CHRISM EUCHARIST
PORTSMOUTH CATHEDRAL
MAUNDY THURSDAY AT 11 A.M.
Readings: Wisdom 1: 1-5/Acts 6: 1-7/Luke 4: 16-21
‘I wasn’t ordained for this’, is a comment sometimes overheard, and it doesn’t just come from those of us who have been at it for thirty years. The world changes and so does the Church: not as much as some would like, and perhaps too much for the taste of others. The same kind of remark is frequently made by people in other walks of life. But it doesn’t always help when we are lectured at about the need for the Church to ‘get its act together’, especially from those who, if I may use a facetious caricature, seem to favour the exclusive use of the Book of Common Prayer, together with the re-introduction of flogging. And along comes the KAIROS process! There are some surface questions like, ‘why weren’t we all consulted ten years ago so that we could get it into our parish programmes properly?’ Then there are deeper ones, like ‘what kind of Church are we really becoming?’ – and ‘is all this going to make much of a difference?’ Because the Sunday gospel readings this year give priority to St. Luke, I want to take a glance at some of what he has to say about ministry, ordained as well as lay, in three thematic canters through his writings.
First of all, providence. In this morning’s gospel (Lk. 4: 16-21), Jesus is in the synagogue in Nazareth, where he uses the passage set for the particular day (Isaiah 61: 1-2a) as his inspiration: ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me’. From the very start, Luke more than any other gospel-writer, has a profound sense of history unfolding before us. God always prepares the way, throwing down the challenge to women and men of faith, and using them to make some kind of sense of the mess we help to create. It is Luke who makes even more of Jesus’ childhood than Matthew (Lk. 1-2, cf. Mt. 1-2); it is Luke alone who portrays the birth of John the Baptist (Lk. 1: 57-58); and he throws into this rich and unexpected part of his portrait of Christ hints of what the future will bring – like Simeon’s second prophesy in the temple that this child is destined for the falling and rising of many (Lk. 2:34). In the darkest moments of secular apathy, or the fiercest ecclesiastical debate (when, for a change, we might be talking about something important!), we are recalled to history, which is full of scary new questions, but where God’s providence is fundamental: ‘in you redemption measures all my time’, as George Herbert observes in one of his poems about baptism. KAIROS is about time, and it poses questions boldly, but in the context of prayer-filled faith. And faith plus time = providence.
Secondly, Luke’s vision of mission and ministry is about widening – widening all our perspectives. So John the Baptist rejects the temple priesthood of the family trade, in order to proclaim the Messiah out in the wilderness (Lk. 1: 5ff, cf. Lk. 3: 1ff). The twelve are indeed called and sent (Lk. 6: 13-16), but so (uniquely) are the seventy (Lk. 10:1ff.). Alone among the gospel-writers, Luke goes on to tell the story of the birth and first generation of the Church, in the Acts of the Apostles, beginning with the selection of Matthias to replace Judas (Acts 1: 15-26), the appointment of the seven deacons, as in today’s second reading (Acts 6: 1-6), as well as no fewer than three accounts of the most controversial appointment of all – Paul’s conversion (Acts 9: 1-9; 22: 1-21; 26: 2-24). There is, too, a widening of the focus of mission and ministry, which can also be glimpsed in Luke’s emphasis, in both Gospel and Acts, on the place of women in salvation: from the call of the Virgin Mary (Lk. 1:26-39), through various people such as Anna the prophetess in the temple (Lk. 2:36-38), the central place of women at the crucifixion, burial and resurrection (Lk. 23:49, 55; 24:1ff. and 22); to Lydia, dealer in purple cloth in Thyatira (Acts 16:14). But everything happens within emerging patterns. People do not just do their own thing because they somehow ‘feel called’, but because God has called them, and the Church, the community of faith, has the imagination to take risks as well as work out structures. Michael Ramsey once wrote, ‘the glory of Christianity is its claim that small things really matter’. We may not always be able to recognise ourselves in what Luke provides. But perhaps we have both too many and too few ministries – what about putting more into youth ministry, and the ministry of music? KAIROS is about widening our understandable defensiveness.
Thirdly, a recurring theme in Luke’s gospel is reversal. This brings us face-to-face with the unexpected, hinted at in today’s first reading from Wisdom: ‘think of the Lord in goodness… because he is found by those who do not put him to the test’ (Wis. 1: 1b-2a). The shepherds, lowly, unpopular, untrusted, supposedly impious because their unsocial hours kept them from the synagogue, are the first to visit the new-born Saviour (Lk. 2: 8-20). Then we have his sequence of ‘lost’ parables – the lost sheep (Lk. 15: 3-7), the lost coin (Lk. 15: 8-10), and the prodigal son (Lk. 15: 11-32); and there are other reversals too, as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16: 19-31). All of this is celebrated in the most powerful way in Mary’s song, the Magnificat (Lk. 1: 46-55), and Luke’s unique four ‘Woes’ (Lk. 6: 24-26), to contrast with his four ‘Blesseds’ (Lk. 6: 20-22), in the ‘Sermon on the Plain’, where Jesus speaks to us, not from a mountain, but on our level. These reversals are not, as we might at first think, about humiliation, in our culture of envy, which can destroy popular careers, livelihoods, reputations, just for the sake of it. As Charles Browne, a Manchester vicar, once remarked, ‘He did not come down from heaven to unmake, but to remake.’ Reversal asks the question, to whom is the gospel to be addressed? KAIROS may be asking us to look at the gospel in unexpected ways: what patterns of reversal in our mission and ministry lie ahead of us?
‘I will put up with this Church until I see a better one; and it will have to put up with me until I become better’. So wrote Erasmus, no less, in 1526, faced with the inherent conservatism of his own Church that seemed so unable to cope with what Martin Luther and his followers were up to. Structure and spirituality struggle towards a proper integration, as they always do, because the management of change begins with Christ himself. Perhaps structure and spirituality can be discerned in those three Lucan themes of ministry, which need to be held together; for providence, on its own, may make us complacent, even in denial about the real issues we are facing; widening ministry, on its own, may land us with a vague, uncoordinated Church where there is no cutting edge; and reversal, on its own, may turn the business of the gospel into no more than a social crusade. At this moment in time, we may be recalled to a mission that is both realistic, and confident – confident in the providence of God, who is the source and final purpose of all that we are, confident in a ministry that widens rather than narrows, and confident in God’s divine reversal of all that the world stands for, of which the cross is the supreme and lasting statement. We were ordained – and commissioned – for this. And in spite of us, and everything else, it is worth putting up with.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
