Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 15 June 2008

Five Christians are on an aeroplane flying over the Pacific Ocean. It crashes on a desert island. All five survive and indeed flourish. The island is verdant and fertile and in no time shelters have been built and a meal prepared. However it is also remote, and there is no prospect of rescue. Days turn into weeks which turn into months. The five Christians pray and read the Bible together (for a copy has miraculously survived the crash).Yet what they long to do is celebrate the Eucharist and thus experience the sacramental mystery of God’s presence with them. But none of them is ordained. Will they ever share the Eucharist again?

Petertide is approaching, the season not only of our patron saint, but also of the sacrament of ordination. Over the next few weeks in cathedrals and churches across the world men and women will have Episcopal hands laid upon them, and will thereafter be addressed differently, will in particular circumstances behave differently, and, often, will dress differently. We inhabit a democratic and populist age in which this rite and its consequences can seem seriously outmoded, for it appears to create a species of religious expert or professional, and the very notion of experts or professionals is under attack. With a decent search engine and a self-help manual or two most of us can discover whatever we need to know about any subject whatsoever, and lawyers, or accountants or indeed priests appear to be self-interested gatekeepers concerned only to preserve their own status.

So why does the Church continue to ordain men and women as deacons, priests and bishops? Many reasons that might appear compelling have fallen away. The ordained are not the sole theological scholars of the Church. The highly-regarded Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, for example, now has only one ordained member of staff: all its systematic theologians and church historians are lay people, and so are all but one of its Biblical studies’ experts. The ordained are not the sole spiritual giants of the Church. There are of course men and women of profound and luminous holiness among them, but I have met as many or more among the laity. The ordained are not the sole pastors of the Church. We are surrounded by a wealth of caring agencies and, thankfully, many communities still boast strong social networks for picking up the fallen and binding up their wounds.

In these circumstances I ask again: why does the Church continue to ordain men and women as deacons, priests and bishops? At James’s licensing in April the Archdeacon of Charing Cross offered us an answer. We have ordained ministry, he said, because we have sacraments, and because without ordained ministry we could not have them. His answer does not hold out much hope for that group of five Christians marooned in perpetuity on the desert island. They have no priest; so they have no Eucharist. The moral may be always to ask a priest to accompany you on your exotic foreign holidays. But you would find that inconvenient and, with due respect to the Archdeacon, I am not sure that I agree with him.

The view of ordination that he espoused, and that denies the five the sacraments, is purely functional. Its essence inheres in its capacity to confect a particular consequence: consecrated bread and wine, reconciled penitents, authentically blessed congregations. It turns the ordained into specialist operatives in an ecclesial process, chosen managers of unique powers to effect certain results. There is no such priest on the island, no functionary with divinely-given authority, secret words and special gestures, and there can therefore be no ritual or rite. The priest is – and I don’t think this is a caricature – a witch doctor or magic man.

Today’s readings hint at a rather different view of ordination, one that allows the five to celebrate the sacraments, and it is this that I invite you to consider as we approach Petertide and prepare to receive one of the newly-ordained among us. The readings suggest that the effect of ordination is the creation not of empowered individuals but of a representative focus for God’s liberating action. In the wilderness of Sinai God speaks through Moses to the children of Israel. He has delivered them from slavery in Egypt, bringing them out of the land of oppression. Now, he says, ‘if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’. Priesthood in the desert years of exile belongs not to a priestly class but to a whole people. In the wilderness it’s not that priests are to mediate the liberating power and presence of God, to manage it on his behalf and jealously guard its boundaries. It’s that a whole people are to bear that liberating power and presence to the world; that a whole people are to take responsibility for God in the world that is his. Israel will be the representative focus of God’s liberating work.

And if Israel is God’s representative to the world then the twelve apostles, the account of whose sending-out we hear in Matthew’s Gospel, are his representatives to the representative. Like the exiles in the desert before them they are to bear God’s liberating power and presence to the lost sheep of Israel. Their task is priestly, as Israel’s is priestly. The Twelve are to be the representative focus of God’s liberating work.

Ordination is never principally about the individual ordained (even if some of the ordained are among the most precious of individuals!). It is about God, God who cannot but involve himself in the world, who works perpetually for the world’s redemption, and who calls his people to work with him. Ordination never sets up the few against the many; it never divides or stratifies God’s people. It belongs to God and to the whole people of God. As he calls Israel to be a priestly people so he calls you, my brothers and sisters - us - the baptized, to be a priestly people, for we are, as Paul writes to the Romans, the ones into whose hearts God’s love has been poured through the Holy Spirit. We are the representative focus of God’s liberating work.

And yes, from among our number he calls some, some whom he probably can’t trust to be lay people, to be the representatives to the representatives, some whose task it is to set before our eyes our common calling, and whose task it is to hold us all to it. But ordination is, because God is in Christ, and because we are God in Christ’s people. Amen.

Exodus: 19: 2-8a;
Romans 5: 1-8;
Matthew 9: 38 – 10: 23.