1999 Petertide Deacons' Reunion

Eucharist in All Saints’ Chapel, Bishopsgrove, at the reunion on the tenth anniversary of 1999 Petertide Deacons. Wednesday 12th August, 12 noon. 

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8/Rom 12:1-12/Mk 10:35-45 

I expect you all have memories of one sort or another of the 1999 Ordination experience. One of mine is when I asked Peter Hancock to do the Retreat, and he came back to me soon afterwards, telling me he was going to base the addresses around the Aramaic sayings of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel (Mk 5:41, 7:34, 14:36); and he was going to book a few days in Cambridge to study them. Well, that’s what I call real ‘delivery’ of ministry. 

And ‘delivery’ is the key word. But it carries many different connotations. Over the last ten years, you will have had many occasions in which you will have had to come to terms with what might be called the more human aspects of the Church. Sometimes this can be cumulatively wearing and discouraging. It’s easy to look at the sheer absurdity of the Church without putting yourself into the picture as well. We are weak and we are human. How can we rekindle the fire as our ministry grows and deepens over the years? 

The three readings set for today, the ones used at the Ordination service, provide some challenge and sustenance, for they are all, based around transformation. First of all, we have Isaiah in the temple, doing the routine thing of going to worship God, in the same way that we might go along to the eight o’clock eucharist, or some All-Age Worship, as a routine. But suddenly the very familiar words and actions, the symbolism of the place, take on a new and different meaning. It all somehow stops being familiar and ‘clicks’. Things are put into a wider perspective, and there is an urgent call, and it is impossible to resist it. 

Then Paul exhorts the congregation in Rome to present themselves as a ‘living sacrifice’. Those words are familiar – perhaps too familiar – to us, because they form part of the prayer usually said after Communion: ‘we you ourselves as a living sacrifice’ But for those first hearers of that letter it would have been anything but familiar. A living sacrifice is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, because sacrifices were either of dead animals or of vegetation, crops, food. But a sacrifice that is alive is exactly what we are called to be – transformed (the same word in Greek as ‘transfigured’ by the renewing of our minds. The call is constant, because we never reach a point of arrival, whether in the wider experiences of discipleship, or in the more restrictive world of ministry. 

Finally, in the Gospel, Jesus is faced with a proud mother wanting the best for her two lads, a very human request, but one that runs contrary to the gospel itself. For in following Christ, there can be no ring-side seats, no status, no grasping for the position of being first in the queue. It’s all very tempting, and the Church has its fair share of grabbers – bishops included! But the way of the gospel is to follow the one who is a ‘ransom for many’. Those words have provoked in preachers and theologians much religious speculation over what was much later called the doctrine of atonement. But we’ll leave it there!  

Christ is the one who calls, the one who transforms, the one who renews - as our ministry grows and deepens over the years. 

+ Kenneth Portsmouth