Ordination/Dedication Service

Gospel Reversals: Turning the World Upside Down

Text:   Luke 22:24-27

Idea: Greatness is found in servant leadership because it reflects the heart of God as revealed in Jesus.

Introduction

It is getting late. Most of us are weary. Our bags are packed. A journey home and tomorrow’s services of Pentecost await. Thus, I shall be mercifully brief. Brevity in acknowledgment of our common state, and so as not to repeat last year’s marathon sermon and service.

To do so I invite your active participation. Imagine that you are in an art gallery. The paintings are sketches - moving-life glimpses of some who give form, color, and contemporaneity to our text. Who give substance to words of Jesus which affirm that greatness is found in servant leadership because such leadership reflects the very heart of God.

Walk through this gallery of vignettes with me. It will be a short, but I trust, provocative jaunt.

I. Exposition

A. Her name was Lynn. She was the evening news anchor for the local NBC affiliate, when we came to know her. She had covered several events in which I was involved. When our young son died, she came to our home and gave us the pewter candle-snuffer we cherish to this day. It was her way of saying that although a life had been snuffed-out, the flame of love flickers always.

Her gift and gesture were enough. But her own story, that we discovered later, was even more to savor. She and her husband had moved to Cincinnati so that he could complete his doctoral studies, while she studied piano at the Conservatory of Music. Late one night, returning home from the library, her husband was accosted by a group of young men. They attempted to rob him. A tussle ensued. He fell backwards. His head inadvertently struck the curb. He died instantly. Lynn, whose lingering grief cut-short her career as a concert pianist, wrote letters to those young men weekly and visited them, at least monthly, for as long as they were incarcerated.

“One life is gone,” she would say, “the further tragedy would be that other lives be destroyed as well.”

A Gospel Reversal: Turning the World Upside Down.

Keep walking and perusing the gallery.

B. Studs Terkel, the 91-year-old conscience of Chicago, tells the story of Mamie Mobley in his book, Race: How Blacks and Whites Feel About the American Obsession.

Mrs. Mobley was the mother of Emmett Till, the young teen from Chicago, who was murdered in 1955 by two white men because he had looked at a white woman down South.

Mamie Mobley told Studs, “It certainly would be unnatural not to hate . . . yet I’d have to say I’m unnatural . . .The Lord gave me Shield, I don’t know how to describe it myself . . . I did not wish them dead. I did not wish them in jail. If I had to, I could take their four little children — they each had two — and I could raise those children as if they were my own and I could have loved them. . .”

A Gospel Reversal: Turning the World Upside Down.

Keep walking and perusing the gallery.

C. Roger Blanchard taught me, by example, what a bishop should be. Scorched in spirit by the haughty arrogance of the United Methodist bishops I knew at the time, this tall, suave, blue-blooded Episcopalian was a drink of cool water for my parched soul.

He moved his office to dog-eared City Hall from well-appointed Diocesan Headquarters — from safety to peril — in the midst of the turmoil of two urban rebellions. He made himself available and accessible to those most enraged and wounded by urban oppression and the effects of white racism.

He calmly said to the well-armed black militant, in the basement of the church where Stokley Carmichael had just spoken with the KKK encircling outside, exactly what I had heard him say to leaders of the white power structure previously, “Put your armaments on the table and let’s seek justice together.”

Roger died a couple of years ago. He was nearly ninety. He had retired early in part because worldly Episcopalian power was uncomfortable with his embodiment of gospel truth. At his memorial service, I learned that throughout his retirement years he served as a volunteer chaplain at the State of Maine’s maximum security prison. He was the one person who needed neither key nor escort to move among the men. Word is that, when he entered the prison year after year, this antiphon would resound from cell-to-cell: “Father Roger’s here . . . Father Roger’s here . . .” And present to the men he would be, just as he had been present to me when I desperately needed a humble, yet courageous, role model to emulate.

A Gospel Reversal: Turning the World Upside Down.

Keep walking and perusing the gallery.

D. Tom and Judy were the largest financial givers in a congregation of good financial stewards. They tithed their considerable income, quietly. I learned of their considerable generosity through others.

What I did know was that Tom washed dishes for most church functions, especially every meal we ate together with homeless families. Judy was one of the sparks that ignited that city’s rendition of [Public Action to Deliver Shelter], her congregation becoming the pilot tall-steeple local church for this ministry of hospitality.

They were front and center in congregation-based organizing. Such risk-taking flowed naturally from Bible study, worship, and theological inquiry. Tom, now in retirement, cares for the exterior of the church. He mows and prunes the extensive yard and flower beds. Judy quietly embraces those most needful within and among the congregation. Tom is a volunteer care-giver for hospice.

I well remember the day Tom closed his lucrative orthodontic practice to go to court with his Disciples of Christ in Community group-mate. A young man arrested with a weapon and an open container of alcohol in his car. He desperately needed an advocate and Tom was at his side.

And, while issues of sexual orientation were new to Tom and Judy, and played hard with their one-time embrace of biblical literalism, they welcomed the gays and lesbians who became a part of our congregation. They stood with me when we performed a same-sex union in the Sanctuary before such a pastoral and liturgical act became a chargeable offense within our Church.

If they read this manuscript, they will be embarrassed. Most saints are like that.

Gospel Reversals: Turning the World Upside Down.

Keep walking. I have two more sketches I invite you to ponder.

E. Chuck Chakour died recently. At his funeral, I was seated beside two elderly women — elderly here means older than I — from one of the congregations Chuck had served.

Using that voice the older and impaired in hearing among us sometime employ regardless of venue, a voice pre-school teachers label an “outside voice,” one shouted to the other, “He was wonderful. The best pastor we ever had. Don’t remember his sermons so much but he was always there when we needed him. And he was so gentle, kind and giving.”

F. Tony Drake is an octogenarian. He has worked, and still does, for 40 plus years in the neighborhood where the disturbingly hard movie, “Traffic”, was filmed.

Tony is almost self-effacing, not given to speech making, despite his brilliance. He arranges the chairs and opens doors for meetings, drives WRO mothers to demonstrations and stands with them, has spent time in jail for his pacifism and anti-racist biases, and knows the people and streets of that hard neighborhood as he knows the back of his own aged hands.