The Rev. Ned Mulligan, March 14, 2010, Fourth Sunday in Lent, Joshua 5:9-12; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Psalm 32; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be here today and what a privilege it is for me to preach on this special occasion. This place has been my spiritual home since my internship and I have to tell you that it continues to feel that way this morning. My sermon will be a little unorthodox for lent, because there are parts of it that are light hearted. I give you permission to laugh if you feel the need to do so. I also have a relevant message hidden somewhere in this sermon taken from the reading from second Corinthians.
In preparing for this morning it occurred to me that the 35th anniversary of my own ordination to the priesthood will be on January 21, 2042. John, if you and I are still alive, I will be approaching my 90th birthday. This is my invitation to you to preach at my celebration, so we will need to take good care of each other to make it.
I first made contact with John in the fall of 2004 when I literally ran into him in a hallway at Yale Divinity School. I was late to a class and I came careening around a corner and I crashed into him with my books and whatever John was carrying flying to the floor. I apologized profusely as I introduced myself as the world’s oldest seminarian. John was completely unfazed by the collision. He responded by being interested in me, which was the last thing I would have expected under the circumstances.
I came to learn something that you all know about John. One of his many strengths of character is his sincere and uncompromising interest in others. We discovered in what was probably only two minutes of preliminary conversation that our mutual home diocese was New Hampshire and that our home parish was St. Paul’s, Concord. The brief conversation ended with an invitation from John to actually come here sometime in the near future to explore the possibility of me serving as an intern. I made the visit and afterward had the privilege to spend over a year here learning things from John that very few others could have taught me about being a priest. I started my internship in the summer of 2004. I soon discovered that I would continue to run into John and other things and that he would turn my mortifying catastrophes into opportunities to be faithful, to learn, to be humble and, most importantly, to laugh at myself. A couple of Sundays into my internship, John and I were standing side by side. We had both just been handed chalices half full of consecrated wine by the Eucharistic ministers. Unfortunately we decided to turn at the same time and we turned toward each other resulting in the chalices colliding and the wine splashing out and onto each of us. John’s immediate response, knowing that I was totally horrified by what I had just done, was to smile and take the blame for my well intentioned but nervous stupidity. Once again he was more interested in helping me learn than he was in responding to a temporary catastrophe.
The wine explosion wasn’t the end of the Eucharistic destruction perpetrated by Mulligan. Relatively soon after the wine incident, I had a paten full of consecrated wafers that I placed on the edge of the credence table obliviously leaving about a third of the paten extending over the edge of the table. I then reached for a chalice which was behind the paten. As I did so, the cuff of my alb caught the edge of the paten. The paten flew off the table with the wafers catapulting through the air in one of those horrible slow motion moments, I thought the wafers would never stop flying through the air and the paten crashed to the floor after which it did that circling thing on the floor before it came to rest. On our knees, the acolytes and I scrambled nervously to pick up about 30 consecrated wafers from the floor.
Once the wafers were picked up and placed back on the paten, I sheepishly looked up to see where John was. He had ducked back and opened the door into the sacristy and he had a smile on his face. When I approached him with the paten full of the wafers we had just gathered from the floor he calmly looked down at the paten and then back up at me and he whispered, “have a nice lunch.” He said nothing else and I knew he was only concerned about letting me know that things were all right, although by making it clear what I was going to have for lunch, he had no intention of eating any of those wafers himself. We never talked about it again.
John, your humor, kindness, and a true sense of what was important and why was demonstrated in a clear, loving, and understated way. What better example could I have as I approached my own ordination and what is developing as a totally fulfilling career serving as a school chaplain. During the remainder of my internship John gave me the opportunity to preach and teach. He even let me sing a stanza at the end of a sermon from the Rolling Stones song, “you can’t always get what you want.”
He was willing, despite his experience to the contrary, to risk having me serve at the Eucharist every Sunday. I don’t think I was actually that big a risk but teaching me was more important to John than any potential risk. We regularly discussed complex passages of scripture, and he helped me to more fully develop my theology in a way that helped me to preach more effectively. What I also learned from John is something that is much easier to talk about than it is to do. John instinctively knows not only what to say and when and how to say it, but he actually lives in a way that demonstrates that he believes it, to live authentically and honestly demonstrating the impact that our faith has on our lives and finding ways to make the lives of others better. John gets it and he also knows how difficult it is consistently to be the faithful Ambassadors for God that St. Paul talks about in the reading from 2 Corinthians this morning.
Being an Ambassador for Christ regularly requires us to speak a different language in a different culture to intelligent, well educated, scientifically oriented, and perhaps suspicious people. We find ourselves preaching, teaching, and counseling under circumstances where there is a different language spoken and different cultural standards applied just outside the church doors; a language and culture that are often engaged in a struggle for supremacy with our faith.
Paul wrote at least the two letters to the people in Corinth, Greece. There may have been as many as four letters and the second letter we read this morning may well be a combination of several different pieces of correspondence that have been compiled from originals that have not survived. The people involved in this early Christian community had Greek culture deeply imbedded in the way they viewed the world and that view made it very difficult for them to understand the way Christians were supposed to live.
Paul’s letters address types of conduct that are, very simply, unchristian at best and immoral at worst. Paul’s approach in the letters is to tell the people that as converted faithful Christians they have been made new in Christ. New not only from the perspective of having received God’s gracious gift of salvation through their new found faith, but new also in terms of the type of life they should cultivate and live in gratitude for what God has done for them, even if doing so was countercultural. Living as a faithful Christian continues to be counter cultural. Things haven’t changed much in the last 2000 years in that regard.
Paul’s success and the spectacular spread of Christianity during the first four centuries after the death and resurrection of Jesus were the result, in great part, of the faithful, authentic, and selfless, efforts of people like St. Paul conveying the Christian message as Ambassadors of Christ despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their way.
In the 35 years that John Branson has been a faithful, authentic, and selfless Ambassador for Christ there has not been a moment when doing so was not under attack by what was happening here and around the world. As a nation the things we have said and done continue to underscore the fact that being an Ambassador for Christ is simply contrary to what we say and do as culture.
A small sampling of the proverbial tip of that 35 year ice berg follows, not necessarily in chronological order or in importance. The Vietnam War came to an end shortly after John’s ordination. We gave up the Panama Canal. The Episcopal Church finally decided to ordain women and we now have a female presiding bishop. The Berlin Wall fell and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. We were devastated by 9/11 which had a significant impact on this community in particular. We engaged in Desert Storm, we started the War in Iraq, we invaded Afghanistan, we embarked on the war on terror, and we elected the first openly gay and partnered Bishop from John’s and my home parish. We had several real estate and financial crashes, we experienced the assassination attempt on President Reagan, Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, the Challenger exploded, and we elected seven presidents; four republican and three democratic. We watched the impeachment of president Clinton on television. We elected our first black president. These are just a sample of the issues we have faced and the changes we have experienced during John’s tenure as an Ambassador for Christ. During that stormy period of time, I know from my friendship with John Branson that in the parishes he served and the communities in which he lived, John was always an Ambassador for Christ. No matter what difficulties he experienced personally or what threats were presented to his parish communities, to the nation and to the world, John remained faithful, authentic, and selfless, not only as the Rector of the parishes he served, but as a husband, father, family member, friend, and leader in his community.
John, you are the best example of all those things and I am grateful for what you have given me, what you have given the church, and what you have given the communities in which you live as the penultimate Ambassador for Christ.
Happy anniversary my friend. Amen
