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Every year the seminary that I went
to gives out a prize for the best preacher in the graduating class. And by the time I was a senior there, I
thought maybe that prize would be mine. I’d given sermons at my home parish in
San Francisco before I even went to seminary, and many more at and my field
education site once I got there, and the responses I received gave me
confidence that this was something I was good at. It’s a tradition at the seminary that on
Tuesdays throughout the year, one of the seniors gives the sermon at the mid-day
Eucharist. And from what I’d seen and
heard there, I thought I measured up well against the competition. I was proud of my own senior sermon, and when
the call went out later in the year for a student volunteer to fill an open
date on the preaching calendar, I jumped at the chance to give another.
So I liked my chances to win the
prize; and as our class was lining up for the commencement ceremony, and
bishops and rectors of cardinal parishes of the church were coming down the
line, giving us their congratulations, I couldn’t help fantasizing about that
moment when I would hear my name called and, in front of my classmates, and the
faculty, and all those distinguished guests, I would walk up to the podium to claim
my reward. And when the ceremony began,
and we’d marched in, and were in our seats, and the big moment was drawing near,
my heart was racing. Finally, the
Homiletics Professor and Dean of the seminary went to the microphone and
announced that the winner of the Rt. Rev. Richard Millard Prize for Excellence
in Preaching for the class of 2005 was…Katherine Kelley.
I was stunned. I didn’t know until that moment just how much
I had wanted that award, and how certain I had been that they would give it to
me. As I struggled with my emotions, I
thought I saw some of my classmates stealing glances at me, as if they knew
that I’d been expecting to win, and I imagined that the color of my face
betrayed my disappointment, and I was ashamed.
Suddenly I was no longer paying attention to what was happening around
me. The ceremony kept moving along
toward the moment when I also would be called up to the podium, to receive that
diploma that I’d worked so hard to get, that only a few years earlier seemed
forever out of my reach, but I was stuck back there, thinking of the honor I
had been denied: “Kathy Kelley? The one
with the voice like a rusty hinge? How
is this possible?”
Finally, I pulled myself together. I recalled that I had missed Kathy Kelley’s
senior sermon, and that for all I knew she was an outstanding preacher. As the commencement exercises ended, and I
looked for her in the crowd to congratulate her, I remembered the Baccalaureate
dinner a couple of nights before. After
dessert, the seniors had the opportunity to get up and make some farewell remarks
to the seminary community. Mine were pretty
lame—your basic “I want to thank everyone who made this moment possible” kind
of speech. But Kathy Kelley’s was oratory,
a wise and heartfelt tribute to the lay people at Trinity, Sacramento who had
nurtured her faith and her call to ministry.
She ended by admonishing us all to honor the laity of the church, and
lead them and serve them with humility and love. When she was finished the room was completely
silent for a long moment, and then burst into applause.
Academic prizes are only one way our
society singles people out for honor. The
cultural code that assigns us our places in the pecking order is extremely
complex, and it depends on everything from the brands we display on our clothes
and our cars, to the neighborhoods where we live and the places where we work
and the schools where we send our children, from how we spend our vacations to where
we sit when we go to the ball park. But in
Jesus’ day the code was simpler. There
weren’t that many ways to stake a claim to prestige. And one of the main places it was done was at
wedding feasts and dinner parties. Who
could hold the most lavish banquet, and who would be invited, and who would
not, and who would accept the invitation, and where they would sit when they came—these
were the things that mattered in the high-stakes game of social standing.
And that is why the documents of the
New Testament contain so many passages about wedding feasts and social banquets.
That is why the Gospel of Luke remembers
Jesus’ remarks to supper guests in the house of a leader of the Pharisees. Because in this passage Jesus isn’t giving
advice about banquet etiquette—he’s pointing out the senselessness of fighting with
your friends over rank. It’s all just based
on someone else’s opinion, and honor can turn to shame in an instant, and starting
out at the bottom is just as promising a strategy as starting out at the top. This is also why it is so radical for Jesus to
tell his host that he’d be better off inviting the kind of guests to his party who
don’t get invited to the better sort of affairs and can do nothing to burnish
his reputation. Because the only reputation
that matters in the end is the one we have in the eyes of God, and God’s idea
of who is honorable, and who is not, is not like ours.
There was a time, not so very long
ago, when attending a church like St. John’s was one way to lay claim to social
prestige. If you wanted to establish
your credentials as a solid citizen and a moral person, someone of good character,
whose acquaintance would reflect well on others, it paid to belong to a
church. And I would guess that this
church gave its members that extra touch of distinction that some of the others
did not. Now I’m not saying that there
weren’t a lot of genuinely devout and faithful people here, at every stage of the
167-year history of St. John’s. But I do
think it’s safe to say that there were also some of the other kind. And somewhere along the line those folks
stopped coming here, because it was paying diminishing social returns.
Today going to church is no
guarantee of respect. Indeed, there are
some circles where it marks one out as a bigot, or a credulous fool. There are others for whom church is still valuable
for social climbing, but they tend to prefer places a little more fashionable
than ours. And we, who used to sit at
the highest place at the table, now find ourselves nearer to the lowest. But I think that if we’re truthful to the wisdom
of our tradition, we’d have to say that it’s a better place to be. At the low place it’s easier to remember that
social status is an idol, a cracked cistern that holds no water. It’s easier to
remember that honor is just shame that hasn’t shown up at the party yet. At the low place it’s easier to remember what
it is like to be uninvited, to be on wrong side of the codes of social acceptance. In the low place it’s easier to remember how treating
others on the basis of what they can do for our social standing is an affront
to God.
It’s also a place where it’s easier
to remember Jesus, and the dinner parties that he had, where he ate and drank and celebrated the Kingdom of God
with tax-collectors and prostitutes. It’s
easier to remember how he sat at table with the one who would betray him, and
the ones who would desert him, and said, “this is my Body, given for you.” From the low place we keep the feast that he
commanded, holding in highest honor the last meal of a condemned man. Everyone is invited to this feast, where we
come not for distinction, but forgiveness, where we belong, not to an exclusive
social set, but to the eternal kingdom of the love of the one creator of us all.
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