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FROM THE BISHOP

Bishop Dean E. Wolfe joined graduates of the Kansas School of Ministry at their graduation ceremony June 25 at Grace Cathedral, Topeka.  They are (front row, from left) Kathi Babcock, Sally Wilcox and Carveth Neer; (back row, from left) Bishop Wolfe, Deacon Bob Honse, Diane Kruger and Jesse Milan.   Photo by Melodie Woerman

Note: These are excerpts from Bishop Wolfe’s sermon at the graduation service for the Kansas School of Ministry June 25 at Grace Cathedral, Topeka.

Christianity and complexity

Your education has made you peculiar in certain ways, and that is both the purpose as well as the unwelcome by-product of a solid educational process. It will be difficult for a few of you when you can’t find someone to go a round with you on the Cappadocian Fathers, or Friedman’s family systems theories, or my favorite, the Caroline Divines.

Christians, I might add, are meant to be peculiar people. A people who believe that life is found in death, that the last will be first, that the poor in spirit are blessed, that the peacemakers will inherit the earth — well, let’s just say that they, or rather we, are not truly normal. Stanly Haerwas wrote famously that Christians are “resident aliens” who find themselves occupying a world that can never be their true home. So any education that helps you embrace your peculiarity as a Christian believer actually is a gift for which you must be thankful.

The goal is transformation

You each have been engaged in a long effort in the pursuit of a goal, and the goal should never be graduation or ordination. The goal for which you have been striving is to be able to more adequately convey our multifaceted faith in an increasingly complex world.

You have been studying so you can change people, and in order for you to change others, you must be changed yourself. You see, the aim of Christian education is never the mere accumulation of knowledge. The aim of Christian education, in fact the aim of every Christian endeavor, always is transformation. Transformed minds. Transformed lives. Transformed souls.

Christians are sent into the world as yeast to leaven the whole loaf. They are called to be the catalyst that makes the whole loaf, that is, the whole world, rise. We are, by our baptism, ordained for trouble-making.

Some people seek to be educated in order to see things more simply. But your education, if it is what I think it is, has made you see more clearly the complexity of all things. It is not just a matter of, “The Bible says it, and that settles, it.” We know that the Bible saying it is just the beginning of the exercise. Being better educated in the Christian faith enables us to better embrace the paradox that is at the heart of our faith. Where else could a cross be a symbol of hope? Or a tomb, the symbol of resurrection?

Triumph of complexity

In a time when conversations about theological doctrines are becoming increasingly shrill, and debates about what constitutes Christian orthodoxy more and more mean-spirited, it may be a little dangerous to suggest that the Christian faith is a celebration of the triumph of the multiple hues of complexity over a monochromatic simplicity.

One of the core doctrines of our faith is the doctrine of the Trinity, a reminder that the central metaphor of God for Christians is a diversity, encapsulated within a unity, complete in its numeric simplicity and integrity. And the Trinity is not the only symbol of diversity and complexity for Christians. After all, the Bible itself, with two creation accounts in Genesis and four Gospels, each with a strikingly different approach to telling the story of Jesus and his ministry, is a symbol of a unity that is not uniform.

There is a wondrous, creative tension that exists between these three persons of the one, holy and undivided Trinity. It is not that the Trinitarian God is too complicated to understand; it’s that a Trinitarian God is too complex to be managed or manipulated by mere mortals with a limited agenda. We often see issues in black and white, but we live our lives in color.

What would it mean to our faith to see the possibility of God even in the fractured places of our lives? What would it mean to discover God in the abandoned, the forgotten and the mostly broken places, and realize that the complexity of God makes God present in those places as well? What would it mean to discover God in the midst of our own mistakes, our pain, our illnesses, even our deaths?

Saint Augustine once told his students, “Lest you become discouraged, know that when you love, you know more about who God is than you could ever know with your intellect.”

May you come to love a larger and more complicated God than you ever before imagined.