INSTALLATION ADDRESS:
"You gave voice to that very One who is the Word"

The Rev. Dr. Timothy Wengert

We assemble to mark a milestone in the history of this seminary. We celebrate a seminary that owns a national and, even, international reputation-committed as it is to a multicultural, global perspective, with the most diverse faculty of any Lutheran theological institution-dare I say it-in the world. Reason dictates that the speaker for such an occasion carry on his or her uniform the medals won fighting for and defending this cause, one whose Weltanschauung matches the vision of its faculty and its newly elected president. There are some sitting here who could easily bear the palm on this occasion. Thus, the one who stands before you could scarcely match in either experience or eloquence the orator needed for this event.

Nevertheless, commanded as I am to appear at this moment, I urge you to overlook the weakness of my words and my penchant for rhetorical excess. Forgive the lapses in my life story and my narrow championing of Lutheran causes and, instead, give thanks to the One who reminds us that even out of the mouths of babes and infants thou hast prepared praise for thyself. Surely, the Heavenly Composer, in whose name we have begun these exercises, can take my paltry offering and your careless listening and create a flawless Vesper song.

Taking my cue from that One's divine Words, I can only assert that the president we install this day is neither shepherd nor hired hand. Instead, you see before you only a voice; you hear simply a witness, not unlike the voice that cried in wilderness and the witness that pointed and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

For, when the incarnate Word turned to his own dear flock, which included the blind beggar recently healed and even more recently rejected by his own, he made a claim that allows no contradiction. "I am," said the Word of the great I AM. "I am the Good Shepherd." We, who are so quickly called "pastor," shepherd, by the flocks gathered around us, must cast not just our crowns but also our titles before the only Good Shepherd. Even when Christ takes Peter aside after the Resurrection, that first apostle does not receive a commission to feed his own flock but-in the simplicity that marks even the last chapter of John's gospel-what does Jesus say? "Feed MY sheep, my lambs, my flock." For this flock never belongs to someone else but only to its Good Shepherd. "What comfort this sweet sentence gives!" You are not the shepherd, Jesus is.

To which we can only add, what protection from the single greatest temptation for seminary administrators the next sweet sentence gives. "The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." You see, Master Philip, someone has already died for the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia: its staff, its faculty, its student body, its board of trustees, and its alumni. That means you do not have to kill yourself in this position.

This particular administrative vice comes adorned with the hellish sentence of burn out-a fitting reward for those who burn midnight oil and candles at both ends. For your sake, for this institution's sake, someone ought to cross-stitch this verse into the wall over your desk, "The Good Shepherd"-and he alone-"lays down his life for the sheep." We walk in a benighted society lit by the corpses of the burned out. Whether we observe business moguls or conscientious politicians, public administrators or private executives, the same disease infects them all. A century ago, Edwin Markham, the American poet, described their plight in his premier work, "The Man with the Hoe." Inspired by the biting social commentary of the French artist Jean Millet and his painting of the same name, Markham wrote: "Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground. The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burdens of the world."

Permit me to mold John's metaphor to match this occasion. We can well imagine that burn out occurs precisely when the hired hand remains to fight the wolves and imagines that he or she must shoulder the sins of this age-or at least of this institution. To prevent even that kind of desertion of the flock, the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. No other life will do; none other's death is needed.

More than that, you do not need to and, indeed, cannot know us, nor can we know you. That again rests at the heart of the Good Shepherd's work, who promises, "I know my own, and my own know me." In the countless interviews and conversations that have led to this moment, you may have been tempted to play the part of the know-it-all. All candidates for office-pastoral, professorial, or presidential-find it hard to resist that siren song. Knowledge is a seductive opiate in our scholarly universe. Not that I would have you regress to blissful ignorance in your new position-not at all! Instead, let us all kneel before the One who knows us so well that, one day, we, too, shall know. My prayer for you this day and every day of your tenure in office will be that God fill you with far more questions than answers and a sense of wonder for the communal life that we call seminary. To be quite honest, outside of Lois Lacroix, who knows how anything gets done in this place?

You are not Shepherd, nor sacrifice, nor knower of the sheep. Perhaps most liberating of all: you cannot unite the sheep. Now, anyone who has lived in church and academia as long as you have need hardly be told the impossibility of that task. Growing up in a Lutheran parsonage, serving for ten years in the city of Baltimore as pastor, where you managed to master the Middle Ages at Catholic University, racing through the University of Chicago under the tutelage of medievalist Bernie McGinn, elected just minutes after I was to serve this faculty in 1989-you have experienced first-hand the disunity that marks our ecclesial and intellectual life. Yet, how often have those most committed to the Ulyssean task of administration not taken on their shoulders the burden of uniting learner and teacher at an institution like ours? How often have they not laid awake nights fretting over the fractious faculty or intransigent staff or lethargic student body? To these mundane worries, then add the ecumenical agenda that so forms our life together. Over against all these things, "one little word" of our savior stands and lifts the weight from your shoulders. "I," he says, not YOU. "I have other sheep ... I must bring them ... they will listen to MY voice" not to yours. What more gracious comfort comes from our Shepherd's lips? Whether you are dealing with the diversity of this campus or the countless seminaries and other institutions around us: Southern, your alma mater Gettysburg, General, Moravian, Lancaster, the Synods of the ELCA, the judicatories of other denominations. The unity we so desperately seek lies not in your hands but in his. After all, in John 17 Jesus, who knows all things, wisely prays to his heavenly Father for the unity of his followers. Thank God he does not pray to us.

At this point, some Thrasonian voices would crow, "Then this Philip Krey is only a hired hand. There are only two options in this text: Good Shepherd and Perverse Hireling. You have left us with no other choice than to declare the new president a run-away who cares for nothing but his own skin." Certainly the process by which you have come to this juncture in your life would argue heavily in favor of such a conclusion. We interviewed you as a "final candidate." You now serve at the pleasure of the board of trustees. They will pay your salary and provide you a house. All marks of a hired hand!

Moreover, it will be hard, if not impossible, to escape the drudgery of the tasks. Especially when you will soon discover, if you have not already found out, that the pleasures of teaching and research will be drown in a sea of administrative sorrows. The excessive rhetoric I employ hardly reflects the crush of your responsibilities.

Nevertheless, to reduce you to an executive lackey would be, finally, to capitulate to the world in which we live but of which we dare not be. For, like Peter, you who love our Lord have also received a call to feed and tend his flock. Called, not hired. Whatever remuneration you receive will perhaps suffice to keep children in college but hardly be enough to match the dignity of the office and the authority of your vocation. Furthermore, whatever process we devised to place you here finally pales in comparison to the power of the Holy Spirit, who breathes into even the dry bones of this institution and gives us life. More importantly, even the toil makes your work not a job but the joyful labor of birth and the cross.

No, those who would reduce this text and your office to shepherd or slave, have overlooked the third, and only true, option. It lurks unnoticed behind every text in Scripture but especially in this gospel. It is the voice of the author himself-the beloved disciple-who writes these things so that we "may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through believing may have life in his name." This evangelist, whose eagle eye could truly pierce beyond the grave, saw himself reflected in his namesake, John the Baptist. No wonder that five verses into his saga he announced-to the consternation of those who would later look for the perfect Christ hymn-"There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness." And yet, he is not the silent witness of Greek tragedy who appears on stage but, like Joseph in children's nativity pageants, never has a line. Rather, as if to underscore the point, the evangelist puts the entire gospel in the mouth of John, when he cries, "Behold the Lamb of God!" The writer never forgets that witness, so that at the end of the story, with Jesus' unbroken body pierced, he recalls the fate of the Passover lamb: "None of his bones shall be broken." Just to seal the testimony, he adds, "He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth."

That is who you are among us, too. A witness to God's Lamb and Good Shepherd. You give voice to that very One who is the Word. As fashionable as it is these days to encourage the witness of your deeds, I, for one, will not lay that burden on your shoulders. May God instead hide from you both success and failure and instead put your true witness for us in your mouth and, better yet, on your fingertips. "In your mouth," for John the Baptist and John the Evangelist did not speak of their own accord but only at the behest of their Lord and Word.

Why then do I add "on your fingertips"? To depict your johannine office, I can think of no better artist than Matthias Grünewald, that fifteenth-century painter of the famous altarpiece that now stands in Colmar, France. Next to Christ in agony on the cross, he placed the expected figure of John the Baptist, holding a lamb and pointing to the Lamb of God on the cross. What strikes the viewer, however, is the length of John's finger painted on a stark, dark background. For Grünewald, who doubtless understood perspective and proportion, has purposely drawn that finger twice the length it should be-lest anyone be tempted to forget John's office and yours, Philip: to point away from yourself to the one who walks toward us carrying away the sin of the world.

I say all this to introduce another witness, one who shares your Christian name, Philip Melanchthon. You are surrounded today by your family: brothers and sisters, spouse and children. We have come to expect such things: a married president. And yet, the way you now tread was blazed by none other than my beloved Master Philip, who in 1524 became the first married rector of a European institution of higher learning. In honor of that connection I have taken the liberty of shaping my remarks in accord with his rules of rhetoric, although, in that regard, I also owe a debt to one of his mentors and yours, the greatest rhetor of the Western church, Augustine. We may no longer be accustomed to the grandiloquence of Ciceronian declamations, and yet, an occasion so grand demands a certain extravagance, for which I have already begged your forgiveness. With Melanchthon as its rector, the University of Wittenberg introduced such declamationes, polished speeches, into its curriculum. With you as dean, we began here the lovely (albeit medieval) custom of the quodlibet-a safe place to ask our questions. In both cases, you and your namesake Philip, were providing voice and witness: inexorably pointing the way to the One who is the Way, telling the truth about the One who is truth, and enliving our mutual sharing in his gospel of life.

In lieu of a peroration, Philip Melanchthon often concluded his orations on biblical texts with prayer. Thus, as Philip Krey begins his ministry among us, let us all pray to Almighty God. That you would in Christ lead us to good pasture beside still waters. That you would bless this school and its supporters. That you would give us ears to hear your gentle call placed in the heart and on the lips of your servant Philip. But, most especially, we pray for thy whole church throughout the world, redeemed through the precious blood of the Lamb. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purge it; where it is in error, direct it; where it is superstitious, rectify it; where anything is amiss, reform it; where it is right, strengthen and confirm it; where it is in want, furnish it; where it is divided and rent asunder, make up the breaches of it; O thou Holy One of Israel, for the sake of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen

And now, may the peace of God, which passes all human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

I have spoken.