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Sermon October 2, 2005 |
A Brief Homily Before Receiving Parish Input
to the Selection Process for the Bishop of
Monty
Python’s The Meaning of Life suddenly cuts from a busy restaurant to a scene of
the French countryside. Gaston, wearing
the uniform of a waiter, gestures ahead of us: “You
see that house? That is where I was born. My mother said to me, ‘Garçon, the world is a beautiful place, and you must spread
joy and contentment everywhere you go.’ And so I became a waiter ...” We don’t
find his words very profound. But in a
Christian context, they are the meaning of life. We are called to spread joy
wherever we go.
In
a moment we are going to do an exercise we’ve been asked to do by the
diocese. The exercise begins our search
for a new bishop, so before we do it, I thought it might be a good idea to talk
just a moment about the division of labor in the church that we call “orders of
ministry.”
The
Episcopal Church recognizes four orders of ministry: lay people, deacons,
priests and bishops. When it comes to
churchy pomp and circumstance, it is easy to see that the bishops are at the
top of the heap. In church they wear the
fanciest clothes. Lay people serving at
the altar wear simple robes, deacons wear a stole across one shoulder, priests
wear a stole and a chasuble, bishops wear even more
complicated stuff and a special hat called a miter. But a wise man told me just before I got
ordained as a deacon, the church’s honors are backward
when it comes to the importance of each role.
If we ordained people in the order of importance, he said, we start with
the office of Bishop, and if you did that well, you’d get ordained a priest,
and so on, until finally, only if you did your job as a deacon really well
would you be allowed to become the most important kind of minister: a lay
person.
There’s
a lot of truth to this. The lay person’s
ministry is the most important and the hardest—we are all ordained to it in
baptism: it is the ministry of spreading God’s love to all people wherever you
are. The next most important is the role
of deacon. The deacon is called to
perform a specific kind of service ministry to the poor, the sick, the
friendless and the needy. Lynn Czarniecki, for example, exercises her diaconate
particularly to hospital patients. In
doing this ministry to those in need, Deacons remind all of us that we are
supposed to be Christ’s servants in the world.
Priests have a simpler job: to keep the local church going by
administering the sacraments and preaching the word. We are supposed to provide the nurture that
keeps you, God’s ministers in the world, going.
An even simpler job is that of the Bishop who keeps the institutional
church going as its chief pastor, principal teacher, and leader.
This
review of the orders of ministry is a little tongue in cheek. The bishop is called to be the “servant of
the servants of God,” but how the bishop performs this role makes a big
difference to the whole church. The
bishop serves as the role model and organizer for the institutional church and
plays the most important part in choosing the people who will serve the institutional
church as its priests and deacons.
Because the bishop is so important to the life of the church it is
fitting that the whole church be involved in choosing the bishop. In the Episcopal Church, bishops are chosen
by election—the people whom you elect to represent you in the diocese will cast
the ballots that choose our next bishop.
And even before that, each member of the church is asked to say what
sort of bishop you want to have lead you in this
diocese. So let’s begin by asking all of you what you want in your next bishop.