ADDRESS 1: BRINGING JOY
The Wedding at Cana: John 2.1-11
The Wedding at Cana: John 2.1-11
For Jesus in the gospels, ministry meant words
and works: mighty works, words of power that touched lives and changed them. In
our public ministry as deacons and then priests, it’s the same. Our calling is to speak the words and perform
the works that bear witness to Jesus, that give glimpses of God’s kingdom and
that touch human lives.
In our ordination retreat I want to focus on the
works of Jesus in St John’s Gospel. I’ve chosen five out of the seven: the
wedding at Cana, the healing of a royal official’s son, the feeding of the
crowd, the blind man who is given sight, and the raising of Lazarus. As you
know, in St John, Jesus does not work miracles
but performs signs, that, says
John, disclose Jesus’ glory. Where do we see glory? St John tells us in the
prologue, the gospel we read on Christmas Day. “And we beheld his glory, the
glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”. Glory is
what we see when we look on God’s incarnate Son. Glory is what we see when we
look on grace and truth.
I want to make the bold claim that our own
ministries, when we model them on his, if they are fashioned around grace and
truth, will show signs of glory. If as ministers of the church our task, our
call, our longing is to reveal him, to bring him to birth in the lives of
others, then grace and truth and glory are what we are about. So I’ve taken as
my title for these five addresses, “signs of ministry, signs of glory”. It’s a
title, but it’s also my prayer for you all this week, that in everything you
may walk in the path of the Lord whose words and works spoke of God’s glory and
pointed to its coming in this world and in the lives of people who pray as
Moses did, “Lord, show me your glory!”
********
First, then, the wedding at Cana in Galilee. St
John pays great attention to the symbolism of this first sign with which Jesus
launches his ministry, and so must we. “Jesus did this, the first of his signs,
in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.”
Some of you may have been to Cana on pilgrimages
to Israel-Palestine. It is not a place that reveals much glory today. There are
some big old stone water jars, it’s true, but that’s about it, if you don’t
include the souvenir shops where you can buy bottles of cheap red wine labelled
Cana in Galilee, a long way from the best wine that was kept to the last thanks
to Jesus, which must have been a Burgundy grand
cru at the very least.
And I doubt Cana was much to write home about
when Jesus and his disciples went there. You mustn’t imagine a grand society
wedding in Chelsea. This was probably a peasant marriage, the kind you see
depicted in genre paintings by the Dutch masters. It would be homely and
humble. But the entire village would be there: it would be unthinkable not to join
in the community’s life events of both lament and celebration. And there would
be glory, too, long before Jesus arrived, for when people love each other, God
is always present. But the wine runs out – for times are hard and funds are
scarce. There’s a possibility that the party will peter out, a grave crisis
when marriage festivities in the ancient near east usually last for a week, and
grave for the reputations of the families concerned, for in these times,
memories are long.
What does Jesus do? He doesn’t speak many words,
only what is necessary to his mother and those responsible for the feast. In
particular, he doesn’t make a speech to the crowd, though if ever there was an
opportunity for witness, this is it. The deed is performed, done in the spirit
of this wedding: modestly, unobtrusively and as far as the guests are
concerned, silently. And he “revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in
him”.
Before I get to the principal point I want to
make about Cana, let’s notice the lowly, unspectacular character of this first
sign of glory. This is not like Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand that we’ll
come to later, where people exclaim that all the world has gone after him. The
changing of water into wine is so unobtrusive a sign that most people don’t
even notice it. But people with eyes to see understand what has happened. They
glimpse the glory. And I have to tell you that most of ordained ministry is
like that: unseen to most people, hidden from the crowd, understated, modest.
Indeed, that may often be the mark of its sheer authenticity, that it doesn’t
cry out for attention saying “look at me!”. This is how Jesus begins his
ministry in St John, quietly. This is how your ministry will begin, I suspect,
I hope; “begun, continued and ended”
in that way – that’s my experience after more than forty years as a deacon. The
question is not, who is around to see this but, how does God reveal his glory
through the works we do in his name in our ministry?
Ask that question of Cana and here’s the answer.
Jesus reveals his glory by making sure that the party can go on. I once worked
with a bishop who said that the essence of good religion was prayer and
parties. For parties are about joy, pleasure, happiness, the conviviality that
happens when human beings are glad to be together to eat and drink, tell
stories, celebrate all that is lovely in life. This is what Jesus can’t bear to
think might end before its time. And because the party can now go on, indeed, get
better and better with this wine that excels anything they’ve ever tasted, their
cup of happiness is complete. This first act of ministry has shown Jesus to be the bringer of joy. And by making people
glad, he has revealed his glory. By
making people glad.
I think this is very striking. Many people think
of clergy as bringing comfort in distress, wisdom in crisis, hope in times of
despair. And that is a large part of it as we’ll see in some of the later signs
Jesus performs. Others regard clergy with wariness and caution, dangerous
people who will open up matters you don’t want to explore, so you don’t want to
sit too close to a dog collar on the train. Ministry baffles a lot of people.
It even puzzles us at times when we ask ourselves, what are we really for? Jesus seems to say in this sign at
Cana that one of the things we are for is to bring joy, to make others happy. Let’s
think about this for a while.
There are of course many occasions in ministry
where happiness is a given. When we baptise children or marry couples, when we
celebrate the life events that make people glad, we clergy don’t bring joy for it’s already there. What
we do is to help them interpret it, find meaning in what they are experiencing,
glimpse how God is present at these high points of human life. That will often
add greatly to the joy of the celebration, help to make it more conscious.
But what if the wine runs out? Think about it as
a metaphor of a common human experience, our
experience. We know what it’s like when ecstasy subsides and even the
memory of shining happy days becomes dulled with time, and we revert to the
treadmill of our ordinary days. For many people in our parishes, the treadmill is
the rule, not the exception. And especially for those who are “just about
managing”, or not managing at all, for whom simply surviving to the end of the
day and not caving in to despair is a real achievement. How can we be bringers
of joy to those who thirst for it as the wedding guests longed for fresh
supplies of wine that day at Cana?
The first thing I want to say is that in the
ordained ministry, we must never lose our sense of gratitude and wonder as
those who are called to handle the holy gifts God entrusts to us. For many of
us, becoming closer to these mysteries was what drew us to offer ourselves in
the first place. We wanted to be better Christians, disciples who walked closer
to Jesus, and being ordained was one way of doing this. I’m not saying this is
all there is to vocation – far from it. I’m wanting us to acknowledge that it
is there, somewhere, if we examine ourselves. And that is good if it keeps us
wondering at how we came to be preaching God’s word, celebrating his sacraments,
caring for those he loves, bringing people to faith. You may think it odd that
since I’ve retired, I’ve pondered this miracle more and more, when I’ve found
myself celebrating the eucharist in some remote Northumberland church or listening
to the stories people bring in spiritual direction or preaching a retreat like
this. Reverencing the gifts we bring helps guard against casualness and
over-familiarity with sacred things. It keeps wonder and gratitude alive. For
if we don’t cultivate joy ourselves as ministers of Christ, why should anyone
else be joyful as a result of anything we do or say?
I’m saying that to be bringers of joy, we need to
be joyful ourselves. I’m not confusing this with shallow behavioural advice
like “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, don’t mess with Mr
Inbetween”. We all have good days and bad days, times of light, times of
shadow, and these are part of our human condition. When I was vicar of Alnwick
just up the road, and learning how to be a good incumbent, I had yet to learn
this lesson. What helped me more than anything was meeting the widow of my
predecessor who had died suddenly in his fifties of a brain tumour. He had been
vicar for just six months. She said to me: “clergy often say that they only have
one sermon which they preach in a thousand different ways. John’s was about
gratitude. Christians should be thank-you people because thankfulness is the
basis of being alive. It’s what the word eucharist
means. I’m trying now in my grief to learn that. Even in dark times, it’s
possible to be joyful.” Or words to that effect.
I tried to learn that too in the parish. It
wasn’t easy when I felt so exposed, so challenged. Much of what I learned then,
and since, was learned the hard way by making mistakes, not trusting enough in
the goodness and forgiveness of God, not noticing so much that was lovely and
good all around me. (And, I can also say, being too busy in the role of
incumbent to be present to the joy that was in my own vicarage where we were bringing
up four young children, one of whom was born during that time. Like Martha, being
distracted by many things is as likely in the church as it is in hearth and
home.)
At times, joy comes upon us unexpectedly. We’d
love to know what it was that brought the sudden rush recalled by William
Wordsworth in his celebrated sonnet “Surprised by Joy”. But the poem is not
about the joy, rather the absence of a beloved one to share it with, which is
why C.S. Lewis chose it as the title of his great memoir of bereavement. We’ve
all known moments when, often for reasons we can describe, but sometimes not,
we are overwhelmed with a radiant sense of happiness, often the sheer gladness
that we are alive and see what we see, hear what we hear and feel what we feel.
They are among our best moments, these joyful mysteries of life.
However, I don’t think that most of the time, joy
comes upon us spontaneously. I believe it’s a spiritual habit we can and should
cultivate. When the scriptures command us to “rejoice in the Lord” or to be
joyful “because he comes to judge the earth”, this isn’t to conjure up happy
feelings but to focus our minds and hearts on the fundamental truth of God that
we live and die by. That truth is that God loves us and has come among us in
Jesus to transform our world, turn the water of mere existence into the wine
that is a symbol of what it means to be truly alive. So it is not just wine
but, says the story, good wine, the very
best wine because it represents the
good news, the best news, that is the meaning of the word gospel. You could say that the whole of the spiritual life, all of
discipleship means making this the focus of our gratitude and our longing,
practising eucharistia as I said just
now. When once we grasp the basic insight that all of life is pure gift, we are
on the way to living gratefully and joyfully.
Life-as-gift has infinitely many dimensions. But
at the apex of the gifts we are most aware of and most thankful for is St
John’s truth that God is love. It’s this love that moves the sun and the stars,
sustains every living being, shines through our most precious relationships and
experiences, lights up our dark times. By it we live, by it we learn love’s
work, by it we serve God in whatever ways he calls us, and by it we shall die.
All of prayer, all of ministry, all of mission, all of discipleship is an act
of love for God and for our fellow human beings. If you take nothing else away
from this retreat, I beg you to remember that.
Because all that we can ever bring to ministry is
our selves, as life and experience and God have formed us. I think it’s vital
if we are to flourish in this calling and if we are to touch the lives of
others for good that the selves we offer are thankful, joyful selves. I have no
doubt that on Saturday when you are ordained, when your life as “clergy”
begins, you will never have felt more joyful, more thankful as you will at that
moment. You may want to dance and dab in front of the cameras after the
service. You will offer your lives to God in the service of the church out of
pure gratitude that he has brought you to this point. But think ahead to ten
years’ time, twenty, forty. The seeds of lifelong contentment, joy, gratitude
in your ministry begin to be sown now. For it’s in these initial years of being
a deacon and then a priest that spiritual habits are formed, often for a
lifetime. You might like to imagine writing this week letters to your older
self, to be opened on each decade’s anniversary of your ordination. Better
still, why not do it? Why not remind yourself how grateful you are now, and how
you long for the joy of your ordination to be sustained across the years to
come?
Because ordained ministers are meant to be
bearers of joy, just as Jesus brought joy to the wedding feast. In ways that
you can’t yet foresee, you will turn water into wine for countless people whom
God will lead across your path. The ordinal reminds us that deacons “serve as
heralds of Christ’s kingdom”. That is your calling, and especially in “reaching
into the forgotten corners of the world, that the love of God may be made
visible”. It’s what it means to bring good news so that sorrow and sighing may flee
away and humanity find joy and gladness by learning to be God’s people once
again.
ADDRESS 2: BRINGING WHOLENESS
The Healing of the Official’s Son: John 4.46-end
Jesus has travelled far since the first sign. He
has been up to Jerusalem for the first Passover in St John, overturned the
tables of the temple traders, met the leading Pharisee Nicodemus for that
unforgettable night-time conversation, baptised followers in the Judean
wilderness, and turned north again through Samaria where he has had another
encounter with a seeker-after-truth, the Samaritan woman. Now he is back in his
home country, back at Cana where, John reminds us, “he had changed the water
into wine”.
It’s here that Jesus performs the second sign of
his ministry, the healing of the Roman official’s son. This man is probably an
officer of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, the Herod you hear most about in
the gospels and the one who beheaded John the Baptist. I think we can assume
that he was a Roman, so this is the first time a pagan believes in St John.
First the Jewish disciples find faith, then the woman of Samaria, now a gentile
soldier, perhaps consciously echoing the spread of the gospel into the wider
world as the Acts of the Apostles depict it. And the man is not alone. “He
himself believed, along with his whole household.”
Like the wedding at Cana, this story feels
modest, understated. Just as at the marriage feast, Jesus makes no speeches,
offers no teaching unlike the later healing signs in St John, does not draw
attention to his own powers. And he takes his time. At the wedding, Jesus had
engaged in that intriguing dialogue with his mother, saying that his time had
not yet come. Here it’s with the boy’s father who has travelled a day’s journey
from Capernaum to find him. Instead of rushing out, which is what most of us
would have done, Jesus seems to stall: “unless you see signs and wonders you
will not believe”. But the official won’t be drawn into a theological argument.
You can hear his voice catching with urgency and a father’s love for his son,
and with the fear that even now, if Jesus set out at once, it could be too
late. “Lord, come down before my little boy dies!” And then, Jesus speaks the
word. “Go, your son will live.” In that wonderful instant everything is turned
round. The sun breaks through the gloom. “The man believed the word that Jesus
spoke to him.” The child lives.
If joy is at the heart of Christian ministry, so
are suffering and pain. When we left Alnwick to go to Coventry, the community gave
us a sampler that some parishioners had crafted, with images of the church and
town on it, and the names of all our family. We treasure it after 35 years, not
least for the lines by William Blake that are sewn into it.
Man was
made for joy and woe; And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
“Woven fine” – not just a sampler but all of life. In Coventry I wrote a book about Graham Sutherland’s great Tapestry of Christ in Glory where I explored the spirituality of how our life in God is “woven fine”. Next week I am going back to the Cathedral as part of the diocese’s centenary celebrations to revisit that book a quarter of a century after writing it. Blake’s imagery about joy and woe being “woven fine” feels as accurate now as did then, more so indeed, given that I’ve lived that bit longer to be able to confirm that this is indeed how things are for us human beings.
Hebrew and Christian faith have always stood in solidarity with people in both their joy and their woe. “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” says St Paul. And when it comes to weeping, there is a rich seam of biblical texts to draw on. When we consider the Psalms of lament, the oracles of Jeremiah, the servant songs of the second Isaiah, the book of Job and, in the New Testament, the four passion narratives, it’s clear that suffering is a major theme in the Bible. If not unique among the world faiths, it’s a distinctive emphasis. These texts of pain and terror tell us three things. First, that God is close to all who cry out of the depths in the belief that there will be what the Psalm scholars call a “certainty of hearing”? Secondly, they tell us that to wonder why, to interrogate suffering, is not only a natural human response to pain but is a fundamental theological and spiritual task. Thirdly, and most profoundly of all, these texts culminate in a story of how God himself undergoes suffering in the person of his Son Jesus, whose cross is the emblem of our redemption and healing.
This is why the ordained minister is inevitably involved in suffering of every kind. The ordinal reminds us that deacons are to work “in searching out the poor and weak, the sick and lonely and those who are oppressed and powerless, reaching into the forgotten corners of the world, that the love of God may be made visible”. That is a beautiful statement. For pastoral care is always an act of love in the name of the church and ultimately, of God. Once upon a time, when you began a new ministry in a parish or chaplaincy, the bishop would deliver you your licence with the words “receive the cure of souls which is both mine and yours, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. That time-honoured phrase cure of souls means simply the care of human lives committed to your charge. A curate is someone who has this care written into their role. What nobler calling could there be than to become a curate? It marks you out as men and women publicly destined to care, to serve, to love in God’s name. Vicars, according to the literal meaning of that title, act for someone else, and rectors rule. But curates care! At your ordination, the Bishop will ask you: “Will you strive to make the love of Christ known through word and example, and have a particular care for those in need?” A ministry that was not pastoral in this sense of embodying divine love and bringing it to the world would not be ministry as the Bible understands it. It would not be true diakonia, service.
I guess of the multitude of tasks we shall have performed as ministers by the time we die, the vast majority will be forgotten. All those sermons and services, social events and outreach activities, the visits and the fundraising – all important, all helping to build up the life of the church, all bearing witness to Jesus in one way or another, all will one day belong to history. It puts us in our place and that’s no bad thing. We shouldn’t set up memorials to ourselves. We must decrease, he must increase. But there’s perhaps one exception. Parishioners, I think, long remember the spirit in which we did these things, the kindness, the care, the self-giving love. Especially is this true of our pastoral activity: how we were at the bedside of a hospital patient, how we waited with a family while a parent or partner or child was dying, how we tried to comfort the bereaved. And pastoral care extends into liturgy too: how we conducted funerals, how we prayed for the sick and anointed them, how we imitated the compassion of Jesus as he performed his signs that spoke of God’s glory and his love. Compassion, suffering with. That’s what will be remembered, believe me.
What about that second strand in texts of suffering, those that ask the question why? Why this suffering, why me, why anyone? Why natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis? Why accidents and disasters? Why the endless tide of war and conflict, of cruelty and abuse, lives irreparably damaged through our human propensity to hurt and injure and maim? The why-question is universal. The Hebrew Bible is no stranger to it: recall Job and his wrestling with God out of his painful ordeal. Or the Psalm laments for whom questions like “how long O Lord?” beg for some insight into why God appears to side with the ungodly rather than bring relief to the afflicted. In the Bible, it is permitted to argue with the Almighty.
You won’t be surprised if, within days of your being ordained, you are asked by church members of parishioners why God has allowed this or that to happen, be it a terminal illness or the death of a youngster in a road accident, or some terrorist incident or natural disaster that hits the headlines. In holy orders, you are presumed to have divine wisdom conferred on you that is denied to ordinary mortals. How you handle such questions may be another of those things that get remembered.
I vividly recall one Ascension Day in the parish. The mid-morning eucharist was coming to an end on a beautiful spring morning. We heard the news that one of our most committed church members had been killed an hour earlier in a car crash on the A1 near Felton. It was one of those days you get in the North East when the sea fret drifts inland and without warning a patch of fog obliterates the road in front of you. Her husband had driven straight into the back of a slow-moving tractor. Her funeral was one of those where you had to hold on to the woodwork for dear life: utterly joyous, utterly painful at the same time. If ever I realised how joy and woe were woven fine, it was then. As the numbness began to wear off, her widowed husband tried to make sense of why it had happened. On Ascension Day of all days, it was hard not to imagine that the risen Jesus had indeed disappeared from us, left us alone in the world to make our way without him as best we could. I learned a lot simply by sharing his bafflement and admitting, probably for the first time out loud, that I did not know why God had let this happen any more than he did. But I also added that he, God, cared for Joan even more than John or any of us did or ever could. To say you don’t know but that God’s love holds us even in the darkest of times is, I believe, to place ourselves alongside people in pain, rather than above them. You can’t wash feet from above. In ministry, that’s a key lesson to learn.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t work hard on your theodicy as curates – explore what you believe about pain and suffering in a broken world over which, claims Christianity, God reigns as king and Lord. I’m only suggesting that arguing with people who are walking in the valley of the shadow of death is not the tactic of a good pastor or a good theologian. It’s true that Jesus challenges the officer who begs him to heal his son, but it’s to purify his motives in coming to him, not his beliefs about why his boy is at death’s door. Unwittingly, the man rises to the challenge by exposing the sheer extent of his need. He appeals to Jesus’ feeling as a fellow human being, the compassion he senses in him. “Lord come down before my little boy dies.” And when he hears the words “your son will live”, he knows in his bones that it’s true, for here is a voice that can be trusted. You may or may not be blessed with the gift of healing, but in the deepest sense of that word, healing is what you bring whenever you take the side of the person who presents their pain, and you hold them in your heart before God. And because we know our own brokenness as men and women of faith, our ministry becomes all the more authentic. We take on the role of what Henri Nouwen classically called the Wounded Healer. And the words we speak and the human kindness with which we hold the people we care for take on a power beyond all our imagining.
In St John, Jesus’ signs of healing are directly connected, I think, to his vocation as the Son of God who is destined to suffer. In the first address I mentioned the link between the signs, the revealing of God’s glory, and the faith they brought to birth. “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” That, I’m sure, is meant as a template to shape our reading of this Gospel. Signs of glory lead to faith. I quoted the Christmas gospel in St John’s prologue: “We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”.
So if you had asked St John where he saw this glory most fully manifested, what would he answer? I think he would say: at the cross, at Golgotha, in the passion and death of the incarnate Son of God. Why would he point there? Because for John, the cross is Jesus’ moment of enthronement and transfiguration, the revelation of what it means to be the kind of king who pours himself out in love for the world. He often speaks of his hour not yet having come; but when it does, he says, there will be glory in his “lifting up”, and an appeal that will win the whole world to become his loyal subjects. “I, when I am lifted up, will draw all humanity to myself.”
And this is the third strand of those texts of suffering and terror I spoke about. The passion narrative proclaims for all time that God is no stranger to pain and dereliction and mortality and death. In Jesus, he has entered into this universal human experience and made it his own out of love for the world. The most precious verse in the Fourth Gospel is the one we know off by heart. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” God’s self-giving in life, but especially in death, is the source, says John, of our redemption.
So whether we are in pastor or theologian mode (and I want to urge you that it should always be both), our care for those who suffer and our exploration into what suffering means must always end by focusing on the cross. Golgotha is where all suffering is interpreted, not as an abstract concept but in the Person who in himself embodies and transfigures our suffering, afflicted, pain-ridden humanity. As theologians and pastors we look to the cross because we are about the business of humanity and the business of Jesus Christ. Which is why, so early on in John’s Gospel, we are introduced to suffering in the person of this Roman official and his dying boy, and to the idea that this sign of ministry, this sign of glory, brings about not only the boy’s healing but also the faith of an entire family. It’s as transformative as that. You never know what the effect may be when you perform a simple act of care in Christ’s name.
Christ not only crucified but raised from the dead. Of course: to read the Gospel stories and understand the signs of glory in the light of its ending is what John expects us to do. That’s the clue to what this transformation of human lives is about – lives lived forwards but understood backwards, in the theological and spiritual light of death-and-resurrection. Whether by word or work, to be an interpreter of peoples’ stories of life and death, and to be a sign of God’s eternal presence in the midst of joy and woe is precisely our vocation as the ordained.
ADDRESS 3: BRINGING NOURISHMENT
The Feeding of the Crowd: John 6.1-15
We’ve looked at the first two works of Jesus in
the Fourth Gospel that St John explicitly labels as “signs”: the turning of
water into wine, and the healing of the Roman official’s son. The next one is
the feeding of the crowd. And once again, John makes the link between Jesus
performing the sign and people finding faith. “When the people saw the sign
that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come
into the world’.” I recognise that this isn’t yet the full flowering of faith
in Jesus as the incarnate Word of God. But the journey of believing has to
start somewhere. This is what the feeding of the five thousand marks, for those
who grasp its significance.
Why is this story so important that all four
gospels record it? St John makes explicit what is more implicit in the other
gospels. In the long dialogue that follows, Jesus takes his hearers back to the
Hebrew Bible and their ancestors’ wanderings in the wilderness. What they had
to learn in the desert was to trust in the God who had delivered them from
slavery in Egypt and brought them to freedom. Specifically, they needed to look
to him to be fed. “Can God make a table in the wilderness?” they ask scornfully
in one of the psalms. Jesus replies, yes he can and he did, for what was the
manna they ate daily if not the evidence of a God who nourishes his people? “It
was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives
you the true bread from heaven that gives life to the world.” “Lord, give us
this bread always!” they exclaim. And Jesus says to them, “I am the bread of
life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will
never thirst”.
I’m wanting to suggest that in ordained life, we
follow Jesus in performing works of God that are signs of his glory. If you
don’t believe me, let me remind you of the conclusion of the ordination prayer
that the Bishop will pray over you as new deacons. “May their life be
disciplined and holy, their words declare your love and their actions reveal your glory, that your people may walk with
them in the way of truth and be made ready for the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ”. So just as Jesus responded to the needs of a hungry crowd, I want to
explore with you some aspects of the ordained ministry in which we imitate him
and bring nourishment to people who need it.
Let me begin with what is specific to the
ordained, our nourishment of the people of God through the ministry of word and
sacrament. First, the deacon as a man or woman of the word. One of the highlights of my time as Dean of Durham was the
visit of the Lindisfarne Gospels to the city in 2013. Some of you will have
come to the peninsula to see this miraculous book on display on Palace Green in
the shadow of the Cathedral where they once belonged. We were determined that
this three-month residency was not simply going to be a celebration of
Northumbrian identity, art and culture, though it was all those things. But
what was more important than any of them was the historical fact that this book
from the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries was a gospel book. It was written “in honour of God and St Cuthbert” as a
manuscript that carried good news. So we believed we should encourage the
churches of the North East to grasp this opportunity, and do something creative
in mission and outreach on the theme of Gospels and gospel.
What we need to remember about a gospel book is
that it was a liturgical object. In the Benedictine house that was Durham
Cathedral Priory, the Lindisfarne Gospels didn’t reside in the spendement where
all the other precious books and manuscripts were kept. The book was kept in
the sacristy, for it was, we imagine, carried in procession and read from on
grand ceremonial occasions. We had our own facsimile and used to process it at
feasts of St Cuthbert. This was the liturgical deacon’s job. It is incredibly
heavy. I used to think that was a good metaphor of the word of God. In Hebrew,
the word for glory comes from a root
meaning heavy. So if the word of God
is charged with glory, it is bound to be weighty, if not physically, then
metaphorically and spiritually. To be a man or woman of the word is, in an
important sense, a necessary burden that
we must carry.
At the eucharist, one of the deacon’s distinctive
roles is to carry the gospel book and read the gospel from it. The deacon is
marked out as the gospel man or woman. At your ordination on Saturday you will
be presented with the scriptures and the Bishop will say, “Receive this book as
a sign of the authority given you this day to speak God’s word to his people.
Build them up in his truth and serve them in his name”. There’s an important
association of ideas here, between the authority
given to you as a public minister and speaking God’s word to build up God’s
people and to serve them. It means sharing good news, bringing nourishment,
just as Jesus served the crowd that was hungry and brought them the bread they
craved.
In the reformed tradition in which Anglicanism
stands, it’s an important emphasis that the ordained are ministers of both word
and sacrament. They are equally significant in the life of the church, for both
are its essence and its lifeblood. Your diaconate is an important year in which
you begin to inhabit your public role in both these respects. When you are
ordained priest next summer, God willing, some of you will make a special
celebration of your first time at the altar presiding at the eucharist. I wonder
why we don’t mark our first public reading of the gospel and our first sermon
as ordained people in some way too? Of course, we have done both these things
as lay people, not least during our training. But to me, it felt different once
I had a dog-collar on and was dressed for the liturgy. Today is the anniversary
of my own ordination as a deacon in 1975. A week later I preached for the first
time as an ordained man. I don’t remember the content, mercifully, but I do
recall the experience of getting up into a pulpit with the authority of a
public minister to proclaim the word of God, to carry that burden and be part
of the church’s calling to make us wise in God’s truth.
I can’t recall a time when preaching was as much
discussed in the media as it has been since the royal wedding last month.
Bishop Michael Curry’s remarkable sermon shows that even in our secular age,
sermons still get talked about. There was a lot of comment on social media,
much of it by clergy who were tempted to scrap what they had prepared for the
following Sunday and start again in the light of it. I wrote a blog setting out
what I had taken from watching this charismatic leader preach. It wasn’t that
we must raise our homiletical game, try to imitate his style, attain his
rhetorical gifts. It was that we must find our own voice as preachers. What I
most envied in that sermon was that here was a preacher who was utterly
authentic, not overawed by his audience, not controlled by expectations, simply
a bishop who was as much himself as a preacher as he was a human being. It is a
lifelong task to find our own voice in the pulpit. It begins with your
ordination, when you receive not only the scriptures that will be given to you
but the authority conferred on you to be a man or woman of the word.
One more point about being deacons of the word.
When I spoke about being bringers of joy, I said that we needed to drink often
at the sources of our own joy. When I spoke about suffering, I quoted the
phrase “wounded healer”. It’s always the case in ministry that what we are to
other people we must always be in ourselves. And this is true of us who are
ministers of the word. George Herbert in his great work The Priest to the Temple says that before we preach a sermon to
others, we must first preach it to ourselves, make sure that we are properly
nourished as we endeavour to nourish those in our care. It’s about being
authentic in our role, trustworthy enough to know we have the same need to be
fed as everyone else. So when the Bishop asks you at your ordination, “Will you
be diligent in prayer, in reading holy scripture, and in all studies that will
deepen your faith and fit you to bear witness to the truth of the gospel?”,
don’t simply pay lip-service to it. Take it seriously, value the time you spend
on your own nourishment not only as disciples now but as ministers.
Let’s turn from word to sacrament. This sixth
chapter of St John’s Gospel is one of the classic sacramental texts of the New
Testament. The Fourth Gospel does not have an institution narrative like the
other three, yet it is arguably the most sacramental gospel of them all. When
you hear words like “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal
life, and I will raise them up on the last day”, it’s impossible not to hear
them as St John’s eucharistic words, bearing witness to Jesus the Living Bread and
the True Vine who nourishes his people with the eternal life of God himself.
This time next year, you will be thinking hard
about your role as presidents at the eucharist. We won’t get ahead of ourselves
at this deacons’ retreat. Yet sacramental ministry is at the heart of diaconal
service. For a start, it’s embodied by the very fact of your being “clergy” who
are publicly marked out as you walk around your parishes in clerical collars.
Austin Farrer famously called priests “walking sacraments” because their very
presence was a sign of God’s care for the world, his involvement in its
affairs, his commitment to the life of every human child of his. But if
priests, why not deacons too? Why not especially
deacons, who, as we’ve already said, have a special vocation to serve the
poor and the helpless and the needy of our world? For in the Prayer Book
definition, a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace, and this is precisely what we are as ministers in the Church
of God.
For us who are ordained, taking up a visible role
in the life of the church involves us in a highly symbolic world. This is
inevitable when we are its visible representatives, God’s visible representatives. For the gospel opens up doors of
perception, expands our horizons, gives us glimpses of worlds that were once
hidden from our sight. We are learning how everything points beyond itself to what
is deeper and richer and more wonderful than humanity had ever dreamed. Take
the feeding of the five thousand in this sixth chapter of St John. The story
begins with Jesus simply meeting a human need. The people are hungry, so he
feeds them. But how does this sign happen? What brings it about? Above all,
what does it mean? So Jesus speaks
about the manna in the wilderness, as we’ve seen, helps the people grasp what
they have witnessed, this work of God in their very midst. And as he goes on,
the bread that has fed them becomes the richest possible symbol not only of the
bread that offers eternal life, but of “God’s presence and his very self”, as
Newman’s hymn puts it, the Lord incarnate who proclaims himself as the Bread of
Life who has come down from heaven to be among his people.
And this is the essence of living sacramentally, performing
signs of ministry that proclaim the eternal God here in our midst. The bread
and wine of communion that you administer as deacons aren’t just bread and wine, but “visible words”
of the gospel that nourish the faith of God’s people. The water with which you
baptise isn’t just water but a symbol
of the living water that wells up to eternal life. The oil with which you
anoint the sick isn’t just oil but a
sign of the oil of healing and gladness that gives hope to the afflicted. The
words of scripture that you read and preach aren’t just words but bear meanings of eternal significance. The touch
with which you pass the peace isn’t just about
human friendship but a sign of how grace touches our lives and changes us. When
you welcome people to church, it is God’s hospitality you are offering because
the church is his sacred space. When you visit parishioners in their homes or
in hospital or care home or hospice, you do it in God’s name as bearers of his
mercy and goodness. When you say your prayers, you bring the parish with you
and know that you’re in the presence of an innumerable company of saints and
angels. And so on. All of ministry is sacramental because it goes beyond what
we can see and touch. It bears witness to the things that are not seen, which
Paul says are eternal. And it not only points to them but brings them into our
very midst here in our material world where we are called to know and follow
Jesus.
I’m saying that if we are to nourish people in
ministry, we constantly need to think
beyond ourselves. To do that is to know our place in a symbolic,
sacramental world. It can take a real act of the imagination to begin with, or
perhaps I mean re-imagination, for it
entails seeing ourselves in a new way as God’s representatives, God’s envoys,
God’s missionaries who bear good news to a world that longs to be fed. But
imagination is important if our vocation to ordained ministry is not to
collapse into merely doing a job. No-one entertains this thought on the eve of
their ordination, nor for many years afterwards. But with the decades, it is
possible to become despondent, wondering what difference our ministry has made.
We can become disappointed because the ordained life is not quite what we
imagined it would be. We can become tired, eroded by conflict or difficulty. If
we are not going to lose heart, it’s essential that we think beyond ourselves,
see ourselves as God sees us, recall what the liturgy said to us on the day the
Bishop ordained us and trust that God will gather up the fragments of our
ministry so that nothing is lost.
What Jesus did that day when he took the bread,
gave thanks and fed the crowd was, above all, to bring blessing. It takes us back to the first address about joy. In a
beautiful book by the Catholic writer Daniel O’Leary, Unmasking God, he says that the sacraments are a permanent blessing
within the earth, “the releasing of all the seeds for good and for love
implanted by God at the core of everything… What are we doing when we bless?
Are we actually making something holy, adding on something that was missing,
spiritually disinfecting a merely natural object? Or are we revealing a hidden
richness, divining a wellspring of sacred presence, already secure below the
surface of everything? Is this not the true meaning of Incarnation?”
Let Teresa of Ávila have the last word. “Christ
has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the
eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet
with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses
all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you
are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” On this retreat we offer
ourselves to God in humble thankfulness for the privilege he gives us as he sends
us out to do love’s work in the world.
ADDRESS 4: BRINGING SIGHT
The Man Born Blind: John 9.1-12
In St John’s Gospel the theme of light is
prominent. The first time is when Nicodemus comes to him “by night” and Jesus
speaks about how darkness and light symbolise the human condition: “this is the
judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness
rather than light because their deeds were evil”. Not long afterwards he is in
Jerusalem for the feast of Booths. Great golden lamps were lit in the Temple
precincts at the pilgrim feasts, prompting Jesus to say: “I am the Light of the
world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light
of life”. And later, on the eve of his passion, he elaborates on this theme:
“the light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so
that the darkness may not overtake you. While you have the light, believe in
the light, so that you may become children of light.” As we read the gospel we recall
how in the prologue, John has spoken about the incarnate Word: “in him was
life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”.
In the ninth chapter of St John, we have another
healing, this time of the man born blind. By now, John has stopped marking every
work of Jesus as a sign: he expects us to make the connection ourselves when
faith is born as a result of Jesus’s acts. As it is here in an unforgettable way.
In his second sign, Jesus had healed a powerful Roman officer’s son. This time
it is a lowly beggar. High and low, rich and poor, there is no distinction: we are
all equal when it comes to suffering, we are all in the same need of God’s
grace and truth. The commemorative hearings at the Grenfell Tower inquiry have
underlined how ordinary people died because they were among the neglected and
forgotten of London’s wealthiest borough. When the Titanic went down, not one passenger from steerage survived. It
moves me that St John devotes an entire chapter to this man whom the haughty
Pharisees utterly disdain. When I was instituted as vicar of Alnwick, the
Bishop looked across at me from the pulpit and said: “always remember the poor,
who are God’s special treasure”. I recalled it on the day Pope Francis was
elected. As he got up to acknowledge his election, one of his fellow cardinals
tugged at his cassock and whispered, “never forget the poor”. As deacons, this
is our particular vocation.
Seeing and not-seeing, walking in darkness,
walking in light are the themes of this next sign. This is clear from the way
Jesus answers the disciples’ opening question, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or
his parents, that he was born blind?” That question which you’ll be asked in a
thousand different ways during your lifetime of ministry – we’ve spoken about
it already. And like Jesus, you won’t fall for it because it’s unanswerable.
There is no “because”. There is suffering and there is pain, and these are
facts on the ground. And there is a God, we believe, whose works can bring
about a real transformation in lives blighted by affliction. This is Jesus’s
task, to bear witness to the power of God. “We must work the works of him who
sent me while it is day; night is coming when no-one can work. As long as I am
in the world, I am the light of the world.” As the ordained, we too must work
the works of the One who has sent us while it is still day. What those works
will be has not yet been revealed to us. But we can say for certain that like
Jesus, they will involve opening eyes, bringing to sight, shining a light where
before there was darkness. For this is always the work of the gospel.
I say that because of how the story ends. Once
the blind man can see, he finds himself interrogated first by the people who
knew him or had seen him beg, then by the Jewish authorities. The scrutiny
becomes increasingly aggressive until he is driven out by the leaders of his
own community. This is the point at which Jesus finds him again, the excluded
outsider. Notice that. He asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is
he, sir? Tell me so that I may believe in him.” “You have seen him” says Jesus,
“and the one speaking with you is he.” You
have seen him. That moment of recognition is when faith is born. “Lord, I
believe.” And he worships him. It’s so Johannine – think of the woman at the
well, or Martha in the story of Lazarus, or Mary’s Rabbouni in the garden on Easter morning, or Thomas’s “my Lord and
my God” when the risen Jesus comes to find the man who would not believe unless
he saw for himself. So it is here. And
Jesus sums up what this has all been for: “I came into this world for judgment
so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”
In all the great religious traditions, a whole
vocabulary of words to do with light and sight provide metaphors of the
spiritual path. They speak of enlightenment,
illumination, insight, dawning,
having one’s eyes opened, all words of seeing that try to capture what
happens when we gain understanding, become aware, begin to grasp some great
mystery. In Plato’s Republic, he
offers an allegory where human beings are chained facing into the walls of a
great cave, aware only of shadows cast by some light behind them that they
cannot see or even conceive of. The shadows are their only truth, and they want
nothing more. If only they could turn around and see for themselves the sun
shining in through the cave’s entrance! They would know at once that this was
reality, not the shadows playing on the walls or in their stunted imaginations.
What is truth and what is illusion? What is wisdom and what is folly? What
gives life and what deals out death? These are the universal questions of humanity
across the ages in its long search for meaning and purpose.
To which, says St John, the Word incarnate is
God’s answer. We who are ordained are among the ways in which that answer is offered
to men, women and children today. Let me explore some aspects of this with you
in the rest of this address. What I want to say about ordination is that its focus is as much outward as it is inward.
Deacons, priests and bishops are there to bear witness to God in the world as
much as to serve, build up and care for the church. The buzz-word we use for
this outwardly-turned attitude these days is missional. Thankfully, the ordinal speaks in plain English. But the
idea is there. Let me quote from the words with which the Bishop will introduce
your ordination as deacons.
God
calls his people to follow Christ, and forms us into a royal priesthood, a holy
nation, to declare the wonderful deeds of him who has called us out of darkness
into his marvellous light. The church is the body of Christ, the people of God
and the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. In baptism the whole church is
summoned to witness to God’s love and to work for the coming of the kingdom…
Deacons are ordained so that the people of God may be better equipped to make
Christ known.
This is of a piece with what St John has been
teaching us about the true Light that has come into the world to enlighten
human lives. And because of this enlightenment, says the ordinal, the church is
to bear witness to God’s love and point to the coming of the kingdom. This is
precisely the activity that deacons are ordained for, so that the people of God may be better equipped to make Christ known. For
the church is called to be evangelical,
that is, of the gospel, and deacons are
among the ways it fulfils that calling. So the Bishop asks you, “Will you work
with your fellow-servants in the gospel for the sake of the kingdom of God?”
And you answer, “By the help of God, I will”. You identify on your ordination
day with this mission-task of the church to carry the light of Jesus in the
world.
When I was training for ordination, the
curriculum made a distinction between ministry
and mission. I doubt that this
was right. As I read the New Testament, I see a church wholly orientated to the
tasks of mission, whose worship and service and care and koinonia all bore witness to the marvellous light into which God
has brought his people. To be outwardly-turned was in its life-blood. St Paul in
that great passage in 2 Corinthians speaks of the “the light of the gospel of
the glory of Christ who is the image of God” and goes on to say: “For we do not
proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your
slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out in
darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” This is worship and ministry and
mission, for the transforming power of light is the church’s whole business.
What does it mean for deacons to be light-bearers?
It seems to me to come down to that phrase in the ordinal, bearing witness. To bear witness is to tell a story of what you
have seen and heard, the experience it has led you to have and the meanings it
holds for you. As I’ve said, our visible presence as public ministers already
bears witness, for we are identifiably God’s representatives in human life. And
this, to me, is a reason for be recognisable as we go about God’s business in
ministry, whether by wearing a cassock, a collar, or as French clergy often do,
a discreet lapel cross that says of us, like John the Baptist: I am here to
bear witness to the One who is coming, indeed, who is already among us even if
we do not yet see him or fully know him. Let our works speak for themselves as
signs of his presence, as they did for Jesus in St John’s Gospel. I doubt St
Francis actually said, “Preach the gospel. Use words if necessary.” But it’s a
good saying nevertheless. There’s a lot of truth in it.
But the story of the man born blind leaves us in
no doubt that words are necessary at
times. As we’ve seen, it concludes with Jesus finding him and helping him to
articulate the faith that is being born within him. In three short verses, he
travels from not knowing how to answer Jesus’s question “Do you believe in the
Son of Man?” to acclaiming with joy, “Lord, I believe” and worshipping him. For
some it takes a few minutes to make this journey and find their eyes are
opened. For others it can take months, years, a lifetime. The important thing,
John is saying, is that this journey of finding faith and worshipping God is
the most important a human being can ever make. If you, if I, if the people we
serve are to find light, life and love, then this is “the true and living way”
to it, as Jesus declares to the disciples later on when they ask how they can
know where he is going.
It takes discernment to recognise where people
are on this journey through the stages of faith. It’s telling that Jesus leaves
this conversation with the healed man to the end. There is the sign, there is the
debate about what it means, and last of all, the discovery of faith. Some of
you will have had moments of recognition that you know you’ll never forget. But
even if you don’t, I wager that you all owe the fact that you are being ordained
to people who, over the years, listened to you, explored faith with you, helped
you face the difficulties and challenges of believing, encouraged you to
recognise the Lord who was calling you to know and love him. You are here as
the evidence of the many who have accompanied you over a lifetime, not least in
the discernment process towards ordained ministry. On the eve of your
ordination, I hope you’ll spare all these good people who cared about you a
thought, and a thanksgiving, and a prayer.
In these talks I’m asking how we imitate Jesus in
our signs of ministry. Today’s chapter says to me that the place of
faith-sharing is central to ministry. Put it like that and it sounds obvious:
as we’ve seen, the ordinal could not be clearer about our call to bear witness
to God’s kingdom in all that we say and do and are. But my point is that the
preaching and proclamation we explored in the last address aren’t confined to
the formal, set-piece events like sermons and talks. We are just as much
preachers of the gospel when we have personal conversations with the
spiritually curious. The ordinal says that deacons “accompany those searching
for faith and bring them to baptism”.
There is a short story by Chekhov called The Student. Ivan, a seminarian, is walking home on a
cold Good Friday afternoon when he sees a mother and her daughter in their
garden by a fire. Both are widows. They talk about the day, and Ivan reminds
them how Peter warmed himself by just such a fire on the night of the passion,
and denied Jesus there. As he recalls
the cock crowing and Peter’s tears, the older woman begins to weep and her
daughter takes on a look great pain.
Ivan stops talking and in the silence they are alone with their
thoughts. He says goodnight and
leaves. Here is how the story ends.
The
student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had
been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about,
which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present -- to
both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman
had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was
near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in
Peter's soul. And joy suddenly stirred in his
soul… ‘The past,’ he thought, ‘is linked with the present by an unbroken chain
of events flowing one out of another.’ And it seemed to him that he had just
seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered. When he crossed the river by the ferry boat and
afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where
the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and
beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the
high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had always been
the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed;… and the
inexpressible sweet expectation of … mysterious happiness, took possession of
him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full
of meaning.
That to me is faith-sharing.
A man speaks naturally about God and uncovers a chain of connection
between the gospel and the stories of two women who find that they are not
simply observers of a drama that happened centuries ago but participants
in an event that is happening now. We
never find out what their stories are, only that what Ivan says has this
profound effect on them. He stops
speaking, for he knows that there is a time for speech and a time for
silence. But the inner work goes on, and
we know that a profound change is taking place: not just in the women but in
him as well. Out of his hopelessness springs joy. He glimpses both ends of that chain of
connection, touching one end and seeing the other quiver. He knows he has been on the giving and
receiving end of the gift of transformation we call ‘grace’. This is what it is to preach. This is what it
is to be a faith-sharer. This is what it means to be in ministry and like
Jesus, bear God’s light to all who long to see.
ADDRESS 5: BRINGING LIFE
The Raising of Lazarus: John 11.38-44
In our retreat, we’ve been looking at five of the seven signs Jesus performs in St John’s Gospel. I’ve suggested how we can see them as modelling aspects of our own ministry as ordained men and women. For we too perform “signs” in God’s name, and through them we pray and hope and believe that something of God’s glory shines through, something of his grace and truth.
The last of the signs is the raising of Lazarus. It stands at a pivotal place in the Fourth Gospel, for it is the link between John’s stories of Jesus’s ministry in words and works on the one hand, and his death and resurrection on the other. We can see why John wants the death of Lazarus and his being raised back to life to foreshadow the events of Holy Week and Easter. Like the other signs, the story of Lazarus symbolises a central aspect of how God comes into the world to bring transformation to human lives. And because the death and resurrection of Jesus is the very core of Christian faith, John tells a story which, in the light of what follows, turns out to be of universal significance. When Jesus says to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life: those who believe in me, even though they die, will live”, he isn’t speaking only about her, or Mary, or Lazarus. He is speaking about all humanity, all of us to whom he extends the invitation to find in him the way to God, the truth by which to live and die, and the life that is love and joy and peace.
I’ve explored with you how deacons are called to bring joy, wholeness, nourishment and sight. This last sign suggests that you are to bring life. When Jesus says in St John, “I have come that they may have life, and have it in all its fulness”, there’s a sense in which that is true of us too. Once again, daunting though it may seem, the ordinal isn’t afraid to name this aspect of the deacon’s ministry specifically. Just before you make the declarations this afternoon, you will hear these words. And just so that you are in no doubt, the liturgy goes out of its way to emphasise in the rubric that at this point in the service, “the bishop addresses the ordinands directly”. We trust that you are fully determined, by the grace of God, to give yourself wholly to his service, that you may draw his people into that new life which God has prepared for those who love him. “That you may draw his people into that new life.” What else can ordained ministry be for, if not this? New life is what gathers up all the themes of this retreat, everything that we have been preparing for during these last years and months and days. So let’s see how the story of Lazarus can help us glimpse what it means on this ordination day.
Life is one of St John’s great words. The Gospel begins with the statement that “in him was life, and the life was the light of all humanity”. It ends with the evangelist telling us why he has written his gospel, “that you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through believing may have life in his name.” “Life”, as John uses the word, means a new quality of being alive, a new dimension that transfigures everything we’ve ever known. Nearly twenty times John speaks about eternal life which, Jesus says in his final prayer before his passion, is to “know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”. And it becomes progressively clearer that as the gift of God in his Son, it is inextricably linked to God’s act of giving himself out of love for the sake of the world. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that all who believe in him may not perish but have eternal life.” “I, if I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself.”
On Thursday you'll recall that we commemorated Irenaeus, one of the apostolic fathers who was Bishop of Lyon in southern France in the second century. He had heard Polycarp preach in his great old age, the saintly bishop who went cheerfully to his death at the hands of the Romans saying “Christ has done me no wrong in all these years I have served him. Why should I deny him now?” Polycarp was said to have known St John the Evangelist. That would make him John’s grandson in the faith. Who knows? I mention him because he famously said, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”. I want to ponder that great saying for a moment, for it seems to echo St John in the way it links God’s glory to the gift of life which in turn originates in God’s self-giving love, one of our key themes as we have listened to St John in this retreat.
I’ve said that the story of Lazarus looks forward to the
death and resurrection of Jesus. For us as disciples and ministers, this is the
beginning and the end of everything. Without it, there is no faith as the New
Testament and catholic Christianity understand it, no hope that makes a lasting
difference to our living and suffering and dying, no love to transform human
experience and give it ultimate purpose and meaning in God. So to do as the
ordinal says, and “draw God’s people into that new life which he has prepared
for those who love him” is to bring people back to their God-given glory as men
and women who are “fully alive”, in Irenaeus’s phrase. And this comes down to
restoring the image of God in them, marred and broken by sin and suffering, yet
for all that never irretrievably lost, always recognisable in the dignity and
worth of every human being. Christianity, then, makes us more human because the
gospel puts us back together again as the men and women God meant us to be.
And I want to end this retreat by drawing attention to our
own need as ministers to bring glory to God by being as “fully alive” as it’s
possible to be. During these addresses I’ve been pointing to this need to take
good care of ourselves in ministry. If we are to bring joy to others, we need
to nurture our own sense of gratitude and gladness. If we are to bring
wholeness to others, our own wellbeing and healing matter too. If we are to nourish
others, we need to make sure that we are not undernourished ourselves. If we
are to help others to see, then sustaining our own clear-sightedness must always
be a priority.
There are no short cuts to being fully alive. It’s a lifelong
task to realise our birth and fully become the human beings that we are. It’s a
lifelong task to realise our baptism and fully become the Christians that we
are. It’s a lifelong task to realise our ordination and fully become the
deacons and priests that we are. This being made or remade in God’s image is
what we call formation. It happens in
God’s time. It will not be hurried. Often, our self-interest and self-serving
gets in the way, and our purity of heart and motive is compromised, and the
transparency of the God-given life becomes clouded for a while. Yet in all of
us, the longing to be fully alive never goes away. And even our failures and
disappointments can have the good effect of reminding us, convicting us of what
we have lost sight of, so that we learn to feel after God and find him once
again.
I want to urge you throughout your ordained ministry to make
being “fully alive” your aim. And you say yes at once, for on your ordination
day, how could you possibly want anything else? But I’m thinking further along
the road of public ministry, when, as I said before, we can face real
challenges and difficulties and wonder if it was all worthwhile. Here is where
nurturing good spiritual habits early on in ministry comes in. And I want in
particular to refer you back to the story of Lazarus, and that great saying of Jesus
I’ve already quoted, “I am the resurrection and the life”.
Being “fully alive” is to find our daily inspiration in the
cross and resurrection. That is to say, not only will our witness and
proclamation be focused on Christ crucified and risen as it must always be, but
our ministerial ambitions and our personal spiritual aims will themselves be
shaped in this paschal, this cruciform way. The cross is the emblem of our
faith, our ministry and our lives, not because it is the end of the story that
we tell about Jesus, but because in it we find reconciliation and forgiveness,
and out of it has sprung the new beginning that we celebrate in the
resurrection. Redemption looks back to that saving event. Because of it there
is a new creation. It defines the church, it defines us as its ministers, and
it defines every follower of Jesus for all time.
It is for each of us to discover our own spirituality in
ministry. It takes time: we have to inhabit our new roles before we understand
how best to pray within them. But if being “fully alive” is what we aspire to as
ministers, then the cross and resurrection will be central to our spirituality.
The daily office is one way in which the eternal patterns of death and resurrection
are presented to us in the cycle of psalmody, scripture, canticle and prayer. The
eucharist is another, for in it we celebrate the crucified and risen Christ of
whom the bread and wine are symbols not only of a broken body and shed blood,
but are also the food and drink of the heavenly banquet in which we are raised
to feast with the risen Christ and his saints and angels. If you’re not used to
making the sign of the cross, why not try it as a way of making
cross-and-resurrection personal to you. You may want to find words to remind
you of when you were signed with the cross at your baptism, like “Lord Jesus
Christ, crucified and risen, keep me faithful, and give me your blessing”. Use
images and icons if they help. Get into the habit of thinking of Friday as the
day of the cross, and Sunday as the day of resurrection and finding ways to
honour that weekly rhythm. The possibilities are endless.
Why is this an important habit for us to cultivate in
ministry? I’ve already given one answer to that question: because the cross and
resurrection are the basis of our kerygma,
our proclamation as public ministers, our witness to the gospel. But there’s
another. It’s that it offers us a template through which we learn how to read
the lives and experiences of those we minister to. I mean that the changes and
chances of human existence so often turn out to be lived embodiments of death
and resurrection. This is as true of what happens in society and the local
community as it is of personal human lives.
Let me illustrate. People who are going through ordeals like
serious illness or bereavement often speak as though God had abandoned them. In
Matthew and Mark’s crucifixion, this is exactly how Jesus cries out to his
Father from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” To be able
to sit with them in the midst of their pain, and remind them that they are not
alone, for the Son of Man himself underwent such darkness as led him to the
brink of despair can be extraordinarily helpful pastorally. When someone has
experienced a deliverance that brings not only relief but ecstatic joy and
gratitude, it is for them a real resurrection. Again, to make that spiritual
and theological link can enable them to find a language in which to express
their thankfulness and understand it as part of God’s movement from death to
life and from alienation to reconciliation. We all know this intuitively. The
story of Lazarus acts it out for us. I’m suggesting that we acquire the habit
of reading all human life in this Christological cross-and-resurrection way.
That’s how we learn to make the connections between the lived patterns of death
and resurrection, and our pastoral care and prayers that invoke the aid of the
One who died, but who is always among us as the risen and triumphant Lord.
I come back to ourselves and what makes us “fully alive”. If
we are learning to read human life like this, then we are learning to read our
own lives that way too. Socrates said that “the unreflected life is not worth
living”. We speak of people in caring professions as “reflective
practitioners”, and this is what we clergy need to be. The tides of death and
resurrection move in our own lives too, and we need to be attuned to them if we
are to be authentic as clergy. The story of Lazarus wasn’t simply death and
resurrection for him only, or even his sisters Martha and Mary. John says that
Jesus’ tears were as real as everyone else’s. So when the dead man came out of
the tomb, didn’t Jesus share that family’s joy? Wasn’t it a rehearsal of his
own death and resurrection?
So it is with us as ministers. “Man was made for joy and
woe”. You will have joy enough and woe enough as deacons and priests – if, that
is, you care sufficiently to be involved in people’s lives by loving not at a
distance but face to face, incarnationally, as God does. Crucifixions and
resurrections in abundance lie in wait for you, I promise. Be attentive to them,
and to the God who is present within them, and discover how they belong to your
journey of becoming “fully alive”. For the more we immerse ourselves in God’s
work in the world, the more we look for him in the lives of others, the more
fully alive we ourselves become, and the more our signs, the more our works bring
glory to God.
That is my prayer for you on this day that you pledge yourselves
to be men and women who will represent God in the world. Go with his blessing. Bring
joy. Bring wholeness. Bring nourishment. Bring light. Bring life. Be fully
alive. And always be thankful.
Given at the Friary, Alnmouth, Northumberland, June 2018
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