Homily                                                                                    Concordia College

Installation of Elly McHan                                                    October 30, 2012

Beloved of God, Grace and peace be to you from our maker, redeemer, and inspiration.  How fortunate I feel to speak on this wonderful occasion, the installation of the Reverend Elizabeth McHan as Associate Campus Pastor of Concordia College.   

And how daunted as well: When I was a boy in a little town in western Pennsylvania, my Presbyterian pastors—yes, friends, I was a childhood Calvinist—loomed large in my life.  Richard Graves, Jack Steward, Ron Ogblesbee, Bill Philips: They were ministers of wisdom, wit, patience, and kindness: for Anne and me (we grew up in the same congregation) they became teachers, counselors, and, sometimes, profiles in courage.  Through them we were confirmed, communed, and married. And in the church they led, I first saw outside of my home the leadership that women exercised in our community—as teachers, deacons, and elders.   

Those pastors were the first scholars I ever knew: readers of Hebrew and Greek, seekers of truth, wide-ranging in their thought from Shakespeare to Kierkegaard. (In fact, I admired them so much that I suspect it was only the prospect of attending endless church committee meetings that kept me from seeking to become a minister myself—and God has had a good laugh about that now in my academic life.)  So I think with you this morning about what it means to be a pastor called to a community of scholars, called to serve through word and sacrament at this global liberal arts college of the church. 

In this task the scripture chosen by Pastor McHan for this day guides us.  I will begin with the Gospel, turn Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, and end with the Psalm.  The story of Christ’s appearance to the disciples after the resurrection, when they are locked in fear after Jesus’ brutal death, strikes me as both comforting and mysterious.  Filled with wonder, the prelude to this scene presents the weeping Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ empty tomb, distraught that his body has been taken away, asking the man she thinks a gardener if he knows where the body is—only to realize, when the gardener speaks, that he is her resurrected Lord. 

It is this surprising Jesus who comes to the fearful disciples, turning their misery into rejoicing, and then giving them his peace, breathing on them the spirit of God, and sending them out—commissioning them, as we in the name of God commission Pastor McHan this morning at Concordia.  Yet in John, Jesus sends them out with these strange words: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (20:23).  It is a comfort to hear that the first injunction the resurrected Christ gives, after he breathes forth God’s spirit, is to forgive: this is the good news, the news that the justice of our God lies in mercy, that beaten, broken, executed Jesus returns alive not with anger but with the wonder of his love. 

But what do we make this morning of the corollary in the latter half of verse 23—“if you retain the sins of any, they are retained”?  As Pastor McHan wrote to me when she sent me the readings for today: this “is not any easy text.”  What it suggests to me is that for a disciple, and for a pastor, there must be not only the role of worship and care, but a prophetic role.  Pastors must tell us the truth, even when it is neither comfortable nor convenient, even the truth of our brokeness.  The Greek for this verse suggests that forgiveness is a letting go and that retaining is a matter of holding onto.  This hard language acknowledges that the things that would separate us from God, including our own perverse self-interest, are real.  That cruelty, meanness, neglect, moral blindness, and violence against others and ourselves, are real, even in so idyllic a place as this college campus.   We fail.  We fall.  We find ourselves empty and lost.  Pastor McHan is called to name such things among us and in the larger world; she is called to remind us that deep relationship, genuine community, requires the truth, spoken in love. 

The second letter to the Corinthians helps us to make the next move, and to see in it the role our pastor must play.  (It is almost as if Pastor McHan chose these lessons with a purpose!) If John’s gospel links forgiveness to truth telling and to the prophetic role of disciples and pastors, Paul’s letter to a conflicted community commends to us the ministry of reconciliation.  That reconciling begins with the recognition of what the grieving Mary Magdalene saw in the face of the gardener who speaks her name at the tomb: that Christ has been raised, and everything has changed.  We are set free: free from fear, and free from the mean addictions bind us.  “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new” (5:17). 

Elly, we are changed because you are here.  Your advent reminds us that God’s creation is not once and done but perpetual.  You come to us—from Canada, from Oslo, from Jerusalem—bringing great gifts, not the least of which is the reminder that God is everywhere and in every time making all things new.  And in the liberty of that recreation, you are called to reconcile us: to heal the divisions within and among us.  Like truth telling, this is hard work.  We live in an age of speed and fragmentation, when our time, our learning, our relationships are broken up into bits and pieces, where perhaps the great temptation is not to some focused sin but to endless and terminal distraction.  You are called among us to speak the health of the whole, undivided life.   

We are often divided not only within but also among us—separated by culture, by political difference, by wealth and poverty, even by our faith traditions and convictions.  In the midst of this difference, you are called to reconcile us to our neighbors, close and far away, teaching us to see in them the face of the crucified and resurrected Christ.   You are, in other words, called to be the like gardener at the tomb, speaking our names and letting us see that in Christ we are made new, free to love others as God has first loved us.

In this labor, you have the comfort of knowing that even though you have travelled from the Middle East to the upper Midwest, from Jerusalem to far Fargo-Moorhead, God is with you—and with us together in this community of faith and learning.  Together we have the consolation of knowing that God’s right hand holds us fast.   

Elizabeth McHan, yours is the ministry of word and sacrament at Concordia College.  You are called among us to speak the truth to us in love.  You are called to reconcile us in the liberating love of God.  You are called to remember and proclaim that the one who made us and redeemed us is here, now, forever.   

Elly, we rejoice that you have been called to Concordia College.  God bless and keep you in your ministry, and God bless us all, forgiven and reconciled in God’s new creation.  Amen.