Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
June 10, 2020 / Commemoration of Ephrem of Edessa
Ordination of Abby Leigh VanderBrug to the Priesthood of the Episcopal Church
John 10:11-18
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
One of the questions I am asked, as a clergyman, most often by any number of my well-meaning but non-church-going friends is this: “What do you do during the week?” We know all about Sunday morning services, but what about the rest of the time? I assume that my reverend and right reverend colleagues here tonight have been asked the same question, at one point or another. Come to think of it, it is a question asked not only by well-meaning pagans, but by well-meaning churchgoers as well, churchgoers whose engagement with the life of the Christian faith begins at 9 o’clock on Sunday mornings and is finished at the stroke of 10:15, just in time for brunch and/or sports.
But it is not a bad question. What DO we do during the week?
We have gathered this evening, some in this building and many, many other across the country, to witness and ratify Abby’s ordination as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Abby, that question, of the identity, duties, and work of a priest is very much to the fore this evening, as it will be to the fore throughout your ministry.[1]
After this sermon, and after our saying together the Nicene Creed, Bishop Douglas will outline what it is that the Episcopal Church considers the essential duties of the priesthood. Duties to which you are about to subscribe. They are:
to proclaim by word and deed the Gospel of Jesus Christ
to love and serve the people among whom you will work
to preach, to declare God's forgiveness to penitent sinners, to pronounce God's blessing
to share in the administration of the sacraments of the church
That’s the office and work of a priest. That’s the core. And all of that informs not only what you do during the week, but also why, and for whom.
This evening’s Gospel lesson recounts our Lord’s rather famous description of himself as the Good Shepherd. This image of Jesus, much more than the image of him, say, as judge, has assumed a prominent place in our common imagination of who Jesus is, and it forms the basis of a lot of how we think about what ordained ministry is all about: pastor, after all, is just the Latin word for shepherd. The most beloved window in this church, the one behind the altar, has at its center an image of Jesus as the good shepherd. It is Christ Church’s own version of the iconic image of a pastoral Jesus, gently tending the flock.
The English shepherd James Rebanks, whose book The Shepherd’s Life spent weeks atop the bestseller lists, was interviewed at the Chicago Humanities Festival a few years ago. Sitting in a darkened theatre, with images of the Lake District and its flocks of sheep projected on a screen behind the stage, the interviewer began by saying,
When I first heard about your book and that you were coming and that I would get to interview you, an image of a shepherd came into my mind of a man with a long beard, and a long flowing robe, and a giant crook!
This is the place where, in a television comedy, the director would cut to the window behind the altar, and everyone would laugh at the obvious similarities between the stereotype and the window. Rebanks replied to the interviewer by saying,
I did have a mother and son who met me one day, and the mother explained what I did, and the son said, “What, like in the Bible?!”[2]
The Good Shepherd, Gorham Company, New York, 1910, Christ Church, Greenwich, Conn.
Behind the altar, our Lord appears calm, serene. He stands with a lamb resting in the crook of his arm, while other sheep look on adoringly or calmly tend to their own business. They are fluffy, cute; everyone is doe-eyed, in a masterpiece of ecclesiastical sentimentality. From this image we extrapolate quite a bit. We extrapolate what clergy are supposed to be like, how the church is supposed to function. And that’s all very well and good, except that none of it bears any resemblance to either the actual work of shepherds, or the actual work of the church and her clergy.
Rebanks’ book, The Shepherd’s Life, “describes the passage of the seasons and the physical realities of farming: herding, shearing, feeding, castrating, deworming, doctoring, mending, mucking, chopping.”[3] Real sheep can be stubborn, and sneaky, and non-compliant. They can be willful, or scared, and run themselves into harm in either case. They can fall to their deaths, or wander off into the flock of another shepherd. It is for all of these reasons, and more, that they must be looked after by farmers and dogs together. Anyone who has ever worked with real livestock knows that the work is unsparing and hard, and beautiful and very real all at the same time.
That describes the work of the priest. To be a leader within the local Christian community requires the wits, the fortitude, the patience, the foresight, the faithfulness, and the plain good humor to shepherd the faithful out of harm’s way, harm to which they sometimes seem hell-bent on returning again and again. This is what it is to love, in the most Christian sense. Loving one’s neighbor as a Christian means looking out for the good of that person. It’s about the other person’s welfare, not necessarily his feelings, and as shepherd it’s about the welfare of the whole flock.[4]
“It is our business,” said the Scottish minister Alexander Gerard, “to instruct (2 Tim 2:25), to convince, to exhort (Titus 1.9), to charge (1 Tim 4:17 and 2:14), to intreat (1 Tim 5:1), to reprove and to rebuke (1 Tim 5:20 and 2 Tim 4:2).”[5] I don’t have to tell you the New Testament warrant for any of those duties, as Scripture is clear about the spiritual perils awaiting those who are misled, and awaiting those who mislead them. The quad of Yale Divinity School is paved at the intersections of its central axes with millstones, lest those who train for the ministry forget what our Lord says about those who lead even a single person astray.[6]
It is a tremendous responsibility, therefore, that the Lord and the church have placed upon you, but is an honor as well, and a joy. The priest is the member of the Christian community whose charge it is to organize the faithful, to by her life and doctrine teach the faith, to love and serve the people, and to administer the sacraments. She is teacher, counselor, catechist, preacher, exemplar, and fellow-traveler, in all things pointing not to herself, but to Jesus Christ.
In that sense the clergy are the hired hands in this work, tenant farmers in the Lord’s fields, keeping the Lord’s sheep. We are called to serve, we make our way through ordination, and serve in the church for a season before being put out to pasture ourselves. As I was reminded by the preacher at my own ordination, “Priests come and go.” It is not through our labors but through our Lord’s universal work on the Cross by which the sheep are saved. That is God’s mission, in which we clergy are but servants. We labor that there may be one flock under one shepherd, who is Jesus Christ our Lord.[7]
At our baptisms, we were all received into the congregation of that flock, and we were signed with the sign of the Cross, making each one of us Christ’s own forever. That means that we do not belong to ourselves any more. We do not belong to our résumés, to the accidents of birth or achievement or just plain luck. We belong to Christ, and that changes everything, because when you don’t own your life, your life is different. You are free. Free to be brave. Free to love. Free to serve. Free to have peace.
And so, you see, we return to that question, What do you do during the week? It is not just a question for Abby, actually; and it’s not just a question for the clergy. It is a question for every Christian, for every person baptized with water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, a question for every person who can hear the Lord’s call. Christianity is not just about what happens between 9 and 10:15 on a Sunday morning. It is about the substance of our lives: in industry, in finance, in education, in the arts, in marriage, in the home, in all of which we belong to the Lord’s flock. It is the priest who makes that reminder, again and again; it is the priest who guides us home.
You’re going to be a good priest, Abby. The Lord has called you to this work, and he will sustain you in it… through grief and humor and frustration and exultation. Do not forget to pray, to ask the Lord to help carry this burden which he has given you, to ask him to be with you and Michael and Roz as you share in this journey, this adventure in faith. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light, and we do it all, with God’s help.
And so may the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, the great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant: Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well pleasing in his sight; through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever.
AMEN.
The preacher and the new priest.
[1] In former editions of the Prayer Book, in fact in every edition of the Prayer Book in every Anglican jurisdiction around the world, prior to the current American Prayer Book’s adoption in 1979, a priest was ordained by the bishop to, and this is the language, “the office and work of a priest.” That formula suggests an intimate and necessary relationship between the responsibilities of a priest and his identity.
[2] https://youtu.be/efmp2wNeQCA
[3] Roslyn Sulcas, “James Rebanks, Man of Sheep, Man of Letters,” New York Times, June 5, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/06/books/james-rebanks-man-of-sheep-man-of-letters.html
[4] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 115-16.
[5] Alexander Gerard, The Influence of the Pastoral Office on the Character examined; with a view, especially, to Mr. HUME's representation of the spirit of that office: A SERMON Preached before the SYNOD of ABERDEEN, At ABERDEEN, April 8. 1760 (Synod of Aberdeen, 1760), 31.
[6] Matthew 18:6; Luke 17:2
[7] Solemn collect for Good Friday, Book of Common Prayer (1979), 280.