Last weekend, from Fresno to downtown Los Angeles, I experienced an immersion in the Sacred Order of Deacons that reinforced something I’ve long believed. Deacons can be at risk of being held back by virtue of their excellence.
On Saturday morning, I was at the consecration and ordination of our own Greg Kimura as sixth bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin. In the fellowship time as well as the liturgy, we were drenched in deacons. San Joaquin’s second of three bishops provisional, LA’s former bishop suffragan Chet Talton, was devoted to the diaconate. Perhaps that is a factor. I reconnected with several deacon friends and made new ones. They had been successful in prior vocations, from business to marriage and family therapy.
I made it back Los Angeles in time to offer remarks at a reception hosted by the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, sitting in for Archbishop Hosam Naoum رئيس الأساقفة حسام نعوم. He couldn’t leave his people because of the United States and Israeli war against Iran.
One American Friends trustee, Anne, a deacon in Maryland, spent a career in the foreign service before ordination. I asked about her last posting. She said she was President Obama’s ambassador to Lithuania. That means an Episcopal deacon played a role in the painstaking work of shielding the Baltic states from the most pernicious aspects of sharing their neighborhood with Moscow’s always insinuating Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.
It is a familiar story. Usually before even conceiving of a vocation in the church, deacons achieve excellence in the world. It is often true of priests. It is always true of deacons. In our congregation this morning, our discerners include a physician and a standup comic. In our deacon corps itself, we have current and former federal and municipal officials as well as experts in public health and the lives of women living in the Arabic speaking world.
Your reputations precede you. And that could be a problem. If the church is feeling especially churchy and copping an especially superior attitude toward the worldly – if we proclaim that we are pure and washed clean and therefore above politics and public policy – if we think we don’t need to articulate a view on the Baltic states or Iran, immigration or the social safety net — or if anyone else in the ecclesial system is feeling insecure about themselves – then a deacon may end up feeling undervalued.
Sorry to get down to brass tacks. But the deacon’s ministry occurs in the tension that always exists between the church and world. We are gathered on St. Mark’s’ feast day. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus’s ministry sprang alive in a world that was desperately in need of justice and healing. In Mark, the saving power of Jesus Christ intrudes with sudden urgency. In just the first chapter, we feel the world shift on its axis.
And at the end, as we heard today, just before our Lord’s ascension, he says that those who believe in him will have nothing to fear from the world. From its tongues and languages of power, polarization, and hatred. From its snake oil solutions and the poisons with which it seduces and addicts us away from the elixir of the unconditional love of our God in Christ.
Jesus says believers can touch worldly things and not be hurt. Believers also look and see that much of what we experience in creation is sanctified and beautiful. Deacons teach us not to be binary about the church and the world. We can bring everything to church, all we are, learn from it, see grace sanctify it, and then go out back out into the world and re-introduce it to people as belonging to the godhead. Using our sacred vocabulary, we can reacquaint spiritually hungry neighbors to all creation’s kinship with the sacred.
Deacons help us do that because they have already conquered the world. We can’t have a complete church without the diaconate. We can’t fully understand the breadth and depth of creation without the diaconate. Which is why I’m proud to be a deacon for life and I have been proud to serve with each of you.
[My sermon on Saturday at the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles’s annual deacons’ retreat at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Sierra Madre. Our brilliant archdeacon, the Ven. Laura Eustis Siriani, organized every detail, assisted by the Rev. Ed Sniecienski. Over lunch, deacons and I thanked one another for the ministry that has been ours together in this time and place.]