Sermon: On Being a Priest

In the gospel today, Luke says that Jesus ‘went through cities and villages proclaiming and bringing good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, as well as some women’. All of Christian service, all of Christian life is in that short statement about being with Jesus in his ministry. And it makes me pause today, the 13th June, for it was on this day, Trinity Sunday 1976, that I was ordained a priest. And Luke’s emphasis on the women who were with him reminds us that it is 10 years ago that women were ordained priest in our church, an event we celebrated here in the Cathedral a week ago, and at which we continue to rejoice for all the ways in which women priests have enriched our understanding not only of priesthood but of human life.

Perhaps you will forgive me, then, for reflecting aloud for a few minutes on Christian priesthood. It is extraordinary, I think, that in the 21st century, priests should exist at all and should still be welcomed and wanted in a society such as ours. And of course I need to say at the outset that theologically, the priesthood of the ordained is not different from the priesthood of the whole people of God. Christ is the high priest who has opened up for us all the way to God. His priestly body, the church, stands before God on behalf of humanity to celebrate his goodness in creation and redemption and to enter into the pain of the world. The ordained priesthood focuses and represents this priesthood of all the baptised. What it comes down to is that an ordained priest can never speak about my priesthood or even my vocation as if these were private possessions apart from the priesthood and vocation of the church. Priesthood is for others and for God. A priest is a public representative of God’s catholic church. A priest is what he or she is because of what the church itself is called to be and what Christ for ever is.

Yet in another way, an ordained priest stands apart. We are anomalous, paradoxical people, like clowns and jesters, people who live an alternative lifestyle, who don’t quite fit the rules. Priests fascinate and make people nervous. We carry hopes and longings, projections and transferences. What are we paid to do? Is it a job or isn’t it? What does it mean publicly and officially to stand both for the paraphernalia of organised religion and at the same time for the contradiction of the cross? And how do we come to be here at all - for sometimes, the experience of vocation is that it happens somewhat against our will, or at least without our fully realising what is happening to us. Perhaps ordained priesthood becomes more elusive the more we inhabit it - just as a long-married couple can find it hard to put into words what lies at the heart of something so rich and rewarding. You are ordained priest in about an hour. You spend a lifetime becoming one.

An old tag is that the priest is alter Christus, standing as Christ towards others and to the world in word, in sacrament, in intercession, in absolution, in blessing. Another is that a priest as a ‘walking sacrament’ of the grace of God, to quote Austin Farrer: an embodied reminder that there is God to be reckoned with who calls us to love and serve him. To me, words like ‘awareness’ and ‘presence’ have become increasingly important: discovering that it is what we are as priests that is the fundamental thing. Carl Jung said that a society without priests would be severely impoverished because there would be no-one to reawaken in people the spiritual, the imaginative, the humane, the compassionate, the prophetic dimension of life, to be there, publicly, in Blake’s words, to open the doors of perception. Who would help people celebrate the God who is at the heart of life? Who would care for the soul?

I have vivid memories of 1976. It was a glorious summer. On retreat, I sat in the grounds of Nashdom Abbey under an immense cypress reading De Caussade’s Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence. The service took place in the chapel of my Oxford college. The preacher spoke out of St John’s Gospel about how love and service in the church derive from the love that is in God the Holy Trinity. Afterwards, we ate and drank in the college garden in a setting that could not have been more idyllic. Three days later, a name hit the headlines dramatically and tragically: Soweto, the name that became the symbol of the struggle for racial justice in South Africa. It was a harsh reminder, at a time I was filled with beautiful thoughts, of how the world actually was, where people were crying out of their oppression in the old slogan of the slave liberationists, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’

There was to me a deep synchronicity between Soweto and being ordained priest. On the very same day that I was celebrating the eucharist for the first time, and in awe of the holy things I was handling, people, mostly young, were being put to death: broken body and shed blood not only in the bread and wine of eucharist, but in Soweto’s streets and squares. I knew I must never forget this, how priesthood means both celebrating with and suffering with. Priesthood connects us with the whole of life: I am learning that. But I glimpsed early on that there is a particular vocation in ordained ministry to be there for victims, for the suffering, for those in pain. Archbishop Michael Ramsey said to his ordinands: ‘In your service of others you will feel, you will care, you will be hurt, you will have your heart broken. And it is doubtful if any of us can do anything at all until we have been very much hurt, and until our hearts have been very much broken. And this is because God’s gift to us is the glory of Christ crucified - being sensitive to the pain and sorrow that exists in so much of the world.’

Strange as it may seem, I believe that society still welcomes men and women who choose this way, who are chosen for this way of involving and immersing themselves in the glory and the pain of life. In two weeks’ time, men and women will be ordained priest in this cathedral and in cathedrals and churches across the land. Pray for them. Pray for vocations. Pray for us. Pray that as the years pass and we grow old in vocation, love may not grow cold nor fervour fade. In the gospel for today, Luke seems to be saying that being with Jesus in his ministry flows from only one motive: the love that drove the woman of the city to anoint Jesus’ feet with her tears and her oil. Priests are as sinful, as broken as she was. Yet few of us know how to love as she did, perhaps because the danger of being a religious professional is that you can become estranged from those basic facts of the spiritual life which are about knowing God, being forgiven and loving much. Priesthood is a privileged and wonderful vocation but it is not without risk to the soul.

At my ordination, the choir sang a favourite anthem, Charles Wood’s Expectans Expectavi.

This sanctuary of my soul Unwitting I keep white and whole
Unlatched and lit, if thou shouldst care To enter and to tarry there.
Call thou early, call thou late To thy great service dedicate.

It was a text not only for me as a new priest, but for all of us as we promised live the truth as it is in Jesus and to be drawn into the movement of God’s Trinitarian love towards the world. And if we are here this morning tasting the love of God in this sacrament, where else would any of us be tomorrow and in our ordinary days than with Jesus bringing the good news of the kingdom of God – ‘call thou early, call thou late’?