 Dr. Megan Larissa Good is teaching pastor at Trinity Mennonite Church in Glendale, Arizona, and the author of The Bible Unwrapped, Making Sense of Scripture Today, published by Harold Press in 2018. She holds a BA from Gordon College, a Master of Divinity from Duke Divinity School, and a Doctor of Ministry from Portland Seminary. She is a frequent preacher and lecturer at churches and universities across the country, speaking on subjects such as biblical hermeneutics and contemporary preaching. Her blog, MeganLarissaGood.com, offers short devotional reflections and features articles exploring the nature of biblical hermeneutics. Dr. Good combines and embodies many gifts that I believe the world urgently needs at this time. She is a careful and attentive scholar of the Bible and an energized, creative and imaginative pastor. She is courageous in going into unfamiliar places to build relationships, willing to challenge time-worn ways of doing things, and eager to take a spirit-led adventure seemingly wherever it will take her. We at AMBS have learned to know and love Megan as a dedicated and hard-working and insightful member of the AMBS Board of Directors. And I have personally appreciated and greatly benefited from her role as an advisor on the AMBS Church Leadership Center advisory board. Her love of the in-depth study of Scripture and her passion for making biblical scholarship not only usable but attractive to large and wide audiences inspires me and gives me great hope. Megan lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with what she calls, quote, her prized dinosaur bone and a ridiculously large book collection, unquote. Megan, we are so delighted to have you here honored. Invite you now to come and speak on the great parade. I invite you to pray with me as we approach God's word together. Lord, breathe on your word by the power of your spirit so that it would live for us and we can live for you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. The book of Second Corinthians has long been one of my favorite books of the Bible. There's something about this book and it's a combination of practical insight and personal insight into the life of Paul that I love. And one of the big questions of the book of Second Corinthians is a conversation between Paul and the Corinthian church that he planted on whether or not Paul is actually qualified for the ministry he's undertaken. You've got to love it when your church has that conversation. I can think of two times in my life that stand out most distinctly where I question my own qualifications. One was the day that I got my driver's license and took my first kind of cruise through town without anyone in the car. And I thought about how two months earlier when I had taken Driver's Ed I actually rolled backwards off the speed bump because I didn't get enough momentum to get over. And the Driver's Ed instructor who had been teaching for more than 40 years had taught the parents of my classmates that I was the worst beginning driver he'd ever seen. And I thought who on earth would license me to drive this giant piece of machinery? The second time I had that feeling of being totally unqualified was the week I graduated from seminary. Six days after the graduation ceremony I was hired as a 25 year old lead pastor and the night after that hire I stayed awake all night lying in bed thinking did this church just have a collective psychotic break? One of my current dreams is that someday a seminary is going to ask me to teach a class on things that seminary does not prepare you for in pastoral ministry. I have a running list going I've been keeping one for a while. One what to do when one of your parishioners is in a genuine spiritual crisis over what is the fate of the soul of their cat. Another is what to do when parents bring their six year old to you and this has happened to me twice and say please explain to my child who Cain and Abel married. Another is what to do when you were conducting a funeral and it turns out that all of the other speakers at the funeral who were sharing on behalf of the family all show up completely wasted. Another and this one did not happen to me but it did happen to a male colleague of mine is what to do when you go to your town's only gas station to buy flowers for a housebound parishioner and that parishioner pulls on the bud of the rose and it unfolds into lace underwear. This is sufficient for these things, Paul asks. And the only answer we can possibly offer is nobody. But in all seriousness, whether we are sending you out today as a pastor or a nonprofit leader or a professor, we are sending you out into truly difficult territory. I don't think I have to stand up here today and make a case to you on how badly the world is broken. In the time that it takes us as leaders to bind up one wound, evil makes ten more. Compassion fatigue is a real thing. You might have the experience of Ezekiel. This is a chapter of Ezekiel I read over and over again. An experience of just getting up in the pulpit and speaking a word burning on your heart from God and having your congregation turn to you and say, thank you pastor for that beautiful love song. You might have the experience and all of us will of encountering someone in the world who is literally addicted to the thing that is killing them and that lash out at you when you try to help. I mean, there is a burden. Most of us come in to these kind of ministries with a burden to save the world and keep it on tracks and help things come together and everything in the world seems to resist that effort. And sooner or later, whether it's happened to you yet or whether it will happen to you some point in the future, you'll come to a moment where you are overwhelmed and exhausted and completely beat up and you'll ask yourself the question, who is qualified for this? Second Corinthians, as I mentioned, is Paul's most personal letter. And I love this passage of Second Corinthians we read this morning because in this passage, Paul describes his personal experience in ministry as quote, like being led in triumphal procession. Now the image of this triumphal procession, this is an image taken from the military of the Roman Empire. A triumphal procession is what happens when a general achieves victory and returns to Rome and enters into Rome wearing purple robes and being led in a chariot with horses with golden bridles. And he's followed by all of his troops who've achieved victory with him marching behind and then all the prisoners of war and everybody in the crowds and on the sidelines cheer and the victory story is told and the people praise the God who made it possible. Now in this metaphor, Paul imagines Christ as the general at the head of the victory parade. And it's easy to assume when you hear that that what Paul is imagining is that we are the troops following behind Christ, the troops who shared in the work and now share in the triumph and the glory. And we think to ourselves, well, if that's ministry, that's not so bad. But then you read the surrounding context of Second Corinthians and you read the writer thought of Paul and you suddenly have the realization Paul does not mean that ministers are the troops following behind the general. Paul is describing ministers of the gospel as the prisoners in the parade. And you know what happens to the prisoners? They get killed at the end of the parade. So Paul says to the Corinthian church, this is what ministry is like. It's like being on an endless parade where your weaknesses are on display for everyone to see and what you march and march and march and then you're killed at the end. And I know what some of you are thinking, this is the most depressing seminary grad sermon you've ever heard. It's too late for a refund on your degree. Note that when Paul uses this kind of tragic metaphor, it comes in a context in which Paul says, thanks be to God that this is the case. I mean anyone who would have seen one of these parades in this culture would have a picture in their mind of the captives who are marching through with their heads hanging down in total despair. But in Paul's image of the great parade, the captive section is leading the celebration. The captive section of the parade are dancing and singing all the way along. And the onlookers of the parade are looking at them thinking, what is wrong with these people? Don't they know where this great walk is going? This whole scene is crazy. It makes no sense unless the captives know something that no one else does. Now here's the fact, the hold of evil on the world is great and there is no way to break that hold without costly sacrifice. But in the cross of Christ, God has struck a death blow to evil and the powers. In Christ, God is reconciling all things to himself, banishing evil, tipping tyrants off thrones, establishing justice and filling the hungry. The resurrected and the ascended Christ is marching at the head of the victory procession of God. And it's so important, it's so crucial for us as ministers to understand our place in this story. We are not in God's army. We are not. If we were in the army, our job would be to fight God's battles, banquish evil and make peace happen. God forbid that we think that. To begin with, we are thoroughly outmatched. The opposition is too strong, the obstacles are too great, and this can only end in total failure and despair. And second, if we are arrogant enough to try to take that role, we simply will become the evil we thought we would overthrow. Hear me, future leaders, the broken world is not out there waiting for you to go and save it. It has been saved and it will be saved by Jesus Christ, just as you. He is the one with the power to make all things right. So who are we? We are just captives to his mercy. We have been swept up in the spoils of his triumph, and we have been bound to the path of his parade. There's a war unfolding, no question about it, and the stakes are higher than we think, but as ministers and as leaders, we have not been commissioned as soldiers in battle. The stakes are really unimaginably high, but they are not our stakes to bear. This is why Christianity is such great news. The stakes belong to Christ, and the outcome is guaranteed in him. That means that what we are commissioning you for today, we are commissioning you for a ministry of celebration. We are sending you out as the world's most joy-filled captives. And wherever you go from here, wherever God's call takes you, what you are going to do is you are going to wear your weakness openly and declare at the top of your lungs, look what the power of God has done. The God of the universe is toppling tyrants beginning here with me. Praise God that I've been taken captive by the mercy of the Lamb. Paul draws us into this mystery that's at the very heart of the Gospel, that this paradox, that there's a real sense that when you are called into the parade of Christ, you are certainly on a path to death. Jesus says this openly, the only path to triumph is the path of the cross. Death is the only place this can lead, but the paradox is that the work of ministry is the work of celebration because our primary work is to do two things. To proclaim to the world its glorious destiny and to rejoice ahead of time in the victory that's overcoming everything. To people on the outside, we are going to look and smell like inevitable death, but we are going to sniff our own robes and we are going to recognize that scent. That powerful smell is the scent of grave clothes falling off. That smell, that smell of death is the smell of resurrection life coming. So let's get practical here. What is the difference in doing ministry this way? What does it look like to practice ministry as a member of Christ's triumphal procession? I want to tell you just two small stories from my own ministry. Some years ago I reached out to a member of the community who was pretty housebound and lonely and not church attending and through our relationship she became a member of the church. She eventually went on hospice and the next time I went to see her as she was on her deathbed she sat me down and she told me she had decided to pay a man to do her funeral instead of me. I got back in my car and you know sometimes it's just one blow too many. And I put my head on my steering wheel and just started crying and thought I give up. And that's when I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit just fill the car and I heard the voice of the Spirit as clearly as I've ever heard it say to me, rejoice with her because her image of me is about to get so much bigger. And I sat there and just was blinded by this flash of the sheer glory of God. I sat in the shadow of eternity for a moment and just celebrated with her the joy and the beauty that was ahead of both of us and I found myself weeping from sheer overwhelming joy because I realized there was no battle left to fight there were no words left to be said everything that needed to be said would be spoken by the victory of Jesus Christ of which we were both simply joyful captives. So second story, like many of you will experience from time to time I doubt my sufficiency as a communicator in the modern world and a couple of months ago I was invited to guest preach at this huge evangelical church and after I had preached the sermon I was standing at the front and a woman came up to me and she told me that she had not set foot inside a church building in more than 15 years. And she said, I want you to know that I came here today because I thought someone else was preaching. I met God this morning while you were preaching and I wanted you to know that I'm giving my life to him. I laughed and I threw my arms around her and I said, well then welcome home. This is ministry as a captive. It is the realization that it is not my parade and it is not your parade. This is not our story. God was calling that woman on that Sunday morning and she was coming back regardless of who was standing in that pulpit. The light of truth was going to reign regardless of whether I won the argument that day in the car that I persuaded anyone to hold my point of view. We can hype ourselves up and we can take on heavy burdens with the thought of our indispensability or we can take a deep liberating breath in the spirit of Jesus and get over ourselves a little. The world will be healed because Jesus punctures evil. Jesus ends deception. Jesus defeats death and Jesus draws all things to himself and that is going to happen. That is the future regardless of whether you get up and work tomorrow or spend the entire day under the covers eating Cheetos. That future is inevitable. That is the future that Christ has won. But friends, the incredible joy of getting to participate in the story. That is the gift of sheer grace. The privilege of your weakness being the place that other people see the power of Christ. The privilege of getting to join your voice with a choir of captives who are singing ahead of time. The privilege of letting your dying body be the place where the aroma of life goes out. If you are going to do ministry, there is only one reason to do ministry. Do it for joy. There is no other reason to do ministry than to do it for sheer joy. You don't have to be a Christian minister to do peace or justice or do good for the world. All sorts of people do that who aren't Christian. What makes ministry uniquely profoundly Christian is the joy that we can afford. As Christians we can afford each other's failures and we can afford our own failures. We can afford patience with seeds and with yeast that take way too long to grow. We can afford hope when all hope is lost. We can afford to love even the very people who will kill us because we have been caught up in the victory procession of Christ. Our destiny is written and it is a one-way trip from death to life. And the world's destiny has been written too and that too is glorious. So we can afford to go out today and we can afford to give ourselves fully to a ministry of celebration. Smelling like empty grave clothes and bound for freedom. Who is sufficient for these things? Who is qualified? Nobody but Christ. And we are His captives. Where He goes, we follow after. Thanks be to God who gives us this victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.