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Sermon at the January 8, 2011 ordination
of Barbara Gibson, Jeff Roper, Fran Wheeler, Michael Bell, Dixie Junk and Antoinette Tackkett
Grace Cathedral, Topeka, Kansas
By the Right Reverend Dean E. Wolfe, D.D., Ninth Bishop of Kansas
Come Holy Spirit and kindle the fire that is in us. Take our lips and speak through them. Take our hearts and see through them. Take our souls and set them on fire. Amen.
“Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.”
Fear is such a powerful thing. It is truly the gift that just keeps on giving. You can rationalize it, analyze it, treat it therapeutically or pharmaceutically, but there it is, the uninvited roommate on the journey of life. Politicians have long known how to harness its power, and all of us have felt its impact on our lives. If we could have back all the energy that has been siphoned away from our lives by our fears, rational and irrational, I believe we could power the earth for the foreseeable future.
Fear of failing. Fear of offending. Fear of telling the truth. Fear of not telling the truth. Fear of the fear – and on and on it goes.
We know fear is a form of faithlessness, a way of dismissing an omnipotent God who loves us and knows us and seeks to protect us, but there is nothing rational about fear. Still, our fears can sometimes serve a useful function, when they warn us to be more careful or inspire us to take extra precaution.
In the passage we heard read this morning about the call of Jeremiah, the Lord instructs his prophet to “not be afraid of those to whom he is sent, for I am with you to deliver you,” says the Lord.”
Of course, we often joke that if you’re not afraid, perhaps you don’t understand the gravity of the situation.
Left to their own qualifications and their own abilities, our ordinands today should be scared. Like the long, winding line of ordained clergy who have gone on before them, they are not worthy of the holy work to which they have been called.
Now don’t get me wrong. We are ordaining today an incredible group of people, and I would even venture that we have seldom ordained at one time so many capable, gifted and inspiring clergy. However, if their effectiveness depends more on their skills than their faithfulness, then they (and we) are in a world of hurt.
This passage from Jeremiah invites us to ponder that, at some level, before they were even born, they were born for this. They were born to do this, to be these persons, these servants – and every single thing they’ve done, every book they’ve read, every disappointment they’ve endured, every joy they’ve celebrated, every grief, all of that has served to prepare them precisely for this. Maybe we need to examine this all much more closely.
This morning we will, by the grace of God, ordain Barbara Gibson, Jeff Roper and Fran Wheeler to the sacred order of deacons.
We will ask them, in the name of Jesus Christ, “to serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick and the lonely.” We will send them to the margins of the world where we believe they will find the true Center. We will ask them to go to the most unlikely places and to care for the most unlikely people, because God is found in the most unlikely of places and in the most unlikely of people.
We will ask them to be servant leaders, and with the deepest humility they can summon, we will call upon them to speak holy and hard truthes to the highest powers and principalities of this world.
Then, we will, by the grace of God, ordain Michael Bell, Dixie Junk and Antoinette Tackett to the sacred order of priests. We will send them to baptize in the name of the Trinity, absolve sin and heal in the name of Christ, to bless and to withhold blessing, and to speak truth to power. We will especially call upon them to preach and teach both new and ancient truths.
We will ask them to be loving shepherds to the flocks that will be entrusted to their care. They will consecrate bread and wine, and by the power of the Holy Trinity, they will make it the everlasting meal that sustains and binds God’s people to one another and, finally, binds us all to the Creator.
And every one of these fine candidates for ordination will attempt to beg off these sacred assignments at some point in their ministry. And how do you think I know this? I know this because it is the one tendency all ordained people hold in common. It is the one thing that binds all Christians together.
They will say, very much in the spirit of Jeremiah, “Truly, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy, I am only a girl!”
They will say, “I am really too new.”
“I don’t know enough about that.”
“I’m not gifted enough for that.”
“I don’t think I’m faithful enough.”
“Why, God, are you calling on me?”
As time goes by, they may even start to say things like, “I really don’t feel supported enough in this ministry.”
“No one has fully prepared me for this!”
Or finally, “This is just too damn hard.”
In those moments, it will be my most ardent hope that our ordinands, along with all the rest of us who are trying to duck out of the discipleship imperative, will recall the words of our Lord to Jeremiah when the Lord said, “Do not say ‘I am only a boy;’ for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.”
Often our fears are masked in our anger, and when we are extremely angry we are almost always extremely scared. Each one of these ordinands will be sent forward as a representative of Christ, and woe be to any of them if they become too timid when it comes their time to speak truth to power. Woe be unto any of them, or to any of us, if we do not speak the truth the Lord has given us when the moment has arrived, and speaking the truth is difficult and daring.
As a bishop, it is my observation that ordained people can do an amazing amount of good, and they can also do an amazing amount of damage. By my own estimations during my tenure as your bishop, the most damage done to the ministries of this diocese have been done by gifted, hardworking, charismatic clergy who believed they were exceptional and the rules didn’t apply to them. They worked over and against the wider church, the diocese, the bishop and even their clerical colleagues, openly and in secret, and they convinced themselves (along with many of their parishioners) that they were not the cause of any of the problems that were soon to follow.
One of the brilliant things about our unique polity is that it recognizes an old truth: all local communities of faith are prone to heresy. It is the connection to the wider church, the wider family of faith, that keeps any individual family of faith from running off in the wrong direction.
I will lay my hands on each of these ordinands individually, but none of them will be ordained alone. Each of them came out of communities, studied in communities, were formed in communities, did field work in communities and now go to serve in community. They are part of something bigger than themselves.
As in every Episcopal liturgy when people are called to make audacious, unkeepable promises, they will make promises, and we, all of us gathered here today, will make promises that are equally holy and binding, to support and uphold them in their ministries. The fear we feel inside us feels so much smaller when we are holding hands and walking forward together.
Now, as a church, we Episcopalians may be a smaller denomination, but I don’t think we should accept this as our fate, as some kind of manifest destiny. Every religious revolution that has ever taken place has come out of a time of great social and political upheaval, and they almost always come following a period of great religious apathy. We might want to be prepared to welcome a whole new generation of people who are looking for something ancient and authentic.
In every small town in Kansas where there is an Episcopal church, or in every city for that matter, when a woman has a child outside of the benefit of marriage, that community will welcome her and her child (along with the father of that child) without judgment.
When two people can no longer find a way to work through their differences, there is an Episcopal church that will help them work through their divorce, and welcome them as individuals in the pew and at the altar rail. And, if it is God’s will that they meet someone new and seek to live a new life with that person, there is an Episcopal priest who will, after proper preparation and reflection, be willing to marry them.
When someone doesn’t believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible and fears they are going to a literal and eternal hell, there is an Episcopal church that will welcome them and help them through their fear.
When someone c annot believe in the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome, when someone doesn’t believe God forbids married persons, gay persons and all women from serving at the altar of God, there is an Episcopal church there to welcome them.
I believe the Episcopal Church is the roomiest, most welcoming community of faith in the Christian tradition, and if all that I’ve said isn’t true, we need to be working so much harder to make sure that it’s true. In our attempt to be nice, Christian people, we maybe haven’t been clear enough about who we are and who we are not.
Honestly, as I stand here facing these ordinands and the imperceptible future they face, I don’t know exactly what I should be telling them! No one knows what the future will hold for you or for the church. I couldn’t be any more surprised about how things are turning out! It hasn’t been anything like what I expected when I joined the Episcopal Church all those years ago, and yet I keep getting this strange, peaceful sense that this may be what God had been intending all along.
When I started regularly attending an Episcopal Church in college, there were very few women priests. The only one I knew was serving as our college chaplain because no parish in Southern Ohio at that time would hire her. There was no 1979 Book of Common Prayer – and therefore no Baptismal Covenant recited regularly, and no Easter Vigil and no broad lectionary so that the people would hear all the great stories of the Bible over a three year cycle.
There were no children receiving communion at the rail, no public discussions regarding the place of gay and lesbian persons in our faith community, no services in any other language but English, in fact, there was not much thought of mission beyond the United States, and generally, there wasn’t much thought about mission beyond the boundaries of the parish.
What a strange time that was! There were very few two-income families, there were no cell phones, there was no Internet, and people seldom lived openly with one another prior to marriage. There was no Sunday morning soccer for children, and as I remember, a powder blue leisure suit with white shoes and a white belt was considered quite fashionable in some circles!
Engineers used slide rules, architects hand-drew blue prints, computer engineers used punch cards to input data, doctor made their diagnoses without the benefit of MRIs – and mind you, I’m not 107 years old! This all happened over the span of about 40 years. What can I tell these ordinands in order to prepare them for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years of ministry?
I cansuggest a few things. You will need to be seriously grounded, so these winds of change don’t blow you away. You need to work to be in good spiritual shape, because this “ordained ministry thing” looks really easy, but most clergy don’t get past 30 years of active, healthy ministry in this work.
This work can break you. Bishops will fail you. Vestries will be unbelievably dysfunctional. Colleagues won’t call. This church will break your heart. And if you aren’t able to climb into your big girl or big boy pants, you are going to be in a world of hurt.
I’ve said before that when I first became bishop, I thought that what we really needed were smart clergy. They need to be smarter. If they are smarter, it will be better. And then I came to the conclusion that smart is good, but they also need to be faithful. Smart and faithful.
But then I realized that smart and faithful -- very good, very important – but actually beyond that, they need to be tough. They need to be resilient. They need to be just a little bit hard, so that they could get knocked down and still get back up again.
But guess what? The good news is, you’re not in this by yourself! And this is work worth doing, because you are being called to be bearers of eternal truths and the key to life itself. You will discover that in living for others, you will find you will have lived a life worthy of having been lived. The first beneficiary of compassion is the person who expresses it.
I’d rather feed a hungry child, comfort an exhausted mother, counsel an angry father, baptize a crying baby, marry a love-dazed couple, teach a skeptical teenager, unite a divided vestry, surprise a struggling parish by showing them what they actually can accomplish, showing them the resources they can raise, the good they can do, than almost anything else in the world I can think of.
Ordained ministry looks pretty simple, and perhaps it really is. You live your life according to a rule. You really do have to pray. You really must read the Bible. You have to pray and study and learn in order to serve and model and teach. At an ordination, these are the things you promise.
Additionally, you have to be a decent person, at least decent enough so you don’t become a distraction. You have to be organized, at least organized enough not to be a train wreck in the field. You have to possess a sense of urgency, at least enough urgency to move people beyond their natural complacency. You have to be emotionally mature, at least mature enough so that when people begin to follow your leadership you don’t start believing that it’s all about you. You need to be courageous, not courageous enough to charge machine gun nests, but courageous enough to tell people at cocktail parties that they are way off base.
All those jokes about only working one day a week will stop being funny after the first five or six 60-hour weeks, and I’ll confess to occasionally feeling as though I missed the golden era of the Episcopal Church. You know, those by-gone years when there were lots of Episcopalians in the Senate and there was brandy and cigars at vestry meetings, and a genteel sort of feeling surrounding the entire enterprise.
Well, welcome to the revolution! You see, the Episcopal Church has undergone a reformation every bit as radical as anything that happened in the 1500s and 1600s, minus the bloodshed.
I always wonder what we should say in moments like this, when things are changing so rapidly that anything that might be said in the midst of such a fast-moving cultural and theological stream might be swept away and look ridiculous as it rolls downstream.
When things are moving most swiftly, it’s probably the time to take our steps most carefully. When we are looking too far ahead, we probably need to look deeply into our past. When the modern stories seem passé, then it’s time to remember the ancient stories. Jesus said, “Be dressed for action and keep your lamps lit.”
This is a great vocation, but it is a terrible way to spend your life if you aren’t given to it, driven by it, inspired, excited and motivated by it.
Now, it is a tradition of the church to give the ordinands a charge prior to their ordination, and so, may I ask ordinands to please rise?
My brothers and sisters in Christ: Dearest Barbara, we need your prophetic voice in the public square. Jeff, we are desperate for your gifts for leadership and your faithfulness. Fran, we have been waiting for your ability to organize and mobilize God’s people.
Michael, we are so glad you are in Kansas; we’ve needed your passionate heart. Dixie, we need your artist’s eye and your love for theology and liturgy. Antoinette, we need your deep resolve and your ability to adapt, innovate and overcome.
I charge you all to serve especially the poor, the elderly, the sick, the lonely, the imprisoned and the young. They are the ones who are the easiest to forget.
I charge you to be careful that you do not exhaust yourself in the name of Christ doing “God’s work.” God is not all that impressed with your busyness, and our Lord certainly does not need your exhaustion.
I charge you to remember that how you go about your ministry will always be more important than what you actually do in your ministry, because it is God, finally, who is in charge of all our outcomes.
Be known for your patience, your generosity and your love.
Come and join us, your brothers and sisters in Christ, and find great joy in this work. Come with us and find riches you never imagined existed. Come with us and find a gladness that exceeds my every attempt to describe it. Come with us, and serve the people of God in the holy name of God, and discover for yourself that perfect love casts out all fear.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.