Diocesan News
Service to celebrate with Archbishop Richard Clarke the 40th Anniversary of Ordination as Priest and the 20th Anniversary as Bishop
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon in Armagh, as Archbishop Richard’s family, colleagues and friends gathered with him in St Patrick’s Cathedral for a special celebration of the Eucharist to thank God for the life and ministry of our much loved Primate.
Dr Clarke has served as Curate Assistant in Holywood and in Dublin, as Dean of Trinity College Dublin, as a Rector in Bandon, Co Cork, and as Dean of St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork, and as Bishop of Meath and Kildare before coming to Armagh as Archbishop in October 2012.
The preacher at the service was the Archbishop of Dublin. Together with a mixture of anecdote and biography of Archbishop Richard’s life, Archbishop Michael focused our attention on the threefold Order of Ministry of Deacon, Priest and Bishop: A Deacon voices discipleship. A Priest voices presence. A Bishop voices engagement.
The Archbishop went on to say he believed that all of the explorations and expressions of the three ordained ministries are already present and powerful in the laity and that the releasing of these gifts and inspirations as lay leadership, is a work on which the Church of Ireland, so dear to the heart of the Primate, has only begun.
Both Archbishops have been much inspired by the work and ministry of the Community of Sant‘Egidio which is found on the banks of the River Tiber in Italy. Archbishop Michael said: “This is a community that cuts through so much of contemporary hierarchicalism, a lay community with an episcopal chaplain. This is a community that combines what we in Ireland have found so problematic and so enigmatic: catholicism and evangelicalism. They are not incompatible. Too many of us have contrived to make them so.”
Following the celebration of the Eucharist, the large congregation enjoyed afternoon tea in the Alexander Synod Hall and Archbishop Richard was presented with a gift of a day out at the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit.
Sermon by the Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson: Ministry in the Anglican tradition: a range of voices
A Service to mark 20 years in the episcopacy and 40 years in holy orders on the part of the Most Reverend Dr Richard Clarke, Archbishop of Armagh
Readings: Numbers 27.15–20, 22, 23; Psalm 119.165–174; 2 Corinthians 4.1–10; St John 21.15–17
Introduction
Those of us who have gathered this afternoon in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh have done so to mark and to celebrate years of vocation and years of service in the life of a particular individual. He means a great deal to those who have been invited to come together in this particular way; he means a great deal to his family; and, in the spirit of the Communion of Saints, I also dare to suggest he means a great deal to those who can no longer be here this particular afternoon with Richard in this life as we know it.
Today is an occasion of joy and gladness, an occasion when, as often, the psalmist leads us to where God wants us to be, a place of security and a place of obedience:
I hope for your deliverance, Lord, and I fulfil your commandments; gladly I heed your instruction and love it dearly. (psalm 119.167, 168)
This psalm, as we so often find with The Psalms, is realistic about the past, hopeful about the present and adventurous about the future. Its realism is tinged, nonetheless, with the need to grapple with sadness as something that also plays its part in the light and shade of God’s gift of life and love to us. The darkness does not overcome the light; but it is, nonetheless, in the darkness that the light shines as St John memorably tells us.
I take you to another St Patrick’s and to another archbishop. The following story was widely told by Dean Victor Griffin himself, indeed it may still be, and it relates to Archbishop Henry McAdoo. The archbishop was a patient in the Meath Hospital and the dean was the chaplain engaged in visiting. While the scenario may indeed have all of the ingredients of a combined episode of The Barchester Chronicles and of Rev, it has a cautionary pertinence to it on a day such as this. After fraternal greetings were exchanged, the archbishop asked the dean: ‘Victor, do you know what day it is?’ and went on to answer his own question: ‘It is the twenty–fifth anniversary of my consecration as bishop.’ The dean replied: ‘Harry, it is Tuesday; and, in any case, what really matters is the day you were made deacon.’ Underneath the banter and the cameraderie, there is a truth that is always there to challenge and to connect. Service and leadership continue to rub shoulders; nobody who is ordained ever relinquishes an earlier form or Order of Ministry; the duty and the diligence of each Order infuse the life of the whole church. And none of them would be possible without the laity and discipleship themselves as the bedrock and the heartbeat of the church of God for the world of God.
Personal qualities and journey in service
Many of us have known the Primate in various phases and in different contexts, as his public ministry in the Church of Ireland has unfolded. In his earliest days of ordination, he served successively in Holywood, Diocese of Down and Dromore, and in St Bartholomew’s, Diocese of Dublin and Glendalough as curate–assistant. He next served as Church of Ireland Chaplain in Trinity College, Dublin at a time of ecumenical creativity and collaboration, as the University itself took sustained steps to grasp the nettle of the dignity of difference in a diverse Ireland around the profession of faith. This may seem blindingly obvious today but, in its own day, it was quite a revolution as two significant religious players on the Irish scene, the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church, along with the Presbyterian and Methodist traditions, worked out what it means in daily living to be ecumenical in the same place and at the same time, week in, term out.
From Trinity College, he moved to Cork in two parts: first to Bandon and secondly to St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork City. In so many ways, I suggest, he himself would still regard the Corkonian Period as truly formative personally, domestically, pastorally and professionally in ways that are hard to quantify. The quality of this experience shines through still in so many of the situations and decisions he meets on a daily basis. The United Dioceses of Meath and Kildare gave him what has proved to be his longest uninterrupted period of ministerial service to date. In every respect he served the people and the communities among whom he and his family have lived, faithfully and thoroughly, again to quote the psalmist: May your hand be prompt to help me, for I have chosen your precepts. (Psalm 119.173).
Since December 2012 he has served the Diocese of Armagh as bishop and the Church of Ireland as Primate. During that time he has carried with him so many of the skills and experiences he has accumulated over forty years of ordained ministry and twenty years of episcopal ministry. He is known to us all for his quickness of mind, for his lightness of touch and, if I may add a personal observation, a creative memory. One of his abiding consistencies is to centre on the life of the church the best of the insights of contemporary and historical humanism. In his faithfulness to the tradition, he is true to a perspective which he and I share instinctively: Tradition is the church interpreting, not the church reminiscing. Diocesan life matters to him, it energizes him and the local informs the wider realm of decision and action.
Exploration
Knowing Richard as I do, he would feel somewhat short–changed if I offered him on this day of days no more than a mixture of anecdote and biography. So, I promise now to try something different – to reflect, through the prism of his and our celebration, on why we in the Church of Ireland understand the threefold Order of Ministry to be an important contributor to the mission of God to the world through the church. The Scriptural Readings, readings for the ordination of a bishop, are rich in opportunity for us to be inspired by what it is to be a child of God in the church and world of the here and now.
I see ministry, in each of its three ordained expressions, as the pro–active and generous offering of self for others. I see this combined expression as true across the whole of humanity. It is an interaction of individuals praying and working with others to create community for the common good and for the dignity and justice of those with no voice in the community in which they find themselves. I see it as given specific and divine urgency in the life of the church of God for the people of God to Go and Tell the Good News of salvation in Christ Jesus and to share the love of God graciously and generously.
Diaconate: voicing discipleship: the First Lesson from The Book of Numbers gives voice to the bedrock of all public ministry. The duty and the gift of the people is to let their discernment meet God’s discernment. They need to release this energy; and the leader and the led will be enriched in the exchange. Discernment we learn has to do with the succession between Moses and Joshua and with the transference of authority. We have conventionally thought of diaconate in terms of service but we need also to think of it in terms of power – even though we often shy away from this notion out of an over–stated sense of church hierarchy or a scruple of personal reticence. When one is a deacon, one’s antennae are out, one’s eagerness is strong and one’s energy is forceful. This, in part, is because all experiences are still new. But it is also because one is at the point of closest consciousness of a fresh commissioning and closest connection with an existing condition within the discipleship one has sought to exercise up until now. Who, in the early days, has not looked into the mirror and asked: Is this really me in that collar? God is asked in a late prayer in the Service of Ordination to give to deacons the will to undertake the task before them, the strength to perform it and the capacity to complete the work begun by God in them. Deacons give voice to discipleship in Gospel, in liturgy and in assistance but also in embassy, relationship and authority. Leadership follows through from laity into a discipleship of collaboration in wisdom and in discipline. What is that about? Knowing what you are doing and sticking to it and listening to God.
Priesthood: voicing presence: priesthood is the long haul. A priest shares everything he or she is with whomever in Christ. A priest is daily at the interface of church and world and of world and world. There is no protection from it, nor should there be. That does not mean that self–care is not essential – quite the opposite, in fact. The primacy of the local in the interpretation and the appreciation of the general is pivotal to priesthood. It is the point of intersection where those liberating words of Paul in today’s Epistle come to life:
It is by declaring the truth openly that we recommend ourselves to the conscience of our fellow–men in the sight of God. (2 Corinthians 4.2b) Priesthood develops the special ministry that a deacon has with the bishop to be a ministry with fellow–priests and all the people within and beyond the church: that the world may come to know God’s glory and love. The priest cannot be in it or of it, if the priest is not at it. And this presence is what infuses the being of the priest, again quoting 2 Corinthians 4.5: It is not ourselves that we proclaim; we proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’s sake. And so we find that it is the priest who is the servant!
Episcopacy: voicing engagement: The Gospel Reading for the ordination of a bishop makes fairly chilling reading. Superficially it seems positive and harmless, like most of our church–based life, week in week out. But if we allow it to be, it is much more demanding. The Gospel comes from the final chapter of St John’s Gospel and it connects directly with the first chapter. It asks the following question: Are we able to let the light of restoration shine through the darkness of conventional togetherness? The Johannine Prologue convinces us that the darkness does not snuff out the light. The work of a bishop is to give voice to engagement in its most unpopular form, if needs be. Others know better and inevitably know that they are right; and many are not slow to tell you. But the bishop is to be the voice of proactive engagement where others are, in the blood–curdling words of the hymn, turning their face away. If the first chapter of St John tells us that the darkness does not quench the light, the final chapter tells us that reconciliation in and of itself simply is not sufficient as a response to betrayal and denial from a Godly perspective.
There is one question in three forms: Do you love me? It is the key that takes us beyond all of the functioning avoidance that can so easily thwart fruitful engagement with those we do not know and those we think we know. It is the key that moves us from reconciliation to restoration. Few care to embrace this. Bishops have no option but to do so; they must challenge the limitation of reconcilation as an insufficient expression of the flowering of human personhood, as an expression of human dignity and as, what a predecessor of Archbishop Richard referred to as: the ability to disagree agreeably and to remain one in Chrsit and one on earth. Reconciliation is about restoration. Restoration takes us beyond uneasy truce; it takes us beyond silence as the new talking; it takes us beyond a bogus understanding of information as wisdom. It brings us into the rather frightening zone of unknowing – what Anglicanism has called provisionality – voiced in the Lord’s Prayer: on earth as it is in heaven. This restoration is what we want everyone to glimpse. And none of us is ordained or equipped to contradict the ethic of heaven.
A range of voices
There is nothing new in what I have said. It is all there in the Scriptures and in the Book of Common Prayer. The Primate will see this and know this. All of these explorations and expressions of the three ordained ministries are already present and powerful in the laity. The releasing of these gifts and inspirations as lay leadership is a work on which the Church of Ireland, so dear to the heart of the Primate, has only begun. The range of voices is pervasive in the people of God in evey tradition ecumenically; the Anglican sharpening is something to which intellectually he has devoted much of himself and I predict will continue to do so. His inspiration, if for a moment I may be personal, will be The Community of Sant’Egidio. This is a lay community on the banks of the River Tiber. This is a community that cuts through so much of contemporary hierarchicalism, a lay community with an episcopal chaplain. This is a community that combines what we in Ireland have found so problematic and so enigmatic: catholicism and evangelicalism. They are not incompatible; too many of us have contrived to make them so.
The community is lay. It is not only lay–led; it is lay. The community means a great deal to the Primate and it means a great deal to me also. In a month’s time, I intend to travel with a number of my clergy to the Anglican Centre in Rome and to engage again directly with the Community of Sant’Egidio when we are there. Members of this community travelled the extra mile to be with Richard on the day when Linda was buried. They model and manifest all of the characterisatics of ordained minstry as lay people: discipleship, presence, engagement. And they do this with those whom respectable Christianity sets to one side: the migrants, the prisoners, the poor who are the Gospel.
Prospect
I offer you and Richard finally the words of Jesus: Then feed my sheep. (St John 21.17)
For further information please contact:
Diocesan Communications Officer, Armagh
07703 821533
Mr Jonathan Hull
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