Sermon for Apr 13, 2008, 4 Easter

The other night I watched a movie called Heart of the Game. It is a documentary about a young African American women’s experience as a High School Basketball player in Seattle. She decided not to attend the school she lived next door to in favor of a white suburban school across town. It is a compelling story, and quite inspiring, I recommend it. One of the most effective things the coach of her team did was create what he called the inner circle. He believed part of his job was removing parents and other adults from the decision making processes these young women had to go through in order to create a team. He realized after he had implemented this plan that it meant he could not be a part of the inner circle either, being an adult. In the four years of this documentary the young women had to deal with tremendous decisions that would effect their season, chemistry and many other aspects of their game and lives on as well as off the court. Each player, at some point in the movie, spoke to how they felt empowered, lifted up and given the opportunity to make life decisions that truly made a difference. These young women were given the opportunity to be priests to one another using their gifts to create a team that was near unstoppable on the court and a team that overcame great challenge and controversy off the court.

Bill Countryman, my New Testament professor at seminary wrote a book called “Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of all”. He asks, “What then, is priestly ministry?” His response is, “It is the ministry that introduces us to arcana – hidden things, secrets.” I will come back to that in a moment, but I want to speak to this idea of the priesthood of all believers first. In one sense priestly ministry is the most ordinary thing we can imagine, all our lives we are repeatedly in the position of finding, revealing, explaining and teaching. We are all priests of a particular mystery that someone else does not know. Whether that is coaching a sports team, putting together a budget, leading a business team, cooking a turkey, we are constantly serving others as priests of the mysteries known to us and being served by those who know what we do not. As you can see, these secrets, these arcana, as Countryman talks about, are not secrets that we hold to our chests, deliberately keeping from others for the sake of power and privilege. They are the secrets that we know deep in our souls, secrets that are about experience more than they are about knowledge. They are about having life and having life abundantly. We all have a vocation that leads us to a deeper relationship with God and in that vocation we discover out rue humanity, our true priesthood.

All of this is to say that today’s Gospel is one of the most popular images we have in all of scripture, Jesus as Shepherd; God as shepherd. It is, besides God the Father, one of the most impactful images we have for the Church. Lutherans call their spiritual leaders Pastors, another term for shepherd, and Pastors, Priests and Ministers call their congregations flocks. The image of shepherd is a popular one that has created roles and boundaries and lines that are rarely crossed, it is one of those images that has helped perpetuate a hierarchy in the Church that has not been so helpful over the years. While this idea of the shepherd developed out of a time where they knew exactly what herding sheep was about, I would argue its symbolism is lost on a people who have rarely, if ever seen and understand exactly what it means to be a shepherd today. The image in our stained glass over there would suggest that sheep are cute and wonderful and cooperative, and while that is true to some extant, they are also stubborn and loud and dirty. And shepherds were not regal in the way Jesus is regal in that picture. Shepherds were usually hired hands; they were often thieves who were forced to steal and rob to get food to eat and resources to survive day to day.

So who are we? How do we see ourselves as we listen to the Gospel of Christ, the Good News and begin to hear how we are called to be part of the priesthood of all believers? Bill Countryman taught me in his class, “The news God speaks to human beings can only be good news if it address and affirms our humanness, the very humanness with which God first endowed us in creation.” We talk often of the incarnation, God putting on human flesh, in that same sense God’s putting on of human flesh has endowed each of us with a holiness that calls us into deeper relationship and deeper love of God and one another. By serving one another, out of the arcana that we know and even the arcana that we do not know, we are bringing Christ to the world as priests of the Church. Our basic humanity, Countryman is saying, is what makes us all priests. Our basic humanness is what we serve in one another as priests of the Church and priests of creation. Our basic human essence reminds us that priesthood is a fundamental and inescapable part of being human.

So with that in mind, how does the Gospel read now? To me it means to follow. It means to listen to the voice that is calling to me. It means to be open to the humanness that connects me to each and every person on the planet. It means that I am not the shepherd, I am not the one who is calling to other humans to follow me, I am not the one who is the gate, or the gatekeeper. I am sheep, dirty, stubborn, uncooperative, yet responsive to the familiar voice of God. It means that I am called to live into the humanity that is the core of my priesthood. William Stringfellow wrote, “The vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the Resurrection. The only thing that really matters is to live in Christ instead of death.”

Lately I have found myself surprised by my opinions and thoughts, has that ever happened to you? Where you thought you believed one thing, then in a conversation your belief changes and it changes in such a way that it completely surprises you. As you all know we have lived, as the Diocese of Minnesota, for the last two years in the knowledge that we are in precipitous decline. That we are slowly dying, and it will be a long and painful death we have been told. I found myself having a conversation with a colleague the other day, and I found myself saying to this person, I believe that this precipitous decline that we are in as the Diocese of Minnesota will become a precipitous incline. That we will be starting churches, reviving churches, we will see great growth, great depth and spiritual renewal the likes many of us have never experienced. And I will see it in my lifetime. I was quite surprised by my confidence, it felt good, it felt good to shake away that negativity we had had for so long, it felt good to get to the crux of my Anglican/Episcopal Identity and hold that incarnational, relational belief. But the next words that I heard struck me right back down. My colleague asked me, “Where’s your confidence in that?” Where is your confidence in that? My colleague asked me. My response was simply, God is in the resurrection business. God is doing something new, God is active and present and pulling us out of our self interest, out of our selfishness out of the need to think only of myself. God’s voice is coming over the loudspeaker of life and calling to us all, speaking gently and softly to us, saying, follow me. And it is God’s voice we are following; we are no longer following the voices of those who would pretend to lead us. Our clergy who are wise, though also foolish, are no longer the voice that people are listening to; it is the voice of Christ, the voice of Jesus saying to us, you are my priest, my beloved, follow me. That is where my confidence lies, that we are becoming the inner circle, it is not just the clergy who reside in the circle, keeping the secrets of salvation to ourselves, it is the church, the people of God who are slowly infiltrating that circle and bringing to the table a voice and a perspective that is transformative, that is equalitative, that is authentically priestly.

God is in the resurrection business, and we pray everyday to be shaped and formed by the life Christ led, by the Good News we have in the Scriptures, and by the priesthood our humanity bestows upon us. We live in the shadow of death, but we also live in the confident hope, and I mean CONFIDENT in all capital letters, hope of the resurrection. God is our coach, God is our empowerer, we must trust fully that God knows what God is doing and we must trust fully in the humanity we have that bestows upon us the gifts of priesthood and the call to serve one another and be served by those around us. In all things, we are priests. The degree to which faith, hope and love permeate us with integrity determines how effective we are as priests, but to be no priest at all is impossible. In all things we are priests.