Sean Wall’s ordination
July 6, 2013
Jeremiah 1: 4-9; Ps 119: 33-40; 2 Cor 4: 1-6; Luke 22: 24-27
The story is told that Abba Isaac, one of the early Desert Fathers, was chosen by his fellow-monks to be ordained a priest. Hearing of this, Isaac fled. His fellow-monks pursued him, stopping to rest by a farmer’s field. While they rested, their donkey wandered into the field and stood still where Isaac happened to be hiding. The monks, retrieving the donkey, found Isaac and tackled him, and began to tie him up to lead him back to be ordained. But Isaac sighed and said, “No need for the ropes. Clearly this is the will of God.”
Now that’s a call and discernment process!
There are a number of stories like Abba Isaac’s, where far from seeking ordination the early monks and other early Christians dreaded it and avoided it, even to the point of being held down while the bishop imposed hands.
In those days there was one clear call, the call of God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit given in Baptism. Those were still the great days of baptismal catechesis, and the ancient power and dignity of baptism had not yet faded. Women and men fled to the desert so they could live that all-consuming, all-absorbing call to radical simplicity and poverty of spirit and humility and immersion in the mystery of the Christ that is the baptismal call of us all. Ordination was seen as presenting real problems, possible distractions from that one love of the one Lord, real temptations to pride and vanity and ambition cloaked as ministry.
Well, green and well-watered Lake Oswego is not the Egyptian desert, but as we gather here Christ gathers with us, and with Christ come all his friends, Abba Isaac among them. Old Isaac’s tale invites us to recall the one Baptismal call that we all share, the one Lord who gathers us, the one Love above all loves without whom nothing we do or say has life and light. Only in the light of Christ who calls us all can we understand ordaining Sean today.
It is that one Lord who gathers us. It is his Body, that wonderful and sacred mystery as the Collect says, that shines with his presence. It is the sacrament of the gathered assembly, the glorious and broken and comical and sinful and maddening and beautiful Body of Christ on earth, who calls us all into fellowship and who calls some of the baptized to Orders. Sean, you are to be ordered today as a deacon preliminary to, with God’s help, being ordered a priest according to our present practice. Holy Orders are just that, the church’s orders to be a specific presence that the Body needs, ordered to do certain tasks that the Body requires to grow and nourish our common life in Christ.
I can tell you with complete confidence, with the authority of my own existential experience, that what you are being ordered to do and be is humanly impossible. A transitional deacon on the path to priesthood is apprenticed to gather the Body in Christ’s name. You are apprenticed to unfailingly point not to yourself but to Christ, just as Saint Paul did when he said “We do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord.” You are to allow Christ to love and heal and speak hope in you and through you. You will be expected, on both regularly scheduled occasions as well as at barbecues and bus stops and brewpubs and hospital waiting rooms, to speak words that are not your words alone, but Christ’s words enfleshed in your words. You are to lead the Body of Christ to grow in mission and service in an age and a culture wherein the Gospel and Jesus himself are in disrepute, are out of fashion, are looked upon with indifference that quickly turns to suspicion.
The doors are open if you want to make a break for it. Ushers, please stand ready!
But know this: if this task and this life seems daunting, then you are in good company. Jeremiah’s call makes that clear. There is never a comfortable time to be a servant of God. Jeremiah’s “yes” to God’s call meant a life of tension and conflict. He names before God his sense of inability and his lack of preparation. I wonder if he passed all his GOE’s? But call is call because it is unexpected and unlikely, and any of us who are called rarely feel equal to the task. But with call comes a promise, God’s promise to be strength and rest and Word and voice, for Jeremiah and for all who hear and respond and for you.
We prayed a portion of Psalm 119, a Psalm that Celtic monks used to repeat daily from memory. They did this to renew their commitment to listen to and respond to God’s Word, to be people of the living Word. That is a wise idea—to be soaked daily in the living Word, in Scripture, in prayer, in the living Word made flesh in the Eucharist, in the living Word heard by listening deeply and carefully to God’s speech in the world.
And the Christ who speaks today in the Gospel says to us and to you over and over: Serve. Be in the world as a servant. Do not fear, because the Master came to serve. Let him serve through your service.
That simple call to serve is the most life-giving, unfashionable, deeply needed, and counter-cultural word you can proclaim with your mouth and with your fingers on a keyboard and, above all, by your actions and your stance in the world. So surrender to it. I know you have sought to.
And you do not come to this day alone.
Your wonderful family has supported you and challenged you and healed you and stretched you and make sure that you keep it real and that you keep your feet on the ground. That’s their job and I’ll bet they are good at it. Love them and treasure them for that gift among many. If they are like my family, they have already put up with a lot.
Value this community who raised you up. Value the years spent in a plane cockpit where I suspect this day seemed as remote as the horizon-line. Value the simple servanthood you have exercised feeding the poor at Brigid’s Breakfast. Your studies, your friendships, those who have challenged you, all those with whom you have served to this date—all are part of the journey and all are here today with you in this ending which is a beginning, this beginning that marks an ending.
The wondrous, maddening, dying and rising Body that we call Church is in a period of extraordinary change. Much has grown old. Much has reached the end of its course. And although there is much talk of leadership these days, the need for the ordained to lead, the paradox is that any skills or knowledge we may learn or deploy will not change the fact that most of what is happening in the Church and the world is utterly, utterly beyond our control.
Some may consider this a disaster. Me, I think it is an opportunity—to remember who we most truly and deeply are. Before his death, Henri Nouwen said, “I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love.” We are being given a terrible, wondrous grace in this age: all is falling away except Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as servants for Jesus’ sake. This is actually a wondrous gift of God.
So my brother Sean, in the name of this gathering I ask you to do what you know you are called to do. Do it as a life, one day at a time, with the help of God.
Answer the call of God in Christ. “Call” is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Your call will come daily, hourly. Keep your ears cleaned out and open, your attention alert, your eyes sharp. Your call to serve will be renewed each time the phone rings, each time the doorbell rings, each time an e-mail pops up on the server, each time someone tugs on your sleeve, each time someone springs into your mind unbidden.
Immerse yourself daily in the mystery of Christ. Do this by soaking in prayer, by marinating yourself in Scripture, by asking for grace and help over and over again. Never let this soaking be something that gets done if you have time for it, because you won’t. Do it as if your life depends on it. It does.
Love the church. I do not mean love the culture of an institution. That is changing under our very feet. I do not mean love the church as it might be, because that is a dream shaped by our own hopes and fears. Do not love the church you think you remember, because that is nostalgia often shaped by rejection of the present. Love the wonderful and sacred, comical and tragic, delightful and heroic, faltering and cowardly, and very real collection of pilgrims that we are and that Jesus loves right here and now.
Seek the servant Lord over and over again. Ask him humbly to serve in and through you.
And know that there will be days when you want to do nothing but cut and run. Believe me on that. But don’t worry—God will have Abba Isaac’s donkey all ready to look for you!
