Stephen Ministry Commissioning

Pastor Phillip’s Sermon

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today is a huge beginning in ministry for this congregation, Stephen’s Ministry. I know it’s a strange name and it doesn’t really bring much to mind yet. But today I’m going to talk to you about that.

In many ways, Stephen Ministry is like overcoming a wall and breaking it down and so I’ll talk for awhile about walls. In Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall, the speaker repairs his rock wall and ponders, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” That may be true but we sure build a lot of them. And not just rock walls and barbed-wire fences to keep the cows out of the corn, mankind has been building walls for thousands of years.

The ancient Egyptians built a wall 100 miles long. That would stretch from here to Iowa City. About the same time, the Babylonians built one 175 miles long and the Roman emperors built walls in Britain and Germany. But, of course, the most famous and the longest is the wall that the Chinese built, 1,500 miles long. It’s the only manmade object that can be seen from space. It’s mind-boggling, isn’t it? To build walls to keep people out, to keep people in one place or another.

More recently, in World War II, Hitler built the Atlantic wall to protect his fortress Europe and then, some years after that, the Soviets divided Europe with the Iron Curtain. And, even today, we hear talk about building a wall to keep people out.

You’d expect that when it comes to religion, you wouldn’t have walls. You’d think that the whole idea was to bring all the people in, as many as you could possibly get in so you wouldn’t put any walls up. But it seems that, with religion, walls are even more prominent. In 1871, a carved rock slab was discovered in Jerusalem. It was one of the original signs that hung in the temple in the courtyard during the time of Paul. This is what it said, “Let no foreigner enter inside the barrier and the fence around the sanctuary. Whosoever is caught will be the cause of death following as a penalty.”

Now the temple was built as a series of large rectangular courtyards beginning with the largest and outer most, the Court of the Gentiles. Now anybody could go in that court. You and I could go in that court. But the next court in was the Court of Israel and you had to be an Israelite to enter into those gates. That’s where that sign would have hung. The next court in from that, only men 12 and up could go in, Jewish men. The next court after that, only priests. You had to be born into one of the priestly tribes to enter into the Priest Courtyard and beyond that, the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, as it was called, and only the High Priest could enter into that place once a year.

Now the walls of these courtyards kept people from going where they didn’t belong. It divided people and kept them separate. But when you make barriers, you kind of run into problems, don’t you? The Jewish people separated themselves out of their sincere religious convictions. But when you start building these walls, you create hostility. You create an in-group and an out-group. You create, as Robert Frost put it, he asked a question, “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out because no matter where you stand on one side of the wall or the other, it will have an impact on you. Either you will build a wall to keep people out but ultimately you’re building a cage that keeps you in.” That’s part of the problem with a wall.

Once Paul was on the temple grounds with a few of his Gentile friends. Now he wasn’t where he shouldn’t have been. He was in the outer most court, the Court of the Gentiles, and they were just talking and spreading the word about Jesus. Then after a time, he decided, as his privilege allowed, he would enter to the inner courts. And someone who had seen him in the outer courts with the Gentiles and then saw him inside assumed he had taken his Gentile friends with him to the inner courts. They looked at him and accused him in front of the whole crowd and instantly there was a riot. And people were all attacking Paul. The temple guard was called in but they were really not much help because they were Jews, too. They knew what the sign said. They knew what the penalty was. And so they were not really helping Paul. Finally, the Roman soldiers came in and they calmed things down. The scriptures say, “Paul was literally at the point of being torn in two by the crowd.” This is the kind of hostility these walls of division brought into the culture of that time.

Later, as Paul was thinking back on that experience, he was writing to the people in Ephesus, the church, and he was describing that experience but his focus wasn’t on himself or the rules of the Jewish faith or anything like that. His focus was on what Jesus had to do. This is how he describes it in Ephesians 2, “For he himself is our peace who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” Jesus, according to Paul, has destroyed two very important walls. First, He destroyed the wall between us and God, the wall of hostility between us and God. This is the wall that’s built by our sin. If you think about it, every person from the first person God created until now has sinned and all those sins are an offense to God, an obstacle in our relationship with God, a wall between us and God because God is holy and just and He must punish sin. He cannot be in the presence of sin and so there is a wall between us. But Paul says that Jesus has torn that wall down, that Jesus has destroyed that barrier of hostility between us and God and He did that when He died on the cross, when He took our sins upon Himself and He hung, bled and died on the cross, Jesus took away that wall of hostility so now we can enjoy a wonderful and intimate relationship with God our creator. Stephen ministers are people who will help when someone is struggling in their relationship with God. They will help people to know that Jesus has destroyed that wall.

The second wall that Paul is talking about in Ephesians is the wall between Jews and Gentiles. We could simply say between us and the people around us. Paul says that this wall has also been destroyed by Christ and here’s the point. The point is that we are all equally sinful, right? We are all equally inclined to sin. We all equally failed in living according to God’s ways. We all fall short of the glory of God as Scripture says. So we are all equal in that sense.

We are also equal in that we are all desperate for God’s grace and all given that grace as a free gift. Nothing to do to earn it, nothing to do to please God and make Him happy with us. It’s simply His gift to us. God forgives our sins. Stephen ministers can help people who struggle with that unity in Christ concept, who think that they’re not as good as somebody else or they feel like they’ve been discriminated against or withheld from certain blessings from God.

Very often when we go through painful times, we feel alone and isolated in our pain. The raw emotions of the experience leave us hiding behind walls that we have built to defend ourselves and protect ourselves from further pain. At first, when we first go through that pain, it seems like the only safe thing to do is to hide. The problem is unless we talk about it, we will never get over it. We will never get better. We’ll never process it. We have to get it out. We have to be able to express that.

You’ve heard the expression, “Time heals all wounds.” Well, that’s only true if you work on it, if you try to deal with it. If you just bury it, you’ve buried it alive. It’s still there. The pain’s still there. Stephen ministers are people you can talk to. Every conversation is confidential. They are people who will walk with you through the valley. Think of a low point that you’ve gone through in your life, something difficult that you faced. Wouldn’t it have been great if you had someone right there with you to walk with you, to hear what you were feeling, to listen to you as you expressed what you were struggling with.

God has put compassion in the hearts of our Stephen ministers, just like He has in many Christians. But He’s also given them His Holy Spirit so that they felt called to dedicate six months of time to training to serve you. They’ve also made a two-year commitment of service so that you don’t need to suffer alone. To reach out with God’s love and bring down the walls of isolation and loneliness, that is the heart of Stephen Ministry.

[Video] “My life was falling apart. I felt I was surrounded by darkness. Hope was a distant memory. I didn’t know where to turn. I called the church and they told me about Stephen Ministry. Prayerfully, I waited for my Stephen minister to call me. I wondered what she would be like, if I would be able to relate to her. How could she ever help me? It was like God hand-picked someone just for me. We talked a lot. She listened to me. She accepted me and prayed for me. She never gave up on me during the ugliest times of my life. I was ready to quit but she never stopped praying and hoping. You know, I met God in a powerful way through my Stephen minister. I really felt God’s love through her. All I can say is thank you.”

“I’d just been fired. My wife told me she was thinking of leaving. My self respect was out the door before she was. A friend who knew how I was feeling suggested I call the church for help. I was skeptical but they put me in touch with a Stephen minister. That’s another man who listened to me, encouraged me and was there when I needed someone. I can’t say I expected a lot but in a very real sense, my Stephen minister saved my life. I don’t know how I’d have made it. I do know I wouldn’t have made it without my Stephen minister. I’m grateful to God for bringing him into my life, bringing hope and healing.”

“I was 19 years old, six month’s pregnant with a drug addict’s baby. He had left the week before our wedding, taking with him all our money. I had been with this guy for a year and a half, in and out of rehab and jail and I had been there for him and now he was gone. I had never been so alone. My Stephen minister stood with me when no one else would. She listened to me. She heard all the bad stuff, you know, the things I was too ashamed to tell anyone else. She never judged me. She just believed in me and she encouraged me. She was someone I could confide in. She never laughed at me. She just loved me. Because of her, I’ve been able to get on with my life. She’s helped me grow and learn and be myself but, more than that, she’s become someone I can respect and learn from. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of her and thank God for her.”

The other day I heard a story about a man whose home had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. It was his family home, the one he was raised in. All his memories were there in a big pile after the hurricane. He called Lutheran World Relief and Human Care and asked the director for assistance and they put together a team. And in short order, they showed up at the site like an army of people in blue Tyvek suits and rubber gloves and rubber boots, masks, ready to go to work. The man stood quietly while they made preparations to begin, kind of just stood there. They got to work with their shovels and their rakes and picking things up, going back and forth with the wheelbarrows hauling stuff to the curb. And he just stood there. People were hauling sacks, large black trash bags full of soggy, ruined memories to the curb, piling them high. And the man just stood there. He had dark sunglasses on. He was hoping no one could see that he was crying. Finally, one of the pastors realized what he was going through and he went up to him and started talking and asked some questions to help him begin to speak about his experience and his loss. He gave him a few hours but that’s all he had. That man needed a friend, someone to talk to. That man needed a Stephen minister.

May God bless this compassionate ministry in our congregation and community. Amen.

Copyright 2009 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church