Psalm 18 Archives - 51��Ƶ

John Hines Day and Dedication of the Loise Henderson Wessendorff Center

nancy — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 15:58:44 +0000

Amos 7:7-9
Psalm 18:21-36
2 Corinthians 4:5-12
Luke 9:23-26

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

Today we honor John Elbridge Hines, the founder of the Episcopal Theological 51��Ƶ. We remember his fearlessness as he led the Episcopal Church into the most difficult, divisive, compelling challenge of his generation: the legacy of slavery, the inequities of race, the ongoing suffering of citizens of this nation. We recall his powerful preaching — that very old-fashioned low tech art of personal, corporate, scriptural persuasion and conversion. We give thanks that he established this seminary, and that God has given it growth to be the place that we love and serve today.
I know John Hines through those who knew him, Dena, Charlie Cook, and Carl Shannon, and lots of others, even people I run into in my travels: Dolores Goble, from Houston, who still talks proudly of having been confirmed by him as a young woman at the University of Texas in a confirmation class of one. I have heard fine preachers interpret him in sermons on his feast day.
However, I am mindful that whenever you celebrate the past, (especially if you weren’t there) there is a risk that you will romanticize and exaggerate the accomplishments of saints of an earlier era, and compare the colorful drama of then with your own pastel and uneventful present.
It would be a terrible shame to do that, because then we would miss God’s call upon us at the present moment.
Today, when we dedicate the Loise Henderson Wessendorff Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation and give God thanks for the gift from her foundation to endow and name the center, we are taking the present seriously.
Now in the present, we are exercising, in our own way, the gift that John Hines had: of reading the signs of the times. He looked around, at reality of the world – in Jesus’ time the region of Galilee, in Hines’ the United States of America and he looked at it in light of the good news. And he discerned how the church was being called to take up the cross daily and follow Jesus.
We are reading the signs of our times and recognizing and naming the world’s brokenness and hurt. We are feeling the pressure and experiencing the lure of God’s call. Our Vocation.
For the drama of the present moment is indeed as intense, and the suffering as severe as in the time of John Hines. The gospel makes a claim upon us to speak and to act – to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, let the oppressed go free, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
In the present moment, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are returning home, and their wounds are not yet healed. Their families need to be held up and cared for. They are traumatized, broken, disoriented – these are the ones whom Jesus went with, those who showed faith.
The graduates of the Loise Henderson Wessendorff center will be serving these, they will listen for their questions, listen them into speech, hear them into healing. Bring them a word of hope.
Whole families without health insurance get sicker and sicker – the old, the babies and go en masse to the ER. Graduates of the masters programs in counseling and chaplaincy will care for the whole person, body, mind, and spirit. They will minister to them, in the translation of the scripture, “wait upon them.”
Graduates of the Henderson Wessendorff Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation at the 51��Ƶ will offer healthy food to the spiritually hungry, who are high on junk food but famished for the Word of God.
To postmodern, media-overloaded, surfers, driven to distraction, they will seek together for the peace which passeth all understanding.
God calls gifted people, from all walks of life, to come and study for ministry as counselors, chaplains, teachers, and spiritual directors. They come to be well trained in the clinical methods of their fields, and to be grounded in the Christian tradition, formed in its patterns of prayer. In their listening, questioning, pastoring, they invoke the prophetic vision of the new creation spun out by the prophets and embodied in Jesus.
In a violent dog eat dog world, human beings are chemically programed for survival at the expense of the unfit, and the laws of the marketplace are the only reliable rules, contrast and summon Amos’ vision of God’s justice measured with a plumb line, straight and true, against which the violence and greed of Israel would be judged.
Weave Isaiah’ vision of comfort to those who mourn in Zion, a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
Recover and put into new words (or even old words) the vision of the human being, made in the image of God (Genesis 1) and (Genesis 2) molded from dirt and infused with the spirit of GOD.
The human being, us, our sister and brother, as made of clay, basically mud, or even hard fired shiny china, but even so, able to be shattered by force, by childhood trauma, by a roadside bomb, back into the dusty elements from which we were formed, and yet even then, precious, worthy, holy, beloved.
Paul recovers and weaves the prophetic vision:
“We have these treasures in earthen vessels (clay jars) so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”
“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”
Jesus invoked the prophetic vision and preached the reign of God. He taught the paradox at the heart of reality that it is by losing one’s life that you ultimately save it. He performed that paradox in his passion.
It is God’s call upon us at this present moment to invoke this prophetic vision, through the work of the Loise Henderson Wessendorff Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation of the 51��Ƶ. Let us pray that we will be swept up into that same arc of prophetic preaching, shared with John Hines, with Amos, with Jesus, and with Paul, the vision of the new creation.
Amen

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John Hines Day 2011

nancy — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:44:55 +0000

John Hines Day
October 6, 2011
The Rt. Rev. David M. Reed, MDiv ’83, DD ‘08
Bishop Suffragan – Diocese of West Texas
Christ Chapel, 51��Ƶ
Amos 7:7-9a; Ps. 18:21-36; II Corinthians 4:5-12; Luke 9:23-26
Jh. In the Name of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
INTRO: It’s a privilege and a blessing to be with you for this celebration of the life and ministry of John Hines, 4^th Bishop of Texas, 22^nd Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and most importantly for our purposes here today, without which there wouldn’t be a here, here , for us to celebrate, Founder of 51��Ƶ almost 60 years ago. Born 1910, died 1997…the child of God, and heir of the Kingdom.
When Bishop Hines announced his plans for this seminary, the first to be established in the 20^th century, he dreamed of a seminary fully engaged with the culture, interpreting Christian theology in terms the modern world could understand and led by a faculty of intimidating intellect, stupendous scholarship, amazing good looks and rigorous yet incredibly merciful teaching methods. The seminarians from West Texas would like their professors to know that they feel the dream has come true.
It is an honor, and humbling, to be invited to preach on such a day as this, to stand in this chapel and this pulpit made possible by the vision and energy of Bishop Hines, a passionate and prophetic preacher. And to do so with his family and friends, and some of the clergy who were here when this place was built—it’s all a little intimidating. What was I thinking when I said yes? I haven’t preached here since my Senior Sermon in 1983, and am grateful to the dean for giving me another chance. It feels just the same, except I’m not being graded…well, yes, I guess I am…
The bishop’s passion and prophetic leadership grew out of, of all things, his love for Jesus. He could not imagine that following Jesus could lead anywhere else but to the poor, the overlooked, the alienated, the oppressed—to lead him to stand against segregation, apartheid and poverty. The Incarnation illumined his life and his ministry, and in the crucified, dead and risen Christ, he found the grace, the strength and the stubbornness to enter into and stand with those who suffer. And not just stand there, gawking like a turista, but to talk about it boldly, to call and recall the comfortable and secure Church of his day to pay attention to Jesus.
“The more you genuinely concentrate upon the person and ministry of Christ,” he told a gathering at the College of Preachers, “the more you will be driven into confrontations in his name with the powers of darkness and with the demonic structures that demean human life and frustrate and scar the human spirit.” Standing in this prophetic tradition, your dean said in a meeting last spring, “If we don’t tell the world it’s crazy, who will?” Or I guess the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel work, too: “If you want to follow me, deny yourselves, take up your cross, and come on.” I looked up Bishop Hines’ in the NY Times, and this was my favorite line: “He was accused by critics of overlooking administrative detail as he focused on social issues.” May that be engraved on all our tombstones.
It’s not easy being a prophet, and it’s even harder when you’re on the inside, and Bishop Hines was way on the inside. He was bishop and presiding bishop when that still carried a lot of weight and opened a lot of doors. And yet, not counting equality with the social movers and political shakers a thing to be grasped, he saw his office and authority as instruments and leverage for God’s Kingdom, ways in which he could confront the demonic structures that demean human life, go up against the love of power with the power of love, and get in the face of his own beloved Church and say, “Pay attention to Jesus.”
I suspect that one of the reasons most of us have a hard time hearing prophets—I mean, besides the fact that they’re usually talking about us—is that it seems to be a fine line between being a prophet and being a jerk. Real prophets seem to be pretty disinterested in their identity as prophets, don’t seem to dwell on it; it’s not about them, they say, and their words aren’t even their own. They seem overtaken by God’s Word. Fake prophets seem to be self-conscious, concerned with how they’re doing, maybe even enjoying how they’re upsetting everyone. Real prophets are heart-broken by the work God gives them. There’s plenty of righteous anger, but they are speaking against the people they love…because they love them. Who else will bother to tell these people they’re crazy?
In the Book of Amos, just after the passage we heard about Amos’ waking-dream about the plumbline used to test the sturdiness and straightness of a wall, the priest Amaziah reports to King Jeroboam that Amos is stirring up trouble “in the middle of the house of Israel.” He characterizes him as both a political subversive and a religious nutcase. The priest then goes to Amos and says, “Go, please, just go away. Go home to Judah and earn your living prophesying there.” Amos rejects both labels and responds heatedly, “I’m no prophet and not a prophet’s son, either. I’m a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees.” (According to my advanced research, that does not involve putting clothing on trees, but harvesting and cutting up figs.) Then he says, in effect, this was not my idea. “The Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’” (Amos 7:14-15) He was all caught up in this prophetic Word.
I don’t get any sense that Bishop Hines spent much time wondering if he was a prophet. He was a priest, then a bishop, and always a churchman who loved the Church, and loved the Lord of the Church. He was trying to follow him. Only someone who loves the Church and has a lot of confidence in God’s purposes for the Church could have devoted so many years to challenging his people to take up the cross and have real life. If you think of time as the measuring out of our lives, then in a very real way, Bishop Hines laid down his life for the love of Jesus.
Times have changed, of course, and the Church is not the way it was when Bishop Hines served it. But I’ve come to suspect that the Church has never been “the way it was.” We live in a time of anger, despair, fear, division, and distrust. And that’s just within the Church…What were you all thinking when you said yes? How will the prophetic Word be heard in our own day, in a culture whose interest in the Church seems to be descending to the level of reality TV: if it’s not about sex, power, fighting, yelling and bad behavior, who cares? How do we get a hearing for God’s Word?
I don’t know if God has called or will call any one of you to be his prophet. Best not to worry about it. But know for sure that he has called you through your baptism into a prophetic movement, a countercultural Way that is against the world for love of the world. Because Jesus is our true Prophet, his whole Church is prophetic by nature. Listen: You are here, for Christ’s sake…you’re here on a Thursday morning, in this chapel that a passion for the Gospel built. Have you not heard, and have you not seen, that gathering for worship, week by week, is an incredibly countercultural and prophetic act? (I was dragging my vestments in here earlier this morning, and walked right into Morning Prayer. What could I do, but stop and join my prayers to the prayers of those stopped to be recollected to God, those who stepped out of all their busyness to remember they have been set free, and to remember who now owns them. How countercultural is that?) Where else will people hear this life-giving Word? Where else will people be caught up in this Word, pressed down, sifted and transformed? And we come, week by week, not to hunker down and escape—we’re crazy if we think we can be at ease in Zion these days– but so that we can be comforted and confronted, strengthened, fed, lit up, and sent back out there, convinced that “in here” and “out there” are all the same to God.
In your time in this seminary, you will feast on words, you will be overstuffed with words, and they aren’t always going to taste like honey-dipped scrolls. But the point– what makes it all worthwhile—is not that you become really, really smart, but that you be transformed… made into God’s holy people…that your heart gets changed. You will find that you begin to look out these chapel windows differently, that you see differently, maybe with the eyes of Jesus, and that you have a language of hope and joy with which to describe what you see and know. It could just be that you get carried away by it all and end up doing something bold and prophetic, and people will say, “Well, yes, but he’s a political subversive, a religious nut,” or “Well, you know, she’s not much of an administrator.” And you’ll care, but not that much, because you’ve been caught up in a movement that takes your breath away and gives you the breath of God, the living Word…I think it’s something in the baptismal water.
Because Jesus is a prophet—calling for repentance, saying the hard and hope-filled truth, announcing and embodying this Kingdom, pointing to this new thing God is doing– the whole Church is, by nature, prophetic, standing like a cross jammed into the ground, recalling us…them…everyone and each one…to the redeeming love of God in Christ Jesus. To us has been given the compelling Word that sends us out again and again to confront all that demeans and destroys life, to stand with those who suffer, to overcome the love of power with the power of love, and to always, always, pay attention to Jesus. AMEN.

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