Ordination of Godwin Chimara and Ferdinand von Prondzynski

On Saturday (September 23) the Rt Rev Dr John Armes ordained Godwin Chimara and Ferdinand von Prondzynski as Deacons at a special service at St John’s, Aberdeen.

Following their ordinations both Godwin and Ferdinand will continue in the Diocese, with Godwin to serve as Assistant Curate at St John’s and St James’s, Aberdeen; and Ferdinand to serve as Assistant Curate at St Andrew’s Church, Alford.

The Rt Rev Dorsey McConnell preached at the service.  His sermon is printed below.

Image: L-R – The Rev Godwin Chimara, the Rt Rev Dorsey McConnell, the Rt Rev Dr John Armes, the Rev Ferdinand von Prondzynski

Does anyone notice?

Sermon preached by the Rt Rev Dorsey McConnell at the Ordination of Godwin Chimara and Ferdinand von Prondzynski to the Sacred Order of Deacons on September 23, 2023 at the Church of Saint John the Evangelist, Aberdeen.

Text: John 13: 1-16, 20

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel.  Then he began to wash the disciples’ feet….

Dear brothers, Godwin and Ferdinand, this day has finally arrived, and this church is filled with people who could not be happier!  And I hope, before the bishop lays hands on you, I may offer you a few words of challenge and encouragement, to go with you on your way.

Forty years ago, a few days before my own ordination as a deacon, I met with my confessor, the Reverend Professor Thomas J. Talley. Tommy was a distinguished liturgical scholar, a wee man with a brilliant mind, who never lost his South Texas accent.  In this session with him I was even a bit more of a mess than usual, and blurted out right at the beginning that I didn’t think I was worthy to be ordained.  Of course, you’re not, he said. That’s the whole point, son! Then he sat back, scratched his beard, and continued.  This deacon thing, it’s basically a ministry of emptying ash trays.  That’s what you do.  Someone fills it with ashes, burnt stuff, offscourings, and you come along, and empty it, wipe it clean and put it back.  Then you move on to the next one. Then the one after that.  Oh, and if you’re doing it right, no one notices.  No one notices.

Now this was not what I wanted to hear.  I was (and still am, to some extent) a dry sponge always thirsty for affirmation, so to hear that my ministry might be measured by the kind of holiness that is never noticed, did not sit well with me.  But over the years I have gradually learned more and more the truth of Dr. Talley’s observation, and I have come to understand that the story we have just heard, of the foot-washing in John’s gospel is an emblem of that holiness.

We in the Church are so used to thinking of the trials of Jesus as public events. We imagine the mob of hecklers, the spectators crowding the way of the Cross. We believe the words of Paul before King Agrippa, that these things were not done in a corner (Acts 26:26) and all of that is true.  But this moment in John’s gospel, when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, this was done in a corner.  The disciples didn’t understand it, nor probably did anyone they tried to explain it to later.  Other Christ events at least fell more or less within the zone of people’s comprehension.  Though the Cross as universal atonement might have been hard to swallow, people of the time were well acquainted with the notion of a sacrifice for sin.  The Resurrection, though unique in its details, has echoes in other mythologies, and sacred meals were practiced not only in Judaism but in many pagan cults, so the Eucharist at least had a symbolic universe it could draw on.

But a God who washes feet and tells his friends to do the same?  Well, it’s awkward, and bewildering, and a little disturbing, and doesn’t land easily in our imaginations.  Which is, I think, the whole point, as Dr Talley said.  It was for that moment, with those friends, in that corner, where there was no one else to notice, one last try to get them to deal with the truly discomfiting, dislocating, non-sensical mystery of a God who so loves us that he strips himself, gets on his knees and washes our feet.  It is menial work, slave-work, the work of those destined to be born anonymously, unseen while they are here, and forgotten when they pass from this world.  And Jesus is saying to the twelve, This is now your work, because it is my work; to the extent that you do it, it will prove that you love one another as I have loved you.  To the extent that you do not, no one will believe.  So, go to the place of the world’s deepest pain, and get busy: serve those who need me. And if no one else but them notices, then maybe you’re doing it right.

Now, as I say, this is shocking.  Surely our job is to get people to notice Jesus Christ, to lift their eyes to the King of Glory, to see his mercy, his meekness his holiness, reflected in us his Body.  But, Godwin and Ferdinand, my dear brothers– isn’t it possible, that we also want the world to notice us, to admire our virtue, our sacrifice? Don’t we enjoy the moment as we blush a bit in humble pride, when someone within our hearing calls us holy or good?  We want the world to pay attention to the poor and the oppressed, but don’t we also want to be seen as selfless servants of Christ when we come down from our privilege to help them?   And we are shocked—shocked—when such folk sometimes do not respond with gratitude at all the attention we are sharing with them, when they look at us with suspicion or mistrust or weary resignation.  There is a story of an old woman visiting her local settlement house in London’s East End around 1900.  As she looked for the first time on the latest bright, well-scrubbed, upper-crust young curate the bishop had sent, she shook her head and muttered, Oh, ‘ow I do ‘ate being worked among.  So, oddly, paradoxically perhaps, when you truly do the work of a deacon, the less you are concerned that anyone may be noticing apart from those you serve, the deeper your share in Christ crucified, the Forgotten One.

I say the forgotten Christ and I mean it. I mean the Christ who is beyond all our images of him.  Ferdinand and Godwin, please, here before you take your vows, just for a few minutes, abandon every image of Jesus you are carrying in your heads:  you can have them back later, if you insist, but for now, get rid of them.  Dispense with the muscular Jesus and the gentle Jesus, and the blond-haired-blue-eyed Jesus; for the moment, strip away the Jesus of the key fob and of the velvet tapestry, but also the Jesus of Rembrandt and Caravaggio and Rublev, until you come to the nearly unimaginably forlorn Christ: scourged, mocked, abandoned, filthy, poor, naked, bleeding and dying.  To paraphrase the prophet Isaiah, he looked barely human, so marred was his appearance we did not consider him worthy of our attention. (Isaiah 53:2) With that Christ in your mind, you can then see all those whom the world contrives to pass over:  the poor, the persecuted, the sick, the abandoned, of course, but not only them.  Plenty of us may be physically well, with enough food on our plates, but desperate for mercy.  Perhaps we have committed one grievous sin after another but cannot see them or refuse to face them.  Maybe we have been sidelined or abused or humiliated within an inch of our lives.  Or it could be that we have wrapped our pride about us like a cloak and then wonder why we are alone.  And if any of those things strike a chord in you, if they find an echo in your heart and soul, because you’ve been there, or just because God awakens the gift of compassion in you, then you will know them as the ones you must serve.  The only question is how.

For that, you must turn the clock back a few hours from Good Friday to the night before and see Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, who is before all things and in whom all things hold together, the one by whom and through whom all things were made, (Colossians 1:16-17) who strips and kneels and washes the 26 bones and 33 joints and hundred or so muscles of each foot of each of his friends, flesh that he knows as well as a potter knows her clay, before proceeding to the next one, and the next.  Then he rises and says: do you see?  That is how you must serve one another: the way I have just served you.  And you can’t serve another unless you know them the way I know them—know not only their wounds, but their pride, their rage, their stubbornness, know all the deceit of their hearts, in a word know their sin so well that you see it is no different from your own.  And you can’t know them in that way unless you love them, the way I love you, not caring if anyone else notices: but if you do it right, they will notice. 

And Jesus gives us the same commission. Of course, dear brothers, you will make a hash of it.  You’ll be no better than Peter, poor dear.  Consider him, who is so like us: first, he pushes Jesus away in false humility.  Jesus reproves him clearly but gently. Peter then runs to the other end of the spectrum, do my hands and my head too!  Make me the most noticeable of the unnoticed.  And Jesus is so patient with him, so insistent, just as he will be with you, when he says Simon, you are nothing special, your feet will be enough, if in anything you are unclean, I’ll clean you.  Just relax and do the same for others, and since you won’t be worried about whether anyone is watching, your eyes will be clear to see and receive whomever I send you, and you need to be clear-eyed, focused on who’s at the door, because sometimes they can be so quiet, so tentative, so shy at the threshold, if you’re not careful you’ll miss them; and then you’ll miss me, and you’ll miss the one who sent me.

It saddens me to think of those whom Christ may have sent to us in this diocese, whom we have not even noticed because we have been so caught up in our own troubles.  How many times have we missed him?  But I take heart in the fact that Jesus never gives up on his Church, and always loves those he has sworn to love, and keeps sending himself again and again in the form of his little ones until we do notice.  And sometimes you meet someone in whose life Christ shines so brightly that, though the world may think they’re not much to look at, the Church must bow in wonder as God invites us to be like them.

In the early 90’s I was rector of a parish on the upper east side of New York City.  It was not going well.  The parish had been deeply hurt before I arrived, but I was not helping.  I had come from two previous posts where I had been adored. I assumed that once again, I would be affirmed and admired, and when that did not happen, I reacted poorly.  A lot of the problem was my attitude.  Up to that point, I was pleased that God had given me so successful a ministry and delighted that God wanted to help.  So, it was high time I came face to face with Christ Crucified, which I did by drinking deeply from the cup of failure.  The parish fought with me, then with each other, so much so that you could easily have missed the weekly miracle taking place in the undercroft.  You see, every Wednesday night, we opened our doors and served a meal to New York’s homeless citizens.  The kitchen was run by a diminutive woman named Connie Keresey.

Connie was born into a wealthy Irish American family, raised Roman Catholic, grew up on Park Avenue, went to Vassar College and married the wrong man.  She managed to raise her four sons in a small apartment on the Upper West Side, but she also drank, and that led to pills, which led to madness, and she was finally committed to a mental hospital in Connecticut.  It was there one night, where she was trussed up in a strait jacket, lying in a padded cell, that Jesus came to her, and told her that all her sorrow, all her suffering, now belonged to him.  When she left, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous, stayed clean and sober, and eventually came to the Episcopal parish where I later became rector.  She was never fully accepted, never really seen, because (being Irish and Catholic) she wasn’t a “person of quality” in the eyes of some, but that didn’t bother her.  They can think what they like, she said with a shrug, but I’m never giving up my devotion to the Infant of Prague!   When the parish blew up, and the homeless dinner was threatened for lack of volunteers, she jumped in and took over.

You could always find her in the kitchen, all five feet and 90 pounds of her, stirring her pots with a big wooden spoon, her peroxide blond hair permanently fixed, nails polished, mascara and rouge deftly in place, ready to greet fifty or sixty of her wayward sons and daughters.  How she loved them, and they returned the favor!  She knew all their names, always sat with them for as long as she could, listened to their stories and told a few of her own.  They called her Miss Connie and treated her like the mom she was.  One evening a fight broke out, with two very big guys going for each other tooth and nail.  Connie was there in a flash. With the help of her wooden spoon, she pushed her way between them, and gave them a piece of her mind, an Irish David between two Goliaths.  They looked sheepish, reluctantly shook hands with each other, and sat down.  She spent the rest of the evening making sure they were ok.

One afternoon, Connie came through the front door of the Church having just finished her shopping for that evening’s dinner.  She had struggled with asthma her whole life, and she staggered under the weight of the several shopping bags she was carrying and collapsed on a bench at the top of the stairs, gasping for breath.  I reached for a couple of her bags, to take them downstairs for her, but she tightened her grip. Do not touch these. She said evenly. Do not take away my joy.  After all he has done for me, I can at least do this for him.

Someday, when I grow up, I want to be like Connie. I don’t know how many lives she blessed, perhaps even saved, but I know there were dozens, if not hundreds. You may already have someone like this in your past, Godwin and Ferdinand, and no doubt you will meet others as you grow into the meaning of your diaconate, beacons of humility and love, who could not care less if they are noticed while they get busy washing the feet of the world.  But they are noticed: by the Father who has numbered every hair of our heads, and by the Son who knows and loves each of us from our scalp to our toenails, and by the Holy Spirit who pours grace through such lives into rivers of mercy that can change the world; and noticed by Connie, of course, now with the Lord, and by the angels and archangels, not to mention the entire church triumphant, by holy women and men in all their choirs, to name only a few.  They are cheering you on, dear ones, and praying with all their strength that from this day forward you may be as bold in love as they, and may be filled with joy that someone is noticing after all