And a wilderness it may seem like at times. Who wants deacons these days? Who needs clergy other than to lend tone or make fun of? Why be ordained at all when the tides of secularism sweep all before them? Well, look back to John the Baptist on your ordination day. Things were scarcely more auspicious then. His ministry baffled some and offended many more. He spoke truth to power and paid for it with his life. You could hardly call it a successful career. And yet he bore witness. That’s what matters – bearing witness. “In the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.” “But”, some might reply, “of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made” as Immanuel Kant put it. Maybe he was right. Nevertheless, it matters that we point to the promised justice and reconciliation and truth that will one day break into our world.
For you who are becoming deacons this afternoon, “pointing” in words and deeds to the reality of God is what ordination means. Of course every baptised Christian does this day in, day out, if we take Christianity seriously. But what marks clergy out is that you are public representatives of God and his church, witnesses before the world of what the gospel promises to all who welcome it and embrace it. You are not the Messiah, however much people may wish that you were and sometimes even build pedestals for you to try to make you one. You are not Elijah, and not the Prophet. You are you, and your calling to is point to the Messiah in what you say and what you do and what you are. That makes you a public witness to the gospel. It confers on you the authority of the church. You become, as Austin Farrer famously said, a “walking sacrament”, a living symbol of God’s love. He was speaking of priests but it’s true of all who are ordained, because we are “outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace”, which is how the Prayer Book defines a sacrament.
Once, when I left a cathedral I’d served for eight years as dean, the Bishop said at my farewell service: “what matters in ministry is to know your place”. He used that phrase half a dozen times: knowing our place. I have often thought about it in the twenty years since then. Knowing your place is close to knowing yourself, and in public life, there is nothing more important than to know ourselves inside as well as out. In the church’s ministry, as in any other institution, it’s what gives leaders authenticity, integrity, emotional and spiritual intelligence, empathy, influence. You look at Jesus in the gospels and you’re struck by how powerfully he lived out these qualities. And because he knew how essential it was to nurture them, he went up mountains to pray and find solitude and nourish his relationship with his Father. He knew himself and he knew his place as God’s Son and servant. And John the Baptist knew his place too, as not being the messiah, or any messiah but simply a seeker after truth who bore witness and pointed to the One who was to come.
In our retreat at Alnmouth Friary this week, I’ve shared some reflections on Jesus as he is portrayed in St John’s Gospel, from which our reading today was drawn. In the Gospel Jesus performs a number of signs that act out different aspects of his coming among us as God’s Son. St John says that in these signs he reveals God’s glory. He turns water into wine. He heals a child. He feeds the hungry crowd. He gives sight to a man born blind. He raises Lazarus from the dead. In these five ways he brings joy, and wholeness, and nourishment, and light, and life. In my addresses I’ve suggested that we as deacons are called to perform works like his that visibly draw attention to God’s love that is always at work in the world. We too are signs of joy, signs of wholeness, signs of nourishment, signs of light, signs of new life and – yes – signs of glory, God’s glory, the God who loves the world, who is at work in human lives, whose glory is revealed even – if you can believe it – in the words and actions of ordinary people like us whom he calls to the office and work of a deacon.
An American church bulletin recently reported on a deacons’ ordination with the headline in big letters, “Not to serve but to be served”. Oh dear. Maybe you don’t always say what you mean, but you do mean what you say. “Being served” is precisely how some people view the clergy, and some clergy see themselves. So it matters, it really matters, that we are not going to be grand or self-important. We are going to wash the feet of others and prepare the way of the Lord. John the Baptist shows us the spirit in which we shall do this. For him, everything is looking forward to the Messiah who is to come. His words are charged with an unshakeable, radiant hope in the promises of God. And later in this first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, here is the Messiah himself, the promised one of whom John says, “see the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world…This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me…I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
And all the signs Jesus performs are a fulfilment of what John has looked forward to so keenly, that God is now among us, and we see his glory full of grace and truth. It takes hope to do what John the Baptist did, what Jesus himself did, what we must do in his name. If we don’t have hope in God’s coming among us, why are we here today in this holy place, pledging ourselves to a life of service in the company of friends with whom we break bread? If we don’t have hope, if we don’t truly believe through our ministry God will touch the lives of others, how can we be good witnesses of the gospel that the church calls us to be? If we don’t ourselves minister and live by hope, what hope can there be for the church? For the world? For any of us?
You are here to bear witness. You are here to bring hope. You are not the Messiah or Elijah or the Prophet. But you are witnesses of grace and truth in our midst, and you will speak of them in the words you utter and the service you give. You too will perform signs of glory that imitate the works of Jesus. In his name, you announce the coming of the Lord, you prepare his way, and you point to the hope he brings. Your ordination today is a sign of the hope God has set before us. May the God of hope be with you all.
Newcastle Cathedral, 30 June 2018
John 1.19-23
No comments:
Post a Comment