Ezekiel 2:1-5
Mark 6:1-13

 The texts from Ezekiel and Mark’s Gospel have a similar theme.  Ezekiel and Jesus represent God’s message of love and grace to people and both are rejected by the people. This prompted Jesus to make the statement that has since become well-known, “A prophet has honor anywhere except in his own home town.”  This illustrates the concept that familiarity breeds contempt.  Those who had known Jesus from birth could not imagine that he had anything to tell them about God and relationship with God.  After all wasn’t he just a carpenter, the son of Mary, with brothers and sisters they all knew? 
           
What does Jesus do in response to this rejection as he begins his ministry? Does he give up?  Does he call it quits because he has been rejected?  Jesus spent time with people who listened to him.  He called a group of ordinary folk and sent them out to do his work. Sometimes you and I overlook what a peculiar way this is to get the reign of God started. Jesus chose people who, so far as we know from Mark's Gospel, have no apparent qualifications to be at the vanguard of God's new order. Their only qualification is that they are chosen, commissioned, and equipped by Christ.  They are willing to listen to Jesus, to learn from him, and to become partners with him in telling the story of God’s love and grace, caring for people in need, being ministers.  Jesus invited his disciples to join him in a shared ministry.
           
That is you. That is me. I'm not the only minister in this church. we all are servants and ministers - those to whom Jesus has delegated the work of God. As your senior minister, I'm not the one who does the ministry; I'm at best a coordinator and an encourager and an equipper of you, the ministers.  The ministry of this congregation is a shared ministry.
           
Master preacher Barbara Brown Taylor has written a wonderful meditation on ordination and vocation, stressing the importance of the vocation of all Christians:
           
Somewhere along the way we have misplaced the ancient vision of the church as a priestly people - set apart for ministry in baptism, confirmed and strengthened in worship, made manifest in service to the world. That vision is a foreign one to many church members, who have learned from colloquial usage that minister means the "ordained person" in a congregation, while lay person means "someone who does not engage in full-time ministry." Professionally speaking that is fair enough - ordained people make their livings in ministry, and lay people do not - but speaking ecclesiastically, it is a disaster. Language like that turns clergy into purveyors of religion and lay people into consumers, who shop around for the church that offers them the best product.

. . . Perhaps we should revive Luther's vision of the priesthood of all believers, who are ordained by God at baptism to share Christ's ministry in the world - a body of people united by that one common vocation, which they pursue across the gamut of their offices in the world. It is a vision that requires a rich and disciplined imagination because it is largely a matter of learning to see in a different way. To believe in one's own priesthood is to see the extraordinary dimensions of an ordinary life, to see the hand of God at work in the world and to see one's own hands as necessary to that work. Whether those hands are diapering an infant, assembling an automobile, or balancing a corporate account, they are God's hands, claimed by God at baptism for the accomplishment of God's will on earth. There are plenty who will decline the honor, finding it either too fearsome or too intrusive to be taken seriously, but those willing to accept the challenge will want to know more about what a priest does, exactly.
           
The first thing to say is that a priest is a representative person - a parson - who walks the shifting boundary between heaven and earth, representing God to humankind, representing humankind to God, and serving each in the other's name. It is not possible to exercise such priesthood without participating in Christ's own, which means there are no entrepreneurs in ministry, only partners. Pursuing that vocation, priests are likely to wear a hundred different hats - social worker, chauffeur, cook, financial advisor, community organizer, babysitter, philanthropist, marriage counselor, cheerleader, friend - but whatever hat they happen to be wearing at the time, priests remember that they wear it as God's person, for God's sake, in God's name.
           
Everything else a priest does comes to focus in worship, where all of God's ministers - the baptized ones and the ordained ones - approach God through the sacraments of word and table. In the early church, believers decided it was not practical for all of them to preside over community worship, so they elected different members of the body to officiate from week to week. Sometimes they drew lots, making it clear that the job had nothing to do with superiority. It was a representative function, whereby one member of the congregation stepped forward to do what everyone present was able to do.

. . . While preaching and celebrating sacraments are discrete tasks, the two particular functions to which I was ordained, they are also metaphors for the whole church's understanding of life and faith . . . Preaching is not something an ordained minister does for 15 minutes on Sundays, but what the whole congregation does all week long; it is a way of approaching the world, and of gleaning God's presence there (The Preaching Life, pp. 125-130).
           
Note in today's gospel that most of the ministry that Jesus sends his disciples out to do is the ministry of healing. Through the years, I've been impressed with the healing ministry of those in congregations:
           
In one congregation a member paid for the treatment of a young man who was addicted to alcohol, helping him to get his life back on track. He was not a member of any family in the congregation, not even a very close friend. He was just someone who needed the ministry of healing in the worst kind of way and that person enabled that to happen.
           
Another person visits an older person who is confined to her home. She buys groceries for her, takes her to the doctor when she needs a ride, and sometimes just sits and visits. She manages to check in with her every week.
           
A younger person saw a girl her age on the school ground. No one was playing with her. She was new at school. She was just learning how to speak English, having moved here from another country. She went over and befriended her, asked her to sit at her table at lunch, and introduced her to her friends.  Doing these things because of our relationship with God, because we see ourselves as disciples, a followers of the way Jesus taught, then we are ministering.
           
God has delegated important work to each of us. True, God can be everywhere, but our God also invites us to be some places as God's representatives - God's ambassadors. God is a great delegator.
           
What incredible trust. What amazing confidence God has in us, ordinary people.
           
Where has Jesus called you to ministry? What is the work you are equipped and called to do that no one else can or will do?
           
In Genesis, God creates the world, all the trees and the animals, all the mountains and the seas. Then God creates human beings, women and men. And God gives them a garden, telling them to tend the garden, to look after it and to enjoy it. It is as if God says, "I've enjoyed creating beauty and order in the world, now you try it for yourselves."
           
Jesus comes into the world proclaiming the advent of God's reign. He heals and feeds as a sign of that reign. He redeems the lives of the lost and reaches out to the poor and needy.
           
And then it is as if he says, "I've enjoyed doing the work of God, demonstrating the reality of God's reign, now you try it for yourselves. I'll commission you as my disciples, my representatives to do my work in the world."  That's you. That’s me. That's all of us.
           
Barbara Brown Taylor has an interesting observation.  “I have often wondered whether the church would be even smaller than it is if that cross at baptism were made not with water but with permanent ink - a nice deep purple, perhaps - so that all who bore Christ's mark bore it openly, visibly, for the rest of their lives. In many ways, I think, that is the chief difference between the ministry of the baptized and the ministry of the ordained. The ordained consent to be visible in a way that the baptized do not. They agree to let people look at them as they struggle with their own baptismal vows: to continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to resist evil, to proclaim the good news of God in Christ, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people. Those are not the vows of the ordained, but the baptized, even though we do not seem to know how to honor them in the course of ordinary life on earth” (Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, Cowley Publications, 1993, pp. 25-34).
           
The work of God is both serious and joyful; so it is intended we should be. God's kenotic acts are entirely gratuitous: there is no need for God to create; there is no need for God to redeem. It's for sheer love that God does both; and for no purpose. God is at play.
           
Thus it is too with the way of tears: the holding of two things in the heart is both knowledge of the human tragedy and our insecure, perilous freedom, and at the same time, the lightness, delightedness of life lived in the security of the redeeming, playful love of God (Maggie Ross, The Fountain and the Furnace, Paulist Press, p. 291).
           
Ann Lamott tells, as a child, what she imagined adult life to be like.  “It's funny. I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendship, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they're enough” (Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, p. 103).
           
These are the tools we are given to minister together: friendship, prayer, conscience, honesty.  They are enough.  Against all odds, it is amazing what shared ministry we are able to accomplish with these gifts. It is amazing what we are able to do with friendship, prayer, conscience, and honesty.  So let’s be about the work we are called, the shared ministry of loving the world for God’s sake beginning here, now, in this place, in this corner of the world.