Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City,
June 11, 2006, The First Sunday of Pentecost, Year B
For the 40th Anniversary of the Ordination of Peter Carey
by The Reverend Brian Daley, S.J.

Exodus 3: 1-6
Psalm 93
Romans 8: 12-17
John 3: 1-16

       There’s an aphorism circulating on clerical e-mail these days that goes (in the Catholic version, at least) something like this: There are three great Mysteries that are known only to God: how the Dominicans of the Paris Province remain in communion with the Dominicans of Toulouse; how many orders of Franciscan nuns there are; and what the Jesuits really believe. If you’re versed in Roman Catholic lore, you can add other Mysteries almost at will: what the Passionists do on Easter Sunday; how the Carthusians manage to keep warm; how much Notre Dame pays its football coach, Charlie Weis. I’m sure you have a whole range of similar mysteries in the Anglican communion, which I’m neither wise enough nor foolish enough to formulate here! Yet it seems clear to me that the Mysteries we have come together here to celebrate this morning, on the 40th anniversary of Peter Carey’s ordination as a priest, are more profound and more wonderful still, and certainly more important for us, as a gathering of Christian disciples on this Feast of the Most Holy Trinity: the Mystery of friendship, the Mystery of vocation, and beyond and beneath both of them, the infinite Mystery of God.

       I. Friendship. I have to start by making a full disclosure, as they say in the corporate world: Peter is my oldest friend. (Not the oldest in years, of course, or the person who fills my very earliest memories, but the friend with whom I have remained in living and delightful contact – with all the ups and downs, battles and reconciliations that every friendship involves – for longer than anyone else I can think of.) I remember clearly how it all began – Peter running down Midland Avenue, East Orange, shouting, “Hey, wait for me!” as we got out of class one warm September afternoon at the start of fifth grade in Holy Name School. I remember how it continued: bicycle explorations of all the best parks of the northern New Jersey suburbs; bicycle pilgrimages on Holy Thursday; trips to New York museums with Aunt Liz; new, improvised operas in the Careys’ basement; creatively constructed Buddhist liturgies in the Daleys’ basement; canasta on the back porch on hot summer days; secret messages dropped on each other’s desk in sixth grade; the birth of Jean, the death of Kathleen, their dear mother; visits with the Dominicans at Guzman Hall and Dover and Seabright; correspondence from Rome; the illness and death of my own brother John; St. Stephen’s Church and thrift shop in Woodlawn; visits and dinner parties with Peter and David here in Chelsea, amidst all their various collections… The list could keep on growing, and - please God - it will! But through it all Peter remains faithful and generous: quietly organizing my life, keeping me up to date on things he thinks I should know about; ever thoughtful, ever lively, ever funny and outrageous and interesting, ever himself.
Each of us here could doubtless put together a similar list that might help evoke Peter’s friendship in concrete images and memories. Yet of course that friendship can’t be captured in images, and goes beyond memories, which is why we call it a Mystery: a reality of love, of shared life, that draws us all out beyond our fearful, limited selves into a unity that reflects, if only in fragments, the eternal Mystery of God, the Mystery of pure and endless self-giving at the origin of all things. As St. Augustine remarks in Book 8 of his great work On the Trinity, “In this question we are occupied with, about the trinity and about knowing God, the only thing we really have to see is what love is.” (De Trin VIII, 10). And we see that mysterious, God-driven love, Augustine himself would agree, first of all in what we share with our friends.

        II. Vocation. Yet we are here today not simply to celebrate our friendship with Peter, in all the spectrum of colors and images each of us might supply; we are here to celebrate his ordination to the sacramental priesthood, 40 years ago last Friday. We are celebrating Peter’s ministry, in other words: forty years of lived commitment to meditating on the Word of God as revealed in Jesus, to preaching that Word, sharing its consolations and challenges with the Church and the world, deepening his own identification with that Word as Jesus has made it - and still makes it - flesh. We speak of such a life of witness and ministry as a vocation: an honor one does not take on oneself, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us (5.4), unless one is “called by God, as Aaron was,” as Jesus was. Priesthood is an honor, a role in the Church; but it is also always a mission to which we are called, a journey that may begin on familiar ground, but that takes one to new and unexpected places – even, as Jesus warned the first Peter, to places where one might not personally wish to go (John 21.18). And the roots of this vocation, this mission journey of witness and care for the Church, lie clearly in a person’s encounter with God as the ultimate Mystery: to have a sense of God as what is ultimately real, inescapably and transformingly near, is to know that one is called by name, marked to be a channel of faith and love to others, sent on, in some way or other, to help in God’s great work of forming his human creatures into a free and holy people – in Christian terms, of building up the Body of Christ.

     So in our first reading today, Moses – still simply a shepherd on his father-in-law’s ranch – sees a remarkable sight in the wilderness of Sinai that becomes for him a symbol, a proclamation, of the reality of God: “an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.” As he contemplates the wonder - sees a flame that gives heat and light, yet leaves its fuel, its container and its setting intact – Moses hears himself being called by name, and bows down to adore. The voice who speaks to him, he learns, is the voice of the same God who had called his ancestors, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob: a God yet without name, always without bodily form or metaphysical definition; yet a God who remains faithful, who cares for the people he has chosen. To encounter this God was, for Moses, also a summons to move on, to leave his father-in-law’s flock and set out on a dangerous, always challenging journey at the head of a doubting and resistant people; it was a vocation, not simply to report what he had seen, but to be the continuing mediator, the chosen go-between, who made it possible for the people to hear God’s call to them, and to remain in some semblance of peace and friendship with God. The ministry of being blessed with a vision of God, being called to communicate that vision to others in understandable terms for their own time, is really the vocation that is built into all religious faith, as Scripture understands it; but for the Christian priest it becomes the form of one’s life, an unending preoccupation and challenge and joy, a new level of participation in God’s mysterious life. One of my own favorite Church Fathers, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, in his famous sermon on priestly ministry, describes it this way:

    To me it seems no trivial task, no work for a small mind, to give each person, in due season, his portion of the nourishment of the word, and to dispense in a discerning way the truth of our opinions. These concern speculation on such subjects as the world or worlds, matter, the soul, the intellect and good and evil intelligences, the providence that weaves together and unrolls all things..; they are concerned, further, with our original formation and final restoration; with the types of the truth and the covenants [in Scripture]; with the first and the second coming of Christ, his incarnation, sufferings and death; and also with his resurrection, the last day, the judgment and retribution, whether sad or glorious; and to crown all, with what we are to think of the supreme and blessed Trinity. This, surely, is the most dangerous task assigned to those entrusted with sharing the light in baptism… (Or. 2.35-36)

    Today, we might come up with a slightly different list of “dangerous subjects” for Christian preaching and teaching; but surely Gregory’s point remains real for us: that the vocation of teasing out the implications of the Gospel for our world of semi-believers is a risky and daunting one, and that the heart of it, the challenge that “crowns all,” is to speak of God’s own self as that God has spoken to us and called us – the God whom we dare to call Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. Speaking often and deeply about God is a challenge no priest, no Christian, can refuse.

      III. Trinity. That is why it seems so appropriate, to me at least, that we should be celebrating the priestly vocation of our friend Peter on this feast of the Holy Trinity, this one Sunday in the year when we not only worship the God who is one and yet three, but go on to remind ourselves that it is this Mystery, this unique and manifold and self-communicating God, who really is the sum and substance of what we Christians have to say to the world. The “Trinity, which is God” (to use a favorite phrase of Augustine’s), is not simply something we know or conjecture about God, about how and what God is. The Trinity is what Christians have discovered to be the Mystery at the heart of all reality: a presence illuminating and warming our world without destroying its authentic form, as Moses discovered in the burning bush – a presence calling us by name, sending us to do his work of leading his people to freedom and unity, yet always beyond our human power to name or imagine; but a presence, in fact, whom Jesus of Nazareth taught us to name “Father,” and who – as today’s Gospel reminds us – has “so loved the world” that he sent not simply Moses but Jesus, his “only Son,” to lead those who believe in him – who are ready to be “born again,” shaped anew in the water of baptism’s womb – to share in God’s “eternal life”; a presence, finally, in which we believe we already share through the Spirit Jesus sends down on us from the Father, the Spirit who includes us in the life, the inner relationships of this eternal God. “When we cry ‘Abba! Father!’,” St. Paul reminds us in our second reading today – when we say the Lord’s prayer, as Jesus taught us – “it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ…”

      This, after all, is really what Christianity is all about. Our talk of God as Trinity, expressed in countless prayers and blessings and in the formula in which we are all baptized, is the Christian Mystery in a verbal nutshell, the briefest of Christian creeds, the summing-up of the Good News Christianity has to proclaim to all the world. God is real, though beyond our sight in the fullness of his being; God has sent his Son Jesus to tell us of him, and to show us what God’s love is by dying on the cross; and both Father and Son have given the Holy Spirit now to us, in the grace of faith and love and in the sacraments of the Church, to make us brothers and sisters of Jesus, sons and daughters, heirs of the life promised to Abraham – to include us in the Mystery that God is. God is with us so that we might be with God; God has become one of us, so that we might become one with him, in him, and with each other along with him. Trinity Sunday is the day, of all days, when we talk of God, and God is both the source and the object of our Christian vocation, of Peter’s priestly vocation – the anchor and model of our friendship, the goal of our journey.
Back in the early 13th century, the Cistercians (an upstart reform order at the time) decided, in a series of general chapters, that while they should join the rest of the Western Church in celebrating the new feast of the Most Holy Trinity on the first Sunday after Pentecost, and celebrate it with appropriate solemnity, the abbot of each monastery, who would normally preside and preach, should be dispensed from the obligation of a sermon on this one major feast propter difficultatem materiae (“because of the difficulty of the subject”). In my humble view, that was a bad decision (though many preachers since then have longed to follow the Cistercians’ lead); the Trinity may be beyond our grasp in verbal and conceptual terms, but it is really meant to be, in one way or another, the subject of every sermon and the fulfillment of every prayer, the grace of every sacrament – God, through Christ Jesus, giving us a share in his own Spirit. Today, as we join joyfully in celebrating Peter’s 40 years of preaching and teaching and ministering God to God’s people on their journey, let us pray that he, too, may continue to be formed by the Holy Spirit in the image of Christ the Son, and that our friendship with him may continue to draw us more deeply into experiencing for ourselves that God-given love that gives life to the world.

     And to that same God be all praise and thanks: Father and Son and Holy Spirit, the God who is, and who was, and who will be, unto the ages of ages.

     Amen.

   Back to Sermon Selections