Sermon given by the Bishop of Oxford at the post-inauguration eucharist for retired clergy in the diocese on 12th June 2007
Coming to Oxford as bishop is a huge, unexpected privilege. I’ve had to get over what I’m told is called imposter syndrome and believe that God is somehow behind it all. That’s my only chance. Either that or I get rumbled at last.
But I know that I’m meeting today some of the real heroes and heroines of the diocese of Oxford (and elsewhere) and that we owe you a huge amount not only for your ministry of the past but very much for your ministry of the present, bringing your skills and your time and above all your knowledge of God and his deep ways, to the parishes and to the life of this diocese. Thank you. A thousand times thank you.
A man was driving down a country lane when his car broke down. He got out, put his head under the bonnet and heard a voice saying, ‘You have to realign the distributor.’ He looked up but couldn’t see anyone, so he put his head under the bonnet again. Then he heard the same voice: ‘You have to realign the distributor.’ He looked around but all he could see was a black horse. ‘Was that you?’ he said. ‘Yes it was,’ the horse replied. ‘You have to realign the distributor.’ So the man did just that and lo and behold the car started again. Somewhat shaken, he drove into the nearest village and stopped at the pub. He went in and told the barman what had happened ‘Was it a white horse?’ the barman asked. ‘No, it was a black one.’ ‘Thank goodness,’ said the barman. ‘The white horse hasn’t got a clue about cars.’ Well, I haven’t got much of a clue about the diocese of Oxford. I have loads to learn. But in this cathedral today is a mass of wisdom and experience, and I hope you won’t hesitate to share that wisdom with me. We’re all in this together.
For those of you who have retired I guess in a sense you could say that yours is a ministry of the Third Age, just like we have a University of the Third Age, and you are enjoying (I hope) this new stage of being priests and priestly families without the hassle of trying to sustain the institution of the Church of England at the same time. I hope it’s a time of liberation, enjoying the core activities of your ministry – what you got ordained for.
And in the case of members of our religious communities there will also be people in the second and third ages of the religious life.
The first age of ministry for those who are ordained is the thrill and enthusiasm of the early years. It was great, wasn’t it? At least if you screen out the tyrannical training incumbent, the freezing cold flat and the bread and dripping for tea. But we knew what we were about; there were services to take (from the 1928 Prayer Book, which was never legal); there were people to be visited – 30 a week, with a full account given to the vicar; there was the youth club to run, even though the last curate had been phenomenal, a cross between St Francis and James Dean. But it was all so simple. Mornings for study, afternoons for visiting, evenings for meetings. When did it all go wrong?
And for members of our religious communities, I imagine there’s a similar process of enchantment at finally having arrived as a novice and loving the rhythms and regularities of the religious life. All is well – so far.
Probably in the second age we were given positions of responsibility, parishes to run, populated by a rich mixture of saints and well-practiced sinners. Then there were PCCs with a neurotic fear of change, and parishioners who expected you to be omniscient, and omnicompetent and omnipresent; and altar servers with an uncanny knowledge of when you’d done something slightly different from the way Father Sligo had taught them before the war. And you moved to another parish when the bishop asked you (those were the days!) and there were the same characters, only they’d changed their names. But people still wanted to be birthed, and married and buried by the Church, and you did it a thousand times, and the diocese kept asking for more money, and the archdeacon kept asking if you’d got a faculty for that nail, and the bishop kept living in extraordinary luxury and was occasionally rumoured to have been seen in a neighbouring deanery. It was all very hard work.
So too in the religious communities. Enchantment doesn’t last. Reality bites. The religious vocation is tough. You go to pray and the last thing you seem to have time for is prayer. You go for community and everyone lives in their own little world. But it’s still God’s call – and he’s the boss. Allegedly.
Yes, it was the second age and it became quite wearying by the end. But now has come the Third Age. For retired priests the pressure’s off. A 104 year old was once asked what was the best thing about being 104. ‘No peer pressure,’ she answered. There are other pressures of course, keeping our shape for one. One retired person said, ‘I feel like my body has got completely out of shape, so I got my doctor’s permission to join a fitness club and start exercising. I decided to take an aerobics class for seniors. I bent, twisted, gyrated, jumped up and down, and perspired for over an hour. But by the time I’d got my leotard on, the class was over.’
But now at last as priests you can choose what you want to do in ministry and someone else has to go and deal with the hand to hand fighting at the PCC meeting, and you don’t have to miss Eastenders, and you can read a book with a clear conscience. Wonderful. Can I have my P45 now?
It’s not so easy for members of communities. This is for life. But there’s still probably a Third Age, a period of mature acceptance and quiet pleasure. Irritations matter less; God matters more.
But what happens to faith when it’s cut loose from institutional responsibility, as happens for parish priests? I think this is really interesting. Without the familiar moorings our faith can take a number of different directions. If we follow that wonderful Easter morning narrative we’ve just heard there are some who when they retire cry like Mary Magdalene: ‘They have taken away my Lord!’ Some of us lose our way, enter a large and lonely plain. I was talking to a retired bishop not long ago and he said he’d recently met 8 older well-known Christian people who’d said they’d really entered the darkness in later life, and were just having to hang on.
‘They’ve taken away my Lord.’ The soul and centre of Mary’s life had gone missing. The one who gave her life meaning had been taken away without her permission. She had nowhere to go; not even a tomb with his body. So we too may lose our sense of direction as the props are knocked away. And anxious voices rise within us asking if this was all folly.
The answer, surely, is to set about creating a new framework of prayer and reflection, stripped of the unnecessary, flexible and free, but with the familiar landmarks of scripture and psalm, sacrament and silence. As our life circumstances change, so our way of praying and perceiving God’s presence may change as well. That’s fine; that’s being human. God is still with us.
A second response to spirituality in the Third Age may be to find that God has become a more universalized presence. ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,’ said Jesus when he met Mary in the garden. In other words, I’m no longer going to be limited to the old conventions of meeting. You’ll have to let me go from being your own possession. Let me be myself, free to be with all my people, the God beyond your ideas of God. ‘My God and your God.’
That’s what some people discover. A larger, more embracing, inclusive vision of God. I’ve been in correspondence for a number of years with a good retired priest who took this journey and finds it very frustrating to keep on returning to a church that only wants to live in three dimensions when he wants to live in six. I ask him to be patient. As all the players found in the story of Easter, the risen Christ meets us all exactly where we need to meet him – in a garden, in an upper room, by a lake, on a mountain side. We might even bump into him in ourselves. Our journey isn’t anyone else’s journey.
A third response to spirituality in the Third Age might be to meet Christ afresh and to say with Mary Magdalene ‘I have seen the Lord!’ Freed from what we now feel were the constricting formulas of parish life we find like George Herbert that ‘In age I bud again.’ It’s a return to our first love, and it’s a joyful reunion. It’s like being a curate again, but the house is better now, and the grandchildren have first call on our time.
Whichever way it’s gone for you – and all our stories are unique – you – former parish priests - are the ministers of the Third Age and I’m delighted to join you in your ministry, as I hope you are ready to join me in mine. It may no longer be ‘my cure and yours’ but we have one Lord, one faith, one baptism – and one Church, the battered but magnificent Church of England.
And for the religious communities I really look forward to finding out how it is for the older brother and sister and their faith in the Third Age. They have so much to draw on, but all of us are beginners in some sense.
When people announce the demise of the Church or the faith I remember the words of GK Chesterton who once said ‘Three times in history people have said Xy has gone to the dogs, but each time it’s the dog that’s died.’ We’re here for the long haul and you and I in our own generation have passed on the baton to the next young team. Sometimes we worry whether the new generation is up to it, like the mother who had a delegation of her children who came to her and said, ‘You know that old vase that you said had been handed down from one generation to another? Well this generation’s dropped it.’ We fear that’s what will happen once we’ve let go.
But God is bigger than our fears. He’s been this way before and the message is the same – the Kingdom of God is unstoppable. The liquid gold of the gospel has to be poured into the moulds of every new age, but it’s God who is the guarantor, not we frail disciples. The end result isn’t in doubt.
Let’s travel on, therefore, happy to have borne the heat and burden of the day, happy now to exercise a new ministry of the Third Age, happy above all that God is God and so we don’t have to be.
As always in the Christian life – the best is yet to be!
