Morgan Allen, Class of 2003 from the Diocese of Western Louisiana

Senior Sermon on October 3, 2002

Come Holy Spirit, and enkindle in the hearts of your faithful, the fire of your love. AMEN.

"The mind of Christ." The phrase bears a weight itself, as if we were to set it on a scale, gears would turn and balances would shift at the very carriage of the words - it is a heavy image to consider.

In the epistle to the Philippians, Paul commissions his readers to participate in "the mind of Christ," to participate in an attitude and purpose of course characterized and enacted by obedience and by humility. So goes the hymn: "Though Christ was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited." Rather, Christ "empties himself," and, "being found in human form," he humbles himself, "obedient to the point of death."

In service to his argument, Paul carries to the surface of his theology Christ's pre-existence and independence within the Godhead, a rhetorical decision directing a particular emphasis to the discerning action of Christ. Christ chooses, and, by that claim, Paul's call to the church at Philippi - his "therefore" moment - gathers its logical momentum: as Christ chooses, so must we choose; and, as Christ chooses obedience and humility, so, too, must the people of God obey and be humble. Paul writes, "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus."

Christian humility, then, is our intent to set the needs of others before the desires we have for ourselves. Christian humility is our intent to set the needs of others before the desires we have for ourselves: before our desires to be successful; before our desires to be universally likeable; before our desires to be comfortable. The humble intent is born of our will-to-faith, our energy to be faithful to the One God, as modeled by the fidelity of Christ.

The expressions of that fidelity and the humility thereby provoked, depend upon the peculiar conditions of a time and a space. That is to say, our fidelity and our intent to be humble remain constant, but what it looks like in practice to set the needs of others before our own desires depends upon the situation in which we discover ourselves. Humility requires us differently in different situations.

Imagine: It is time for the convocational clericus, that afternoon every 2nd Tuesday, when we and the clergy from St. Pious and St. Flatulence and Holy Spearmint gather to eat lunch (you know, break bread, share some fellowship) and support one another's vital ministries. Of course, Beverly Cleary, The Very Rev. Bev, as she likes to be called (but says that she doesn't), is late today. As it happened, the guy from Road Runner who was coming about the cable modems, well he was running late, and The Very Rev. Bev. needs full downloading capabilities for the webcast of the national church's missiology conference this evening. Would you believe that there are eight people in the Spearmint parish who are signed-up to attend the programming?! Now, the good news on this day is that the caravans from Grace Home, "An Apartment Community Where Dignity Comes First," have arrived on time, and they have delivered Fr. Roosevelt, the long-term interim at St. Pious. Because no one else seems like they're gonna do it, we wheel him to what we believe to be an affirming sort of spot at the table. As his minibus pulls away we notice through the windows of its rear doors the drawn faces of a man and a woman, but, before we can almost think of that scene in The Graduate, Fr. Goldleaf, the associate at St. Flat's, rushes around the corner in his 2003 Lexus sedan. We consider for a moment that his wife drives a Lexus SUV, and we wonder, what is the plural for Lexus: Lexi? Lexae? For Fr. Goldleaf's sake, we hope it's not Lexuses, as his lisp can stop a sssilver dollar on a dime. As he walks into the fellowship room, Fr. Goldleaf pats his brow (we believe with one of the new paper purificators the Bishop has been encouraging) and announces that he will convene for the convocational dean, Marshall Mathers, his rector at The Cardinal Parish. It seems Fr. Mathers had a conflicting tee-time with the mayor that he, "just didn't feel comfortable breaking."

And then there's us. Wet behind the ears. The new Deacon. The rookie. Eager and scared, energetic and immobilized all at once. Called to the Priesthood, called to this damn meeting, and called to be humble. Who are we in this mess?

I submit to you that those expressions we have traditionally catalogued as synonymous with humility (according to Roget) - "lowliness, bashfulness, innocuousness, smallness" - attend only a single moment in the life of being humble. The archetypal models of these sorts of humility - turn the other cheek, bear your cross - serve us in the church inordinately, as generalized buffers between our earthly desires and the responsibility to risk even that which we hold most dear. We don't toss the Temple tables of this place, not because we choose to be meek, but because we choose to be prideful. We are too often unwilling to risk our social standing, our ecclesial candidacy, our fiscal well-being, for what it means to be faithful and for what it means "to set the needs of others before the desires we have for ourselves." It's hubris, not humility, that keeps us quiet.

We have tortured the models of humility's expression that Christ reveals into one-size-fits-all smallness because turning the other cheek guards so effectively that caddy of desires we are unwilling to expose to even the possibility of communal accountability or change. Selfishly, our stake in ourselves and our own glory is too much to jeopardize for even Truth itself, and so we begin that life-long process of rounding the edges of who are, of rounding the edges of who we're called to be - so that there is no sharpness to us - until our only course of action is inaction or afternoon tee times with the mayor or cable-modem teleconferencing. And if, under the auspices of something like bashfulness, we confine ourselves to only those darkest alleys between sacristy and quire, altar and nave, church and world, where the likes of Fr. Goldleaf and the Very Rev. Bev. deal exclusively in interpersonal anesthetics, then we deny our charge to humility, refuse our call to faithfulness, and, while we claim it with our words, we reject the mind of Christ.

The humility to which Paul calls us, the humility that Christ models, empowers the community and its members, and as that Gospel power becomes invested in us, comes to constitute who we are by our actions, we become an excited and an exciting people: Truth gets shared, lives gets saved, worlds get changed. The humility to which we are called bears God in the world, and, while that's a necessarily endangering event, it's what it means for us to "work out…salvation with fear and trembling." It's absolutely dangerous to take one another so seriously, absolutely dangerous to love so radically, and our fears discipline us to be careful. But, in the best times of us, when the story of God's purposes finds its variable expression in our lives, when we no longer act humbly but become humility, are humility and love and grace, Calvary shines a fresh light into us, not as any singular expression of how-to-be-humble, but as a model of fidelity's thoroughness, and we can love so powerfully in our own lives because we know from the life of community what it means to be so powerfully loved.

In the Ordering of Priests according to the 1928 Prayer Book, the Bishop reads to those

who are to be ordained "as followeth:"

And now again we exhort you, in the Name of our Lord
Jesus Christ, that ye have in remembrance, into how high a Dignity,
and to how weighty an Office and Charge ye are called: that is to
say, to be Messengers, Watch[persons], and Stewards of the Lord; to teach,
and to premonish, to feed and provide for the Lord's family; to seek
for Christ's sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for his children who
are in the midst of this naughty world, that they may be saved through
Christ for ever.
Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great
a treasure is committed to your care. For they are the sheep of Christ.

Well, hell yes I'm scared. I am scared to lead, I am scared to love, I am scared to speak out, and, depending on what day of the week it is, I am The Very Rev. Bev. I am Father Roosevelt. I am Father Goldleaf, because to do what love requires, what humility demands, is to risk the most authentic parts of us, to claim what it means to be a Christian, to risk being disputed and being ridiculed, to be fools for Christ. We all tremble and fear - at least we had better - but that doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to remember that every one we meet is a sheep of Christ, that every moment we enter is a "treasure committed to our care." And that we must tend each with the intensity and the integrity that the Gospel requires. The Christian life to which we are called is one of action, one of enacting, and one of activation. The Incarnational call we answer isn't to do something sorta "like that;" it's to go out and do likewise, to do just like that, to be the struggle of faith in the world. Life's just too short to run around being symbolic. For as Paul tells us, reminds us, blesses us: "it is God who is at work in [us], enabling [us] both to will and to work for his good pleasure."

In the name of a God who creates, a Spirit who animates, and an Incarnate Power
who saves us from ourselves, AMEN.