Institution of Bruce as Incumbent of Wickham and Shedfield at St John the Baptist’s, Shedfield

Monday September 8^th, at 7.30 p.m.

Readings: Ezek 12: 21-end/Lk 6: 6-11

In October 1980, I started my first main term as University Chaplain in Manchester. Very early on, I was on my way into the Chaplaincy, and slipped and fell on a recently polished floor. In agony, I walked down to the Manchester Royal Infirmary, where I was told I’d chipped my right elbow, and I’d have to have my right arm in a sling for six weeks. Instead of being ‘the new chaplain’, I was ‘the new chaplain with his right arm in a sling.’ My temporary disability was so obvious that it became an important part of my identity. I can, therefore, relate (as they say) to the anonymous man with the withered right hand in this evening’s gospel-reading, which is set for today. It may seem a strange one for this occasion, but it is, in fact, about the mission of the Church, by Jesus, and how organised religion can get in the way, with the scribes and the Pharisees.

If you’re left-handed (which I’m not), you have to put up with the fact that the bible is very right-hand-ist! The right hand for most people is the hand that does most of the work. If you have your right hand out of action, either permanently or temporarily, whether it’s result of an accident, or a stroke, or something else, you are seriously disabled. Symbolism takes over in the New Testament, where Jesus is described sitting at the ‘right hand of God’, expressing strength, privilege, intimacy. He is there for us, on our behalf, and our prayers are united with his, which is why they end with the words, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ It’s not a literary convention. It’s a religious and theological truth.

Such thoughts as these – of strength, purpose, and action, or of strength, purpose and action stunted and disabled - are appropriate for two neighbouring parishes getting ready to welcome a new priest. A strong, purposeful and active ministry is what you are praying for. But sometimes I wish that the Church would be more honest about its own vulnerability, what it finds difficult, what it has failed to do in the past. In other words, admit that the ‘right hand’ is a bit withered, and not quite as strong or active as you’d like it, and in need of God’s healing. I always read Parish Profiles carefully, and I enjoy learning more about the buildings, the communities, the schools, the new housing developments, the opportunities (and the hopes) for outreach into the community, particularly young people.  But I also try to decode what they say about the difficulties, the different power-bases that, at their best, are good creative tensions, and at their less than best can inhibit that right hand of mission, depth of worship, and spiritual progress. Every organisation, local government included, lives with these sorts of oscillations as well.

That brings me to what follows after Jesus meets this man. It’s the synagogue, and it’s Saturday. For the devout Jew, nothing was more sacred than meeting together for worship on that day, especially in terrain, like Galilee, which had people of other faiths as well – what we would nowadays call ‘multicultural’. It was a way for Jews to express publicly who they were, in the face of everyone else. And just to underline the importance of the Sabbath, if you were really ‘sound’, you had to keep to a list of about thirty things which you were not allowed to do. Not everyone agreed on this – but the scribes and the Pharisees, the most organised and devout groups, certainly did. On this particular sabbath scene, their envy of Jesus, which he can see a mile off, makes them recoil against him. You mustn’t do anything on the sabbath, certainly not work, and that includes healing, especially by a religious trouble-maker like this local guy, Jesus of Nazareth.

It’s a dramatic scene. It sharpens up the distance between the man with the withered right hand and the religious nitpickers who can only think of their procedures and traditions. We all fall into that trap in one way or another. We may not score as highly as the Pharisees – who, as it happens, uniquely among the Jews, shared with Jesus a belief in resurrection (though of a vague kind). But we must recognise the need for our all too vulnerable strength to be healed by Jesus, rather than suddenly wake up and discover that we have become an impressive bunch of religious people who effectively want to narrow down the gospel and the sacraments, and deprive them of their life, their vitality, their openness, their capacity to engage with the world in which we live.

Yes, the world in which we live. The recent Lambeth Conference, fortunately, was about far more than the current (important) disputes about gender and sexuality. I know that these are areas that torment different parts of the Church. But we have allowed them to become far too important, to the exclusion of other more pressing issues. Let me give you an example. Last Wednesday night, I watched ‘God on Trial’ on television, a play about a group of Jewish prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp, who decide to ‘try’ God, arguing through all the issues of human suffering, and picking over many of the events in Jewish history. In the end, after some strong disagreements, they find God ‘guilty’, but it’s the agonising process they go through which I found riveting. I couldn’t help wondering why the Church’s emotional energy (and as a hospital patient, I came to prize and nurture emotional energy like never before) is not spent on the bigger questions so dramatically aired in that play.

The world’s questions to the Church, what we are in effect being ‘tried for’, may appear to be about the latest scandal, or faith schools, or what it all costs in financial terms. But in reality they are about whether the God of the gospel of humanity forgiven and restored, suffering entered into and made sense of, is believable or not. In other words, is it true? How do we bear its marks in our lives? And does the depth of our worship - not its decibel output, or its starchiness, or its informality – help that process?

Well, Bruce, the miracle in the synagogue is (perhaps surprisingly!) a good starting-point for your ministry here, and in the Wykeham Group Ministry. We wish you and your family every joy. And with your own experience prior to ordination you will have pondered some of these questions long and hard. As a former colleague in Manchester once said, ‘God’s people are God’s problem’ – and that includes the clergy! Of course we need procedures and liturgies to give our common life some stability. I expect, too, we shall persist in carrying in ourselves the seeds of a Pharisaism that goes much, much further than that and wants everything, absolutely  everything, neatly sown up. But the miracle is that we are able instead to find ourselves in that anonymous man in the synagogue, to whom Jesus speaks his words of acceptance, and strength.                  

+ Kenneth Portsmouth: