THE SERMON PREACHED BY
THE REV. DR. ROGER A. FERLO
FOR THE ORDINATION OF NATHAN ALEXANDER RUGH
TO THE SACRED ORDER OF PRIESTS
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE FEAST OF SAINT JOHN OF THE CROSS
DECEMBER 14, 2006

 

 

 

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 1 Corinthians 2: 2

 

 

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

 

I bring you greetings from the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria. I can't tell you how pleased I was to have my student and colleague, Nate, invite me to preach today. Not only is it a great occasion for you, Nate, but also, as some of you know, this is a kind of homecoming for me, as I was Rector of your neighbor parish, Church of the Redeemer in Squirrel Hill, for six and a half wonderful years. So this place means a lot to me and, Nate, it will mean a lot to you. Bishop, when Nate called you about his coming to Pittsburgh you might have received the news with some trepidation. But I can assure you, from my own experience of Calvary Church, that Calvary is an island of sanity in what you might call tumultuous seas.

 

Now, you will note that I said "sanity" and not "sanctity." "Sanctity" -holiness-is something we're all working on, including Nate. And the fact is, that in all the beauty and solemnity of services like these-this glorious music, the silences, the readings, Nate prostrate on the floor, and after this the calling down of the Holy Spirit, the laying on of hands, the anointing, the vesting-all this terrific beauty, and solemnity will not make Nate more holy. In fact all of this pomp is meant to bring home to him, and to all of us, the risks of holiness. As Paul knew, the gift of holiness, the gift of sanctity, does not always look like sanity in this world.

 

Think of Isaiah. It is a long-standing custom to use the passage from chapter six of Isaiah at ordination services. If you read that passage, or hear that passage sung as gloriously as it was sung as the introit tonight, you realize that that is a story of holy terror.

 

Some years ago, actually quite a few years ago now, I remember walking into this very room when all the pews were gone. Remember that? What an amazing space this was. I want you to imagine Calvary Church not just with all the pews gone, but with the roof opening up, the whole place filled with smoke and the very hem of Lord God close enough for you to touch. The fiery seraphim have come down; there is smoke and there is thunder, and suddenly the spotlight is on Nate as the angels sing: "Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!" Holy! Holy! Holy! Now that's terror. Of course, by the time the spotlight turned on Nate none of you would be here, because you would have fled the scene. So, Nate, this is your chance.

 

What does it mean to be holy? It's not just a question for Nate. It is a question for all of us. And once you leave aside all of the sentimentality and moralistic posturing and obsessive rule-following that often passes for Christian believing in America- ask yourself, What does holiness mean? What does it look like? What does it entail?

 

How do you answer a question like that? Is holiness the knowledge of God? Well now, Nate here is a very knowledgeable man. I can testify to that as his teacher at Virginia Seminary. We are proud of people like him, and of his two classmates who are serving as deacons tonight in this room. I mean this is what seminary is for: to deepen our knowledge of God. That is why we rely on a learned priesthood. What's more, from what I know of Calvary Church, this is also a pretty learned congregation, led by a long line of learned Rectors, all of whose names are engraved in those tablets right near the door. But we are not fooled. What those rectors knew; and what Nate's teachers know; and what Nate knows; and what I think you all know, is that the knowledge of God is a different kind of knowledge than the knowledge you get from books.

 

Paul calls it a secret and hidden wisdom, a wisdom approached only in fear and trembling. It is a wisdom that demonstrates the presence of the Spirit--not by an aggrandizement of knowledge and power, but by self-sacrifice and self-emptying, by living for others and not for ourselves. We abdicate from wisdom in order to embrace wisdom-laying ourselves bare and prostrate before a God from whom no secrets are hid.

 

No wonder that moments like this in the church are so solemn, in the root sense of the word so terrifying. I was amazed, Nate, when you called me up and said you were going to be ordained on the Feast of John of the Cross. I want to name John of the Cross, that strange, really kind of off-putting, sixteenth-century Spaniard, as the patron saint of tonight's terrifying event.

 

Thomas Merton, who knew something about monks and off-putting people, said that John of the Cross is "the patron of those who have a vocation that is thought by others to be spectacular, but which in reality is lowly, difficult, and obscure." That's the best definition of priesthood I have heard in a long time.

 

John of the Cross knew something about terror. Terror was what religion was all about in sixteenth-century Spain; for that matter, in sixteenth-century England as well. A time when church people knew they were right, and that alternative ideas were wrong, a time when charges of schism, apostasy, and heresy flew as freely as they do today in places like-Virginia. For attempting to reform the church, John was kidnapped, imprisoned for months in a dungeon without light or sound, relieved only by sporadic forced appearances in the monastic refectory where he was publicly flogged and shamed. No one knows how after all those months he escaped from such a prison. If you read the hagiographies you are told that it is by sheer miracle that he escaped. Well, if it was a miracle, it was more like the miracle of Lazarus, who was raised from the grave only to be chased and persecuted by the Pharisees. Where first John had been kidnapped and tortured by those he had tried to reform, at the end of his too-short life he was hounded and persecuted by the very people who once rallied to his cause. So much for the holiness of church.

 

Of only a few saints can it be said what I suspect Paul would have said of John of the Cross: that he knew only one thing, and that was Jesus Christ, and him crucified. John knew this in his own flesh, in the ache of his own bones, and yet for all the pain he suffered he could still unveil his knowledge of God in a set of writings that ravish you by their beauty-songs of praise to a God who embraces you even in the darkest night of your soul.

 

Nate, we're not ordaining you today to suffer John's fate, even though, I must say, the blinkered intolerance and vicious rhetoric of self-righteous people might make church in Pittsburgh feel more like sixteenth-century Spain than twenty-first century America. But we are ordaining you to deepen in us the knowledge of God that John possessed-the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and of him crucified; his love of the oppressed and the shunned, poured out like the water and the blood that poured out of Jesus' side. As John wrote from prison: "Pouring out these thousand graces he passed these groves in haste, and having looked at them, with his image alone, clothed them in beauty."

 

Thomas Merton called John of the Cross the father of all those whose prayer is an undefined isolation outside the boundary of spirituality. Prayer outside the boundary. That's the paradox in which you're ordained tonight. Priesthood is an office that seems so often to be all about boundaries, hedged as it is with rules, and limits, and rubrics, and exclusions. Church too often seems all about boundaries. So much of what we're doing tonight seems to emphasize the rules, including that Declaration of Intention that you signed that you will be loyal to the doctrine and discipline of the Episcopal Church. One cannot help but notice that you signed such document at a time when that loyalty is being threatened from every quarter, not least by the elements in the diocese from which I come and by the one which you now are entering.

 

But the great secret, the great paradox is that your job as priest is to lead us across the boundaries, or better to give us the courage to cross the sometimes perilous thresholds that separate us from our better selves and from one another-thresholds that separate us from the God who at once is so awesome, as John said, and so fugitive, so terrible, yet so eager for our loving embrace.

 

Merton said something else about John of the Cross. In a way it was wonderful that there was a misprint in the collect of tonight's bulletin, where Nate's name was substituted for the saint's. Nate, you got your marching orders tonight. Your job as priest is to act like John of the Cross, in Merton's words, "to deal chiefly with those who, in one way or another, have been brought face-to-face with God in a way methods do not account for and books do not explain."

 

Look around you tonight, Nate. Look around you. These are the people--we are the people-whom Merton is talking about. All of us are here because at some time in our lives we have been brought face-to-face with God. For some of us, these moments were a matter of great joy. Perhaps it was when we gathered at this threshold to be married or arrived at that font to be baptized, or when a child was born or received into our families.

 

But coming face-to-face with God, as all of us here can testify, can also be a time of great sorrow, and even of great anger: at the death of a loved one, at the betrayal of a friend, the loss of a job, the loss of a sense of who we are and of what we were called to be.

 

Nate, you were called tonight because we seek in you a companion-a companion who will give us language to discern what it is that is happening with us when we catch a glimpse of God in our lives. To discern the kind of life in Christ to which we all have been called because God had entered our lives-in John's words-"Pouring out a thousand graces yet passing us in haste."

 

Tonight, Nate, you stand poised to cross a perilous and magnificent threshold, to move toward that altar as a priest of the church, and thereby to take your place among us as a teacher, a pastor, a counselor and a confessor. Be for us and for our fractured church a priest in Jesus' image. Follow Jesus' own path. Become for us in your priesthood a peacemaker, a reconciler, a lover of outcasts, a unifier and not a divider.

 

In spite of what he said, Thomas Merton knew that priesthood was a spectacular vocation, a spectacular calling. And it is now yours-to embrace in all its joys, in all its difficulties and in all its tedium, and in all its deep, deep satisfaction.

 

We are gathered here today-your Bishop, your Rector, your colleagues, your presenters, your family, all those present-because we believe that the Holy Spirit has been leading you to this threshold since the day of your Baptism. If that be the case, stand here with us now as priest, as pastor, as teacher, as friend. Stand with us tonight and in the days to come as all of us take the risk of holiness.

 

In Jesus' name, Amen.