Exhortation, Commissioning

Exhortation, Commissioning May 14, 2006

John 12:24: Jesus said, Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

We are not ordaining you today. We are not laying hands on you. But we are commissioning you to a ministry in the church of Jesus Christ, and we fully expect you will eventually serve the church as an ordained man. This commissioning is a proto-ordination, and as you go to begin that ministry I want to remind you what that eventual ordination calls you to.


To put it simply, ordination is a call to death. In the Old Testament, worshipers laid a hand on an animal just before they slaughtered it for sacrifice. Israel laid hands on the Levites to stand in the place of the people around the tabernacle, and in that capacity they served as a boundary between the Holy God enthroned in the tabernacle and the sinful people in the camp. Ordination puts you in danger; ordination is always a call to death.

This will not be the first time you’ve died. You died to Adam in your baptism. You died to singleness when you got married. You died to one phase of your education when you graduated from high school and again when you graduated from college. You died to one phase of your life when you left Maryland to move to Moscow, and you’ll die to another phase when you move away from Moscow back East. Each of events marked an ending within your life, a kind of death, a move into an uncertain future. You have died regularly in all sorts of ways during your life. By your ordination, you will be called to die again.

Ordination is a call to death because it brings an end to one form of living the Christian life. You won’t be in the audience anymore; you’ll be up front leading the people of God into the presence of God. You’ll be responsible in a new way for teaching God’s people, and for speaking the gospel of Jesus into the broken lives of sinners. Ordination is also a call to death because it is a call to daily death – giving up preferences, convenience, comfort, peace and quiet for the sake of your people. You are called to die by giving your life and time and energies to serving the people of the congregation you are called to. Every Christian is called to die to himself, but ordination is a specification of baptism that calls you in a particular way to follow Jesus the Good Shepherd in laying down your life for the sheep. Ordination confers authority and privilege; but that privilege and authority are cruciform or they are nothing.

You can follow the call of your ordination only in faith. Each time you’ve died, you’ve had to do it in hope of resurrection, with faith in the God who raises the dead. Having never been married, you set out on an adventure into new territory when you died in your wedding service. You died trusting the Lord of life and death to be faithful to give you a new life. When you left home to move to Moscow, you did it in faith that the Lord would open a new life here, and He did. That is the same faith you need to serve the Lord as a commissioned pastoral candidate and later as an ordained pastor.

This faith is faith in resurrection, and also faith that death is, as Jesus said, the only way of fruitfulness. We might wish that our seeds could become fruitful in a more direct fashion, without the intervention of death. We might want a harvest directly from the seed, a tree grown up and fruitful without having to kill the seed. But that’s not the way the world works. Even Jesus, who is THE seed, did not bear fruit without dying. If you want your ministry to be fruitful, you must be that seed that goes into the earth and dies. You must accept the call of your ordination, that call to death, and fill it out with by daily death.

So, as you begin your work in South Carolina, and as you prepare for eventual ordination, prepare to die. But prepare to die in full hope that this is the way, the only way, of fruitful ministry.


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