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Mhm. Reading from the Gospel of john the first chapter, beginning with the first verse in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning

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with God. All things came into being through him and without him, not one thing came into being . What has come into being in him was life and the life was the light of all people.

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The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. And the word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory. The glory as of a father's only son, full

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of grace and truth. The word of the Lord , Thanks be to God. I wish I'd gotten shape the size for this puppet before I came up here to preach. But can anybody see me from

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? It was good. I think I'm gonna do something right now. Actually, it'll make me feel better. There's a church in our constituency that has a little button in it that enables the person in

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the pulpit to rise or lower first President san Antonio . It's a great place to preach on ascension. Sunday, believe me, Yeah, I want to extend a warm word of welcome on behalf of this

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institution, to those of you who have returned for this spring semester of 2010, some of whom have not been around since late december and to say a special word of welcome to those of you who are

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hereby, beginning your first semester of seminary here soon . You will sign what we often call the Book of Life and will thus step into a certain institution that you've not been part of before. You will

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add your name to the list of so many other students who have gone before you across the schools lifespan of more than a century and as you sign, you'll be stepping into the ongoing story of a certain

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particular institution. Institutions are never just buildings. There are also people, faculty students, administrators, donors , board members. Some of their names are on buildings and rooms and walls and you will see lots

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of names, some of them going way back. Names like Calvin and Luther and Olive eton. Yeah . All over this place. There are names which remind us that institutions are not just buildings, bricks

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and mortar, but they are people. Now you're coming here in a time when there is a great cultural suspicion of institutions generally considered and some of you may be or even cringing whenever I use the word

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institution. That word is so fallen out of favor , hasn't it? Mhm Hugh. Heck Low professor of public affairs who wrote a book a couple of years ago called on thinking institutionally and on the advice

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of our deny read. That book acknowledges in that book that we are disposed to distrust institutions. This is the basic fact of life that we share with modern people as good pluralist, tolerant, multiculturalists,

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secular or religious moralists. We can be divided on almost any imaginable subject, but a fundamental distrust of institutions is the one mark we have in common as inhabitants of these times. Question authority says the bumper

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sticker, sometimes there's another bumper sticker out there that says question, the dominant paradigm. We are suspicious of institutions. It is that pervasive recurrent nod of agreement we have in common as modern 21st century people

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. We are compelled to live in a thick tangle of institutions while believing that they do not have our best interests at heart. I think heckler is onto something. I looked at that recent survey that showed

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up in the papers a few months ago of the trust or distrust that americans have for various professions. And the results in that survey bore out the disturbing news that trust in clergy generally kind of up there

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has declined precipitously since the last time that survey was taken. The fact of the matter is, hecla puts it, is that today's institutions have gained our trust in the old fashioned way, have gained our

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distrust in the old fashioned way. They've earned it . He notes that institutions of the public, private and non profit sectors have been oblivious to the common good at so many points. Banks, politicians,

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pastors, that the public distrust is all around us . There is such a thing as healthy distrust. But what I'm talking about is an anti institutional anxiety out there in our culture, and certainly in the

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church that runs all the way beyond healthy distrust to cynicism. Of course, the church's earned it too . And there is in the land of fresh desire to imagine a church and a ministry that is somehow

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non institutional, you've heard this somehow spiritual, but not religious as the mantra goes. Do we really need our seminaries even it is often asked in these days, and are they not part of the problem

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so encrusted with curricula in buildings and memory and tradition , can we just throw all that baggage over so that we can be like an unencumbered flag blowing freely in the breeze totally relevant to today and tomorrow and

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forget about yesterday, institutions like this one and like the institution of ministry, our suspect in our time to the point that there is now a candidate for the office of moderator of the General Assembly this year

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, who in public settings, has said that seminaries are pharisee factories, we really don't need them. He said there's another respected church leader who has said in my hearing that seminaries need the church, but

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the church doesn't need the seminaries and even God help us. Eugene Peterson, an iconic practical theologian and model for the pastoral life whose work out deeply appreciated , has argued that ministers should concentrate on preaching and

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teaching and stay out of the institutional life of the church. I love by the way, the way in which our alumnus and recent curry lecturer, tom curry. The third responded to that in an article

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he wrote. It strikes me, he says, as more than a little romantic and perhaps even a bit dot ascetic. The administrative tasks of a minister extends said tom curry to knowing what the giving patterns

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in her congregation are like, what financial needs and challenges in the congregation what resources and people can be called upon to help the community meet those needs and challenges. That means meetings and time. This is

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not the most important thing tom says, but it is far from being the least important. It is hard and often energy draining and time consuming still, unless these matters to our embraced by the minister,

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her own ministry becomes entirely to spiritual and not nearly as intimate as it needs to be. Life is in the minutia in the details, As is much of ministry. Remember a time when I was considering

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a call to a certain church, the church I went to in Atlanta in 1991 and I was talking to my dear friend john Walton on the phone john at that time was a pastor in Delaware. Now

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he's the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in new york . And I said to john, what I really want is to go to a place where all I have to do is to get ready for preaching and

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teaching. He said, you do that and all that you can preach will only be beautiful nonsense. The point is that these things as tedious and un enjoyable as they often are or the stuff of life

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and the stuff of ministry and so curry was taking Peterson on to say life is in the menu, sha in the details as as much of ministry, the institutional life of churches and seminaries and clergy matters

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. And not just because these institutions have been around for a while and not just because in my case and in the case of the mothers in this room were paid by this institution. These institutions matter finally

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, because at their best they are incarnation. At their best, they assist in enabling the church to respond faithfully to God's invitation to love the world, all of it. We're not invited only to love

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an idea or to love the world of ideas, the world of the spiritual, but rather to love every square inch of it, even the tactile parts of it, because we believe that there is not

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one square inch in all the world that does not bear the initials of God. This is, I'm sure why john Calvin cared as much about the sewer systems of Geneva as he did. Its churches and

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its schools and its hospitals. Every square inch in all the world bears the initials of God, who by the way, is not just a good idea but is deeply and profoundly incarnation all through jesus christ

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our Lord. This is why I love both of these new testament texts that we have read today from the gospel of john, that proof text for loving every square inch of the world, the word became

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flesh and dwelt among us. The word was not just the word, It became flesh, that's the incarnation And it invites us to to be incarnation, elin our lives and our commitments. And then that

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wonderful image from 2nd Corinthians, we have this treasure in Earthen vessels. The Gospel is not just some pristine nonstick thing that hovers above the landscape of our lives. It is instead that incarnate reality that enters

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all of life, that enters even us, the clay jars and earthen vessels and cracked pots that we all of us are and that calls upon us to care in meaningful ways, in physical ways, in

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the name of jesus christ about everything and everybody that's the incarnation. And yet the church gets dinged all the time for being too institutional. The Church gets dinged all the time for being itself. This past

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Tuesday, we had the jim Cullen the jim Cullum jazz band play for the Tuesday evening Eucharist at the mid Winter lecture. Some of you might have been there to hear them. They were outrageous. They

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rocked the house. They even had presbyterians clapping, which is not always a very good idea. We don't do it. There was but they were smoking . And I had a conversation with jim column,

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the guy who is the spirit of that man, wonderful trumpet player after that service. And he was telling me, I said, where do you guys go? He said, we go everywhere, We've

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been to Grace Cathedral in san Francisco. We've been to presbyterian churches all over texas and beyond. We've we're on national public radio et cetera. He said probably the gig that scared me the most was a

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gig we did at the roman catholic cathedral in ST louis said we we did a jazz mass there on a sunday morning. And then when the service was over and we were packing up all of our stuff

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, I went out on the front portico of that cathedral. There was one solitary none there. I said sister, how did you like the service? He said, said it was all right. And

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then he said, she shook her finger in my face and said, but it was too jazzy. Here's a jazz band created to play jazz, but it was too jazzy. We're a church created to

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be an earthen vessel out there, embodying and nurturing and being nurtured by this treasure at the center of it all, jesus, christ our Lord and sometimes people look at us with our buildings and are book

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of order and our creeds and all of that and say, you're just too churches. I told these stories of the alumni banquet last Wednesday, but this is in great measure, a different audience and those

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of you who heard it, last Wednesday won't hurt to hear it again. And so I'm gonna risk telling it again to you. My younger daughter is probably my most effective teacher and coach in the ways

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of all about our world, that is most contemporary years ago now, she heard her older sister, who's now a senior in college say to me once dad, you are so five minutes ago and she

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resolved from that moment to kind of help make me a little hipper. And so, uh she took me under her wing and began coaching me and as much of her world's music and film and technology and

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literature that she dare share with me and hopefully it would prevent me from being completely embarrassing and irrelevant in this exciting present and future. Last week, near the beginning of midwinter lecturers, she sent me an

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email from college that she had picked up from somebody else's facebook and she thought I needed to know about it. It was somebody's definition of Christianity. It seemed sadly too cynical for a college student Christianity.

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So this person's facebook went, Is a belief that a 2000 year old Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so

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he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity. Because a rib woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat an apple, automatic magical tree in a wonderland. I wrote her

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back and I said, yeah, that's how the faith often looks from the outside, but here's how the faith looks from the inside to presbyterians here in Austin, members of the church, we go to

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, We're working in a hospital 20 miles away from the port of Prince earthquake. They got out from the rubble of their building and the wife in that couple was finally able on a borrowed cell phone with

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just a little bit of juice left in it to get an email out from Haiti to loved ones here that they were okay. That message then got forwarded to a bunch of us in the congregation. Now

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we know what it's like. She said to live like Haitians, We're living in a field behind the hospital. Some 200 of us at night. We go to sleep to the sound of him singing and

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we wake up to worship scriptures, prayers and the saying out loud of the apostles creed. I thought about that scene As I read these words today to you from 2nd Corinthians afflicted in every way, but

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not crushed, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of jesus, so that the life of jesus maybe also made visible in our bodies,

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treasure in clay jars, earthen vessels, she wrote . I have never understood the concept of joy in suffering until now. 200 earthen vessels gathered together in a field behind a hospital in the wake of an

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unspeakable tragedy, gathered there, hopefully to be safe from anything else falling on them and to sleep at night, but also to worship, to celebrate the gospel treasure within each one of them, that's incarnation

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, not just an idea, but the good news in the midst of a hellish circumstance that the world is hungry for, and sometimes that good news is passed on through institutions like this. It's our job

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after all to Stewart it and to tell it and to pass it on. And on this first day of this semester, we begin at all over again , and we will keep on doing it over and

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over again for God's sake and for the sake of the world, in the name of God creator,