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March 31, 2010
The sermon delivered by the Rt. Rev. Mark Sisk to the priests who attended the Mass of Collegiality and Blessing of the Chrism at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Holy Tuesday, March 30, 2010.
The last two years have been, how shall I put it: astringent. The economic melt-down has touched the lives of all of us, as it has touched the life of the institution that we serve in Christ’s name.
I want to think with you this morning about some of that impact.
The first thing I want to comment on is the term “melt-down” itself. It has often seemed to me that that was a term inadequate to the task of describing what has happened. The melting of ice simply means that it changes shape and form, in its essence it remains the same thing. What we have experienced, it seems to me, is rather different. What we are faced with is something other than the old world wrapped in new packaging.
What comes to my mind when I think of what has happened to our economy is a different image entirely. I think of one of those air-filled mannequin-like figures that you see along the roadside frantically waving to get your attention. You know, those balloon-like figures that are held up by a heavy-duty blower, that attempt to make you notice some second-rate used car lot.
The difference is that now, the blower is running at half power, and the mannequin, half filled with air, just sort of flops around revealing its true identity, as rather a fraud.
Crisis like the one that we have had, and are still facing, is much like that. What we have discovered is that we, as a society, have been living a mirage. Such a discovery of crisis has a double edged effect. The first effect is the one that is most familiar: it is negative. It is panic. But the second effect is, or at least can be positive: it is the forced reconsideration of our core values and purposes.
This is true for every dimension of our lives. This morning, what I am going to consider is our lives as Christians who serve God and God’s church as ordained people.
First, what are we afraid of? Are we afraid of discovering that there is “no there, there”? Or are we afraid of discovering that those core values and purposes simply can not be achieved without the support of those outward and visible elements that we may, perhaps, have assumed to be essential?
In other words crisis drives us to reflect upon the essence of what we have been, and are, doing.
The familiar message of Jesus is the message of the cross and the resurrection: we have no reason to fear because the God we worship has demonstrated that the Divine Will can bring life out of death itself.
But even more than that, the message of the resurrection is that God uses crisis, God uses even death itself, to bring about life.
Therefore, painful as it may be, counter-intuitive as it may feel, it seems to me that the clear message of the Gospel is that God is using this moment to reveal to us, to open us, yet once again, the new life that is ours in Him.
For those of us who serve God through the medium of ordained ministry this presents us with at least two questions. The first is a question faced by all Christian people, in every age, and under every circumstance: how do we live as faithful witnesses to our Lord’s Life giving promise? How do we live so as to give others a glimpse of the glory that is theirs in God?
And here the message is as old as the Gospel itself. And the message is simple and it is this: the glory and the wonder of your life and mine do not depend upon the vicissitudes, the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the fortunes if you will, of this present age. Rather our lives depend on the sure and certain love of God as revealed in Jesus. That is the absolute core of our conviction and our hope.
The second question is one that is directed to those of us in the Christian community who have accepted specific and distinct, though not unique, responsibilities for leadership.
In this age of crisis: How are we to carry out the duties that have been entrusted to us?
The answer to that, I am convinced, is familiar.
It is to do what we have always been called to do. It is to tend the flock of Christ: to remind people of the promise that they have in God. With the shards of their shattered dreams scattered all about them many people are driven to question what it’s all about. At a time when the American promise that hard work will lead inexorably to the good life seems to many a cruel joke, as they stagger under the weight of under-water mortgages, unmanageable credit card debt, health care that is still out of reach, college loans that will take a lifetime to pay-off, a retirement that no longer looks affordable. All this buttressed by the institutions of society carefully arrayed against them in a seeming impregnable wall united in the single goal of extracting from each and every person every last dollar that they can earn or borrow.
This is the time to remind people of what they know already instinctively; life is more than the accumulation of wealth. Life is more than security. Life has to do with relationships: relationships with each other, grounded upon and leading to that ultimate relationship, our relationship with God.
Life has to do with the way we live.
The question for those of us who are ordained is: What is our very particular leadership role in the light of that re-discovery?
I am convinced that a careful re-examine the foundation on which our very particular ministry rests will reveal that it is to the pastoral care of the people of God that we are called.
When I look to those foundations what I see is the need for a renewed commitment to pastoral care. We are called to recommit ourselves to the fundamental call to be shepherd to the flock that has been entrusted to our care.
There is, however, a problem. Few of us are sufficiently familiar with the gritty demands of that ancient image to find it deeply compelling. For far too many of us this image leaves us with a kind of generalized pastoral romanticism: the coddling fluffy sheep as they bound happily across spring pastures. Therefore, all too easily we dismiss this ancient image. Sadly we are in danger of dismissing the whole image as an outmoded model of leadership because it seems of completely out of touch with the reality of the dignity of the people we have been called to serve.
Such a view misses the core reality of a shepherd’s life.
A shepherd is called to become completely identified with the flock. He or she knows the sheep each by name. The shepherd knows that the sheep need the basics of life: food, water, shelter and security. The good shepherd knows when they need them and where they are to be found. The good shepherd binds up the sheep’s wounds: they are with their sheep at their birthing and at dying. They give confidence in the face of danger.
What’s more the shepherd’s job is a dangerous one. The shepherd doesn’t just sit around and wait for lost sheep to return. The shepherd knows where sheep are likely to wander and goes in search of them. There is absolutely nothing passive about being a shepherd.
But there is one more crucial thing to remember about the shepherd’s job. The point of being a shepherd is to help and the flock become the flock it is intended to be. The whole point of shepherding is not the shepherd; it is the flock, the flock that the shepherd is husbanding. The point of keeping the flock is so that the sheep can produce that which they were intended to produce. That is to say, a life richly lived, a life lived and offered to the glory of God; and yes, despite conservative commentators’ claims to the contrary, the community of faith is called to work for that world of justice where the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginal can find a welcome, and a society that offers to them the dignity that all people are due.
The point of our vocation as priests and bishops is not simply that we be a good priest or a good bishop, as important as that is. The point of our vocation is rather, that the people that we serve in Christ’s name are equipped to be better Christians, which is to say, that they are equipped to live the life to which they have been called. We are called to help them know and understand the hope that is in them. They need to know the stories of God’s ever embracing arms of love. It is then that they can do those things, address those concerns that flow from their discovery of themselves as children of God, bound up in the sweep of God’s infinite love; a love which gathers up all the people on earth, and all earths, and all time.
That, I am convinced, is the sacred ministry to which we have all been called, and by God’s infinite mercy and grace, that ministry is ours, today, tomorrow and unto the ages of ages. AMEN
