May 20, 2023
Your Eminences, Your Graces,
Father Chad, faculty and staff of the seminary,
Members of the seminary board of trustees,
Students commencing and continuing,
Assembled clergy and faithful:
Christ is risen!
In the Gospel reading at today’s liturgy, we heard the words of the Lord: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
The Lord’s sheep, the Lord’s voice, the Lord in the lead: this is the essence of Christianity. At the center of our faith is a person, the Lord Jesus Christ, and Christians are those who share his Name, who follow him, who obey him, who live for him and in him and through him and thus hope to obtain life eternal with him.
The seminarians gathered here today, both those who are graduating and those who will remain, are all preparing for roles of leadership in Christ’s holy Orthodox Church: some in ordained ministry as priests, some as choir directors and other practitioners of liturgical arts, some as lay leaders at every level—parish, diocesan, and national. By dint of obtaining your seminary degree, all of you will, to some degree or other, be seen as spiritual and intellectual leaders in your communities.
Many who dream of church leadership dream vainly about imposing their own ideas, preferences, and agenda on the Church. But believers do not come to church because they want their pastors’ and lay leaders’ personal ideas and priorities. Believer come to the Church because they want Jesus Christ.
They hear his voice; he knows them; him do they follow.
And so to all of you seminarians, and especially you graduating clergy, I say: if you wish to serve the Church, if you wish to be a shepherd of Christ’s flock, then let go of your own voice, and become the voice of Christ. In a poem in his Prologue from Ohrid, St. Nikolai Velimirovich writes about Saint John the Forerunner:
. . . The tree rustles when the wind approaches
But you neither rustle nor moan.
Neither your lament nor your song echoes through the wilderness!
. . . What is your name?
. . .
“The voice, the voice, the voice: I am the voice—
But he is the Word of God.”
Like Saint John, you are called to become the voice of the Word. Like him, you must be a forerunner of Christ, bringing your people to Christ and Christ to your people. Ultimately, you must decrease so that Christ may increase.
There are many ways to understand our tradition of liturgical vesting, but at least one way is this: when the priest and deacon put on their vestments to serve, this is a sign that, in their ministry, they have become by grace something that they cannot attain by nature.
It is the Lord who crowns the priest and adorns him; he pours out his grace upon his priests; the Lord’s hand makes and fashions the priest; the Lord grants the priest understanding; the priest is clothed in righteousness that comes from and belongs to the Lord.
When he puts on his cassock, when he dons his riassa, and especially when he vests in the sacred vestments, the priest is disappearing, decreasing, so that Christ may increase.
But the priest’s clothing is only an outward sign of what should be occurring in his entire ministry: it should not be a ministry built around his preferences, his desires, his issues. It should be ministry that points always and solely to Jesus Christ.
And, as I say, this does not only apply to priests, or to clergy. All leadership in Christ’s holy Church must come from and lead back to Christ himself.
All of you are called to become his voice in your communities. All of you are called to become his forerunner in the lives of your brethren and neighbors.
In a world filled with noise, with thousands of millions of voices competing to be heard, to build their brand, to revel in their so-called individuality, the way of Christian leadership and influence is different.
The cacophonous world does not need our rustles and moans, our personal laments and songs.
What it needs is the voice of Christ.
May each of you hear his voice and follow him. And, by his grace, may each of you become of a voice of the pre-eternal Word, announcing his glory alone, for the life of the world and its salvation.
I will conclude by wishing all of today’s graduates my congratulations and assuring them of my prayers. By God’s providence, may each of you become the voice of the Word, calling the sheep to follow.
Christ is risen!