Good morning everyone!
My sisters and brothers, we have come together this morning for a Love Fest. A Love Fest on many levels. Many of us are here because we love Abel Lopez, finding him one of the greatest priests God has ever ordained to the priesthood. Many of us are here because of our love for The Church of the Messiah, Santa Ana, and its magnificent mission in Orange County. All of us are here because of the love of God – we love God and God’s love for us has taught us that every church is God’s favorite church. God desperately needs every church, every faith community to be as healthy as it possibly can be. It is in the best interests of All Saints Church, Pasadena, for Messiah, Santa Ana to be as healthy as it can be and it is in the best interests of Messiah, Santa Ana, for All Saints Church, Pasadena and all other faith communities to be as healthy as they can be.
It is because of my love of God and my understanding that we are all in this thing together, that I as rector of All Saints, Pasadena, have been able to forgive Messiah, Santa Ana for coming to Pasadena and stealing from us one of the finest priests ever ordained. Love always forgives.
Now, in the vernacular of the Episcopal Church, we are here to “install” Abel Lopez as the 13th rector of this outstanding church. There are skeptical wags both in and outside the church who make fun of our use of the word, “install,” in this circumstance. “What do you all do in the Episcopal Church?” my sarcastic friends ask. “Install priest like they were appliances? Like you install a dishwasher or a stove or a refrigerator? Then you plug them in and expect them to wash, cook, and chill for you?”
But in the wisdom of the Book of Common Prayer, this liturgy is formally called, “The Celebration of a New Ministry.” And the new ministry we are celebrating this morning is not just the ministry of Abel Lopez; it is the ministry of all the people of Messiah, Santa Ana, because there never has been a priest who had a fruit-bearing ministry who tried to do ministry by herself or himself. This is a faith community above everything else. This community is called into ministry. There never was a church which had a fruit-bearing ministry who didn’t have as many people in the church – including the oldest members and the youngest members – on mission and in gear with their vocations.
Now two words about this business of vocation and ministry.
The happiest and most fruitful members of any church are those who are doing what God is calling them to do in life. Vocation comes from the word, vocare, meaning “call.” Your vocation, even if you are a physician is not working in a leper colony if you hate that kind of work. Conversely, your vocation is not writing advertisements for the fuzzy dice you can hang from your rear view mirror because the world’s deep needs do not include fuzzy dice.
No. Your vocation is where your deep joys and the world’s deep needs meet. (This definition comes from the Rev. Frederick Buechner.) I have a dear friend who was practicing real estate law and was sinking deeper and deeper into depression. The world does need real estate attorneys but that was not his deep joy. He, with the help of his wife and family and larger community mustered the courage to leave the practice of law and begin teaching teenagers literature in the public school because that is what his true self always wanted to do and it brings him deep joy – not without challenges that all of us face in life – but deep satisfying joy and Lord knows, one of the world’s deep needs is to have caring people in public school classrooms. That’s enough about the word, vocation, for now.
You have a rector in Abel Lopez who is in gear vocationally. He would be miserable selling cars, although, let me tell you, Abel Lopez knows a great deal about cars. I have always asked him to accompany me in choosing a car. He knows everything about them and there is no one more clever, winsome, and wily as a fox in negotiating with a car salesman than Abel Lopez. But Abel’s vocation is as a priest – you can see it in his celebrating the Eucharist. You can feel it in his exquisite and profound sermons. You can know it in his group work and one-on-one pastoral counseling. He is in vocational gear and can be an inspiration for you to get your life into vocational gear. And, please, all of you who are lay persons, remember, priests are not a cut above all other human beings. The reason God calls people to be priests is because God can’t trust priests to be lay people.
A word about ministry. There are two kinds of ministry in the church – church work and the work of the church. Every church has to have a minimum of church work done. The communion silver has to be polished. The bulletin and liturgies have to be distributed at the door. The finances of the church have to be overseen by the best financial minds Messiah, Santa Ana has to offer. The staff and the outreach of the church have to be paid for. The people must be inspired by other members to give generously from the labor and resources of their lives. The choir needs joyful noise and music-makers. AND. As crucial as all of that is, as important as coming here regularly for transformative worship and education and governance is – it is not the ultimate reason we come to worship.
Abel Lopez is a priest who stands in the tradition of the Jewish prophets – the tradition in which Jesus was grounded. There are a lot of traditions in the Bible – the wisdom tradition, the historic tradition, the purity code tradition, and on and on, but Jesus grounded himself in the prophetic tradition when he preached his inauguration sermon at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth – Isaiah 51 he quoted – the Spirit of the Lord is upon me for the Spirit has anointed me to…. Well listen to the way The Message translates it:
God’s Spirit is on me;
he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and
recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, “This is God’s year to act!” Luke 4:18
The prophetic tradition in which we stand says your worship, your educational offerings, and your governance, your community relationality better be beautiful, healthy, transformative, and nourishing. However, please understand, all the prophets from Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos and Isaiah to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Caesar Chavez, and Dorothy Day, and Cornel West say that that all that is rubbish if you are not making life better for widows and orphans, for poor and oppressed people, if you are not finding ways to rehabilitate and free prisoners instead of warehousing them, if you aren’t finding ways to give dignity and freedom from fear to immigrants, to include Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender persons, and if you are not continuing to dismantle systems of discrimination against women and people of color. That is the work of the church – out there in the world. And the church work you do here on these beautiful grounds aren’t worth a flip if it is not helping the world flip every system of oppression and discrimination.
The church is not being church if it’s not in the business of transformation. Transformation must always be at two levels – personal/internal transformation through spiritual formation and political/systemic transformation through acts of mercy and justice for and with those on the margins of life. The prophetic tradition made sure that the people were so immersed in contemplation, prayer, mysticism, and personal conversion that they were accessing God and God’s love all the time – that’s what St. Paul meant when he wrote “Pray without ceasing.” And that the people were so identified with and in solidarity with those who are suffering and outcast that they knew that everyone is in one boat, one interwoven tapestry, one interconnected uni-verse so that as Dostoevsky said, “if you slap someone of this side of the world, someone on the other side of the world winces.” Or Martin Luther King, Jr. said, that our network of mutuality is such that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I cannot be who I am supposed to be until you are who you are supposed to be and vice versa. That includes the undocumented immigrant, the person in prison, and the person living homeless on the street.
Now, finally, a word from our Scripture. All the readings appointed for this Celebration of New Ministry are saturated with shepherd imagery and I have had these passages of scripture in my mind as I have composed this sermon.
As a testimony to Abel Lopez’s brilliant and unconventional leadership – leadership rooted in vocation, the work of the church more than church work, the prophetic tradition, solidarity with the oppressed and the poor, -- Abel wrote me and said, “I love all this shepherd stuff – God and Jesus are our Good shepherd and we are called to emulate God and Jesus and, and, and, but where is the call to Justice in all this?
My friends, that is the question, where is Justice in all this? Where is Compassion? Augustine. Don’t leave a passage of scripture until you find what it says about compassion. About justice.
I wrote Abel back and asked that we read the passage from Ezekiel we’ve just read. For it contains the job description of Messiah, of All Saints, and of all faith communities.
The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. Ezekiel 34: 1-4
All of us are called to strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the injured, bring home the strays back the strays, and search for the lost. We are never to lead through coercion or fear.
Bishop Diane, our presider today is the only one of us carrying around a Shepherd’s staff this morning. I am of the theological persuasion that she is not ontologically different from the rest of us. Remember, God had her elected bishop because God could no longer trust her to be a priest. She is a symbol person for us – a great one, by the way. She is to remind you and me that all of use are called to be shepherds – good shepherds. Shepherds who are called to feed and nourish all people – and the nourishment we are to give is the nourishment of justice at Ezekiel 34: 16 calls us to.
We are here for a Love Fest, my friends – celebrating Abel’s glorious priestly leadership as rector of Messiah, Santa Ana. May we all remember and commit ourselves to the goal of being emissaries of God our Good Shepherd, who nourishes all with Justice.
Amen.
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