Sermon for the Ordination of Deacons

I once came across a book in a library which convinced me that there are clerical fashions that are as changeable in their own way as the width of flares on trousers. It was called “Advice for young clergy” and it was published in 1870 by the Bishop of Limerick. It was a best seller in the Church of Ireland until oh, at least 1871. It was full of lots of practical advice, such as this, about pastoral visits  “You may dismount your horse at any time, but do not stable it until invited” and this, about preaching, “ Failing all else, always be possessed of one sound commentary on the Epistle to the Romans”.  But there are three things, he suggests, that young clergy should cultivate above all.  The first is a very good hat, for dignity, the second is a melodious voice, so you do not cause offense to your congregation, and the third is gout, so you’ll never be without an anxious expression.

Dignity, inoffensiveness, and anxiety. Far be it from me to doubt the wisdom of bishops, even dead Irish ones, but Meg and Katrina, as you’re ordained to the diaconate today, I’d like to suggest there are very good reasons not to strive for any of these virtues.

The first virtue to avoid is dignity. The days are long gone, thank God, when there was any kind of inherent status in the office of a deacon or a priest, or certainly any that a good hat would help you with. The English word ‘minister’ comes from a root which means small and insignificant. We are, quite literally, mini people in the scheme of things, and smallness and weakness is our stock in trade. The word that St Paul uses most often for a deacon means a servant, or an attendant, and it’s very closely associated with the word that means dusty from running. A deacon should be a person who is so anxious to wait upon God that they run to do God’s will, and they get sweaty and covered in filth in the process.

Another word that St Paul uses for minister, though very rarely, means a slave, a rower on a galley, out of sight in the dark in the second tier of rowers down. A galley slave works away unseen and unseeing, toiling away together in time with all the other slaves on the ship. They trust that all their efforts will take people to a new land, even if they don’t get to see it for themselves. That's the incredible privilege of our ministry. Our role is to take people by our service, by prayer, by word and sacrament to another place. There’s very little room left for dignity if we’re doing that properly.

The second virtue the book recommends is inoffensiveness Now, I’m not suggesting you go out of your way to insult people – just beware of the terrible oppressive vice of Christian niceness. God preserve us from cardboard cut-out clergy who smile slightly too much to be convincing, and are just a little more dull and two dimensional than the rest of the world. There is a suspicion in the culture we’re a part of that once you are ordained you immediately turn into Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a funeral. There’s a strangely consistent picture of clergy painted in TV and film. They are usually rather kindly, permanently baffled and experts in odd and unworldly things like badgers or Greek pots. I have forgotten most of Dick Emery’s characters, but not the Vicar with his huge teeth and vast threatening smile. These are not the kind of people you want to get stuck next to in a long haul flight.

And it affects our mission. If we are to be authentic ministers of the Gospel, we have to be people who become more richly ourselves by experiencing the extravagant ordinariness of God’s grace. There is a natural, unfussy, unselfconscious kind of holiness which allows us to become ourselves and to appreciate each other more fully. It allows us to see what we might not otherwise see of the sheer rich variety of God’s creation, because we know that at some level are all inexorably the same. When the Church absorbs this atmosphere of rich holiness, we can find in our neighbours and ourselves just a hint more quirkiness and individuality than we might otherwise be aware of.  

The last virtue that we should avoid is a kind of pained anxiety to do the right thing.  Many of us labour under the illusion that ministry is one of the helping professions. We imagine that the church is sustained by the services it provides or the amount of fellowship and good feeling in the congregation, and somehow our job is to struggle to maintain it. If there is no sense of purpose other than meeting people’s needs, there is no possible way to limit what people demand of you in ministry, those demands become voracious and all-consuming. Ministry is trivialised when it becomes solely about the meeting of needs.

Sometimes the solution that is suggested is that clergy should develop more self-esteem, learn to say no, demand a day off – in brief, to become as self-centred as the rest of the culture around us. We live in a society which tends to respond to lack of meaning by telling people they will feel better if they more fully develop their egos, and sometimes that leaks over into the church as well. It might be temporarily satisfying, but ultimately its careful self-preservation is not what we’re about. The church is much more than an economy of self-fulfillment.

The acid test for our entire ministry is the church at worship. In our worship, we retell and are held accountable to the story of what God is doing with us in Christ. All our ministry can be evaluated by liturgical criteria: How well does what we’re doing enable people to be with God?  Ministers of the Gospel who determine to speak to truth, to reprove, to correct, to witness, to interpret, to remember and retell God’s story – can expect to be lonely occasionally. But it’s a loneliness of  unshowy faithfulness rather than a loneliness produced by being overly accessible.

So what, in the end is ministry about? A few verses after the end of this evening’s Gospel reading, Pilate asks a question that can shape the whole direction of our ministry for us, if only we will allow it. The scene is the most dramatic political confrontation in scripture. Pilate has interrogated Jesus; he will go on to declare him innocent three times, but to satisfy the relentless baying mob, he will have him flogged and put to death anyway .  But before he does Pilate asks a single, incriminating question. “What is truth?” he muses but he dare not stay still long enough to hear the answer.

Our basic vocation as Christians – of which our vocation as clergy is only ever an addition and a refinement – is to bear witness to the truth. It is as simple as that. Our job is to give evidence for God, to make God believable in how we live and how we die. We give thanks that God in Christ has made himself credible; credible in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus; credible in the lives of those in whom Jesus has come alive. And we give thanks for Meg and Katrina who are offering themselves for this terrible, relentless, joyful, privileged, overwhelming ministry.

In the name of Christ. Amen.

Procrastination is an art...

I have a sermon to write for an ordination on Sunday.  So far today I have:

• Found reasons to explain the history of Anglicanism (with gestures) to non-English speaking Poles.
• Re-written a brochure about confirmation classes to include "funky" post-it note graphics
• Discovered a passionate interest in the art and archeology of Assyria, and joined three online groups to discuss it ad nauseam
• Made a large ball of elastic bands
• Dismembered the ball and used the elastic bands individually as offensive weapons
  
• Plotting the next story in the ongoing saga of Meryl the happy goat, avatar of Anglicanism
  
• Seized people and forced them on pain of death to drink coffee with me.

So this cartoon by the lovely Dave Walker struck m rather forcefully:


Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

The relentless grind

I knew I had a problem when I found myself attempting to read emails on my laptop while sitting in the bath. The relaxing cup of chamomile tea went undrunk; the lavender-scented bubbles slowly popped around me, and still I wrestled to keep the screen above the water-line.

Technology adds a great deal to life, and I wouldn’t be without it. But it produces a kind of relentless electronic fidgeting which eats up the mental attention and makes any kind of intellectual focus increasingly difficult. The distinction between work time and leisure time gets blurred and we get snappish and tetchy. We may shoot off an email at 1.00am, but how well are we actually communicating?

There’s no doubt that we are creatures hard-wired for communication, but it isn’t all about speed or immediacy. I once had a spiritul director who was a wise, occasionally-stroppy and largely silent nun. The tradition she represented saw self-control, listening and not speaking as essential for the kind of deep communication we were created for. Anything less would ultimately be unsatisfying. 'Be still and know that I am God' wrote the Psalmist or to paraphrase: stop the relentless fidgeting, stop worrying that your missing something, and give yourself wholly over to listening. In that stillness there is the space for creativity and complex thinking ; we may even a whisper of the voice of God.

Long live the weeds

I’ve spent the last few days reading a biography of the composer and notorious eccentric Dame Edith Smith.  She was invited to dinner one evening with some friends who lived about 10 miles away. She duly set off on her bicycle encased in thick brown tweeds with a flying helmet on her head.  When she was about half way there, she was suddenly struck by doubt. What, she thought, if she wasn’t properly dressed for dinner?  She decided that what she really needed was a corset, so she made a detour to the nearest village. “I’m sorry madam, “ said the flustered shop assistant. “I’m afraid we don’t stock corsets.”  Dame Edith looked around the shop, her eyes lit up, and she pointed.  “I’ll take that” she said. And about half an hour later, the dinner party hostess was perplexed to find Dame Edith ensconced in her shrubbery in a state of partial undress dismembering a large metal birdcage and trying to fit it under her tweeds.

Eccentricity is often uncomfortable.  In my last parish in Oxford, we once had a poorly dressed stranger come in on a Sunday morning just as the sermon was starting.  He took off his hat and passed it from row to row in the congregation.  And given that we were mostly English, and largely middle class and typically Anglican, we sort of shuffled for a bit, and caught each other’s eyes, and popped in a few stray coins and tried to look like we were still concentrating on the sermon.  Then the man marched to the front of the church, up to the state of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and laid the hat down at her feet. “Sorry its not very much, love” he said in a loud voice. “They’re a tight bunch.” And then he stomped out.

 I wonder if its ever been very different. If you were one of Jesus’ contemporaries, the quality to aspire to in your social and your spiritual life was a sort of decency at all costs. Whatever you do, don’t cause a fuss, and don’t give anyone reason to talk about you. The audience who first heard the parable of the weeds and the wheat would very likely have been the same.   Your duty is to wrestle with the law in all its details and to keep your distance from anything or anyone unclean. You are contaminated by eating the wrong food, by being in the wrong place, and by mixing with the wrong people; it doesn’t just make you dirty, it makes you ungodly. That explains the outrage of the decent religious folk in the gospel when Jesus spends his time with notorious sinners, with prostitutes, with the politically dodgy, illegal immigrants and the people who made their living from things that fall off the back of trucks. These are the weeds of the world. Surely someone who claims to be holy ought to be giving them a wide berth?

 All of the sympathies of the decent people would have been with the servant in the story. He gets agitated about the unnamed enemy who has paid a visit by night and planted these weeds.  The tares wouldn’t have had the audacity to spring up by themselves in his field - they are nasty plants planted by malicious people and the only sensible thing to do is get rid of them. That’ll teach them! But the landowner dismisses all his concerns. Just let them grow, he says with sublime confidence. I don’t care where they came from. We’ll see whether they turn out to be valuable or not at the end when harvest comes. In the meantime, you’ve got a mixture of good and bad, real and counterfeit all growing next to each other. Don’t worry about it.


The church, ideally, has all sorts of people tangled up together but increasingly it seems hard to live with the tension of our differences. There is a persuasive type of theology that wants to make careful distinctions – to divide the saints from the sinners, and to get rid of the weeds which have taken root in the body of Christ before they spoil everything. Those of you who have been following developments in the Anglican Communion over the last few years will have seen that theology at work, as the various parts of the communion shuffle towards a divoce, but manouevre to see who will keep the house. It would be easier for all of us if the church was a community of the likeminded. But the Gospel doesn’t allow us that luxury.  We are one church because we are all baptised into Christ, not, thank God, because we all believe the same things. The genius of Anglicanism is that it is so imprecise and largely so unheroic. We are a church, at our best, given to an unfussy and prayerful sort of pragmatism.  At our best,  we wrestling with the kind of accommodations which allow people of vastly different beliefs to somehow live together under the same roof. We struggle, and we often fail, to show the world the strange generous hospitality of God who keeps an open table for all.

But it is always so much easier to spend our time with those who are most like us, the people who affirm us most. Each of us lives with an almost unconscious temptation to weed things and people out of our lives. I keep a stack of old address books in a shoebox, and when I look back over them, I see a slow sort of attrition over the years. People who were once friends or colleagues slip back to being occasional correspondents, then creep onto the once-a-year-at Christmas lists, and finally we lose touch altogether.  And they are often those whose take on the world is different from mine.  Sometimes I feel the loss of the people who challenge me most, or who call me to account, but to be honest, I mostly just don’t notice that they’re gone.

The temptation to weed can make an appearance within our lives as well.  As a culture we are strangely addicted to self-improvement. We join a gym, or take a class, or read a book which promises the solution to some problem we are wrestling with. We aim to be fitter, happier and more productive, and we try to weed out those parts of ourselves that we don’t want other people to catch a glimpse of.  Because it is far too hard to live with the truth that we are in equal parts gifted and failures, wise beyond measure and bent double with our own anxieties. For every unselfish thing we do, there will be some small moment of compromise at someone else’s expense. For every generous act, there will be some deficit in our ability to love and be loved.

It is tempting to see salvation as part of the self-improvement game.  God picks us up, dusts us off, weeds out the inadequate and sinful parts of ourselves and in exchange for our promise to try harder, generally makes us a better person. But it is much trickier to accept that God knows us in every detail, and loves us anyway.  Most of us would rather be fixed like broken toys, than loved exactly as we are. Yet with all the tangle of our talents, our bluster and our mistakes and all our noisy self-reliance, God loves us . We are wheat and weeds together, and we are deeply loved. That is the startling and terrible promise of God.

Life's simple pleasures

I've been using the Book Depository for years for my obsessive online book-ferreting. Now I find they have a live site where you can watch the world shop for books. Its hypnotic. While looked on, with a certain voyeuristic pleasure,  someone in Wales bought The Reluctant Vegetarian, some one in Finland bought Zombie Flesh Eaters and someone in New Zealand bought The Care Bear Sticker Book Volume I.
(It comes in volumes?)

Magic, magic, magic.

The brilliant Dave Walker.

I recommend Dave Walker's blog, which regularly has me chortling happily to myself. Its the anarchic face of Anglicanism...

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

"Vicar, do you know that poem about death?"

I took a funeral this week, in which the family chose as a reading the notorious poem Henry Scott Holland, "Death is nothing at all"
It's a poem I've never really appreciated, since it seems to minimise the reality of death, and it's frankly uncomfortable to stand among the weeping mourners and assert feebly, "I have only slipped away into the next room." I've always assumed it was a piece of British stiff-upper-lip sentiment, but I discovered this week, thanks to Giles Fraser, that it's lifted from Scott Holland's 1910 sermon in St Paul's cathedral after the death of Edward VII. And it takes death seriously: "It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared. It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters".

Sometimes we feel pressure to make out that death doesn't really exist, that human beings just keep going in another realm under slightly brighter lights and with fewer creases in their clothes. It's good to find that the slightly sickly sentimentality of Henry Scott Holland has some real bottle behind it.