The Family Letter A little of what’s going on with me, some ranting, and more!

Moki is a Priest!

At an absolutely wonderful and spirit-touched ceremony on Saturday the Bishop of Hawaii laid hands upon Robert Kealamokihana Hino and called down the Holy Spirit upon him. He is now the newest priest in the Diocese of Hawaii.

It truly was a wonderful day, and I was honored to be there and to take part. There was a large Seabury contingent (John and Patty, Charlie and his wife and daughter, Betty, Mary, Rebecca, Liz, Joy[1]).

"Joy" is Joy Rodgers, the preacher. It was one of the best ordination sermons I have ever heard. She was gracious enough not only to allow me to have a copy, but also gave me permision to post it here:

Moki Ordination/Februrary 4, 2006

Let your priests be clothed with righteousness; *
let your faithful people sing with joy.

And so the church gathers, this beautiful morning, on this beautiful island to ordain a priest. This spirit-struck body of the Baptized will call down upon Robert Kealamokihana Hino yet another burst of Holy Spirit, invoked by prayer and promise, by the Bishop's holy touch and the heavy hands of presbyters, by the consent of the people and by the commitment of the ordinand.

At every baptism the gathered assembly renews their own baptismal covenant. The prayers of the people in the Marriage liturgy include a petition that all married persons who "have witiiessed these vows may find their lives strengthened and their loyalties confirmed."

The ordination liturgy contains no explicit call to ordained persons to reexamine or reaffirm the vows of our peculiar vocations in the context of another's promise making.
Perhaps it is enough to attend such an event that sharing the moment of newness will jog our memories and nudge us to recall something of our own ordained beginnings.
There is something about an ordination that brings to consciousness details that I had not thought about in a lot of years.
On my big day, the procession assembled. The organist was playing something with great crashing chords. I peeked into a church filled with folk from all kinds of places in my life, family and friends, neighbors and co-workers; parishioners from my sponsoring parish, my field ed parish, my new parish. There were diocesan clergy and classmates from seminary, members of the Standing Committee and Commission on Ministry.
A crowd that looked a lot like this one in some ways--maybe more Midwestern and not quite so exotic.
The Bishop was decked out in his episcopal finery and waiting in the wings.
And then it occurred to me--this whole thing was a huge misunderstanding. Someone had made a terrible mistake.
I headed for the door, and whispered to my rector as I passed, "I changed my mind."
He never missed a beat. He followed me out onto the sidewalk, grasped my elbow and walked me back into the church saying calmly and quietly:
"This is not your show. That is why we have that endless process and all those irritating hurdles that you complained about so much. You don't get to do this because you think you want to. You are here with the rest of us because God has called the Church to do this. So now let's do it."

He deposited me back into my place in the line, and off we marched to the strains of "Ye watchers and ye holy ones."

There is something about an ordination that calls me back to that tentative and yet exhilarating time. Barbara Crafton asks the ordained to remember--remember my reverend brothers and sisters, the first time you told someone that maybe God is calling you to this task, remember the day you started seminary, the first time you saw yourself in a collar, how it felt to explain the mysterious yearnings to a Commission on Ministry, to the Bishop, to a search committee.
And then, there is always something in every ordination that makes me feel that someone is about to push through to the back of the wardrobe and stumble into Narnia, or jump through the brick wall at Platform 9 3/4 to catch the train to Hogwarts. Something that makes me feel that a power will be set loose that provides transportation to another realm, a power as cataclysmic as the tornado that sends Dorothy flying out of Kansas and crashing into Oz, or as mysterious as a stranger who teaches Wendy how to fly.

Or maybe, that someone is about to tumble down the rabbit hole. Do you remember this passage of secular scripture, Moki?

"Who are you?" asked the caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.
Alice replied, rather shyly, "I ...I hardly know, Sir, just at present. At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then."
"What do you mean by that?" said the caterpillar. “Explain yourself.”
“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

There is an issue of identity here.

Today it is Moki's turn, to try to figure out who he is now, another soul on the threshold of amazing adventures in an ecclesiastical wonderland populated by peculiar inhabitants, some of whom will be frequently found earnestly spouting incomprehensible utterances ("Twas brillig and the slimey [sic] tove"), others in a perpetual dither, in a terrible hurry without ever quite knowing where they are going ("I'm late! I'm late! ...for a very important date!”).
Alice's Wonderland is home to a character with the oddest headgear [2], and a locale of a mysterious, never ending tea party that attracts the strangest of guests. I leave it up to you to assess the similarities between Wonderland and us.
The Cheshire cat maintains, "We're all mad here."
Alice protests that she is not.
The Cat replies, "You must be, or you wouldn't have come here."

Moki, for you, like Alice, the flat and shining surface of the Looking Glass in the parlor has shimmered and dissolved at least once already, and propelled you into the realm of ordained ministry. For most of a year, you have been the Deacon. Today you are confirmed, affirmed, ordained for the ministry for which you have long discerned a call and for which you have prepared.
Priest in Christ's holy, catholic Church.

Here is my caution: what you are about to do and become next must not negate all that has gone before.
When pushed to ponder the work of a priest I discover that perhaps 80% of what I do on a daily or weekly basis is grounded in my Baptism--how I live and work, how I engage others and treat people, how I pray and study and give and forgive; how I visit the shut ins or give oversight to staff and lay leaders. We meet that 'respect the dignity of every human being' business everywhere.
Another 15% of my work is grounded in my deacon's orders. It has become fashionable to call deacons like you 'transitional' deacons, but I think that is both a misnomer and misleading. A new sacrament doesn't erase a prior one.
Your ministry as a deacon should be more than a passing fancy, more than an interim identity to be discarded upon receipt of something grander.
Deacon’s vows are the common denominator of the church’s clergy; bishops and priests and deacons have all begun our ordained vocations on the same terms--under the rubric of the particular promises and demands of a ministry of servanthood.
We ordain deacons as icons of the servant ministry of Christ because as a people we claim to live out of an identity as a servant church.
It is at our peril and the church's, when ordained leadership forgets that our vocations are grounded first in servant hood--servants of the servants of God.
Diaconate holds the work I do in arenas like outreach, even much of what we call pastoral care, and probably all the things I do to tend to buildings and property. (How come they never tell you that part of it in seminary?) We are deacons in that part of preaching and teaching that 'interprets the world to the church' and the reading and study and work and relationships that inform us to do that.
So only 5% of my time is concretely spent doing priesty things. After all how many hours a week do you stand at an altar? How long does it take to break the bread? You can pronounce forgiveness and blessing on lots of people in pretty short order.
But always, it is that part of identity which colors the rest--for priest and people. To preside at worship, to preach to God's people, to preach them to an experience of God and to a knowledge of who we are as God's own, to call a community to corporate prayer and public gospel witness, to be called to exercise spiritual leadership and temporal authority in a cure, means that that other 95% of all that you do and all that you are carries a public and sacred meaning. The authenticity of anyone's priesthood is connected to their baptismal and diaconal witness.
In a very few minutes your Bishop will say to you: As a priest, it will be your task to proclaim by word and deed the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
He will ask you:
Will you endeavor so to minister the Word of God and the sacraments of the New Covenant, that the reconciling love of Christ may be known and received?

The Church ordains a priest to hold out to us all our identity as a priestly people: ...a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of God.

That is not always an easy identity for the Church of our time and place and struggles to claim.
Maybe we need new images to understand ourselves.

On a shelf at home, in the midst of some of my own holy things, there is a clay doll--a native American work of art--a story teller doll. For the Navaho, storyteller dolls can be either male or female.
Mine is a figure of a woman, sitting and clearly speaking; on her lap and legs, and filling her arms are the figures of many little children.
She is a sign, a symbol for the people who made her of how their life continues. She tells the sacred stories to the children so that they know who they are and whose they are. So that they recognize in their own experience the mysterious powers that move among them, and fill the world with beauty and purpose and challenges and growth and decay and then new life. So that they will tell the stories one day to their own children.
I love my little doll, because she has been for me a sign of what it means to be a priest, preacher and teacher in a community of faith. A priest is ordained to tell the story in the parish hall, in the classroom and confessional, at the bedsides of the dying, to a couple getting married.
A priest is ordained to tell the story from a pulpit and at the altar.
"On the night before he died for us...”
Every time you break the bread, my friend, and bless the cup of wine, you will rehearse the story--this story that is our reason for being.
The blessings you will pronounce and the hope you will announce are only other ways to tell the story.
And more, the storyteller doll, like a priest, is a symbol of the church--the Body which is the bearer and teller of our sacred stories and the place that holds children of God in her arms for the telling of them--so that we know who we are and whose we are.
This isn't Moki's show. It is still about the identity of God's church.
Moki, my friend, by virtue of your formation, your education, your amazing history, on the strength of preparation and prayer, the faith, the love, the support, the struggles, the grace, that has brought you to this moment, you are called now and ordained to be the storyteller for the Church:
to share your own story, the incredible story of your global citizenship and your open heart;
to tell the stories of your people, your community, your communities;
tell us the stories, Moki, of a Church with an Asian face and an island soul; tell the children about Emma and Kamehameha; of Queen Liliuokalani;
tell us the stories that will break our hearts and fill our imaginations with the possibilities of courage and care;
And then tell us the story of death and resurrection; connect our human stories with God's story in Jesus Christ.
The pews are full of folk who can tell us about the world--people on antidepressants, survivors of abuse, teenagers contemplating suicide, children in therapy, the frightened, the alienated, the addicted, the guilty and the grieving. There are also plenty of folk in the pews who come to church because they do not want to know any of that, and are praying that God will keep it all away from them.
For both, there is a credibility problem--a gap of sometimes unnerving proportions between the gospels and what passes in popular consciousness, within and beyond the church, for Christianity.
Tell your people God's story, with your life and with your love, with your words and with your deeds.
Tell us the story of God who breaks out of heaven and joins beloved creatures in the messy mystery of creation itself.
Tell the story of God who wears flesh and blood to show us what being fully human looks like.
Tell the stories of God who comes among us to heal and to help; to feed, and forgive, to make us holy and whole and home with God and with each other.
God who will be present in suffering and dying to show us what love really means.
God who breaks free of death to show us what life really means.

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Tell us the stories that tell us whose we are, so that we know who we are. Minister the Word of God and the Sacraments of the New Covenant.
Help all the confused and frightened Alices in your Wonderland make the connections between the Word we meet in Scripture, in the Sacraments, in the Baptized, in the Bishop, and that same Word, alive and active, and at work in our beautiful and broken world.
Tell us the story, as well, of those young people with whom you now minister. Help us understand why so many of our own young people cannot in good faith, give themselves week after week, to something they perhaps perceive as watered down religion, a pale imitation or sad distortion of the truth of Jesus.
Tell us when they sit in judgment upon us, upon our churchy obsessions with petty, pitiful, tedious notions of sin; with our fascination with the flaws in ourselves and others that consume us and worry us, because we want to make it into heaven, rather than take on the hells that pervade so much of human existence.

"The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."

Help the people of God see the human needs in our midst and beyond our doors and call us to live out of our stories, to put flesh on the tales of God's healing, forgiving, feeding work by our own actions; to hold all the children of God in our collective arms, and fill them with the truth of faithful lives and loving hearts and ongoing presence.

Tell us what it means to serve a Holy God, a God greater than our own neuroses and out of our control.

"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory."
A God beyond chumminess, beyond our facile definitions and arrogant pronouncements about what God thinks and wants as if we really knew what that was.

Annie Dillard reminds us that we do not have the foggiest notion of the kind of power we invoke every time we worship.
"It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church," she writes. "We should all be wearing crash helmets.. .Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares and they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may awake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, p.40).
A power is set loose among us today, a power that transports the likes of us into another realm.
It is an issue of identity. For a priest and for a church.
Some divine sleight of hand is built into story power that keeps us telling them until we get them right, or until they get us right.
Until some connection is made something is triggered, revealed, exposed, engaged--by circumstances, insight, knowledge, happenstance, relationship or death.
A light bulb goes on, the dove lands, a ton of bricks hits, the scales fall from our eyes.
Or suddenly we recognize the stranger in our midst who teaches us to fly.
It is a kind of madness in a sensible world.

I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, "Here am I; send me!”

But it wasn't a white rabbit who led us here. Rather, a crucified and risen Lord bids us follow and then a Holy Spirit pushes us all again and again, into the blasted rabbit hole -- into a realm more amazing than Narnia or Neverland or Wonderland or Oz; right into the Kingdom of God.
So we join them once again, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, at that mysterious, never-ending tea party.
Maybe we are a little mad, by some lights, but if we weren't we wouldn't have come here.

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Bloggers notes: As most anyone who has ever preached knows, the above probably isn't an exact match to what we heard on Saturday morning. This is what was written down by the preacher prior to her oral presentation. Any differences are, usually, a matter of the Holy Spirit, and any complaints may be lodged in that office.

Also, many thanks to my assistant who reviewed this copy after it was scanned in via OCR. Anyone who has ever used OCR knows that the computer makes mistakes, butchers some words, etc. My assistant compared the scanned document to the original and made changes as necessary. The occasional change in punctuation or spelling may have slipped in though, so please be understanding.

Peace!

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1. Who am I missing? [<--]
2. Blogger's note: a significant glance was made in the direction of the bishop here, along with a lot of laughter [<--]