Ad Clerum – Easter 2009

Dear colleagues,

‘We are the Easter People, and Alleluia is our song.’ This is the kernel of our faith, and if we believe it to be true, then it must mean something real, even if – like the disciples! - we do not always grasp it immediately. Among many other things, it must mean being ready to live through death-and-resurrection experiences all through our lives, both as individuals and as a Church. This, after all, is the foundation of a living ecclesiology. Such thoughts as these have been going through my mind in relation to our plans for the emerging Strategy of Ministry for Mission. And they also provoked three questions recently put to me, which hit the nail on the head: ‘What is God doing in the current staffing crisis being visited on the Church? How is God’s energy being experienced as we grapple with these new realities? Is God prompting us to rediscover the roles of bishop, priest, and deacon?’

This is very Old Testament language, and Easter is, surprisingly, a good time to look at the Old Testament. I am thinking particularly of the prophet Ezekiel, perhaps one of the most off-beat writers in the Hebrew tradition, whose vision of the valley of the dry bones (Ezek 37:1-14) has long been associated both with Easter and with Pentecost from the very earliest times. Here, the prophet seems to be led to a battlefield, full of the dry bones of the fallen. Nothing is said about who they were or when they died. There is an anonymity about the whole scene. Then the Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones. And the Spirit comes upon them, and gradually the bones grow sinews and fit together again, and in the end they become living people again as their lives are restored to them.

I can’t think of a better text than this for trying to understand what God is doing, how we can experience his energies, and the questions he may be asking of the tradition in which we stand. First of all, we have to start with God – and not rush too quickly to number-crunching and statistics. I have never believed that anything is inevitable, and I have experienced enough evidence of exactly that in my recent turmoils – and survivals! We are not dealing with something for which we are entirely responsible because we have taken the wrong turning and are somehow being punished for it. As I have observed before, there are too many people in society – and the Church – who are only too ready to tell us what to be afraid of, and who to blame for it. We are here because we are here – and God, who is faithful and just, will see us through.

But we can still help to make things slightly less difficult for him (should I have said, a little bit easier?!), through our faithful response in our own time. It is clear from the current Kairos buildings initiative that we are going to have to use some of our buildings differently, and make others formally (even if temporarily) redundant. That will involve hard choices, but that is where the train-tracks are leading. We are going to have encourage the stipendiary clergy themselves, and liberate them from many of the day-to-day burdens of parochial administration, so that they can work more effectively as priests, by presiding and preaching at the liturgy, by being released to be a spiritual resource for their communities, and by spending time on the edges of society, among the very people Jesus ministered to. That will mean more non-stipendiaries and better trained lay ministry – but with an emphasis as much on being as on doing. You only have to look, for example, at the courses on Spirituality in the diocese to see proof positive that here is a real and growing need. At a recent meeting with the Area Deans, we were considering the distinction in Greek Patristic theology between the ‘essence’ and the ‘energies’ of God. That, surely, is another way of saying exactly the same thing.

Here are some real pointers for a community to whom life will be restored through some testing times. Bishop’s Council and Diocesan Synod will play their full part, but there will also be Archdeaconry and Deanery encounters, where sharp questions can be asked, and different models developed. And there may even be the odd battle here and there! Not everyone is going to get what they want. There will doubtless be some who will come to decision-making time with cherished assumptions about how and why all this should be done who are going to go away disappointed. As I said in my sermon at the Chrism Eucharist, we are going to have to learn to travel a lot more lightly, a lot more generously, and a lot more prayerfully. History keeps telling us – if we will only look! – that the times of greatest crisis more often than not are the most creative. 

There can be no short cut from the Last Supper to Easter morning. Sometimes we have to be prepared to be broken, our faith shaken, our relationships put to the test. And we emerge, ‘early on the first day of the week’, still bearing the scars, but with our faith renewed, as God reforms us in his Easter community.

With every blessing

+ Kenneth