Petertide ORdination 2010 - the Sermon
Revd Patrick Coleman led the ordination retreat at Llantarnam Abbey and preached at both ordination services.
This is the text of his sermon:
On 29th July 1890, Vincent van Gogh finally succeeded in taking his own life. His short life had been full of colour and more than passing enthusiasms. Ten years before he had been barred from preaching by the Evangelical church whose ministry he had attempted to train for – but he was too difficult, too hard to fit into a category, too full of whatever aspect of life attracted his interest in the fleeting moment. Working with miners in Southern Belgium, he was not just scandalised by their poverty – he sold his possessions and gave them the clothes from his back.
He must have been the ultimate nightmare for any selection conference, and the reason for his ultimate rejection was not the eccentric behaviour, nor the fervour for an evangelistic way of life, but his inability to preach an articulate sermon.
Now – where do you think I’m going with this? Not too far, I hope, since I’ve been asked to be short – and not to upset the Dean! But what I want to focus our attention on is the variety and the colour represented here by our ordinands – and I thank them for the privilege of spending these few days with them on retreat.
You see, we have spent these days getting to know Jesus a little better as he’s presented to us in the four gospels, and one of the things I realise more and more about Jesus as I get longer in the tooth – in years and in priesthood – is how colourful he appeared to the people of his time, and how attractive was his open teaching about his Father.
Yet this attraction could so easily turn into scandal and shock – even among those who had set themselves to understand him and absorb his words. Peter, who in other gospel accounts fails to understand how Jesus will be rejected, rejects the invitation of Jesus to wash his feet. A couple of Sundays ago we heard of the outcast woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee washing Jesus’s own feet with her tears and drying them with her hair, causing scandal and judgement among the religious and respectable gathered to hear Jesus.
These two gospel incidents have one thing in common – much love. Jesus tells us the woman’s many sins are forgiven because she has loved much; he teaches us as his disciples to follow his example – to wash feet – in other words, to love much.
We do well not to second-guess Jesus in his invitation to love much. Perhaps this is what the disciples were up to when they prompt the words of Jesus: messengers are not greater than the one who sent them. They may have been thinking – oh, we’ll follow his example, but behind closed doors, or among those who won’t take the … when we do it, or within conditions carefully defined by Canon Law.
Yet it is the law of much love, Saint Paul teaches us all through his letters, that reconciles us to God. Much love never divides; much love never judges; much love encourages diversity and variety of gifts; much love calls us to be reconciled while the time remains favourable.
Isaiah is able to tell us in famous words what the heralds of much love will bring with them: good news to the oppressed, binding up for the broken-hearted, liberty for the captives, release for the prisoners. He also speaks of the Day of Vengeance for God. In the language of the Prophets, this is the Day when God will at last put everything straight. While we might consider vengeance to be a matter of righting a wrong by carrying out an equal wrong, and getting the balance right again in that way – God’s way is different, for the way of much love is to cancel out the wrong with love which is pressed down, shaken together and running over – remember the woman at the feet of Jesus?
God puts things right by calling us to lift oppression, to heal hurt and division, to free those whose lives are captive in any way. We will comfort those who are in mourning, and we will replace the grey ashes on their heads with the oil of gladness, giving them a colourful garland to take away their long faces.
Unfortunately, in a context which is increasingly risk-averse, to be the colourful heralds of much love also entails risk – and here we can come back to the example of Vincent van Gogh. In his lifetime, he sought in so many ways to bring colour and love into the world around him, and to reflect the colour and love he saw in the most unlikely of human subjects. He is generally considered to have been clinically insane, asocial and probably a psychopath. Yet his work now commands huge sums – because of the colour of his love, and the exhibition of his art and letters at the Royal Academy earlier this year attracted huge crowds. We might also suggest that the colourful approach to his attempts at Christian ministry was (OK with the benefit of hindsight) more than a little Franciscan, and that his inability to preach a coherent sermon was transcended by the real sermon of his giving away all to provide the good news of a decent shirt to a poor man. We can also see that in his lifetime he was consistently and cruelly rejected because he saw things different.
The fourteen people sitting here – they’ve been named already, but I’ll name them again – Gareth, Jim, Heidi & Mary to be ordained Deacon; Annie, Sue, Mary, Chris, Pam, Mike, Rob, Nick, Dorothy & Chris to be ordained Priest – you all represent a complete spectrum of the vivid colours brought about in you by much love. You are not asked today to seek out rejection, yet you risk rejection because in your ordination you are about to become the one who loved much and yet was rejected – the one whose love was just too colourful for the comfortable and predictable structures to bear. He sends you, and as he says, those who receive the ones he sends receive him, and those who receive him receive the one who sent him.
Because of this risk – because you break the bounds of law and respectability that govern too many of our relationships – you will need to keep your relationship with God through Jesus alive in the Spirit and through prayer. You will also need (and I mean need) the people who have come here to support you today – yes, I mean all of you out there – and up there! They can support you by action and word as well as in prayer. And you will need the support of that ‘great cloud of witnesses’ too, who have sown the seeds of vocation in you, and now know in their flesh what much love really is, not in a glass darkly, but face to face.
Here, then, are the ones who offer their colourful gifts and their colourful lives in much love today and into an uncharted future, to be Jesus, in service, in Word, in sacramental presence, and in a real world which needs to be reconciled to itself and to God just as much as we all need to be reconciled. Much love will be the reconciler, and the reconciliation will be as colourful as was the life of the one who showed the way and whose shoes these fourteen souls take to themselves today.
I began with one whose life gave colour to a grey reality, and I conclude with words from John Bell, who today adds colour to the often grey reality that can pass for faith. He encourages us to be inspired by love, to have a practical anger at injustice, and to keep an eye on Jesus:
God asks: ‘Who will go for me?
Who will extend my reach?
And who, when few will listen,
will prophesy and preach?
And who, when few bid welcome,
will offer all they know?
And who, when few dare follow,
will walk the road I show?
Amused in someone’s kitchen,
Asleep in someone’s boat,
attuned to what the ancients
exposed, proclaimed and wrote,
a Saviour without safety,
a tradesman without tools
has come to tip the balance
with fishermen and fools.