Graduates and spouses, families and friends, faculty and staff and trustees of Trinity, distinguished guests—it is an honor to speak to you tonight. I would endeavor to speak to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit:
I want to begin on a sober note—with a warning. All of you are about to graduate from Trinity and go into various places of service. Many of you are going to begin ministries of Word and Sacrament, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and administering His body and blood to His faithful. You are going to be sitting at the bedsides of dying people or across the table from couples about to divorce. Many of you are going to work with youth, with young parents enduring sleepless nights, with older parents grieving the rebellion of their teenagers, and with the infertile. Others of you are going to other countries to work among the poor, the dispossessed, the ones who have had to flee their homes. Still others of you are going into so-called “secular” professions, to bear the light of Christ beyond the walls of church sanctuaries. You are going to sit down with addicts and social climbers and with those declaring bankruptcy. And you are going to take the gospel that we at Trinity have tried to communicate to you again and again, and you are going to proclaim the love of Jesus Christ into all these lives.
But now here is the warning. You are also about to be told—from multiple corners of the church and from multiple people, many of whom you trust and admire—that are you not equipped for this ministry. You’re going to be told that you don’t yet know what you need to know in order to be an effective minister. And the people telling you this are going to promise you that they have “What You Need” to succeed.
I spent some time Googling “pastor help” this past week, and I found dozens of websites telling pastors how they’re ill-equipped and what they need to do to fix their inadequacies. One website was promoting a conference where you can learn tips for things you don’t yet know enough about:
- “How to cultivate consistent personal and professional growth”
- “What you can do to lead your church to health and growth”
- “How you can continually become a better spouse and parent”
- “Tactics and checkpoints to ensure that you’re fulfilling your calling as a minister”
- “Stress management and emotional strength to lead for a lifetime”
Another website advertised a pastors’ conference like this:
“Across the nation millions of aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders will embark on a journey to launch their business or ministry. Yet, many will fail. To make an impact in today’s cross-generational environments, you must understand how to communicate and work effectively with each generation, to obtain buy-in for your ideas, and more.”
Do you hear what this is saying? You are on the brink of failure unless you glean the knowledge that this conference will offer you. Notice that “must.” “You must understand how to communicate and work effectively”—which you apparently don’t yet know how to do—so come to our conference!
Over twenty years ago, the evangelical theologian David Wells diagnosed this situation among pastors like this:
“The yearning for wisdom [has been] transformed into a yearning to look more like a skilled lawyer, psychologist, or business executive than an ordained minister of the gospel…. [Ministers now] feel they must present themselves as having a desired competence, and that competence, as it turns out, is largely managerial.”
“Ministers now feel they must present themselves as having a managerial competence.” But the catch-22 is that you are being told over and over again that you don’t yet have that competence, so you need to trust X, Y, or Z scheme or conference or book or retreat or website in order to get it.
It strikes me that this is entirely of a piece with the original setting of our epistle reading for tonight. After the apostle Paul founded the churches in Galatia, he left, moving on to other mission fields. In the meantime, some other Christian missionaries, claiming the authority of the Jerusalem church, showed up in Galatia and tried to convince Paul’s converts that they were severely under-equipped to live a fully Christian life. They were, in fact, only half-converted. Yes, Paul had told them about Jesus, but he hadn’t told them the full story. He left out the part about how the Galatian Christians, or the males anyway, needed to get circumcised. He left out the part about how everyone needed to start observing Jewish holidays and food regulations, even though they themselves weren’t Jewish. And, perhaps most dangerously of all, Paul had left his converts exposed to the Evil Impulse of the Flesh, exposed to temptation and primed for inevitable more failure. As Lou Martyn in his great commentary on Galatians imagines these missionaries saying, “Paul failed to give you the Law, thus allowing you to remain a group of sailors on the treacherous high seas in nothing more than a small and poorly equipped boat. He gave you no provisions for the trip, no map, no rudder, and no anchor. In a word, he failed to pass on to you God’s greatest gift, the Law.” The Galatians, in short, were in trouble. They didn’t have what they needed to live the Christian life. They were sitting ducks for sin and death to come pick off.
When Paul heard about this, he was incensed, and he fired off the letter we now know as the epistle to the Galatians. How does he respond to these rival missionaries who are troubling his converts? Listen again to what he says: “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh…. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.”
When I was growing up, I thought that was a command, and it filled me with guilt. Was I keeping in step with the Holy Spirit enough? Was I doing enough to please and not quench the Spirit? But in context, it’s actually a promise, an assurance. Here is my expanded paraphrase of what I think Paul is saying:
“You Galatians are being told that I didn’t give you enough to protect you from the assaults of the flesh. The missionaries who came after me are telling you that you need circumcision as a safeguard to keep you from the wiles of the flesh. But I’m here to tell you I did give you everything you need! You already have the Spirit. I preached Jesus Christ to you, and you received the Spirit. What more could circumcision possibly add to that? Just stay with the Spirit—walk alongside Him—and you’ll be protected from the flesh.”
In order to see why Paul says this, we need to take a step back and ask who this Spirit is that he’s talking about. Just a few paragraphs before our reading for tonight, Paul tells us exactly what “Spirit” he means:
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.”
The Spirit that Paul is talking about, in other words, is the Spirit of Jesus. The Spirit who indwells the Galatians is the one who enables them to join Jesus the Son in praying the same prayer that He prays to His Father and now, also, their Father. The Spirit is the seal of the union that the Galatians have with God the Father through His Son Jesus.
Earlier in the epistle, Paul reminds the Galatians how they first received this Spirit:
“It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”
The Galatians received the Spirit of Jesus Christ when they heard Paul publicly proclaiming Christ and they believed in him. Paul came to them as a suffering apostle, bearing the dying of Jesus in his own body, and he preached about the crucified Jesus. He told the Galatians that Jesus loved them and gave himself for them. He told them that the cross of Jesus delivered them from this present evil age. He told them that Jesus bore the curse of hanging on a tree on their behalf. And they heard this message with faith and received Jesus’ own Spirit. For Paul, there was nothing more they needed. If you have Jesus and his Spirit, what more could there possibly be to need?
So Paul tells them in our reading for this evening, “Stay with what you already have. Keep in step with the Spirit you’ve already received. Don’t give in to the lie that you’re ill-equipped.” And here’s the result: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” Or, perhaps more literally, “The Law is not against such things.” In other words, don’t listen to the new missionaries in town. If you rely on the Spirit you’ve already received, you are going to end up doing all that the Law requires. You don’t need to get circumcised in order to fulfill the Law. The Spirit is sufficient. Christ is enough. You have everything you need.
And that, my friends, is what I want to say to you tonight. When, in a few weeks or months, you find yourself wondering if you have what it takes to minister to the sick, the needy, the brokenhearted, the rebellious, the young, the old, the lost, or anyone else, in your parish or your neighborhood or your mission field, the answer is, You have Jesus. Jesus Christ and him crucified is the one whom everyone needs and longs for, whether they know it or not, and you know him and can proclaim him.
In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Through His blood we have the forgiveness of sins. By His cross we have been crucified to the world and the world to us. God gave His only Son Jesus Christ “to suffer death on the cross for our redemption: who made there by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” Christ is what you need—he is all you need—going forward.
Many other things may be helpful to you in various ways. You will gain skills on the job that you didn’t learn at Trinity. You’ll attend diocesan workshops and mission training events that will help you strategize about how to love people better. You’ll learn how to read a parish budget and plan a potluck dinner. You’ll learn through the school of hard knocks how to say you’re sorry. But fundamentally, right now, you do not lack anything for your ministry of the Gospel.
So, my charge to you tonight, friends, is to rest. To breathe deeply and let go of anxiety. You have life through the death of Jesus. You live by His Spirit. And what you’re called to do now is simply to announce and herald to anyone who will listen that He is a great Savior.
The Rev. Wesley Hill, PhD is associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. He is the author of five books including Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus (IVP, 2025).
