25th Priesthood Anniversary

Saint Luke's Day, October 16, 2005

When I was a child, I thought child-like—especially on dark, confusing nights, when I awakened to I know not what; knowing only that I was scared—sensing or imagining danger; startled by a noise. What did I hear? Shouting? Arguing? Anything? Had I been dreaming? Fearful that my answer yet lurked in the surrounding darkness, I would pay attention, instead, to lining up angels and archangels, seraphim and cherubim too (whatever they were! My little mind was content to simply think of them as part of the joy in heaven). To calm those nighttime feelings of fear and helplessness, I would watch a parade in my mind in heaven, patterned on the liturgical processions I had experienced in church, complete with the plaintive notes of choral litanies: “Sanctus Micha-el, orate pro nobis. Sanctus Rapha-el, orate pro nobis…” I had everyone in heaven orate /praying for me because somehow, already, by age 4 or 5, I had learned it is better to pray “We beseech thee to hear us, Good Lord” than to fall prey to fear. On one early childhood night, I even was confronted by the devil. I was petrified. Everything was caught in my throat. But I knew, and I managed to say it to the devil, that all I had to do was call for Jesus to help and the devil would have to leave me alone and go away. I remember how bold I felt pronouncing the name of Jesus. And I also clearly recall the devil warning me not to be so confident, that he'd come back at me some time when I wasn't thinking about God.

I hadn't even begun school yet; so where was I learning this stuff? In the Gospel proclamation on Sunday mornings, no doubt. I remember always listening to the Gospel story. Yes, whereas adults hearing the Gospel, at times, may get confused, have questions about the meaning, and therefore reserve embracing the good news until someone clears things up, kids listening to the Gospel don't wait for some authority to give it meaning. Children get a meaning and take it with them as they go along. And that's what I did. I listened to the Gospel and to the music. Otherwise, I was that squirmy little kid in the pew with whom you all are so familiar. Long before there was an exchange of the Peace, I was that three year-old who'd turn around, stand in the pew and look at you, kick my shod feet under the pew in front of me, or try to escape his family and run down the aisle, usually during the sermon when I was really restless (after which we started sitting way off to the side next to some pretty awful stained glass). But I still had a direct sight line to the pulpit and full attention at the Gospel over the course of those young years. Little girls being raised from the dead (Jesus caring for her parents as much as he cared for her), swine going over a cliff (a lot of wasted food but I guessed Jesus thought it more important to get rid of evil), blind men seeing, the paralyzed walking, poor picked on ladies being protected by Jesus who stands up to rock throwers. “Let the children come to me… Get behind me, Satan… Love one another as I have loved you.” By the time I was six years old, the stories about the nasty Pharisees and brutish Roman officials (even the nailing to the cross) paled in comparison to the experience of practicing the run for shelter at the sound of sirens and hearing the rhetoric about Soviet nuclear attack. However (and certainly by this age my behavior allowed me to be seated back in the center of the church), when Jesus said “What's so special about liking your friends, why even criminals will take care of each other, I tell you ‘Love your enemies,'” that's what planted a seed in me about the connection between religion and the world; though I wouldn't consciously think about it for a few years.

No, at 7-8 years old, about church I was asking questions such as why is there a communion rail. Why are they trying to keep us out and away from the altar? And, why does everybody bow their heads when the priest elevates the bread at the Prayer of Consecration; doesn't it make more sense if everyone is heads up looking right at it? I remember one teacher hushing me up, telling me “No, Thomas. As an act of faith and out of reverence for what God does in Jesus, we bow our heads in silence.” Well, that didn't make too much sense to me. After all, we weren't silent. We said Amen at the conclusion. So shouldn't we look at what we are saying yes to?! Besides, isn't there more to faith than reverence? Then, along the way, another teacher explained to me her take on the situation: During Roman times, when being Christian was a crime, and people went to church in caves (the catacombs), they'd bow their heads and not look at the elevated bread, the Presence of Christ, so that if government officials asked them if they had witnessed the Eucharistic Sacrifice they could say no without its being a lie. I liked that. She took the time to make some sense with me. What she said intrigued me because the church and world connection was coming up again. The Romans should not have been persecuting Christians and Christians were figuring out a way to outsmart them. Again, I could hear the Gospel, this time the account in which Jesus taught, “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” So I unabashedly looked up each and every time the bread was elevated, and I was beginning to sense that Gospel is somehow bigger than government and Christ more important than church. But I was just a kid and that was just a flash: present and then gone, sort of.

About church and faith, for a 9 year old, there were more pressing questions, especially since I attended a parochial school. Around that time, a bunch of 7 th graders were telling us 4 th graders that if you went into the church, on your way home from school, and watched the Cross behind the altar, you would see Christ on the cross, moving (Well, wasn't that one better than the circus coming to town)! For awhile I just let it go, dismissing it as a tease. But when fellow classmates, whom I trusted and respected, reported that they too had seen Jesus moving on the cross, I thought I should give it a look that day after school.

Here's exactly what happened after considerable minutes of staring at the cross: absolutely nothing, except some watery eyes; for I had tried not to blink much. But in the moments after the self-satisfaction of exposing the prank, I began to feel the hollowness of such a rational victory, which brought on a small interior worry. So I sat there awhile, other school children had left by then. I supposed I was alone. I knelt and I prayed, whether silently or aloud I have no recollection. I prayed: Dear God, would you please find a way that definitely shows me you really exist? Immediately, I heard a loud and audible NO! Well, I hauled me and my book bag out of that church faster than you could say Let Us Bless the Lord. As I ran, I wondered if I had prayed out loud, if the sexton had been there in the church and heard me and had he decided it would be funny to answer me, or if somehow God had heard me and, if somehow, I was hearing God—with which I slowed to a walk and pondered a God who perhaps says No to the kinds of questions that ask for black and white answers.

Life went on. Age 11. Oh don't fret good people. This homily is not going to become the equivalent of home movies. But on this Saint Luke's Day when quite personally I am asking myself how 25 years of priesthood could have happened already, I wanted to share something of myself with you, something of my experience of faith and God.

“Praise my soul the King of Heaven; to his feet they tribute bring —the tribute of your experiences of God, sharing your faith so that we can experience each other as Gospel stories, proclamations of the presence of Christ. How have you experienced God throughout life? What have been the occasions and events, who have been the people opening you up to the Divine?

“How lovely are the messengers that bring us the Gospel of Peace…”

That anthem was sung at my ordination and I have been glad to hear it again, whenever the Saint Luke's Choir sings it.

Who are the messengers who have brought you the Gospel of Peace?

When I was 11, and the civil rights marches and the police brutality were happening in the South, my grandmother started hosting dinners in her home, inviting people White and African Americans around a table of fellowship so that everyone could get to know each other better. She was one of the gospel messengers in my life, as was Martin Luther King, Jr., showing me that praying to God and believing in Christ meant not only that we should be reverent before the throne of heaven but also engaged in Holy Spirited activity on behalf of all people. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere… We are all connected to each other in an inescapable web of mutuality.” There is an essential connection between the church and the world. Faith is not, in a vacuum, about how to get to heaven but about how we respond to God and fellow humanity so as to make of this earth some of God's heaven. There are after all, two great commandments

A few years later, when I was 17, during the height of the war in Southeast Asia, during The Prayers of The People at a Sunday Eucharist, the priest added a petition: Pray that God ends the war in Viet Nam. I do remember responding that day aloud, perhaps too loud, that God didn't start the war, so don't leave it up to him to end it. I had had enough of a church unconnected to the plight of the world and its people, a church which said it was folding its hands to pray but appeared to me to be wringing its hands and doing nothing. I left the Church and went off to college.

Once at university, I dabbled in a number of Humanities' majors—Philosophy, English, Psychology. But at each juncture, something in me with sighs too deep for words kept bringing me back to my basic questions—religious questions: What is life's meaning/who is God? Who am I/Who are we? What are we going to about it? So, I became a Religion major and received academic credit just for being serious about what was important to me. I still pretty much stayed away from church. There seemed, at that time to me, to be too great a divide between what the institutional church was up to and what the Gospel called for. Reading , pondering and praying the Gospels was an amazing experience for me. God's love and peace in Christ for the people is what it is all about. I thought so then and believe it now. Yes, even now there are times when I still have my serious questions about what the institutional church is up to. Though, now, I am not as brash or bold as I was back then. Now, I have much more appreciation for the ways in which people in the church struggle to be faithful and endure to do the work of an evangelist, carrying out ministry fully. My college and grad school years introduced me to messengers of the gospel who I met in the printed page—people like Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit scientist from the 1920s, who in his book The Divine Milieu wrote of Christ and Humanity and “Christogenesis”: how the process of evolution could be God's way of filling the world with the presence of Christ.

And there was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran Pastor in Nazi Germany, writing of faith and social responsibility from his cell in Letters and Papers from Prison. From the same time period, I learned more about faith from a Jew than I ever had from a Christian theologian. In his trilogy of novels based on his experience as a 12 year old concentration camp victim witnessing dehumanization and death, Nobel Prize winner Elie Weisel wrestles with God and bears witness with humanity, demonstrating that as human beings we are made by God, hard-wired for resurrection. Even under the conditions of hopeless death is God's Spirit in us, helping us to live by hope.

Such messengers were sending me on my way in preparation to be a college professor. However, as powerful as were these and many other great writers, there were one or two quiet interpersonal experiences that changed me or helped to grow me and send me back in the direction of the church. Both experiences were moments of crisis that became opportunities for compassion—Agape: the activity in the human heart of God's love that seeks nothing but the good of the other. In one case, I was the receiver; in the other the giver. In both persons I experienced Christ—that the Word does in deed become Flesh; and as importantly and reverently, as a result of meeting Christ in and with each other, our flesh becomes Bread and Wine for each other.

“O, enter then his courts with praise, approach with joy his courts unto, praise laud and bless his Name always, for it is seemly so to do.”

I returned to the church, I withdrew from graduate school, I entered seminary. Even at that, parish ministry was going to be just a two year experiment. That was 25 years ago. Then and now, I am compelled to offer myself as teacher and pastor centered at the Eucharistic Table. Then, as now, the confusions of this world demand that we gather together at this table.

As sung in the Collect for The Feast of our Patron Saint and my ordination's benefactor: “God inspired Luke to set forth in the Gospel the love and healing power of Christ…” Showing this love and exercising this power to heal is our calling as the church. It is not a “priestly” calling, except as it is the responsibility of all the baptized, the Priesthood of All Believers. We are all Messengers of the Gospel of Peace.

So, on this day, when we give thanks, together let us be re-dedicated to our vocation. For God's works will never be finished until everyone is gathered at this one Banquet Table: Episcopalians with all manner of Anglicans; single persons, married and same-gender couples, families and those who are alone; Presbyterians, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Lutherans and on; Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists; Scientists and Fundamentalists; 1st and 3 rd Worlds; Marxists, Socialists and Capitalists; repentant terrorists and imperialists; Women and Men; the Children; the Old.

Anything short of this will be yet where we are in need of forgiveness. Yet we can endure to do the work of an evangelist and carry out our ministry fully. Nourishment from this Table and the experience of living with each other is the revelation of Christ.

In the power of the Holy Spirit, “ We take his love, nourished by hope, forward in faith.” Amen.

October 16, 2005

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