Chrism Mass: Ordination Reflection

Reflecting on the ministry of a priest after yesterday's Chrism Mass re-commitment to ordination, I recalled this sermon which I preached at the Waiapu diocesan ordination in 2005. 

For several days this past week, Christine, Moira, Oenone, Adrienne and Jo, have followed Jesus’ example and have retreated to a quiet place.  Against a background of the prayerful hospitality of Southern Star Abbey, those to be ordained as deacons and priests have paused to catch their breath, to reflect and pray, in something of a vigil (and indeed some of them did get up at 4.00am for the night office of Vigils - under no compulsion from the sleeping ministry educator, I assure you).  These last few days have been a time apart to ponder the step to which God has called them and which the Church has affirmed, and to which they have responded.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what may happen now that you have left your retreat.  Following ordination, life will take on a new dimension.  Humanly speaking this will involve anything from a reasonably predictable rhythm, to the unexpected and seemingly impossible: all of this against a background of new encounters and learnings.  Life will be different for you all.  And the context of your lives and of your ministries as deacons and priests is very different for each of you.  You each bring varying and unique experiences, insights, formation and training, to your ministries.  And yet through all this, I think you have discovered some commonalities over these last few days, not least in the solidarity of your ordination at this time.  You are all committed to the faith journey in its various expressions, begun in your baptism.  Now you are to serve God and God’s people in and outside the Church, in the ministries of deacon and priest.  You have responded to the call of God on your lives.  May you daily respond to this call of God, which as the verse of Psalm 95 puts it, O that today you would listen to God’s voice; harden not your hearts.

In a few minutes the bishop will ask commitment questions of Christine, Moira, Oenone, Adrienne and Jo, at the end of which each candidate will be asked to

give glory to God, the holy and blessed Trinity.

Those to be ordained will each answer with the words,

Glory to God on high, God of power and might.

You are my God.

I can neither add to your glory

nor take away from your power.

Yet will I wait upon you daily in prayer and praise.

This brief, but very full declaration, contains a profound truth.  Waiting upon God daily in prayer and praise is the way we ensure that we remember that God is the God of power and might, and that we can neither add to God’s glory nor take away from God’s power.  What the declaration doesn’t say, is that when praise and prayer become absent from our lives, it is most often to ourselves that we are tempted to transfer power and glory.  Then we are a spiritual menace to ourselves and to others.

Let me borrow and expand some words from the sixth-century S Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule; written for bishops, and equally applicable to ministry teams and deacons and priests.

While they are preoccupied with exterior matters, they must not lessen their solicitude for the interior. Nor when they are preoccupied with the interior may they relax their watch on the exterior.  Otherwise, by giving themselves up to pressing duties from outside, they would experience an interior collapse; or by keeping themselves busy solely on interior matters, would be neglecting their external duties towards their neighbour.

There will always be tension between the need to make time for daily waiting upon God in prayer and praise, and the immediacy or even the urgency (some of it imagined) of the tasks to be done.  But we will be able to resist the temptation to make our mark and even perhaps to single-handedly save the church or the world, if God remains for us, the One to whom we give glory.

A Lutheran pastor wrote to me after we had both stayed in an American monastery:

What I am trying to retain … is a sense of deliberation that the monks have: that eternity has begun; there is all the time in the world because God is in control; I need to work hard, but I don’t feel like “success” depends on me.  My ongoing struggle is to be satisfied with the work I have gotten to, and not to worry about what I have not gotten to.

Andy Ballentine

In the widely varying circumstances of your lives and ministries, Jo, Oenone, Christine, Adrienne, Moira, you will need to find a way to ensure that the work of ministry does not run away with you; and that your own ambitions do not (in my Lutheran friend’s words) get in the way of being satisfied with what you have gotten to, rather than preoccupation with what you have not gotten to; and that waiting daily upon God in prayer and praise remains the basis of all that you are and all that you do.

So what do we mean by giving glory to God, the holy and blessed Trinity?  The Genesis 18 story of the three visitors provides a clue.  The well-known icon of this scene depicts a serene circle of three angels, with the chalice – symbol of suffering love – at the centre of the table.  It is a remarkable picture of the Trinity as both energy and stillness.  And even more, its vacant space at the front of the table is an invitation for us to enter and participate in the love and movement of these holy three.

Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément describes this entering into God as being

caught up in the immense movement of the love of the Trinity which reveals the other person to us as ‘neighbour’ or [even better] which enables each one of us to become the ‘neighbour’ of the others.

The Roots of Mysticism

Putting this even more sharply he says,

The truly spiritual person draws apart from everyone for the ‘one to one’ alone with God, but going more deeply and anonymously into God, finds the self afresh in Christ, in the great movement of Trinitarian love, no longer separated but united with everyone.

Daily waiting upon God in prayer and praise is an endlessly renewed communion with the God who speaks to us when

we come as disciples for whom it is more fitting to be silent than to speak.

Michael Casey Towards God

All our waiting upon God carries the Advent characteristic of expectancy.  This waiting is no idle vacuum.  It is a hopeful waiting of longing and desire.  Neither is our waiting a time to devise programmes or to stimulate the mind with study.  As the Orthodox say, it is a time of prayer, when we stand with the mind in the heart before God.

From this prior orientation in your lives and ministries as deacons and priests, it is then possible that the people of God will recognise in you those who are to gather the community of faith and give leadership, and as those who will – in the bishop’s words to those to be ordained deacons - search and serve.  Searching and serving will have a major place in your ministries.  This will be so more obviously in pastoral ministry, where you are called to be a Christ encounter with those whom you meet.  You will also, as deacons and priests have to search and serve in ways that are not yet clear.  You will be called to redraw the maps by which we find our way; to look for the hidden signposts in the often uncharted places where our ministry may lie, and to decipher their language.

You are also being called to be with people as they themselves search the depths of their hearts in their own lives.  To do this as priests and deacons, you yourselves need to be in the regular and sustained engagement of waiting upon God in prayer, allowing the Word of God the freedom of our minds and hearts.

The nineteenth-century Russian monk and bishop, Theophan the Recluse, reminds us that prayer is a long-haul journey of stages.  Prayer is given to us gradually, and so is of necessity, a daily waiting upon God.

Prayer of the heart never comes prematurely.  With its advent God begins to work within us; as it becomes increasingly established in the heart this work is brought more and more to its fullness.  This prayer must be sought with no scant effort; then God, seeing our travail, will give us what we seek.  True prayer will not be achieved by human efforts; it is a gift of God.

in Igumen Chariton, The Art of Prayer

Waiting daily upon God in prayer and praise is a prerequisite for a ministry of searching and serving.  But the core of ordination goes even deeper.  The bishop will shortly tell you, Adrienne and Jo who are to be ordained priests, that You must be prepared to be what you proclaim.

Long before diet promoters told us you are what you eat, the Church’s teachers of faith have explicitly kept this truth before us.  We are the body of Christ; we eat the body of Christ.  The Eucharist makes the Church; the Church makes the Eucharist.

As priests, Adrienne and Jo, you are called to gather people into this defining and identifying assembly; the body of Christ.  You are called to echo and mirror and make present, the gift of Christ’s life, with the same generosity with which he himself gives his life to us.  You must be prepared to be what you proclaim, and your task is to draw those whom you gather to celebrate this proclamation, deeper and deeper into the heart of this mystery of a death that becomes abundant and unending life.

You yourselves will grow into this centre of priesthood, and you will see that it is a centre not for its own sake, but because of what goes out from it.  A contemporary American theologian puts it like this.

A true eucharist is never a passive, comforting moment alone with God, something which allows us to escape the cares and concerns of our everyday life.  Eucharist is where all these cares and concerns come to a focus, and where we are asked to measure them against the standard lived by Jesus when he proclaimed for all to hear that the bread that he would give would provide life for the entire world.  But it will do so only if, finding ourselves with a basket of bread, we have peered deeply enough into the heart of Christ to know what to do with it.

Paul Bernier, Bread Broken and Shared

These are far-reaching implications for priests who are called to preside at the Eucharist.  In ways you are yet to see, your ministries will be about searching and serving, and about being what you proclaim.  Someone said that the ministry of presider

[c]alls on one’s full humanity to unveil and to serve the mystery of God.  In turn it makes human life vulnerable to the mystery that is served.  It demands that the presider take on the desires and affections of God, the desires and affections of Christ, and the hopes and aspirations of a sinful and holy Church in a sinful and grace-filled world.  One does not take on this ministry lightly.  It demands much even before the presider begins; it continues to demand much as the symbols with which the presider is engaged shape and guide the presider’s own life.  They will take the presider into the mystery they express; the mystery in turn will unfold in the presider’s life.

Peter Fink, “Spirituality for Liturgical Presiders” in Eleanor Bernstein (ed) Disciple at the Crossroads

Christine, Moira, Oenone, Adrienne, Jo, take your place in that serene and holy circle of the holy and blessed Trinity, and give glory to God, as you wait daily in prayer and praise.