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Let me begin by assuring those of you being ordained priest this afternoon
that you don't know what you're doing. You really don't.
The way the Church ordains people has always seemed a bit of a mystery
- for some clergy, let alone anyone else. You go to the Cathedral and
get ordained, acquire the title 'Revd' and a plastic collar round your
neck. Then blow me, there you go a year later, doing it all over again.
Why?
Last year you were ordained deacon. The Greek word 'deacon' means literally
a servant; your role this year has been as public servants of Jesus Christ,
a public sign to the Church and the world at large of the nature of Jesus
Christ, the servant of God on behalf of all. The role of a deacon is to
serve others in Christ's name, and care for their physical and spiritual
needs. That's expressed in the communion service by assisting with preaching
and distributing the sacrament, the bread and wine. But you haven't been
able to lead communion up till now, or to declare with the Church's public
authority the forgiveness of sins. Becoming a priest will allow you to
do that.
But it’s much more than a bit of a promotion. The word 'priest' comes
from the Greek word presbyter, meaning elder. In English use it's also
associated with the idea of offering a sacrifice. Some Christians get
very twitchy about Old Testament associations between priesthood and sacrifice,
particularly because of the link in the Roman Catholic mass between Jesus'
sacrifice on the cross, and offering a sacrifice in the communion service
itself. But both these ideas, being an elder and sacrifice, give a way
of understanding the particular thing you're doing today in being ordained
priest.
What are you letting yourself in for? Well, here are a few examples from
my own curacy: what would you do when:
1. the train you're on breaks down and arrives into London at one in the
morning, and people get off and look at you in your dog collar and say,
can you help us get home;
2. you get a frantic phone call and five minutes
later you're standing over the body of a member of the church who collapsed
over the washing up, with his shocked new widow looking at you with no
idea what to do;
3. a long-time disabled church member says to you that
she can’t see the point of her life any more;
4. you go on a regular
visit to a housebound lady with hearing difficulties and she says she’s
got an ear infection and could you please clear the ear wax out of her
hearing aid;
5. you go to a cemetery to take a funeral and find a fight
going on, and are offered money to get the undertaker to take the lid
off the coffin so that mourners can see the body. What would you do? How
would you be as Christ in each situation?
A priest is on the one hand an elder, a wise person and leader in the
community, both the church and the wider community: a public person there
to assist others, yes, but even more importantly to be a public sign of
the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. You’re being ordained to
be Christ to others, and to bring them to Christ. And that’s an awesome
calling.
When you preside at communion for the first time, you will live out your
new role, as the one who not only leads the community together before
God, but makes present, focuses, the shared priestly calling of the whole
church into this one service and event. Above all, a priest's calling
is primarily to pray: to spend time with God, to pray for people yes,
but more than that, to grow in spiritual wisdom and holiness and humility,
so that you can help people grow in their relationship with God. If you
don't spend time with God, then you won't be much use as a priest - you
may still be a good social worker or chair of committees, but you'll have
lost the heart of what today you're being ordained for.
Don't be afraid either to wear a dog collar to help you bring Christian
faith into the public arena: to be like a church building, a sign of the
importance, reality and presence of God in our very secular world. In
York Minster on Tuesday morning was a head teacher who had taken a morning
off from school to act as the Archbishop’s deacon at the consecration
of a bishop – and she said to me what a big difference it had made
with her wearing a dog collar in her community, not church, school, and
how staff and parents had responded in new and exciting ways. There will
however be the times you’re ignored, stared at, even sworn at: and
that’s part of the sacrifice that being a priest entails.
So what does sacrifice have to do with being a priest? Well, start with
today's bible readings.
Today we remember St Peter: and in his letter he talks about your role
as an elder- and being an elder, a presbyter, means you will witness to
and live out the sufferings of Christ, alongside the sufferings of his
people. Being a priest, an elder, isn't about power or authority. If you
ever find yourself about to utter the words 'because I'm the vicar' when
asked why something should be done, don’t – seek help urgently
instead! However justified you think you may be, your authority is not
that of command, but comes from loving and sacrificial service to God
and others. Your job as an elder is to endure more suffering than anyone
else, without complaining or taking it out on anyone else.
We also see sacrifice in the reading from Jeremiah, where Jeremiah struggles
to keep his faith in God, wanting to walk away from his ministry and the
pain it brings, yet feeling he has to carry on with this fire burning
inside him which he can't deny, even though it burns him. And if you haven't
yet felt yet that you can't bear the pains and pressures of ministry any
more, and that you'd like to walk away, well you will: because as we follow
the love of God and it gets graven into our bones, then the sufferings
of the world and the sacrifice of God will touch us more deeply. It gets
harder, not easier, as you go along.
And in the gospel reading about Peter the fisherman: Jesus calls Peter
to start by doing what he can do, to lend him a boat from which to preach;
then he sends Peter out to do what Peter thinks he can do already, catch
fish, and Jesus shocks Peter by being better at spotting fish than the
professionals; and as Peter kneels at the feet of Jesus in amazement and
fear, the Lord calls him to leave it all behind - his boat, his livelihood,
his expertise, all that he has and thinks he is - and walk with Jesus
into the unknown. So God unmasks the competence behind which we hide,
and shows it as the weakness it is; but God accepts our weaknesses and
calls us to go beyond them - to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others.
You really don't know what you're doing today; you don't know where God
will take you, what will be asked of you, what joy and pain your calling
will bring you. You only know that God will be with you on each step of
the journey: the fire in your bones, the light through the darkness, the
love which sustains you, calling you into new things even as you feel
increasingly pushed beyond what you can endure. Here and now, like the
bread of the Eucharist which you will shortly celebrate, you are to be
taken and blessed and broken and given for the life of the world.
Like Jeremiah, Simon Peter said, Lord, leave me alone, I'm not able to
take it; but Jesus said – do not be afraid: from now on you’ll
be working, not with dead fish, but with living people...
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