A sermon for the ordination of deacons, given at Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville, Tennessee, June 1, 2024
Today is a day I have looked forward to for several years, even before I knew precisely what the calendar date would be. There have been so many conversations and meetings — so many prayers of so many faithful people. So much careful discernment and hard work and study. All these things have helped bring us to this extraordinary moment.
All of us gathered here have long anticipated the ordinations of Tabitha Lewis, Laura Lowndes, and Kathy Pack to the sacred order of deacons. Still, as much as I have looked forward to this occasion — to this day — I have also found myself looking back more than two and a half decades ago, back to the earliest days of my ministry, to a time that was decisively formative for me in how I began to understand the ministry of a deacon.
At that time, I was working on a diocesan staff for a bishop who had been laboring for the renewal of the historic ministry of the deacon within the total ministry of the church.
In conversations with him, and with many others across the wider church who shared a similar vision, I learned something of the significance and breath of this ministry to which Tabitha and Laura and Kathy are being ordained this morning.
You see, I must confess that, up until that point, my grasp of the ministry of the deacon had been mostly limited to what the deacon can and cannot do in the liturgy. And while the link between the role one has in worship and the function one has in the day-to-day workings of the church had been regularly impressed upon me, it would take some time and experience to learn the deeper truths of such maxims as The deacon serves at the Lord’s table because the deacon is engaged in a ministry of servanthood. I am still learning the truth of this maxim, as well as the ways it can limit our capacity to imagine and to reimagine the theology and practice of ministry for our time and place.
Now, I have lots to say about all that, but I want to begin with two interconnected aspects of the ministry of the deacon which I believe have an equal value and claim. Two images, if you will, that I began to grasp in those conversations with my first bishop and in talks with many throughout the Episcopal Church: the deacon as servant and herald.
I’ve already referenced that first image, the image of service or servanthood. It occurs right away in the bishop’s examination of the candidates for ordination:
God now calls you to a special ministry of servanthood directly under your bishop. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are to serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely. (Book of Common Prayer)
In fact, many who think and write about the diaconate often describe the deacon as an icon of service, more specifically as an icon of Christ’s ministry of servanthood to the world and an icon of the poor to the church.
Here, we would do well to remember that an icon is not something we look at, but rather look through. Icons invite us to prayer; they summon us to glimpse something of the extraordinary, the holy, through the otherwise ordinary objects of our gaze. As Deacon Suzanne Epting writes, “An icon is a window, or perhaps more accurately a prism, through which the divine light shines on creation. An icon is not an end in itself, but exists only to point beyond itself to the divine.”[1]
We do not ordain deacons so that they can do the ministry of service, of diakonia, for the rest of us (such that servant ministry is their job). Rather, we ordain deacons so that whenever they are present in the liturgy and in the broader life of the church, they shine a light on Christ’s service to the poor, the oppressed, the sick; to prisoners, the refugees, and all who are forgotten.
As icons of servanthood, deacons are the windows through which the divine light may shine on all who live in the shadows. The light that Tabitha, Laura, and Kathy will shed on Christ’s ministry of servanthood is the same light we heard about in our reading from 2 Corinthians: “For it is the God who said, ‘Light will shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Tabitha and Laura and Kathy are not being ordained to proclaim themselves, but to proclaim Christ’s always radical love for the least of these. And in so doing they will help the rest of us in our ministry of seeking and serving Christ in all persons, of loving our neighbor, of striving for justice and peace, and promoting the dignity of every human being.
New Testament scholars have recently argued for an expanded definition of the Greek word I used a few minutes ago, diakonia, the word from which our English word deacon derives, which has been traditionally translated as servant and table-waiter. In other contexts, diakonia was used to describe those who functioned as messengers or go-betweens.[2] And it is this meaning of diakonia that brings me to the second image I have referenced: the deacon as herald. Soon we will hear our bishop say to Tabitha, Laura, and Kathy that they “are to interpret to the church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world.” Deacons have often been described as those who stand on the threshold between the church and the world. But what are deacons doing when they are standing in such a place? Here, we see the prophetic and interpretive dimensions of the deacon as herald — as messenger and go-between.
Maybe you’ve heard the story about a woman, standing on a riverbank, who sees a man drowning. The woman takes off her coat and jumps in the river and saves him, bringing him to shore. Soon she sees another person in the river who is drowning, and then another. Each time the woman jumps in and, again, brings the person safely to shore.
Meanwhile, a crowd gathers. And when the woman sees yet another person drowning in the river, she turns and starts walking upstream. And someone from the crowd shouts out after her, “Why aren’t you jumping in the river? Aren’t you going to save that drowning person? Where are you going?” To which the woman responds, “I’m going upstream to see why people keep falling in the river.”[3]
Tabitha, Laura, and Kathy, we are counting on you to go upstream, to analyze the various structures and systems that get in the way of human life and thriving — and especially those structures and systems that would corrupt and destroy God’s creatures. We are counting on you to continue your learning about systems of oppression. About the myriad ways that people fall through the cracks of human care and concern and their exclusion from basic human rights and resources. We are counting on you to do the hard work of interpreting your findings to us.
Now, let me be clear that I am not advocating that the church become yet another social-service organization, as important as such organizations are. What I am saying is that we are counting on you to do the hard work of theological and spiritual reflection and interpretation, inviting us to do the same.
You are to be like the scribes in our reading from Ecclesiasticus: those who seek out ancient wisdom, who are concerned with prophecies and the obscurities of parables. Those who serve among the great and appear before rulers, who travel in distant lands and learn what is good and evil in the human lot.
This work of interpretation is foundational for the ministry of a deacon. But we must also admit that it can (and should) come as a word of challenge to us, perhaps even to the point of causing tension and discomfort. Which is why deacons are sometimes called Holy Troublemakers!
As Deacon Epting notes, “while the deacon can point the way toward mission and the building of the church, it is also the deacon who sometimes must ask the church to dismantle those things that get in the way of mission and care for others, inviting her to recreate herself as a servant structure.”[4] In other words, the systems and structures that thwart neighbor-love and justice and peace, that sometimes deny the dignity of human beings, those systems and structures aren’t just out there in the world, but are also internal to us.
Those words — that the deacon must sometimes ask the church to dismantle those things that get in the way of mission and care of others, inviting her to recreate herself as a servant structure. I find those words both profoundly unsettling and astonishingly hopeful.
Are we ready to listen as these deacons offer us their interpretations? As they tell us what they have found out upstream — why so many people are falling into the river? As they announce to us the necessity of our own renewal?
When I look at the church catholic — including the Episcopal Church — I see so many engaged in ministries of mission and care. But I also see so very many who are attached to prestige and privilege and power — to money (mammon, to use that old-fashioned word). I see so many among us jockeying for position, vying for who will be the “greatest.” So many congregations and clergy alike are held in the thrall of such attachments and strivings. And we seldom name and discuss that reality. It’s a topic that unsettles us — that makes us seriously uncomfortable.
We have hard questions to ask ourselves, including whether our current structures and ways of being and of doing business are truly reflective of Christ’s servanthood — of his radical love and care for the poor … for “the least of these.” Now as much as ever, we need deacons as heralds, standing on the threshold between the church and the world, calling the church to re-creation of ourselves as a servant structure. For just as deacons are icons of Christ’s ministry of servanthood to the world, they are also icons of the poor to the church.
As Deacon Maylanne Maybee once put it to a gathering of her fellow deacons: “If we’re going to be agents of transformation,” she said, “we have to look at what’s holding people down. If we’re going to make the church a servant church, we have to look at a different emphasis: through involvement with the poor, with people who are oppressed, with those whom our society and culture are marginalizing, we come to understand God and Jesus the poor servant. We do not flee the world as a mystic community. As servants of transformation, we take the incarnation seriously, we recognize that here and now has priority, we acknowledge creation as good.”[5]
In her talk, Deacon Maybee was describing the authority of the deacon — the authority not only offers us solace and strength, but also renewal, both for the world and for people of God. Deacons as heralds are living reminders — they interpret, they read the signs, they urge us to take our gifts of faith and grace to those who are desperately waiting on us for help.
Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old and being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your son Jesus Christ our Lord. (BCP, p. 540)
We have been looking forward to this day with great anticipation.
Today, Tabitha and Laura and Kathy are being ordained as deacons, as icons of Christ’s servanthood and as servants of transformation. They will remind us all of our common ministry as the whole baptized people of God — to be agents of God’s healing balm amid life’s wounds. To be agents of God’s liberation wherever people are weighed down or oppressed. To be windows through which God’s light shines out in the darkness. And that light is none other than the good news of Christ, who is the image of God — it is none other than the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
And because we serve a God who does infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, this day is sure to give us more than we ever could have imagined or anticipated. For today marks a special moment in God’s renewal of the church into a servant structure. Now we begin to look beyond this day, into the future that God holds for us.
When we see Tabitha and Laura and Kathy at the altar, just as we see the breaking of the bread and the pouring of the wine, may we also see Jesus with the basin of water and the towel, who washed the feet of his disciples and taught them that the greatest must become like the lowest, and the leader like one who serves.
[1] Unexpected Consequences: The Diaconate Renewed, New York: Morehouse, 2015, p. 79.
[2] See, for example, John Collins’ Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
[3] As recounted in Ormonde Plater’s Many Servants, Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2009, p. 70.
[4] Unexpected Consequences, p. 7.
[5] Keynote address at the 1989 meeting of the North American Association for the Diaconate, as cited in Epting’s Unexpected Consequences, pp. 101-02.
The Rev. Dr. Amy Bentley Lamborn is the vicar of the Southeastern Tennessee Episcopal Ministry (STEM) in the Diocese of Tennessee. She is visiting faculty at the School of Theology, University of the South.
