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From www.forwardinfaith.com FiF UK
To the principal celebrant – or VICTIM – they can seem like a premature obituary. Like the proverbial drowning man he sees the whole of his life (or at least his ministerial life) pass before him in a moment of time.
To the congregation they can as easily appear as a sort of extended sycophancy on the part of the preacher. He is, they may ruefully conclude, a man desperately in search of another job.
Let me put your minds at rest. I come neither to bury Caesar nor to praise him. What I want to do instead is to say something about priesthood and about episcopacy – what they are and what they are for. To Bishop John I have only one thing to say: if the cap fits, wear it!
But in order to say anything useful about the nature and role of the priest and bishop, we have, it seems to me, to clear the ground somewhat.
In the debate in the General Synod leading up to the establishment of the Rochester Commission Simon Killwick begged the Synod to see that the Report addressed the question squarely. It was no use, he said, talking about who can be bishops if you are not, from the outset, clear about what bishops are.
The Report when it appeared – but you are way ahead of me - paid him the backhanded compliment of misunderstanding his request. Instead of an ontological examination, an examination of being and nature, it came up with two appendices about what bishops do; bishops’ diaries detailing the meetings and conferences which make up the life of the modern-day manager. Which, of course, had the unintended and unfortunate effect of paying women the backhanded compliment of wondering whether they are up to the job.
We must do better this afternoon. We must deal not with the frothy surface but with the still depths.
The priest (and par excellence the bishop) is primarily the man of the sacraments. Of course he must visit the sick, nurture the young, care for the poor, feed the hungry, comfort the bereaved, uphold the oppressed. But those are not specifically or primarily priestly tasks. They are the vocation of the whole priestly people of God, of the entire baptised community. In what he or she does every Christian is called to be alter Christus, another Christ, perpetuating the work of Jesus in the world, who has now no hands but theirs, or rather, YOURS.
But as the man of the sacraments the priest is a particular witness to the incarnation, of which sacraments are an extension into present time. That is why the question about him is properly the Caesarea Phillippi question: not ‘What do men say that I do?’ but ‘Who do men say that I am?’ The priest is, as Fr Austin Farrer beautifully put it, a ‘walking sacrament’: in a sense which is not true of other Christians, he is what he portrays. This is especially the case, of course, in the celebration of the eucharist, where he presides in the place of Jesus at the paschal table, the paterfamilias of the Household of God; where his hands make present the founder of the feast and the bread of angels.
But in order to be what he portrays he must, of necessity, internalise that awareness of himself and of his being as a priest. Jesus asks all his disciples to take up their cross and follow Him. But more so the priest.
The one who makes the weekly and daily memorial of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection must know that passion in his own life, and in his own way have lived it.
Perhaps, then, we should be glad that in our day the status of the priest has been so diminished in our society that he has become, in many areas, more a pariah than a paragon. We can certainly pity those bishops and senior clergy who find their dignity in rubbing shoulders with Lord Mayors and Lords Lieutenant. And we all know clergy who, in seeking the sanction of secular society, have become royal peculiars in more senses than one.
But if the priest is the man of the sacraments, he is equally as importantly, the man of the Word. Not because he is the only preacher of it, but because he is the guardian and guarantor of the authenticity of the word preached.
The proclamation of the Word, of course, is also incarnational. As the Word was made flesh in the person of Jesus, so he comes to the world today – robed in the outward forms of a culture vastly different from that of first century Palestine. The priest (and par excellence the Bishop) has the task of proclaiming and guarding that eternal Word.
It is a daunting task: he must be au fait with the latest developments – if only to refute them; and up with the latest fashions – if only to stand aside from them. He must be able to distinguish between Zeitgeist and Heiliger Geist, and having done so, have the courage to stand his ground. Above all, he must demonstrate an infectious enthusiasm for the Faith. Christianity is not a religion of propositions, but a religion of the heart and the affections.
The phrase ‘the beauty of holiness’ has, alas, been taken up by a phalanx of architectural aesthetes, Betjemaniacs to a person, for whom it spells out their own predelictions – John Loughborough Pearson, Sir Ninian Comper and even , I suppose, William Butterfield and Hans Feibusch. But there is a deeper beauty which conduces to holiness – the sense of the splendour and majesty, and glorious coherence of the Catholic Faith. The priest in his preaching and teaching is to worship the Lord in the beauty of that holiness, in such a way that it becomes apparent to others. In a way that renders it catching.
Finally, and not least, the priest is his own man. No one can preach the incarnation, and the dignity which the Word made Flesh has conferred on the whole of humankind if he is devoid of a sense of his own human worth, dignity and character. To be the image of the ‘man for others’ the priest must first be himself.
Alexander Pope, perhaps because he was himself a contradiction (a Roman Catholic who became the darling of Voltaire), got the whole thing wrong. ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.’ Somehow the couplet needs to be reversed: because of the Incarnation the knowledge of God is intimately bound up with our knowledge of ourselves. It is as we progress in our understanding of ourselves – our strengths, our weaknesses, our wisdom, our folly – that he finds us and draws us to himself. How often, in our Catholic Movement in the Church of England, have we had cause to celebrate priests who were ‘characters’. And how often those priests, for all their flaws and failings, have been strangely transparent to the love of God!
Bishop John, I told various people, including Judi, that I was going to use as the text of this sermon a rather naughty quotation from one of my favourite literary critics. They all forbade me. On of them even said that if I used it I would be dead in the water. But you know what I am like. So here it is; and ending rather than a beginning.
At the eightieth birthday, in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, of the American poet Robert Frost, Lionel Trilling was asked to propose a toast. Without a moment’s hesitation he raised his glass and said: ‘Old man, we see through you’.
It was, in my view, the perfect toast, to a poet or to a priest. Frost had a persona in which he was comfortable and with which his readers are comfortable – the uncomplicated New England small-holder with a store of homely wisdom. But Frost was more – far more than the image. He had deep insights to share. Others came to see a deeper reality through his eyes. They saw through him; and simultaneously they saw through him.
It’s rather like that with us and you. That’s why we’re here to say, on behalf of all those to whom you have ministered, Multos Annos! May God perfect his grace in you all your days.
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