Will’s Anniversary

In my time here at St Mary’s, I would frequently find myself internally tutting and eye-rolling as yet another visiting preacher decided to begin their sermon with some well-meaning but inane comments about how simply amazing it was to be preaching in this beautiful church with its rich and deep and troubled sense of history, and to be inhabiting this very tall and illustrious pulpit.

Well today, I should take all that back, because I’m going to do much the same. It is really really special to be back with you.

And it is poignant too: The last time I was here it was the weekend when we had Philip O’Neill’s funeral, and the Sunday before the first lockdown – way back then. Some of you will know that earlier this year, my sermons from St Mary’s were published together in a volume, dedicated in part to Philip – well, you should all know that, because you should all have bought a copy by now! It is particularly special to me to be back here in this funny wooden tower where those sermons first came about – sermons, for whatever their quality, that I’ve lived with over and over again this past year, and which were for me so formative in struggling to find and voice my own faith.

That idea of ‘finding your voice’ is a pretty good place to start with our readings today – and as we give thanks with Will for twenty-five years of ministry as a priest in God’s church. I’ve not yet asked Will where he sees himself in today’s readings – the itinerant beggar, the frustrated exorcist, the rejected prophet, the powerful wonder-worker, or a minister among impudent and stubborn rebels.

Each of these types is a familiar trope for the ancient holy man or woman – liminal, misunderstood, a bit wacky, at odds with the world, but full of strange and desperately-desired promises that hint at something beyond.

These holy caricatures suggest a tension between God’s messenger being welcomed and celebrated and revered, and their being socially precarious, vulnerable, and disconnected.

That’s a tension I recognise, in trying to minister faithfully to your calling. On the one hand, there is a desire and hope and goal that what you as a minister have to offer and be and say to and for others will resonate, will be received, will take root and bear fruit – you hope that stubborn hearts will soften, that your ministry and service will be welcomed and effective, that healing of bodies and minds and hearts and communities will be enabled.

Yet, on the other hand, there comes the abiding sense that perhaps every minister knows, that if you think you’re aiming for smooth popularity, for adoring fans, for people to hang on your every word and command, then, even if you achieve that, you’re falling far short of your calling. This is not just the get-out-clause for useless ministers; there’s a truth there, that success, in vocational terms, is a tricky thing.

Those, I find, whose call seems to resonate deepest and truest are those who have learned to be themselves and to let the rest sort itself out. Because finding a voice is the easy bit – finding your voice, your calling, is the hard bit. Anyone can be someone; but finding the courage and style to be utterly unreservedly yourself, the ‘you’ that God is calling and filling and redeeming and anointing, that’s the common human challenge, whatever your calling may be. In the Christian vocation, the way in which you get to be and are called to be utterly yourself for God is precisely that: Yourself, for God.

It is only when God is not just in the picture, but IS the picture, that the contours and colour and character of the person you might become can come into their own. Your voice is the smallest little echo of the voice of God, and as you speak out and live out a life for God, all you can hope is that as you give yourself to that voice, that calling, that is God’s not yours, people will hear in your little echo, just the slightest twang, a murmur, of God’s voice, calling all our hurts to healing, our failings to be redeemed, our staleness and tiredness to a new life, a new creation.

So, you’ve been called; but now you’ve got to get up and get moving, get on the road, you’ve got to do something about it. We hear in our Gospel reading of the twelve disciples making their entrance village by village, to see how they would be received. They don’t take much with them. It is an exercise in trust – though not at first some fundamental theological exercise in seeing whether divine providence will come true and miraculous lunch boxes will be discovered in phone boxes along the way. Not at first: for whatever undergirding trust in God that this exercise in poverty forms in the disciple, it does so by throwing them first on the mercy and hospitality, the grace of others. Not just any others – but the complete stranger, and someone who is not yet on your side, who is not signed up to what your life is now all about. In other words, trust across the breach of difference and potential suspicion.

That breach is crossed not with power and influence, but in embodying our emptiness and vulnerability – by throwing ourselves on the ground of another’s mercy. We cannot show anyone anything of what it is to stand in need of the grace and mercy and providence of God, if we cannot first acknowledge that each of us stands in need of grace and mercy and generosity from each other.

We, each of us, learn the patterns of love, of acceptance, of sacrifice, through those who have shown us the same, whose lives and words and actions have embodied for us the truth and grace of God that holds all things together. How true, too, for those of us called to some form of ministry and teaching and service – which, in some way, is all of us, really. But perhaps for those of us with robes and dog collars, who keep getting unknowingly popped on pedestals and are expected to know the answers or take the flack, it is, I have found, one of the most wonderful shapes of grace that you are ministered to by those to whom you seek to minister. It has, for me, been those who received my ministry from whom I myself have received the most in my time of need, who have renewed my faith, my humanity, who have recalled me to grace.

Now I’ve been using the word minister quite a lot – but this is a celebration of the anniversary of you being ordained priest, Will. Perhaps this is a slip back into my dark evangelical past, when I first came across Will. My first introduction to Will was while I was escaping my own evangelical theological college, and suckling on the teets of liberality at the Westcott House bar. I didn’t actually quite meet Will, but just ahead of him, entering the bar as a sort of advance party to the Vice Principal, was his dog Oscar, doing the rounds, come to check up on everyone. I wish someone had explained to those twelve disciples that if they just took an adorable labrador with them on their trip round those villages, they needn’t have worried for a thorough and enthusiastic welcome.

But anyway – to these images of ministry we see in our readings today – the inspired prophet, the travelling preacher – we must add that of the priest. Much of what I’ve already noted applies here to the shape of a priestly calling – that sense of being stuck in the middle, or mediating I think we call it, between belonging and never quite belonging, between the voice of God and the hearts of God’s people, between pain and healing, trauma and peace, failing and redemption, sin and grace, doubt and faith. The priest stands there with broken bread, holding the bloodied body of Christ, and dares to speak of healing and the promise of the redemption of all things. The priest stands in the tension of that and every breach for others and with others, that each of us might find that in that liminal space where things don’t add up, where we can’t make sense of things, where we can barely find the questions let alone the answers – there, in the breaches and breaks of our lives, is God…and God is not done yet. There is God suspending the tension, breaking down the tidy facades of the tidy houses of our tidy lives, breaking us down to remake us, to heal us, to make us whole.

Maybe, as we trek through the villages of our lives, we too need to be stripped bare, to be resensitized to the power and gift of the simple mercies of others that minister to us God’s unending care. Maybe we need to take away all that buffers us from the liminality and uncertainty of our own existence, to not run from the discords and disparities we feel in our hearts, but to know God holds them with us and for us, and holds us there, that as we dwell in the breaches and breaks of our lives, of our communities, of our families, of our world, that we, each of us, priests of God, find him calling us to sit, to pray, to be, to speak, to act, to dream, to dare, to bless, to offer our echo of the voice that calls us, and calls all things, to be restored, made new, and whole, and glorious for God.

And as, in a moment, the broken body of Christ is held out to us –

Christ betrayed, silenced, abused, may we know that God holds all our brokenness, the bruises and betrayals we limp around with, God cries through the silence and fear that choke us from hearing and following his call and speaking his word in a lonely and confused world; God still holds us, still calls us, still sends us out into that world – because God is not done yet.