If you were to catch an ostrich in order to weigh it, you would find it tipped the scales at something like 250 pounds. If however, it escaped you and you tried to chase it, you would find it could accelerate up to sixty miles per hour. If you decided that in fact a long, slow haul would be more likely to bring you success, beware the ostrich can trot for two hundred miles at a steady pace of ten miles an hour without stopping. If, when you had caught it, you so frightened it that it laid an egg, it would take you forty minutes to hard-boil that egg!
I can see you sitting there bemused: I’m sure that you all really wanted to know all that and at least you can go away from this service feeling that you’ve learnt something. But unless you want to be an ostrich farmer, or perhaps become a student at the College where I work, the Royal Veterinary College, and specialise in exotic animals, it will make no difference whatsoever to your lives to know these facts about the ostrich. But we are here tonight to receive Holy Communion from the hands of one of the Church’s newest priests, who just a few days ago was not a priest and yet who looks the same as when we last saw her. We are bound to think then, in relation to Sarah’s priesthood, like knowing the facts about the ostrich, “What difference does it make? What difference does priesthood make?”
The short answer is that the priest is a person for God and a person for others. She, and isn’t is great we can take about she in relation to priesthood, let’s hope we can talk of women Bishops soon, she is a person for God and a person for others in the way that Jesus was a person for God and a person for others. But we could say this of every baptised Christian, you might say. And that is precisely the point, a priest is an ordinary member of the Christian community, committed as all Christians are to order her life for God and for others.
Well, that’s not much of a sermon, so I’d better say something more. A priest is a lay Christian, set apart by vocation, training and ordination to accentuate, by what she is, what the Church is and what the Gospel is for. That’s it: it’s an accentuation. This allows us to see the priesthood of all believers and the priesthood of priests in their interdependence and their distinction.
There could be many metaphors which we could adopt tonight in talking of priesthood, but I guess one of the ones which most resonates with 21st century Britain (or should I say in World Cup season, 21st century England) is that of priest as interpreter. A good priest interprets people to themselves, interprets people to each other, interprets the movements of the time and place in which we live, and interprets all this (as if this weren’t enough), in relation to that unveiling of meaning which is God’s self-revelation in Christ. This interpreting, necessary and continuing as it is, requires of Sarah and all priests, a life-long habit of reading and reflection, of participation, observation and appraisal. It’s a habit which new priests need especially to work upon, not because they have less life experience than others because that is not necessarily the case, but because the patterns of ministry established in the first years of priesthood can either enrich you for a lifetime or else take years to re-fashion having had to kick-over the traces. All of us already know that Sarah is wise, loving and mature but she will need our help to make her even more so, even as she helps us to develop these qualities within ourselves.
To live such a priestly life is to live in a very unstructured way. Being open and available to people, requires a spiritual and emotional maturity a confidence and conviction based on experience. That great Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard told us that we live life forwards but understand it backwards. If that is the case, then my 13 years of priesthood are only a third of my life to understand, so I hope you’ll accept my thoughts on priesthood as partial and contingent. As I look back over my own priesthood I think I have come to see that priests are trained but not prepared for what is to come, and it could not be otherwise. What could prepared me for hearing an off the cuff confession of a French Roman Catholic woman who saw that because I had my small son with me, I was a physical as well as a spiritual father, and through sobs and broken English unburdened her heart to me, a stranger, on a bench in a central London park and told me of the abortion hr husband had forced her to have some years before? What could have prepared me for a six foot five man, seized by mental illness, dropping his knife and falling to the ground when he saw my dog collar and who then lay his head on my lap, and sat in the middle of one of London’s busiest tourist attractions, until the police and social workers came to take him away?
Such dramatic events are of course, not commonplace, but one of the experiences which I suppose has kept me grounded in ministry is an event which happened to me in my first year after ordination to the priesthood. I visited a parishioner in hospital and, since she was asleep as she had been when I’d visited before, I left my printed visiting card. A few days later I visited again and saw on the trolley, by the nurses’ station, that my visiting card had been used as a piece of scrap paper. Stuck to a small plastic vial on this trolley was my beautifully embossed card, printed with “The Revd Giles Legood, Curate” now bearing the addition, in scrawled biro, “Sputum.”
I laughed then and I laugh still and think that there in this occurrence is all that is needful to know about priesthood. It’s about priesthood as faithfulness, as caring, as practicality, about earthiness: in fact it is simply about the Incarnation because it is about the Christian ministry being used by others as well as being done to others. All human experience is grist to the mill in understanding priesthood, as it is in understanding life. So when we ask what difference priesthood makes, we perhaps can answer it best (or even answer it only) through stories such as these. It is the best answer because, as Judas asked in John’s Gospel, how is Christ revealed to us? As we know, Christ is revealed in the person sitting next to us and in the person on the other side of the world. Christ is revealed in the ordinary and the extraordinary, Christ is revealed in the everyday and in the once in a lifetime.
Sarah will find out what she needs to know about priesthood, and what difference it makes, when she does it, when she lives it. I’ve not spoken of the Anglican priesthood to which Sarah has been called because, well, that’s another sermon. But if Sarah ever finds herself, as an Anglican priest, leading worship in another church, say in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and forgets which denomination the Church is, there is a good rule of thumb she can apply. She can tell if she’s in a Roman Catholic vestry is there’s a crucifix on the wall, she can tell if its a Free Church vestry if there’s a picture of the Good Shepherd on the wall and she can tell if it’s a Church of England vestry if there’s a full-length mirror on the wall! (Sadly, it’s true).
All of us here today, about to be blessed in receiving the body and blood of Christ at Sarah’s hands, should ask not only as I asked at the start of this sermon, “What difference does priesthood make?” but also, because priesthood is an accentuation of what the Church is and what the Gospel is for, “What difference does my faith make?” We need to call to mind all the experiences from our lives and try to work-out an understanding of our humanity and ask “What difference does my faith make?” As we bring all of our lives to mind, so we bring them before God and come with open hands to the altar of God, and pray (as we’ve sung) “Just as I am, thou wilt receive, wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve: because thy promise I believe, O Lamb of God, I come.” Amen.
Giles Legood