“HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BODY OF CHRIST”

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Ryan Stevenson-Cosgrove is one my partners with the Iowa Preachers Project. A Lutheran preacher in Minnesota, Ryan has a heart for the gospel, an ear for sound theology, and a hand that knows how to write sentences. Here is his presentation from our first gathering of our second cohort— I wish I had the audio of it to share with you.

Well, seeing as I’m in the company of professional forgivers, I’d like to begin with a confession. Often, when I would hear the folks at Mockingbird, or Ken, or Jason complain about the sorry state of preaching, I suspected they were playing it up! To be honest, part of me wondered if maybe they weren’t building straw men to bolster a weak argument. But then, something happened.

What happened was, I took a new call. When I arrived, I got to preach three Sundays in a row. But then, after that, I didn’t preach for a month. And in that month, I heard, at least, nine different sermons, given by four different pastors. And let me tell you, by the time it was over, I was in a sorry state of affairs.

The final sermon I had to sit through was a funeral sermon. My friend’s father had died. And this was the friend whose family let me live with them after our house fire. They did that so I wouldn’t have to miss classes. As you might expect, the man we laid to rest, Jeff, meant an awful lot to me.

Plus, Jeff’s death came unexpectedly. He was only 67. And the pastor had the good sense to acknowledge this. But then, after making this obvious statement, the pastor felt the need to say more.

The pastor admitted that, yes, Jeff was young. And he also wasn’t young. After all, reasoned the good reverend, we could all die at any moment. Therefore, concluded the pastor, we had all do well to get right with God with the precious little time we all have.

At this point, I nearly had to muffle a scream. Didn’t this pastor know that was precisely my problem?!? I wasn’t right with God! I couldn’t sing “It is well with my soul!” In fact, the devil was using that funeral to preach another sermon to me. And after the month I had, I think I succumbed to it.

Every single sermon I heard that month told me what I should believe or do. And let me be clear, on the whole, I basically agreed with everything they said. The only problem was, that was my problem! I knew what I should do or think. But, blast it, like Saint Paul before me, that was exactly what I couldn’t do when I most needed to!

Worst of all, not one of those pastors saw fit to lift a finger and lighten my terrible load! Honestly, they mostly just added to it. And yes, they added to it with good things, but that only made everything worse! In my story state, their admonitions didn’t help me get closer to God. They just drove the wedge further in.

Let me be frank, when you’re your own worst enemy, and we all are moreoften than we care to admit, you don’t have it in you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps! No, when Sin and Death get a toehold, the only thing we can do, even with our best efforts, is just dig ourselves deeper into our own graves! Those pastors’ exhortations that I just believe this or do that threw my problem back on itself: me and myself! My problem was me, myself, and my utter lack of any righteousness or faithfulness!

So, let me ask you, why did those pastors think I had it in me to make anything better?!? And to be honest, after a month of being beaten downwith shoulds and oughts, I began to look enviously at the corpse. At least he got to be dead! I, though—I had to haul my miserable carcass around! I had to try whipping it yet again, in the awful delusion that maybe this time that dead horse might get up and do something!

Let me tell you, it was miserable.

At my wits’ end, I called Ken on the long drive home. I have no doubt that call was laced with obscenities. Ken, for his part, listened and, most importantly, preached. And that, preaching, that alone freed me. Once I had a little breathing room, I could finally ask the real question: why!

Why did I, this poor kid with dyslexia from Nowheresville, Iowa, know better than all those preachers?!? Why didn’t a single one of them get it? They all came from better families! One of them even went to Princeton, Sarah and Jason! So, why, oh why, didn’t they get it?!? And that’s when Ken suggested I work something up for you all.

It was helpful advice, too. As I wrote this, I realized I’ve already touched upon my answer. My upbringing itself taught me the hard way not to put my trust in mortals, in whom there is no help! The rest of those pastors managed to manage their middle-class lives reasonably well. For them, life was mostly manageable. Like Mrs. Ruby Turpin in Flannery O’Connor’s excellent short story Revelation, those pastors mistook God’s forbearance for their own faithfulness.

…However. However, to stop there would be dishonest. Wouldn’t it? For one thing, it would be a dodge on my part. And for another, it would be to give those other pastors too much credit!

The truth is, no one walks a cleared path. Do we? No, those pastors must have met a problem they couldn’t solve. For whatever reason, though, they failed to learn its God-given lesson!

Speaking for myself, my rocky childhood wasn’t enough to teach me to rely on God, either! If anything, it just as often taught me the opposite lesson! The tough times taught me to be tougher. And to be honest, my determinationserved me pretty well, too. Until, that is, it didn’t.

In college, here at Grand View, I ran my life into the ground. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it’s truly a miracle I’m here. And I don’t mean alive. I mean, it’s a miracle I’m even allowed back on campus!

Let’s leave it there, though. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t depravity that drove my life into the ground. On the contrary, it was ambition and righteousness! I never wrecked so much havoc on my own life and the lives of others as when I was driving myself to Princeton! Satan is an equal opportunity employer in that way! Satan is just as adept with virtue as vice. It’s we who are all too susceptible to the mortal sin of hubris, or self-righteousness!

I caught more than my fair share of breaks afterward. As I said, getting to walk away is more than I could have asked for. And given my working-class family, it’s more than a lot of my kin ever received. But my best break by far was the gory details.

Blowing up my own life with aspiration and blowing it up so absolutely taught me two invaluable lessons. First of all, I learned that what I experienced is common. Secondly, since I had wrecked my own life so completely, it was also impossible for me to move on from it. And seeing as those two lessons are true, because they are, I’d be willing to bet you can relate, too.

If you’re here, you probably know a thing or two about what I’m talking about. You can probably fill in the details for yourself. As the Whiskey Priest in ThePower and the Glory realizes, sin is not as original as we think. Either way, I’d be willing to wager disaster has probably struck you, a loved one, or the congregation you served head-on. At the very least, this shipwreck of righteousness has most certainly come too close for comfort.

I would ask you to stay in touch with this uncomfortable fact, too. Because that, finally, is what I suspect those other pastors got wrong. The pastors were all well-meaning to a fault. And all things considered, they weren’t half-bad, either.

Their only problem was that those pastors thought the catastrophes of life were the anomaly, and not the ordinary that they are! In a word, those pastors were working with an imaginary view of life! It’s like Luther said to Philip Melanchthon:

If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness, but, as Peter says, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.

In their minds, those pastors were preaching to people who had all the faithand willpower they needed to manage their lives, and their eternal lives, too! Therefore, their sermons didn’t offer salvation! They offered self-help! And while that has its time and place, it’s utterly suffocating when you’re already suffering from that terrible sickness unto death! When you’re the poor in spirit, no amount of bucking up will help; only the blessing of Jesus Christ can do that!

Those pastors offered sermons full of good advice. And it was all very nice. But it was only nice in theory. In real life, those sermons were cruel! They were nothing short of terminal! They amounted to the chief priests and elders telling Judas to see about his guilt himself.

…Sermons that only offer good advice are bad news. And they’re bad news for everyone involved. They’re bad news for hearers. Sermons that only offer guidance usually just lead to death, be it physical or spiritual.

Speaking for myself, I learned this in middle school! I grew up in a Pentecostal church! I was constantly cajoled to gin up my spiritual life! And after too much ordinary failure, I came to the inevitable conclusion: God and I were at odds. Before I even graduated high school, I knew that once my mom couldn’t make me go to church, I was never going to go again.

Thank God God had other plans. And it bears repeating that all that time I spent running from God never did as much damage as when I was trying to run to God!

Seeing as I’m speaking to professional forgivers, though, it’s you I want to address. Nice sermons, full of good advice, are bad news for you, too. They’re a recipe for resentment, burnout, and in the end, despair. If you’re here, I reckon you know this. If you just want to improve people, you might as well tear up your ordination certificate right now! Spare yourself and the people you serve a lot of heartache.

If you just want the people you serve to improve, go into finances! By and large, we only progress incrementally. But that’s just a fancy way of saying we don’t really get that much better at all! So, if that’s what you want, prepare to be disappointed. And if you would, please don’t take your disappointment out on the people you’ve been called to deliver God’s word. Join a gym, for God’s sake!

What I’d like to propose, though, is that the church is a surprisingly inefficient little operation! But the secret is, that it’s greatest gift! Either way, it’s no accident! As Saint Paul said, God has subjected creation to futility!

However, creation has not been subjected to futility in wrath! No, creation has been subjected to futility in hope! Creation has been subjected to futility in hope that it would be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God! And dear children of God, in Christ, this hope is yours!

That’s not all, either! On account of your calling, it’s the obligation that has been laid upon you! And woe to you if you do not proclaim the gospel! But hurrah for you if you do!

Preaching that begins with God-given futility is the most effective thing you can do! Plus, it’s a lot of fun, too! We pastors have to be so cautious, so often. So, let me tell you, it’s refreshing to, at least, once a week, climb into the pulpit and put caution to the wind! You get to preach the gospel, and let the chips fall where they may!

If you’re here, I suspect you know a thing or two about the fun of the gospel. So, I’d like to talk a little about its functionality. First of all, preaching is the most significant act of pastoral care you will conduct all week. Worship is the largest gathering of members. So give sermon preparation its due time.

As the musician, Jason Isbell, said, his songs got better when he got sober. The main reason wasn’t that he had a clear head, either! No, it was just that he had time to give the songs time! When he was sober, songwriting didn’t have to compete for time with drinking!

So, give sermons their due time! There’s nothing else you can’t entrust to a member to handle, either. Pastors don’t have to do everything! In fact, we infantilize congregations by making our insecurity their problem!

A good pastor knows they don’t have to know everything. And an even betterpastor knows when it’s time to hand off other work and get their hands on the Bible. But if you think I’m playing this up, just talk to a bi-vocational pastor. They’ll tell you how lucky you are to be afforded time for sermon preparation. So, use it faithfully. Ok?

…That’s just a practical consideration, though. So, let me cut to the chase: When you begin with God-given futility, you can actually get something done! When you know you’re talking to real sinners, you will know you have something to say!

Plus, you won’t have to worry about how to say it, either! When you have news, you don’t have to waste time trying to be clever! No, when you have a message that’s so good it actually impacts people’s lives, you can just trust that the newsworthiness of your proclamation will capture attention all by itself!

You don’t have to be compelling! The message is more than compelling enough all by itself! In fact, trying to punch up the Gospel is a good way to get in the way of it! And if I’m honest, when I see I’m a little too worried about being interesting, I’ve come to realize I’m really betraying a deep distrust in the power of the message!

If you think the Gospel needs to be dressed up with a whole bunch of folderol, don’t be surprised when people don’t believe it! After all, we pastors spend the entire sermon gesturing that the message isn’t enough with all ourso-called flair!

A quick aside, I’ve read and listened to enough truly faithful sermons to believe this, too. There are too many voices that say a good sermon shouldsound like this or that, or do this or that. But at its best, that’s just fiddling around the edges. And at its worst, it’s a faithless presumption. Either way, it’s not the main thing!

I’ve heard faithful Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic, Disciples, and Lutheran sermons. They each have their own sound! And that’s ok! Don’t lose sleep trying to sound like someone else! It is God’s good pleasure that you preach!

You don’t have to sound like anyone else! No, you have to do something harder. You have to sound like the steward of God’s mysteries that you are! And all you have to do to do this is stay true to the word of God! Then, go ahead and sound like anyone you darn well please! Since you’re here, though, it’s probably best that you sound like yourself!

That said, you are free if you want to adopt another voice! But let me challenge you to try to let the Scripture dictate that! No one else may notice that you’ve assumed a narrative style to preach a narrative. Nevertheless, the internal consistency will witness back to the power of the source material itself! And if nothing else, it’ll buck you up! You’ll climb into the pulpit knowing you’re not pulling any punches!

Now we’re in the weeds, though. So, let me just say, if we do our work, youwill walk away sounding more like yourself. Most of all, though, you’ll soundmore like a good steward of God’s mysteries! And the best stewards are the ones who are free to experiment with as many voices that are faithful to God’s word, God’s people, and God’s servants—in that order.

…But I was talking about the efficacy of God-given futility. When you address your sermons to people who have really run their own lives into the ground, you’ll start to speak to the largest group in the congregation, everyone! And you’ll have something to say to them, too!

This is what makes for missional preaching! Missional isn’t about being clever, winning, or even relevant. No, it’s about meeting people where they actually live! And the rock bottom assumption you can make about anyone with a pulse is that they are either the perpetrator or victim of besetting sin. And more than likely, they’re a confusing mixture of both! I know I am!

People tolerate bad sermons because they don’t know they can demand anything better! What we really believe is that we won’t have to believe! We believe we can white-knuckle some shabby imitation of belief. Or we lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves that we really do believe that this time we can finally get our life together and work God out of a job!

Ultimately, though, that is just despair dressed up in religious garb! The real sin of those sermons I spoke about earlier is that they believed in a fictionalversion of life, and therefore, they didn’t believe in the real and living God! Those sermons, in so many words, preached that it’s up to us. In other words, their baseline assumption is that we’re in this alone! Luther called this treating God no better than a liar.

At the end of the day, it’s preaching a God who is still dead and in the grave! However, that’s not where God is to be found! God is alive and on the loose! Preaching that tells us it’s up to us, walks away from God, and therefore inevitably leads us to our shallow tombs!

…Now, I will grant you, convicting is a part of preaching. But to stop there or end there is to fail to deliver the punchline! And the Gospel is a comedy! The Gospel is the stunning subversion of the expectation of Sin, Death, and the Devil’s reign of terror!

This is the good humor you get to share with the world! You get to free people from the doom of doubt! You get to tell people they’re not alone! You get to tell people that, because Christ lives, and he does, we shall live forever in him and his never-ending love!

This message will come back to you, too, dear preachers! As the creeds teach, often, the best way to believe God’s promises is to wrap your lips around them! The more you preach, the more you will come to believe! But it needn’t be so solipsistic as that.

Preaching the gospel week-in and week-out won’t just make you amorous for it. Although it will. No, preaching the Gospel will get others in the congregation aroused for it, too! When that happens, the sermon will begin to have an outsized impact!

First of all, when you know you’re actually preaching to real-life sinners, you won’t have to be surprised when people act like it! And that, believe it or not, will make you into the kind of pastor who can be surprised when the Holy Spirit works through good-for-nothing members nevertheless! The Gospelcan actually give the joy of this vocation back to you! And it can do that from the biggest pain in your ass!

That’s not all, either! When you know you’re actually preaching to real-life sinners, you don’t have to be afraid of the futility of creation! From now on, nothing can be the end of the world for you anymore! No, that already happened on Good Friday!

If you want to see the zero-sum of futility that creation has been subjected to, you need look no further than the cross! Then, after you’ve really looked, start preaching! And preach recklessly, too! Preach as if you’re already as good as dead! Preach as if you’re already as good as dead because you are!

You can’t fail! But you can’t succeed, either! No, those are categories for the living who still have yet to die. But you are the dead in your sin who live in Christ and his righteousness! So, go ahead and let your corpse be the welcome mat to the congregation’s empty tomb!

With that, the congregation will no longer be a project for your ambition or ego. Instead, it will become a playground for the Holy Spirit! And not only is that when the surprises start and the failures end, it’s also where the fun begins! And I believe Sarah and Jason will back me up on this. But I’ll just speak from personal experience.

My last call was a very precarious one. When I arrived, there were no children. And the budget wasn’t just month-to-month, it was day-to-day. I got my checks on the 5th and 20th instead of the 1st and 15th because, for five months in a row, we had to wait a day to cut my check because there wasn’t enough money in the bank.

Believe me, you can ask Ken; no one tried harder to berate that congregation into vitality. And let me tell you, all it bred was frustration. Instead of loving the congregation for what it was, I hated it for what it wasn’t. Finally, I burnt out. Drained of everything else, I just preached bread-and-butter sermons week after week.

Slowly, the congregation became resilient. Over the course of 13 years, the congregation moved from being on the edge of a part-time call to a full-time call. Then, it became a second call. When I left, they could still afford to pay a full-time pastor with 13 years of experience. And we also started to attract younger families. All the while, the services got more liturgical and the sermons got longer, too.

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, though. God wasn’t stingy with crosses, either. For instance, aside from all the normal, everyday suffering, we had a boiler explosion that forced us to demolish the sanctuary. But even that, as Saint Paul promises, worked together for good.

Yes, there’s the money in the bank we got from the insurance company. But the real treasure is that I learned Luther was right! “Were they to take our house, goods, honor, child, or spouse, though life be wrenched away, they cannot win the day! The kingdom’s ours forever! Our mighty fortress isn’t our sanctuaries or success. No, it’s God’s faithfulness!

After enough crosses, I can honestly say I ceased to connect my identity to how things were going from day to day. Yes, there were some dark nights. But I suppose I always had this sense that none of it would be the end. And that taught me to hold it all loosely.

There were summers when our youth group was the biggest one at confirmation camp. And there were summers I had to ask the confirmand to wait a year so we could have two the next year. But never was my worth or the power of the Gospel tied up with uncontrollable variables like that!

…I know it drove Ken crazy that I wouldn’t move on. But when you have it all, it’s hard to find a better call. As far as I was concerned, that littlecongregation in a fly-over state was bursting with more promise than I could ever have dared to hope for! And I want you to know, this is what God has in store for you, too.

God isn’t waiting for you to become a better preacher. And for heaven’s sakes, God isn’t waiting for you to become a more successful congregational leader, either! God forbid! God save us from all that unhappy business. No, God has already raised Christ from the tomb by the power of the Holy Spirit! It’s all already done! Te-telestai. It’s finished!

You don’t have to be effective! The futility of ministry is the secret to its success! And in Christ, it’s all yours! I know this can be hard to see. But that’s how God wants it! We live by faith. Not by sight!

So, let me leave you with something that’s been helpful for me when life, the congregation, or especially the sermon isn’t shaking out. It comes from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. This part is from the last movement of the second quartet, East Coker.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate - but there is no competition -

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

This may seem like too small an expectation for the sermon. And I go back and forth on that myself. Mr. Eliot is only writing about poems. But I do know what it’s like to be frustrated with myself and tired of my own voice.

I agree that sermon writing is more of an act of submission than strength. And I know that when I read Luther turn a phrase, I see how far I come up short of him. But maybe, maybe there’s no competition after all. Maybe it’s just a fight to recover what has been lost, and found, and lost again and again.

I tend to agree that these days, the conditions do indeed seem unpropitious. But perhaps, since it’s God’s word, there’s no gain or loss anymore. For us preachers, there’s only the trying. The rest, be it success or eloquence, is not our business.

Hidden in the hustle and bustle, and tucked away in the struggle of slow days in this, the bedraggled church, is the freedom of the glory of the children of God! That’s it. There’s nothing else. It’s just your good fortune that you get to hand on the goods, come what may!

So, get to it! Will ya? Speaking from personal experience, people are killing to hear cheap imitations of it! So, gird up your loins! Get to it! Tie up your dressfor battle! Get hyped! You’ve got marching orders.

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