St. Martin’s Church, Pahrump, NV
Ordination to the Sacred Order of Deacons - Clelia Garrity
Jeremiah 1:4-9; 2 Corinthians 4:1-6; Luke 12:35-38 (Propers for the Ordination of a Deacon)
Preacher; The Reverend William H. Stokes
How privileged I feel to be here and to be your preacher on this extraordinary occasion, when, in a short while, by God’s grace and with your consent, Clelia Garrity will be ordained a deacon in Christ’s one holy catholic and apostolic church. I think this day has been a long time coming. I know Clelia feels that way too.
I’ve known Clelia for nearly fifteen years and have been her spiritual director throughout this process. I can assure you she has been waiting for this moment, longing for it. For her, it is a time of fulfillment, a time for her to fulfill that which she feels to the depths of her soul. Clelia is a deacon through and through and through. She has a deacon’s heart!
Today we are giving outward expression to an inward reality which is already present; which God has planted with the soul of Clelia Garrity. That’s what a sacrament is: giving outward and visible expression to an inward invisible reality. Ordination is a sacrament.
God has given Clelia a heart of compassion. Not the kind of compassion that feels only and then doesn’t act, that is “enabling” rather than “empowering.” Oh, no, Clelia Garrity’s compassion is active compassion. Clelia sees, and Clelia does.
Clelia has served, and continues to serve, people most in need and in most desperate circumstances: the poor, the battered and the abused, and especially battered and abused children, the most vulnerable ones. She has been performing this kind of service most of her adult her....Yes, God has given Clelia the heart of a servant...God has given Clelia the heart of a Deacon.
Today, we have a holy and sacred responsibility: With our consent, by our prayers, and with Bishop Dan’s actions of laying his hands on Clelia and petitioning the Holy Spirit, by the power of that same Spirit, the outward expression will meet with the inward reality and the deed will be accomplished. We will have a new Deacon – Deacon Clelia Garrity.
Prior to responding to my own call to the priesthood (and it needs to be noted that all priests are first ordained as deacons, although there is a healthy conversation going on in the church today about whether or not we should continue this), I worked for many years in restaurants both as a bartender and a waiter. I started doing this because my wife and I had married young, very young; when I was a freshman in college. Working in restaurants allowed me to work at night and go to school during the day. I kept that up for two years. Then restaurants took over and I dropped out of college and started running restaurants. I did pretty well, running some pretty big places, mostly in New York.
After eight years of that, I got restless. I was working 6 and 7 days a week, often from 9 or 10 in the morning until 2 0r 3 the next morning. I’d go home, sleep for a few hours, get up and do it again. I had a family, including small children....What’s this about? I began to wonder to myself. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the Spirit was stirring in me. I began to sense a call to the priesthood.
Eventually I responded to that call and went back and finished college and then went to seminary. I stopped running restaurants, but I still had to work, I had children to support. I started waiting tables again. I waited tables through the first year and a half of seminary.
In 1987, during my first year at General Seminary, where one of my classmates was Bishop Dan Edwards, we were required to take a course in church history called Patristics....Patristics studies the earliest history of the church; from the time immediately following the Resurrection of Jesus and the church of the first Apostles to about the 6th century. One of the first lectures of the course was on the early development of the church’s ordained ministry, the order of deacons. “The word deacon,” Professor Bob Wright said in class that day, “comes from the Greek word DIACONOS which means ‘servant’ or more specifically `humble table servant’ or ‘waiter.’”
I cannot describe to you, how overwhelmed I was at hearing that in that classroom...As I indicated, at the time, I was still waiting tables in a restaurant in New York... “The word deacon,” Professor Bob Wright said, “comes from the Greek word DIACONOS which means `servant’ `humble table servant’ or ‘waiter.’”
Yes, it was overwhelming to hear that. I was at a totally new place in my life and in my understanding...I was in a totally new place in my relationship with God but, I had come full circle. I knew what those words meant. I was entering a new servanthood, a new form of humble table service. Tears came to my eyes and I could barely hear the rest of the lecture. It was as if God had spoken to me; had affirmed my call.
Today we are gathered to ordain another person into the ranks of God’s humble table servants, God’s waiters....Another person, Clelia Garrity, has by the grace of God in her own distinct way come full circle in her life. She, too, has felt the stirring of the Spirit, which made her restless, unsettled her....And she has, in response the Spirit’s urging, presented herself to the Church; jumped through all its hoops and been found worthy to enter its servant ranks. So we rejoice in that and give thanks for it, even as we recognize the solemnity of the occasion and grapple with its implications.
In one of his Epistles, St. Clement of Rome, an early Church Father (who dates to about. 95 AD), states that the institution of deacons along with that of bishops “is the work of the Apostles themselves.”1 Therefore, the ordination which takes place today, and the ministry which we celebrate, reaches back to the very earliest life of the church. Wow!
In its earliest expressions the diaconate was clear and well-defined. There were seven deacons in Rome and in each of the large cities of the church. In a thorough treatment of the subject, the Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that deacons were responsible for oversight of church funds and for the distribution of alms to the poor, the widows and the orphans....Deacons were responsible for seeking out the sick and the needy and reporting to the bishop and representing to the bishop both their condition and their necessities...They were responsible for inviting the elderly women of the church community to the Agape meal. 2
Deacons were “the guardians of order in the church.” 3 They saw that the faithful occupied their proper places, that “none gossiped or slept...They were to welcome the poor and aged and to take care that they were not at a disadvantage as to their position in the church.”4...As St. Chrysostom says in general terms: “if anyone misbehave let the deacon be summoned.” 5 I like that!
Besides all this, Deacons, “.were largely employed in the direct ministry of the altar, preparing the sacred vessels and bringing water for the ablutions....”6 Deacons read the Gospel, led the prayers of the people, and dismissed them into the world at the end of the mass...7
There are a number of other qualities of this ministry from early days, and, although they had receded into the background for many hundreds of years, the ministry of the deacon has re-surged, both in the Roman Church, and particularly in the Episcopal Church...
The Book of Common Prayer captures the essentials of this ministry, its implications and its tensions in the Examination which we shall soon hear. The Bishop will state to Clelia, “As a deacon....You are to make Christ and his redemptive love known, by your word and example, to those among whom you live, and work, and worship. You are to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world. You are to assist the bishops and priests in public worship and in the ministration of God’s Word and Sacraments, and you are to carry out other duties assigned to you from time to time. At, all times, your life and teaching are to show Christ’s people that in serving the helpless, they are serving Christ himself....” 8 Servanthood is that the heart of the diaconal ministry....In fact, servanthood is at the core of all Christian ministry.
Were you paying attention to the Gospel reading when it was read? Did it shock you? It should have. It certainly would have shocked those who heard it when Jesus spoke those words...
Jesus is speaking to a crowd....He had already been engaged in a somewhat hostile exchange with scribes and Pharisees who are lying in wait, ready to pounce on anything he says which might give them an excuse to have him arrested (cf. Luke 11:53).
Those scribes and Pharisees knew about power and privilege....They were the cream of their society....They kept the law and observed every propriety....They also knew who was who in their society. They were at the top of the social rung; everybody else, well, they should be kept in their place.....
Jesus addresses the crowd and urges them to be ready for the time when the master of the House will come (Luke 12:26) Apparently, in this short teaching, the master has been attending a wedding banquet, it’s an image for the messianic banquet, the consummation of time, when the righteous will be judged favorably and enter into the master’s heaven and when the wicked will be judged negatively and cast into the place of eternal separation from God....
“Be dressed, “ Jesus says to his listeners... “Be dressed and ready for action. Have your lamps lit....Be like those who are waiting for the Master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks” (Luke 12:35 - 36).
Now listen to this. Listen carefully! Listen to what Jesus says next, “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves! (Luke 12:37-38). The master of the house will come and fasten his belt, and then have them sit down to eat, and HE will serve them?! It’s unbelievable! It’s absurd!
But that’s what the ministry and Gospel message of Jesus is: unbelievable, outrageous, absurd! It turns the world upside down....It turns the world’s calculus and power structures upside down. The rich are poor and the poor are rich....The blind receive their sight and the lame are healed....The captives are set free, the oppressed are limited....And masters wait tables and serve the servants....
In his book Living Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson writes, “The claim to be learning Jesus is superficial if not grounded in specific practices that embody such learning. The pattern of faithful obedience and loving service is not something to be memorized as though it were a mental image. Rather, it is a pattern that must be spelled out in the practices of living faith within a community...The pattern by which we were imprinted by baptism – the pattern of a dying and rising Lord Jesus....We need to translate this pattern into consistent habits of behavior that express the mind of Christ.” 9
Johnson continues, “We shall not be able to learn Jesus in the sick and imprisoned unless we visit those who are sick and imprisoned. We shall not find Jesus in the hungry and thirsty unless we go to those who are hungry with food and to those who are thirsty with drink. We shall not meet Jesus in the stranger unless we provide the stranger with hospitality...”10
Johnson is right and his description addresses what should be the ministry of all the baptized. But his words and images point with special particularity, I believe, to the ministry of the deacon as that ministry is understood in the Book of Common Prayer and as that ministry has been handed down to us through th ages in the church: a ministry, a radical ministry, to which Clelia is now called and into which she is now to be ordained...She has the heart for it....She has a deacons heart through and through....
Charge to Clelia
Clelia, God has led you on an extraordinary journey and now calls you into an extraordinary ministry of service...I know you...I know you well....I give thanks for this day and for God’s call to you...I think it has been a long time coming....I am thankful for the privilege of sharing with you in this call....You know about power and privilege and celebrity and the all the superficialities and artificial categories of value that mark the world in which we live....You have lived among them....
You have also recognized the needs of the world and dedicated yourself as a layperson and social worker to responding to those needs....Christ now calls you into deeper servanthood and deeper love....On behalf of God’s people, I now charge you to continue to grow in Christ’s love and service and to grow in your servant ministry as a deacon....Continue to break boundaries, to journey to places of discomfort and pain, to journey to places which challenge your own comfort level and perhaps even threaten your own self-understanding...Go to those places...Go to those places because you are needed there...Go to those places because Christ is needed there...Let those who see you, see, experience Christ, through you and in you...Let his words resound through your ministry, “I am among you as one who serves.”
Charge to the People
It is customary for the preacher at an ordination service to charge the ordinand and I have just done this...But it is important that we all be charged....Clelia is about to be ordained to the servant ministry of Deacon, but we should recognize that her particular ministry is a specific expression of the servant ministry we all share by virtue of our baptism...We have promised that we will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves...In this promise, we indicate our share in the diaconate. I charge you all therefore, not only to support Clelia in her diaconal ministry, but to remember that we you are all called to represent the reconciling love of Christ and his church wherever you may: in the home, at work, in school, at play, in service. The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ....May Christ give you strength and grace to be willing and obedient servants in that restoration work...May God bless and keep you always in his heart and love...Amen
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