The Very Rev. Douglas Travis

Evensong, May 13, 2013

Lections:

Philippians 2:5-13

John 15:12-17

 
St. Teresa of Avila was one of the great mystics of the church. Born after Columbus came to this continent but before Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door, she spent her entire life reforming not only her order, the Carmelites, but the larger Roman Catholic Church. She is one of only four women “doctors” of the Roman Catholic Church.
There was very little that scared Teresa including, apparently, God. She founded and visited Carmelite convents all over Spain, and so she rode her donkey a lot! One day her saddle slipped, and she found herself head down under the belly of her donkey as she crossed a stream. Complaining to the Lord of her treatment, she heard him reply, “Teresa, whom the Lord loves, he chastises. This is how I treat all my friends.” She replied tartly, “No wonder you have so few!”[1]
I must confess to you there were days during the earlier years of my tenure here when being president felt more or less like riding a donkey upside down in a slipped saddle with my head under the water. I’ll leave it to your imaginations to determine whether I complained to God about how he treats his friends!
But I will share this: the older I’ve gotten the more convinced I’ve become that the essence of being a mature Christian leader is resigning oneself to being a friend with God. I say “resign” because by many conventional standards being God’s friend is often not much fun . . . but it may ultimately be the only thing that makes life worth living.
I recently shared with one of my good friends, Cynthia Kittredge, that to my mind the gospel story could nearly be summed up in two passages from the New Testament – Philippians 2 and John 15, our New Testament and Gospel lessons for this evening. Indeed, so convinced am I of this notion that in preparation for this evening’s service I did that most un-Anglican of all things: I completely disregarded the lectionary and chose the readings myself! There is a certain license that comes with being the retiring dean of the chapel!
Let me tell you why I chose these two passages.
Fully a third of the people in the Roman Empire were slaves. In many contemporary versions of the Bible, the Greek word for slave is often gently translated as “servant”, and one can understand why. A servant is a wage owner. She can quit. In contrast a slave is property. He can’t quit! Slavery is perhaps the most horrible of all human institutions. It implies the complete objectification of one human being by another. Despite being human, a slave is little more than a beast to service the needs or pleasure of the master. The horror of that reality is served by accurately translating the word douloV in the Greek text, because it brings home the shocking drama of the biblical message.
The word “slave” appears in both our texts this evening:
 
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. (Phil. 2:6-7)
 
And in John:
 
I do not call youslavesany longer, because the slavedoes not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. (John 15:15)
 
Sometimes the biblical vision is assumed to be so pre-modern that contemporary folk cannot find it meaningful. We’re told that in the world of modern science we can no longer believe in the three-tiered universe. We just celebrated the ascension of our Lord, and I have to confess that stained glass windows showing the bottom of Jesus’ feet as he disappears into the cloud do stretch credulity. But I don’t think that’s the biblical idea. Philippians 2 makes the point: The ever present God, the God who knows the number of hairs on my head, the God who names me and calls me gives me identity – this God is far too big for any of my senses or even my mind to grasp. This God is hidden in light inaccessible and is ineffable. I can only yearn to see this God’s face.
And yet, Paul tells me, in his overwhelming humility and love for me, this God empties himself, taking the form of a slave, and is born in human likeness – so that we who are so very, very small and so very, very limited can see, touch, hear, and know him. As John reminds us, “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I was raised with a profound bias against Baptists. As a kid I could sum up the difference between the Baptists and the Presbyterians with this: the Baptists had “Jesus”. We Presbyterians had “Christ” because, being more sophisticated and less credulous, we were on a last name basis with the Lord. But then I discovered the mystics, people like Teresa of Avila, and I began to have an occasional experience of riding donkeys upside down through streams, and I realized that the only thing really wrong with the Baptists constantly talking about having a personal relationship with Jesus was that they weren’t being biblical enough. The Gospel of John doesn’t talk about having a “personal relationship.” The Gospel of John talks about being friends with Jesus!
Think about the extraordinary elevation that’s occurring in our passage from John. Think about what Jesus is saying! You’re not slaves! You’re not my property! You’re not here simply to serve me! Rather you’re my friends. You are my friends! But there is a price. “You’re my friends if you do what I command you: Love one another as I have loved you! Not just “love one another” but, “love one another as I have loved you!”
Now who can pull that off? The answer is, nobody. Nobody – absolutely nobody – is capable of loving as Jesus loved. So why would he give us a command we can’t possibly fulfill?
Frankly I think the only way we can love as Jesus loves is to love with the selfsame love with which Jesus loves, and to be able to love that way can come only as a gift, a grace. You and I are able to love with the selfsame love with which Jesus loves only through the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit – the Holy Breath of God – the breath with which Jesus fills us.
Now think about this: might not Jesus empty himself, becoming small enough for us to see, touch, hear, and know him that he then might breathe his breath into us that we might become like him, returning with him whence he came. Athanasius put it well: “God became human that human beings might become divine.” And to become divine with Jesus is to become Jesus’ friend.
Now what, you may all be wondering to yourselves, has any of this to do with 51ĘÓƵ?
Together as a community and an institution we have enjoyed extraordinary success these last six years, and the world has noticed. Believe me, the world has noticed.
Success is fun. Success is measurable. If you’ve been successful you can prove it, and you can say, â€Ŕá” did this.
But there’s the rub – the temptation to say, I did this.
Who can love with the love of Jesus? Can I love with the love of Jesus? Can I be Jesus’ friend? Can you?
I’m convinced it is a law that our strengths are also always our weaknesses, and our greatest strengths are always our greatest weaknesses. We have been remarkably successful, and that puts us at great risk.
Let me quote two great 20^th century mystics on the notion of success. Regarding success, Thomas Merton said, “If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”[2]
Strong words. Now let’s be clear. Merton is not counseling that we do our jobs poorly, and he’s certainly not suggesting that the church (or the 51ĘÓƵ) ought not grow. He’s just suggesting that, perhaps more than anything else, success will give the appearance of being what life’s all about at the expense of our discovering what life is truly about. And the Gospel is about nothing if it is not about what life is truly about!
And Mother Teresa had this to say: God does not call us to be successful. God calls us to be faithful. We must figure out what God wants us to do and do it.
You nor I can love as Jesus loves except as we allow Jesus to love through us. You nor I can ascend with Jesus except as Jesus breathes his Holy Spirit, his Holy Breath into us – the same Holy Breath he breathed into those frightened disciples in the upper room after his crucifixion.
Success is fun because it’s measurable and I can say, “I did it.” But it’s as seductive as it is precisely because it so calls me into my â€Ŕá” – it so calls me into my “e˛µ´Ç”.
That’s not how the love of God works. The Love of God calls me out of my ego into the infinitely larger universe of God’s Presence and Love. There miracles happen. Success is measurable, but the General Thanksgiving that we pray at the end of both Morning and Evening Prayer reminds us that the Love of God is immeasurable.
So, how can we live into God’s immeasurable love?
Sisters and brothers, there were times early in my tenure here when I really did feel like I was riding upside down on a donkey with my head in the water, just like Teresa of Avila, with this exception – Teresa was a very short woman. I’m a tall man. As that donkey traversed that stream I kept banging my head on the rocks at the bottom of the stream!
I could not figure out how to get the various constituencies of this community to see and so truly appreciate each other. Everybody seemed to be in a fighter’s stance.
What has changed is this: Before the enrollment grew, before the annual fund doubled, before the Campaign for Leadership proved successful, before the world began to notice – we had to become friends. Our eyes had to be opened so we could see each other, as God sees us. That’s what the love of Jesus does. That’s what the Presence of God’s Holy Breath does.
It is more important that we be friends than it is that we succeed. It is more important that we be friends than it is that we be professional. It is more important that we be friends than it is that we use the latest marketing technique. It is more important that we be friends than it is that we be colleagues.
As we are such friends – as we are friends in Christ – there is a third one always with us, the one who gives us breath, the one who gives us energy. This one who makes it all work, and then it is not â€Ŕá” who am succeeding. It is “we” who are succeeding, in Christ.
Have this mind among yourselves, the mind of the one who emptied himself taking the form of a slave.
And always recall what this one said: I do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends . . .
Focus on your friendship in Christ first and, to quote yet another mystic, all shall be well.
 

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Psalm: Psalm 122

Gospel: John 17:6a,15-23

In the summer of 2001 I accepted the call to become the rector of a parish which had recently undergone a somewhat catastrophic split over the issues of the day. My predecessor, the majority of the vestry, and about 150 members of the parish had left to form a new parish no longer in the Episcopal Church.
When you’re the rector of such a parish you hold your breath every third year as General Convention comes around. It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with what General Convention’s going to do. It’s a matter of dreading yet more infighting as parishioners takes stands on this side or that of whatever the issue of the day is – sort of like iron filings in a box with very strong magnets at either end. Everybody gravitates to one side or the other, there’s nobody left in the center, and the folk at either end quit talking to each other.
So I wondered, what to do? How are we going to hold this thing together?
As you all know, the opening words of the baptismal rite are taken directly from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. The Celebrant says, “There is one Body and one Spirit. The people respond, “There is one hope in God’s call to us.” “One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism.” “One God and Father of all.” (BCP, p. 299)
There is one . . . one . . . one . . . one . . . one . . .one . . . one . . . one. Seven “one’s”! Count them!
Rather difficult to not get the message, huh!
In Paul’s letter what precedes these verses is: “I therefore . . . beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the UNITY OF THE SPIRIT IN THE BOND OF PEACE.” (Ephesians 4:1-3)
I’m loathe to take liberties with worship. To my mind, one of the great beauties of belonging to a liturgical tradition is the manner in which our worship becomes part of the very fiber of our minds and souls through our repeating the same words again and again and through our knowing that worship in one Episcopal parish will look pretty much like worship in another. But in this instance I decided to innovate. Beginning some time in 2002 we inserted Ephesians 4:1-6 between the blessing and the dismissal at the end of the service. Every Sunday the entire congregation would rise and to together recite: “I . . .  beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called . . . bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the UNITY OF THE SPIRIT IN THE BOND OF PEACE. There is one body and one Spirit . . . .”
2003 rolled around. Gene Robinson received consent to be ordained bishop. To my recollection in a parish of well over a thousand members in a very conservative city we lost perhaps two families.
                According to the Gospel of John, the night before he was crucified our Lord prayed: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may my followers also be in us . . . so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, SO THAT THE WORLD MAY KNOW THAT YOU HAVE SENT ME AND HAVE LOVED THEM EVEN AS YOU HAVE LOVED ME.” (John 17:21)
In 1950 my grandfather was a Presbyterian pastor in Abilene, Texas. Do you know how many psychiatrists there were in Abilene at that time? Two! Think about that! Two psychiatrists for a population of well over 100,000 people!
Do you really think they were less inclined to be mentally ill than we are today?
You’ve probably all heard Frederick Buechner’s famous description of vocation: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” What you may not have heard is what precedes it. Let me read that to you. It’s from his little book, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, (1973, p. 95)
VOCATION
It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a [person] is called to by God.
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirements (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.
NEITHER THE HAIR SHIRT NOR THE SOFT BERTH WILL DO. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
All of you here tonight pondering the possibility of coming to 51ĘÓƵ are here because you’ve heard a call, you’re seeking your true vocation. Our mission at 51ĘÓƵ is to form mature Christian leaders, lay and ordained. Notice that “lay and ordained.” 60 years ago there were only two psychiatrists in Abilene because if you had troubles you went to the preacher.
I loved my grandfather dearly. He was a wonderful man and a wonderful pastor. He would have been a lousy shrink.
We in the church can draw the boundaries of our collective vocation ever more narrowly, leaving the very important work of psychological and physical healing and seeking justice to more “secular” professions, or we can acknowledge that God is his infinite mercy does not restrict himself to sharing grace only with those who have mastered ecclesiastical formulas or have made the conscious effort to belong to that peculiar group of people we call “church”.
At that same parish I referenced earlier there were each month something like 55 Twelve Step Meetings. There was real crossover between the two communities, but there were those in the church who had no contact with the 12 Steppers, and there were 12 Steppers who’d be at the church six days a week – every day but Sunday.
What I learned was, that’s okay. God goes where the need is. There is nowhere God isn’t. God is seeking to heal, to love, to usher in his reign of love everywhere.
This is no way compromises my confidence that Jesus is Lord, my conviction that the tomb was empty and the resurrected life is ours to have, or that Christ is present with us at His Table.
It does however weaken my conviction that entrance to the Kingdom will be determined by passing a theology exam.
And so at 51ĘÓƵ we form priests because the church – and the world – desperately needs good priests. But we also train counselors and psychotherapists and chaplains and spiritual directors, and we welcome enthusiastically those who have not yet really determined just what they think of God, but they need a safe place in which to seek entrance to God’s Kingdom.
They need a safe place . . . .
Safety is marked first and foremost by friendship.
All of you are here this evening seeking to discern whether 51ĘÓƵ is the community in which you will seek to be formed as Christian leaders. As surely as we were all created in the image of God, so in God’s mind there is an image of the true you and an image of the true me. In God’s mind there is the true self God calls us each to be.
Self and vocation may not be exactly the same, but it’s sure difficult to separate them from each other – rather like trying to separate heat from fire or wet from water. And self and vocation go hand in hand in knowing God. As St. Augustine put it, “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know You.”
As surely as we each have a vocation wherein our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger, so we each have a deeper vocation as well. Sisters and brothers, every one of us sitting here this evening – every single one of us, no exceptions! -has a vocation to friendship, first with God, then with each other.
That same evening Jesus prayed that his followers might be One, he said to them “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. . . . You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit . . . I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” (John 15:12-17)
I spend a lot of time pondering just what a Christian leader is. It’s not always the person in charge, believe me. What I’ve come to think is that a Christian leader is that person who truly knows God and so who truly knows her self. Likewise a Christian leader is that person who truly knows his self and so truly knows God. And in this truly biblical knowledge the Christian leader knows his or her vocation. And so the Christian leader knows the joy of her deep gladness meeting the world’s deep hunger.
But more than that the Christian leader understands the primacy of friendship with God and so of friendship with one another.
And so, from her heart the Christian leader can say “there is one body and one Spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

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