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

Christmas Sermon: an acrostic on G-L-O-R-Y

What’s the big Christmas word in the gospel we have just heard? I think it’s GLORY. ‘We have seen his glory’ he says, ‘full of grace and truth’. Today we look into the crib and see a glory we can never forget, a great and mighty wonder, so mighty and so great that we can hardly take it in. So on Christmas morning let me be playful with that word and give you a five-finger exercise based on it. It’s an acrostic, G-L-O-R-Y: five words for each letter of glory, all drawn out of our gospel reading today.

G is for GOD. Where else to begin but where John begins, with the eternal Word who was in the beginning, who was with God, who was God? ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’: St John echoes the story of creation when the universe began the long march of aeons from chaos to cosmos and divine wisdom gave shape and form to it. Things don’t make sense without God. Yes, we look back across billions of years towards the origins of the cosmos, describe the equations that govern it, even predict its fate. But understanding is about purpose and value and meanings. This is what faith sees as it scans the immense complexity of the universe. Faith sees a God who is Word and Being, Alpha and Omega, the Origin and End of all things. He is Ancient of Days, the primordial Mind who is recognisable to reason and intelligence, who utters the word that brings creation into existence, who suffuses the cosmos with a wise and loving presence, who is knowable and invites created beings into relationship with him. This is the God Christmas shows us in the perfect image of his being, Jesus himself. In these last days God has spoken through a Son. In Jesus’s birth we see divine glory.

L is for LIGHT. The first word God speaks in the Bible is fiat lux: ‘let there be light!’  That theme is basic to St John’s Gospel. He tells us about the life that was in the beginning: the light that enlightens all things, the light of humanity. It shines in the darkness and the dark has not overcome it, can never extinguish it. Jesus will say ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness but will have the light of life’. This interplay between darkness and light runs through the ancient winter solstice rituals we still keep in our northern hemisphere with our candles and Christmas trees and starry lights. In dark days and dark times we can still be haunted by archaic anxieties and more contemporary worries: will the light return, will the world come back to life, will this winter of war-mongering nations and peoples ever give way to a spring-time of peace? Will the poor who are always with us have a summer harvest to save them? St John says to us: Christ the morning star is our light and our sun. He has come into the world to bring us life and love, even the most helpless and hopeless. In Jesus’s birth we see the light of God’s glory.

O is for OFFERING. Not our’s but God’s. ‘The true light was coming into the world’ says our reading. Not because of some inevitable deterministic chain of causation, but as a personal gift. John's gospel could not be clearer about this. Gift, he says, comes straight from the heart of a God for whom giving is his essential nature. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.’ And because this Word and this Light was God, the gift is a supreme act of self-offering, a pouring out of love so that the world can be reconciled to him. So when we gaze at the Infant in the manger, the Word made flesh now living among us, as one of us, it is love incarnate that we see, love that gives itself to the very end, kenosis, self-emptying, self-offering. The One who was rich abases himself and becomes poor so that we might become rich through him. It is a risky undertaking, this precarious way of loving. Every act of giving carries risks: we know this when we give away something precious. What if the gift were to be refused, or not liked, or abused? That makes this offering of God’s presence and his very self a thing most wonderful. In Jesus’s birth we see selfless, self-emptying love, and that is true glory.

R is for RECEIVING. Not God’s but ours. Receiving needs as much grace as giving. And our gospel reading acknowledges the risk that a gift could be unwelcome, not received well or even at all. ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by him but the world knew him not. He came to his own people, and his own received him not.’ In the middle of this string of powerful words - God, Word, light, life, glory, grace, truth - comes a ‘but’. Who sees incarnation for what it is? Who recognises the light and embraces it? Even when we come close to it as we do today, we can ignore it or forget about it or turn away from it. We don’t want to admit it on Christmas Day when we are filled with gratitude and love. But our experience tells us that our best moments can be fitful and transient. For John, the gift needs to make a difference. ‘To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become the children of God.’ If Christmas doesn't touch us in some deep place, make us want to be children of God, if it doesn’t challenge and change our thoughts and motives and actions, what is the point of keeping it year after year? Why tell the same old Christmas story if we don’t turn towards those who most need our help and care in the world? I’m thinking of those queuing up at food banks, or on the streets of our cities, or in some middle-eastern countries in fear of their lives on Christmas Day because they worship the Christ Child. Perhaps this year can be different. The carols and readings, the Christmas tree and crib, the sheer beauty of this season, could they speak to us anew so that our hearts are ‘strangely warmed’? Might receiving the holy Child help us to receive those in need? Jesus does not turn his back on them and nor do we. Giving and receiving is God’s way. We see it in Jesus’s birth and recognise it as glory.

God, Light, Offering, Reception. What will Y be?  A good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon monosyllable to end with. This word comes from both God’s heart and ours. For when heart speaks to heart, the word that rises up in each is YES. John is saying in his way what St Paul tells us, that Jesus is God’s Yes to his world, to every man, woman and child, to each of us. He has brought us his light, life and love. And we? What can we say to him, born this happy morning? Yes to Christmas, yes to the newborn child, yes to our redemption. Yes to all who need our love, our care, our friendship, our generosity, our charity. Yes to the pain of the world, yes to the cries of the desperate and destitute, yes to the longings of broken nations, yes to all who have lost their hope.  We embrace them as God embraces us all today. And we say yes to the glory of God who makes a home in our midst, the glory of self-giving love that we celebrate at Bethlehem on this day of days.

Durham Cathedral, Christmas Day 2013

Hebrews 1.14; John 1.1-14