Diocesan News09 Apr 04

"God put his hands on us..." - Bishop Richard Clarke

"God put his hands on us"

sermon preached by

the Most Reverend Richard Clarke,
Bishop of Meath and Kildare

at the

Liturgy for the Renewal of Ordination Promises

Maundy Thursday, 8 April 2004,
Saint Patrick?s Cathedral Trim

A couple of weeks ago, when our colleagues from Saint Andrews Diocese were with us, I found myself talking with them and with some of you about what I perceive as new insecurities and new uncertainties for the priest as he or she goes about ministry in today?s environment. Although I think that it is a matter to which we should certainly return together, this is not the place or time for a deeper exploration, except to say that part of the unease I sense - and at times feel - is a general indecision all around us (and sometimes within us) as to what the priest actually is. Is a priest what he or she does, or is a priest defined by something more intangible, what God made him or her at ordination? Because if it is this latter, then in a post-modern world, we have to admit that many people don?t even begin to grasp the notion.

But yet for us, today, Maundy Thursday, as we renew the promises we made - whether relatively recently or decades ago - at our ordination, we must surely hold on to what God made us at our ordination, and what we accepted at that moment when God put his hands on us. That picture of God putting his hands on us is part of a phrase used by a character in Alan Paton?s novel Cry the Beloved Country, written more than 50 years ago, set in the injustice and hatreds of South Africa as it then was. Not the main character, but the principal friend of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo is another pastor, Theophilus Msimangu. At one moving point in the story, he explains himself and what he is. Msimangu doesn?t see himself as good, far from it, but he recognises what his call means and meant. He says gently to Kumalo in one of the pivotal points in the novel, ?I am a weak and sinful man, but God put His hands on me, that is all.? Perhaps that is all any of us needs to say?

But Msimangu?s moving credo has to mean more in the outworking of ministry and so I would make the additional point today that the one thing none of us should do is to change the basics of that call of God in order to suit ourselves. Too easily we rationalise our failures or weaknesses. We explain away our resentments or our self-pity. Yet deep down we have to accept that we must never move the goalposts of our ordination in order to cover over our insecurity or unease. For me, the great example within literature of what I?m talking about here is the main character, another priest, in Graham Greene?s great novel, The Power and the Glory.

Right through the novel, the priest is on the run from the authorities in a rabidly anti-Christian central American state. And all the way through the book, we are aware of the priest?s terrible weaknesses of character. He is a failure - he is a hopeless drunk, the original indeed for the expression ?whiskey-priest?, he has fathered a child, he is a coward who will do anything to avoid pain, and is quite happy to let other people get into trouble in his behalf, and yet amidst all his failures, and his continuing failures, he always knows what the standards are, the standards he is failing to live up to. He never stops acknowledging that they are the standards, even though he is making an utter catastrophe of his life, and his calling as a priest. But he never gives up some kind of dogged hope / he somehow manages to pick himself up after each failure and moral disaster because he knows what he is meant to be, even though he is failing to be it.

And then, against all the odds, in a blundering pitiable way he somehow becomes a kind of hero. He is redeemed. His priesthood is redeemed. He leaves the safe sanctuary he has reached over the border, and returns to where he is being hunted. He returns because he has been called to give the last rites to a murderer on the run. The priest knows that it is almost certainly a trap, but somehow he puts the standards before the fear. He is captured and is shot by firing squad, a pathetic and squalid Christian martyr. This he is, not because of his courage or his sanctity, but because amidst the failures and cowardice and drunkenness he somehow manages to cling to the unshakeable belief that the Christian standards are the real standards, that priestly standards cannot be rationalised away, and ultimately he does triumphantly appropriate them for himself.

We can see other examples of acknowledging the standards in the midst of weakness as we read the Bible. Samson - a man deeply flawed, a man who has clear weaknesses of character (if not weaknesses of physical strength for most of the time). But Samson, even when he has failed utterly, still accepts in faith what God?s standards are, so that his strength returns at the end. And, in the New Testament, we think instinctively of Simon Peter. One of the most loveable figures in Scripture because he has the strength to get up after his failures, he doesn?t find excuses, he doesn?t lower the standards of Christ to let himself off lightly. He humbly recognises those failures, the denials, the cowardice. He doesn?t try to excuse them or to find an escape route that will leave him with his self-respect intact.

The priest in The Power and the Glory. Samson. Simon Peter. None of them is perfect, and neither are we, you and I. But what they have in common is this courage not to modify the standards set for us all by God. Redemption in Christ sets us the standards of total love, the standards of the Beatitudes, and ultimately the standards of the Cross. We must not, we dare not, conveniently lower those standards for our own priestly lives, even when we fall short of them. ?Moving the goal posts? is to cut ourselves off from redemption, and from our priesthood.

When we acknowledge fully the standards that Christ sets for us, and go on acknowledging them even when it hurts us to do it because we know we?re not matching up - that at least means that God?s work of redemption, God?s ministry through us, is allowed to continue its eternal course.

We are weak and sinful men and women but God put his hands on us. That is all.