by the Rev. Dr. Dan Handschy
Click here to watch the sermon recording on YouTube.
Ecclesiasiticus 39:1-8
Psalm 84
2 Corinthians 4:1-6
Luke 22:24-27
I have to admit that sometimes I can be a little slow on the uptake. I was probably twenty years into my ordained ministry before I realized something rather profound about the ordination service – not that the whole thing it isn’t profound. What I noticed concerns the collect for the ordination service. We use the same collect at every ordination, whether for bishop, priest, or deacon. It’s a magnificent collect:
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
That’s as good a summary of what we Christians believe about God’s plan of salvation as anything I know. The lowly are raised up, and the creation, which has been corrupted through sin is being brought to perfection in Christ. But here’s what I didn’t recognize.
Can anyone tell me where else that prayer occurs in our prayer book? Anyone? See, I am slow on the uptake. Good Friday. The celebrant says this collect at the end of the Solemn Collects on Good Friday. Take out your prayer books and turn to page 277. The deacon bids the congregation to pray, specifically, “that the world might be saved through [Christ].” And notice something else; the deacon then bids us to pray for categories of people and things, in the exact same order as we pray in all six forms of the Prayer of the People to be used at eucharist: The Church, all the peoples of the earth and those who hold authority, for those who suffer in body or spirit, those who sorrow, those who have not received the Gospel of Christ, and the departed.
If you want to know and understand the mission of the church in the world, you couldn’t go far wrong reading and meditating on the Solemn Collects. The catechism says that mission of the Church is to reconcile all things to God in Christ. That’s the ministry Paul claims for himself and for the church at Corinth. The Solemn Collects spell that ministry out in detail. And at the end of those collects, the celebrant prays the prayer we’ve just heard.
I put it to you that on Good Friday, in the Solemn Collects, the Church receives its collective ordination for its ministry in the world. And that ordination happens at exactly the moment we remember Jesus’ death on the cross. I’m not a fan of Anelmian atonement, that says Jesus died to pay the penalty of sin that humans could never pay. Instead, I believe that Jesus’ crucifixion is the inevitable outcome of his Incarnation into a sinful world. The cross is what God’s love looks like under the aspect of human sin. For God so loved the world. Into the midst of all the horrible things human beings can do to one another and to the rest of God’s good creation, God chooses to become Incarnate in Jesus, and we did to Jesus what we have always done to when we are afraid and don’t understand what is happening. The consequences of that fear are all around us.
But John’s Gospel also reminds us that the cross is the moment of Jesus’ glorification. All the damage we can do to one another and to the creation did not and cannot prevent God from taking on our flesh in order to love us back into the human vocation of praising God, and making the creation holy — even at so great a cost. And at precisely the moment of Jesus’ glorification, the church receives her ordination, to take a share in Christ’s ministry of reconciling creation to its Creator.
I’m sure you’ve been to an ordination service where the preacher had a charge for the person being ordained. It’s a standard trope. The preacher has the ordinand stand, and then reminds him or her to be religious in taking their day off, or to remember that they are ordained, not for any holiness of their own, but for the church. This is not one of those sermons, even the though the reading from Sirach could me a lot of grist for that mill – do you think any one of us could live up to that list? Instead, I want to call us all to live into our ordination as the Church, the Body of Christ.
Our prayer book reminds us that baptism is full initiation into Christ’s Body, the church. Again, I put it to you that if we took that seriously, we wouldn’t be so quick to baptize babies, and maybe not so quick to be baptized ourselves. In one of our eucharistic prayers, after the priest invokes the Holy Spirit on the gifts of bread and wine that they may be the Body and Blood of Christ for us, she invokes the Holy Spirit over us, the people, that “we may live as Christ’s Body in the world.” In another prayer, we ask God to “unite us to your Son in his sacrifice.” Good Friday shows us what that can cost us. We are to be bread broken and wine poured out for the life of the world. We are to be the food on the table where the world feasts with God.
And at our baptism, we were smeared with chrism, consecrated oil, and made little Christs (that is what the word Christian means – little Christ). We received the charism of the Holy Spirit appropriate to each of us, appropriate for the role we will take in the ministry of reconciling the creation to its Creator. All of those charisms are consubstantial; each belongs to each other, and together they belong to the whole, and the whole belongs to each. Just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are consubstantial in the Trinity, so your charism, and mine, and Roger’s are consubstantial with one another and with Christ’s. None of us is called to this ministry of reconciliation alone, as Paul reminds us in the reading from his second letter to the Church at Corinth.
Roger is not receiving some sort of super-added grace, which makes his ministry somehow more important than yours or mine. Even Bishop Loya has not received a super-added charism, that lifts him above the church in which he carries out his ministry. All the charisms are consubstantial; without all of them together, none of them is meaningful.
What the orders of ordained ministry show us is the various modes in which the church carries forward Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. Deacons serve at the table, and lead the prayers of the people, modeling the service ministry of the church, and our intercession on behalf of the world. And it is important to remember that the word “intercession” in Latin means to be a go-between. The church is the go-between between God and creation, carrying the concerns of the world to God, and the gifts of God to the world. The deacon is the go-between between the world and the church, bringing to us, in our prayer, the concerns of the world, and pointing us to the broken places of the world that need God’s healing love.
The bishop models Christ’s sending ministry, as when Jesus sent the Twelve and the seventy-two to proclaim the kingdom. When the deacon has identified those heterogenous communities in the broken world, desperately seeking to be fed by God, the bishop goes and places there an altar. The bishop then sends a priest to preside at that altar, so that the world might be fed.
And the priest gathers what those communities offer, and places it on the altar so that the prayers of the community may bless it, so that it become the food the world so desperately needs for its healing. And all of these charisms are consubstantial. None of them means a thing without all of us gathered into the Body of Christ, in whose ministry of reconciliation we all have a share as members of that Body.
And while that collect that started this conversation takes place in the liturgy for Good Friday, the Good Friday liturgy is itself only the middle piece of the whole liturgy of the Triduum, the Great Three Days, which culminates in the Great Vigil of Easter. While our share in this liturgy and this ordination may cost us, may require to enter in Christ’s death, to die to self, and to the sin that makes the world so broken, while we may be called to stand for our neighbors against a cruel empire, Good Friday is not the last word.
The prayer book places our baptism within the context of the Great Vigil of Easter. That love of God which humanity rejects on the cross will not be stymied. No matter how futile we may think our ministry as the church in the world, God comes to us again and again in the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Again and again we are fed with the food of eternity, so that we might be the reconciling meal for the life of the world.
We are ordaining Roger as a deacon today, not so that he can be the go-between between the church and the world in our place, so that we can abdicate our diaconal charism, but so that we can have a model of how we all share in the diaconal ministry of Christ, so that we can be the go-between between God and a hurting creation.
Let’s hear that collect one more time as a reminder that the church is ordained for Christ’s ministry in the world:
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
