Service of Ordination and Installation of Mark Peters Ward

Sermon: The Church and the Salvation of the World

The Reverend David E. Bumbaugh (Mark’s advisor in seminary)

Associate Professor of Ministry

Meadville Lombard Theological School

Chicago, Illinois

This church year has been a special time for me--a time of reflection and of reminiscence. Last October I celebrated the fortieth anniversary of my ordination to the Unitarian Universalist ministry. During those intervening decades I pursued a career in parish ministry, serving congregations in Illinois, Virginia, New York and New Jersey. And then, in a culmination no one could have predicted, an eventuality which suggests there is a rich sense of humor and irony at the heart of the cosmos, I found myself back at Meadville Lombard Theological School, charged with helping prepare women and men for careers in our ministry.

I must confess that during all my decades of service to congregations, I had precious few opportunities to give much thought to the deeper implications of my calling and the purpose of the institution to which I had dedicated my life. Like many people caught up in the daily busyness of living, I met the demands of each day, each occasion with as much energy and integrity and competence as I could muster, but the deeper questions of what I was doing and why it mattered--questions that nagged at me from time to time--I tended to set aside for some rainy Monday afternoon when I could escape the urgent long enough to focus on the truly important.

And then I retired from the parish and accepted a faculty position at Meadville Lombard. Surely now I would find time to reflect on the meaning of this calling which has dominated my life for as long as I can remember. Surely now there would be occasion to think carefully about the nature of this institution to which I have given most of my life. I poured myself into my new career, and I found myself running like crazy just to stay in one place. But with the passage of the years, the questions so-long set aside began to nag at me more insistently. This fortieth anniversary year I have found myself driven again, to reflect on the nature of ministry and the calling of the church. And, an ordination sermon seemed to offer the logical excuse to think more carefully about some of these questions.

However, when I opened the mental cupboard where, over the years I had stored my insights and concerns about church and ministry, what tumbled out were countless questions and few answers. Over the years, all the answers had been consumed by fierce questions. For a time I struggled to sort through those questions, to find some focus and for a time, nothing came. In a panic I found myself confronting the void. For four decades I had practiced the ministry, and now I was charged with preparing new ministers, yet when I attempted to describe, to understand, to explain the meaning of my life and the function of the institution to which I had devoted my energies, and the vocation for which I was preparing students, I found myself speechless and tongue-tied. Where there should have been a lifetime of understanding, there were only mocking questions. What kind of a calling was ministry for an adult human being? What had I been doing all that time? What ever made me think that the church was important in the human struggle? Where did it ever contact reality? What was it I once knew about ministry and had forgotten in the doing of ministry?

In despair, I set the matter aside and buried myself in routine work--the kind of work that occupies the outer court of my mind, while leaving the sanctuary empty to receive whatever gracious gifts of insight might come unbidden. I set myself the task of bringing some order out of the chaos of my filing system--indeed, ever since we moved to Chicago from New Jersey, it had always been more a heap than a system.

As I sorted through mounds of paper, trying to decide what to save and what could safely be discarded, I came across a three-by-five card, blank on one side and on the other, in my handwriting, the words: the salvation of the world. I started to toss the card into the trash, when something stopped me. I stood and stared at the card, trying to recall what it meant. And then I remembered. I had been at a workshop somewhere and the leader - I don’t remember her name - handed out the cards and asked us to write, without any deep thought or lengthy reflection a completion to the sentence: The purpose of the church and its ministry is.... Without a moment’s hesitation, I had written The purpose of the church and its ministry is the salvation of the world. The workshop leader told us to put the card aside and we=d come back to it later. I do not know what happened--perhaps time ran out; perhaps the leader simply forgot; perhaps the workshop took an unexpected turn. In any case, we never did come back to that card. Or perhaps the leader was more prescient than I knew. In any case, now, here it was, saved amidst the accumulated detritus of a career, an improbable voice from the past, proclaiming in my own words that the role of the church and of its ministry is the salvation of the world.

Whatever was I thinking when I scribbled those words? What megalomania had captured my mind? The church is charged with the salvation of the world? Who am I kidding? I stared in silence at the card in my hand, the yellowing around its edges silently reminding me of the relentless passage of time. And suddenly I was overwhelmed by a wordless sadness, a sense of loss and grief that seemed to have no immediate context. As I sat in my office, the radio playing some soft music in the background, I suddenly became aware of the enormous distance we have journeyed since that Sunday in October in 1964, when I was ordained to this ministry.

Those were terrible days. Less than a year earlier, John Kennedy’s murder had ushered in the killing times--when it seemed we were intent upon devouring our leaders, when we committed ourselves to a needless and murderous war in Southeast Asia, when the cry for racial justice was met with bombs and guns and dogs and fire hoses, when the alienation of the young threatened the entire social consensus. And yet, in the midst of that horror there was a curious millennialism at work, a redemptive conviction that the future remained open to new possibilities and that out of the collapse of the old order a new world could be built--that poverty could be overcome, that justice was possible, that the dream of a great society lay within our reach if we had the courage to reach out and grasp the possibilities.

That was the context of my assertion. In the crack between histories, when the future is radically open, when the old crumbles and the new is waiting to be built, then it is that the church is called to its mission. Then it is that ministry becomes a career of power and significance. Then it is that the faithful are called to the salvation of the world, to the creation of a new order in which old promises are redeemed and old dreams are realized and the world is made new again. That was the world in which I began my ministry. That was the world that made church more than it appeared to be. That was the world that made the disappointments bearable, the lapses, the fumbling and uncertainty endurable. We were serving a vision of something beyond ourselves and in faith we could trust the process to use and amplify our feeble and faltering efforts to bring into being a new world.

But over the decades, something has happened to that vision, that faith, that hope. The new world did not come. Or it came in a shape and form we did not recognize. Disappointed in our expectations, we trimmed them to realistic dimensions. We surrendered the notion that we had a calling larger than ourselves, and we settled for tidying up our little local universes. We redefined justice not in terms of a reformed social order, but in terms of remedial action and modest philanthropy. We withdrew the boundaries of our concern to the immediate community, to the personal, to the visible. And we restructured the church and its ministry until it became a shrunken vision of what it once had been. Once upon a time, we believed that the church and its ministry should equip people for the struggle to save the world. But in these days, we are content if we can simply make people feel a little better about themselves. We call it spirituality and focus the energies of the church upon the interior, the personal, the private. We call it spirituality and do not recognize that it is but one more form of narcissism. We call it spirituality and do not understand that it is not faith but self-serving that masquerades as faith.

All around us, our world cries out for redemption. We live in a world in which the few consume empty calories, while the many die from hunger and malnutrition. We live in a world in which wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. We live in a world in which the few lust after spiritual fulfillment, while the many drag out their lives in despair and hopelessness. We live in a world in which we make a desert and call it peace, in which we destroy human lives and dismiss our action as collateral damage, in which we subject others to our economic dominance and call it freedom and insist that this kind of freedom is God’s plan for the world, and that in spreading that freedom with bombs and guns we are acting as God’s agents. We live in a world in which the long-term viability of the planet is regularly traded for short-term gain. We live in a world in which vision is expendable and virtue is privatized and the ethic of the main-chance dominates. And somehow, in such a world, we have dared to define the religious imperative in terms of personal spiritual development, telling ourselves that once we have achieved a meaningful spirituality, there will be time and energy to take care of the world. Too seldom, these days, do we sing Wonders still the world shall witness; too seldom do we sing of building the city of the light; too seldom do we sing of an earth made fair and all her people one; too seldom do we sing These things shall be, a loftier race. Too often, these days, our songs and hymns call us to attend to our miserable, shrunken souls, and we trim the mission of the church and its ministry to the dimensions of those diminished expectations.

Every fiber of my being cries out against this diminished understanding of the church and its ministry. We are not called into being in order to take in each other’s emotional laundry. We are not called into being to serve ourselves, to enrich our interior lives, to justify our narrow vision. We are not called into being to be a twelve step program. The purpose of the church is the salvation of the world. The purpose of its ministry, lay and clergy, is to enlist people in a vision that lifts them out of dumb fascination with themselves, that lifts them out of their little local universes, that helps them understand themselves as part of an ongoing venture, responsible to generations past and generations yet to come for building a world of justice and mercy, a world of peace and hope.

In the current climate such a conviction sounds grandiose and curiously empty--like a faint echo from a time long gone. And yet, I remain convinced that the church will never acquit its responsibility so long as it allows itself to be trapped in and limited by the demands people bring to it from moment to moment and from time to time. Such a church soon becomes little more than part of the entertainment industry, competing with television programs about miracles and angels. True religion, honest faith makes demands upon people in exchange for a deepened sense of purpose and meaning. In the process, the church makes room for grace; contemporary spirituality offers little more than phony grace.

It is in this context that we ordain Mark Ward this evening and install him as minister to this congregation. As he pursues his ministry among you and within our larger movement, it is my prayer that he will be one of those voices calling us back to an understanding of the church as more than a refuge from the world, that he will use his deep compassion and his many talents to structure a commanding vision of the nature of the religious venture, that his ministry will serve to recall us to our ancient vocation: the salvation of the world.

In all fairness, I know that this sounds like a quixotic challenge. If he accepts the challenge, there are ways in which Mark is fore doomed to failure, just as there are ways in which the church is fore doomed to failure in its struggle to redeem the world. It is unlikely that any of us shall ever live in the world we dream. But meaning in our lives derives from service to that world we dream. In the effort to make it reality, even as we fall short, our own existence is amplified and we find the purpose and the meaning of our existence, the purpose and meaning which so mockingly eludes our stubborn, frantic search for the spiritual. We are not required to succeed; we are required to be faithful in the mission that is ours. And in a curious way, the only real failure is to ignore that call.