The Rev. Peter Sipple | June 2, 2024
SERMON – First Sunday after Trinity: Trinity Church, June 2, 2024
The study of leadership is endlessly fascinating. Along with their biographers and other scholars, we tend to think a lot about what goes into making a leader. We recognize the differences between managing and leading. Vision appears essential to success—remember “the vision thing,” as the first President Bush called it? People throughout our society model leadership in quiet, often insignificant ways. Biographies like David McCullough’s work on John Adams show how the founders of this country wrestled with aspects of leadership. What does it take to oversee and manage a democracy? The Founders argued about whether George Washington should be crowned king or at least addressed “Your Majesty.” To understand their debates, we try to get inside the culture and conceptual framework they inherited. And here’s something we learn from well-researched biographies: the likes of Washington, Jefferson and Adams were people like you and me. They weren’t unusually bright superheroes jumping over buildings at a single bound. The settings in which they found themselves demanded extraordinary courage and perseverance; they reached deep and found those strengths, and their trust in God’s justice and mercy helped feed both heart and spleen. You and I possess these same qualities; thank God we can call upon them as we face critical times and even as we live from day to day.
The writers of our Gospels also wondered about leadership. They’d inherited sharply contrasting images of God as leader: God the jealous warrior as over against God the gentle shepherd. The remote unknowable God I AM vis-à-vis the God who converses intimately with Abram and Sarah. The 23rd Psalm describes God as a shepherd tending his flock, attentive to individual everyday concerns in a pastoral setting. Psalm 84 speaks eloquently of the joy of living in God’s house with God as protector, both sun and shield. This image assures our individual security even as we remain in awe of God’s omnipotence.
Christian theology introduces a radically new concept of leadership, for the God we worship became a human being. He leads by example, not fiat, and we his disciples try to live in the way he demonstrates. As a leader, Jesus knows his followers intimately; he is on close terms with his friends and companions. But he is often seen as over against those who resist the coming of the Kingdom of God—most often portrayed by the Pharisees. In today’s Gospel reading, those holders of traditional Judaism and its laws, the Pharisees, materialize out of nowhere to remind Jesus that his followers should not be picking and eating grain on the Sabbath. This trivial breaking of an ancient law is followed by a far-less-trivial healing event, though the same principal is at stake for Jesus’ opponents. The healing, of course, makes the law seem silly: a somewhat arbitrary cultural norm appears more to be valued than the wholeness of a human being. And so the Pharisees plot Jesus’ downfall, frustrated by their perception that he has led them into a moral trap.
What conclusion might we draw from these Gospel moments? That leaders encounter moral dilemmas whose outcomes call for distinguishing between priorities. Jesus’ first priority is the welfare of the individual human being—regarding each person as a child of God. Rabbi Sharon Brous asked in a recent Richard Rohr column:
What would it mean to build a society in which every person is treated as an image of the Divine? How would this view affect our relationships with our neighbors, our coworkers, the stranger lying beneath the stained blankets and trash outside Starbucks? Wouldn’t it compel us to recast the cultures of our schools, organizations, and faith communities? How would it impact health care, education, public policy?
Last Sunday this parish acknowledged my fifty years of ordained ministry; I thank all who offered their good wishes, and Luk who reminded all of us of our call to priesthood. Looking back to the early stages of my time in ministry, I recall that the Episcopal Church faced two major issues, the outcome of which some members thought could spell the end of our denomination. The first, not a moral dilemma but one more personally aesthetic, dealt with the future of the Book of Common Prayer. In more recent years, most of us have grown quite accepting of the present book with its compromise that offers two options, Rites 1 and 2, and its valuing tradition while making contemporary language liturgically appealing. However, the Church’s attempts to get to a new book caused quite a dust-up, didn’t it? It was knock-down, drag-out! Remember the Zebra book and Son of Zebra? The trial liturgies nearly overwhelmed us. For nearly a decade, preliminary revisions were run by the Church, with some folks dead set against any change and others feeling like guinea pigs. But given all that led to the establishment of the new Prayer Book in 1979, I think the Church’s leadership came through it pretty well. It might have been easier not being a moral dilemma, but—need I tell you?—liturgy and music elicit strong responses from Episcopalians. And so folks in the pews were invited into the debates and into the resolution: the book we use now received a great deal of airing: leaders listened and took the opinions of worshippers into account.
The second dilemma confronting the Church during my early years in ministry was of course women’s ordination, and here I find the Church’s leadership somewhat lacking. Of course our gang was going along with ancient and modern notions about gender that kept, and elsewhere are still keeping, women from serving in ordained roles. But our Church could have, far earlier I believe, shown the religious establishment what we now so clearly understand: that the leadership of women in Christ’s Church has enriched its ministries indelibly, and that, prior to women’s ordination, we men had deprived the Church of its full humanity. Here’s a shameful bit of info from the Internet: “The [Church’s House of Deputies] refused to admit women deputies as late as 1970. That fact seems remarkably incongruous in light of the Church’s embrace at the time of a liberal public policy and social justice agenda.”
The so-called “irregular” ordinations of eleven women in Philadelphia in 1974— fifty years ago this summer—went against Church law; these women and their bishops ate of the grain in the field and healed on the Sabbath. As we can now so clearly see, it was high time members of the Episcopal Church broke the law in order to fulfill God’s call and to realize the full humanity of God’s ministers. The action of these Eleven transcended a custom that was impeding the wholeness not just of individuals but of our collective. Those courageous people who stepped forward in Jesus’ shoes should be remembered: Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeanette Piccard, Betty Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig. The bishops who presided at the service were Daniel Corrigan, Robert DeWitt, and Edward Welles II. God has blessed them and us for leading their Church in courage. AMEN.