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Being for God

Could they have guessed, by Galilee,

the impact of Christ’s word?

how lives would change, their world would be

transformed by what they heard?

Those simple, country, peasant folk

who heard their kinsman speak

of suffering for righteousness,

of blessing for the meek;

could they have guessed who this man was,

this man they’d known from youth?

a carpenter from Nazareth

the bearer of God’s truth?

And dare we guess how Jesus’ words

will challenge all we know,

how vast the vision, broad its scope,

how strong its undertow

that stirs the basis of our lives,

asks of us that we face

the challenge of beatitude,

to live our lives by grace?

O that the boundless love of God

Christ’s burning, searing word,

would live in us, and then through us

transform our broken world.44

Earthenware vessels

How on earth are we to fulfil this heavenly calling? How can we live with God and others so that others may live with and for others? How can we be not only signs of the priestliness of God’s people but effectual signs, activators and animators of their calling to live holy lives of blessing? George Herbert, the seventeenth-century Anglican priest and poet, knew the problem.

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?

He is a brittle crazy glass:

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

This glorious and transcendent place,

To be a window, through thy grace.45

Sue, an ordinand whom we both knew, once went to a lecture given by Jürgen Moltmann, the influential German theologian. Inspired by Moltmann’s theology, she attended a small book-signing event after the lecture. As Moltmann was signing her book, Sue mustered the courage to tell him how she was struggling to make the Christian faith relevant to the inner-city people among whom she was living and ministering. Moltmann was silent for some time. She thought he had not heard her or had chosen not to reply. Finally, he turned to her, looked at her with a piercing stare and said, ‘You must divest yourself.’ In this short moment and four words, Sue felt that she had been seen by the eyes of Christ and heard the gospel of the Lord.

Moltmann was calling for the radical repentance that lies at the centre of Christian faith. It is a turning from human pride. Karl Barth defined pride as the original sin, the root problem of humanity’s relationship with God. Pride is the human principle that says ‘we can go it alone’. We cannot be saved unless we turn from this confidence in our own capacities, until we empty ourselves of our own attempts to sort ourselves out and get ourselves right. ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God’ (Ephesians 2:10). Abraham is the father of our salvation by grace through faith. When all seemed hopeless, when the weakness of his own fleshly powers overwhelmed him, he heard God say, ‘Abram, I will sort it’; and he believed the promise of God.

The dynamics of grace do not end with conversion. They begin with the call to follow Christ and they extend into every aspect of discipleship, including Christian ministry. We are saved by grace through faith and we minister by grace through faith. If the father of salvation by grace through faith is Abraham, the father of ministry by grace through faith is Moses. Moses was called to lead the people out of slavery to freedom in the promised land. God had seen the bondage of his people and had come to deliver them (Exodus 3:7–8). God had determined to bring his people to their rightful place in his purposes. God was going to set his people free to worship (Exodus 3:12; 4:23) and was calling Moses to play an instrumental part in these mighty works. Moses’ response was archetypal, echoed throughout the generations of calls to ministry: ‘Who am I that I should go?’ (Exodus 3:11). God’s reply to Moses is equally foundational and remains the word to all who have been called: ‘I will be with you; and this shall be a sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain’ (Exodus 3:12). Moses’ response is a statement of his own weakness. God’s response is a promise of his presence – a presence that will be known to be true only in its believing, only in obeying the call, only in the doing of ministry. ‘Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe’, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his great work on discipleship.46

Moses’ recognition of his own weakness is a justifying recognition. It justifies that God has made the right choice. It justifies that Moses is the right person for this work because it shows that Moses is in the right place to realize that the work will be completed not by his own abilities but by God’s abiding presence and power. It is the place that leads to priestly praise and proclamation:

For I will proclaim the name of the Lord;

ascribe greatness to our God!

The Rock, his work is perfect

and all his ways are just.

A faithful God, without deceit,

just and upright is he. (Deuteronomy 32:3–4)

Moses’ song exalts the Lord as the true God who is able to accomplish the unexpected. It is the same key in which Hannah, Mary and other biblical characters sang. ‘There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you,’ sings Hannah, no one ‘raises up the poor from the dust’ and makes the ‘barren bear seven children’ (1 Samuel 2:2). Mary’s soul too ‘proclaims the greatness of the Lord’ who has ‘looked with favour on his lowly servant’ (Luke 1:46–48). The Daily Office invites us to sing these familiar words of the Magnificat each evening as we gather the day before God in prayer. The day may have felt very unproductive. The powerful forces of the world may have seemed secure on their thrones and we, feeble against them. But the theological truth in the strange kenotic workings of God is that even on this day, when our ministry has seemed at its most barren, God has done great things for us and through us, simply because, with Mary, our faith has said ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord’ (Luke 1:38).

Paul seems to have been suffering from some sort of ‘physical infirmity’ (Galatians 4.13) when he first brought the gospel to the Galatians. It may have been the ‘thorn in the flesh’ to which he referred when writing to the Corinthians. Certainly, the experience of weakness that appeared to debilitate his ministry led Paul to a deeper realization of the power of God.

Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses . . . for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:8–10)

Just as in the dynamics of salvation ‘nothing in our hands we bring, simply to the cross we cling’, so in the dynamics of ministry all we can do is to offer ourselves to God in our weakness, even offer our weakness itself to God, trusting that God’s ‘extraordinary power’ (2 Corinthians 4:7) will be manifested through us. Yes, training for ministry is important, but the fundamental lesson to be learnt in any course of theological education is that ‘our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant’ (2 Corinthians 4:5–6).

Aelred, the abbot of a large Cistercian monastery in Yorkshire during the twelfth century, had a profound sense of his own inadequacy for the responsibility that had been placed upon him. His Pastoral Prayer is a moving manifesto of ministerial weakness.

O Good Shepherd Jesus

good, gentle, tender Shepherd,

behold as a shepherd, poor and pitiful,

a shepherd of your sheep indeed,

but weak and clumsy and of little use,

cries out to you.

To you, I say, Good Shepherd,

this shepherd, who is not good, makes his prayer.

He cries out to you,

troubled upon his own account, and troubled for your sheep.47

The prayer continues through several pages as Aelred wrestles with his calling.

And you, sweet Lord,

have set a person like this over your family,

over the sheep of your pasture.

Me, who take all too little trouble with myself,

you bid to be concerned on their behalf;

and me,

who never pray enough about my own sins,

you would have pray for them.

I, who have taught myself so little too,

have also to teach them.

Wretch that I am.

What have I done?

What have I undertaken?

What was I thinking of?48

‘The divine grace, which always heals what is infirm and supplies what is lacking, appoints [this person], beloved by God’; so says the archbishop in the Byzantine rite before he ordains a bishop, presbyter or deacon. This solemn statement, known fittingly as ‘The Divine Grace’, reminds all concerned that God is the one who is calling this person and that God will supply all that is needed. The people cry out, ‘Lord, have mercy’, and then the archbishop prays over the candidate calling for the ‘great grace of the Spirit’. Following a similar pattern in the Anglican rite we sing:

Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,

and lighten with celestial fire;

Thou the anointing Spirit art,

Who dost thou sevenfold gifts impart.

Prayer for the candidates’ future ministry follows and leads into the ordination prayer during which the bishop prays:

Send down the Holy Spirit upon this your servant

for the office and work of a priest in your church.

Ministry by grace through faith provides the shape of the ordination liturgy. We are called to let it shape the ordained life. It is the pattern we see when Jesus fed the 5,000 in Luke 9. ‘You give them something to eat’, he tells the disciples. They are being called to a new event of ministry. ‘We have no more than five loaves and two fish’, they reply. They face and acknowledge their weakness, their inability to meet the people’s needs by their own endeavours and powers. ‘Make them sit down . . .’, Jesus insists. The call goes on, not despite but because of their acknowledgement of their own inadequacy. Their calling is simply to set the scene for Jesus to act, to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. ‘They did so.’ Here is faith at work – the willingness to risk that God will act as we obey the call and do as Jesus tells us. ‘And then taking the five loaves and two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke them and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd.’ The faith doing, the risk taking goes on as the disciples dare to believe that Christ is active in a situation and can transform it through the faithful ministry of his followers. ‘And all ate and were filled.’ Like Moses we discover the truth of the promise of God’s presence and power as we do the work of ministry.

The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, talks about ‘catholic personality, community and cultural identity’ in his various writings on human reconciliation. We will make some explicit use of these ideas later. It is also possible to talk of evangelical personality. An evangelical personality is permeated with the grace of the gospel. It is a personality whose identity is based on and flows from the unimaginably abundant love of God, the ultimate affirmation of worth and value. This is the personality priests are called to model as they live with God and as they act for God by ministering to others in the love of God. It is a love dedicated to the formation of an evangelical community – a community of people open to the ‘extraordinary power’ (2 Corinthians 4:7) of God’s love, a community willing to act in the power of God’s love through their ministry to each other, and a community willing to make known God’s great love for the world to all the peoples of the earth. It is a love that is seeking to create an evangelical cultural identity. Constrained by the love of Christ, evangelical personalities and evangelical communities are committed to the transformation of the culture of their localities and lands by ministering the love of God to the world. In the face of the enormity of the task, we do well to remember that God still sees the suffering of all that he has made, and yearns for the work of his hands to be set free from the tyrannies that hold humanity captive. And God still calls people to announce to Pharaoh that he has come to bring his people to ‘a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey’ (Exodus 3:8), a land where the dynamics of grace have caused people to realize that only God is to be worshipped and that the idols of our self-sufficiency have bound us in slavery for too long.

As well as the experience of the ‘power of love’, John Chrysostom also looked for wisdom in the ways of God in those to be ordained. Wisdom is one of the marks of the evangelical personality of priests. We are to be skilled in speaking of and living by the hidden ways of God made known in Christ. We are to tell of the God who uses bread and wine, water and oil for eternal purposes. We are to preach of the God whose divinity is not denied but defined by the self-surrender to the conditions of humanity. We are to proclaim a God whose power is demonstrated in the helplessness of a crucifixion. We are to celebrate the God who chooses to create and who suffers the self-imposed limitations that come with freely sharing life with others. We are living proof that God has chosen ‘what is weak in the world to shame the strong’ (1 Corinthians 1:27).

Before we move on to other themes, there is one critical postscript to add. Although we are saved by grace through faith and not by our own goodness or strength, a change does occur in us as we are slowly, faltering step by faltering step, transformed into the likeness of Christ. The same applies in priestly ministry. Although it is always a ministry of faith in the grace of God, God is doing a work in and through us. We are in the worst position to judge the ways that the life and exercise of ministry is changing us into an authentic sign of the priestly people of Christ. But most of us will have known faithful ‘stewards of God’s mysteries’ whose lives have been permeated with the light and beauty of God and can agree with the second verse of George Herbert’s poem ‘The Windows’, the first verse of which began the chapter.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,

Making thy life to shine within

The holy Preacher’s; then the light and glory

More rev’rend grows, and more doth win:

Which else shows wat’rish, bleak and thin.

Beloved disciples

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the beloved; and with you I am well pleased’. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. (Mark 1:8–12)