I do not know

(Note: this homily was preached at the ordination of Jonna Alexander and Brad Tobbein to the transitional diaconate)

Ordination June 2014
Jeremiah 1: 4-9; 2 Cor 4: 1-6; Luke 22: 24-27


Once long ago in the desert, a group of the elder hermit monks came to see the great Abba Antony. Abba Antony decided to turn the conversation to the Holy Scriptures, so he read a passage and asked the monks to offer their comments. Each of the monks thought long and carefully and then spoke, offering their best interpretation. Finally it was the turn of the last monk, Abba Joseph. All eyes were on him as he looked up and said simply, “I do not know.” Abba Antony said, “Truly Abba Joseph has found the way, for he said ‘I do not know.’”

It is not recommended that you try this approach on any of your papers or exams. A professor might be amused, especially if they know this story, but they will not be impressed.

I could not resist telling that desert tale today as we gather for the ordination of two very scholarly and erudite candidates. Brad and Jonna are both known by us as fine students, intellectually oriented, and ready to give richly of these gifts to us, to the church. That is a good thing, a heartening thing. We need deeply intelligent and learned people to offer themselves, and in the words of a Collect “we pray that the Church never be destitute of such gifts.”

But among your friends and family and well-wishers and those who just like ordinations, because face it—ordinations are pretty cool, we bask in the hope and the faith here and we wish to catch a glimpse of Spirit as she rushes by—among the congregation wise old Abba Antony added himself to the guest list. And his ordination gift is his knowledge of the Way—“I do not know.”

Because Jonna and Brad do not know what they are getting into. How can they? None of us do. When each of us accepted baptism, we were not promised a road-map. Instead we were plunged into mystery, into wild-waters. In Baptism we belong to Christ, forever. We dwell wherever Christ dwells. And Christ dwells in startling places—in alleys and forgotten empty lots, in houses with broken windows outside of which gunfire punctures the night, in the back wards of hospitals, under bridges, in lonely rooms where unseen tears are shed, in the depths of hearts broken by life yet often masked by smooth fixed facial expressions and the appearance of “normality”, whatever that is. At the heart of creation, a place infinitely small as well as infinitely vast, there Christ dwells. Most surprising, most mysterious and wondrous and startling of all, Christ dwells in the intricate and only partially-explored depths of our own wondering and longing hearts.

That’s where the baptized live with Christ. Anyone accepting the church’s ordination re-affirms that and commits to seek and proclaim and adore and serve that Christ.

Brad and Jonna, if you accept the church’s ordering today, you are charged to seek that Christ with your whole life’s blood and soul. Seek that Christ, in all the places where Christ is truly the hidden God. Seek that Christ in the heart of the church. The church, the kyriakon, the gathering that belongs to God. Nothing and no one that belongs to God are perfect and resolved and consistent and finished. The church is that mad merry and grieving band of wanderers, often lost and often wrong, always moving and never still, broken and sinful and capable of great good and great ill. The church is a gathering of the broken-hearted who are willing to try one more day. And the church will break your heart—I tell you that on the best authority. And when your heart is broken, yours will be the choice to walk with her one more day. Your broken heart will teach you wisdom.

And you will not know how the journey will end.

Learning will not reveal that. But the flame implanted in your heart by God will make that next step possible.

Jeremiah knew that next step. Few hearts are so openly broken as is Jeremiah’s. Few paid such a price for belonging to God. Few knew so many doubts and so much pain, pain that Jeremiah screamed into the heavens. But few there are whose words so thunder through the ages. It was not his knowing, but his surrender, his laying of his broken fearful heart before God that made the doubt-filled young man into the prophet. “Now I have put my words in your mouth” said the Holy One, blessed be the Name. We pray that today for you: words placed in your mouth even amidst doubt and fear, a heart willing to be open and to be broken. On that holy ground, ground tilled and harrowed, there God will grow the Gospel

And Paul takes you by the hand and welcomes you as kin and partners. He invites you to proclaim not yourselves but Jesus as Lord. That is hard, dear friends, take it from me, because ego is seductive and is good at hiding behind the purest of motives. Part of the journey of ordination is uncovering, sometimes by failure, the tangle of one’s actual motives. There will come a day when you will awaken to that tangle of mixed and messy human motivations and simply cry “Christ have mercy.” In that moment Christ will shine in you, not granting you worldly success but making you worthy of the trust of all the glorious sinners and ragged saints who know their own failures, and who need someone to speak Christ to them, someone who loves them and who feels their own poverty and need. On that day, in those moments, your vocation will be ratified and re-born.

Where you will be, what you will do, how things will go, who you will be is all unknown. Thank God for that. Only tourists know exactly where they are going. The church does not need tourists, people just passing through to pick up souvenirs of career or ambition or gratification. The church needs pilgrims, fellow-journeyers with all of us who have no idea what the journey’s end will be, who do not even fully know ourselves and the mystery of what Christ is working in our own hearts. But please walk with us. As you say “yes” and accept the laying on of hands, please embrace the unknowing, the deep mystery, the immersion into the church’s heart as we walk in an uncertain world where structures are fading and the Gospel is deemed irrelevant and there is no path as the poet said—the path is made by walking.

And that old hermit Antony will smile again, and say “Truly they have found the way, for they say ‘I do not know.’” You do not know, but you say “yes.”