The Best Ordination Sermon EVER!!

Reprinted with Permission,

Gary Hall
St. Mark’s, Hazard, KY
December 16, 2007 [Janey Wilson Ordination]


It is a great pleasure for Kathy and me to be here with you in Hazard celebrating Janey Wilson’s ordination to the priesthood. Although Janey was only at Seabury–the seminary in Evanston where I work–for a year, it was an intense year: she managed to do about two years’ work in one year’s time and emerge from the experience still married and healthy and in one spiritual and psychological piece. I have long admired her intelligence and compassion and energy, and I know she is already serving her congregations with grace and wisdom and love. I also know that about the last thing you came to her ordination for was the sermon. So I won’t say a lot, just enough to help us all focus a bit on what God might be up to in calling and ordaining Janey Wilson to the Sacred Order of Priests.
I went to seminary in the Boston area, and one year a classmate of mine decided that she would buy a free-range turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. This was the 1970s, and the idea of free-range poultry had not yet hit it big. So she called around to about a dozen butcher shops, asking if they had any free-range turkeys for sale. They all said “no”. Finally she got a butcher who was open to a bit more conversation. He asked her to explain what a free-range turkey was. She told him that a free-range turkey was a bird who had been raised outside and allowed to feed itself naturally as a bird would in the wild. After a pause, the butcher said, “Lady, I just sell ‘em. I don’t inquire about their lifestyles.”
For some reason, as I have made my way through all these readings about sheep and shepherds that Janey chose for this occasion, this long-ago incident of the free-range turkey sprang into my memory. In our Gospel for this evening, Jesus says this: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.” [John 10.14-15] We have all grown up with sentimental images of shepherds and sheep, but maybe thinking about turkeys instead helps us put things in perspective. For Jesus to call himself a shepherd and us his sheep is not exactly the most flattering comparison. If you’ve ever smelled wet sheep you would not mistake them for roses. And sheep have a tendency not to act in their own best interest. They need guides–shepherds and sheepdogs–to keep them from running over cliffs or following leaders without established credentials. They are, to put it gently, kind of dumb.
And turkeys are not a lot better–I read once that because it doesn’t know to keep its mouth shut, a turkey can easily drown in the rain. Hence the high cost of free-range turkeys: relatively few of them survive to maturity living in the outdoors. And in both the cases of turkeys and sheep, there are some people who raise them humanely and some people who raise them cruelly. In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, the shepherd Gabriel Oak is described bringing newborn lambs into his shed and then lovingly returning them to their mothers. And in such American classic novels as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle we read of the Chicago stockyards and the ways in which livestock (including sheep) were regularly mistreated there. How we treat the animals we depend on may not matter much to our eating experience, but it does say a lot about the quality of people we are. So when Jesus calls himself a shepherd, he invites comparison with the hired hand who, as he says, “is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.” [John 10.12-13] To the good shepherd, the sheep are beings of value who matter. To the hired hand, the sheep are just there as means to his own ends.
Now classically sermons have three points, and here comes point number one: for you and me Christian people–for us sheep–there is only one shepherd, and that shepherd is Jesus. I know the bishop carries a staff that looks a lot like a shepherd’s crook, and I know that we often call our clergy “pastors”–the Latin word for shepherd. But as we gather to think about Janey Wilson and her call to priestly ministry, let us be clear that she is not being set apart today as a member of a different species from you. You and I already have a good shepherd, and that is Jesus. As fine and accomplished a person as Janey is, she is not your shepherd. If you want to use a barnyard analogy, you might call her your sheepdog.
It is important to remember that because otherwise we set up an impossible distance between priest and parishioner. It’s like in the intercessions when we pray “for clergy and people”, as if we ordained folk are from Mars. I’m sorry if this is news to you, but clergy are human beings; we are recruited from among you; and to think of them as shepherds in charge of sheep does a disservice to both priest and parishioner. A priest is as finite and fragile and limited as any human being. And all baptized people are called and commissioned by God to be agents of love and mercy and justice in the world. To stay in the metaphor, all of us sheep are called by God to be about God’s work in the world. We just need some guidance and direction and compassion in doing that, and that’s why the church has set aside priests and bishops to be the sheepdogs who nip at our heels and keep us all moving in the right direction. But the one shepherd, the Good Shepherd, is Jesus.
That’s the first point, and while I’m at it, here’s the second. (Hey, we’re 2/3 done!) There is not one of us sheepdog priests who got this job because we’re better or holier or smarter or more organized than anybody else. That’s not to say that there aren’t high standards for clergy, because there are. But those of us who serve the church as priests, if we’re honest with ourselves, know that God has called us to and equipped us for something that finally can only be done by and through God’s grace. That’s not theology. That’s reality. And that’s what’s going on in the first reading we heard tonight, the story of the call of the prophet Isaiah: “And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!’” [Isaiah 6.5] I believe that every priest who has kneeled in front of a bishop has thought, at some point in the ceremony, “Who do I think I’m kidding? I’m just a regular human being. One of these days they’re going to find me out.” Isaiah spoke for all of us when he called himself a person of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips. Who do I think I am to presume to speak for God?
And yet that is what God has asked generations of faithful people to do, and for some reason they all have more or less lived into it. So if Jesus would enlist us priestly sheepdogs in his ministry as our Good Shepherd, Isaiah would remind us that the call to do that is ultimately mysterious and unfathomable. Why has God called Janey and not somebody else? Only God can answer that. But here, I believe, is the important second point: Janey, you are a naturally humble and self-effacing person, and I’m sure there is a part of you here tonight that is saying to yourself, “How on earth did I get here?” But my sheepdogly advice to you and to your friends and family and congregations is this: don’t overdo the humility. You are an immensely gifted, able, and accomplished person. As appropriately humble and inadequate as you no doubt feel on this occasion, let it go. It is all right. God will use you, as God uses all of us, to God’s own purposes. There is a lot of responsibility in that, for from now on you will be seen and heard to represent and speak for God. But it is all right. Neither Augustine nor Dietrich Bonhoeffer nor Mother Teresa was any more up to this than you are. It is Jesus, your Good Shepherd, whose work you will be doing. And the experience of generations of us who do this work is that the One who calls you to this work will sustain you in it. That One will see you through.
And that leads me to the third and final point. Hear again what Jesus says in tonight’s Gospel: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” What this all finally comes down to is relationship. Jesus knows and loves the One he calls his Father, and Jesus knows and loves us. Thinking about priesthood in sheep and shepherd terms doesn’t precisely get at the quality of what’s going on between Jesus and his Father, between Christ and us. Not even the greatest shepherd who ever lived cared about his sheep with the depth that Jesus and his Father love each other. And no professionalized understanding of the priest/parishioner connection can ever adequately represent the love between Jesus and the human community and its implications for you and me.
Christianity is not finally an idea. It is a set of relationships. It dares to suggest that we human beings can live together with the depth and compassion and justice which characterizes the relationship between Jesus and the One he calls his Father. And priests and deacons and bishops and lay leaders are part of that transaction not so much because of the power or authority we wield but because of the ways in which we transparently love and know ourselves to be loved. What is finally the most important thing about priesthood is this: to the extent that you know yourself to be someone whom Jesus loves just as much as he loves his Father, to the extent that you know yourself to love others to the extent that Jesus’s Father loves both Jesus and the world, to that extent will your ministry be a faithful living out of the care and compassion which Jesus exemplifies as our Good Shepherd. Before it is anything else, the job of a priest is to radiate the love which is at the center of creation, to know her own just as Jesus knows his Father.
And so, Janey: The church has plenty of free range turkeys. We don’t need another one. What we need is you. You are smart. You are able. You are accomplished. You are humble. You are also compassionate and caring and brave. All these are wonderful traits, and they will serve you well in your ministry. But here’s the deal: remember, as unclean as you may feel your lips to be, they’re no less clean than Isaiah’s. And remember, too, that of all your many gifts, the greatest one you have is your ability to love and be loved by others. Jesus is your Good Shepherd, and you are now to take your place among us as a visible sign of the kind of love which is finally at the center of the whole creation. As busy as you may get caring for others, do not forget that you, too, are loved. If you keep yourself grounded in the experience of God which got you here, your life and your ministry will be a living sign of the love which Jesus and his Father have for one another, and you will lead us all better to know and love the Good Shepherd, too. Amen.