At the Ordination of Deacons in Lincoln Cathedral

It is the greatest privilege to be preaching today. I want to thank the Bishop for his invitation and the warmth of his welcome.

There’s a nice play on words in our reading from the Old Testament. The Lord asks Jeremiah, “What do you see?” Poor lad (for he is only a boy)! Is it a trick question? He peers up at the sky, then across to the hills, then down at the ground, then up again at the object he’s standing right underneath to shelter from the sun. “I see a branch of an almond tree” he says, feeling a trifle foolish, for what kind of answer is that? “You have seen well” comes the response, “for I am watching over my word to perform it”. In Hebrew, shaqed is the almond and shoqed is watching over. So whenever the young man sees an almond tree it will trigger the association of God being vigilant for his word, watching over it. The boy sees what is there, and sees well. Like God who watches. Whether you are divine or human, seeing, looking, watching, the optics of God come into things.

You have seen well. Lincoln has an honoured place in the history of seeing. The great thirteenth century Bishop Robert Grosseteste is now regarded as one of the medieval pioneers of modern scientific method. His preoccupation was the science and art of seeing. He believed that light was the essence of creation, the “first form” of the universe. Everything else derived from it. This made the cosmos intelligible. It could be scanned, contemplated and understood. And because Grosseteste was a theologian, he saw the faculty of sight as a spiritual virtue, a God-given tool with which to read the world around him, read human life itself and at the heart of it all, discern the living God.

Seeing well - scanning, contemplating, understanding - lies at the heart of good ministry. Today we pray for and accompany these seven good ordinands as they offer themselves as ordained ministers of the church. Maybe they've been asking themselves, maybe you're wondering, What does it mean to be “clergy”?  Many things, of course; impossibly many, some may say, for the expectations on the clergy have never been higher. But one of the qualities we might look for in the ordained is that they are learning to see well.

In our retreat during the last few days, we have been studying the hymn we shall sing at the start of the ordination prayer, Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire. We've reflected on some of the big themes in these verses: vocation, protection, resilience, worship, and how we learn to live out of thankfulness. We've explored what it means to know God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity whose love moves the sun and the stars and who breathes life into all creation. And we've spoken about faith as illumination that enables us to see in new ways. When the Spirit comes, says the hymn, there is comfort, life and fire of love. And with God’s fire there is light to see by: enable with perpetual light / the dullness of our blinded sight.

I suggested to the ordinands that they should cultivate this gift of seeing well. Like Jeremiah, it’s a case of paying attention, noticing, looking around you. That’s how you learn to recognise what God is doing in the world and in the lives of others. That’s how you see the joy or the pain, the happiness or need in your parishioners and neighbours. In one of his poems, Thomas Hardy imagines the epitaph on his own gravestone. He wants to be remembered as “a man who used to notice such things”. He’s speaking of the natural world and how easy it is to pass by its wonders without so much as a thought. It points to the all-important emotional and spiritual way of looking which you could call awareness, discernment or insight. These are gifts we should covet in life and in ministry. They would help us become more contemplative and see what is there. One of the words used of Hebrew prophets is the “one who sees”. That is what we are called to be in ministry.

To learn to see well is a lifelong task, especially for those entrusted with public roles in church or society. For Jeremiah under his almond tree it all comes down to this. In that moment, his life is changed forever. God summons him and with the voice comes the opening of his eyes so that he can see. And he is overcome with consternation. How can he speak in God’s name? He is only a boy! To find his voice he must learn to see well. He needs to see the world as it really is, see it as God sees. He needs to see into the issues that face the people of his time, understand their questions, have insight into their anxieties and longings. The eye of faith must teach him what God is doing in the world and in human lives, how he moves in the tides of history where “behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face”. He needs to discern God’s promise that a future is coming where pain and terror are past and the world is reconciled and healed, where there is a new covenant of peace that makes the human family one again. If he can only see well, he can bring the hope that God’s reign is coming.

So much enclosed in an almond branch! Was I talking just now about a Hebrew prophet or about ministers in the world of today? Is there a difference when it comes to seeing and understanding and becoming part of love’s work? I don’t know what the equivalent of the almond branch is for each of you on your ordination day. But I do believe that the question “what do you see?” goes on being asked of us not just today but for as long as we are serving God in ministry.

And it's not only God who asks us “what do we see”, but many of those to whom we go. How can it be that in these secular, often cynical times, people still welcome the presence of clergy in local communities, still value the thought that we say our prayers and care for our parishioners, still look to us to help make sense of life in the light of our faith? There are a surprising number who are genuinely curious about what we see and why it makes a difference. If you have been watching the TV series Broken you'll know what I mean. It’s making the connections so that the penny that dropped for us can drop for others. It’s to allow us to say, in the daily tasks of ministry, “I am here in the name of Christ the Servant. This is how I see things. Maybe you can see them like that too?” Which is why we need to pray constantly to the Holy Spirit in the words of our hymn: enable with perpetual light / the dullness of our blinded sight.

The poet David Scott has a beautiful line in one of his poems. Eyes take in the light for hearts to see by. So look around you with your heart as well as your head. See well. Serve well. Love well. And may the God of peace be with you as you go out from here in his name as deacons in his church, and ministers in the world he loves to the end.

Lincoln Cathedral, 2 July 2017
Jeremiah 1.1-12

A Church Anniversary

Jeremiah was living through the last days of the kingdom of Judah.  The Babylonians were at the gate; but the people of Jerusalem could not believe that God would abandon them.  Had not God pledged to David and Solomon that God would always defend Zion, would always be present in his holy temple, would always hear the prayer of his people?  And then along comes Jeremiah and says: ‘do not trust in these deceptive words: “this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord”’.  The temple cannot save you, he says.  Its sacrifices and ceremonies and rituals, what are they worth if you oppress the alien, the orphan, the widow, if you shed innocent blood, if you go after idols?  But amend your ways and act justly with one another: then I will dwell with you in this place. And only then.  It’s a stark oracle: this church may be 125 years old, our Cathedral may be a thousand, but they will not save us from ourselves.  We cherish our church buildings but we need to ponder Jesus’ reply when the disciples drew his attention to the temple: ‘Look, Lord, what wonderful stones, and wonderful buildings’.  And Jesus says that the days are coming when not one stone will be left standing on top of another.  Even the best of what human hands can build will not last for ever; and if we build while harbouring pride and injustice in our hearts, they will be our judgment all the sooner.

The New Testament reading is tough too in how it demands of us that we let go the pride and injustice Jeremiah speaks of. Zacchaeus, the little man we used to sing about at Sunday school, wants to see Jesus as he passes by. His strategy of both gaining height but also hiding away in the copious branches of a sycamore tree only partly succeeds. There is no escape from the man who sees into every human heart. Back home they go, ignoring the grumbling of the self-righteous crowd that thinks Jesus should know better than to accept the hospitality of a sinner. And then occurs one of those marvellous transformations in human life that Luke is so good at noticing and recounting. Zacchaeus resolves, without any prompting from the Lord, to give half his possessions to the poor and to repay four times over anyone he has defrauded as a tax collector. Here is a rich young man who, unlike the other in the gospel, is not held back by his great wealth. And there is rejoicing among the angels of God over this sinner who repents. ‘Today salvation has come to this house; for the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.’  I said it was a tough reading.  So it is, because the price of this repentance is a complete turning round of a man’s life. Metanoia never costs less than everything.

How do we reflect on this great church building and the life of this parish in the light of these sobering thoughts? Perhaps they concentrate the mind on what is truly of God.  ‘You are God’s temple, and God’s spirit dwells in you’ says Paul in the text that the Bishop of Newcastle preached from at the dedication service here on 17 October 1888.  He said that reverence we pay a house of God is not for anything in the building, its dramatic architecture, its stained glass, its mosaics, however beautiful these all are; nor for the beauty of the ceremonial this church was built for. It is all for the sake of the beauty of God the Indweller, so that the eye travels from the house to its owner. You could say that a church built in the arts and crafts tradition would always speak of a God whose artistry and craftsmanship are what we see all round us in the fabric of the world. But like Jeremiah, the bishop issued a warning.  He said that if Christ welcomes those who come to this temple with integrity, beware those who come carelessly or in profanity of spirit. The house of prayer belongs together with truth and justice, never to be put asunder.

Today we tell the story of a church that has stood here for 125 years, its campanile a sign for miles around of the spiritual and human values of Christian faith.  In that time there will have been many events to celebrate, and perhaps a few to lament: the story of any human institution is always a mixture of light and shadow and it is important that we tell the truth about it. But in the next century, we shall all face challenges and threats our forebears could not have dreamed of in that radiantly confident when Queen Victoria had just celebrated her golden jubilee and it seemed that the sun would never set on the empire. Now, church attendances are in steady decline in most areas, and we know that this diocese is not immune from the eroding effects of secularisation.  With slender resources in both people and money, it matters all the more that we harness them all the more carefully.  This calls for what spiritual guides call discernment.  How do we keep the message of your campanile fresh and vivid in a society that finds itself distanced from religion? An anniversary should mean taking the time to reflect, think, ponder and pray in the light of the question that haunts us in that psalm of exile: how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  Our land is increasingly strange to the church, and the church a stranger to it.   How then do we sing this song with confidence and hope?  How do we live as a church in the generous, life-changing way of Zacchaeus, little in stature but who walked tall in the company of Jesus Christ?

No-one pretends that the tasks of mission are easy in our era.  They never were, though we tend to look back nostalgically to the days when St George’s was built when organised religion was powerful, respected and rich. But we should remind ourselves of the world this church found itself in within a generation of its beginning.  Next year, we shall remember how Europe was suddenly engulfed in a war no-one predicted.  Many young men from this parish and this city had their future taken away from them.  In the aftermath of war came the great depression, huge unemployment here on Tyneside, and then war once again.  The cost to families and communities was beyond imagining.  This church ministered faithfully and well during those decades; it will have called for great vision, courage and skill on the part of both clergy and laity.

What about now?  It’s hard to imagine that life is getting easier for most people especially the disadvantaged, the elderly and the chronically sick. Economically, the lights are only fitfully going on again across Europe; the effects of our collective mismanagement of money, our greed like the temple-goers of Jeremiah’s day, like tax collecting Zacchaeus always to acquire at someone else’s expense will continue will be felt across the North East.  If this is true, it calls for the same degree of vision, courage and skill on the part of people of faith.  We wouldn’t be human if we did not at times feel our spirits sinking, wondering if decline can ever be turned round, and ask, with Paul, ‘who is sufficient for these things?’ Well, his answer is not to lose heart; to go on trusting God to do much through the little that we bring.  ‘We have this treasure in earthen vessels’ he says ‘so that it may be known that this extraordinary power belongs to God and not to us’ he says.  Who can say what story will be told 125 years from now as our descendants here at St George’s gather to celebrate a quarter of a millennium?  In our time, what matters is to be faithful in looking for the kingdom of God, and giving an answer for the hope that is within us. We shall have fought the fight, finished the race, and kept the faith.  We shall have done what we can to be obedient disciples of Jesus. All God needs to know is that we are willing and ready and glad to follow.

St George’s Jesmond 125th anniversary service, 13 October 2013
Jeremiah 7.1-11; Luke 19.1-10

The Gift of Tears

‘The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is it prompts reflection.’  That child lived in an allegedly Christian household: her mother was a fervent Pentecostal, the writer  Jeanette Winterson. Her marvellous autobiography Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? tells a scarcely believable story about an oppressive upbringing fictionalised in the novel and TV series Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. ‘I was not a popular or a likeable child,’ she says. ‘School situations always pick out the misfit.’  One day her class was given the project of embroidering a text of their choice. Jeanette famously chose words from Jeremiah: ‘the summer is ended and we are not yet saved’, given us in our first reading.

In the light of what we have learned about the cruel abuse heaped on young Daniel in Coventry, and thinking of my grandson Isaac baptised here three weeks ago who by contrast is so much loved and cherished, it’s tempting to speak about childhood and how we love and don’t love children. But that must wait for another day. I need to stay with this Jeremiah. There is a link, I suppose: Jeremiah, called to the impossible task of being a prophet, pleads he is ‘only a child’: how can he find the words or have the courage to utter them when there is no hope that they will be heard or understood?  

‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved’. Apt words for the weekend of the autumn equinox. I have always found them haunting. The summer has been glorious, but its long golden days are becoming a memory. The Lindisfarne Gospels will soon leave us again for their southern exile, not to return home for many years. The flowers that glowed in our marvellous festival are dead. Summer has too short a lease: its light is being overtaken, and soon we shall be lighting fires in cold dark places. Jeremiah’s autumnal farewell to good times captures the mood of fall. And maybe his elegiac outpourings of two and half millennia ago can speak to us who also find it hard to take our leave of light-filled health or happiness or hope.

This is one of the so-called ‘confessions’ of Jeremiah, in which this most passionate of prophets exposes something of the agony and self-doubt going on inside. This was a young man who had never sought to be a prophet, never wanted to speak out as prophets must, never contemplated the pain and misery it would bring him. ‘My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.’  In another place he cries out like Job, ‘Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed! Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?’ And out pour the relentless questions: five of them in this short reading. ‘Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why has the health of my poor people not been restored?’

What strikes us about these cries of pain is their honesty. They don’t pretend. Jeremiah is telling the truth about his condition: that it is unbearably hard to be hurt, misunderstood, in pain, in despair and above all, without a friend. And like others in the Hebrew Bible, he is not afraid to acknowledge the reality of dark times. Many of the psalms are in the same minor key: there are more laments in the Psalter than any other kind of psalm. It is a courageous thing to do, to turn suffering back to God and argue with him. It’s what we find at the cross when Jesus cries in the words of one of the most desolate psalm laments: Lema, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?  All of life has a dark side, a night that overtakes the day, a winter that dispels summer. Sometimes we expect it, often it takes us by surprise. True religion recognises that faith is not a pain-killing escape from that shadow but a way of facing it truthfully. Faith helps us stope pretending. The job of the church is not to sell comfort but courage. Life is hard. We need the virtue of fortitude. Faith points us in the right direction.  

But his confessions are not just his own personal outpourings. They belong to an entire people. At the end of the 6^th century, an ominous cloud hung over Judah, the threat of being overrun by Babylon their overlord amassing soldiers and weapons on their borders. Those with eyes to see understood that the life they knew was at an end, ruin was imminent and those who survived would be deported to a strange land where it was not obvious whether they could ever again sing the Lord’s song. Jeremiah never wavered in looking this prospect in the eyes, and speaking about it as God’s work, though it cost him dear. Neither did he walk away when he had spoken such hard words but stood with his people, imploring God’s mercy, yet knowing that he and they would not escape judgment. As a victim himself, his destiny embodied theirs. He talked of being a lamb led to the slaughter - precisely how he also saw Judah. To make other people’s sufferings and fears your own is the mark of true ministry, compassion. It is the image of Jesus who emptied himself so as to take the form of a slave and share our human condition. It is how God is, who, says the passion story, always stands with us in our darkness and our pain.

Sunt lachrimae rerum: ‘there are tears in things’ says Virgil in a beautiful but untranslatable line. This lament ends that way. ‘O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!’ It sounds like a cry of despair. Yet the strange thing is that lament opens the way to a new perspective. It purifies the gaze, helps us see differently. The desert fathers spoke of the ‘gift of tears’ as a kind of baptism, meaning not just what we call self-awareness, emotional intelligence, but a cleansing of the soul. To be at the lowest point of lament, where we have nothing else to rely on or trust in, things become clearer, and faith senses that in ways we can’t understand, God himself could be in the midst of our ordeal, a crucified God who knows pain and darkness, a God who, says our psalm, though he has his dwelling on high, yet humbles himself to behold things that are on earth; who not only sees but acts by taking the lowly out of the dust and lifting the poor out of the mire.  

Psalm laments usually end on a note of confidence, even thankfulness. There is a turning-round, a belief that we are heard. Sometimes it is feeble and tentative, barely glimpsed before it is snuffed out again, as in other laments of Jeremiah.  Sometimes, it transfigures despair as in the miserere psalm Jesus quotes on the cross where faith wins through to a radiant sunburst. But when we find ourselves shedding tears for the tragedy of Syria, or the victims of Nairobi, or little Daniel and so many children abused in literal or metaphorical coal holes, or for the friend we love who has a terminal illness, or for ourselves in the fear or pain or shame that haunt us, we are in a place where prayer becomes possible. And when we are overwhelmed, and can’t find it in ourselves to pray, we can at least weep for others and for our broken selves.  We can hold out empty hands as we do in this eucharist, to receive what mercy and love want to give. This is not a happy ending, but the hard exacting journey through the vale of soul-making that lasts a lifetime. Not a happy ending, but the most important journey there is. Is there any other path we would want to walk but this?

Durham Cathedral, 22 September 2013

Jeremiah 8.18-9.1, Psalm 113