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paul Hooker is an old testament scholar, an authority on presbyterian polity, a former pastor and later a presbyterian executive, a musician in the band and an administrator and member of the faculty here at Austin Seminary

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. If you haven't met him yet, you will encounter him soon enough, paul has taken to poetry in recent years and frankly, is becoming nationally appreciated as a poet. I begin this sermon tonight with

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his permission with one of his new poems. It is a poem about ordination, the event which for many of you will logically follow your education here. The poem might startle you into thinking of your own

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ordination, if that's the track you're on. But it's my sense that this poem also reflects upon his ordination and more largely, perhaps the mystery of ministry itself. The poem is called Mr H's ordination.

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Do you trust in jesus christ your savior, acknowledge him Lord of all, and head of the church and threw him believe in one God, father, son and holy spirit. Well do you? It's

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not a choosing or being chosen. Not a choice but the end of choices. It's the wild mounting desperation of holding back your breath underwater until the will submits is overcome by the mindless lungs irrational demand.

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Even if it drowns you like a rat, Do you trust like that? Mr H. Who cares a fig for Lords and heads? This is existential , not ecclesial. We're talking oxygen on those days

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when a body is desperate to breathe. Days when everything comes crashing, when the sacred all in all amounts to nothing and christ's body yields its neck to the guillotine. Do you trust when times are lean

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Mr H. Three in one and one in three . An axiom of theology. But the only trinity we trust is world and death and fire as often smothered as smoldering in the pitch black cave dark,

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we intuit light reach out and touch the Tryon rock creations basement our prison and reprieve. Is that what you believe? Mr h. These skittish truths we harness to our stars come uneasily to words. They

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bolt like rabbits, rabbits down a hole, they fly like birds. Two branches just beyond our reach best. Teach the tongue restraint and watch your feet along this darkling path we're following, it's easier to

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stumble than to rise. Will that suffice to make you? Was Mr H. This poem reminds us , I think of what's at stake when we are ordained, as many of you will be soon enough

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or it reminds us for that matter of what's at stake in whatever way we each are apt to serve the gospel ordained or not. And so it is with this text from Matthew, This text comes at

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the end of a whole chapter in Matthew, where Jesus has just summoned his 12 newly called disciples and is giving them a pretty bleak picture of what discipleship looks, not just for them but also for disciples

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across time, including us. It's also hard in this chapter from Matthew take no gold or silver or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey . If anyone will not welcome you or listen to

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your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town, I'm sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves. They will hand you over to councils and flogged you

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in the synagogues, you'll be dragged before governors and kings brother will betray brother unto death and a father , his child and Children will rise against parents and have them put to death. Do not think that

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I've come to bring peace to the earth, have not come to bring peace but a sword. I've come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter in law.

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Against her mother in law. Those who find their life will lose it and those who lose their life , for my sake will find it. Is that what we believe? Each one of us? This

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is not happy talk. Yeah, because in this text, Jesus is disabusing his disciples of the illusion that the ministry they are about to undertake is a comfortable, easy, safe thing to be doing.

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It's serving the gospel as a matter of smiling faces and polished teeth. But in this text from Matthew , Jesus says, whoever welcomes a profit in the name of a profit will receive a profits reward.

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Spoiler alert. It's not much of a reward. A profits reward is not the sort of thing we yearn for. Barbara brown taylor, an Episcopal priest and a magnificent creature has written here and there about

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her life. She was born into a contentedly secular family, but when she was about seven, her family moved to Ohio and they tried church. It was a methodist church way out in the Ohio countryside

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and they started going there and they fell in love with their pastor. He was a kind young man , with no family of his own. So often he was a supper guest at their table. I

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grew to adore him. Barbara writes, he was vital and he was funny and he was kind. He could catch an airborne fly with one hand. He listened to me when I talked and let me

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lead him on tours of my projects around the house . He seemed able when he looked at me to see a person and not only a child and I loved him for it. This pasture became a friend

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to that seven year old child. One day though , Barbara noticed that something was wrong. Civil rights had come to Ohio, a phrase that made adults talk loudly and lose their tempers. They chose sides

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and defended them rights. Barbara, they wanted my pastor friend to choose sides to and he did. The doors of the church were open. He said he would stand there to make sure they remained open

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, he said. So that is where they hung him in effigy agro test stuffed figure that bore no resemblance to my friend, swaying in the heat as he packed and left town. That was when I

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began to understand. She writes that God's call was not only wonderful, but also terrible. It had sharp edges to it. It was capable of cutting deep and those who reached out to grasp it had

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best be prepared to bleed, Who really wants a prophets reward In the small South Carolina town where I lived in the mid 1960s and where my father served the Presbyterian Church. There, there was a successful

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dentist in town who ran for an open seat in the States House of Representatives. I was a child , but I remember this particular election so distinctly because this dentist was an african american, and the white

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community in that county seat town was particularly upset about his candidacy. So much so that a couple of weeks before Election Day, the town's leadership urged all the pastors of the mainline churches read that white churches

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to be sure to announce on the sunday before that Tuesday that all the members should get out to vote . There's a lot at stake in this election. You've got to get out and vote other pastures made

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that announcement. But my father didn't. It was my custom after church in those years of my childhood . But right after the benediction, I would run and proudly stand next to my father, clinging to

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the folds in his robe out there on that churches portico as he shook hands with the departing worshippers. And so I had a great view on that sunday . As I watched one particular member come out of

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the north fax just by boiling. His face was red as he got into my father's face and shook his finger and let fly a barrage of profanity and hate speech. His words were weapons that cut deeply

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to be clear. My father was more of a Rotarian than a profit. Not a martin Luther, King Jr not a jesse Jackson, or a john lewis or a jack stocks or a Rachel hinder light

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. He didn't go to Selma, he didn't march in Washington. He just decided to not make an announcement, hardly a prophetic action. But on that sunday he received profits reward. Who wants that?

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Its text like this, Which reminds me of why I would not have wanted to belong to Matthew's church . Mhm. Maybe john's church where the liturgy was so beautiful, maybe loops church where so many marvelous

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things were revealed at table where people were eating and fella shipping and so often getting glimpses of resurrection life just there, but not something as severe and his dour as Matthew's Church where the good news so often

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sounds like unmitigated bad news, where a man gets set against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter in law. Against her mother in law and the most faithful among them receive a prophets

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reward. We know what it's like in these days , days of senseless violence and death like those days , a few weekends ago in Charlottesville days like this day, when what comes to us from the White

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House is the cruelty of a new policy which desires to send immigrant Children back to the lands where their parents came from, lands which most of them have never seen. We know what it's like to live

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in a world in these days, in which bearing witness to the faith so often and so easily places us in direct conflict with the loudest, most dominant voices of our society, When Jesus Command to Love

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one Another, as I have loved. You. Run so regularly and routinely against the rocks of mean spirited rhetoric. When the words, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free crash

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headlong into a society in which so called truths compete with one another for the cultures attention so that my truth competes with your truth. And each one of us is able to marshal alternative facts in support of

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our particular versions of truth. Then the profits reward is to bear witness. It flies in the face of all that and we don't often get thanked for that kind of witness because it's a witness that people

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are barely able to believe and don't much want to hear columnist frank, bruni wrote a column back in june in the new york Times entitled, I'm OK , you're pure evil. Yeah, it was an

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eloquent statement, I think of how we talk to each other these days, fueled as we are, by the way in which the internet and social media have changed the game. It's much harder now,

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isn't it? To sustain an argument that lasts longer than 140 characters in a tweet and so says bruni , to be seen in a thicket of hashtags and heard above the den people screech, passion and provocation

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blur. One is admirable, the other is adolescent and too many of us have lost sight of the line between the two. He notes that this is true, whether the words are spoken from the right

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or the left and where does all of this end frank, bruni says for more and more americans. The other side isn't simply misguided in the extreme. It's evil in the absolute and virtue is measured by

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the starkness with which that evil is labelled and revive . There are emotional satisfactions to this, he acknowledges and then he concludes, there's also a terrible price in Matthew, Jesus looks at the world and sees

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all of that better than we ever have. He sees how prone we have been to see peace as simply the absence of conflict, rather than a sometimes painful necessity. He sees how we've often desired to

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occupy the moral high ground, not factoring in the huge price we pay for our moral superiority. He sees us fighting other people and thus ignoring the internal wars going on inside of us, each one of

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us, and he sees the terrible price of it all. But here's what he also sees. He sees beyond all of that and toward the other side of this fray, in which we live toward the

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other side of the cross square by faith, we are given the eyesight of resurrection, the capacity to see the world as God sees the world. What Matthew, bleak as he can be, wants us

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to know above all else, is that through such eyesight we see what is priceless about the prophets reward . We see how it aligns us with something larger than ourselves, and offers us the cup of cold

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water that quenches the thirst for righteousness, not merely the thirst to be right. I like that one too. Thank you for such a reward. Is not about us getting what we want, but rather

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about us learning to want what God has to give , and, by the way, none of this is safe, all of us who are preaching across the Tuesdays and this semester are asked to address the

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theme. Here I stand. It's an appropriate theme in this 500th anniversary year of the Protestant Reformation, as it recalls Luther's words. Here I stand, I can do no other. And as I assess

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the themes of my own preaching across the years of my ministry. The themes of where I stand, I conclude that one of the major themes in my preaching is that we cannot expect the Gospel to be

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safe. We love that word safe. We use that word a lot here. We want to be assured that in this or that setting we feel safe and I understand that, but ultimately friends, we

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cannot guarantee to you that the Gospel is always safe . The Gospel cannot be harnessed to an agenda, be it from the right or from the left, Rather, the Gospel, like the spirit blows where

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it will, and you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. What you do know is that even if the Gospel is not safe , the Gospel nonetheless is good. There is no

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greater thing to commit one's life too than the goodness of the Gospel. A couple of months ago, I received in the mail a letter from a rare human being, who knows a thing or two about

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the goodness of the Gospel native Texan. He's lived a long and interesting life mostly in texas and has had many adventures across time. He has become a sort of philosopher and we have spent more than a

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few evenings sitting in front of his fireplace, sipping a good single malt and pondering the ultimate mysteries. The purpose of his letter was to set out the details of his funeral and to request that, I

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preach added he's not dying, but he's an intentional person and he's making his plans. We should all do that. When I got his letter, I called him up and said, I'd like to accept

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your request that I preach at your funeral, but I need to know first what the honorarium will be . And then I said, look, I'm not looking forward to this anytime soon. You know,

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he said word law. You know the deal in life and in death. We belong to God. And when I'm done, I want you to get the last word. The letter he had written was

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astonishingly specific with regard to the details of the service . The old testament text, the psalm, the epistle, the Gospel, the anthems to be sung by the choir. He wants the Eucharist, the

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feast of the table. He wrote this letter to three of his pastor friends and he's assigned parts to each of us. Oh, and by the way , he said on the phone, there's one particular

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him which if we don't sing, I will haunt you for the rest of your life. It's a great him, But it fell off the Presbyterian Playlist three hymnals ago. The Episcopalians and Lutherans still sing

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this hymn, but the last time it was published in one of our hymnals was in 1955. But I love this him about discipleship. We'll sing it at his funeral. They cast their nets in galilee

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just off the hills of Brown. Such happy, simple fisher folk before the Lord came down, contented , peaceful fishermen, before they ever knew the peace of God that filled their hearts brimful and broke them

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too young john who trimmed the flapping sale homeless in Patmos died. Peter who hauled the teeming net head down was crucified and then the last verse, the reason he wants us to sing this hymn, the

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peace of God. It is no peace but strife closed in the sod. But brothers sisters pray for this. The marvelous peace of God. It's not safe, but it's a cup of cold water.

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It's the feast at the table. It's what will finally sustain every one of you. It's what sustains the church from generation under generation. It's the prophets reward in the name of God, creator, christ