Eric LeBrocq Ordination Service
The Rev. Sam Todd
St. Johns, Sealy
February 1, 2012
St. Johns, Sealy
February 1, 2012
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In the Book of Exodus the Lord lays claim to every first born of man and beast (Ex. 13:2, 12-13). That is why Jesus’ parents take him to the temple and present him to the Lord (Luke 2:22). Eric LeBrocq is the first born, the only born actually, of his parents. He was supposed to have been presented as a child; so he is a little late getting here. But I am happy to have taken part in his presentation just now nonetheless. I am very pleased to be back in this wonderful parish for Eric’s ordination to the priesthood. I have had the pleasure of knowing him for over three years through the Iona School for Ministry. At Iona we urge our folks to preach on the lections for the day. I mention this because otherwise you would not know it since that is not what I am doing this evening. I had the privilege of being Eric’s mentor for awhile and regard this as my last opportunity to give him some advice.
From the perspective of being an Episcopalian for over seventy years and of being a priest for over forty six of them, I want to reveal tonight two secrets of being a successful priest. And by successful, I mean being a priest your people will love, your bishop will respect and Christ will be proud of. The Church needs good administrators and, God knows, good preachers, but some of the best priests I have known were distinguished neither by their administrative nor by their preaching skills. I yield to no one in my esteem for education, particularly theological education. But in all honesty I cannot claim that the best priests I have known were most distinguished by the excellence of their education. In last Sunday’s Epistle, Paul said “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (I Cor. 8:1b NRSV). Some of the most successful priests I have known were set apart by two things which constitute the content of my counsel. First, they loved their people. They cherished them. They had taken to heart the charge delivered to me at my ordination from the old prayer book: “Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his Spouse and his Body” (1928 BCP p. 540). Is it not a privilege to have love as one’s vocation? Of course anything precious will be counterfeited and there are many imitations of love on the market. Successful politicians have gotten down the outward and visible signs of it: the firm handshake, the warm smile, the sincere look in the eye. If technique is all it is, people will realize that eventually and peg you for a politician. They may even sort of admire you – “boy that Jim could charm the scales off a snake”. But they will not revere you. When I was on staff at Christ Church, San Antonio in 1976 I was calling each week at the home of a dying man. One day I came to his door to discover that he had died not fifteen minutes earlier. Within ten minutes more Sam Capers was there. Sam was the long retired rector but even longer time friend and pastor of this couple; so I paid close attention to what he did. He did not say much; he was just there with them and for them. He later told me, “They won’t remember what you say, but they will never forget what you do”. Sam was not a great preacher but he was a much revered priest . The core of the Christian gospel is the love of God; we priests are meant to be channels of it and our people need us to be. It makes our sermons credible. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it the other way around: “A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men” (Life Together, p.29). Knowing him and this congregation as I do, I can attest that Eric has already passed the Dietrich Bonhoeffer test. It is amusing to me that in all the self studies parishes do and in all the surveys they take on what they want in their next priest, they never say, “We want somebody who will love us”. They would be embarrassed to say that. The other thing they will never say is, “We want a Christian”. It would be insulting to |
say that. Of course he will be a Christian, he is a priest for gosh sakes, he is even an Episcopalian. But underneath all the credentials and accomplishments and lovely appearance, people want what the Old Testament calls an ish elohim, a man of God. They want someone rooted in Christ. When God sent Ezekiel to the Israelites, he told him, “Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels….Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them” (Ezek. 2:3,5 NRSV). Politicians tell folks what they want to hear; our job is to tell them what God wants them to hear. We are not running for anything except fidelity to our calling. I think the Lord says to us, “So speak and live that whether they listen to you or do not listen to you, they will know there has been a Christian among them”.
So my second counsel is this: cleave to Christ. Root yourself in him. Have him as the wellspring of your ministry. The inner life is crucial to clergy. We go on retreat to be alone with Christ. We study the Bible to take on the mind of Christ. We pray to discern the heart of Christ. Our most important mission is the thing prayed for at our baptism, namely, that we will “grow into the full stature of Christ” (BCP p. 302). I am talking about something that cuts below politics. Devout authentic Christian leaders can be politically conservative or politically liberal. Politics has to do with the proper size, role and activities of government. Those are things about which authentic Christians can disagree. My father served in the Air Force for thirty years. He served in the Pacific during World War II and in Korea during the Korean War. When he retired in 1969, he and mother moved back to my hometown of Columbia, South Carolina. They did not attend Trinity, the large downtown church where mother had been reared, where they had been married and where I had been baptized, but went instead to the smaller church, St. Martin’s in the Fields, located directly across the street from their apartment building. They went there the rest of their lives; the ashes of them both are buried in St. Martin’s Church yard. The rector during their whole time there, the priest who buried them both, was a genial man named Jim Abbott who greatly disapproved of this nation being at war in Vietnam, as it then was. I don’t know that he preached about it from the pulpit, I rather doubt that he did, but everyone knew what he thought and how he felt. As it happened, my father was skeptical of our being there; for purely military reasons, he thought it unwise for us to get involved in a land war in Asia. But Jim Abbott was critical for an entirely different reason. He was a pacifist. He was a pacifist in a conservative state in a parish located less than two miles from Ft. Jackson, one of our larger military installations. In other words, he was seriously out of synch with the prevailing sentiment of his community. One day while I was visiting, a friend of my father’s was over at the apartment. This friend was a graduate of Annapolis and a career naval officer and also a member of St. Martin’s. I said to him, “I would suppose that you and the rector do not see eye to eye on military matters or foreign policy.” “You’ve got that right”, he said; “I think he is very naïve”. “And yet”, I said, “you continue to go to St. Martin’s as do many other people. And no one seems to be trying to run the rector off. Why is that? I am just curious. How does he get away with it, with being who he is?” He said, “I continue to go to St. Martin’s because I know that Jim Abbott would lay down his life for me. And he gets away with it because we all know that if the Communists took over this country tomorrow, Jim Abbott is the first guy they would shoot”. Eric, whom I call mentee no longer but friend, I thank you for the privilege of preaching on this glorious occasion; I welcome you as my brother in this holy work and I charge you: love your people and cleave to Christ. That is all. Sam Todd St. John’s Episcopal Church, Sealy, Texas The Eve of the Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple February 1, 2012 |
