Monday 21 January 2008

The Third Sunday of Epiphany 2008

Some of you will recall that the post I left to come to St Peter’s was that of Senior Chaplain to the Bishop of Salisbury. As Senior Chaplain I was a member of the Bishop’s staff team, and, as is the way of teams, we spent a good deal of time discussing our various roles and responsibilities. One of the things I didn’t tell those who interviewed me for St Peter’s was that on one occasion we did so using the Belbin analytical system, which is designed to test the team members’ strengths and weaknesses and to allocate them places in its structure. My results advised me against seeking a position of leadership, and recommended instead that I should seek a powerful and charismatic leader, whose strength would benefit from my natural but second-order skills of discernment and preparation. The Bishop of Salisbury is not used to being described as a powerful and charismatic leader, and he found this very amusing.

There are no doubt some among you who think that the analytical system got it right and that I would have been well advised to steer clear of anything resembling a leadership position, or at least a leadership position anywhere near this parish. But twelve months into the role for which it deemed me plainly unsuitable I find myself thinking a lot about my role and about our mission. And (by way of a footnote, should any of you be great devotees of Belbin) I am inclined to think that it is good at assessing the roles people currently play, and less good at assessing their potential to develop (but then I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I?)

Role and mission are themes woven deeply into the text of our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah. The passage comes from one of the Servant Songs. As you know, these are the identifiable stretches of Isaiah’s work which concern themselves with the servant of God, a servant destined to suffer greatly but to be vindicated in securing God’s ultimate purposes. This morning’s passage discloses a distinct tension surrounding the servant’s identity. For in verse 3 the servant is named as Israel. It is the nation in whom God will be glorified; the nation is the agent of the divine purpose: ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified’. Yet only two verses later it is to the nation that the servant is sent. For in verse 5 it is asserted that the servant is created to bring Jacob back to the Lord, that the servant is created that Israel might be gathered to the Lord. Far from being the agent of the divine purpose the nation is the object of the divine purpose.

Agent, or object? Any priest is at risk of believing himself uniquely charged with delivering God’s mission. Any priest is at risk of forgetting that he is the target of God’s mission. Any Church is similarly at risk, a timely thought in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. When we draft Mission Action Plans and dream of strategies for our future growth; when we offer splendid worship and raise significant sums for charity; when we do any of these things in our successful and confident context we are at risk of forgetting our needs and God’s nature; we are in peril of becoming intoxicated by our apparent self-sufficiency.

Our needs, and God’s nature: as I’ve said, the peril is twofold. First, we overlook our need of grace. If we are the ones in whom the Lord will be glorified then sin seems small beer indeed, and our need of repentance and redemption a rather bizarre reversal of roles. It is surely God who ought to be turning to us in grateful thanks for all we are doing to keep his name alive. And secondly, we misinterpret God’s nature and begin to assume, with monumental arrogance, that he is ours, safely locked away in zip-up Bibles or ornamental aumbries, ours to dish out to a Godless world.

Today’s Gospel is a powerful blow to such flights of fancy. John the Baptist would I guess have provoked an interesting response from the Belbin system: an original and charismatic orator who drew great crowds to hear him, and whose denunciations could send shivers down royal spines. If ever a man deserved to believe himself God’s agent, then it was he. And so he was, of course, for John understood that he was a witness to God’s action. Yet he also understood that one was coming after him who was ranked before him. He understood that this was the one whose sandals he was not worthy to untie, one whose forgiveness and grace and mercy he stood in need of. He understood that the moment he saw the Spirit descending on Jesus his own time had passed. ‘Here is the Lamb of God’ he said, and at those words his own disciples left him and went to join the one whom he had baptized.

‘Here is the Lamb of God’. That is the mission to which we are called, a mission of pointing people away from ourselves, however plausible or fascinating we believe ourselves to be, and of pointing them towards the living God. And only insofar as we are credible objects of God’s love, of love made manifest in our healed and transformed lives, will we ever be effective agents of God’s love.

Last Sunday our Methodist brothers and sisters celebrated their Covenant service. They used words which we need desperately to hear, clergy and lay people, Anglicans of every persuasion, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Baptists and independent Evangelicals, words that we need even more desperately to live:

I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will,
rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing,
put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you
or laid aside for you,
exalted for you
or brought low for you;
let me be full,
let me be empty,
let me have all things,
let me have nothing;
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things
to your pleasure and disposal.

Agents of God’s love, yes, but objects and recipients of it always. Amen.

Sunday 20 January 2008,
Isaiah 49:1-7;
John 1:29-42.

Sunday 6 January 2008

The Epiphany, 2008

One of the trials and one of the joys of spending a few days at my parents’ home is the opportunity of becoming better acquainted with my former self.

I don’t just mean listening to the family stories, or walking around the garden I played in as a child, although I did both those things this week. I mean also the chance discovery, on an afternoon spent rooting around in the bedrooms, of unintended messages and accidental artefacts from what now seem like a very different person’s life. I found letters written whilst an undergraduate at the bottom of a drawer, and came across ticket stubs and newspaper cuttings from long-forgotten summer holidays in a disused and discarded wallet. And best of all, I also rediscovered presents given me at various rites of passage – Baptism, Confirmation, graduation – stored at home for safe-keeping and long since overlooked.

They’re overlooked for a reason: I’ve never had any use for most of them. There’s the engraved silver egg cup, for example, or the white leather-bound King James Bible with its impossibly dense typeface. Such presents reveal far more about their giver than they do about the three month old me to whom they were given. They reveal perhaps a determined adherence to tradition: silver egg cups are what one gave at a Christening in the mid-60s. Or they reveal the giver’s longed-for image: the present had better be something religious-looking, never mind its religious utility.

Epiphany begins as a feast of gift-giving. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh are pressed into the hands of Mary and Joseph in the smoky gloom of a borrowed house. They are strange gifts, gold gleaming in the carpenter’s work-worn hands, the sweetness of incense blending with the unmistakeable smell of the new-born, myrrh as out of place as a wicked fairy at a celebratory feast, pointing to an end that seems so far off. They are gifts as inappropriate to their tiny recipient as were the silver egg cup and illegible weight of Scripture to me, and they have spawned interpretation and speculation ever since.

What became of those gifts, I wonder? Perhaps they were exchanged for food and shelter in the months of exile that followed their bearers’ visit. Perhaps they survived the flight to Egypt and settlement in Nazareth, but became commonplace and unremarkable in the years of prosperity that followed, as Joseph’s business began to flourish. Or perhaps Mary stored them safely, safeguarding them as a memento of the foreigners who had called upon them that long-lost evening in Bethlehem, and treasuring them as she treasured her memories of her son.

And if she did, I wonder if Jesus ever discovered them. In the thirty years he spent in his parents’ home did he ever come across them in a hidden corner on a long afternoon, and unwrap and gaze upon them, as I did this week? Did he speculate, as have his disciples ever since, about their meaning? Perhaps he marvelled at the richness of the gold and thought of the kings and Caesars whom his people had been taught to fear and obey. Perhaps he caught the scent of the incense, remembered the visit made to Jerusalem when he was twelve years old, and was caught up immediately in the sights and sounds of the Temple precincts, the cries of the sacrificial animals and the chanting of the priests. And perhaps he saw the myrrh and heard the wailing of mourning women in his village, the despair and desolation of loss and bereavement.

Might not those thoughts and memories have then played upon his mind as he set out for the Judean wilderness, to find his cousin John and seek his baptism? Perhaps he then conceived his destiny as the proclamation of a royal kingdom. Perhaps he then understood that the offering of prayer and the offering of self would be the means by which it would be built. And perhaps he then perceived, however dimly, that its building would have suffering and death as its point of crisis and point of creation.

None of that would have come as a comfort to Mary, though, on a Friday night thirty-three years after the Magi’s visit. She might have glimpsed the ironies in the ultimate victory of those earthly authorities that had been trying to stifle and silence her son since the moment of his birth. The kingship to which the wise men’s gold had pointed had been revealed as the executioners’ title, hung above their victim’s twisted body. The priesthood to which the frankincense had pointed had been revealed as sacrificial, certainly, but there had been no ornamental role for her son. Instead the priest had become the sacrifice, offered up beyond the city wall. Only the myrrh seemed to have been an appropriate gift, myrrh for anointing his lifeless body.

And perhaps – just perhaps – it is the wise men’s myrrh that Mary clutches as together with her friends she makes her way to the garden at first light, when the bitter fragrance of myrrh is overwhelmed by the joy of heaven’s angels whose praises arise like the smoke of incense around the throne which shines with the glow of the brightest gold.

King, priest, and sacrifice: Melchior, Balthazar and Caspar could not have chosen better gifts. And although history tells us nothing more of them perhaps we might dare to imagine that, like us, they spent the remainder of their lives living out the truth of the gifts they had born him. For if he is a king then we are his royal family, called to responsibility for the kingdom, for its protection, nurture and growth. If he is a priest then we are his fellow priests, called to occupy the narrow space that exists between God and humankind, representing them one to another. And if he is a sacrifice then we are his fellow-travellers on the way of the cross, called to give everything in his service. Amen.