Sermon: Flesh and Blood

Twenty one years ago today I went through an enormous personal transformation. I knew at the time that something big had happened. But I was not aware how big, how significant, how changing, until a few weeks later a small child , about four years old I think, pointed me out to her mother and said, :'Look, its Rachel's daddy'.

The birth of our first child was of course a more significant event for mother and daughter but for me the rapid transiton from being a person in one's own right, to be known as ‘Rachel's daddy' or later ‘dad ' was a very big challenge.  And a few years ago, when Rachel was at the senior end of her secondary education, it became apparent that to her teachers the title ‘Rachel Cherry's father' was a much more auspicious one than ‘rector of the parish church' or ‘school governor'.

This transformation of the self through parenthood is of course a theme at the heart of our commemoration and celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary last Tuesday.  God in Christ transformed Mary's identity from peasant girl to what the Orthodox call Theotokos or Mother of God. This is not always a phrase that we in the west find easy to absorb.  But when we recall that she herself became a disciple, we begin to appreciate something of the transformation of Mary that was initiated when her child came into the world.

As images and statutes of the deposition and pieta remind us, Mary went all the way with Jesus. And when I appreciate this I begin to see Mary as a human being whose humility was expressed and developed by the normal method of simultaneous openness to God's will and human suffering and loss. Mary's humility and holiness are most evident in the way in which she stayed with her Son, the way in which she was changed and transformed, matured, by her remaining loyal to her offspring. So I want to suggest that Mary's humility is less a facet of her youth than her growth. Just as, over time, Jesus was revealed as more and more Christlike, so Mary was revealed as ever more and more childlike - ever more humble and vulnerable and accepting. 

I wonder whether the same might possibly be true for us. That we might grow into childlikeness.  To explore this possibility, let me reflect a little on my experience of parenthood and priesthood.

10 months after Rachel was born I was ordained, and so for me the vocations of priesthood and parenthood have always been intertwined.  It has not always been easy. Twenty years ago in Manchester the idea that a curate had parental duties at home that might interfere with the 24/7 obligations of a parish priest in training was not widely acknowledged. The oblation and sacrifice of priesthood was understood in an exclusive way and the idea was that the mother would do the - well, 'mothering'. The concept of parenting was still being invented and while I set up a support group for parents, the main church effort in this area was for mothers and toddlers.  Dads were either out at work or unemployed and at home (and glad of some peace). The word ‘paternity' was not often heard in those days, and never in the company of the word ‘leave'.

And so I remember writing sermons holding a child on my knee, interviewing a marriage couple with a sick baby lying in a cot on the floor of the study and being summoned from the family Christmas dinner, already transferred to Boxing Day, to visit someone dying in hospital.  The there was the time that I found myself officiating at Evensong in the chapel at King's College Cambridge at the same time as looking after a four year old James.  Fortunately my stall was nice and large.  It was a very interesting experience. I think the first lesson was ‘The Hungry Caterpillar' and the second ‘Each Peach Pear Plum, I Spy Tom Thumb'.  But he was very good and no one who did not see me slip him in just before the service, knew he was there. For me, then, the dialogue between the parental and the priestly vocation has sometimes been a very awkward conversation.

And there have been some very sharp moments indeed. One day I was called to meet a family where the father had just died on the operating table in the local hospital. His name was James. This was a tough call for me because our own one month old James was at that time mysteriously but very seriously ill in the same hospital. I was the only priest available, and the call of duty was clear.  But I was very unsure about whether I would be of any use to this family and decided when I met them that I would begin not by listening and asking questions but explaining my own circumstances so that they would understand if I was not as attentive as I should be. It was absolutely the best thing to do. It allowed them to relate to me as a person as well as a priest.  And they continued to take a great interest in our James, and were very happy when, a few weeks later, I was able to wheel him round in the pram. But we were all different people because of our minutes of mutual vulnerability, minutes when we were all children in the presence of God.

The role of Mum or Dad, Mother or Father is a real privilege and an enormous challenge.  And for the ordained it is a double blessing. But it is important to remember that the primary purpose of being a parent is not to look after children but to help children develop into good adult.  It is one of those asymmetries of nature that you remain a parent long after your child stops being a child. Parenthood is for life, not just the first 21 years.  It is a commitment to stay with them, to be there for them, to share in adventures you neither initiate or control. You may not like their plans, you may think them foolish or selfish but parenthood continues; it goes on and on.  But childlikeness does not stop at 21 either. Indeed, it may only just be beginning. 

Parenthood is never about maintaining unhealthy dependency. It is always the helping of someone on the journey to full maturity, which is something to take into account when we call God ‘our Father' - as we regularly do. God always longs for our fulfilment. His love for us does not render us immature or dependent. Rather it is the most demanding, challenging, supporting, and maturing love we can possibly know. And it is the parental vocation to be a channel of this love for your child - of whatever age.  And it is the priestly vocation to be a channel of this same love for God's people - of all ages. When we love in the name of God we are living out, embodying, a prayer that the beloved - God's beloved - might have life in all its fullness. And that fullness, I want to suggest, overflows with an abundance of both maturity and childlikeness.  It involves growth in competences of all kinds but also in humility. 

In the gospel reading today we heard Jesus trying to explain to the Jews what it meant to eat his flesh and drink his blood.  And to be honest you cannot be too critical of them for at least wanting some clarification. This was Jesus' way of expressing the totality of offering, sacrifice, oblation, that he was about to make for all God's people on the cross. But it is a form of giving so crudely expressed that it causes us to stumble even today. And yet, this donation of flesh and blood is also reflected in parenthood. That we talk about our own flesh and blood is the least of it. The lectern in this Cathedral is of a mother pelican pecking her own breast and nourishing her chicks with her own blood. This ‘self-wounding pelican' is an apt symbol of parents will do for their children. Ask any parent of a child in hospital what he or she would give to make him or her better or take away the pain and they would promise their all. And if they could make an offering that would give the child health into the eternal future they would do it, whatever the cost.  It's a silly thought of course. Childish. But it reveals a childlike heart, a Christlike heart, a heart which gives life and freedom and which also longs for a homecoming - and whether that homecoming is of a prodigal or a paragon, the parental joy is just the same. It is childlike.

When studying psychology here in the 1970s, I learnt that it is at least as true to say that it is the child who makes the parent as that it is the parent who makes the child. But the deeper truth is that when we live in proximity and intimacy we are inevitably and profoundly transformed. Despite what we sing, we cannot readily say of ourselves that we are ‘changed from glory into glory' but we can own that we grow in humanity - changed from ‘humanity into humanity' if you will, or to return to language that applies to Mary but should also be our own aspiration, we can be ‘changed from humility into humility'.  Our development is not to a worldly maturity but to a holy maturity, one in which the child in us is more vividly alive than ever.

If we truly seek to learn humility, we will know that we cannot choose our teachers. And for many of us this is where our family becomes our college, and for others it is where our college becomes our family. Either way, we find that the love of God is communicated to us through surprising channels and has the startling effect of not only changing children into adults but also of changing adults into children: mature children, fulfilled children, joyful children - children of God.