Licensing of Karen Schmidt as Priest-in-Charge of St John the Baptist, Purbrook
Monday 31st January, 2005
Readings: I Cor 3:10-17/Mk 1:21-28
If I want to get really depressed, I open one of the national Church newspapers on a Friday morning and look at the advertisements. This is not because I’m after another job, I hasten to add! It’s because of what those columns often say about the kind of new priest a particular parish is looking for. Decoding them is not very difficult. One place is after a priest who will do all the work for them. Another wants someone who will be part of a busy team, and lead a busy life, in a busy community, in which everything is always rapidly expanding – and somewhere some prayers have to be offered, for what appears to be a somewhat superficial outfit, where Christianity seems to rank as just one more hobby in the local supermarket of suburban leisure activities. Just occasionally, I come across an advertisement that has the ring of truth about it: an honest, unpretentious parish, that asks for someone to help them in their discipleship – which means praying, which means engaging with the local community, and which means both hearing and living the gospel. No fancy words. No slick aims. No jargon – at least, not a lot! And a sense that God speaks through people in their needs, the Church included, in a rather fragile, humble community.
Well, along comes Karen! And there was no advertisement, because my colleagues and I nominated her, after careful consultation. You could have turned her down, and we may very well then have gone to advertisement. It would have been interesting to see what would have been placed in such a notice. But my opening gambit has let you off that particular hook! Her arrival still poses questions – questions about what it is that is being expected of her by the parish, as well as what she is expecting of you. A new ministry is about a two-way process. We’re disciples, keen to learn more about what it is to follow Christ. We’re not consumers, intent on getting our favourite version of the religious package, in the wrapping we insist on - or else!
In the life of the gospel, which means in the life of prayer, more often than not we ask things from God that we do not get, and when we do get something from Him, it is often very different from what we first thought of. Many have been the times over the past nine years that I have been faced with a problem that I felt singularly unsuited to deal with (bishops don’t ‘solve’ problems – we just try to deal with them, if, that is, we haven’t actually gone some way to create them in the first place! And each time, a barely audible voice inside me has said, ‘well, you could have turned this little Portsmouth number down, but you didn’t, and you’ll just have to get on with it as best you – and I – can.’ All this means that – for better for worse – you and Karen are stuck with each other for the foreseeable future; and as the local Bish, I’ve come along to do the deed, make sure she’s arrived, wave the liturgical (and legal) magic wand, and then return to base, ready for whatever tomorrow is going to bring.
All this may sound a bit haphazard, but it’s not. I would prefer to describe it as ambiguous, as tonight’s two reading suggest. In the first reading, Paul is measuring his words carefully with a difficult, articulate, bossy congregation at Corinth who didn’t think he – Paul – was quite up to the job – because he had the nerve to challenge their prejudices, and their tendencies to divide themselves up into first and second class Christians (things don’t change much!). Yes, he did come along to Corinth and start them off on Christianity, but the work was not his, it was God’s, and the resulting building, for all its weaknesses, is no more and no less than God’s dwelling-place, the temple of the Holy Spirit. There is always an ‘in spite of’ about the life of the gospel. There is always an ‘and yet’ about the way God both promises gracious gifts to us and at the same time puts up with our sometimes infuriatingly blind ways of responding to them.
God dwells among us, as we have been celebrating in recent weeks since Christmas. But we – that is ourselves, the planet earth – are not a finished product, as the Tsunami disaster so painfully and tragically has brought home to us. There are inherent imperfections both in us and in the world we inhabit. There are unpredictabilities about the way we behave (well, at least the way some of us do) that make it impossible for us fully to ‘manage’ our lives. The only surprising thing about all this is that we continue to be surprised by it. And yet – in spite of it all – we are still the temple of the Spirit, built by God: yes, human, fallible, weak, narrow, apt to look at ourselves rather than outside us, but still bearing the marks, the indelible marks, of the God who saves.
Then in the gospel-passage we have the curious scene in the synagogue at Capernaum. We’re at the start of Mark’s Gospel, the gospel that gives us no account of the birth of Jesus. Instead, he comes crashing in as an adult, hot on the heels of John the Baptist, your Patron Saint here at Purbrook. It’s Saturday morning at the synagogue. Everyone who is anyone is there, with the pewsheet carefully read in case there are any typographical errors, a quick eye over who is sitting where, a whisper about who has fallen out with who in the last week, and all the other little power-games people devise to keep themselves happy. Jesus is invited to speak, a courtesy given to any rabbi, or teacher: no bishop’s permission required in those days. And they find his teaching, and the way he got his message across, unlike anything else, or anybody else. His sermon stirs a man who was deeply and profoundly disturbed to ask to be healed; and there and then, Jesus breaks the conventions, and heals him. But instead of rejoicing at what he has just said and done, the congregation gets hung up on who Jesus was, for his fame began to spread. But that word ‘fame’ is ambiguous, because Jesus was unable to get anywhere in Capernaum. Yes, he was famous; but it was more like ‘notorious’ – even ‘infamous’. Someone nice to hear once, but too uncomfortable to hear more often.
There is an edge to the life of faith that we cannot escape. If the good news is preached, there is a response. But the response can be very ambiguous. Like the Corinthians, the ambiguity can be about how unable people have become to grasp the ‘and yet’: that we are an imperfect, inadequate bunch, and our life together is about coping with all those imperfections, those inadequacies – as part of God’s way of dwelling among us. That is one kind of ambiguity – how we fail to understand that God is speaking to us precisely when we miss the point. Then there is the other (more dangerous) kind of ambiguity, that we heard of in the gospel-reading. Something good is done, an act of healing, but on the wrong day, and so we refuse to recognize it for what it is, and shrug it off, as too inconvenient, or unexpected.
In this parish and community, there are many opportunities ahead of you: the way Karen is going to make prayer the centre of a ministry that will doubtless have perceptiveness as its hallmark. It may take the form of exploring the full meaning and use of the Church Centre, so that it does not become an end in itself, but can be a means towards more faithful discipleship, in ways both practical and contemplative. It will be all so easy to write it off, but with an ‘of course…..it doesn’t really mean anything at all.’ The Capernaum way is to shrug off the challenge of faith in a particularly deadly manner. Thank heavens God’s patience is infinite – but that should be no excuse for us to keep trying it!
I do not know what kind of advertisement would be appropriate to signal the need for a new priest here in Purbrook. It would be a matter of supreme indifference to Karen now, I can assure you. She has a great deal to learn from you, and you have a great deal to learn from her. You are God’s temple, whether you like it or not, as St. Paul tells the Corinthians; and it just might be possible that Karen’s teaching ministry will have the marks of authority and unpredictability (like Jesus at Capernaum) that will enable those who are disturbed or who for some reason hold back from being part of this community to find a place and a voice among you. All that – and much else – belongs to the future, God’s future, your future.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
