This sermon was preached at the recognition and investiture of the Rt. Rev. Robert Price as Bishop of Dallas on January 11.
John the Baptist said to Jesus (Matt. 3:14), “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?”
When God finished making the world and took his well-deserved rest from all his labors, the world, everyone had to admit, was a pretty fine piece of work. It had atoms that were, each of them, a miniature universe, with quarks and quirks and individuality. It also had galaxies and dark matter and quantum shifts, treasures beyond rational comprehension that thinking creatures would discover only eons later.
Thinking creatures! Yes, he made them too, complex carbon-based life forms, and perhaps other rational life forms as well. It was all splendid beyond splendid, super-splendid and fascinating—fascinating, because God had not just made stuff, like dirt and rocks, that always follows the same laws, always does the same thing. And he had not just made living things like plants. And he had not just made animals that think and communicate in relationship to the world around them. He made life forms that could tell stories, that could make decisions, that could dream about alternative universes, beings that were capable of deciding to tell the truth, or to lie.
Having made this fascinating universe that included rational beings that could think and love in ways that were a kind of picture of his being, God was not satisfied with, as it were, lying down on his Saturday-afternoon sofa for his Saturday-afternoon nap. God wanted to get into his universe. Although he was its creator, he wanted also to be a creature.
Over a long time, in many and various ways, he communicated with some of the complex carbon-based life forms, and eventually he became one of them. It is the most amazing story. The author of everything became a character in the story he wrote. The maker became something that was made. The infinite became finite, and not merely finite, but vulnerable, as fragile as your next heartbeat.
One day as a young adult he went down where all the people were. He joined the line of those who desired to submit to a kind of symbolic drowning. It was a symbol of the death that everyone has to endure eventually, yet a symbol also of getting clean from the wrongful things that everyone has done.
When his turn came, his cousin, who was doing the washing, recognized him. “This is backward,” his cousin said. “I ought to be baptized by you.” Backward it may have been, but the author of all things had his own mind. He wanted to be a character; the creator wanted to be a creature, wanted to be down in the water with everyone. He wanted it and it happened.
—
Several months later, maybe a year, maybe two, he overheard his disciples talking about greatness and authority and, implicitly, about obedience. To correct their misunderstanding, he had a child come up beside him. He was sitting; the child, standing beside him, was thus on his level. All the disciples around (and anyone else) would be standing. To sit, in the ancient world, was to have the position of authority.
Teachers have chairs, even as today the rich endow chairs at our universities. Sitting on the chair is to be in a position that, if things are right, is a position of authority. But Jesus wants his disciples to see that to have greatness, to have authority, is to be on a level with the lowly in the world, represented by the child who, in this visual, was at the same height as Jesus.
—
The disciples were wrong about authority, but so are we, most of the time. We think authority is about getting to tell other people what to do, to issue instructions so that things will get done, and if we have the authority, we think, they will get done right, and we will be praised and maybe rich.
Rightly understood, authority indeed is about things getting done well: but true authority does not consist in telling others what to do. Authority shows us who we are, it creates the conditions for our flourishing. It also involves judgments, actions that separate the true from the false. But it is not, and can never be, merely force, merely compulsion.
We get authority wrong, I think, because we get obedience wrong. To obey is not a matter of your will but a matter of your mind. My grandmother on a farm in central Oklahoma, where I would stay for a week in many summers, had a distinctive way of speaking. There would be something she wanted me not to do—like, don’t touch this sheet with the cookies; perhaps because it would burn me, perhaps because the cookies were for later. She’d tell me, then she’d say, “Do you hear?” She wasn’t asking about my hearing her words. She was asking about my comprehension. Do you hear?—do you understand, do you get what I’m telling you?
Built into this old manner of speaking is true etymology; in “obedience,” the “-edi-” is from Latin audire, from which we get “audio” and other such words. “Ob-” is an intensive prefix; “obedience” is to hear intensely or intensively. Obedience is about hearing, which is to say understanding; it is specifically about sharing a common understanding.
It was there in the upper room where, the night before he would be crucified, Jesus told his disciples that he had shared with them everything that the Father had given him. Their obedience to Jesus was their common understanding with him of his mission from his Father. Think too of the many reports of people saying that Jesus “taught with authority.” The people followed him, not because obedience was forced upon them, but because somehow they understood. Authority shows the truth about the world, about us, about God; and to be obedient is to understand that truth and to live accordingly.
Thus a person in authority is someone to be listened to. But let me point out one more error in common thinking about authority. Authority is not static. We tend to picture authority as a fixed organizational chart: The boss is on top, and everyone else down below. But none of us is really on top.
The centurion (in Matt. 8) said to Jesus, “[Like you,] I also am under authority, and I say to one, come, and he comes (and so forth).” To be able to exercise authority is to be under authority. No one is simply on top, not even Jesus. You don’t own authority like you might own a car; you don’t have authority because there’s a certificate on your wall. On that night, he laid aside his outer garments, took up a towel, and washed their feet.
Thereby he demonstrated the intrinsic dynamism of authority. The person with authority serves those who are “under” him or her, by placing himself (herself) under them. This elevates those who are served to their own position of authority. But in their elevation, they are to do the same. Those who are high come down to serve; those who are elevated by that service then lower themselves again to serve others. It never stops, this rising and falling. There is no free-standing authority.
—
Rob, friend and father in God, I have been speaking of course about that chair into which you are about to be seated. It puts you in the line of bishops of Dallas, from George, its most recent occupant, through James his predecessor and all the way back to the legendary Bishop Garrett. It puts you also in the company of bishops going back to the apostles whose feet Jesus washed.
But most of all, I think, it puts you in a particular place in the story of the Creator who was not satisfied with having made everything but wanted to be with us, alongside us, one of us; and in doing so, did not abhor the virgin’s womb, did not abhor the water, and ultimately did not abhor the tomb. Such are the revealed dynamics of authority. Every diocesan bishop I’ve known has spoken of the heaviness of this particular authority. We promise to continue praying for you, as we are glad you are willing to take this seat.
The Rev. Victor Lee Austin, Ph.D. is theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. He is the author of several books including Up with Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish As Human Beings (T&T Clark, 2010).
