It
is a great pleasure to be with you tonight as you celebrate the renewal of your
ministry here and welcome Court Williams as rector of Trinity Church. Court was
a student leader at Seabury when I served there, and Julie was an active member
of the spouses group which my wife Kathy convened. How they managed to be so
present on campus when they lived all the way up in Mundelein (if I remember
correctly) I never quite figured out. And having done some time in what they
used to call the wilds of the Pacific slope in Oregon they have come back to
God’s country to live and work. And it’s always a joy to be with Jeff Lee, your
bishop, who made a similar move back from Washington state when he became
Bishop of Chicago. As one who is preparing to move back to my native California
early next year, I hope there is not some horrible thing about the west coast
that they’re not telling me.
I’ve
been a priest for almost 40 years now, and one of the things I love about the
church is collecting all the sayings people think are in the Bible but are not
actually there. You know, adages like
“God helps those who help themselves.” “This, too, shall pass.” And, as an
Episcopalian, my favorite, “We’ve always done it this way.” This third is
perhaps the most widely used in our church, said usually in jest, always meant
in earnest. At Washington National
Cathedral I’ve actually had it said to me straightfaced and without any hint of
irony at all. “But dean,” they say to some proposed new thing, “we’ve always done
it this way.” To which I usually reply, “Isn’t that one of the Beatitudes?”
The
liturgy we do tonight is a new—and to my mind much improved—way of celebrating
a new ministry. The rite I have lived most of my working life with came in with
the prayer book of 1979, and it was more like a kingly coronation than the
installation of a servant of Jesus. But
over the course of my working life we in the church have begun to “get” the
radical implications of Baptism, a sacrament also rediscovered in the 1979
prayer book. In the church I grew up in,
we used to think of ordination as the fundamental commissioning to
ministry—indeed the people we called “ministers” were the ordained. But all the
historical and liturgical scholarship that led to the 1979 prayer book revived
our understanding of what Baptism is all about and how it creates and renews
the church. All of us here tonight—from
the bishop to the priests and deacons to everyone lay person in the
building—are baptized people. Some of us in ordained ministry are called to
live out the baptized life in particular ways. But there are no fundamental
differences between us.
So
when we celebrate the renewal of ministry and welcome a rector, what we’re
really doing is asking Court to live out his Baptism in a way that will help
and empower you to live out your Baptism. Court is not coming here as your
ministry service provider. (I think we sometimes conceive ministry as akin to
going to the butcher—“I’ll take a half a pound of weddings please, and throw in
a couple of funerals.”) Court is coming
as one baptized person called to live among you in a priestly way, and his
primary job is not to do your ministry for you but to help you live into the
Gospel in such a way that you can discover and live out what it means to follow
Jesus in the circumstances of your own life.
As
we prepare to welcome Court and renew our own shared sense of what it means to
be baptized, we have three readings to consider. Briefly, here’s a thought
about each.
Our
first scripture passage [Exodus 3: 1-6] tonight tells of Moses’s encounter with
God in the form of a burning bush on Mount Sinai. Maybe it’s because I have
been privileged to serve churches with wonderful buildings—Seabury in its days
in Evanston, Christ Church Cranbrook in Michigan, and now Washington National
Cathedral—that I am particularly attuned to the strangeness of this encounter.
Moses meets God by the side of the road in an ordinary bush. True, the bush is
on fire, but still. It’s not a Gothic cathedral. It’s just a bush. And yet, as
Moses approaches, God says to him, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the
place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
Thought
one: if God can speak out of a bush, God can be anywhere. Indeed, God is
everywhere. The “we’ve always done it this way” part of us wants to locate God
in the sacred space of a building. But a church is not a building. A
church—what Paul in the Bible calls the ekklesia—is
a community, the group of those called
to follow Jesus. If Court and all of you are to emulate Moses, you must be
attentive to God’s presence not only inside this sacred space. The ground on
which you stand—at work, at home, in school, in the community—that ground is
holy ground. And Trinity’s ministry is present there as you are present here.
In
our second Bible reading tonight we heard Paul tell the Romans [Romans 8:
12-17], “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” He then
goes on, “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back
into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.” We who follow Jesus are
not slaves to fear. The events of the last several weeks—shootings in Paris and
Colorado and California, an overheated presidential campaign, an escalating war
in the Middle East, violence on our city streets—are disturbing events, and our
natural tendency is to view the church as a place to flee from them for refuge
and safety. But as Paul reminds us, we who follow Jesus are no longer slaves to
fear. God’s encounter with Moses assures us that all ground is holy ground.
Paul’s letter to the Romans asserts that fear is not a Christian category. In
his life, death, and resurrection Jesus showed us that the kind of love and compassion
he stood for always outlast the things
we fear. In the midst of a culture cringing in terror, the church, the ekklesia, those called to follow Jesus, we
are called to remind that culture of a bigger and enduring set of truths. The
things that scare us will not last. But the values of the baptized life—the
values of love, joy, compassion, forgiveness, justice—those things do last. As
a parish community your job is to proclaim God’s abundant fearlessness to a
world desperately in need of the things that matter.
And
then we have the third reading, the story of Nicodemus seeking out Jesus by
night [John 3: 1-16]. We have come to see Nicodemus as a type of the seeker,
someone driven perhaps by the fearful atmosphere of Jewish Palestine under
Roman occupation to come to Jesus for answers. Jesus tells Nicodemus a couple
of things he has a hard time taking in. ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see
the kingdom of God without being born from above.” “Very truly, I tell you, no
one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.”
Nicodemus comes to Jesus for answers and what Jesus gives him is neither refuge
nor a set of ideas but rather a community. Jesus gives Nicodemus Baptism. The
thing that will help you give shape and meaning to your life, says Jesus, is
living into the baptized life. And the baptized life is something you can only achieve
in community. Jesus is not a guru. He does not promote an individualistic path
to holiness or salvation. Jesus is himself a baptized person, and what he
offers finally is something like solidarity with others and with God. We will
all get through this, but only as we do it together. Being born from above
means being born anew with others. We don’t get through life by hunkering down
in fearful isolation. We get through life by making common cause with others.
We get through life through compassion and forgiveness, not through power and
fear. We get through life by inviting the world onto the holy ground where we
already and always stand.
So to Court and Julie: I’m sorry we won’t see
each other out west, but I rejoice that you have come here and tonight join
with the women and children and men of Trinity Church as we all renew our
shared commitment to follow Jesus as those who have been given life and
identity and ministry in Baptism. The ground on which we stand tonight is holy.
A world overcome with enmity and fear longs for the authentic vision of life on
offer in the Gospel. May we all be born anew tonight both within and from
above, so that the ministry not only of Trinity Church but of each and all of
us may offer that vision to others and call everyone to gather around God’s abundant
table and give thanks. Amen.
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