Diocesan News
Open-air Community Service, Donagh Old Graveyard, Diocese of Clogher
Address by the Right Reverend Dr Michael Jackson, Bishop of ClogherSend your peace to the world
which you have reconciled to yourself
by the ministry of your Son Jesus Christ.
(from The Litany in the Service of Ordination of Priests or Presbyters)
Sometimes it does us no harm to do what the church asks us to do. In a great deal of religion today we spend much of our time improvising – trying to invent ways of speaking or ways of worshipping - when already within the tradition which is our inheritance there are tried-and-tested ways of giving voice and verve to the depth of our hope and the height of our aspiration. My opening quotation is, to my mind, one of them.
Pentecost, Whitsunday, is one of those days in the life of the church and of the Christian person when, if I may adapt a well-established phrase, ‘it is even more blessed to receive than to give.’ Pentecost is a day of gracious plenitude, of flowing over, of fulfilment and of integration. The Holy Spirit of God is God in all of God’s fullness. The Holy Spirit of God is not siphoned off or decanted from God but is God, God in One of God’s Three Persons. Lest there be any scope for mis-emphasis or mis-understanding within the totality of who God is, the church of the same God is quick and nimble to follow Whitsunday with Trinity Sunday. This helps us to avoid wandering off into the hedgerows and byways of seeking out the Person and the part of God we prefer, whether it be Father, Son or Spirit. God is Three in One and One in Three, not Three or One.
One of the features of today’s culture is the quest and thirst for a precision, a separation and a determination of particular issues which satisfy the aggrieved individual but which in themselves have little grasp of how to integrate, to reconcile, to re-unite those who have aggrieved and those who have been aggrieved. It is a major intersection-point where: dealing with the past and dealing with difference meet and potentially clash with violent emotions and little lasting respect. If we let the Holy Spirit take us into the heart and the heat of Pentecost as recounted in the Book of Acts, then we can see that such integration of difference – in people, in language, in culture – lies deep within the gift which the Spirit of God comes to bring, the gift which is ‘more blessed to receive’ than anything we can think of offering back to God. It is one of the features of fire that it purges, that it painfully deprives us of things we want. The Fire of the Spirit takes us deep into the mind of God where our comprehension of everything which happens to us must recede before God’s confirmation of our faith in his purposes. This is indeed a message most unappealing to our generation because it denudes us of certainties and mechanisms of control and obstruction.
My opening words come from the Litany which is used at the Ordination of Priests or Presbyters:
Send your peace to the world
which you have reconciled to yourself
by the ministry of your Son Jesus Christ.
Ordination is an act of the whole church, of the whole people of God, not in any exclusive or superior way an act of its clergy over against its laity. The integration and the reconciliation of which I spoke and which is our proper work as people of the Book and children of the Spirit has already been brought about and given to us by Jesus Christ. The Jesus of St John’s Gospel speaks of leaving peace with his disciples and giving peace to them. This gift is to be treasured because Jesus says that he gives not as the world gives. This gift fills us full with someone we do not possess, that is the Holy Spirit. We move into unknown territory where faith feeds us but certainty eludes us. The peace of God, as we often say in our worship, passes all understanding.
The Spirit is the Spirit of the Christ. The reconciliation is something at which we must work because God needs our hands and our hearts to do this work of peace on earth. Reconciliation is not a strange or a new idea in Ireland but we can always be tempted to leave it to someone else and to delude ourselves that the work is over. Reconciliation is not a new or a strange idea in Israel and Palestine, the sacred space of three world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam but, again, it always needs urgently to be worked at by people of faith and by people of good will.
On this Day of Pentecost uniquely for us here in Donagh we draw together our hopes for reconciliation and peace in all these lands and we extend our praying to embrace those who are suffering and those who are leading in the Land of the Holy One. We have with us here in our midst Bishop Suheil Dawani, fourteenth bishop of Jerusalem, and one who is, in his own family inheritance, a child of Pentecost.
Today, in Ireland and in Jerusalem, we continue our quest and our request for the fruit of the Spirit which is love, joy and peace as we commit the future to the same Spirit.