Gary Hall - Des Moines Diaconate Ordinations sermon
I.
I’ve been to enough ordinations in my life to know that the sermon is probably the last thing you came here for today. Today is about Elizabeth, Raisin, Sallie, and John. They have persevered through the arduous gauntlet of the Episcopal Church’s ordination process and have prevailed. You came here to thank and celebrate them, not to listen to an aging priest’s random free-associations about ministry. Nevertheless, when we Christians do anything liturgically, the Prayer Book insists that we listen to and reflect on what Scripture might have to say about it. And so my task, as painlessly as possible, is to help us all think together for a few minutes about this step that Elizabeth, Raisin, Sallie, and John are taking..
I’m not really sure how this has come about, but for some reason I’ve reached a point in my life where people approach me in big box stores, supermarkets, and electronics outlets and ask me where they can find something they’re looking for. Now it’s true that I did work at both McDonalds and at a supermarket in high school, but it’s been a good 40 years now since I honorably withdrew from Local 770 of the Retail Clerk’s Union. Whatever the cause, something about my late-life affect has convinced shoppers that I am employed by the store in which I’m browsing. I’m hoping this will some day pay off in the form of deep employee discounts.
When all this started a few years ago, my first response was to be annoyed. “Don’t you know who I am?” But over the years I have come to see this aspect of my character as an asset rather than a liability. That I look not like a captain of industry but like the guy who can tell you where the things are in Aisle Six felt at first like an insult. But gradually, over time, I have come to see this presumed identity as a gift. You and I live in a culture which deals out status in accord with how much purchasing power we can be assumed to wield. In my heart if not my wallet I look like Donald Trump. To the people around me I resemble Homer Simpson.
Listen again to today’s Gospel:
A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest. 25But he said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. 26But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. 27For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.—Luke 22.24-27
There is something central for us Christians in the idea of service. Our culture talks about service in very high tones, but what it usually exalts is service condescended to from a position of power—“volunteerism”, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates giving away their billions. While the generosity of billionaires is always laudable, that’s not the kind of service that Jesus advocates. He’s talking about service from the position of powerlessness. In his teaching today he reverses the usual values of status that all of us spend our lives trying to attain. The greatest must become like the youngest. The leader must become like the servant. It is to that kind of service—not to self-serving philanthropy-- that you and I must aspire.
We’re gathered this morning to stand with these four Christian folks as they are ordained to the ministry of Deacon in God’s Church. We often talk about the ministry of the Deacon as a ministry of service. But what, in today’s terms, does “service” mean? Let’s think about it together for a bit.
II.
Our church today is often confused about the role of deacons, but the earliest Christians were not. In our day they read the Gospel and set the table, but in the early church they did that and much more. You might think of the deacons of the early church as the unofficial social service network of the Roman Empire. Unless you were a patrician or a celebrated warrior, the Roman Empire was not a very nice place to live. Power, wealth, and food were held by those at the top of the social structure, and there was no governmental safety net to catch the poor, the sick, the disabled. If you were captured by the Romans in battle you probably became a slave. They offered neither a prescription drug policy nor a defined-benefit retirement plan.
In a world which offered no governmental services to its weakest and poorest people, the church set aside a group of ordained ministers whose job it was to provide those who needed them with food and solace and shelter. Because of all the liturgical language we have about deacons from that period, we tend to talk about their role as those who would serve the bishops and presbyters at table. But we should remember that their table service was profoundly symbolic of their social service. The bishop and presbyter presided at the table because they exercised authority in the assembled community. The deacons served at the table because they served the people Jesus cared about most—the poor, the sick, the homeless, prisoners, captives, widows, orphans—in the world.
And there’s even more to it than that: when the deacon read the Gospel, people stood up. And they stood up because, when the deacon was reading the Gospel, they knew themselves to be in the presence of Jesus himself. You’d stand up for Jesus, wouldn’t you? That’s why you’d stand up for the Deacon: because in their ministry of social service, in their tireless commitment to care for those whom the world had abandoned, the deacons became a living sign and symbol of Jesus himself. The diaconate was not a rung on the ecclesiastical ladder. The diaconate was the foundational order of all Christian ministry. Bishops and presbyters could dress themselves in the vestments of church authority, but only the deacon stood as and for Jesus. The deacon was among us Jesus--as one who serves.
III.
Now what do we make of all that here and now, in this day and age? I am mindful that three of the four people being set apart as deacons today are women, and I am mindful that the language of service has been used over the centuries by people like me to keep women “in their place.” So we must be careful when we tell three women and one man that they need, after all this hard work and study, to be servants. It will probably seem self-evident to at least three of them that they’ve been servants all their lives.
But again, let’s remember that the language of servanthood at work in our talk about deacons is symbolic. The deacon serves at the Eucharistic table as a sign of his or her service in the world. And it is to the thing itself, not only its liturgical symbol, that God is ordaining them today. Just as the first deacons in God’s church served as the organizers of an unofficial Roman social service network, so today’s deacons are set aside not symbolically to serve the poor but actually to serve the poor—and by extension the sick and lonely and lost. Life in the church can be so internally intense that we can become disconnected from the needs and concerns of those who live their lives “up against it” outside our walls. It is the role and ministry of the deacon to be the voice of those who have no voice, to be the ones who constantly stand as and for Jesus, to be the ones who remind us that the church’s business is to bring healing and hope and food and shelter to those who struggle to get by in our world right now without them. The danger of a life spent inside the church’s walls is that we can tend to forget what is really important to God. It is the role of the deacon—your role—to be the ones who refocus our attention. Life is hard—not just for the poor, but for the poor in spirit, too. Our corporate work, like your diaconal work, is constantly to spend our energies in helping people to live it with dignity and joy.
And so Elizabeth, Raisin, Sallie, and John: today you are being ordained as deacons in God’s church. You bring great gifts to this ministry, and on behalf of the church I both applaud and thank you for your willingness to spend the rest of your lives in service to all God’s beloved and broken people—the poor, the oppressed, the grieving, the sick, the lost. As deacons you are called, like all your diaconal predecessors before you, to be the unofficial social service network of a new and different Empire, serving in a culture which exalts success and affluence and habitually turns away from those without them. Your primary ministry to the church will be to keep before us the needs and concerns of the people we are here to serve. And you will do that most faithfully by standing in and for Jesus himself, the One who came among us not to be served but to serve. This diaconate is “transitional” in name only. Like Bishop Scarfe and me and all the bishops and priests present here today, you will be deacons until the day you die.
When we stand up as you read the Gospel, remember who it is we’re really standing up for and who you’re standing in for. You can only do this work by keeping your eyes on Jesus. As you keep your eyes on him, we can’t help but keep our eyes on you. And as we come to see Jesus in and through you and your ministries, we will all be called in some deeper way to become a community of deacons ourselves. It is no humiliation to be taken for one of the hired help. Even Mary Magdalene thought the risen Jesus might be the gardener, and he did not disabuse her of that perception. The only humiliation in being taken for a servant is to be embarrassed about it. Your charge is this: do not be afraid or ashamed to stand in and for the Jesus who calls us us all to serve. In so doing you and God’s world will be blessed and we all will come more fully to see and know and follow the One who calls us now to gather around this table in our Eucharistic celebration of diaconal service, human dignity, and everlasting joy. Amen.