Thursday 14th June 2007
Sermon given by the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd John Pritchard at Christ Church Cathdral on 10th June 2007 at the post-inauguration service for Licensed Clergy, Licensed Lay Ministers and Licensed Youth Ministers.
A former curate of mine left the parish where he’d been vicar to join the Northumbria Community for a year to think about his future. He gave away everything he had in his vicarage apart from what he could fit into his car – and that was already half filled with his beloved dog. By contrast, when we came down to Oxford last month we brought two huge removal vans, a ton of books, a small forest of plants, a collection of old cameras, piles of sermons I’m too embarrassed even to look at, and several boxes with labels like ‘pictures we will never put on the wall again’ and ‘pieces of string too small to be of any use’. Oh and one fat, feline friend looking for a good home.
How did we get so weighed down with possessions? Why is life so complex? And there’s a bit of me that already things nostalgically of our days of innocence in Durham where we walked our whippets over the old coal mines whistling the Blaydon Races, pulling down our cloth caps against the driving rain. Life was so much simpler. You may remember the probably apocryphal story of the trainee police who were set an exam in which the following question came up: ‘You are proceeding down the street when you see a house on fire and a woman shouting for help from an upper window. At the same time a bus coming down the road is distracted by the smoke and crashes down an embankment. A car following the bus skids to a halt in the melee and an escaped convict jumps out and runs off down the street. What would you do?’ One trainee policeman wrote; ‘On encountering this situation I would carefully remove my uniform and mingle unobtrusively with the crowd.’ That’s rather how I feel. Maybe you do too sometimes. Being in ministry has all got so complex and demanding. ‘Lord, call me to Tahiti,’ we pray.
So I want to encourage us all to do three things; to enjoy our faith, to value being an Anglican, and to take pride in our calling.
First, let’s enjoy our faith. When we took on our ministries, deacon, priest, LLM, we didn’t set out to suffer. In my case, I turned aside from law because I was gripped by Christ’s offer of life, in abundance – the opportunity to explore that life, to share that life, to enable that life to transform society. This was an all-embracing vision, a coherent way of life. And it hasn’t disappointed me. Of course it means that we enter into some very dark places and encounter some desperate sorrows. And of course there are times when the fire that first drew us singing and dancing into the kingdom burns very low. Maybe for some of us here, now.
But our first love is worth remembering and putting back on the altar every day. We are here because we have experienced the living touch of Christ, in ways that are entirely unique. Paul said in that reading from Galatians, ‘It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’ That’s a very important verse for me. ‘It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’ I don’t need to go searching for God, seeking a spiritual high; he is quietly lodged within. If I let Christ ease his way into my life I have the greatest resource, the most irresistible source of life.
Bp. John V Taylor once wrote: ‘It has long been my conviction that God is not hugely interested as to whether we are religious or not. What matters, and matters supremely, is whether we are alive or not. If your religion brings you more fully to life, God will be in it; but if your religion inhibits your capacity for life or makes you run away from it, you may be sure God is against it just as Jesus was.’ Or, as Jesus said, ‘I have come that they may have life and have it in abundance.’
We have access to that life through the supreme privilege of prayer, that oxygen of our Christian lives. Without it we gasp for breath, and our ministry seems like pushing a car without petrol up a very steep hill. Prayer makes us present to the presence of God within, and opens us to his enrichment and grace. Let’s encourage each other in prayer. It’s a bedrock for us. For Christ is the source of our life. Enjoy!
Here’s my second encouragement: value being an Anglican. I think it was Woody Allen who said: ‘I was born in New York. The reason’s simple; I wanted to stay close to my mother.’ Well I was born an Anglican, for the simple reason that my parents were Anglican. If I’d been born a Methodist, I may well have been happy with that. But I happen to think that being an Anglican is an exciting place to be. We all know the problems. A friend assured me there’s nothing wrong with the Church of England that the Second Coming can’t sort out. But whether the Church of England will be first through the gates on the Day of Judgement I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the Kingdom of God is unstoppable. It’s here – at the door, announced in the life of Jesus, carved on the cross, launched by the resurrection. But it’s churches that serve the Kingdom, and the Church of England serves it well, and could serve it even better.
It may be frustrating for some that we look in many directions at once in the Church of England and speak with many voices. But the result is that we can engage with the whole of society, contribute to many situations, contribute to many discourses. We’re a connecting Church. We connect Church and society because we’re known and trusted in many diverse arenas. We connect catholic and reformed because we draw on both traditions. We connect past and future, romance and reality, grief and hope, because we handle those crucial points of transition – birth, marriage and death. We connect. And when many people want to explore issues of faith, spirituality, the meaning of this floating ball, they often turn to the Church of England (though we do have to take seriously the whole post-modern shift that has eaten into the soul of society. More of that on other occasions.)
Joshua wasn’t an Anglican (although he probably was proleptically of course!) But he heard the same message from God that we need in our age. ‘Be strong and courageous; for you shall put this people in possession of the land that I swore to give them. Only be strong and very courageous… do not turn to the right hand or to the left,,, and then you shall be successful. I hereby command you: be strong and courageous, so not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’
We get the message: be strong and courageous. And also be loving. In any family there are bound to be some arguments and some slamming of doors. We’ve done a fair bit of that recently in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. But families are held together by love. If we, of all people, can’t love one another, then what hope for the world? I shall be looking to promote graceful and godly conversations between all members of our wonderful holy family. We love and respect each other because of the mystery of Christ within the other. ‘It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.’ In all of us.
Let’s enjoy our faith; let’s value being Anglicans. And thirdly, let’s take pride in our calling. Being a priest, being an LLM, being a Christian, is an enormous privilege. God has honoured our uniqueness with a unique vocation. Primarily that vocation is one to be ourselves. When Rabbi Zusya was talking about his death he said to his followers that the first question he would have to answer was not; why had he not been Abraham or why had he not been Moses, but why had he not been Zusya? And part of the uniqueness of our identity is the uniqueness of our vocational calling, and where we are, and what we’re doing, and who we’re doing it with. No-one else can do what we can do where we can do it.
What’s more remarkable is that, in a sense, we do it in the dark. In today’s gospel that other disciples say to Thomas ‘We have seen the Lord.’ We can’t say that. Instead Jesus says to us, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ That’s you and me. We go determinedly on, and I want to salute you and say thank you. Well done. In season and our of season, winter and summer, no matter that the church has hit 15 below and you have to chip the organist out of her seat – you’re still there, proclaiming by who you are and what you do that Jesus is Lord. Thank you. Your name will be written in the Book of Life – which is kept in the Bishop’s office of course.
So please take pride in your calling. It’s good for you to be you, and God honours that and smiles upon it. Of course the task of being a priest or LLM is much more complex now than it was when you first thought of it. It’s like those games where someone says: think of a number, double it, add thirty, subtract your shoe size, multiply it by the number of goals scored by Ronaldo last season, divide it by your lump sum pension payment, and so on. It’s very complex being in ministry today, often not at all what we signed up for.
But remember; ‘Be strong and very courageous, for the Lord your God is with you’. And this bishop, for one, believes in the dignity of your calling and your ability to see it through. Stay anchored in God and then work out the details. With the rest of the Senior Staff I’ll be there to support and encourage, and I ask the same of you, particularly in these early months where I’ll be working out of a considerable knowledge deficit! I’ll need your help.
Last November I was in Lesotho, the tiny, tragically-poor state surrounded by South Africa. Desmond Tutu had been a previous bishop in this fragile land. Apparently he was not a natural horseman but one day he had to ride to get to a remote community. He went with a couple of companions and hung on grimly to his patient but fast-moving steed. Finally, breathlessly, they arrived at the village and were met by a group of horsemen who had come out to greet their bishop. When he managed to come to a standstill, Desmond Tutu proceeded ignominiously to fall off his horse, whereupon all the other members of the group did exactly the same, to avoid embarrassing the dusty prelate. It’s a lovely picture, and I’d like to invite you to emulate those noble Christian brothers if and when you see me metaphorically sliding off my horse and getting it wrong. Together, on the ground, we might find out something more about the humour and humility of our God.
My invitation to you today, my brothers and sisters, is to join me
- in enjoying our life-giving faith
- in valuing being a strong, courageous and loving Anglican
- in taking pride in our unique calling.
I’ve gained a lot from the ecumenical community in Taize over the years and hope to be going with a diocesan group again this year. Brother Roger, the late, lamented founder of the community once wrote this: ‘If festival disappears from the body of Christ, if the Church becomes a place of narrowness and not of universality, where in the world shall we find a place of friendship for the whole of humankind?’ And then he went on in prayer to the risen Christ: ‘You are he who loves me into life unending… each morning you slip on to my finger the ring of the prodigal son restored, the ring of festival. And always you urge – “live that little part of the Gospel that you have already grasped. Proclaim my life among all people. Kindle fire on the earth. Follow me.”’
That’s the authentic gospel of Christ.
And all God’s people say – Amen.