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.
