Here I was all prepared to give you a good lesson today how the ministry of the church is the ministry of the church, not the ministry of the ministers, and then you go and do just that these past few days and steal my thunder.  So take what I say today as a pat on the back instead of a kick in the pants, an Atta boy and You go, girl and a sincere thank you.

I got a postcard last week from Bobby Easley, who has been working in Berlin for a few weeks.  It was a picture of the Capitol building that houses the German Parliament.  The Reichstag has a long and storied history.  The section that formerly housed the parliament had been destroyed and lay in ruins for years.  In its place the Berlin Wall was built, running right through the rubble of the old chamber.  With the fall of the wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany a year later, they determined to rebuild the parliament house.  The new room is constructed directly over the spot where the old wall stood, the invisible wall precisely bisecting the new chamber.  Overhead a spectacular glass cupola symbolizes the new Germany, where, as Bobby puts it, government will never again be impenetrable, dark, and secret.

Communist ideology, for all of its talk of being a people’s movement, ended up with a small cabal of privileged party members dictating to the people the policies of the state as if they knew better than the people themselves.  If Mr. Lincoln could comment, he would say it was government for the people but not of the people and by the people, and therefore it would must needs perish from the face of the earth.

We have here a parable for the church!  It’s worth remembering that Germany was also the site of the great Protestant Reformation movement of the church.  Martin Luther rang the bell that sounded the death of the death grip church rulers claimed to hold over the fate of people’s souls.  The priesthood of every believer was rediscovered.  People don’t need to go through a priest to get to God; God had gotten through to each of us through the one high priest of us all— Jesus Christ.

Baptists have joined in and shouted that truth loudly.  A personal relationship to God does not depend upon the preacher or sacraments to uphold.  Even Catholics have been renewed by this emphasis on faith that comes through grace.  But with the rest of Christendom, we Baptists have left the promise of the Reformation hanging.  We have not been radical enough.  We have failed to finish the job.  We have applied the Reformation to personal salvation but not to the corporate ministry of the church.  We have celebrated the priesthood of every believer and neglected the priesthood of all believers.  We have put the Word of God into the hands of the people, but we have to go on and put the ministry of the church in their hands as well.

There is an invisible wall that has long run through the church, separating clergy and laity.  We have harbored the notion that staff does the ministry of the people to the people and for the people.  Most of the time, people like me, men and women of the cloth, like that right well, thank you very much.  Weeks like this one expose me and all clergy as frauds.  In our hearts we know we are not the church; we know we are not up to doing it alone, to being there for mothers and fathers whose little girl has been murdered.  The exhaustion of trying to do that—especially on a day like today—is too much for any of us, even if we are called by God and buoyed by the prayers of the people.

But the people too can sometimes be complicit in this thing.  You have your own secular callings to tend to, you tell us; you pay your tithes to the church so you can get good service from the pastor and the wait staff.  Well, wherever in the world we got that from—and it was from the world, not from the Bible, don’t you know?! —it has to end.   Gratefully, what I saw in you this week tells me that it is ending.  You are getting it.  You are proving that you are ministers, too— ordained or no.

For this to really take root, though, not just in the midst of crisis but every day, there are hurdles to leap.  Fear has to give way to faith, anxiety to adventure.  For us paid Christians, we have to learn to celebrate your ministry and nurture it along instead of doing it by ourselves.  We’ve got to see you at the hospital or at the graveside and see that what you are doing is what we are doing, too, and that we both belong there.  And for you in the pew, you need to stop defaulting the work of the church to the professionals.  Our calling is not only to do ministry ourselves; it is to help you find and fulfill your calling to ministry.  We are all of us called into the ministry, and we must not substitute our calling for yours.

Remember those Free Willy movies?  Two of them, I think.  About a killer whale so disoriented he got stuck in the bay.  Well, Keiko the killer whale has retired from the movies now.  He has been flown back from Oregon to his natural habitat in the waters around Iceland.   But in a life-imitates-art thing, they have tried to release Keiko back into the open ocean, but he will not go.  He has grown so attached to his handlers and so dependent upon them for food and care that he keeps returning to his human companions.  They have even led him out to a school of killer whales, but instead of joining the class, he follows the boat back to his pen.

Clergy and laity alike need to conspire to break that kind of dependency.  We are in this ministry together: every single one of us is called to ministry by God.  Perhaps clergy are to called to ministry in the church, while laity are called to the ministry of the church.  We need to help each other discover that calling that is unique to each of us.  We can all do a lot of good and noble things with our lives, but the crucial thing is that we each of us do that thing that is given in our nature by God and in sync with the gifts Christ has bestowed on us.

I was talking recently with a woman who was telling me about how she came to find her calling.  She was at TCU studying zoology, because she loved animals and her parents thought that was what she needed to do.  On the side, she was using her artistic skills to illustrate figures of animals for various publications.  She became so good at it that other successful illustrators took her under their wing and wanted her to do that.  Her parents wanted her to finish her studies and make sure she could take care of herself by getting a practical degree.  All the while she was dying on the inside.  What other people wanted for her was not what was native to her.  I realized, she told me, that I was living someone else’s life.    Sadly, it took an emotional breakdown to get the attention of her family.  She finally found the courage from God to enter the University of Texas and study art, and when she did, she found her sanity along with her calling.  Today she is an abstract sculptor, allowing her inner life to flow into her work.

There’s an old Quaker saying: Let your life speak.  You have a life, and it wants to show itself to the world.  You cannot give it away to someone else or hide it under a bushel without denying the creative genius of God.  You have gifts given by Christ, and they want to be expressed in ministry to the world.  You cannot stifle them without being ungrateful to the Christ who gave them to you.

Listen again to what Paul says:  When [Christ] ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.  Here’s the image: it’s as if we are all locked up in prisons of different kinds.  Some of us justly there because of things we have done, some unjustly because of things done to us.  The sins we have committed and the sins committed against us.  Over time this incarceration robs us of our humanity to the point where our bondage makes us think we have nothing to offer the world.  Christ knows that and throws open the prison doors, tossing away the keys.  They cannot be locked again unless we close ourselves up in open cells.  But he doesn’t leave us there.  He draws us out, cleans us up, introduces us to freedom, stuffs gifts into the suitcase of our soul, and tells us to get to work letting our life speak.

The only way you will find the kind of meaning you seek in your life is to discover the way your life wants to fulfill its calling.  And not to worry about God wanting you to do something that will make you miserable; it’s just the opposite— God will always call you according to the gifts Christ has given you in order that you may flourish rather than be forever frustrated.

Discovery of your calling must proceed on the basis of the is-ness of your nature rather than the ought-ness of your nurture.  It’s about who you actually are, not about what you think you should be. 

So if you have the gift of teaching but your daddy told you to get a business degree because you’ll never make a good living on teacher’s pay, you may earn an honorable living and at the same time dishonor your gifts and muffle the voice your life wants to speak through.  Likewise, if you have been teaching a Sunday school class for twenty years because some minister told you you should, well fine and good as long as that’s who you are.  But if it’s nothing but a weekly chore to you and you don’t come alive doing it, you’re slowly draining the life out of everyone in your class who has to listen to you. 

Deep has to call unto deep.  What we need in the church and the world both are people who are doing what truly makes them come alive.  That’s what builds up the body of Christ.  That’s what nourishes the church and feeds it.  That’s what makes for that mysterious something that can only be evidence of the Spirit at work—that je ne sais quoi of holy joy.

And joy is a big part of it, for you and for the church.  Frederick Buechner has said about our true vocation that it is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.  The first thing is your gladness.  The first thing is to act according to your gifts and not do everything others want you to do, which will only rob you of the joy of your unique ministry and the joy of others in receiving it.  What the world most needs from you, what the church most needs from you is … you!  The you God is making you into.

Some of you have been held up from answering your call to ministry in the church because you haven’t thought it was your place unless you were on the payroll.  Some of you have been held up because you haven’t felt worthy of it, thinking you have nothing to offer.  Some of you have been worried that if you answer the call, it will be something you won’t want to do.  Wrong, wrong, and wrong. 

We are all in this together.  We need each other.  Each of us for all of us.  Are you ready to let your life speak?  We are ready to listen.