Bishops' Blog

Ordination Homily

Before I begin this morning, I have a more general word about ordination. I once read that, some years ago, Brown University wanted to put in sidewalks on campus.  But first they let students walk where they wished for a year, so that they could see where the grass was worn down, and they then proceeded to put sidewalks in the actual walkways.  Ordination is something like that- we ordain the one who already is effectively a servant, a deacon, so that we come here to confirm the obvious with a blessing.  That is certainly true of this morning in the case of Carrie. And of course at a personal level this is a happy occasion for us all.  Over the years we have joked that we should introduce potential ordinands to Carrie and if they don’t like her, we’d reject them on the spot- something is the matter with them!

I want to begin his sermon with a book review- full disclosure, I haven’t read the book, why should that stop me, but I have received a good synopsis of it from a friend. The book is Ian McGilchrist’s ‘the Master and his Emissary,’ though we all know something of the argument since ‘right and left brain’ has entered common parlance.  The author gives an example from the natural world. A robin scans the ground. The bird uses the right eye (left brain) to look down and distinguish a seed, edible, from a pebble, not. Without that ability the bird would die. Then, taking flight, with the left eye (right brain) the bird is scanning the horizon far and wide for any hawks. That seed won’t do any good if the creature is devoured the next moment!  Well, your problem and mine are no longer pebbles and hawks, though we have our own kinds of threats close and far. Fast forward many millenia, and our right brain sees the big picture, the pattern, the story beginning to end. Meanwhile, conversely, back at the ranch, we have to attend to the things and people and relationships and tasks that get us safely and, we hope, fruitfully through our day.  Take one last step with Dr. McGilchrist- the point isn’t two mini-brains, but their relationship, their dialogue, of the most intricate and subtle kind, way more so than any AI.  End of book report!

Later on in II Corinthians, in chapter ten, we read that we are to ‘take every concept captive for Christ.’ Carrie, a whole lot of the mission theology you now are studying at a doctoral level is packed into that sentence!  Let’s take brain hemispheres captive for Jesus. And then let’s hear their duet sung through Ii Corinthians, and imagine what Christian mission from the right and left hemisphere of the mind of the Church would be. And finally let’s bring it home to this place, this morning, this deacon. 

A saint for this season, perilous as it is, is Francis, a distant mirror for us across eight centuries. The great rood screen cross in Church spoke to him in his trauma. Jesus on the cross said to him, ‘Francis, repair my church.’ And so he set out to the country chapel of San Damiano, fallen into ruins, and began to rebuild it, with his hands, brick on brick, and caring for the lepers who lived nearby. Diaconal indeed. And that is important, and worthy of expending one’s life, on the concrete struggles and possibilities of actual churches in real villages barrios reales. That is where people hear the Gospel and receive Christ’s body, and suffer and serve. That is where you, Carrie, have labored, with your ministry of encouragement and accompaniment. We who work in the Church know how granular, how particular, it is, frustratingly and amazingly so. Your work has gotten down to context, which is also a buzzword in the mission speak. That is mission of the left hemisphere. We drift from that anchor at our peril. In the Episcopal world that means parishes, places, no matter how our culture drifts into the sphere if the cyber-disembodied.

But of course, to follow out my Franciscan theme, that same saint sang a hymn to the cosmos. He travelled a thousand miles perilously to meet Saladin the Muslim general in Cairo. He began a spiritual family of beggars who would spread across the world. His parish, to borrow Wesley’s line, was the world, indeed the universe, wherever Jesus was Lord!  His, our, mission, even if we never leave greater Dallas, reaches to the ends of the earth, for we are all called to be right hemisphere disciples as well.

Carrie, you have had just such a ministry among us, because you are a servant of Jesus Christ, lord of the horizon as well as of the hamlet.  Your charism of friendship has led us to friendships precious to us, not theories, but relations to brothers and sisters in Christ, which remind us that there is no white or black Church, because the wall of division Paul speaks of in Ephesians 2 is already broken down. Amen. Amidst all the concrete demands of ministry to congregations right here, you have recently been in dialogue over zoom with fellow evangelists in southern Kenya. Meanwhile, you are just back from South Korea, where you played a leadership role in the global evangelical Lausanne movement, all of which is about as right hemisphere as you can get. My exhortation to you this morning is to forge ahead, Adelante, in all these directions, because we need the example of both hemispheres of mission in concert.

The Church’s intricate two-hemisphere mission is on display through II Corinthians, from which our epistle reading comes.  Paul has worked through a stack of pastoral issues in the first letter, some quite distressing, and here too the letter begins in a granular mode with encouragement to his friends, and ends with a more personal note about the ‘thorn in his own flesh.’  Paul could mimic a famous Boston pol, that all pastoralia is local.  But he keeps returning to the great claims, deep as eternity and wide as the world, that Christ has died, so we all have truly died in him, that God has already reconciled the world in Jesus, of which news we are called to be diaconoi, servants,  living out the appeal: be reconciled, let your life catch up with its deepest reality. Along the way he insists that distress in Jerusalem, another thousand miles away, is also their problem, because they are all a fellowship, a body. The missional vision of II Corinthians can only be seen with eyes serving both hemispheres, both having been taken captive by the ascended Jesus.

No one in this room is less comfortable with Saint Carrie, than Carrie!  I opened with a word about ordination, so let me close with one as well. We are proud of your diaconal ministry past and future, but we ordain deacons to remind the whole body that it is to be diaconal, each and all. For the same reason we ordain priests so that I Peter 2 should echo in our hearts, that we all are a priestly, which implies an evangelistic people. And bishops? We all have a share in the work of traditioning, of handing on what our grandmothers and grandfathers in the faith have given us. Carrie becomes a deacon so as to be a living reminder of our call to be servants, in word and deed, near and far, of the reconciliation already enacted in Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and glory now and forever.    

Sermon for the third Sunday after the Epiphany

It is always encouraging, at my age, when you remember something you were told forty five years ago, whether it is so or not! And I have just such a memory, all the way back to seminary, this morning, having to do with our Gospel passage. And the word I remember is ‘vengeance.’ And no, I am not going anywhere near contemporary American politics!

The story goes like this. Jesus is at the very outset of his ministry, after his baptism in the Jordan and the Holy Spirit, which amounted to his commissioning from his Father. Now he heads back home to preach to his family, and each of us can imagine how easy that is going to be!  The passage for the Sabbath in the Nazareth synagogue happens to be the sixty first chapter of the prophet Isaiah, which is as promising an option as one can imagine. It is the perfect basis for the calling I just mentioned. The Holy Spirit has sent the prophet, and his mission is to proclaim the ‘good news’, the Gospel, which means the announcement that God himself is come to his subjects. And what does that arrival portend? Healing and liberation, in every dimension we can imagine.  Personal pain, generational trauma, the Romans, past guilt and future death- resolved by God’s own act. As good as an inaugural as possible. 

Jesus goes on further to describe this Gospel in an assortment of ways- it will be the Jubilee, what he calls the ‘year of the Lord. ‘ it will be the end of mourning, of what Jews would later call ‘sitting kaddish.’ Our lives will be like good trees by the river, as in the very first Psalm. The long years of devastation, the exile, repaired. Food aplenty. A new dispensation in which the whole nation shall be priestly (anticipating the great passage about Church in Peter’s first letter).

One way to preach is to find the pebble in the shoe, or better yet in the oyster- what in this passage raises an issue? How does that irritation, that question, turn to insight?  Luke 4 tells us of Jesus’ first sermon, on this optimal text of Isaiah 61. But things start to go sour when they grumble, ‘isn’t this Joseph’s son?’ who do you think you are? A few verses later things have gone way off the rails, with the congregation ready to throw him off a cliff- now that is a sermon gone wrong.  Why? Because Jesus offers a short bible study, focusing on two noted and blessed Gentiles, first the widow of Zarephath, who took Elijah in, and second the leper Naaman, a general in the invading Syrian army, whom Elisha healed. The blessed outsider and the recent convert, set the congregation’s teeth on edge. What are we chopped liver? 

All of which takes us back to the word ‘vengeance.’ You see Jesus’ text from Isaiah followed up ‘the acceptable year’ with the ‘day of vengeance of our God.’ But when Jesus preaches on that passage, he emphasizes the first, and leaves the second out for the time being. Apparently the audience liked that revenge on their pagan neighbors part, only to have rabbi Jesus rub salt in the wound with his subsequent praise of famous Gentiles. 

Now the great thing about the word of God is that in narrating the ‘then’ it addresses the same Word, to us, now. We are the congregation, the irony being we are most all Gentiles ourselves, though we are no different, a tough hometown audience, who like our mercy laced with a little revenge as well, who, when it comes to hearing about pure grace, have an equally hard time taking ‘Yes’ for an answer.  Here I am reminded of the joke about the new priest also giving his first sermon, which the congregation loves. Next Sunday he stands up and delivers the very same sermon- Ok, it was good, maybe he’s busy moving in…Third week, same sermon word for word. The Senior warden sidles up to him and says ‘Father, you gave the same sermon three times in a row.’ And He replies,’ I did, because they haven't done what I told them yet!’ that’s us, like Jesus’ relatives in the Nazareth synagogue, resistant to the shock of a message of grace, so against the grain of our world, which is why you and I come Sunday by Sunday until forgiveness sinks in, worried as we are that if it’s free, there must be a catch.

Well that’s my memory of New Testament class long ago, of the Gospel on the one hand, and us become the audience before the new hometown rabbi.  But I want to add a postscript. For in the bible some ideas are postdated. They seem to be rejected, but in fact come back into play in dramatic new ways. Law, justification, Messiah, kingdom of God, and more, they all come back into play for the new Israel in relation to the risen Jesus. So let us think a little harder about God’s victory over the Gentiles` We were reminded at Epiphany in Psalm 72 that the Messiah would rule the nations, as they brought tribute; that is what the gold, frankincense, and myrrh were. What kind of empire is this, what kind of triumph over the now subject nations? Similarly Paul tells us that the Gentile converts, us, are in a triumphal procession, comparable to the kind of spectacle which Caesar would have stage through the Roman streets, with representatives of the captive nations paraded through the streets. I have in mind here II Corinthians 2,: “But thanks be to God,” declares Paul, “who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ.’ (The aroma being the incense used in processions to mask the stench of a Roman street!)  The New Testament is so adept at turning things on their heads- we are the captives, of hope says the Psalmist, captives stolen from the evil one, as if from Azkaban in a Harry Potter novel. Our liturgical procession itself is meant to be just such a celebration of the Gentiles now in the possession of the Messiah. In short, vengeance as anger is in the new dispensation to be gone, but not the victory over the nations itself.  Nor are we to jettison this image of being taken over, for our own individual choices are not the point, however much we worship such, but rather the one who has triumphed, who comes in mercy as well as power, whose arrival is marked by the proclamation of the Jubilee, first in our hearts, in time in His world which is already God’s. Amen.