the good of the world.

And we have to choose to use this infrastructure. We must choose it. Knowing what we know about ourselves when it comes to making pledges and keeping them, we have to keep making vows and promises and pledges that testify to the love of God for the world.

When we fail, we have to repent and do better. But we can’t stop choosing.

What Joshua is reminding his sisters and brothers in the faith is that this infrastructure they have been given is not simply for their benefit. Their whole story begins with God choosing and calling their ancestor Abram from beyond the Euphrates, promising to make of him and his wife Sarai a great nation that will bless all the families of the earth.

They are where they are and God has done all of the things God has done for them because they still have a job to do. They have a vocation—to bless all the families of the earth.

That vocation requires repeated choice. They must choose that calling over and over and over again; there is no law or ritual that will fulfill it. The people have to “choose this [and the next] day whom [they] will serve,” as Joshua, for his part, announces that “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (I’m sure you’ve seen that hanging on someone’s living room wall somewhere.) They must choose. And even knowing what’s coming, they can choose it. They do.

The world needs people who choose to pledge themselves to things bigger than themselves. The world needs a church that pledges itself over and over again to serve the Lord—not the nation or the economy or the shifting sensibilities of the culture. The world today needs us to pledge ourselves to our calling to be a blessing to others.

As my friend Bruce likes to say, “It’s just that easy, and it’s just that hard.” But we can do it. We must do it.

Look at you: you’re already doing it. You chose to come here this afternoon, and though the music is stirring and the space is beautiful and the bread will be tasty, I know you chose to be here for more than those things. Our being here in worship together is its own kind of pledge, and it matters.

Coming to this table with one another to say yes to God’s pledge of sustenance through this bread and cup is a pledge, and it matters.

And in two weeks when we dedicate our monetary pledges to the ministry of Fourth Church in 2023, that will matter too.

It all matters.

Thanks be to God, it all matters.

Amen.