Sermon for Institution of George Smith

Sermon for the Institution of George Smith
as Rector of St. Mark’s, Glen Ellyn

May 4, 2006

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Amen.

When was the first time you fell in love? I don’t think any one of us is either too young or too old to recall the moment when we realized we loved someone, when we stepped over the line of curiosity or flirtation and admitted to ourselves, “I’m in love.” It’s a very dangerous step, crossing over that line—full of booby traps and unrealistic expectations. Some question whether “falling in love” is love at all, especially in hindsight, but we need not worry about that tonight. What you and I are about tonight is the Celebration of a New Ministry and the joyfulness, the hopefulness, and just good feeling of falling in love.

I don’t know if George has shared this with you or even if he believes it to be true, but I think I know when George fell in love with you. And while it’s always dangerous to comment publicly about someone else’s love life, the calling of a new rector is not only a spiritual and practical enterprise, it is also an emotional one. And while I have no access to your side of the equation, I can certainly report on George’s side of the equation and, moreover, he can’t shush me up because that would be reneging on his invitation for me to preach.

Just to set the stage a little bit, the calling process involves a lot of sniffing around on the part of both the parish and the candidates. You begin with a lot of indirect data: the parish profile, the candidate’s resume and church deployment profile, the Bishop’s assessment, references, all that sort of stuff. My first contact with St. Mark’s was a phone conversation with Ashley Woodewiss when George was among seven or eight people St. Mark’s search committee was looking at more closely. From the candidate’s perspective, you’re thinking about what kind of community Glen Ellyn is, what size the church is, its history, its facilities, and perhaps the challenges. The parish in the meantime is concerned about experience, marital status, educational background…you get the idea. All very preliminary stuff, and not very personal at that.

At some point, however, you take the risk of falling in love. It’s a bit like the continuation of John’s gospel when Jesus says, “I do not call you servants any longer….but I have called you friends…You did not choose me but I chose you.” At some point in the process you say, “Choose me. Love me. I no longer want to be a function, I want to be a friend.”

At this point you and George were meeting face to face, and while not declaring out loud that you had fallen in love, that you had crossed the line from inquiry to yearning, you said in your heart of hearts I want to love these people and I want to love this priest.

For George, there may have been multiple moments but one that I’m aware of is when your search committee asked him what kind of pastor he would be for you, and he couldn’t answer. His feeling for you became overwhelming and he could not speak for the depth of that feeling. Whether he could articulate that or not, that’s when George said, “Choose me. Love me. Because I am choosing you and I am loving you.”

Now before we get too mushy about it let’s remember that Scott Peck makes a big distinction between falling in love and love, as does the New Testament, truth be known, but my own feeling is that when called to be the rector of a parish there is something in the deepest part of our souls that gets touched above and beyond job descriptions, letters of institution, and the like. In short, I want to honor George’s choking up as well as your moments of anxiety that he might say “No,” that he might reject you.

And so Jesus’ commandment to love one another as he has loved us informs us at the beginning of this process but then tells us what the substance of your relationship must be. St. Paul in his letter to the Romans fleshes that out as if to say what that love looks like in a parish church. He says, “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; …rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.” That’s what your life together is meant to look like which is nothing short of the aspiration to a mature love, a sacrificial love, a love toward friend and neighbor and even enemy that goes the second mile and will know no limit.

That’s a challenge for St. Mark’s Church in its ministry and presence in Glen Ellyn and as one part of the Body of Christ we call the Diocese of Chicago, as one part of the Anglican Communion worldwide, as one part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. It is not exclusively your challenge. It is mine as well at Christ Church in Winnetka, it is Bishop Persell’s challenge, and it is Bishop Daniel’s challenge in Renk, Sudan, and Bishop Benito’s challenge in Southeast Mexico, to name but a few with whom we are connected and to whom we are committed both within and without this parish and this diocese. After falling in love we must decide what shape our genuine love will take. For the Church in Rome Paul had every reason to tell them to circle the wagon train. The culture was a mess. The Jewish Christians had been expelled by a Roman emperor claiming to be God and the Gentile Christians couldn’t tell the difference between the Torah and a toga. How tempting to make a clear distinction between who’s in and who’s out and then just sit tight until Jesus returns. Instead, Paul says there’s lots of room here. Jews have a part of the truth, but Gentiles have exhibited fruits of the spirit as well. In a letter to another church he’s even more specific. “As many of you as were baptized into Christ you have clothed yourselves with Christ. There’s no longer Jew or Greek, there’s no longer slave or free, there’s no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Does that mean we’re all the same? Not really, and thank God for that. In fact, God expects us to use our different gifts.

And then Paul goes on beyond our reading tonight to say even if it is your enemies who are hungry we are to feed them. In fact, that his how the early Church grew. The hospitality and welcome that was present in the Church in a culture that divided and isolated was God’s spirit at work. In a church that had no creeds as yet much less a Windsor Report, it practiced a theology of embracing love and preached Christ crucified and raised from the dead. There was no orthodoxy apart from the Church’s witness that Christ’s resurrection had conquered death, however death is to be confronted. Much is being said these days about the authority of Scripture, but for the earliest Christians the authority that informed them was the palpable presence of Christ in their midst, the resurrected presence of Christ. It has been said that the gospels do not explain the Resurrection but rather that the Resurrection explains the gospels. It is the Resurrection which is the power of God’s love that has gathered us here tonight, the palpable presence of the Risen Christ that proclaims all of us are children of God, all of us are of infinite value.

And so St. Mark’s Church in Glen Ellyn, Diocese of Chicago, state of Illinois, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Anglican Church worldwide, and the Universal Church, should expect George Smith to preach the Resurrection, and George Smith will have every expectation that St. Mark’s Church will live the Resurrection.

I started my Easter Sunday sermon this year by saying that I was sick and tired of dying and death. This isn’t to say that any of us can avoid dying and death, nor should we sugarcoat it or pretend that “it’s not as bad as all that.” It is as bad as all that in the issues of contention that divide Christians, in grinding poverty that marginalizes and excludes those of a good will and a right spirit who find themselves trapped in class and racial prisons, in tribal and sectarian fundamentalisms that would assign non-believers or other believers to a spirit of destruction, in our criminal disregard for the future of this planet,—death and dying are all around us and within us. But George’s vocation and St. Mark’s opportunity is to confront dying and death with the Good News of the Gospel that Christ has been raised, that death will no longer have final dominion, and that we shall be raised. And tonight we can see that. I can see it in the love that brought George, Cecilia, Lydia, Frances, and Geo to you, and in the love that you have offered them. Whatever else we may say this night, let it be our acclamation, “Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.” Amen.