the Invitation
Certificado en Ministerios Hispanos Graduation Address
Lexington Theological Seminary
by Rev. Dr. Loida I. Martell
Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean
Professor of Constructive Theology
June 6, 2025
Ezekiel 47: 1-12 NRSVUE
1 Then he brought me back to the entrance of the temple; there water was flowing from below the entryway of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east), and the water was flowing down from below the south side of the temple, south of the altar. 2 Then he brought me out by way of the north gate and led me around on the outside to the outer gate that faces toward the east, and the water was trickling out on the south side.
3 Going on eastward with a cord in his hand, the man measured one thousand cubits and then led me through the water, and it was ankle-deep. 4 Again he measured one thousand and led me through the water, and it was knee-deep. Again he measured one thousand and led me through the water, and it was up to the waist. 5 Again he measured one thousand, and it was a river that I could not cross, for the water had risen; it was deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be crossed. 6 He said to me, “Mortal, have you seen this?”
Then he led me back along the bank of the river. 7 As I came back, I saw on the bank of the river a great many trees on the one side and on the other. 8 He said to me, “This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah, and when it enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh. 9 Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish once these waters reach there. It will become fresh, and everything will live where the river goes. 10 People will stand fishing beside the sea from En-gedi to En-eglaim; it will be a place for the spreading of nets; its fish will be of a great many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea. 11 But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they are to be left for salt. 12 On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing.”
Greetings to President Gillett and the esteemed faculty, and to Rev. Dr. William Lee, Chair of the Board of Trustees. Greetings to the dedicated staff of LTS. A special word of greetings and congratulations to all the graduates of the Certificate in African American Ministries program, and to their family and friends who have been present with them not only today but throughout their academic and vocational journey. I am honored and privileged to participate in this virtual ceremony at the invitation of the President, the Board and the faculty.
Commencement. What a curious word to use at graduations. Its root word “commence” means “to initiate,” to “have or make a beginning.” And so here we are, after having completed your studies for your Certificate to be told that you are not, in fact, celebrating the “end” of something but are only just now at the “beginning.” Wait…what? You mean to tell me, that after slogging through Bible courses and exegesis, finally getting my head around theological terms and theological thinking, learning the methods and importance of formation and missions, church administration, pastoral care, and getting all those dates in history lined up in correct chronological order, I am at the beginning? Yes!
For you see, every end is a beginning and every beginning is an end. The resurrection is surely a paradigm of this. The end of Jesus earthly ministry was actually the eschatological beginning of God’s salvific vision for all of humanity and creation. The apostle Paul exclaimed: “Behold, all things are made new!”
Commencement is thus a beginning, one that also implies invitation: to enter into new spaces or to go deeper into the spaces you currently inhabit. Transitions events, such as graduations, are invitations to explore new vistas, open new doors, discover new ground. This afternoon, I want to look further at this theme of invitation with you by examining the invitation offered to Ezekiel while he was exiled in Babylon.
I find Ezekiel to be an intriguing prophet. A strange one at the very least. Misunderstood, shunned. Commentaries question his sanity, his perception of reality. I read Ezekiel and Abraham Heschel’s description of prophets come to mind. They are perceived to be “strange, one-sided, an unbearable extremist…stigmatized as a madman by [their] contemporaries, and by some modern scholars, as abnormal.” And yet, like all prophets, Ezekiel’s “ear…is attuned to a cry imperceptible to others.”[1] It seems to me that Heschel’s description is not too far off for those of us who are called to serve God in the twenty-first century. People look at us when we say we are going into ministry as if there is something not quite right. Why ministry? they wonder, when you could make so much more money, or receive so much more prestige, or have more doing something else.
Why? Because we have been invited! We have been asked to enter into this wondrous, amazing journey that we have named a “calling,” or vocation, a “vocare” in the Latin. The prophet Jeremiah called it a seduction, a wooing. It is a love dance. God invites. Hebrews 5:1 uses the word of “selected (chosen).” It is why we can never consider our positions in ministry “employment.” It is not a “job.” It is an invitation and a calling. And you are here because you have said, “yes.” So in this commencement, this ending that is a beginning, I want delve deeper into the implications of this invitation through the vision and metaphor of Ezekiel at the river.
In Ezekiel 47, the prophet is shown a temple and from below gurgles forth a stream of water that quickly turns into rushing river that reaches the uncultivated and over salinated regions of the Dead Sea. A guide invites the prophet to enter the river. The scene described tells us that Ezekiel found himself ankle-deep, and then knee-deep, then waist-deep, and until finally he must swim in a “river that could not be crossed.” It is the guide who must lead him (I suspect “carried him”) to the shore. I must admit that whenever I read this text I reflect on the fact that I cannot swim. I know. A Puerto Rican who grew up in an island and I cannot swim. What irony! When my friends and I would go to the beach, I would go just deep enough that I could stand firmly in the water and pretend swim. I made sure I was in control. But every once in a while a wave would come that would push me a tad too deep, and there would be this momentary panic. I was no longer in control. The water determined where I was to go! I would scramble in a panic until I could regain sure footing and continue with my charade of pseudo-swimming.
Not so in this text. The invitation is not to pretend float, not to pretend swim. It is an invitation to go so deep that you are carried away, that you are no longer in control, that you must rely on someone else, on grace from above to take you where you must go to do what you are being invited to do. Whew! Heady stuff, right? So what does this strange text of rivers flowing from a temple, a guide with a measuring stick, and healing trees have to say to us this morning? What is this invitation about?
To delve into the question of invitation, I ask us to first look at Who is inviting. The text is emphatic: God is the One who invites because God is the source of all. The temple is a metaphor for God’s Presence, and the God is the source of the river. It is the text’s way of indicating that God’s presence permeates everything. To be invited into the depth of the river is to be invited to enter into the fullness of presence of God. For Israel this was significant message: they were exiled in Babylon and believed that God had forsaken them. God was afar. The psalmist weeps by the rivers of Babylon and laments, “how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” How many of us in this walk throughout this calling have had our Babylon moments, where God has seemed so far away, where we have wondered if we are on the right path, if the sacrifice was well worth it, if we were going to reach our goals, if we indeed were going to “sing the Lord’s song?” It is in such places that the fullness of God’s presence abounds and God invites us, “enter good servant.” This vision is an affirmation of God’s presence, God’s faithfulness. There is no place in which God is absent. As a people called to serve, the invitation to enter deeper is an invitation to be permeated with God’s glory. It is to be invited into the fullness of God’s holiness, God’s mercy, God’s love, God’s grace, and yes, God’s life. It is to be invited to a holy dance from which we will never emerge the same. God is the beginning and the end of this invitation, the alpha and omega, the very font of grace that lifts us, providing us with what we will need to move forward. To be fully blessed, the prophetic challenge is that we not stand askance at the edges of the shore, not wade ankle deep in superficial religiosity. We are called to surrender fully in God’s hands without fear that we will be lost, carried by the currents of events or crises. We are not surrendering to happenstance. We are surrendering ourselves fully into the will of God.
If we know the who is inviting, the question that follows is the why? Why are we invited to go deeper into our callings? I mean, we were doing well at knee-deep and even waist-deep. Some of us are doing some amazing things and are figuratively speaking up to our necks in serving the Lord. Gustavo Gutierrez reminds us that God’s invitation to serve is an act of grace. We accept this call understanding that it is a gift. [2] And what a gift it has been! The experiences we have lived! The people we have encountered! The things we have been witness to as we have seen the hand of God move in our midst and bring life, healing, and transformation where there to spaces of despair, loss, and death. Yet, I cannot help but think about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s and his challenge that we live lives of costly grace. Costly grace implies a following of Jesus Christ, who is God’s grace and love embodied in the world.[3] It is a following regardless, without fear. To be selected, to be asked to follow in this grace-full manner is rather a humbling reality: we are chosen and invited to be a “holy priesthood.” Gutierrez asserts that in being invited into holiness, we are called to be a people of justice.[4] This God of life invites us into the fullness of life that we may confront death-dealing powers with God’s love and life. We are to confront despair and discouragement with a word of hope: that Christ lives because the God of Life has brought life to the world in the midst of death. This invitation to come deeper into the waters to be permeated with God’s grace, holiness, love, and life means that we are chosen in turn to be a holy people who bring life and justice in spaces of death.
To be invited into the fullness of this “holy priesthood” enables us, in turn, to dream new dreams and see new visions. We are invited not only to see what is, but also to see the possibilities who we can be as church and as a society through the holy Presence of the transforming One who pours out love and hope into the world. God called Ezekiel to not simply witness the realities facing an exiled and demoralized people and not simply to see the uncultivable and salinized lands surrounding the Dead Sea. Ezekiel was given the ability to envision healing waters that permeated inarable lands, waters that brought forth new flora and healing fruit. It was a promise of salvation to a demoralized people. To enter into deeper waters is an invitation to see through the eyes of God, to see “new heavens and a new earth,” to envision new possibilities. To enter into deeper waters is to see how this saving God pours out “rivers of living water” that brings wholeness and healing not only to the people but to the earth itself. “Behold, all things are indeed made new!”
It is not easy to be a visionary in this post-pandemic world of divisiveness, war, and rampant hate. Our political leaders have sown fear, projecting a vision of a world on the brink of destruction. The repeated message is that all is irrevocably lost. We are invited to stand at the shore, passively, to place our eyes not on the God of life but on the Caesers of the world—the very ones who in the past as in the present, proclaim to be sōtērs/ saviors and peacemakers, as they plunder and agitate. Ezekiel’s vision reminds us that God’s invitation to deepen our ties with God gifts us with the capacity “dream new dreams and see new visions.” To dream is a profoundly subversive act that allow us to resist the seductive siren call of despair and divisiveness. It allows us to transgress the boundaries of what is. Dreams enable us to envision how to shatter sinful structures. We can dream of a different way of being as a people and as a society. To leave the shores of complacency and enter the deeper waters of God’s fullness transforms us into a “holy priesthood,” purveyors of the “good news” that God’s basileia, God’s reign of hope, justice, and love has broken in through Jesus Christ.
To accept the invitation to live and dream in this way takes take courage. One must leave the safety of the shore. No more wading at the edge of comfort. LTS provides us with effective practical and intellectual tools for ministry, and creates spaces to develop spiritual formation. What the seminary cannot provide us with is courage. Courage arises from faith: a deep and abiding trust that God has us in hand and is leading us in ways that we cannot even begin to fathom. When I said yes to God, when I jumped into that river and let the current take me, I never imagined that I would be led from the beaches of San Juan, Puerto Rico to the shores of Lexington, Kentucky. I said, “Here I am, Lord,” and for the past eight years I never faltered in my trust in God. To have courage is to have faith that God will provide the vision, the resources, the strength, and the means for the Church to carry out its mission. President Gillett often reminds us that the mission of Lexington Theological Seminary is to prepare faithful leaders for the Church of Jesus Christ to serve the world. I will modify that only slightly with her permission. It is to prepare faithful and courageous leaders to enable the Church of Jesus Christ to transform the world: where there is hate, let us bring love. Where there is despair, let us bring hope. Where there is intolerance, let us bring diversity and inclusion. Where there is a scattering of peoples due to xenophobia, let us gather them round the table of the Lord and way, “welcome.” Where there is darkness, let us bring light. Perhaps I am not saying this properly. So let me turn to Matthew 25, where another kind of invitation was extended, an invitation to serve “the least of these” as part of our inheritance in the reign of God. Jesus invited us to courageously and faithfully feed the hungry in our midst instead of shutting down the funds that deny food to the poorest of the poor, bring water to those who are thirsty instead of breaking the water bottles that humanitarian groups leave for these traversing deserts in border towns, welcome the stranger instead of paying foreign prisons to chain them up or drop them off in the middle of war zones, provide clothing to cover the nakedness of those without instead of shifting their paltry resources to further enrich the powerful, and care for the sick rather than refuse care because they are uninsured or live in areas lacking medical facilities (Matt 25:35-40). Jesus reminds us, “Truly, as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matt 25: 40, NRSV).
LTS heard the invitation to come deeper into the waters and changed its institutional culture to ensure that it was an open and welcoming place for all people, regardless of gender and gender fluidity, race and culture, political spectrum and theological viewpoint. It has remained faithful to its calling to create courageous, prophetic, and faithful leaders for the church to serve in the world. And here you are. On this Commencement day, I invite you to go deeper into the healing, restorative, envisioning, transformative waters that is the fullness of God’s calling on your lives. Be prepared to be amazed. Be prepared to be swept away. Above all, be prepared to be invited to move ever deeper to the next level. You are the “holy priesthood,” a people of courageous faith who God continuously invites to serve the Church in its call to transform this world and bring light, love, hope, and life. May it be so.
[1] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 7, 16, 18.
[2] Gustavo Gutierrez, The God of Life, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 5.
[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (NY: Touchstone, 1995), 37.
[4] Gutierrez, The God of Life, 28–29.