A sermon exploring the kind of pastoral leadership the church needs for the 21st century. Risky. Daring. Egalitarian. And able to help disentangle us from the patriarchy that's held us captive for too long.
This was preaching on a live Zoom service upon the ordination of the Rev. Sara Tillema, Minister of Word and Sacrament.
The texts were John 2.1-11 and "Summer's Day" by Mary Oliver. And a performance of The New Rule by the 13th century Sufi poet, Rumi.
1.
Sara, today we’re celebrating your tenacity and the patience that have helped bring your journey to his moment. Today, we’re ritualizing the beginning of a new journey as a Minister of Word and Sacrament, serving not only the part of the Christian tribe we call the Presbyterians, but also the much larger “holy catholic church.”
When I say we’re ordaining you as Minister of Word and Sacrament for the “holy catholic church,” I mean catholic, small “c”—the universal or cosmic church, not identified one with a particular religious brand or sect or communion. God’s church is bigger than that. For the whole world, the universe itself, is God’s cathedral, and every star and every sea anemone, every bee and every butte, every river and every redwood, every poem and every person is part of this grand mystery called the church. What we do religiously is just a way to awaken us as human beings to the truth that God is in fact in everything and is contained by no one thing, denomination, or religious tradition.
Sara, we’re all going to need you in the years ahead to keep us alive to all this because religion in general, and Christianity, especially Presbyterianism, has an unfortunate habit of falling from this grand vision of the vast, untamable, uncontrollable nature of the divine and into the sectarian smallness that is neither worthy of the bigness of God, nor capable of meeting the spiritual and material needs of the third millennium. To live it out, you’ll not only need courage and creativity, you’re gonna need to gather together the great diversity of life itself and work against the forces that seek to divide us from the riches of each other and from the riches hidden even inside our very selves.
2.
You’ve chosen two readings today. One from the Gospel According to John and another from the poet, Mary Oliver. I think you’ve chosen Mary Oliver because you know she knows how big God is; she’s as uninterested as you are in a spirituality that domesticates the divine; she, like you, sees that the only god that’s worthy of being worshipped is the God who opens doors, breaks down barriers, brings down the powerful and uplifts the downtrodden, and joins together what others want to separate.
Who made the world? she says.
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand . . .
Mary Oliver knows that all nature is imbued with intimations of the sacred; she knows that all things are holy and that nothing and no one is to be excluded from the wonder of being known and cherished and reverenced as an intimation of the divine. And in proper humility she says that:
I don't know exactly what a prayer is,
I hope you never know exactly what prayer is, Sara. If you ever think you know exactly what prayer is, it’s a sign that the church has domesticated you, Sara. And you’ll know it’s time to get converted all over again. It’ll be time for you to do what Mary Oliver does:
I do know how to pay attention, she says, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
In the grass idle and blessed, you’ll find God again, expand your soul again, awaken yourself again to the wildness that can save you—and us. But if you have trouble, if you get so boxed up inside church work and feel like you’re losing your soul, then remember that you’re going to die.
Doesn't everything die at last, she says, and too soon?
The reality of death might just keep you alive spirituality. Especially, if the reality of your mortality awakens you to the question everybody loves at the end of this poem:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
3.
I think you chose Mary Oliver because you sense she’ll keep you alive to the bigness of God, she’ll keep calling you to reckon with her memorable line: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”—a question I hope will keep you open to the holy mischief I think God wants to do through you. And this leads me to our second reading from the Fourth Gospel.
The reading takes us to a village, Cana, in Galilee. A wedding and the party after the wedding. We were all having a good time, until the wine ran out. People are leaving early, going home. We’re about to, disappointed in the poor planning of our hosts. The hosts are ashamed of themselves. We notice that Jesus’ mother goes to him and says, “Jesus, we’re all out of wine.” “So,” he says, “what am I supposed to do about that?” Jesus seems perfectly willing to allow the party to die. But his mother isn’t. She seems to know that a bad wedding reception will not only get them off to a bad start, it’ll reflect badly on this newly married couple and tarnish their standing in the community. So she takes matters into her own hands: “Do whatever he tells you,” she says to the workers. Now standing there are six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each able to hold twenty or thirty gallons. Prodded by his mother, Jesus says to the workers, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And so they fill them up to the brim. Then Jesus says, ‘Now draw some out.’ And low and behold, the water has become wine, and not the cheap kind; it’s the best of wines. The party is saved. And the wedding is blessed.
Sara, the tale is symbolic, a sign. Jesus is, of course, the focus of the story. But I want to direct our attention to the woman, Jesus’ mother. I don’t think the storyteller meant what I’m going to say. But there’s always more to a story than what the writer intends. So it is with scripture.
It’s no secret that Christianity, like religion in general, is struggling in the modern world. The church is often irrelevant to the realities of the 21st century. In fact, it’s often been a perpetrator of what’s not only foolish, but what’s unjust, even inhumane. I don’t need to create a list. You know what students on university campuses say. You know what academics lay at the feet of religion. You know what you yourself have experienced.
We’re out of wine. Folks are leaving the party. And unless there’s an intervention, the party’s over.
And those who are still in power not only don’t really know what to do, they seem perfectly willing to let the party die. There’s a lot we could say about the role of patriarchy in this death. But I don’t want merely to say that masculinity has messed things up, though it certainly has. Obviously I’m implicated in that. After all, a big part of me kinda identifies with masculinity; I choose for myself the “he” series of pronouns. But it’s also true that there’s a good deal of feminine complicity in all that patriarchy’s done that harms us all. Although to be fair, the feminine hasn’t quite had a fair shot at righting the wrongs.
Instead of pitting the feminine against the masculine and doing more of what’s got us into this predicament in the first place—instead, what I want to point out from the symbolism of this Gospel story is the dynamic interaction, the possibility of a full complementary of the masculine and the feminine. Without both, the party would have been over.
Nor do I want to perpetuate the old binary categories. There’s so much more to be gained through the grace of gender fluidity, the holy mix of masculinity and femininity in all of us, if only we’ll explore it more fully.
In this highly symbolic Gospel story, in order for the new wine to come, the party needed both femininity and masculinity working together in parity: initiative, ingenuity, subversion, determination, authority, action. Both the feminine and the masculine in us and among us need each other, to complement each other, to cooperate with each other, to create something good and beautiful and healing together. This is what the Gospel shows us—in the characters of Jesus and his mother and the roles they played in this miracle, in the symbol of the wedding itself showing the union of femininity and masculinity in parity, and in symbol of the wine, an abundant source not only of pleasure but healing.
Sara, it won’t be easy to carry us into the new era before us. But it is necessary—for the sake of all that’s holy and just, for the sake of human life on the planet, for the sake of all that’s on this planet, for the sake of the church, for students, for you, for Aron, for Asa and all that will come after you. It won’t be easy, but it’s necessary. You’ll have to be creative and courageous, sometimes subversive and determined, and all times seeking the cooperation and complementary of others—the parts of you and us around you that you, frankly, can’t do without. And sometimes you’re just gonna have to mess things up if we’re gonna find the life God desires for all of us.
I’ll end with these verses from the great mischief maker, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the thirteenth century Sufi mystic and poet. A riddle in the shape of a poem. Like Jesus and his mother, Rumi wants to shake things up, and to do so he combines metaphors, runs roughshod over the laws of physics and social convention, joins together what we often separate, and says that to get to something holy and new, we’re gonna have to break some rules:
It’s the old rule that drunks have to argue
and get into fights.
The lover is just as bad. She falls into a hole.
But down in that hole she finds something shining,
worth more than any amount of money or power.
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.
Here’s the new rule: break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glassblower’s breath.
Sara, you’ve got one wild and precious life. Break the wineglass, let the new wine flow, and fall toward the glassblower’s breath.