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Days Like This
The Ordination of Timothy John Squier to the Sacred Order of Priests
Chapel of St. John the Divine
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois
October 2, 2005
Charles W. Allen
Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 43; Philippians 4:4-9; John 10:11-18
Psalm 43: Give judgment for me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people; deliver me from the deceitful and the wicked. For you are the God of my strength; why have you put me from you? And why do I go so heavily while the enemy oppresses me? Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling; That I may go to the altar of God, to the God of my joy and gladness; and on the harp I will give thanks to you, O God my God. Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
Tim, it doesn’t get much better than this. This is one of those moments when you’re almost guaranteed to sense the presence of God moving among us today. The rest of us are almost guaranteed to sense that presence too. Even people who aren’t sure they like you would have trouble not being caught up in this celebration.
Thank God there are sometimes days like this! If there weren’t, we’d all quit now.
Our Scripture lessons treat us to a rich tapestry of images.
There’s Isaiah’s vision of a smoke-filled worship space, with hints of vestments, pageantry, service music, a read-hot, cleansing communion wafer of sorts, and a dismissal for mission. It’s every Anglo-Catholic church queen’s fondest dream!
We’re also treated to one of those rare moments when St. Paul actually drops his controlling personality and lets himself and the rest of us celebrate creation’s goodness wherever it might be found. It helped the Church embrace the idea that it might really be OK to go off and learn a few things about the world around us and in us.
And then there’s that picture of Jesus the good shepherd—not one of those sentimental Sunday-school pictures of Jesus holding lambs, but the shepherd who gives away everything to invite the whole flock to share in the common knowledge and life God shares with us: no ordinary shepherd, no ordinary sheep, and certainly no ordinary God.
All those images! It’s enough to overwhelm anybody’s imagination. But then that fits the rest of the service, doesn’t it? This isn’t a classroom or a Bible study. It’s a sacred moment when we let ourselves be overwhelmed and caught up into a mystery: God acts in and through the likes of us to make a flawed but irreplaceable creature into a living, breathing sign of God-with-us in our flesh. It’s not conferring degrees or honors. It’s not make-believe. It’s mystery-making: us making things happen only to find ourselves drawn into a deeper happening that won’t let us live quite the same lives ever again. Today “things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and … all things are being brought to their perfection by [the one] through whom all things were made.”
Thank God there are sometimes days like this! You need them, Tim. You’ll need their memory. You’ll need the promise their memory brings that this won’t be the last of those days. All of us need that. We need the patience these moments can bring us as we face a world, a Church and a ministry where everything seems to conspire every day to make us less than the gifts God calls each of us to be. We need these high moments, because we’re called to live most of our lives not in them but between them.
That’s why, out of this whole rich tapestry of images and attitudes, the text that kept floating to the surface this past week was Psalm 43. It’s a psalm for in-between times. There’s no “Rejoice in the Lord always” here—just a memory of, and a hope for, more days like today.
“Give judgment for me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people.” For a moment, Tim, I thought that might be an e-mail from you! Give judgment for me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly CTS Student Council. Defend my cause against a stubborn Board of Elders. Defend my cause against a whimsical, game-playing Commission on Ministry. (You’ve got lots of company on that one.) Defend my cause against seminarians who don’t want to talk theology.
Maybe that’s not the most flattering snapshot, but it’s an honest one.The psalm writer reminds us of you, Tim, because you’ve never been known to run away from conflict. You’ve had lots of opportunities, more than you ever asked for, to look at your patterns of acting and thinking. The Church has been looking at you too. You and we know that you’re one of those people who arrives at truth and community by confronting things head-on. You’re one of those people who comes to welcome another’s vision by first pushing your own. It makes the people around you sometimes want to cheer you on and sometimes want to wring your neck. And it makes you feel the same conflicted way about them.
So today hear the verdict of a Church that already knows you well:We need you to be that honest, unsettling voice among us. We need you to be that voice that won’t let us have community without struggling for truth and justice. Too many of us are drawn to ministry because we want to pretend we’ve already found this one big happy family gathered around a thanksgiving meal—like that Norman Rockwell painting of a huge turkey served to a table full of smiling, well-scrubbed, middle-class, Midwestern white people. We want to keep coaxing smiles like that from everybody all the time.
But God knows, families weren’t ever like that; the Church was never like that either; and life isn’t like that. We’re surrounded all the time by conflicts so close to home we usually don’t even see them till they’ve done their damage. When we bury them, they just eat away at our common life like a slow-acting acid. Or sometimes they break out again with even worse results.One of the things that tires me most these days about all the hand-wringing around the Anglican Communion’s fractures is that we act as if this were something new and unprecedented. How do we manage to forget that there was never a time when the Body of Christ wasn’t being broken?
We can’t afford to run away from this. There’s a reason why our rites of initiation and thanksgiving meals won’t let us forget about dying and brokenness. There’s a reason why one of our vital points of community-making happens when one of us lifts up a loaf of bread and then rips it in half. This is where God meets us—in the middle of our brokenness, in the middle of our conflicts, not when we’re trying to pretend they never happened.
That’s why we need voices like the psalm writer’s, voices like yours, Tim. That may be one of the things about you that you need to keep track of, but it is not something you need to change. Don’t let the rest of us timid types silence you or drive you away. We need you. We need your voice. It will cost you. It will cost us too. But there’s no other way to God’s meeting us in our conflicted flesh than through voices like yours.
Of course the cost to all of us, lay and ordained, whether we face conflict or run away from it, is that we find ourselves mostly living in that in-between time—the time in between those moments when we’re treated to a brief glimpse of the common life God promises to bring. Once we’ve seen what life together could be, anything less feels like exile. Maybe we don’t like to admit how much we grumble about those who won’t see things our way. Or maybe we’re actually getting better at reminding ourselves that we need disagreement and opposition to keep us honest before God. But either way, it really gets to us. It wears us down.
“Why have you put me from you, [God of my strength]? … Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me?” Dear people of God, if those words aren’t frequently your words, let me be rude enough to suggest that you aren’t being fully honest with yourself. Maybe it’s time for a little therapy, or at least a good spiritual director. Or maybe it’s time you opened yourself to glimpse what a reconciled common life could be. Then you’ll know how the psalm writer feels. You’ll know the disquiet of those in-between times.
So again, thank God there are sometimes days like this! Today we dare to believe that God acts in and through the likes of us to make a flawed but irreplaceable creature into a living, breathing sign of God-with-us in our flesh. Today we dare to affirm that God is sending out light and truth in these very words and actions, bringing us to God’s dwelling, transfiguring this altar made by human hands into the very altar of God, the God of our joy and gladness.
If there weren’t days like this, we’d all quit now. But, God willing and the people consenting, this is indeed one of those days. Thanks be to God!