The Power of Love
Sermon preached by the Rev. John Kirkley
at the Ordination of Brian Gary Rallison
to the Sacred Order of Deacons
Saturday, February 2, 2019
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Salt Lake City, UT
Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful people
and enkindle in them the power of your love.
Amen.
What a joy to be with you for this glorious celebration
today! I want to express my gratitude to
Brian for the invitation and to Bishop Scott for permission to preach, as well
as to Father Kurt and St. Paul’s for their gracious hospitality. Thank you to all of you gathered here –
family, friends, colleagues, mentors, fellow laborers in the vineyard of the LORD
– for the love, prayer, and service that has brought Brian to this place. It takes a village, doesn’t it?
I had the privilege of serving as Brian’s field education
supervisor last year when he served as a seminary intern at my parish, St.
James, San Francisco. Brian shared his
many gifts and his heart with us, and our congregation was blessed by his
presence and service. As one of our
long-time leaders said, “Brian was the best field education student we’ve ever
had!” Brian, please know that the people
of St. James are holding you in prayer with thanksgiving for your ordination.
In a few minutes, Bishop Scott will place his hands on Brian
and pray that God will fill him with grace and power, and make him a deacon in
the Church. “Deacon” is a fancy word
for “servant.” Today’s scripture
readings are concerned with issues of leadership, service and power. According to Ecclesiasticus, the wise man serves
among the great and appears before rulers.[1] St. Paul defends the legitimacy of his
leadership, arguing, “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus
Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.”[2] Jesus, inserting himself into a dispute among
his disciples about which of them is the greatest, distinguishes between kings
who dominate their subjects, and leaders who serve them, declaring, “I am among
you as one who serves.”[3]
Issues of leadership, service and power are matters that
concern us all. We don’t ordain people as deacons so we can outsource the
servant work to them. All the baptized
share the work of service, offer leadership, and exercise power. Deacons do have an important role to play in
the life of the church as icons of leadership in the service of sharing power. They hold us accountable for the use of our
power in conformity with the model of leadership as service that Jesus practiced;
especially, for how the use of our power affects those who are most vulnerable
in our community: the poor, the sick,
the immigrant, and the outcast.
Deacons help us to get clear about the issue of power. Their work is far more difficult, provocative,
and challenging than simply organizing charity drives. They ask the hard questions about the
relationship between privilege, power, and justice in our communities. Scratch a deacon, and underneath you will
find a community organizer. That is as
it should be. After all, Pilate was a
governor. Jesus was a community
organizer. Jesus is the model for
leadership that deacons embody and invite us to emulate.
The earliest Christian affirmation of faith is the simple
statement: “Jesus is LORD.” Jesus is our
leader. He is the ultimate source of
authority, the One to whom we pledge our allegiance. This title, “LORD,” was significant for two
reasons. First, because it was a title
reserved for the Emperor, the affirmation that Jesus is LORD had the negative
connotation that Ceasar is not LORD; not the ultimate source of authority, not
worthy of our ultimate allegiance. The
authority of any person or institution is radically subordinate to, and stands
under the judgment of, Jesus.
Leadership, if it is to have any authority, must conform to the way of
Jesus.
Secondly, the title, “LORD,” was used to translate the word
in Hebrew Scriptures that referred to God, long before Caesar tried to
monopolize it. “LORD” substituted for
the unspeakable name of God and recognized God’s power and authority as
supreme. Jesus, drawing on the prophetic
strand of Jewish tradition, taught and demonstrated that God’s power takes the
form of love; a deathless love that is ever new, creative, and life
giving. Christians came to a shorthand
expression of this idea in the statement that “God is love,”[4]
thereby proclaiming the absolute, universal, and intimately personal authority
of love. To say, then, that “Jesus is LORD”
is to say that God’s love is expressed in an unrestricted way in the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus. “Faith
in Jesus Christ as LORD means ultimate trust in the power of God’s love shining
forth in him.”[5]
Love is powerful. We
too often forget that. We have relegated
love to the realm of private, emotional experiences, limiting it to mere interpersonal
affection based on attraction. That
isn’t how Jesus loved. Jesus loved on
folks in public – even his enemies – and he did it with power. As Dr. Martin Luther King urgently reminded
us, “What is needed is a realization
that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is
sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of
justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands
against love.”[6] Power is love implementing the demands of
justice. That is the kind of power
Jesus’ exercised.
Love isn’t
about being nice or avoiding conflict.
It is about engaging conflict courageously and creatively for the sake
of the common good. The power of love
relentlessly interrogates the love of power that privileges the few at the
expense of the many. Praying that God’s
kingdom may come, God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven, is about
becoming transparent to the power of love in our lives for the sake of justice
in our communities.
Love’s power
is unleashed through vulnerability, a willingness to open our hearts to God and
others so that love can flow through us and between us. Jesus was completely vulnerable to God, and
so the flow of love in him was unrestricted.
As our hearts are broken open, when we are most weak, most in touch with
our suffering and that of our sisters and brothers, we discover a capacious and
fierce love within us that gives us the power to do infinitely more than we can
ask for or imagine. The limit of our
love is the only limit of our power.
But here is
the thing about love’s power. Because it
is relational, it must be shared. It is
not “my” power or “your” power it is God’s power that becomes our power. Jesus said to those who came to him for
healing, “Your faith has made you whole.”[7] Love’s power is conveyed through
relationships of trust. It was this
trust that produced the “miracle” of people sharing their food to feed
thousands of hungry people. It was this
trust that brought healing to women, outcasts, and sinners, that reconciled
enemies, that allowed the poor to realize their dignity, that created a
movement that brought great crowds of people to Jerusalem demanding justice for
God’s people.
Jesus
gathered a community of disciples, trained them, and gave them the authority to
teach, heal, and forgive in his name. He
sent them out two by two share the power of love with people in neighboring
villages. Jesus was a brilliant
community organizer! He knew that if he
tried to grasp power for himself it would wither and die; but if he shared it,
it would plant seeds and grow to live another day. Love is subversive like that. It goes underground for a season, but then
blooms into life, transforming the landscape; just when you thought it had
disappeared forever.
Jesus knew that
love is a renewable resource. That is
why he could go towards his own death with such deep trust in his Father. He
understood that the power of love is not concerned with winning or losing. Hanging on the cross, Jesus surely knew he
had lost that round. But the power of
love lies in its capacity to build relationships, to restore dignity, to create
a people, a community, a human family through whom God’s love never ceases to
rise-up.
The twelve
disciples are representative figures, symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel –
the entire people of God. We are all
called and sent out to claim and share the power of love. With this power, we win even when we lose,
because our hearts and our relationships just keep expanding to encompass more
of reality, more life, more love.
The
disciples, gathered with Jesus at table for the final meal before his arrest
and execution, still didn’t understand the nature of Jesus’ power. They were still busy arguing about who among
them was the greatest. They thought they
were in control, able to use power coercively to get what they thought they
wanted. Only after the utter loss and
failure of Good Friday, the grief and fear of Holy Saturday, and the unexpected
mystery and joy of Easter Sunday, did they begin to really grasp – or allow
themselves to be grasped by – the power of love.
Only as we
embrace our vulnerability and accept our interdependence do we discover the
power of love, and realize that it has always, already been available to us;
because God loves us unconditionally and forever. Held
in that love, we become a live feed transmitting the same love that flowed
through Jesus in the power of the Spirit.
We become a network of love covering the whole earth. We become the Body of Christ, poured out for
the renewal of the world.
This is the
nature of our service, our diakonia: to invite people to claim the power of love and
to share it with others. Leadership is
in the service of raising up leaders who share love’s power. We give ourselves away, and in so doing,
discover just how much we have; really, everything we need.
And so, Brian,
you have been given everything you need to become an icon of service for
us. To you has been given the power of
love. Receive it gladly. Share if freely and courageously, for that is
the true mark of leadership in Jesus’ name.
May you be among us as one who serves.
In the name
of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
[1] Ecclesiasticus 39:4a.
[2] II Corinthians 4:5.
[3] Luke 22:27c.
[4] I John 4:7-8.
[5] Brother David Steindl-Rast, Deeper than Words: Living the
Apostles’ Creed (New York:
Doubleday, 2010), pp. 59-60.
[6] King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1967. "Where Do We Go From Here?" Annual
Report Delivered at
the 11th Convention of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, August 16, Atlanta, GA.
[7] Mark 5:34; Luke 17:19.
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