An Ascension Day sermon by the Very. Rev. Douglas Travis, Dean and President of the Seminary of the Southwest, given on May 1, 2008, in Christ Chapel

Lections

Acts 1:1-11

Ephesians 1:15-23

Luke 24:49-53

Teri preached a magnificent sermon yesterday, and she did so in 10 minutes and 47 seconds!

I make no such promise!

I also want to say that in the year and a half I’ve been listening to student sermons in this chapel I’ve been consistently impressed by the quality of your sermons: their content, their structure, and the obvious fact of your faith shining through. I’m very confident that when you leave the Seminary of the Southwest you’re well prepared to lead the people of God.

In a sense, that’s what I’d like to address today – Christian leadership, especially in our proclamation of the Word.

My father is fond of telling me that bankers are loathe to lend money to three types of people, what he calls the “three P’s” – preachers, painters . . . and prostitutes!

I’d like today to address another set of three “P’s” – Presence, Promise, and Power.

Jesus was crucified. As he hung on the cross he was - apparently - utterly powerless. He died and seemed irrevocably lost. The disciples thought they would never again enjoy his Presence. But then . . . He returns! Not as a ghost. Not as some shadowy form from a place of liminal existence. But as a resurrected person.“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” (Luke 24:39) And they “disbelieved for joy”. Despite our having done our absolute worse to Him, He returns to give us a simple message: I STILL LOVE YOU.

But He does not stay indefinitely. “Lifting up his hands he blessed them. And while he blessed them he parted from them.” (Lk. 24:50-51)

As surely as they had anticipated never again enjoying his Presence - and then did enjoy His Presence – they are now faced again with his apparent absence. “He parted from them.” But He’s made two promises immediately prior to His parting:

In Luke 24:46 we read, “and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things. 49And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’

My own experience as a pastor and, probably more to the point, as a human being is that God has a established a universal spiritual law that if we acknowledge our sins and repent – truly repent – we will enjoy forgiveness. This is God’s Promise! It’s a promise God keeps.

As all of you graduating seniors should know by now, Episcopal Recovery Ministries has given each of you a copy of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. As you all know, AA gave us the now famous 12 Steps. There are two, and really only two, ingredients absolutely essential to the success of 12 Step: Absolute honesty and a willing surrender of wills and our lives to a (notice this word) Power greater than ourselves.

Why is absolute honesty necessary? Because only as I am willing to see and acknowledge myself as I truly am – wounded and desperately in need of healing – can I confess my sin, my dis-ease – and so receives the healing I truly need.

Why must I surrender my will and my life? Because I cannot heal myself. It’s that simple. The First Step is quite simply this: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.” I’m convinced that if we simply replace the word “alcohol” with the word “sin” we’ve described the human condition and the human need perfectly.

I cannot heal myself. If I’m to be healed, I must obviously be healed by an “other”. Teri’s a doctor. If I am in need of a doctor, and Teri is to fulfill that need, then in some manner she must be present to me, even if only by phone. And if I have a serious and life-threatening disease – and we all do – she is nearly certain to want to see me in person.

Jesus was dead. Nothing more irrevocably separates us from a loved one than death. But Jesus was also raised from the dead. The one whose Presence they had lost is restored to them. Jesus then leaves again, but not before first making another promise: “Behold I send the Promise of my Father upon you.” Luke 24:49 But, notice something else! They have to wait for the promise to be fulfilled! Jesus goes on to say, “Stay in the city, until you are clothed with Power from on high.” What power? The Power of the Holy Spirit! (cf., Acts 1:8)

Now notice the dynamic here. Jesus was absent, irrevocably absent. And then He was Present. And then He left again, but only after Promising Power – the Power of the Holy Spirit.

Note the dynamic: Presence, Promise, Power – the three “P’s”.

Edwin Friedman very famously asked of clergy, “Who in your family system ordained you?” As I’ve pondered that question over the years, I’ve come to realize that I was actually ordained by my grandfather one evening in my 17th year. Viet Nam was raging, the draft was in force, and I think he thought my time was coming. For reasons I forget he and I ended up spending the night together alone, and he did something he had never done before and would never do again: he told me about his experiences as a Navy chaplain in the South Pacific during the Second World War.

I don’t know about you, but my experience of veterans is, if they tell you about it, they haven’t seen it. If they won’t talk about it, they’ve seen it.

Granddad had seen it. One story makes the point. A kamikaze had hit the battle ship across the way from his ship. They were bringing the survivors to the deck of Granddad’s ship, and he was going from kid to kid talking with them, praying with them, blessing them as they died. He came to one kid who clearly wasn’t going to make it. He knelt by him, prayed with him, and then as he was getting up to go to the next kid he laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said simply, “God bless you, Son.” The boy responded, “That’s the first time a white man ever said that to me.”

In the early ‘50’s my aunt – Granddad’s daughter – was married to a test pilot for the Marine Corps. They were stationed in North Carolina. One day Sis called Granddad and said, “Daddy, the chaplains are here. You know what that means.”

It fell to my Grandfather to go to Roger’s parents’ house and tell them that their boy had just died in a plane crash. Understandably, they became hysterical. To my utter amazement as Granddad told me the story that remarkable night in my 17 th year, he said, “I wanted to grab them and say, ‘Don’t you know there’s a God?! Don’t you know there’s a God?!”

There is nobody more convinced that all reality can be subjected to human logic than a 17 year old. I did not say this to Granddad, but I sat there silently asking, “How do you know there’s a God? How do you know there’s a God?”

Indeed! How can you watch boy after boy die long before their time and be faced over and again with the prospect of your own death and be so convinced there’s a God?

What years later I came to understand was this: Granddad had not believed – Granddad had not trusted – because of his own logic, though he was a bright and well educated man. Granddad believed – Granddad trusted – because he had experienced the Presence, he had repented and knew from his core out the reality of forgiveness, and he had been filled with Power, the Power of the Holy Spirit to sustain trust in the face of the most horrific of circumstances. Granddad had learned to trust and live in the Promise.

Presence, Promise, Power.

To trust God in Jesus, to trust the Incarnate Lord, is to trust an-other, an-Other Who promises His Presence in the Power of the Holy Spirit.

I became an Episcopalian because of my experience of the Presence at His table. I scarcely always experience Him there with me, but I have so experienced it – and I trust that Presence.

I want to end with a brief reflection on a trusting Christian’s experience – and exercise – of our appropriate power, for to my mind it goes to the heart of what Christian leadership is about.

As we typically use the word “power” we think about somebody Lording it over somebody else, and we all know what Jesus says about that. (cf., Mt. 20:25-29) We Christians love to pay lip service to the idea that we don’t do that. But recall what I said about absolute honesty being the absolutely necessary prerequisite to healing. I am increasingly convinced that nearly all squabbles between Christians are caused by somebody’s confusing their own will to power with the Power of the Holy Spirit.

As we human beings normally exercise power, it is nothing more nor less nor other than our own ability to get what we want, to get my way. A really powerful person gets what he or she wants more of the time than does a powerless person.

I am aware that this raises all kinds of questions regarding justice, and I pray God that my life and my thought demonstrate my devotion to justice. But I’m also acutely aware that when, in my devotion to justice, I fall prey to the temptation to exercise my power, even when I’m right . . . I’m wrong.

And I’m taken by the fact that the great spiritual leaders of the 20 th century – Mohandis Gandhi, Martin uther King, Cesar Chavez, Desmond Tutu . . . Bill W. – never held public office, though many of them were (and note this) ordained. A different power flowed through them, a power which enabled them to seek justice without falling prey to the temptation to simply seeking to get “my way.”

Many of you are about to be ordained. You’re called to be, not just leaders, but Christian leaders – leaders who live in the Presence, who trust the Promise, through whom the Power flows.

Christian leadership is hard, and bluntly, the more authority you get, the harder it gets.

As I have asked you to do, so am I trying to be faithful in reading every day Joan Chittister’s commentary on The Rule of St. Benedict. I’m accused – probably justly – of being easily moved, but last Saturday when I read these words of Chittister’s I sobbed.

Benedict understood clearly that the function of leadership is to call us beyond ourselves, to stretch us to our limits, to turn the clay into breathless beauty. But first, of course, we have to allow it to happen. (April 26)

If you do it right – if rather than exercising your own power you allow the Holy Spirit to exercise God’s power within you – you will be stretched to your limits, and there will be days when you think there is no way you can be equal to the task. May God be praised.

Teri said something beautiful yesterday in her sermon. She said, “God’s gifts to us are never one-time evens; they are given to us anew every second of every day. But when the sense of gift is lost somewhere along the way, the work of our lives ceases to be for us an offering, and becomes a burden.”

Truer words were never uttered.

Might not God’s greatest gift to us be Power? The Power of God’s Holy Spirit? God’s Holy Breath breathed into us giving us God’s life? God’s life now and for all eternity?

As you continue further on your journey into Christian leadership my earnest prayer for you – and for myself – is that you always discern the difference between your own will to power and the Power of the Holy Spirit. And my earnest prayer for you – and for myself – is that, rather than seeking to exercise your power you seek to let God’s Holy Spirit exercise God’s Power through you.

And so I end, I hope appropriately, with these words from Paul:

Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20,21 as translated in the BCP, p. 102)

__________________________________

Sermon preached by Teri Daily, April 30, 2008, Christ Chapel, ETSS

Ibid.