The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



Reaffirmation of Ordination Vows & Consecration of Chrism, March 20, 2008, Christ Church Cathedral Nashville

“You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me; you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over” (Ps. 23:5).

 

God’s Long Summer, by Charles Marsh, tells the story of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. What’s outstanding about Marsh’s book is that it’s looking for the presence of God in the midst of this struggle; looking at the way in which people were motivated by Christian faith (in very different ways) in responding to the crisis of suffering and disenfranchisement in Mississippi’s black community.  One of Marsh’s heroes is Fannie Lou Hamer, an African-American woman he calls “one of America’s most innovative religious imaginations”; a woman who in the midst of imprisonment and beatings was able to reach beyond hatred and embrace a radical love for and forgiveness of her abusers. She was able to re-conceive the community of faith as a place where one’s enemies are the strangers who need to be welcomed. “You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me; you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over”: a reference to the Twenty-third Psalm that Hamer made herself.

 

Love and forgiveness, even toward our enemies, point us toward some truths about community. All community is built upon a willingness on the part of people to give of themselves for their neighbors. Without this willingness to forbear and to extend oneself for others there is no community worth speaking of, only a ghastly simulacrum of it, a distilled form of shared selfishness. It’s in the nature of community to take us beyond ourselves to consider the other.  Another way of saying this is to repeat St. Augustine’s insight that community requires love, at least of the most basic sort, in order to come into existence and to hold together.

 

Christian community itself is a reality that is purchased through suffering, by love that gives sacrificially. Christian community requires charity, self-giving and sacrificial love. The model for us is the Cross. The voluntary embrace of sacrifice on the part of the Messiah led to salvation for the world. It brought into existence the Church, which is nothing less than the world redeemed by God’s love. In order to re-found and re-orient human community, God himself had to provide the sacrifice. God’s charity toward the human race in the person of Jesus Christ given for us breaks down our hatred and leads to forgiveness and welcome. In the midst of our own suffering and disenfranchisement a table is prepared for us in the presence of our enemies, who are themselves also included and welcomed by God.

 

The Church is founded on sacrifice, so there’s a compelling logic behind our reaffirmation of ordination vows during Holy Week. We don’t need to save the world or the Church: good news for the ordained, thank God, since both world and church are in pretty tough shape. That work has already been done by the Savior of the world. But as I’m about to remind us all in a few moments, “the ministry we share is none other than the sacrificial ministry of Christ”. Our lives as “stewards of God’s mysteries” (1 Cor. 4:1) are ordered to this end, that the members of the Church may not forget their own calling. As ministers of the altar, in making Eucharist, we are supposed to “show forth the Lord’s death, until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26), in Paul’s words.  As preachers who “preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23), we are supposed to proclaim Christ’s sacrificial death; and in our preaching to plot the course of its trajectory in the world we live in, among the everyday events of our lives.

 

But above all, we are called to show forth in our lives what we profess by our faith, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our lives themselves are meant to have a cruciform quality, in which the movement through death to life is readily apparent. Those whose lives are ordered by the Church for this ministry of Word and Sacrament will of necessity discover this, from the beginning to the very end of pastoral ministry.  Again, to paraphrase St Paul, we do it all for the sake of the Gospel, that we may share in its blessings (1 Cor. 9:23).

 

The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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