Fourth Sunday of Easter, 29 April 2012, All Saints Margaret Street

The young man was going to plead guilty to a charge of burglary. He had been to prison many times before and he was about to do so again. I had expected that the twelve months that he would undoubtedly have to serve would be like water off a duck's back to him, old hand that he was. But when I arrived in the cell under Lewes Crown Court he was pacing the floor, highly agitated and utterly obsessed. Would his sentence definitely be twelve months, he wanted to know. Might it not be nine, or even six? I remember feeling righteous exasperation. He had sixty or seventy years of life ahead of him. His girlfriend was expecting their baby. He'd never had a job and he had no qualifications. I couldn't understand why he was so wound up about the prospect of a few months inside. He could do it standing on his head. It was the rest of his life, I thought, that he ought to be worrying about. I should explain that before I was ordained I practised as a barrister. For nearly twenty years I have interpreted that story as a significant signpost in my journey towards ordination. I have understood it as the moment when I realized that I would ultimately become dissatisfied with my wig and gown and the role they consigned me to. I have understood it as the moment when I became sure that I was called to a more holistically rounded role than that of a lawyer. I wasn't interested in his case. I was interested in him. I wanted to encourage him towards a better and more productive use of the years ahead of him. But last week, as I tried to write that interpretation up for you, an authentic illustration of a key stage in the vocational journey, I realized that I could no longer do so with integrity. Instead I read what I'd written and blushed for my former self. I still don't know why that young man was so agitated. Perhaps, despite his record, he was simply frightened. I wish I had met him with less righteous exasperation and more generous compassion. I wish I had schemed less about what his future life might hold and shared more in what his present life did hold. I wish I had not made him a case study and related to him better as a human person. He almost certainly needed a priest as much as he needed a lawyer, but he needed a priest who would share his fear and accompany him through it. He did not need a priest who would brush under the carpet the pain of today in the interests of an unimaginable tomorrow. He needed someone who would be for him the good shepherd who walks through the valley of the shadow of death. Father Alan's invitation to preach on vocation is the first such invitation I've received since becoming Area Director of Ordinands. By the time I sit down he may well be on his BlackBerry ensuring that it's the last. A sermon is a risky place for a preacher to attempt a re-assessment of his own story - a sermon preached when the preacher is a guest even more so. The encounter remains a seminal moment on my journey towards ordination. But whereas I once understood it as confirmatory of God's call to priesthood, I now understand it as confirmatory of the inadequate poverty of my grasp of God's call. In what appear to be our moments of greatest clarity, when God and God's purposes seem to be set out before us without any possibility of misunderstanding, then we most need to be on our guard. We never know the whole of our story. We may know that we long for bread, but we cannot know that manna will rain down from the heavens. We may know that we long for meat, but we cannot know that the skies will fill with quails. In the landscape of the wilderness of our lives, the immutable rocks around which we plot our course are revealed as shadows; the pleasant oasis where we drink our fill is revealed as a deceiving mirage; the star upon which we set our sights is revealed as a trick of the light. The discernment of what God is calling us to does not consist of our determining the things we would like to do or the things we would like to be. It does not even consist of our determining the things we would like to do for others or the things we would like to be for others. It consists of our listening to what the Spirit is saying. It consists of our asking God to reveal to us who we are, and who we are becoming. It consists of our opening ourselves up to those who know us best. It consists of our engaging with Christ's body, the Church. And above all, it consists of our waiting on God in prayer, of our daring to linger in our interior wilderness, of our conquering the shadows, the mirages and the tricks. It consists of our reading the new name that God presses into our hands. Then "...very, very occasionally," writes Rowan Williams, "around an unexpected corner or with an unexpected person, we catch a glimpse of the fire, the desert filled with flame". .