A Sermon for Priests

Maundy Thursday 2007
St. Alban's Cathedral, Prince Albert

This afternoon we reaffirm the vows we made at our ordination. The ministerial priesthood is the living proclamation of the saving sacrifice of Calvary in word and sacrament. The priesthood has many dimensions, of course, as the Ordinal makes plain; we are to be messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord; to teach and to warn, “to feed and provide for the Lord’s family; to seek for Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for his children who are in the midst of this wicked world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever.”

Sometimes we feel frustrated and ineffective in our ministry. Some of you have told me that you think of yourself as a messenger whose messages go unread, as a watchman whose warnings go unheeded, as a steward in bankruptcy, as a shepherd whose sheep are unmovable in their contentment. You look for evidence of the effectiveness of your ministry but you find your aged fig tree is no more fruitful than the day you inherited it.

Perhaps your Church and Communion seem less of a blessing than a burden to you. Perhaps you find yourself at the local ministerial association the object of incomprehension or suspicion or sympathy.

It is good that this service falls in Holy Week when we remember the last days of Jesus’ earthly ministry. We find his ministry not in genteel stagnation but in disarray. His doctrinally muddled disciples all let him down: the worst betrays him, the best denies him, the rest abandon him and go to ground. His mission is in apparent collapse. The agenda of the world moves inexorably forward; one court of justice after another fails. Even Pilate suggests to the crowd that they might take pity on the poor fellow – “behold the man!” But no. Jesus is nailed to the tree in abandoned desolation.

Part of the proclamation of the Cross is that God’s hand is often hidden. The Kingdom of God advances in ways that we cannot always perceive. The Kingdom advances not by Valkyries, tremendous on winged stallions, descending from the sky, but by the still small voice, by the infant in swaddling clothes, by the mustard seed.

“I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.”

If we evaluate our ministry and are discouraged, we should be discouraged not by our uselessness but by our vanity. The effectiveness of our ministry is not finally ours to evaluate: no measure we concoct will be God’s measure.

II.

Earlier this year a visitor to the Diocese approached me and told me the same thing he had told me ten years earlier. He was frustrated that his bishop wouldn’t ordain him a priest on the strength of his many years of faithful service as a lay reader. He balked at his bishop’s requirement that he take some schooling. This was an absurd and unbiblical demand, in his view, and he cited the example of the Apostles, none of whom had studied at a theological college. (I bit my tongue and did not point out that Jesus required of the Apostles a three year live-in curriculum before he would loose them on the world). And yet this gentleman was touching on something that was true: the proclamation of the Cross is only partly a proclamation of words.

The Ordinal is plain about this. We pray in the Collect that the candidate may faithfully serve “by word and good example.” Cranmer’s monumental exhortation to the ordinand continually intertwines knowledge of the Scriptures with holiness of life, and, conversely, error in religion with viciousness of life. A seventeenth century preacher put it this way: “Our actions, if they be good, speak louder than our sermons; our preaching is our speech, our good life is our eloquence. Preaching celebrates the Sabbath, but a good life makes the whole week a Sabbath.” [1]

In every generation Jesus communicates not only by words on a page, or ideas in a catechism, but by apostles who love him. St. Paul puts it this way to the Corinthians:

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. [2]

Christ proclaims in every generation the Good News of the Cross not by dropping tablets of stone from the heavens or igniting bushes or making donkeys speak but by sending priests with authority, an authority that is validated both by the Church and by their intense relationship with God. The priest’s love for Jesus matters just as much as the correctness of his or her teaching and preaching. One is not a substitute for the other: they must be found together.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. [3]

We bless oils today, oil for baptism, oil for healing. Quite commonly people come off the street into the Synod Office to request a bottle of healing oil. We have to decline these requests because these oils are meant to be accompanied by a priest. The oil is sent with the priest not because he or she is a brilliant technician but because he or she is God’s authorized ambassador. The Church needs to be confident that her holy oils will be administered by holy hands.

So the priest must be a believer who loves Christ with a love that marries intellectual conviction with an intense life of prayer.  People can sense what kind of spiritual life (or lack of spiritual life) we have. No amount of technique or activity or programme can substitute for a priest’s prayer life, and, indeed, technique and activity and programme will likely not go very far unless the priest is perceptibly holy.

III.

I would not place this call to holiness on you as burden. It is a gift of God. George Herbert, a country priest of a small parish himself, contrasts his priesthood with an image of the Old Testament priest Aaron in his Temple vestments:

Of Aaron he writes:

HOLINESS on the head,
Light and perfection on the breast,
Harmonious bells below raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.*

But George Herbert says of himself:

Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest :
Poor priest ! thus am I drest.

It is only in putting on Christ that he can bear the burden of priesthood:

Only another head
I have another heart and breast,
Another music, making live, not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest :
In Him I am well drest. [4]

IV.

Our priesthood, for all its frustrations and challenges, is a life of wonderful privilege and blessing. For one thing, God has given us all at least some holy lay people to encourage us. They are present in every parish. Part of our spiritual vocation is to be open to receiving the nearness to God they convey to us. We all need the humility to receive their gift.

What a privilege to spend our lives, like Simeon, at prayer in the Temple! What a privilege be paid to read and meditate upon the Scripture and then to preach the Good News of Christ! What a privilege to celebrate the mysteries of our Lord’s body and blood, to introduce people young and old to Christ, to reconcile the penitent, to awake the sleeping, to baptize, to marry, to prepare the dying for their final journey!

And at the end of all this to follow those whom we have prepared for death, to experience ourselves the full flowering of our soul in heaven, where she, in the words of John Donne:

reads without spelling, and knows without thinking, and concludes without arguing; she is at the end of her race without running; In her triumph without fighting; In her haven without sailing; A free-man without any prentiship; at full years, without any wardship; and a Doctor without any proceeding. She knows truly, and easily and immediately, and entirely, and everlastingly; Nothing left out at first, nothing worne out at last, that conduces to her happiness. [5]

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

[1] John Donne, Sermons II. 13.167-8.

[2] 2 Cor 3: 2-3.

[3] 1 Cor 13:1.

[4] George Herbert, Aaron.

[5] John Donne, Sermons VI.2.523-31.