Ezekiel 36:24-28
Psalm 27
Romans 8:14-17
Mark 10: 13-16

It is a great joy and privilege to be with you, and to be invited to become part of the CDSP community. I am very grateful to you all for this honor.

Let me begin with the words of another bishop, St. Augustine of Hippo: “For you, I am a bishop, but with you I am a Christian; one is an office accepted; the other a gift received. One is danger; the other is safety. If I am happier to be redeemed with you, than to be placed over you then I shall, as the Lord commanded, be mercifully your servant.”

The gift received is our life, “hidden with Christ in God,” which we proclaim and celebrate in baptism. The potential danger is the “office accepted” in the form of ordination or some other articulation of ministry in the name of the risen Christ.

The readings, chosen for this liturgy by members of the graduating class, have been taken from among those appointed for use at baptism. This being so, the invitation to me, as the one called to break the bread of the word on this occasion, is to draw our attention to the gift of baptism which undergirds and sustains all forms of ministry and service. As well, this is a moment to be mindful of some of the dangers that can compromise and undermine our participation in Christ’s work of reconciliation.

Here it is important to remember that Jesus’ self-knowledge, and the seed from which his fidelity to the work of the One who sent him grew and matured, were embedded in his own experience of baptism. What descended upon Jesus as he rose up from the waters of the Jordan was not an agenda from on high. Rather, he emerged with an overwhelming sense of being deeply loved, favored and rejoiced in: “You are my Son, the Beloved. And with you I am well pleased.”

Before all else, baptism is the declaration in word, water, oil and human touch that we too are loved, favored, rejoiced in: that with our existence and the potentialities that exist within us, God is well pleased, and that we too are God’s beloved daughters and sons. It may, however, take a lifetime of resistance and struggle before this deep truth is able to have its way with us.

With the 17th century priest-poet, George Herbert, we may choose to invoke our guilt and shame, and protect ourselves from God’s unrelenting mercy by hiding behind our imperfections. But Christ, “The Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” will continue to pursue us saying in any number of ways, “You must sit down and taste my meat” “my deathless love, my profligate compassion “and stop chewing over your self-judgments. And at some point, possibly out of exhaustion or by being stripped of our defenses, we will find ourselves embraced, pierced, cracked open, riven through, and able to give root room to Christ’s love, saying with Herbert, in response to Christ’s insistence: “So I did sit and eat.”

Baptism constitutes our formal entrance into the wild and unpredictable realm of the divine agape: the circle dance, which constitutes the inner life of the Trinity. St. John of the Cross likens the encounter with divine mystery to finding ourselves transported to “strange islands” where we have never before been, an encounter which plays havoc with our understanding and expectations.

“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” Jesus tells us in today’s gospel reading. What does it mean to be “reborn by the Holy Spirit” and become as a child other than to be given a new way of seeing, a transformation of consciousness, a renewal of the mind, “an inquiring and discerning heart,” or in the word
spoken through the prophet Ezekiel, a “new spirit” and a “heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone.”

One of the diseases which continually afflicts the people of God as they undertake their journey through the pages of Scripture is that of Sklerocardia: hardness of heart. And when we remember that the heart, in the minds and understanding of the biblical writers, was not primarily the seat of our emotions, but the ground and center of our personhood.
Sklerocardia is understood as a condition that affects the totality of our being, along with our perceptions and relationships. Sklerocardia is one of the dangers that can overtake us in the midst of ministry when an office or responsibility to which we are called becomes a possession rather than a gift. At the same time, we can “possess” various images of the Church which reflect our own biases and need for self-confirmation and certitude, and mold them into a golden calf that protects us against the fierce inscrutability of divine logic, and a God whose ways are not our ways, and whose thoughts are not our thoughts.

Through the agency of the Holy Spirit, however, the waters of baptism are able to cleanse us from our idolatries, overturn our golden calves, render our hearts open and permeable to the ever unfolding mystery of “Christ in [us] the hope of glory,” and work in us, over time, that interior freedom for which “Christ has set us free.”

“The process of Christ,” to use a phrase from the 18th century mystic, William Law “our growing up “in every way into him who is the head” “is costly and demanding, and integral to all authentic manifestations of the ministry of reconciliation.

Growing up into Christ, and appropriating the full measure of who we are called to be as limbs and members of Christ’s risen body, requires our being “buried with Christ in his death” and sharing “in Christ’s resurrection.” In other words, growing up into Christ means our continuing participation in the paschal mystery of dying and rising, losing and finding. The paschal mystery accosts us, not just ritually in baptism, but over and over again through the circumstances and demands that life sets before us, and in the midst of the ministries to which we are called. The Church is no refuge from the paschal dynamic; in fact, the Church is often where its force is most keenly felt. This is true in congregations, dioceses and across the provinces of the Anglican Communion.

“Those who want to save their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake, [as Jesus declared,] and for the sake of the gospel will save it.” Sometimes this paradox of saving and finding by relinquishing and losing is highly personal and hidden from view. At other times it is corporate and very public. In either case it is painful and costly. Yet, at the same time, it opens the way to our being more fully conformed to the image of Christ, and to Christ being that much more deeply formed in us.

All this being said, we can avoid the deeper implications of our being baptized into Christ by becoming what a Benedictine abbot who was an important guide in my early years as a priest once described as “technicians of the sacred,” “that is those who have become skilled in the management and manipulation of the things of ministry without ever succumbing to the full force of their personal implications; those able to preach to others while remaining impermeable to the word being proclaimed; those capable of proffering the Bread of Life while refusing to taste Christ’s “meat” “Christ’s desire to meet them “face to face” in his sacraments and assuage their own hunger.

Such are some of the dangers that can befall us when our sharing of Christ’s ministry becomes a possession severed from its baptismal root and we become victims of what that same Benedictine abbot described as l’eglise mechanique “victims of the mechanical church.

The Spirit who bore down upon Jesus at the waters of the Jordan, implanting within him a deep awareness of his belovedness, and who bears down upon us as we are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, is, we are told in our reading from Romans, “a spirit of adoption,” that is a spirit who unites us with Christ so profoundly and intimately that Christ’s unbounded availability and passionate desire to be one with God’s desire becomes our own.

“My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work,” Jesus cries out in the Gospel of John. The Spirit at work in Jesus “called in Galatians the Spirit of God’s Son “plumbs the depths of our own spirit, and makes it possible for us authentically to cry “Abba, Father,” infused with Christ’s own longing and desire to be one with God’s desire.

In the midst of our various longings and disparate desires the “Spirit helps us in our weakness” by reordering and unifying our yearnings and the pattern of our desiring, teaching us to pray by praying within us with what Paul describes as “sighs too deep for words.” According to the Apostle, prayer is first and foremost the activity of the Spirit within the depths of our own spirit. And our conscious acts of prayer are a response to and collaboration with the Spirit praying within us.

Prayer, as Julian of Norwich observed many centuries ago, “ones us to God,” or in a more Pauline idiom, works in us the mind of Christ. Having the mind of Christ, seeing as Christ sees, desiring as Christ desires, loving as Christ loves is the outworking of our baptismal identification with Christ.

What is the fruit of the Spirit, described in Galatians as “love, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control,” but the consequence of Christ’s own spirit finding a home in the depths of our own being in a way that is unselfconscious, spontaneous and co-natural with who we, in grace and truth, are called to be?

It is the Spirit who pours God’s love into our hearts: that is God’s love for us, which is the ground of all our loving and transforms our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh: that is hearts of compassion.  St. Isaac of Syria asks what a compassionate heart might be, and then gives this reply; “It is a heart that burns with love for the whole of creation: for men and women, for the birds, for the beasts, for the demons, for every creature. When a person with a heart such as this thinks of the creatures or looks at them, his eyes are filled with tears. An overwhelming compassion makes his heart grow small and weak, and he cannot endure to hear or see any suffering, even the smallest pain, inflicted upon any creature. Therefore, such a person never ceases to pray, with tears even for the irrational animals, for the enemies of truth, and for those who do him evil, asking that they may be guarded and receive God’s mercy. And for the reptiles also he prays with great compassion, which rises up endlessly in his heart until he or she shines again and is glorious like God.”

No amount of active imagination or psychological effort on our part can render our hearts truly compassionate. Only the Spirit, working within us the transforming mystery of Christ’s deathless and all encompassing love, only the Spirit can expand our hearts and give us the courage and capacity to embrace the demons, those who do us evil, the enemies of truth and, yes, even the reptiles.

In this present season in the life of the Church, a deep and disciplined and prayerful appropriation of our baptismal identity is essential if our various ministries are to be revelatory of Christ’s own ministry of drawing all things to himself.

Here we need to be mindful of the fact that Satan “can disguise himself as an angel of light,” and that our notions of a church “without spot or wrinkle” may be projections of our own ego needs to have the Church serve us and confirm our idolatries. The Spirit, however, blows where it wills and “where the Spirit of the Lord is, here is freedom.” That is the freedom to embrace Christ’s work of reconciliation in all its wide ranging complexity: freedom to discern the motions of the Spirit in unexpected places; freedom to allow the Spirit to form Christ in us and in others in ways that exceed or contradict what we might ask or imagine.

“You speak in my heart and say, “Seek my face,” cries the psalmist in today’s psalm. And, with longing love and hopeful trust the psalmist responds to the voice of the Spirit saying, “Your face, Lord, will I seek.”  May each of you graduating this day “and may each of us “both today and in whatever lies ahead, make that same faithful response: “Your face, Lord, will I seek.” And, as we do so, may Christ’s enduring ministry of reconciliation, into which we are drawn through baptism, become more deeply and fully our own.

Amen.