Sermon at the Institution and Induction of The Rev. Dr. James Kowalski as Rector of St. Luke's Parish, Darien, Connecticut, December 10, 1993

[Biblical Readings: Joshua 1:7-9: 2 Corinthians 4:1-6: John 15:9-16]

     Ministry, love, and courage - these are our watchwords this evening as we gather to celebrate a new ministry. The realities that these words represent are at the heart of what those who call themselves Christian experience of God's power in their lives, and which have been experienced by all those faithful persons who have preceded them in the communities of ministry, love and courage that we have called churches.

     First we gather to celebrate ministry. “Ministry” means, of course, serving the needs of others. It comes originally from the relation between master (magister) and servant (minor); the minister served the master. As Christians, of course, we understand ministry as our service not primarily to God (our ultimate master), but to all those persons whom God has, by becoming a servant himself, already loved even unto death itself. We need to note, in this regard, the radical reversal of meaning that God, the master, initiated in becoming himself the minor, or minister of and to others when he took flesh, not to control human beings, but to serve them by the power of self-sacrificial love. He became the least of all in order to serve all in the fullest and most effective way possible: namely, by helping them transcend the all too human distinctions we create between those who master others through the exercise of political and economic power and those who are their subjects.

     God ministered to us not by the exercise of executive power, but by undergoing the extreme embarrassment and helplessness of a cross. God left the executive suite and ministered to all those in the corporation by taking up the janitor's broom in the basement. God knew, as human beings do not, that the secret to real power, the power to achieve what all of us ultimately want even when we can't admit it (namely living together in community in love and friendship) could only be achieved by the power of love, persuasion, compassion, vulnerability, and care for the needy - not by coercion, dominance, force, aggressiveness, and indifference to the weak. So the true Lord of the Universe became the most helpless of all beings in order to minister to the real needs of his people in their helplessness. God did not become less than God, but he showed us through the ministry of Jesus what being God was all about; namely, through the ministry of love the building up, and care of those in need so that, having received fulfillment they could in turn enter into full communion with God and with each other.

     In celebrating ministry, therefore, we are celebrating those who serve the needs of others by placing those needs ahead of their own.

     But who are these ministers who serve others as God served them? They are the people whose lives, careers, and activities are oriented toward meeting the genuine needs of others - those needs that are at the core of what it takes to be fully and most exuberantly human. They are the people who meet the needs of the hungry, the homeless, those with AIDS, the economically poor, those who are rendered subservient and helpless by virtue of their skin color, or age, or gender, or educational accomplishment. And these ministers meet these needs not only in direct voluntary action, but also through the just exercise of political and economic power. These persons are the first and chief ministers of Christ; they are the members of every Christian community; and, most importantly, they are chiefly the laity - the people whose daily work is in the structures, patterns, and policies of the world where need is obvious, real, and persistent. They are the people who can affect most immediately and directly, by their vocational and avocational actions, those who are in economic, political, material, psychological, medical, and legal need. They are the people whose daily work is the work of the world for the sake of the world because God chose to die for the world in order to save the world. They, you and I, are those people who, in our baptism, agreed to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ: to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and to strive for justice and peace among people, respecting the dignity of every human being. These were our commitments, by virtue of our incorporation into the Christian community. They are commitments that are as deeply and fully ours as they are of the ordained persons who we are used to calling ministers.

     But what has happened, you might ask, to the one we have traditionally called "the" minister, namely the priest, or in this case, the rector? We have become so used to naming the priests or the other ordained persons in our community 'the' ministers that we have completely forgotten the meaning of ministry as our work: the work of the community as a whole and of all its individual members. And in the process we have elevated the term minister to a kind of master-status, a position which connotes lordship, executive power, dominance, and privilege to which all other work within the church and from the church to the world is made subservient. Ironically, this relationship of 'the' minister to the congregation returns us to the very position that God himself rejected when he became the minister, the servant who was Jesus, who consorted with the lowest and most outcast members of the society: the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and the adulterers; the one who refused to use his power to do away with his enemies but who, instead, chose to die shamefully on a cross at the hands of his enemies so that they might live.

     Well now, you might think, here comes this old friend of Jim Kowalski's, and he preaches a sermon cutting down Jim's new status as the rector of this important parish. What kind of friend is this?

     I think I can say that Jim is not offended by what I am claiming. Jim knows, and shares, my and the church’s understanding of ministry. Because what I am saying does make his particular ministry extremely crucial and significant. If all of you are the chief ministers of this parish for the world, then Jim's role is really quite extraordinary. He has the awesome responsibility of getting you ready to do your ministry successfully. His ministry is to make you more effective ministers. And this is no easy task. You, by virtue of your daily work 'in the world' are the practical technicians of ministry: your knowledge, expertise, and experience give you the credentials for knowing what will make for the most effective ways of doing the ministry of justice and peace, respecting the dignity of all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself. The 'how' by which these things are, done will be determined most realistically by you, since you understand the particular and concrete contexts of the world in which you work: whether by your economic decisions, your political choices, your business policies, your medical or legal expertise, your use of voluntary time, in short, in any of the ways you wield real power in the world.

     But you need someone who has a ministry that will help you remember the well-springs of your ministry, who will nourish and support you in your work, who will reinvigorate you with the knowledge of God's ministry in Jesus and in your daily lives, who will challenge you to be prophets of change when change is necessary to bring about greater social, and economic justice for those in need, who will stand at the center of your community and point you toward its source, who will preach to you the wisdom of God in all the doings of your lives, and who will offer you the life-renewing power of the grace of God in and through the sacraments.

     You have called your rector to a very special and very particular ministry. His ministry may overlap yours at times; he will be called to speak boldly and with courage (as will you) whenever there are policies that work injustice, hinder peace, and degrade the dignity of persons in the social and political order. Such policies may include those having to do with fair housing, racially integrated schools, justice for the homeless, medical care for all who are in need. But over and beyond those things upon which your ministry and his converge, there will be his ministry of looking after you. Your ministry emerges out of this community; it is not a Lone Ranger ministry, done entirely on your own without any grounding in the community that sustains it. Love, after all, is the meaning of human life, and love makes sense and can be fully realized only in community. As the psalm says: ‘how good and pleasant it is for people to dwell together in unity.’ And Jesus gives this truth concrete embodiment; he calls those who follow him to join in his love: ‘love one another,’ he says, ‘as I have loved you, and in so doing you will cease to be my servants but will become my friends,’ and, like me, will live together in love and in service not just to each other but to the world. Your community of love will be both an end in itself (through the intrinsic delight and joy which Christian love brings) and a means to an end: a living body of persons serving the world as Jesus served them. You are, as Jesus said, to bear fruit for the world, and not just for yourselves. Jim's ministry will be to continually work to develop and maintain the bonds of community so that your ministries will be continually enhanced and empowered by the love you feel for each other and by the love of God which undergirds and uplifts you and those you love.

     Jim will do that in large part by recalling for you the works of love that God has performed for his people throughout human history. The story of those works is in the Bible, and Jim will help you to remain deeply grounded in this book of the acts of God - for without that grounding your works of love will become fragile, self-centered, and without purpose. As the Old Testament lesson puts it, this book will not depart out of his mouth, and he will meditate on it day and night. The power to live out of the story of God's love for his people is the power of the Holy Spirit; and that power is especially present in the sacraments. Jim is called to make them present to you in living and vital ways.

     Finally, Jim will remind you (and you will remind him) not to confuse your worldly wisdom and cunning with the wisdom and cunning of the true Lord of history. God loved the world fully, but the world has not loved fully in return. We must not abandon the world, because it is still God's world, nor must we divide our lives into two irreconcilable parts: world and spirit, for the spirit of God in and through us must permeate every nook and cranny of the world; but nor should we assume that the wisdom that has made us a success in the world and given us status, power, and wealth is the wisdom of God. As St. Paul reminds us in First Corinthians, the god of this world has blinded many people; there is still much darkness, and in that darkness even we who are Christians are tempted to identify the secret of our worldly success with the secret of the Gospel. But they are not the same; the criterion of success, both for you and for Jim, must not be the world's criterion of success: material power and wealth. Rather it is must be the criterion of God's success: the power and wealth of love, and service, and humility. If we believe anything at all as Christians it is that in the powerlessness of God on the cross, we saw the greatest power in the world beginning to do its work; by dying for others Jesus gave others the power to be fulfilled according to God's love for them. By dying to ourselves, we can give ourselves to others and in so doing (by the great paradox of love) bring them and us into the fullness of life that God has given us in his communities of love.

      Jim will be your guide, he will stand with you, he will nurture and support you in your ministries. But all this will take courage: there are many in the world who will be suspicious of you, who will deride you for your unfashionable religious convictions, who will even write you off as irrelevant to the real business of the world. But in celebrating your ministry and your new rector's here this evening, you are proclaiming that your convictions and your commitments are the stuff of life itself and that, in the end, you cannot be defeated, thanks be to God.