Feast of the Ascension--Celebration of a New Ministry: Who are You Looking at?

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Feast of the Ascension & Celebration of a New Ministry

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

At a recent meeting of the House of Bishops, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry asked how we can live in such a way that, “when folk look at Episcopalians, they longer see those that we celebrated for their power and their glory, but they see those who celebrate the glory and grandeur and goodness of God. How do we make that happen?” What a question! How do we make that happen? With a liturgy titled The Installation of a New Rector or the Celebration of a New Ministry, it’s easy to think that this is all about the person being installed, rather than one we call Lord, the one we follow tripping after down the way of love.

On our altar at home—when it hasn’t been desecrated by a flying Barbie Mobile, a nerf gun dart, or a soccer ball—we have an icon of Christ Pantocrator flanked on one side by Rublev’s John the Baptist and by the Virgin Mary on the other. The interesting thing about these two flanking figures is that they both have the same hand gestures—pointing away from themselves and towards Jesus. “Don’t look at me, dummy,” they seem to say, “look at Him!”

Remember at the Transfiguration atop Mount Tabor, after all the fireworks, the talking clouds, the garments that would make any Javex lab technician jealous, what do we have? As Luke tells it, “When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.” Simply Jesus. Or Paul, in his First Letter to the clanging cymbal Corinthians, who writes, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” I wonder how that would go over this evening, if I stood here and said, “I have decided to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Well, we would likely say, I certainly hope he knows a little bit more than that! There’s the stewardship campaign, the annual budget, ageing buildings and grounds, and don’t forget the precipitous decline of the Protestant mainline and new missional strategies for making the church relevant to millennials! At a time when a managerial mindset seems to hold sway in some corners of the Church, it’s tempting to think that strategies and techniques (preferably with the imprimatur of an Ivy League institution or a successful Silicon Valley tycoon) will save us. But they can’t and they won’t.

I had a priest in Philadelphia who traveled far and wide in the Anglican Communion trying to get dioceses to adopt the Bible Challenge—reading the Bible cover-to-cover in a year. Episcopalians are the most educated denomination, he was fond of saying, and yet the most Biblically illiterate. This priest got to meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and having just completed a five-year strategic plan for his parish, asked the Archbishop what his strategic plan for the Church of England was. Silence. More silence. More silence. Then Williams, in that gentle, wry, teddy bear baritone of his asked, “Strategic plan?” The topic of conversation was quickly changed.

Now was Rowan Williams just playing dumb? Was he being willfully naïve? Or is there is deeper wisdom to his answer? This was at a time when the Anglican Communion was in crisis (when has it not been?!). The questions of women bishops, same-sex marriage, LGBTQ priests were tearing at the fabric of unity, and yet here was the Archbishop apparently playing dumb—"Strategic plan?”

I think what Rowan Williams was getting at is that the power, the goodness, the grandeur of God are foolishness in the eyes of the world. Williams, like any true minister, was pointing away from himself, his efforts, his sizeable intellectual capacity, to the source of all beauty, goodness, and truth, the crucified and risen one, Christ Jesus. As he puts it rather pithily, “If you want to be holy, look at God.” “Seek,” as Julian of Norwich says, “into the beholding.”

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s Way of Love—his call to the Church to practice and live out in the context of our daily lives the habits, dispositions, and disciplines that open us up to a Jesus-saturated life—is not a strategy for church growth. It’s not tried and true method for filling the pews. It’s far more simple, more faithful, and less predatorially calculative than that. The Way of Love is about knowing Jesus and living Jesus. It’s about opening ourselves to the transfiguring power of his love. It’s about making a little space for God in Christ through the Holy Spirit to get us so that He might live his live in and through us for others, all others, without exception.

It’s said that when you pray with an icon, you pray through not to the icon. Icons are widows that open onto the mystery of God. Like John the Baptist, like Mary, it’s the church’s job, this Cathedral’s job to point away from itself to the glory, the grandeur, the goodness of God. Icons draw the gaze beyond themselves towards their source. Idols, on the other hand, stop the gaze at the surface of object and make us forget the source all together. Any Church, any ministry, that points to itself, that refers to its own glory and grandeur, has stopped following after the one we call Lord. To be Church means we are always on the way, tripping after the one who vanishes as soon as we recognize his face.

Now does this mean we can just be muddle-headed about the work we have been given to do in this place? Of course not. We need to keep journeying into generosity and self-sufficiency in our stewardship—learning to see our sacrificial giving not as tip, or a fee-for-service, but as spiritual discipline that teaches what it means to live from giftedness, and givenness. We need to continue to explore what it means to be good stewards of our buildings and grounds, how we might open our doors to local non-profits who would like to use our largely empty space in the furtherance of shared missional goals. The nursery school is good first step, but there is more work to do. We need to keep inviting and involving the laity—the first people listed as the ministers of the church in the work God has given us to do. And  we want to keep reaching out to the last, the least, the lost and left behind including the over 28,000 people served every year through Hildegarde’s Pantry, living into our call to radically welcoming and indiscriminately hospitable to the homeless families we host through Family Promise, and the patrons of the Laundry Love program.

But all of this begins with looking at God. In our reading from Luke, the last thing Jesus tells the disciples is to, “stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” The power of the disciples to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sin to all nations comes not from themselves, their strategies, techniques, plans, but from above. Stay here, Jesus says. Wait. Remain open. Receive. Allow something other than the same old same old to come down that God’s will, not your will, might be done.

The Church, especially in Luke-Acts, is only the Church, is only the always provisional place through which God can act with his transfiguring Grace, in the degree to which it is open to the Holy Spirit. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."  And so we return to Bishop Curry’s question about how can we live in such a way that that when people look at Episcopalians they see the love of God, they see love that pours itself out for the other, that goes towards those from whom we’ve been taught to recoil, that journeys to margins that there might no longer be any margins as bread to feed, water to wash, oil to heal, and wine to slake the thirst of parched.

How can we live in such a way? How can we make that happen? Well, of, course we can’t make that happen on our own. We can only dispose ourselves to the work of grace upon our nature that we might become a little more like him, a place where God can tabernacle. We do that by being close to Jesus, breathing the air that he breathes, taking the breath of peace that breaks into the locked room of our fear, our complacency, our blindness, our deafness, deeply into the ground of our being and living as an Easter people from that indestructible ground. And how do we get close to Jesus? How do we breathe the air he breathes and make his life our own?

By turning from all those sham substitutes for happiness—money, sex,  power, control, prestige—and finding our true rest, the peace that passes all understanding in the source of beauty, goodness, and truth. Through daily prayer. Through daily dwelling upon Jesus’ life especially as revealed in the Gospels. Through weekly worship shoulder to shoulder in community. Through crossing boundaries and serving those rendered invisible and voiceless by manically whirring wheels of commerce, of what Wordsworth calls, “getting and spending.” By listening to the stories of others, discerning the presence and action of a loving God who won’t let us go in their lives, and inviting them to participate in the beloved community that is the Church.

Deans come and go. Ministries come and go. Strategies and techniques change for growing the church change with every puff of wind. Only Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. There’s nothing new about Christ, but he is indeed our hope and our salvation. He is indeed our ancient future. If we look to him and him alone, if we get to know him and him alone, if we open ourselves to receive the gift of our unspeakable belovedness and know ourselves to unconditionally welcomed to the banquet of divine love that has been in full swing since the foundation of the world, then the rest—with some grace, some grit, some wit, some hard work, some wiliness, some wisdom—will take care of itself.

May this place be a place of true encounter with the Living God. May this place and the people gathered here be icons, like John, like Mary, who point away from themselves to the loving, liberating, life-giving, presence of Jesus. May all who enter feel welcomed and enfolded in warmth of his loving embrace, and may that prodigal love, at the Deacon’s dismissal, run like sparks through the stubble into the wilderness places, onto the highways and byways, unto the ends of the earth.