Bishop Michael's Sermons
Ordination Charge, 5 July 2009
Winchester Cathedral
But you – keep your eye on what you’re doing; accept the hard times along with the good; keep the Message alive; do a thorough job as God’s servant.”
(2 Timothy 4.5, Eugene Peterson The Message)
On Wednesday morning last week, the celebration of the Birth of St John the Baptist, I was in Westminster Abbey for the ordination as Bishop of Graham kings as Bishop of Sherborne in the Diocese of Salisbury.
After the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and I had the best seats in the place! Sitting on Rowan’s left, balancing Richard on his right, at the top of the steps before the High Altar, I could see everyone else in the Choir and the Transepts. And though the open doors in the Screen, and then through the great doors at the West end of the Nave, I could see the world going by – the buses and the taxis, the tourists and the civil servants, every so often a police car or an ambulance with their sirens. Surrounded, as you are in the Abbey, by reminders of the panoply of the history of England, I thought how questions of Church and State occupy me and others today. I thought of Parliament, a hundred yards behind me as I sat there, and the last few traumatic weeks – and I remembered John the Baptist’s word to soldiers, “Be content with your Pay” (Luke 3.14)!
I reflected on how I had spent the previous day, across the road in Parliament, and other days recently, with still others to come – in the House of Lords Committee on the Coroners and Justice Bill, and with two commitments in particular: to oppose those seeking to create, by amendments to the Bill, an opening for Assisted Suicide, Assisted Dying, Euthanasia; and to oppose the Government in its attempt to reintroduce a Clause which is likely to expose to the risk of Police enquiry anyone who, without intention to harass or intimidate, let alone to stir up “hatred”, expresses traditional beliefs and attitudes, whether Christian or not, that differ from the currently ruling orthodoxies about sexual, and especially about homosexual, behaviour.
And I remembered, in moments of praying and thinking surrounded by the tombs of monarchs and politicians from the Norman Conquest to the present, that I’d read, in a recent lecture by the Bishop of London on William Pitt, that Pitt had “pressed for more rights for Dissenters…….and was critical of the bishops for trying to maintain a confessional state. He was a supporter of the free market in religious ideas which was finally achieved in 1829.” I had written to Bishop Richard that it seems today that it is the Government that is seeking to re-impose a “confessional state”, in the face of many others and some at least of the bishops who are advocating “a free market in religious ideas”; but the “confession” in question, with regard to both these issues for which I am attending the Committee of the Coroners and Justice Bill, is that pressed on the Government by the ascendant lobbies of the National Secular Society and Stonewall!
I share all this with you, because I judge that it accurately catches elements of our present context in this country which are likely to become still more significant, still more pervasive, as you live out your discipleship, and your ordained ministry as the place where God has set you, through these next years and decades. To be a Christian, and so all the more to be an ordained minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is already to be “counter-cultural” to a degree that I think that I could never have imagined when I was in your position 42 and 41 years ago. I think that this will become more, not less, the case. This is of course (but how easily we fail to see it!) the situation of the Christians not just of the first decades but of the first centuries; and the situation of millions of our Christian sisters and brothers in many different places and cultures across the world today. But I do not find that very many Christians in this country, and perhaps especially that very many Church of England Christians, are fully alive to this fundamental reality.
As I was preparing this Charge, I was also preparing to preach on Sunday evening in a church in Southampton, the Eve of the Commemoration of Saints Peter and Paul. The set Reading was from Ezekiel, from the demanding (as so many of them are!) third chapter:
“All my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart and hear with your ears; then go to the exiles, (not to a people of obscure speech and difficult language but) to your people, and speak to them, “Thus says the Lord God”; whether they hear or refuse to hear.” (Ezekiel 3.5, 10-11)
I thought of the fine priest-in-charge whom I was going to make Vicar of the parish; and of course I thought of you, and your and my and our Church’s, our people’s, context, the context for our participation in God’s Mission which I’ve just been sketching. I thought of your, and the Vicar’s, and my calling to sustain and teach and encourage and nerve God’s people for their participation, through all their as well as our waking hours, in the Mission of God – in our contemporary context.
As the Cranmer Hall Bible-Knowledge Survey has most recently underlined, though we are among “our own people” and (mostly) working in English, not therefore in the main among “people of obscure speech and difficult language”, yet we have become so to most of them; and this, not only on account of so little familiarity, across so much of the population, with the most basic elements of Christian believing that are so familiar to us; but because it is widely not fashionable, not intellectually appropriate, even not good for professional advancement, to take seriously the claims of Christian Faith. Yet as you and I know, so many people are hearing, freshly and for the first time or for the first time in years of their lives, the Good News of Jesus Christ; as at the beginning and always, so now, through the quality of the lives and the love and the care of Christians and of the Church, but also as we learn new languages, new ways of expressing in words, too, what we believe.
And, too, new tones of voice. Neither Ezekiel, nor John the Baptist, was a comfortable person with whom to sit down and talk in a café or in your kitchen! We are thought, to be honest we are often experienced especially in the media, to be as prickly, as judgemental, as unattractive as they seemed to many of their contemporaries. So in reaction it’s tempting to present Jesus, who in reality was no less uncompromising than those prophets, as quite different, as inclusive without reserve, even “meek and mild”, eating only, as it were, cucumber sandwiches like a stage vicar! Yet Jesus, and the first Christians, and Christians today all over the world and especially in its most demanding places, Jesus is and they are tellingly, convertingly attractive to people of every sort as they live, and present, a full-bodied Christian Faith. You and I are called to find life-styles, the words and the tone to be as attractive here – and this week we are praying confidently for God’s equipping Grace for each of you.
If all this places demands upon you and upon me, I’m well aware that it will sometimes be demanding for our families too. In the UK these demands do not often come, as they come so often elsewhere in the world, with knives and clubs and threats of violence; but not only you and I, but our spouses and our children too, can be hurt by what people say or write about us, indeed by what we judge it right to say or write.
All this places a premium upon your, as upon my, continual formation for discipleship and for Christian ministry – the more so, as you and I are charged with responsibility for the formation of others. I hope that I can say that we shall continue to do our best as Bishops and Archdeacons, and then as a Diocese through your training incumbents and through Simon Baker and his colleagues, to serve and encourage this “continual formation” – formation into the character and the effectiveness of our Lord. It is, though, first of all for each of you to take for yourselves the proper responsibility for your own continual formation, that is expressed in the Declarations that you will make in the Ordination Service – the life- giving responsibility to seek to be with our Lord in worship and prayer, in using Scripture, with your fellow-disciples – and in the work of the ministry.
For all this, of course “Who is equal?” (2 Cor.2.16)
So remember always, that the letter near the end of which come the words with which I began this address,
keep your eye on what you’re doing; accept the hard times along with the good; keep the Message alive; do a thorough job as God’s servant”,
has close to its beginning these words to which I return and return: here is 2 Timothy 1.6-7, again in Eugene Peterson’s translation:
“The special gift of ministry that you received when I laid hands on you and prayed – keep that ablaze! God doesn’t want us to be shy with his gifts, but bold and loving and sensible.”