Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Sermon at Cathedral Ordinations
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
June 14, 1997[Four persons were ordained deacons and two former Roman Catholic priests were received as priests in the Episcopal Church. More than 400 people participated in the liturgy.]
On behalf of the ordinands and the diocese, I want to thank the clergy, musicians, and all those people here at Nativity who have made this celebration possible.
And a celebration it is, as with you six whom I have come to treasure over the last fourteen months, we come -- at last -- to this day. You have arrived here after six long and complicated journeys, each of them quite different, each of them supported by the prayers of parishes, families, committees and commissions, your rectors and two bishop. And that, of course, is why it is wonderful to have the opportunity to ordain or receive you in the face of this sweet, sweet gathering of the whole Church. Don't ever say, dismissively, that you were "done in a batch at the Cathedral." No, today's grand assembly emphasizes that while ordination certainly is about you, it is in a much larger sense about the whole Church. The Church brings you here in order to offer you to God and to receive you back again to bear word and sacrament for it and to it. The Church celebrates God's gift of servant leaders as yet another sign that the Holy Spirit lives in and through the Church.
Our lessons today are about servanthood for several reasons. First, of course, because four of you receive ordination as deacons as you move toward your vocation of priesthood. But you four new deacons, together with you two priests who come to the Episcopal Church today, you come here knowing that those who follow Jesus are not greater than the Master, so you say what Jesus said in our Gospel, "I am among you as one who serves." You certainly don't need me to tell you that in our culture, that commitment to serve is about the most counter-cultural thing a woman or man claiming to be a professional of any kind could ever say. Counter-cultural, but the only path to real life, real life here and know, and forever. The other two lessons also serve as grace-filled reminders for you. There will come a day, count on it, when you will flop down onto your bed or chair, convinced that you are unable to perform your ministry, a day when you will feel like a failure or an imposter. On that day, remember God's astonishingly polite answer to Jeremiah's kvetching. God says, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." In a few minutes I will ask you new deacons if you believe that you are called to this ministry. Remember that when you say Yes to that question, it also means that God knows exactly what he's getting, so try to look at yourself the way God does. Let God work with who and what you are.
And so, the Epistle said, "we don't lose heart," because it is the all-sufficient Christ whom we proclaim. St. Paul goes on, that because of who Christ is, we can dare to be servants to God's people, and there is real joy in that service, but you know that already.
So, knowing that it is Christ within, before, and behind you, and believing that God knows exactly what's available when you are called to serve, let me add some thoughts about what it means to be the servant of the church for Jesus Christ's sake in our time and place.
As I have mentioned before, there is no day, not one, when I do not thank God for being called to serve in the Diocese of Bethlehem. I say this to you now, because I hope you know what a privilege it is for you to be called to serve in a diocese where all the baptized, lay and ordained, are committed to living and working with each other in a way that makes sense only if the self-giving, the all-welcoming Christ really is raised as Lord of all. We are all on the same side here: being disciples of Jesus, seeking to know and do God's will together. Together. Together. I say this to you on this your watershed day because I very much want you to learn, as I am learning, to relax into the support and energizing matrix that is the family of God in Bethlehem diocese.
You will discover, as I have, that your ordained colleagues and all the baptized are largely gentle and holy women and men. Treasure that. But I am also saying, be careful to preserve what we have here. What makes this diocese work is that we seek to be Christ's community before we seek to tackle the difficult and divisive questions, pressing as they are. Nonetheless, most of us know the temptation to become a zealot -- precisely in proportion to our faith and commitment. Zealots come in all shapes and sizes. By now you all know the joke that ends up saying that the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist. Well, that is true of anybody who becomes a single-issue or perhaps even a two-issue person, whether the issue is worship, justice, evangelism, control, or whatever.
A teacher of mine used to say that most heresies and schisms come not from absolutely false ideas, but from an over- emphasis on one aspect of the truth. Think about that. So I ask you, for the sake of the churches, not to lose a sense of balance. What St. Paul says in Corinthians about discerning the body, he meant in the sense of the church as well as the sacrament, and those of us who have anything to do with the care of the churches have to discern the body, constantly keeping the entire body in view and the totality of its health in mind. There will be no point to achieving what you believe to be a perfect parish with perfect liturgy and perfect program if you had to drive away the members to do it. There needs to be a respectful, gentle embrace of the whole church if we are to meets the needs of the present hour without destroying the future. Sometimes our most cherished insights have to be put on hold, have to sacrificed for the sake of the body.
An expression we hear in the Episcopal Church is that there will be "no outcasts." For Jesus Christ's sake, let that be true of our ministry and our life together as a diocese. But it is not some nice bumper sticker sentiment: let it be literally true, biographically true, of you -- even when it means serving those whom you find unattractive. The temptation to distance ourselves from people who do not share our priorities, the temptation to distance ourselves from people too far to the right or to the left of us, the temptation to distance ourselves from those who have hurt us, who intimidate us, or whom we find unremittingly irritating or embarrassing -- that temptation will be with you always. I have never given in to that without being immensely and bitterly sorry very soon after.
SO, go prayerfully to find those who are marginalized in your parishes: those whom other people avoid because they can't stop talking, those who seem to be bigots, those who may be sexists, those who can't afford church clothes, those who think the church has left them behind, those who may think the church hasn't got room for them anymore, those who are old enough or disabled enough to be forgotten, those who represent whatever it is that is not like what you hold dear -- and by what you do and say, live out the words of that haunting song, "Won't you let me be your servant," or the closing line of "Here I am, Lord," which is simply, "I will hold your people in my heart." You cannot solve every perceived problem, and not every one of them ought to have a quick fix, but you can make it clear that even people who may be wrong are loved. Loving people in a way that says they have value may be all they need to "leap," as the hymn says, "to unloose their chains," no matter what those chains are. Most people know what they need to do, whether it is to stand up for themselves or to repent of wrong, or whatever. What they need is to know or feel that it is safe to make the leap. That it is safe. Such inconvenient servanthood will always be part of the care of the church that every member has, but which its leaders must model.
So to string all this together, serve the church, ALL of the church. Remember that God knows exactly who you are and has chosen to work with that. As you lead the church, gently cherish each of its members, and do recall that we do it all for Jesus' sake. And then I believe with all my heart, that God will make you a blessing to many. He who calls you is faithful: he will do it.
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