I begin this morning with a
confession: I feel a certain amount of trepidation stepping into this pulpit to
preach at the ordination of priests. My fear does not spring from inexperience:
I’ve been a priest myself for almost 43 years, having been ordained at these very
diocesan ordinations on January 15, 1977, the day on which Victoria Hatch was
ordained as the first woman priest in Los Angeles. And a good part of my
ministry was spent in seminaries, so I’ve bloviated on occasions like this plenty
of times before.
What really scares me, though, is
comparison to what happened at this event last year. Hartshorn Murphy, a
longtime friend and colleague of mine, preached a spectacular sermon, telling
spellbinding stories of his own early life in the church and and his long
ministry in it, doing so with nary a note or a text before him. The excellence
of Murphy’s sermon alone would have been enough to strike fear into any
subsequent ordination preacher, but what really intensified the problem was
what happened next. It seemed, for a while, that at every diocesan meeting I
went to I was forced to watch the video of this sermon. Commission on Ministry:
watch Murphy’s video. Standing Committee: watch Murphy’s video. Commission on
Parking, Potlucks, and Purificators: watch Murphy’s video. It got to the point
that I could only look at it by forcing my eyelids open, kind of like Malcolm
McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Luckily, they stopped short of issuing
Murphy ordination sermon swag, so I never had to get the mug, the tote bag, or
the souvenir key chain. But you get the idea.
So here I am, not standing boldly on
the step but cowering meekly in the pulpit, holding onto my manuscript for dear
life. From this relatively safe position, let me begin with a doublesided
prediction. On the downside, you will not hear anything this morning remotely
as compelling as what you heard a year ago. On the upside, you’ll never be
forced to watch the video again. Or buy the keychain, the tote bag, or the mug.
We’re gathered this morning as a
diverse group of people—families, friends, parishioners, diocesan community—to
witness and consent to the ordination of eight people to the priesthood. In the
church it is customary for us to pause for a moment before we proceed and allow
ourselves to reflect on what the scriptures might have to say about what we are
doing. We have two Bible readings this morning to consider, and I’d like to say
a brief word about each.
Our first reading is from the book
of the prophet Isaiah, and it recounts the call of Isaiah to be a prophet
[Isaiah 6: 18]. It is a powerful account: Isaiah sees God and the angels
hovering above him and is both overwhelmed with a sense of God’s holiness and
filled with personal despair.
And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of
unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen
the King, the Lord of hosts!’
Now although we often read this passage at
ordinations, the dramatic experience of God it relates is not shared by most of
us in the ordained ministry. Frankly, if one of our eight friends had presented
themselves to the Commission on Ministry and announced that they “saw the Lord
sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple”
they would politely have been told to seek professional help. As they say in
the ads, “Don’t try this at home”. Yet we regularly read this passage because
it gets at something that all of us who have offered ourselves for this work
feel. We feel both driven and unworthy to do it.
Then I heard the voice
of the Lord saying, ‘Whom
shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And
I said, ‘Here am I; send me!‘
This reading from Isaiah reminds us
that we who follow Jesus—baptized people and clergy—do so because we really
can’t do anything else. And the church sets some of us apart to dress up and
perform priestly actions because it knows that we fragile, finite, dependent
creatures will somehow advance the common good, often in spite of ourselves. We
don’t get ordained because of our professional competence. We get ordained
because, in the words of the New English Bible, we “know our need of God”. And
if we really know our need of God we can help others find it, express it, and
live out a response to it—which, for the time being, will be enough.
So that’s our first reading. The
second comes from the Gospel of John [John 10:11-18] and it is also a familiar
passage
‘I am the good
shepherd. . . . I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father
knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’
To
people both inside and outside the church, all of this talk about shepherds and
sheep can be a little confusing. Jesus is the shepherd and we are the sheep.
Wait, aren’t we all the same species? When we call clergy shepherds, aren’t we
setting up some kind of hierarchical difference between them and their congregants?
One of my long-ago seminary professors solved this by changing the analogy.
Clergy were not shepherds, he said, but sheepdogs. My own longtime friend and
mentor, Harvey Guthrie (who preached at that ordination in 1977) told us all we
were about to become “sheep in shepherds’ clothing”. Both of these figures
point to the same problem faced by Isaiah: we priests are regular people being
asked to do something extraordinary. And the only way to get through it without
massively messing up is to remember how regular and sheep-like we really are.
For our ordination retreat this week,
I asked these eight folks to read a short story by Wendell Berry, a story
called “A Desirable Woman”. It tells of a young minister and his wife in a
rural community, and it describes the beauty and nobility of the priestly
calling as few things I’ve ever read. Here are a couple of lines from that
story:
[The
minister] had the gift of comforting. He carried it with him, not by his will,
it seemed, but by the purest gift, the very presence of comfort. And yet even
as it was a comfort to others, it could be a bafflement and a burden to him.
His calling, and the respect accorded to it, admitted him into the presence of
troubles he could not mend.
Whether we’re parish clergy, school,
hospital, or prison chaplains, seminary professors, even bishops and cathedral
deans, the truest thing you can say about us priests is that we are regularly
“admitted into the presence of troubles” we cannot mend. When I was in
seminary, I was so daunted by the prospect of facing those troubles that I
tried to prepare by reading everything and trying to store up pastoral
responses that would serve in any emergency. It was only after years working in
the church that I realized the folly of that kind of proleptic cramming.
What
makes it possible for us priests to do any good at all is the simple gift of
the way people let us into our lives—to be with them in the troubles we cannot
mend. Sometimes those are public troubles like war, peace, and injustice.
Usually they are private troubles like illness, death, failure, and loss. And
the best we can do with that gift is not get confused about what it means. Our
people are neither our lovers, our enemies, nor our followers. They are, as we
are, human beings who suffer and love and try to do their best. All they really
want is some empathy and compassion along the way.
And
so, to Jamie, Brainerd, KC, Sarah, Bill, Jon, Carlos, and Judith: welcome to
the burden and bafflement of priestly ministry. Like all of us who have come
before you, you have first said, “Woe is me!” and then answered God’s call in
Isaiah’s words, “Here I am, send me.” And like all of us you will spend the
rest of your lives being invited into the presence of troubles you cannot mend.
Your task, in the midst of those troubles, is to witness to the infinite grace
and mercy of God by first remembering what a privilege it is to step into other
peoples’ lives and allow God to work through you. But remember: Jesus is the
good shepherd. You and I are fellow sheep who have now been asked now to dress
in shepherds’ clothing. We are regular people asked to do something
extraordinary, allowing ourselves to be vessels of the healing, liberation, and
blessing which finally belong to God.
As
we stood in the nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Saturday, January 15, 1977,
none of the six of us being ordained that day could have imagined the changes
that would be coming to the church in our working lifetimes. As you stand here
today none of you can predict where your ministries will take you over the next
40 years. Some of you will be prophetic movement leaders, others parish or
chaplaincy pastors. Most of what you do will never be captured on video or
shared on social media. Yet all of it—the public, the private—will be
characterized by what Wendell Berry calls the privilege of being “admitted into
troubles you cannot mend”. To the extent that you come to know that about
yourselves and those you work with, you will come to see God not only calling
you but working in and through you as well. And what way of life can be finally
be more fulfilling or noble than that? Amen.
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