Zechariah 1:7–11
Psalm 31:19-24
Revelation 14:13–16
Matthew 8:5–13
Alan Jones is a priest and was for a long time Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Phyllis Tickle lives on a farm in Millington, Tennessee. She is an editor and writer. She is a lector in her parish church and a Eucharistic Minister – and she is the mother of seven children. Ini Kopuria, whom our Church remembers this evening, was, for a large part of his life, a cop.
Twenty-seven years ago Alan wrote a splendid and prophetic book called Soulmaking in which he talks about the inner life of the human spirit and about the psychology of the spiritual journey we are on as followers of Jesus. He also says a bit about the shape our church is in in our time. He was an early voice, now joined by a whole chorus others, insisting that the church we all know and love is in for changes of a magnitude only rarely seen before. He says our times in particular will require of us a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest.” He means to imply, I am sure, that there is much about faith that can be not passionate, but lukewarm; not intelligent but over-simplified and intellectually shallow; not honest but fearful, willfully duplicitous and ignorant: A fortress of denial not an outpost of the Gospel.
Alan compares our situation to that of the English residents of Victorian India in the days of the Raj – when Brittan’ia ruled the waves. There is a story that when those English colonials had to flee quickly because of uprisings of the indigenous Indian population, the road out of town was “strewn with such things as stuffed owls and Victorian bric-a-brac,” – those decorative but otherwise useless things the ruling class had gathered about them. Jones says he has no idea what our church’s equivalent of “stuffed owls” will be in the coming era, but that he is sure, because of the changes God is making in God’s church, that our paths will be just as littered. He says that having faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest” means that, “we Christians will need to travel light,” wisely choosing what we take forward with us.
For Phyllis Tickle, it isn’t that there will be road littered with once valued and now useless things. She says In her book The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why that from time to time the Church has “a great collective rummage sale”: a time when things once useful, but now no longer so, are discarded. What I like about what Phyllis says is that, though our times are extraordinary, and can be extraordinarily difficult, they are not unprecedented. She demonstrates most convincingly – and somewhat consolingly – that every five-hundred years or so this Great Collective Rummage sale takes place – and you and I happen to be living during just such a cleaning-out of the attic.
So, what are the stuffed owls we must leave behind? What is being shuffled off to the great rummage sale?
We are so much in the middle of it all, it’s not always easy to say, but there are some things that we can be pretty sure of.
One thing that will be left behind is the notion that only those who are ordained deacon, priest or bishop are ministers of the Gospel. There was a celebrated Bishop of New York who, fresh from his ordination as bishop in the great Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, was sharing with his wife how wonderful and moving and glorious the day had been. “I suppose so,” was her laconic reply, “but I hope you don’t think anything that happened today was more important that your baptism.”
And so it is: the church is leaving behind the ideas that the ordained are there only to minister to the un-ordained, that clergy are providers and laity are consumers. The truth being rediscovered is that we all minister to each other with equal authority and equal integrity – and that our ministries are not confined to “churchy” things and emergency situations. Oh yes, being an acolyte and a lector and an usher are important and valuable, but they are not, in the emerging model, “ministries” in the most profound and beautiful sense of the word. Those churchy things are the things we do around the family table so that we can go out into the world where our real ministries are – and, once out there, serve the world in God’s name. It may well be, and probably is, that the old hierarchical structure of the institutional church is a stuffed owl just waiting to be left on the roadside of the spiritual journey.
You certainly know that while EfM – Education for MINISTRY – may indeed make you a better lector and eucharistic minister, usher or member of the altar guild, that is side-effect and not the main purpose of all the reading and learning and praying and worshiping-together you have done over the past four years.
The goal of EfM has been to prepare us for ministry in the world.
“You may be the only Gospel your neighbor ever reads,” says St. Francis. As I look around at what passes for Christianity in contemporary culture – exclusivity; political polarization, national arrogance and denominational elitism, a retreat to fearful and fearsome fundamentalism – I am convinced that the Gospel of which St. Francis speaks, is more critically important than ever. The world needs the living Gospel, visible in us followers of Jesus, as we go about our lives following his example – his kindness, his compassion, his honesty, his faith and his hope. EfM seeks to empower us to be that Gospel – in the check-out line, at the stop-light, in schools and hospitals and shops and offices and restaurants and on busses and trains and everywhere else we live our lives.
EfM calls us to be theologians of the ordinary.
As conscious followers of Jesus Christ, ministry is what we do and who we are all the time. Any other, rarified, specialized, esoteric understanding of ministry is a rummage-sale item we can hope and pray that nobody buys.
Which brings me to Ini Kopuria – remember him? Ini Kopuria was a cop. Well actually he was that and some other things too; but what he was not is ordained. True, he eventually founded an organization called The Melanesian Brotherhood, a kind of semi-monastic fellowship of men; but even then, the members of the Brotherhood were laymen, not ordained, and their vows were temporary, with the expectation that each brother would eventually return to customary community life, most likely marry and be followers of Jesus in their daily lives.
Early on as a student, Ini Kopuria showed a profound interest in things religious; and his friends and associates fairly assumed his life would be about churchy things as a profession. But Ini Koipuria chose to become a cop. That, I am sure, is why we had that interesting reading from Zechariah about those who “patrolled the earth, and lo, the whole earth remains at peace.”
Though he would eventually dedicate his life to the Brotherhood, the truth is he spent more of his life outside the Brotherhood than in it. And, again I say, he was never ordained – other that most important ordination we all share, the ordination of baptism.
One of his biographers choose five particular characteristic to describe him:
First . . his spirituality: prayer was a very real thing with Ini: God was in all his thoughts. Second, his joyousness, he was almost always in high spirits, full of fun, full of the joy of being alive, it was good to live with him. Third, his deep understanding of the thoughts of Melanesians. Fourth, his common sense, he always knew what was practicable and kept discussions to that which was reverent, joyful, sympathetic [and] wise. (Charles E. Fox. From Southern Cross Log (New Zealand Edition), June 1, 1946, pages 21-24.
Prayerful, joyful, perceptive-of and sensitive-to those around him, and a man of common sense. Four virtues anyone of us could claim if we will. In the case of Ini Kopuria these ordinary virtues were the path to the exemplary life that we celebrate today – ordinary human virtues were his path, entering into the hierarchy of the church was not.
Those are four virtues, but I mentioned a fifth. Ini was said not be “popular with the White staff who thought him conceited.” His very English biographer goes on to say that there was indeed some “truth in this, for he felt his own gifts.” “For he felt his own gifts” – and so the British colonials found him conceited. It seems that in Ini’s time-and-place the stuffed owl of racism had not yet been set out on the curb for pick-up. Would that all God’s children would feel – and claim – their own gifts.
I pray that your experiences in EfM have set you on the path to feeling and claiming your gifts as ministers of the Gospel, as Christ’s ambassadors to the world. I pray that it has helped you to a faith that is “passionate, intelligent and honest,” a faith that will help you help us all find the wisdom and the courage to leave the stuffed owls behind.
There is an apocryphal story that tells of some angels talking with Jesus. They ask what are his post-Ascension plans for the earth. “Now that they’ve heard and seen and experienced how much I love them and love the world,” he says, “I’m just going to leave the world in their care. It will be their job to trust that I am always with them, and to carry that message to the world, and to keep that love alive.” The angels sort of chuckled at God’s optimistic regard for the human race. “And if that doesn’t work,” they said, “what other plan do you have?”
“NO other plan,” said Jesus. “No other plan at all.”
As I look around this room today, I have to say there is every reason to think Jesus’s plan was and is a good one.
