Licensing of Paul Smith at St Alban’s, West Leigh, Wednesday 20th July, 7.30 p.m.
Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7, Matthew 16:24-26
‘Icon’ has become an ‘in’ word. In recent years I have heard it used on television bulletins, usually about celebrities. So we find it applied to all sorts of people, from David Beckham to the late Princess of Wales. But they’re all celebrities: folk about whom you can read, held up there in glossy colours, living supposedly perfect lives, even advertising particular ways of dressing and particular places to be on vacation. The trouble comes when their little foibles that are so endearing to some people one moment suddenly become unacceptable to many the next. Celebrities are allowed to have clay feet, but only just a little bit and no more.
But the word ‘icon’ has a wider frame of reference. It is, in fact, a Greek word, meaning no more than picture. And that’s roughly what it meant when it entered the English language in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign: a likeness, whether in the solid form of a statue, or – later on – an illustration in a book. No symbolism was attached to it whatever; indeed, had cameras been invented in those days, I’ve no doubt that all these snap-shots we take might have resulted in ‘icons’. However, symbolism did get in the way, in the 1830’s, at the time when the Christian East was being opened up to folk in this country, resulting in some of the old Greek hymns being translated into English, like ‘The Day of Resurrection’. The word ‘icon’ took on a new lease of life: it was a holy picture, painted according to established rules in the Greek manner, with stylized figures, haloes over their heads, and, invariably, a powerful, deep golden background.
Since then, religious ‘icons’ have left the hands of scholars and historians, and have become the life-blood of many Christians in the West whose forebears would never have dreamt of using them. In my chapel every day I gaze on an icon painted by Brother Anselm, a member of the little Anglican Benedictine community at Alton, where my predecessor Bp Timothy went when he retired: there is the figure of Christ in the centre, and on his right is the Virgin Mary, the ‘God-bearer’, and on his left stands John the Baptist, the ‘Forerunner’ as they are called in the Greek tradition. ‘God-bearer’ and ‘Forerunner’ between them point to Christ, but they also point to me and every on-looker: sometimes I manage to ‘bear Christ’ in the world (like the Virgin Mary), in some small way, but at other times all I can do is ‘run ahead of him’, like John the Baptist, conscious that my life will always be unfulfilled in this world.
So beneath the gloss and colour of my three celebrities is the real world, the world I know full well, the world Jesus comes to take seriously, challenge, encourage, and lead on to new ventures of which I have not the faintest clue. They are emphatically not glossy, colourful figures who advertise themselves, or are advertised by others. Jesus does not have a hidden steamy past that is waiting for some investigative journalist to uncover. The Virgin Mary doesn’t immediately suggest to me where I might go on holiday. And John the Baptist is the last person by the shape and colour of his rugged clothing to point me towards a smart tailor, ecclesiastical or other! And the simple truth is that if they did, I would no longer trust them.
The crucial difference is that all three of them take the whole of this world seriously, or rather, the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist take this world seriously because Jesus does; and none are held up to me as personalities that either try to evade the world’s deepest questions and hardest challenges, or (perhaps unwittingly) deceive us into thinking that all our problems would disappear if we only did this, bought that, or became even more casual about our personal or economic morals than we are already.
Into this ‘iconic’ world comes Paul Smith, your new priest. In a specific sense, a priest is indeed an ‘icon’, a figure, a person, with a gold background given at baptism (we all have that, whether we like it or not!), and a halo, given at ordination. While I’m sure that the halo isn’t restricted to the ordained, it rests over Paul’s head at those moments when he stands and offers to Christ the needs of human life on behalf of the people of God. In other words, when he is ‘in role’, dealing with holy things – the holy things of baptism (water) and eucharist (bread and wine), as well as the rough and tumble and murk, the mire of the holy things of ordinary life: wounded souls, broken lives, fragile relationships. All those are points, moments, when he will be there between you and God, not as an interloper, getting in the way (and clergy, including bishops, can do just that at times!), but as an enabler, a representative, an intercessor, a friend of sinners – a priest. His physique, as you will all know, will restrict physical movement a bit, but never his spiritual potential to look into your souls, to help you cry or laugh, to speak or to keep silent; and to preach and teach, challengingly, and to help this community develop even further its relationship with the whole parish, schools included. Paul is here to be, at least in part, an icon; but not a celebrity, still less one of those boring clerical ‘home-chat heroes’, who has a slick but superficial and easy word for everyone. Paul is a human icon, and your task with him is to ensure that he is enabled to be and to do just that, and not welcomed with a smile and then left to get on with it, preferably in exactly the same way as his predecessor, or else, in as different a way as possible, because that’s somehow been decided already. Perhaps his task is to be an icon of a life lived in depth, rather than on the surface, where so much of the time our lives are busy and hectic, because our lives are hectic and busy.
Today’s readings underscore these truths: Isaiah’s promise that God is with us, whatever happens, and with Jesus calling his disciples to take up their cross and follow him. Today’s two saints, in all their obscurity, do the same: Margaret of Antioch, who converted many to Christ before she was martyred under the Roman Emperor at the beginning of the fourth century; and Bartholomé de las Casas, a Dominican from Seville who as a missionary bishop in Mexico died in July 1566. I suppose what I am really trying to say is that to follow Christ is not about being a celebrity – that’s easy, and really rather skin-deep. Instead it’s about being an icon, a living icon, trusting in our frail humanity, and leaving it to God to supply both the gold background, and the individual, custom-designed halo, so that we can make sense of the lives we lead to both ourselves and each other, and in the end point to the wisdom and reality of God.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
