Shooting for the Stars

Sermon preached at the Installation Service of Dr Titus Presler
Dean and President
Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, Texas, November 13, 2002

Shooting for the Stars! Well you can blame your new Dean and President for the title that I have chosen -- when he invited me to come and preach for you here tonight he told me with a chuckle to 'Shoot for the stars'. And the message I want to share with you tonight is that it is not ultimately me -- but you yourselves -- who need to aim or shoot for those stars. Certainly not to try and shoot them down, please let's not have any of that 'Star wars' talk! -- but to be inspired by them continually to look upwards. That is what is important. If in your ministries you are too afraid to 'aim high' [Ref: William Carey, "Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God."] you risk end up finding that your gaze becomes mediocre and myopic.

In Titus Presler this seminary has certainly appointed a man as your leader who is himself not afraid to engage in a bit of star-shooting. He has a remarkably wide and expansive vision of the mission and ministry of the Church. I was struck -- should I say star-struck -- by the titles he has given to the two books, both significant contributions to mission thinking, that he has written. One is called Horizons of Mission. For 'Horizon' is not something that is ever completely in our grasp. Whenever we approach a horizon we find it has shifted into the distance -- it has moved onwards to provide us with a new challenge. And Titus' other book which comes particularly out of his years of experience as a missionary in Zimbabwe, which I know have been very important to him -- that one is called Transfigured Night. Night in the imagery of world faiths is often a symbol for gloom, ignorance and despair. But the night is literally transfigured by the twinkling of the stars -- those pinpoints of hope and light that you can see so much more clearly in this clear sky of Texas, than I normally can in the area where I now live near London. Your great American spiritual writer Thomas Merton wrote a book about the difficulties and despair he had faced in his life. When it was translated into French it was given the title, 'La nuit privee d'etoiles ' -- which means 'The night deprived of stars'. The night deprived of stars is indeed the blackest of nights -- and of course, since from time immemorial human beings have used stars to navigate by and find their way, a night deprived of stars is a night where it is very easy to lose the correct path. So keep those stars -- and the horizon -- firmly in your line of sight!

Titus, I am well aware, has so much wisdom and insight to offer you who are training for the ministry of the church. He himself, in his own life and ministry provides a model for the minister or priest of today. I know that his understanding of the role of the minister as preacher includes a deep commitment to wrestling seriously with the biblical tradition. So I in turn want to honour Titus by taking the scripture readings chosen for tonight equally seriously. I know that they will not have been selected lightly -- they speak of his aims and vision for you, for whose training he has been given such responsibility, and for the Church, to which both you and he are ultimately accountable. What is it then they have to say to you, star-shooters?

Our first reading from Isaiah 49 comes out of one of the darkest periods of the Old Testament -- the era of the Babylonian exile. By the time these verses were written people had been in exile for almost 50 years. It seemed never ending. The night was indeed deprived of stars. The people felt themselves to be forgotten, insignificant. They were certainly at the very bottom of the great Babylonian social heap. And then comes this prophetic voice with a message not only of comfort -- but also of challenge, summoning the people to look beyond themselves to God's purposes for the whole world. One of the amazing new insights that seems to come fresh at this very point in the story of the Old Testament is that perhaps for the first time people came to understand that their God was the only God, and that he was the Creator of the entire universe -- earth and sea, stars and heaven. The prophet's vision quite literally soars

It is a vision that we must aspire to even today. The summons to be a light to the nations is a challenge offered to us -- to me and to you! What does it mean for the people of America to be confronted here and now with this demand, you the people of this great nation to whom so much has been given by God, and from whom so much will be demanded in return? I well remember being here in the US at the time of the resignation of President Nixon. On the Sunday following, an elderly about to retire Episcopalian priest lamented in a pulpit in LA, crying "Oh, we who have been given this land of milk and honey, what has become of us? '. I want to echo his words, 'America, what has become of you, today'… this land, the most powerful nation of the earth today, but a country whose conspicuous lifestyle shines such a negative message to many people in the world around, a country where dominance rather than re-existence seems to dictate so many political and even moral agendas, which so often seems to choose to isolate itself from the sufferings of others rather than be willing to share them. I speak, excuse me for my blunt words, for I speak as someone who has known and loved the people of America for many years -- but to those of us who look at this land with the spectacles provided by a world perspective, this country seems to have lost a sense of its common humanity living under a common God with others -- and those others, dare I say it, include even Osama bin Laden. (Ref: NFWP) It is, I believe, the task of church leaders such as you are and will become to hold that vision of self-awareness before your own eyes -- and be bold enough to offer it as a vision to those among whom you will be ministering. It is your role both to be a light to this nation, and to require in turn that this nation should light the way for other nations.

That I believe is also the vision of the Gospel message we have heard tonight. The words we heard from Matthew's Gospel include what is often referred to as 'the Great Commission' the summons to mission throughout the entire world. It is certainly a mandate that has influenced many of us who are involved in world mission. Think about the scene in your mind's eye for a moment -- the resurrected Jesus with the veil that concealed his divinity somehow stripped away, standing atop this high mountain in Galilee. We can imagine him gazing into the far distance, indeed encompassing heaven and earth in his gaze. The Jesus whom we meet on this occasion stands in continuity with the God whose lordship over time and space was so eloquently proclaimed by the prophet in Babylon.

But in reaching this moment in time and history he had to follow a path which defies all logic, in fact was deemed foolishness to the wise of His day, and perhaps remains so even until this day. In choosing to come to live amongst us as an expression of His unbounded love, He set in process what remains the path for us all, regardless of who we are and where we go. God's ultimate engagement with humans was compelled by love but lived out through His kenosis and physical presence amongst us and the engagement that He chose to follow through diakonia and servant-hood and which inevitably led to a relationship. This simple modality of presence, service and relationship remains for me and I hope for you, the eternal model which must be our way of engagement within our ministries and unto the ends of the earth, for all people in all places.

I wish to share with you here two of the major influences in my personal life and ministry which perhaps brought me to this day. Firstly, as a young seminarian I had the immeasurable privilege (although at that time not fully appreciated) to experience once a week in my final year of pastoral studies, the ministry of Mother Teresa in Calcutta. In those days she used to be known as Sister JI, rather than mother. One day a couple of us asked her directly what it was that was so salient and central to her service which both motivated her and convicted others. She smiled and simply said " When I take up a child from the gutters of Calcutta who might even look like a worm, we wash her and look at her face and there, we see the very face of God himself, and so we prepare him or her for life. When we take up the abandoned, sick and elderly, at times even soaked in their own human excrement, we clean them and wash them, give them a clean bed and shelter and offer them simple daily meals -- knowing that we are only preparing them for death." That is all that this woman ever did in company with her clones, those tiny Indian women clad in simple saris. And yet both in her lifetime and in her death, the kings and presidents and nations of the world saluted her. In India she is already revered as a saint of the gutters by over a billion people, 95% of whom are of other faiths than her own. They have not waited for the Vatican to canonise her -- in their hearts and minds she is already the face of God who they experienced in their own lives. Yet I wonder, and I often amuse myself, that if she were ever to apply for a Church based job in our parishes, I am almost sure that she would not get the post. She doesn't fit into our frame-work. She may even be wasting our time and resources by going around the streets, and not increasing our church funds or memberships. What a contrast in what she lived out and our understanding of our ministries.

Many years later as a Bishop in perhaps one of the most hostile areas of the world today, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, I began to appreciate what it means to throw resources into diakonia with almost total disregard to the outcome and a return for our investments. I can think of a small mission hospital in Bannu, a town on the border where for over 150 years we must have spent millions of dollars through people and medicine and other resources -- yet if that investment is to be measured in the number of converts, I think if I could count ten baptised Pakhtuns from there, I would be jumping for joy. But the reward for the church's engagement in those parts has been immeasurable. I can tell you many stories, but simply to say that as I have already mentioned, when I visited it in the second week of October last year, a mob of about 7,000 encircled the hospital and church premises and shouted at our beleaguered Christian community as being stooges of American Imperialism, etc. etc. I was there on that day and we could all have been decimated but miraculously, from within that crown itself, the counter-argument started that what wrong had these people done? They are the people who have cleaned our wounds and served our people for so long. Almost like a biblical scene of old, the crowd gradually melted away and the calm returned.

Such ministries are indeed a vivid message of what it means to be engaged for God's purpose in such difficult and hostile situations. They simply are trying to continuously re-enact God's love as experienced in Jesus Christ in human situations. This I believe is the least and the most that we are being called to be, as servants and messengers of the Church of Christ.

I am hesitant to mention it here but I did have a private conversation, graciously granted by your Presiding Bishop during the last weekend of September last year, when we shared the pain and agony about what September 11th had done to humanity everywhere. During the course of that conversation I had to say to my brother Frank ( who as you may recall had made the most poignant statement within hours of the Twin Towers collapse) as to where did he see his church's active and conscious engagement with the world of Islam in and beyond the Americas. As you might guess, we had to grope for answers!

My dear friends, in all this that I am trying to say is :

> If we are to proclaim the sovereignty of one God, who is in all and through all and with all
>If we are to acknowledge and share our common humanity with people of all cultures and creeds
>If we are to be a light to lighten the nations
>If we are to re-enact God's love in human situations
>If we are to be true to our calling of being a servant and a messenger

Then our life and witness must express the reality that our Lord and Master offered to the world and who in the words of St Athanasius "He came down in order that we might go up". We find our fulfilment through this reconciled relationship not only with God, but also with each other and one another.

I wish to end with a remarkable quotation which I have used recently more often than I care to think, as my inspiration and source of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit to fulfil Missio Dei and our obedience to it. Patriarch Ignatius Hazim IV of Antioch, has expressed this role of the Holy Spirit in these words:

Without the Holy Spirit God is far away
With the Holy Spirit God is within you

Without the Holy Spirit Christ stays in the past
With the Holy Spirit Christ is Risen and Present

Without the Holy Spirit the Gospel is a dead letter
With the Holy Spirit the Gospel is the power of life

Without the Holy Spirit the Church is an organisation.
With the Holy Spirit the Church shares the life of the Spirit

Without the Holy Spirit MISSION IS PROPAGANDA
With the Holy Spirit MISSION IS PENTECOST

Mano Rumalshah
November 2002