Readings: Romans 13.8-10; Psalm 112; St Luke 14.25-33

Dublin and Glendalough Clergy Day held in CICE on November 6th2013

Readings: Romans 13.8-10; psalm 112; St Luke 14.25-33

a sermon preached by the archbishop

psalm 112.4: Light shines in the darkness for the upright; gracious and full of compassion are the righteous.

The Eucharist brings us, as it always has, to the heart of conflict and leads us forward to the well of resolution. But it is hard going. It always has been and always will be. Hammered out in the face of certain and imminent death to the world, to family and to friends on the part of Jesus Christ, the Eucharist is both only our food for the journey of life and leads us to a new and different life of resurrection with others who are our neighbours here and now. It is of heaven here on earth.

There is little point, therefore, in expecting that the life of faith and the commitment to ordained service is simply self-explanatory or passively pleasant. It just isn’t and yet I trust that the majority of us gathered here entered this way of life intending to do good. I suggest further we would not probably wish to be doing anything else than the work of God. In many ways, it is a vocation with no career structure; an amateurism overloaded with the expectation of professionalism; an obedience within a riot of synodical freedom and licence, legalism and responsibility. It is not for everyone. Few delight in it all the time although we have to look as if we do – all of the time. And still for those who honourably decide to leave, the mark and the sting of it remain. And for those who honourably hang on in there, it gives fulfilment in faithfulness and scope for service. Yet it so easily unravels in times of distress and fear.

The Readings prescribed for today take us where God and the church want us to be. I have not chosen them to any themes which may emerge in our following conversation. Romans 13 is a sort of ‘ethical app’ for a community of Christians in the capital city of the emerging Empire: discharge the civic dues and uphold laws imposed on you; set the moral code which you have inherited from Judaism within the human interpretation which the same Judaism gives you: love your neighbour as yourself. Now – get on with it!

St Luke 14 has Jesus lay before the crowds advice about the life of faith, advice which is very easily hurried over and deflected because it sounds so brutal and so absolute and so un-believable: hating close family and indeed self; making decisions fully aware that collapse will bring sustained ridicule on top of the person who does not, as we say: ‘deliver.’ And all of this is set within a frame which, of course, we hear but do not really hear even as we hear it: No one who does not carry his cross and come with me can be a disciple of mine. (St Luke 14.27) This is the honesty of one who is making his way intrepidly and knowingly towards crucifixion.

Psalm 112.4: Light shines in the darkness for the upright; gracious and full of compassion are the righteous takes up the spirit of the very first of the psalms which always, to my mind, has such an early morning feel to it. Blessedness consists in a two-way flow of understanding and belonging between God and the righteous. In a Holy Land which is ever thirsty for water and where today water itself has become such a political battering ram, the righteous are: Like a tree planted by streams of water. (psalm1.3a) And so, even the most seemingly unpromising of Scriptures, like today’s, give us scope for renewal, shape for prayer, focus for fear and foundation for faith.

Simplicity is hard to beat. I remember reading a biography of John Betjeman, that rather flamboyant Anglican with an opinion on absolutely everything. I was touched by the fact that, in his final weeks of illness, it sufficed for a man who pontificated, with a combination of charm and cynicism, on the tasteless ills of suburban England and sentimentalized about Medievalizing Victoriana, that the celebration of Holy Communion on an ironing board in his flat sufficed to feed his spiritual needs. Think again please about St Luke 13.33: So also, if you are not prepared to leave all your possessions behind, you cannot be my disciples.

A number of areas seems to me to be our priority in these United Dioceses for the immediate future. We are always, in a sense, at a crossroads. My task of service as your bishop is that of shedding light, with Gospel urgency, on the crossroads of our time. It is not something that I can do alone. It is something where the wisdom and the vulnerabilities of you who carry and share service with me in parishes, schools, hospitals and hospices, shopping centres, industrial estates, sports grounds, holiday venues and soup kitchens along with the wisdom and vulnerabilities of the lay people of God need to combine around God and neighbour. Any of you who were able to be part of Niall Stratford’s ordination to the priesthood on Friday last will surely have been struck by the interweaving, like wisteria human and divine, of lay and ordained ministries, understood primarily as discipleship, and by the fact that they need one another within the ministry of Jesus Christ. These may be among the areas I tease through with you during the course of today and also would have you tease them through one with another as groups of friends. I know that all of our colleagues are not here as yet. Many have celebrations of Holy Communion back in their churches and they are attending to these. When they arrive, they will bring the wisdom and the vulnerabilities of themselves and of the people committed to their charge to share and to invest in our time together.

I encourage each of you not to dive, like lemmings, for your iPhone after you have: gone in peace to love and serve the Lord at the end of this service, but to take the time until 11 am to be silent, in this rather wonderful stark and cavernous chapel or in the capacious grounds of this College, and to reflect about anything and everything, but at least about something, and to commit yourselves to God for fresh commissioning. You might like to begin to focus around aspects of ecclesiastical and clerical life which have a tendency not to go away and which only mushroom if you or I do not address them.

They are the following, and as you might expect in an Anglican context, they are three:

God and neighbour;

use and abuse;

self-care and the love of God.

They are at the core of service and leadership in the ministry and mission of Jesus Christ.

Romans 13.10: Love cannot wrong a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilment of the law.