Dr. Joel Gregory | Guest Speaker

25:53 A joy it is to join with all of the people in the church, community and city in St. Petersburg, Florida, to celebrate this 21st anniversary of your beloved pastor and my friend, Reverend Lewis Murphy. This is a milestone in ministry, and in these kinds of days, even yet more so. It is a joy, honor, and a grace to join with you to celebrate this extended ministry of your pastor. I join with all of you in thanking, first of all, God, the giver of gifts for ministry. Then, for the gifted one and for the gifts that he's given him. in the leadership of that church and beyond that church, and everything that he's meant, so many people, in the church, the community, and the city. I've chosen for you a message that was produced and spoken for preachers about ministry to share on this 21st anniversary. It was spoken where I work and teach at Baylor University's George W. Truitt Theological Seminary.

27:09 I think this message will be of help to you in the celebration of this tremendous anniversary. And my friend, God's best blessings to you on this special day. Well, the brochure said that you can catch the 830 bus from Yosemite Lodge up to Glacier Peak. When you get there, you can stand on the very rock where 100 years ago, Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir had their picture made. And then you go to the trailhead. Take a left. It's just an 8.8 mile hike. It's called the Panorama Trail. one of the most beautiful in all of Yosemite. You hardly get down it until you can turn to the left and you see Half Dome, that amazing rock, postcard picture perfect. Then just 2.2 miles further, down the trail is Illaluit Falls, 370 yards of white water cascading down the rocks, Cross over the Alouet Bridge and then just ascend 800 feet and 1.5 miles and you're at panorama point.

28:25 You look out and you see upper and lower Yosemite Falls. Then just go down 10 switchbacks and you'll get to the Merced River and see Nevada Falls plunge 600 feet down toward the valley floor. And then at mile number six, you are there by the mist falls where the rocks are baptized by water and rainbows appear in the air. Enjoy your 370 foot downward steps on granite and then back up 370 feet. And then you just go to the parking lot and it's all over. It's just a walk in the park. that's what my two adult sons and I thought last June the night we caught the bus took off down the trail 2.2 miles into it we decided that whoever said this is a six hour hike must have come from some extreme sports show and by the six mile marker ten hours into it sun setting behind the western peaks our feet slipping on the rocks of the mist trail arms length away from a waterfall plunging hundreds of feet we said these people must be sadistic if they said this is a moderate hike then night fell real night inky night we push forward with a narrow beam of a little flashlight right next to us were the vernal falls. One month later, three people went over those and disappeared forever. 10 o'clock at night, a big sign, beware of grizzly bears.

30:19 And two pieces of advice. One is if you see a bear, make yourself look big. You know how to and the other was do not be aggressive toward grizzly bears. It never occurred to me to do that. At 11 o'clock we limped back into the parking lot and to top it off forgot where we put our car.

30:46 But on a serious note we didn't say it to one another but we were all thinking it. It's good just to get out alive. In this curious little chapter 45 of Jeremiah, a word came from the living God to Jeremiah to give to his friend Baruch. Baruch, when this whole thing is over, it's good that you'll just get out alive. Now, Baruch doesn't belong to the marquee players of the Bible. he's either on the secondary or tertiary list of cast members he's one of those people who kind of like a meteor burns for a minute and disappears or are like seeing a mast of a ship on the horizon you see him a minute and then he's gone that's Baruch in fact he all we have here this is called technically a colophon. That is, that's when you carve your initials into a tree or spray them on a boxcar, scratch them into a desk. It means at the end of a letter to let them know I'm the one who wrote this. It gives you a moment's peek at someone who otherwise would be invisible.

32:08 You can find them in ancient Near Eastern text and Ugaritic and Egyptian and Assyrian, all kinds of scribes who left this little personal note about when they wrote it and to whom they wrote it and why they wrote it and blessing you if you read it and cursing you if you tamper with it it's a colophon and he left this colophon here so that we could but you know what people like baruch i've come to found help me more than the titanic figures of the bible who can identify with Jeremiah. Life and emotional roller coaster. 23 years of preaching and not one person ever joined the church.

32:49 Who can identify with Paul for that matter? But I can identify with a Baruch or maybe a Timothy. You know, why? One reason I can do that is because sometimes we in ministry just whine and Baruch whines and he doesn't think God overhears. him. In verse three, you hear it. God's telling him what he heard him say. Woe is me. Oye, the Lord has added grief to my sorrow. I fainted in my sighing and I find no rest. You ever notice that it's hard to find a good key to whine in? I don't care if it's C major, D minor, whine just, and go over to the library. You won't find any anthology called Great Whiners of history. He whining. And yet you've got to have some sympathy with Baruch in one way. He was Jeremiah's only friend for 23 years. Can you imagine being the only friend of Jeremiah?

33:54 God told Jeremiah to call out doom for 23 years. And here's Jeremiah's homeboy, Baruch. I mean, nobody, nobody come over and eat nachos with him during the ball game. Nobody to eat Passover with. Nobody to send to the dry cleaners five minutes before it closed. And all of that listening to 23 years of doom. But that's not all of it. He was the amanuensis. He had to write it down. Can you imagine writing down 36 chapters of Hebrew? and then Jeremiah got flu or something and couldn't go to church and for the public reading of this he sent Jeremiah to the National Cathedral and he said get everybody together and read them these 36 chapters of doom and then the high muckety mucks and the grand poobahs said we want a private reading and so he had to read it to them again and they said you'd better get out of Dodge because You see, King Jehoiakim, he likes books about your best life now.

35:05 He really doesn't like what you wrote. You better get out of Dodge. And then, after having written it once, Jehoiakim, who didn't like it, cut it into little pieces and burned it in the brazier in the floor of his window. Burned all 36 chapters. Poor old Baruch. And then Jeremiah dictated the whole thing again to Baruch. I mean, that's enough Hebrew to make Dr. Tucker, Nan, and Reed get real sad. I mean, that's a lot of Hebrew.

35:40 And there he was writing all of that down again. But then it dawned on Baruch. You ever read the Bible and have it dawn on you later? That it's about you. He heard it all. Written it twice. Read it twice. And then it dawned on him. This is about me. My family. My career. All of this doom and blah, blah, blah. A jip we're going to get carried off. It's about me. And suddenly it dawned on him. So he went to Jeremiah, I think. Yet if you read this, you have to understand with all of the pronouns, the you and the you and the you, that Baruch went to Jeremiah and said, Jeremiah, I couldn't sleep last night. It hit me that this is about my family and me.

36:36 Well, Jeremiah's all upset now. Here's his only friend about to quit. So he goes to Jehovah and says, do you have a word for Baruch? I don't know how long it talks, but Baruch to Jeremiah to Jehovah and then Jehovah to Jeremiah. back to Baruch. Well, that's not an easy thing. He says, whoa. Cleo LaRue says, whoa means a misery without a remedy.

37:06 Whoa because of reading it. Whoa because of the implications of it. Whoa because they'd burn the whole thing up. You know, burning books is hard on friendships. Thomas Carlyle wrote a three volume epical work on the French Revolution. He loaned it to his friend John Stuart Mill who left it out in the living room and a housemaid thinking it was scrap paper burned it. The only copy of the first volume. Well Carlyle was so upset he couldn't even write the first one again. he wrote number two and number three finally came back to number one but it strained the friendship forever between Carlisle and J.S. Mill I don't know what kind of strains there were between Baruch and Jeremiah and this whole crowd of people could I just give a parenthesis here when you are in God's service.

38:08 Sometimes loyalty costs you something. You're going to find in God's service some of you in seminary friends you make here you'll need to stand by for a lifetime. Some of you in mid-ministry know it well that it calls for you to stand with people. I remember one time years ago preaching in California. I was on a program with a famed preacher Reverend Dr. E.V. Hill. After we'd both preached we were sitting on the tall platform at Mount Moriah Baptist Church on Figueroa in South Central Los Angeles, dangling our feet over, I remember. And the week before Dr. Hill had been on ABC Nightline, Connie Chung had interviewed him and he'd been defending a longtime friend of his who had been caught laundering money and was sent to jail. And I thought, well, isn't it interesting to be able to ask him what I wanted to ask him the other night when I saw him on TV. So I said, Dr. Hill, You think you put yourself at risk identifying with that man?

39:05 I'll never forget, he poked me in the shoulder very emphatically. As only he could do it. And he said, Gregory, he said, if I'm your friend out of jail, I'm going to be your friend in jail. You know, I've thought for a long time, and I don't have any answer for that. Loyalty in God's cause Standing with people thick and thin Will cost you something I expect it made Baruch take Prozac I don't know what he had to do But then he finds out that those who handle the word need a word.

39:48 Right at the heart of this passage is Baruch. Here's this God who speaks to all of the nations and he's written it all down. But what good does it do if God speaks to Edom and the Moabites and the Babylonians and the Egyptians? if I never feel like he speaks to me.

40:09 He said, I need a word. Part of the possibility and the peril in ministry is that we become like people who are chefs cooking dishes that we never taste. Transcribers of music that we never listen to. like delivery people who deliver packages that we never open or like those people who stand around in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre the guards eyes glazed over in the middle of masterpieces that they don't look at they just look at other people look at the masterpieces it can get that way sometimes with the word of God when we objectify it rather than let it speak to us. And it dawned on him.

41:03 I've been writing down all this doom and doom and this word to nations. Now I, Baruch, need a word. After 36 chapters, is there anything you got to say to me? Amos Wilder of Harvard University, who's the brother of Thornton Wilder, the playwright, he wrote a little book, amazing, influential little book on early Christian rhetoric. Amos Wilder said, when you hear the words of Jesus, they're not like any other words you read in antiquity. He said they're not like Aristotle, they're not like Quintilian, because when you read them, you have the sense of being addressed. to use another figure from long ago more forgotten than not now that philosopher martin buber 1923 wrote that little book i thou the basic premise of it was not all that complicated although he developed it many ramifications and that is we relate to things as its and the people as thou if we relate to them appropriately and our life gets upside down when relate to people as its and things as thou.

42:22 I wonder maybe if Baruch, after years of getting those words, that scroll over there had not become something like an it. It's what it, that's what it, I've been working on it. And then all of a sudden, he needs it to become thou. He needs a word spoken to him. You know, I do too. a peril of preaching day after day, sometimes more days than not, is that we objectify this word and it becomes an it instead of addressing us. You know, sometimes after studying a text and exegeting a text and determining its genre and doing every kind, and we all need to do that. That's why we're here.

43:14 But sometimes I have to stand back from that in a second naivete and say with old C. Austin Miles a hundred years ago, he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own. I have to stand back from it in some second naivete and just sing to myself. I love to tell the story it will be my theme in glory and I like the second verse of that old gospel song where Catherine Hankey said in 1866 she said I love to tell the story more wondrous it seems than all the golden fancies of all my golden dreams and here it is I love to tell the story it means so much to me and that is just the reason I tell it now to thee there needs to be a sense that this isn't just a word for everybody it's a word for somebody and here it comes, here's the word, here it comes, he asked for it and Baruch got it, I don't know how long it took Jeremiah to bring it but he brought it back here's the oracle Baruch was it ever a velvet covered brick Baruch?

44:39 I'm the great builder and I'm going to destroy everything I've been building I'm the great gardener and I'm going to pluck up everything I've been planting if you look at the septuagint and even the vulgate it uses the personal pronoun for emphasis I myself am going to tear it down and I'm going to pluck it up H. Wheeler Robinson the great Baptist Oxford scholar said nowhere else is it more evident that there is a cross in the heart of god just stand back from these words this isn't some tribal deity this is almighty god maker of heaven and earth who for 1400 years had poured his divine life into this little group of semitic people and now he says after this grand experiment i'm going to have to tear the whole thing up here's a God who didn't come in generalities he came in specificity he came in particularity he took his almighty name and bounded up with this family of Abraham Isaac and Jacob and put up with the shenanigans of people like Saul and Solomon God he said now I've got to tear it all up. And Baruch, you're worried about your career path? Thinkest thou great things?

46:12 Think them not? Baruch, you're asking for the best stateroom on the Titanic. Baruch you want an upgrade On a jet that's going to go down Baruch you want to be eating At the windows On the where Right before the plane hits the tower Baruch you want the best seat On the beach just before the tsunami Comes Thinkest thou Great things Well what's behind that well Baruch was a scribe scribes were in the inner circle scribes were literate in a largely illiterate world they were admired he had the key to the executive washroom he got to park his chariot close to the office he had the number to the company membership at the Jerusalem City Club he was on the inside all of those verbal and nonverbal cues and innuendos that mean he belonged to the establishment his grandfather had been governor of Jerusalem his brother would be a chamberlain to King Zedekiah.

47:23 Baruch says, what's this mean for me? I thought I was going to be the head scribe. Or I thought maybe they'd make a sequel to that movie about Elijah and Elisha and Jeremiah's mantle would fall on me. At least I thought if I was Jeremiah's homeboy, I'd get a free ticket out of here.

47:46 And your way is stern here. You know what the lesson is? Baruch, I'm not going to let you co-opt my big mission for your little program.

48:07 Without any apology, God says your program is subordinate to my mission. Get over it. That's why our Lord could walk up to people and say the most audacious things. If he wasn't who he said he was, how dare he say it? Look, you fisher folk, you drop everything. Follow me. Leave it with Zebedee. Let the dead bury their dead. Because if we follow him, and most especially in ministry, our little programs must be subordinate to his big mission. Right down the hall here a few years ago, right down the hall in the Heritage Room, I interviewed the greatest, most renowned living pastor, preacher, Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, in his 91st year now. I asked him right down the hall here, what would you tell young preachers?

49:03 One thing if you had to tell them. He didn't even hesitate. With a voice that sounded like the ages, he said, I would tell them, avoid vanity. Don't try to replace the Lord Jesus Christ in his own house. Thank you. well yeah I thought about that I thought about some of the great egotistical preachers of history thought about Joseph Parker great preacher but Joseph Parker could strut sitting down he when they were drawing up the plans for the city temple he tossed them aside and told the architect he said you draw up a church so that when Queen Victoria comes by, she'll ask, who preaches there?

49:54 One time a pastor search committee came to him from a smaller church, said, would you come? He wrote back a one-line letter. An eagle doesn't roost in a sparrow's nest. now Baruch was not infected with that kind of but he was he what's going to happen to me is this not honestly what we face in this thing called ministry here we are part ape and part angel part dust and part spirit here we have a career but it's a career inside of a calling and he's always asking thinkest thou great things of thyself think think them not oh that sense of entitlement is always around the corner i remember when i came here half dozen years ago just surprised to be here for so many reasons some of you would not just surprised to be here but it's interesting how that hellish demonic cacophonous cackling leering demon of entitlement can start peeking at you from around the corner you know what those of us in ministry when we wake up in the morning our first thought ought to be thank you for the grace that just lets me be in this space and if we pause at noontide to thank him for the generosity that lets us be in ministry and in our last waking reverie before we fall asleep to thank him that we may be able to have another day to serve him all of a sudden baruch baruch was fighting this thing called entitlement back in the days when they used to have big religious conventions they're not that big anymore when there were tens of thousands of people there there was a preacher who'd bought

52:00 his new suit. He and his wife walked into a vast city, complex, 30,000 people there. And in a reverie, not to anybody in particular, he just said, I wonder how many truly great preachers are here. I wonder. His wife, as they can so helpfully do sometimes, said, one less than you think.

52:26 And here is the promise that Baruch gets. Same thing my sons and I thought when we staggered out of Yosemite at 11. Baruch, you're going to get out of this thing alive.

52:50 Now don't you think that's setting the bar kind of low? No. No. Is that the truth? Yes. Does it make you want to roast shmores and sing kumbaya? No. Is it reality? Yes. Does it make the ministry a select career path? No. this is the God who told Jeremiah when he was whining Jeremiah if you can't run with the foot soldiers how do you think you're going to keep up with the cavalry sometimes God's words to us are bracing words but you say what does that mean today that back then he's telling him he's going to get out alive when the Babylonians come and if he gets carried off to Egypt he'll be alive that's the thenness of this text that's true but what's the nowness of it i recognize this phrase is just a cipher it's an empty box right now so you're going to get out alive what's that mean today in 2011 for a bunch of bunch of ministers here you know for some reason i don't know why i've spent my whole ministry around thousands of preachers didn't intend to thought i'd be around regular people but i've spent my life around thousands of preachers out here at baylor undergraduate ministerial line huge seminary student professor up the way pastored two churches close to that seminary came back down i've just spent my life with preachers but let me tell you in the fifth decade of that.

54:34 sadness about it and that is how relatively few of them at the end of the way are in a sound mind still full of the faith and still ministering you won't ask me what does it mean to me to say it's enough to get out alive see what I think I think it's what Hebrews 4.14 means when writing those who wanted to leave the author said sing that we have such a great high priest who's passed through the heavens let us hold our confession I think it's what Paul meant in Ephesians 6. When having done all, stand. You say, isn't that putting the bar kind of low?

55:27 No, not from what I've seen. Like Paul in 2 Timothy 4. He says, I've fought the good part. I've finished the course. I've kept the faith. You notice what he didn't say right there. he didn't say, incidentally, I wrote Romans.

55:50 He didn't say, well, you know, if you really look into it, I actually won at the Jerusalem Council. No. And he didn't say, oh, on that ship trip, on that ship trip to Rome, I took over the boat. And when everybody got ashore on Malta, I fixed them breakfast. No. You know what he said? he said I fought the good fight I finished the course I kept the faith tell you what I think it means to get out alive it means whether you've got 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years of ministry it means to make it your goal at the end to hold your confession that's good I wonder if somebody else might not have heard this phrase There he was, there he was out in the wilderness.

56:45 Those little stones for all the world looked like the little loaves of bread cooked in the Galilean communal ovens. He knew that in one finger he had more real power than any half-baked thaumaturgist in Galilee. Thinkest thou great things of thyself? No. There he is on the zenith of the temple, a caucus of rabbis down at the bottom talking about the Messiah thinkest thou great things of vice no there he is on that magic mystery mountain he sees Roman triremes splitting the waves of the Mediterranean he sees the standards of the legions and he knows he has more command power in him than Tiberius ever imagined seekest thou great things for thyself no and because he said no no no did he ever get out alive I'd like to think that somewhere over there just because Jesus said he's not the God of the dead but the living would you allow me a hope this morning I know this is leaving this text but Allow me the hope that over there somewhere, if you could part the shroud or rend the veil or lift the curtain.

58:13 There's one very surprised little Hebrew scribe. Maybe he's standing for 2,500 years at the corner of Shekinah Avenue and Glory Boulevard. down the street from Abraham and a smiling Jeremiah beside him and saying to nobody in particular, wow, not woe, but wow.