Priesthood - priesting Edmonton

Peter priesthood priesting

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” Matt 16.18

I found myself chuckling again today over the biography of that delightfully eccentric priest, Brian Brindley, remembered with affection by many of us here.

Damian Thompson describes his memory of him striding through Sainsbury’s, dressed in all the finery of a Roman Catholic Monsignor – patent buckled shoes with huge scarlet heels, clip clopping across the linoleum in search of ever creamier puddings. His fatness was covered by a soutane with 39 red buttons. As Brian explained “one for each of the 39 Articles I don’t believe in!”.

Well I don’t think William will be following quite in Brian’s footsteps, but it raised the question again for me ‘what is a priest?’

We know what a deacon is: as one of my Sunday school children explained when another child asked what a deacon was: “it’s something you put on a hill and set fire to.”

But to be a priest in today’s world, indeed, in today’s church, is a high and difficult calling.

Of course there has been quite a movement in the last 40 years to try and make out that a priest is just an ordinary person like any other Christian.

I think it was that great 60s theologian Spike Milligan who saw through the shallowness of this: “never trust a clergyman who wears a rollneck sweater and says ‘call me Ken’”.

Paul Avis in his latest book A Ministry Shaped by Mission, has redressed the balance, and reminded us that although all Christians are called to discipleship, only a few are called to that onerous ministry of priesthood, which is a special gift to the Church.

Now I don’t want to get into a big debate about priestly identity. As Pope Benedict said when he was but a lowly Prefect in the wake of Vatican Two: “we are tired of discussing priestly identity!”

Rather I want to suggest that we display our priesthood in two ways: by sign and by service.

And these two ways reflect our Lord’s instructions to all Christians, priests and people, that they are to be a light to the world, and the salt of the earth.

I remember Bishop Richard saying at a deanery chapter as he looked round the room at those few not wearing dog collars: “I want no anonymous priests in my diocese!”

[Two priests decide to go to Hawaii on holiday. They’re determined to make this a real holiday by not wearing anything that would identify them as clergy. As soon as the plane lands, they buy some outrageous shorts, shirts, sandals & sunglasses.

The next morning sitting on the beach, enjoying a drink, a gorgeous blond in an imaginative bikini walks by. She smiles at them and says, "Good morning, Father, Good morning, Father."

They were both stunned. How in the world could she have known?

The next day, they bought even more outrageous outfits - so loud, you could hear them before you saw them. Well after a while, the same gorgeous blonde, this time accompanied by a stunning brunette, walk along the beach, turning heads as they go.

As they pass they both nod and say "Good morning, Father, Good morning, Father."
Astonished one of the priests shouts out “How do you know we’re priests?”

The blonde turns with a puzzled look and says, "Father, it's us, Sister Angela and Sister Monica!"]

But it is of course more than simply donning clerical dress, or for the laity, wearing a cross or some other Christian symbol, or carrying a large black Bible and reading it on the tube.
As lights to the world, we are to be signposts to the transcendent God. What does that mean?

At some social function this week I found myself, for the umpteenth time, trying to explain what a priest does.

People are generally happy with your doing good about the community, but what genuinely puzzles most of our contemporaries is any sense of devotion to God; of meaningful engagement with the Almighty through prayer and by the sacraments; of saying you can’t meet them for drinks till 7 because you are saying your prayers.

They don’t understand why I should spend so many hours in church every day or week. They do not understand that a priest’s engagement with the world is dependent upon his or her engagement with God.

It is especially in this way that the ordained are called to be the focus of transcendence; an archetype of the priesthood of all the baptized. Our life in Christ should be a challenge to those round about us. It is a signpost to the transcendent God.

We must not be tempted to hide our light under a bushel, with some false humility that argues: ‘I’m such a poor priest that I’d better keep quiet about it.’ As the lady said to the Vicar on the door after a particularly fiery sermon: “Oh Vicar! We never knew what sin was until you came to the parish!”

Our involvement with church must be seen to be an involvement with a God whom we believe to be there; and not just as president of a local social club with nice music. William has not chosen a career – he could find much more profitable ways of using his talents! – he is answering a calling, which has been recognized by the church, whose representatives are here tonight.

Religious faith has become so internalised over the last 50 years - it’s all a matter of private belief - that many in western society find it very strange when Christians assert that it is a public truth. That the transcendent God has revealed himself to us in Christ, and that we are all called to respond.

So a priest is, in a very particular way, a sign, a light to the world.

But secondly, and more briefly, we also exercise our priesthood in service. We are to be the salt of the earth.

In the threefold office of the church, we are ordained deacon first, then priest, and if the Prime Minister calls, bishop. But a priest or a bishop is still a deacon.

Often when we lay out the bishop’s vestments, we have a lightweight dalmatic which he puts on over his alb, and this is to remind him that he is still a deacon - a servant of the church.

Paul Avis again in his book makes the case that the Diaconate is the pivotal office of the Church. It is where we all started our ordained life; he calls it the flagship of ministry.
Jesus himself set us the example:

“the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Matt 20.28)

Salt that remains forever in the saltcellar is of no use. As priests and deacons we should have a strong sense of public service. In the simplest of terms, we should be known to be people who are kind and who do good in society.

In the history of the Anglo-Catholic movement we read time and again of great public funerals of priests in many of the deprived cities of our land. They were loved and honoured because they served Christ as salt in society. Of course we must shut ourselves away to say our prayers, but we must also be open to the world, ready to infect society with godliness.

Today’s epistle is a lovely story – the church are locked away praying fervently, and presumably believingly, for Peter’s release. An angel of the Lord releases him and he turns up at the door of the prayer meeting. When the door girl tells them all he’s there, they think she’s mad! Our prayers are to take us out into the world where God is already at work.

As salt and light, we will be following the example of Our Lord, and of the apostle Peter. And in so doing, what our Lord said of Peter, he will say to all of us – priests and people:

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” Matt 16.18

Time & Eternity

Eternity in their Hearts

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Eccles 3.11)

Today’s readings need little explanation. Jeremiah is about lying prophets, Romans about sin, and the Gospel about generous hospitality. God is against the first two and for the last one.

So that gives me time to think about our verse from Ecclesiastes.

Now it’s no secret that tomorrow is a significant birthday for Fr Alan. In fact I overheard a conversation the other day when a small boy, awed by his mature gravitas, asked him: “Were you in the ark?” “No” chuckled Fr Alan. The thoughtful young boy looked quizzically at him and asked “Then why weren’t you drowned?”

The last 40 years have seen a significant shift in the philosophical climate of our society. It is nearly 40 years since Alan Bennett wrote Forty Years On, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Fr Alan belongs to that demographic group called ‘Generation X’ who grew up in the 60s & 70s. I bought (for 1 shilling & ninepence!) the book ‘Generation X’ published the year before Fr Alan was born. The year Mandela went into prison on Robben Island.
Those 40 years also saw the emergence of ‘postmodernity’.

Although written two and a half thousand years ago Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book. Its famous opening words could be paraphrased: “Vanity of vanities, all is postmodernity.”

Postmodernity describes, not so much a movement, but a mood in contemporary society. It is meaninglessness with attitude; emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex, alcohol and other drugs; and lots of idle humour. Veni, vidi, velcro - I came, I saw, I stuck around.

“Yet” says the Preacher in our verse, “they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Postmodernity is one of the most exciting, painful, challenging, opportunity-filled, anxiety ridden, faith building, depressing, faith destroying, enjoyable and contradictory of times to be alive. Postmodernity is the cultural climate that is increasingly pervading the world, spreading like a virus through TV, the arts, popular culture, ‘new’ politics and designer religion.

What would the Preacher of Ecclesiastes make of it all?

He would most certainly speak from the point of view of identifying with, and being part of, the culture. This can be one of the church’s biggest stumbling blocks, because most Christians are firmly locked into modernism, the outgoing philosophical climate; yesterday’s weather.

Worse still, many of us feel that there is something inherently Christian about modernism, despite the fact that it has only been around for a century or so, although the Judaeo-Christian faith has been around for at least 35 centuries.

However, “She who marries the spirit of the age is sure to be a widow in the next”. So we must not ‘marry’ either modernity or postmodernity. But we must be so in touch with our culture that we feel its pain and know how to apply the balm of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Increasingly in our society, purpose is giving way to play; design to chance; founts of wisdom to pools of knowledge; Reason to reasons; the metanarrative, the Big Picture, to the micronarrative, the local story - the soaps, Big Brother. Primary school children know far more about the world of Pokemon and Harry Potter, than they do about the Christian Gospel that shaped their culture and gave them their school.

Dominic Crossan puts it this way in The Dark Internal: “There is no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse. There is no dry land. There are only people living on rafts made from their own imaginations. And there is sea.”

But eternity is firmly set in our hearts, says the Preacher: a divine uncomfortableness, a dis-ease with what is.

Postmodernity is a way of coping with that dis-ease. It does not make sense of life, but it helps you cope.

Christianity is also a way of coping and making sense of life. Not complete sense, for now we see through a glass darkly.

How then should we live? How carry out the Great Commission to make disciples of all?

Well, evangelism has never been easier; but discipleship has never been harder. This is why 70% of our population claim to be Christians but our churches grow emptier by the week. (Although the picture is more encouraging in London, where numbers are increasing and where yesterday in a completely packed St Paul’s Cathedral, 34 men and women were ordained deacon.)

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts,” says the Preacher.

We need to let God grasp people’s hearts and imaginations before God can transform their minds. And we must learn to live with uncertainty. Yet we still have a Gospel to proclaim, even if we must do so with confident hope rather than fundamentalist certainty. Faith is, as Kierkegaard put it, a passionate commitment made in objective uncertainty.

As Christians we assert that we are not alone in the universe, because the Bible, the Church and Reason call us to believe that there is a ‘transcendent’ God, who is before and beyond all things.

Many postmoderns are sick of themselves. But where can they look but to themselves if there is no ‘Other’?

We must present clearly the intimations of transcendence that God has planted throughout his universe – the ‘eternity in our hearts’.

Beauty and love, order and satisfaction, suffering and meaninglessness, the mystery of the Mass, the splendour of this music and liturgy - all point to an Utterly Other.

We believe that the ‘eternity within’ is no less than ‘Christ in us’, the hope of glory, the imago dei, the image of God.

God, the Holy Trinity, is community, and in that community of love we find our identity in the postmodern sea of shifting images and personal fragmentation. Jesus’ command has never been more relevant: “Love one another as I have loved you… by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”

Part of the tragedy of the rifts that have been dug deeper this week at the Anglican Consultative Council is in the animosity shown by some of the participants.
If we cannot demonstrably love one another, then we are failing the Christ whom we seek to follow.

It is as we worship and love in our Christian communities that we mirror, albeit imperfectly, the eternal God.

At best, the Church’s response to whatever intellectual climate it has found itself immersed in, has been - not a renewed set of dogma, not more resolutions and rules - but a renewed love of God through our worship, and a renewed effort to love and serve one another.

We all get older, and the death of dear friends and our own failing powers remind us that although “He has made everything beautiful in its time,” as Ecclesiastes reminds us, its time to fade will surely come.

Yet “he has also set eternity in their hearts” and in its time, if we will let it, this will blossom into a newer and fuller life which starts now, and which will grow on into the eternity of paradise.

Jonah

Jonah

Jonah prayed “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful.” (4.1)

The Welsh preacher: "There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Plaintiff voice from the back: "What if we have no teeth..."
"Teeth will be provided!"

Many of us within and without the church have difficulty in understanding a God of love who wants to punish wrongdoers. But then poor God can’t win, because when it comes down to it, we also have difficulty in understanding how he can let evil men and women ‘get away with it’ – often at the expense of the good and the poor.

Jonah is a story on this theme; on what has been called ‘The Outrage of Grace’.

This enigmatic little book with its 48 verses, carefully worded and skilfully constructed, is full of surprises and amusing improbability.

Let me remind you of the story. Jonah is not a false prophet but a disobedient one, sent to pronounce judgement on the wicked city of Nineveh - a city that flayed it’s captives alive and whose atrocities are recorded in extra-biblical writings about the Babylonians.

The conversion of Nineveh was not high on the good Jew’s weekly intercessions list. So Jonah, as a good Jew, runs away from the Lord and his duty - to take a cheap Spanish holiday at the opposite end of the Med - in Tarshish.

God brings his ship near to destruction in a fierce storm. The sleeping(!) Jonah is woken, reveals all, and finally persuades the reluctant sailors to throw him overboard: for the storm is his fault. (We’re already detecting a self-destructive streak in Jonah’s personality.)

Now the enormous fish (which is all that most people remember about Jonah) swallows this unlikely servant of Yahweh and after three days vomits him up on the sea shore not a million miles away from Nineveh. That’s package holidays for you.

(The NT draws a parallel between these three days and those of Jesus in the tomb – we read about this in Matthew.)

Thus the fish, as an instrument of God’s grace and mercy, allows Jonah a second chance to obey. He takes it, probably grudgingly, although he is wise enough to realize that God has his mind set on this mercy mission to Iraq – for Nineveh was in modern day Iraq.

So he announces the fate of Nineveh to its wicked inhabitants. To a man they repent - what effective preaching! So God has compassion on them and spares them destruction. But is Jonah pleased with this magnificent story of missionary conversion? Of course not! He’s a religious bigot!

1 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3 And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

He sits down, still hoping for a thunderbolt or two. Then the bush, then the worm (appointed - like the big fish) and the sun and the anger again...

10 Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

And that’s the end.

This fourth chapter now leaves the hearers puzzling over the message of the book and the future of this reluctant prophet. Where is the denouement of a chapter 5 with its resolution of the story and the moral for its listeners? There can be none, for that would defeat the purpose of the book.

Voltaire and lesser known sceptics have mocked the apparently farcical elements of the book, and some Christians, like Luther in his day, would rest easier at night if Jonah had just failed to get into the canon of Scripture.

As a prophecy (Jonah finds himself amongst the twelve minor prophets ion the Bible) it’s almost an oracle free zone. In fact in the Hebrew, there are only 4 words of prophecy in all 48 verses. “Forty - Days - Nineveh - Destroyed” (3:4) (Now that’s a short sermon!)

There is an element of parable in the story. The opening chapter allows the hearer to distance himself from this foolish and disobedient prophet of Yahweh, but as in Nathan’s parable to King David (2 Samuel 12), the closing verses of Jonah round on the hearer with that accusing “Thou art the man!”

Like Jonah you want to limit God’s loving-kindness to Israel alone. You cannot see that his compassion reaches out to all who repent and turn to him; a foreshadowing of the Messiah’s universal mission, the inclusiveness of Pentecost – the Spirit poured out on all flesh.

How just is God? This is the undercurrent of Jonah.

If in God’s world, as the Old Testament recognises it, good is rewarded and wickedness is punished, how can God forgive Nineveh and overlook their sin? To let iniquity go unpunished is as unjust as punishing the innocent.

In Jonah’s eyes it was dishonouring to God for him to show mercy to obvious wrongdoers, even after repentance. For if God is the supreme moral being he must punish or at least demand some penitential good deed or cultic sacrifice to restore the balance.

Like the psalmist, he wonders that the wicked are sleek and fat while he suffers in godly innocence (eg Psalm 73.12.13). Jonah was outraged by grace - the apparent contradiction in God’s moral nature. And he wanted to die and be free from this confusion of mind and from all his self-pity and longings for vengeance.

So finally God points out to Jonah through the incident with the bush, that Jonah’s concern for the plant was motivated by self-interest - whereas God’s concern for all that he had created sprang from the compassion which is God’s very nature.

Perhaps too Jonah was ultimately concerned to vindicate his own theological view of God, rather than to trust obediently in a God whose ways could not always be understood. How could God justify his actions on the grounds of compassion alone? The hearers (you and me) are left to wrestle in their own minds with the tension between crime and punishment: between repentance and forgiveness; and in a latter day Iraq, between Tony Blair & Clare Short.

Is there a New Testament solution? Well, not really. But there is significant further development, shedding light on God’s justice, or lack of it, and his mercy.

The tensions in Jonah’s and the narrator’s theology are partly resolved in the cross of Christ. Here justice and compassion meet as God’s absolute holiness is satisfied by his overwhelming love.

Yet the principled and God-fearing part in all of us wants Christ to come down from the cross and smite the Pharisees and scoffers; to vindicate the honour of a just God and a sinless Son. But in that sense, God is not just - if he were, there would be no hope for us.

Jonah wanted no forgiveness for Nineveh and asked that he might die. God forgave Nineveh and let Jonah live.

But Christ cried ‘Father forgive them’ and God let him die. This is not so much a resolution of the tensions in Jonah, as a call for us to live with that uneasy outrage of grace and mercy in our own lives, in our dealings with others, and in ordering our society.

I spent the New Year in Cape Town enjoying the summer sun, sea, sand and wine. I visited Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for many of his 27 years in prison. As I stood at the door of his cell, I wondered if I could emerge after 27 years, when comrades had been tortured and killed, to smile and forgive and demonstrate the Outrage of Grace; this radical mercy which we are called to show, whether it makes sense or not.

May God’s Holy Spirit allow you to follow Christ in living lives of outrageous grace to all you meet.

Jonah prayed “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful.” (4.1)

Foregiveness

Forgiveness

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6.11

It is said that when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Last Supper he used the innocent face of a choir boy for his portrait of Our Lord. Much later (and he took many years to complete it) he looked for a suitable model for Judas and found it in the degenerate and corrupt face of a dissolute young man recruited from the gutter

Something familiar about the face prompted him to ask the young man about his origins. And to his surprise and horror it was the same choir boy who had fallen into a life of debauchery and sin.

And this is part of our common human dilemma. For the same face can present innocence and corruption. We, as fully human creatures, are endowed with the awful responsibility of choice.

As Paul puts it later on in this letter:

“So I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me.” (7.21)

Children: hands up if you never do anything wrong!

Let’s explore this subject by way of another sinner who struggled with the Flaw at the heart of human nature, John Donne (1573-1631). He belongs to that period of English church history that is presently hotly debated. His life spans the years in which Anglicanism as a distinctive form of Christianity – encompassing Catholic and Protestant elements – came into being.

Donne came from a Roman Catholic family. Yet, after a vivid and chaotic life, he embraced the current Anglicanism of Jacobean England. There is a debate about this. Was Donne a precursor of the Catholic-minded High Churchman or a convert to the prevailing Calvinism of the Church of England at that time?

One of his poems illustrates this debate very well – A Hymn to God the Father. It’s a poem about choice. And choice – God’s choice of us, His election, His predestination of His creatures – is at the heart of the Catholic/Calvinistic apposition, as it was at the heart of Donne’s life.

As you read this poem you are reminded of the choices and contrasts in Donne’s career: from ‘Don Juan’ to Dean of St Paul’s; from ‘Man of the World’ to ‘Man of God’; from dashing young love poet to the shrouded marble corpse that still stands today as his memorial in the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Donne knew all about original sin and Augustine and Calvin’s emphasis on the ‘total depravity’ of man. He would take very seriously indeed the 9th Article of Religion, formulated just before his birth: that "man… is of his own nature… inclined to evil".

Not surprisingly then in his poem Donne first confesses the effects of original sin: the sin of Adam; the first choice that went so very wrong, but also the choices now that we know will go wrong: the weight; the burden (almost too much to bear) of our ethical, moral being.

Even from outside the Garden we still hear God’s voice announcing: "Behold the man is become like one of us, knowing good from evil". Donne writhes in that Calvinistic, that human consciousness of the trapped-ness of existence. And to lighten it a little, he makes a play on his name ‘Donne’, throughout the poem. Let me read the first verse that looks back to Adam’s sin:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

He’s trapped. And yet, even within this moral prison, he is aware of something else: a counter weight that is both a clue to Donne’s own spiritual experience and to the internal workings of Anglican spirituality in general. The clue is in the second verse, and it lies in this corporate nature of our sin. We’re in this together.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

Donne’s past life was a torment to him. He knew only too well the lure, the compulsion, of sin. But he was especially shamed by the memory of those he had won to sin by his own sins: those who made his sin their door to corruption. And this is most painful to him as it is to us!

But look more closely at this poem. In this torture there is healing. In this remorse there is redemption. And here maybe is the Catholic counter-point to Donne’s Calvinism. For the Church teaches that sin is relational. We drag others down with our sin.

But at the same time the opposite is true. Namely, that our repentance, or sanctity, can raise others up! Furthermore, we can be redeemed by that same common humanity that was this first cause of our sin.

And here is the pivotal point of the poem as it was the pivotal point of Donne’s life. Yes, he found degradation in abuse, the rage of his human relationships. But his ultimate salvation comes through that humanity: our humanity which God has made the instrument of our redemption in the human Christ Jesus.

Donne is perhaps the first truly Anglican poet. For in this poem we see him poised – historically, doctrinally - between Protestant and Catholic insight; between saint and sinner; between human experience and biblical truth. This is what Paul wrestles with in this epistle.

For Donne, this resolution is fully worked out as the poem (more of a confession than poem) reaches its climax in the final verse – a final verse that, curiously enough, reminds us of another 17th century poet with far better Protestant credentials; namely John Bunyan.

You may recall in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is shown a vision of a man locked in a room: the room of his own despair; despair that he can ever be saved; despair that he can ever be loved by God.

And this too is Donne’s last fear – his greatest horror. Why? Because it is the underlying neurosis of the human condition; now, in the 21st century, as then in the 17th.

We too fear being locked into an empty Godless universe. We too fear being locked out from the love of an Almighty Parent-God.

But Donne, unlike many today in the West, can see - can allow himself to see - the human face of God shining from the face of this clouded universe.

John Donne believes in the Incarnation; believes that God and Man, the objective and the subjective, the spiritual and the material, meet in the person of Jesus Christ – we are alive to God in Christ Jesus.

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

In our sophisticated, liberal Western lives, we sometimes forget the simple assurance and wonder of the Gospel: that our sins are forgiven.

I remember Neil, who had a past, after communion – tears streaming down his face – 'you ought to put tissues in the pews!' he stammered. He was overwhelmed with the fact that he was forgiven and loved by God.

Let this Gospel sacrament this morning remind you, as you taste the bread and the wine, that you are forgiven, and that you should

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6.11