A Priest at the Altar - for the first time

When you do something for the first time, you can never repeat that moment. That first time is also a last time, because only once in your life do you experience it as the first time. It can be, often is, a defining moment.  You will have your own memories.  Here are some of my landmark first-times. Singing the music of Bach. Glimpsing what calculus was about. First communion. Someone saying to me “I love you” and saying it back. Setting eyes on Durham Cathedral. Being at the birth of my first child. Visiting the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

 

And yes, the first time I presided at the eucharist, as Ian is doing this morning. In one way, an important way, this is just another eucharist on an ordinary Sunday in ordinary time. Today the church is doing what the church always does on the first day of the week. Like Peter in our gospel, we acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, so we are here to worship him. What else would we do on a Sunday morning?

 

Yet today is not ordinary for Ian, and therefore not for us. For a new priest, his first celebration of the eucharist is an occasion to remember for a lifetime. Somehow the very ordinariness of the event highlights what is special about it. How many more times will Ian in the name of the church do this in remembrance of Jesus? Be it many or few, it will never again be like today with that blend of anticipation, excitement, nervousness, gratitude and the sense of privilege that belong to the first time.

 

Yesterday I gave an address to the priest candidates at the end of their retreat. I had the privilege of conducting their deacons’ retreat last year, so we were old friends. I quoted some passages that the twentieth century Cistercian monk Thomas Merton wrote about his ordination as a priest, and the first mass he celebrated the next day. He says of those days of ordination and first eucharist “they crown this portion of my history… for this I came into the world”. I hope Ian feels today that he was meant to do this, stand at the altar and preside at the eucharist as God’s priest.

 

But Merton goes on to say something else. Some people had warned him that he would be nervous the first time he stood there, anxious to make sure he got everything right. Yet he confided to his diary: “I did not find that to be true at all. I felt as if I had been saying mass all my life”. So today is ordinary and not-ordinary just as the eucharist itself is ordinary and not-ordinary. That is its paradox. In and through the stuff of matter, ordinary things like bread and wine, we glimpse God. He comes to us in the grace and glory of self-giving love. Ordinary yet God takes the stuff of everyday life and transforms it so that he may transform us. That’s what a sacrament means.

 

Why is God so humble as to choose this way of being among us in and through ordinary things?  Today we are honouring Saint Peter whose festival was yesterday. In the gospel we heard, he recognises Jesus as God’s Messiah, God’s Christ. And Jesus says of that moment, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven”. How could an ordinary, rough-hewn fisherman rise to that great confession of faith? Jesus says that it’s not his own doing. Rather, it’s God gift to him, this revelation of the Son of the Living God. And because of it, another gift is given, his role in God’s church which Jesus will build upon this rock. Everything is gift. Faith is gift, and hope, and love. And church, priesthood, and eucharist. And the love of friends, our companions in faith with whom we break bread. All of life is gift.

 

The ordinariness and not-ordinariness of today says something important about how Ian will be among you as a priest. Yesterday he was set apart to do God’s work in the church and in the world. You might think that would make him someone special. Ah, how seductive it is to put our priests and bishops on pedestals and defer to them. But that is not the way of the gospel. We do the priesthood a disservice when we elevate it above our humanity. Ordination doesn’t take someone away from us. The best priests are those in whom people recognise something of themselves, taken, blessed, broken and given, just like the ordinary bread of the eucharist.

 

It’s the action of God that makes the difference. Pusey said that holiness was not doing extraordinary things, but doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way: extraordinary because it is God’s work. Priests are walking sacraments of God’s presence in our midst. That is what makes priesthood holy and not-ordinary, a sign of contradiction in a world that thinks it has no need of spirituality and sacraments and sacred spaces. The world needs priests who by what they symbolise point people to God.  And perhaps a priest is never more a priest than when he or she is at the altar, just as the church is never more the church than when we do what we are doing now, making eucharist, giving thanks, offering our life to God, receiving it back transformed.

 

The church’s priesthood and sacraments belong not to us but to God. Yet his work is also ours. For Ian and for us, today marks the seal of his journey towards ordination. A new priest stands among us. The altar stands ready, with bread and wine. It is time to do what Jesus commands, to celebrate the feast, and once more and once less, show forth the Lord’s death until he comes.

St Bartholomew’s, Whittingham, 30 June 2019
At the first celebration of the eucharist of The Reverend Ian Chadwick

Matthew 16.13-19

Hope and the Death of Death

It’s good to be with you on All Saints Sunday and to be launching this sermon series on hope. There is an evocative aspect to this time of year as autumn dies into winter, when the light is eclipsed and the first frosts come.  It can be a forlorn season when spirits are low and summer a beautiful but fading memory.  The solstice beckons, and dark times, and perhaps forebodings about what another year may bring: for our world, for our society, for ourselves. 

Yet we know within ourselves that the turning of the year tells a truth about the transience of things, the necessity of dying, our own mortality. The Christian and civic calendars echo this time of fall and of loss with the commemoration of the dead on All Souls’ Day followed by Armistice Day not long after.  Yet the liturgy lays over it a quite different way of construing winter: with the joyful celebration of All Saints, and with the exquisite season of longing and expectancy which is Advent.  Liturgical winter is not only a time for the burning of the leaves but for the rising of the sap; of light penetrating the darkness of this world, of grace and truth ordering our wayward human lives, of love everlasting transfiguring our loneliness, struggle and pain.  It is a time to rediscover hope.

I am sure you agree that hope is in short supply right now.  Like the colliding weather systems that made Hurricane Sandy such an awesome and destructive power across the Caribbean and North America, it is as if many different kinds of turbulence have come together in this decade to make things appear even more precarious than they were before.  I am thinking of the economic chaos whose millions of victims are the voiceless poor and those with least resources to withstand its angry shocks; and of the recognition of how close we are to irreversible climate change; and of the relentless conflicts tearing apart the Arab world; and of the failure of powerful wealthy nations to make lasting inroads into global poverty. I could go on.  If the church can speak a single word into this state we are in, it must surely be hope: daring to look both into ourselves and beyond ourselves for the power to give us back our dignity, rebuild fragmented societies and mend a broken world.

And if hope is needed to transform the big story of the world and its future, it is also needed to transform the little stories of our personal lives and relationships.  I say little: but they are not little to us. Each day many face fightings within and fears without that constitute a powerful undertow dragging us away from the light and immortality for which we were made. Physical or mental illness, ageing, misfortune, broken relationships, addictive behaviour, unhealed memories, loss: these are our personal equivalents of the global threats that on good days we try to pretend are not as bad as we had feared, and on less good days have the capacity to paralyse us with the thought that one day this little light of ours will be put out for ever.

This makes All Saints’ tide all the more of a gift.  At this time of year, the liturgy invites us to celebrate those who were and are lights in the world.  It says to us: notice what fills the pages of history and what is all around you today: the goodness, the graciousness, the joy, the perseverance, the charity of the people we call saints.  Sainthood is not the sentimental whitewashing of a human life to make it seem something that it isn’t.  Nor is it often heroic, as if the only way of holiness is to scale Himalayan peaks of faith, discipline and good works.  The secret lies in the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday.  Pusey said that sanctity doesn’t mean doing extraordinary things, but doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways.  ‘Extraordinary’ means doing them for God, making drudgery divine:  The saints are emblems of hope: because they light little fires in dark rooms and inspire us to go on believing, trusting, hoping against hope in the God who makes all things new as our reading puts it.. 

One of these is death itself, the last enemy that we have faced on All Souls’ Day.  Today’s gospel tells of how Jesus raises Lazarus back to life.  Bethany where Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived was a favourite place for Jesus.  There he found what he had had to renounce for the sake of his ministry: friendship, family and foyer, the warmth of care and affection, a place to call home.  So Lazarus’ death is a blow not just for his own family but for Jesus too: ‘see how he loved him’ they say.  St John uses this story as an introduction to his account of the death and resurrection of Jesus that makes up the rest of the gospel.  It’s a kind of visual aid: the man who died and came back from the dead announces what Jesus himself is about to do, only more gloriously, for when Jesus comes back from the dead, all things will begin to become new for he will be alive for ever.

But this beautiful story doesn’t simply illustrate a truth about Jesus crucified and risen in history.  It gives us a picture of what we ourselves are in him: those who have been brought back to life through the power and grace of God.  We are Lazarus, once held by our grave cloths as people who were not yet truly alive, emerging blinking and bewildered out of our tombs into the strong light of day into which the risen Saviour has led us. We are Lazarus, sought out and found by the searching loving grace of God that rolls away the stones that imprison us, opening up amazing new doors of possibility: new life, new purpose, new meaning, new joy, new hope.  This is St John’s message.  It is about how Jesus transforms our lives: like the man born blind who comes to see; like the woman at the well whose thirst is quenched; like the water turned into wine and the bread multiplied on the hillside.  It’s the light shining in the darkness as we shall soon hear in the Christmas gospel, and the darkness never again being able to overcome it. 

And this, I think, is what St John would mean by sainthood.  To be a saint is to live the new life God offers us in Jesus, to find that the ordinariness of work, leisure and relationships becomes something extraordinary because we learn to see God and bless him in it all.  So All Saints is about who and what we are as the people of God, faithfully following Jesus, speaking his words of truth and love, living in the strength of God as points of inspiration and challenge in a world that has so little time for him. The secret is to live out of gratitude for the love of God that made us and redeems us and sustains us. 

At All Saints’ tide, I think of the men, women and children who have lived that way in past ages and have completed their journeys and are now at rest.  I think of those who have loved me into life, influenced me, touched me in important ways, but for whom I would not be here now as a priest, a Christian and a man.  Like Lazarus, who was no-one in particular, simply a friend of Jesus in whom the life-changing power of God made all the difference.  That is why we celebrate that great multitude no-one can number who were faithful unto death, and have now received the crown of life, and in whose company, God willing, we shall one day find ourselves sharing in the vision of God when death shall be no more, neither mourning nor crying nor pain, for the first things have passed away, and the One seated on the throne says: ‘behold, I am making all things new.’. 

Blackburn Cathedral

4 November 2012

(Revelation 21.1-6a, John 11.32-44)

The first in a series of sermons at the Cathedral on the theme of hope.