I'm on sabbatical at the moment, so generally not going anywhere near the work of preaching (or indeed much else that usually counts as 'work'). But it was an immense privilege to be asked by a very dear friend, Revd Catherine Matlock, to preach at her first eucharist as a priest, in the parish of Kings Norton where she is currently Pioneer Curate. Lots of people said lots of very generous things about the sermon, so here it is...
(Readings for Proper 8C: Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Psalm 16; Luke 9:51-end)
Francesco Bernardone’s family were up-and-coming, newly rich.
His dad was a shrewd and ambitious businessman, and as his fabric business made
money, he bought up tracts of land from struggling landowners in the area.
Young Francesco had seemingly limitless money to spend, and his father
encouraged him to splash it around freely. Aside from his wealth, Francesco was
a popular young man, charming, witty, and by all accounts a bit of a party
animal. He was also a fighter, alongside many of the other young men of the
city – committed to defending their wealth and property from hostile
neighbours.
Clara Favarone, by contrast, came from a long line of
aristocracy – and was intended to be married, in time, to a similarly
aristocratic husband. She lived in a grand palace, high up on the city’s
central hill, and even as a young woman had earned a widespread reputation for
great honesty, kindness and humility.
When Francesco’s father discovered that his son had not only
donated the money from the sale of some expensive cloth for the restoration of
a ruined local church, but had also sold the horse he had been riding, his
father came to find him, dragged him home in a fury, locked him up for several
days, and demanded a court hearing to have the erratic behaviour of his son
punished. In the public hearing that followed, Francesco not only repaid the
money in question, but stripped himself naked, handing every piece of his fine
clothing back to his father – renouncing his inheritance, his family, his
status, to follow Jesus to the very edges of society, living in community among
the marginalized and excluded.
Clara, meanwhile, after months of planning and preparation,
slipped out of the palace one night under cover of darkness, and sought
sanctuary in a convent about 4 km from the city. The very next day, some of her
male relatives found her and stormed the chapel where she was hiding. Her
sister Catherine who followed Clara two weeks later was again pursued by family
members, who beat her until she appeared lifeless. Both sisters, however, resisted
their family’s violent efforts to take them back home and, with Francesco and
some of his new brothers, committed themselves to establishing communities of
solidarity, sanctuary and tender care, spaces of resistance and humanizing
transformation in a divided, violent society.
57 As they were going along the
road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 And
Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the
Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59 To another
he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60 But
Jesus[c] said to him, “Let the dead
bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Another
said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my
home.” 62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to
the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
It is dangerous to read biblical texts in isolation. Dare I
say it, the Jesus in this passage from Luke’s gospel doesn’t come across as
much fun, very likeable, or even particularly compassionate. There is a
single-minded, tunnel-visioned intensity about this man who, we’re told, has
“set his face to go to Jerusalem”, and nothing, and no one, it seems, will
deviate or delay him from that path.
So thank God for the reminder in today’s psalm (Psalm 16),
that this path of Jesus is in fact “the path of life” – that walking this path
is to walk with God, “in [whose] presence is fullness of joy”. If we are
to make good sense of what God is calling us to today, we need to hold these
two things alongside each other – the single-minded intensity, and the fullness
of joy. Jesus invites us to say a great big, joyful YES. But that Yes also
requires us to say some careful, but firm NO’s.
Just remember – lest this harsh bit of Luke’s gospel confuses
that memory – Jesus had absolutely nothing against Samaritans (the woman at the
well, for one); he had nothing against caring for one’s family (he goes out of
his way to heal Peter’s mother-in-law); and he had nothing against grieving for
those who have died (think of his own tears at the death of his dear friend
Lazarus). What Jesus is demanding, in his followers – and demanding, I think is
the word – is what another of the psalms (Psalm 86) calls “an undivided heart”.
To follow Jesus, to be a co-worker for the kingdom, to walk the path of life,
requires our full, undivided commitment right here, right now – no
“buts”, no qualifiers, no conditions, no competing demands. Which is why, of
course, Jesus rebukes James and John for wanting to call down a bit of
consuming fire on the inhospitable Samaritan village – there is no room, on the
path of life, for resentment, violence and revenge. No room. That is to walk in
the opposite direction to the way of Jesus.
But in the world that we live in, to follow the way of Jesus,
to walk the path of life, demands a lifetime of disentangling, of extricating
ourselves from ways of indifference, division and death. That’s what Francesco
and Clara discovered – or St Francis and St Clare of Assisi, as we tend to call
them. That to say Yes to Jesus required them to say No to the lives that they
had previously had – and to the power, status and violence, the social and
cultural assumptions and divisions, that those lives were bound up with. For
Francis and Clare, it required them to say No to the consumption,
competitiveness and ‘gated communities’ of wealth; to say No to the violence so
often mobilized to protect vested interests and the status quo; to say No to
the exclusion, abuse and exploitation of those deemed less-than-human; to say
No to those desires in ourselves that seek to deny our interrelatedness,
diminish our humanity, and hide from the truth. And of course Francis and
Clare’s world is not that different to our own. Many of the No’s that they had
to say, are No’s required of us too – so that we too can say Yes to the way of
Jesus, the path of life. Some of these No’s, in our society of Brexit-exposed
divisions and ecological emergency, are perhaps even more urgent than they were
for Francis and Clare – and certainly no less so.
And what about Catherine, dear friend, newly-priested pioneer
curate? What does God ask of you – through, around, or in spite of, today’s
Scripture readings? The ‘job descriptions’ of ‘pioneer’ and ‘priest’ allow for
so many things you can say ‘Yes’ to, it can often be hard to utter your ‘No’s.
For some of you here, to hear Catherine say ‘No’ at all may feel uncomfortable,
difficult to take. Did not St Paul say he was ‘all things to all people’, you
might say to yourself? (Although even St Paul immediately followed that up by focusing
in on ‘some’ people, rather than everyone.) On the other hand, is Catherine to
be like the Jesus of today’s gospel reading, setting her face in one direction
only, on one small section of the parish, boldly pioneering where no one has
pioneered before, saying No to ‘here’, so she can say a whole-hearted Yes to
‘there’? There is a careful, prayerful discernment in the role of pioneer
priest which is unenviable. There is no blueprint. No roadmap. As St Francis
himself wrote towards the end of his life: “No one showed me what I had to do.”
Only slowly and gradually, one faltering step at a time, do we – pioneers,
priests and saints among us – discover what walking the way of Jesus, the path
of life, looks like in practice.
But there are, at the very least, some clues to shape our
discerning, from those who have – in fact – boldly gone before us. And I want
to leave you with two interrelated images, both in some ways profoundly
traditional.
The first is the priest as eucharistic host. Here in this
eucharist, Catherine, you have done the welcoming, you will do
the inviting, and from your hands we will receive the bread, the body of
Christ. In some important sense, as much as we are all guests of God here, it
is you who creates the conditions for hospitality in this space this
morning. But in the eucharist you invite us not just into a sacred space,
but into a sacred time. Eucharistic time is Sabbath time. Whether
it is in church or in a fresh expression, whether it’s on Sunday morning or on
Thursday afternoon, the eucharist invites us into a time for saying No to
‘productivity’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’; to say No to deadlines and clock-watching,
busyness and hurriedness; to say No to consumption and competition for scarce
resources; to say No to division, enmity and violence… to say No, so that we
can say Yes, whole-heartedly, full-bodiedly, to enjoying each other in God’s
company, to celebrating around God’s table without limit or end… This patient,
generous, gentle eucharistic time, Sabbath time, nevertheless has an urgency to
it – as urgent as Jesus’ proclamation, as urgent as Francis and Clare’s
invitation, as urgent as our ecological emergency. As priest, Catherine, even
where you find yourself the guest of others, you invite those around you to say
Yes to eucharistic time, Sabbath time – and call us to be inviters in turn.
But as priest, Catherine, God also invites you to inhabit
that eucharistic time, Sabbath time, for yourself – and to do so with an urgent
slowness (and I’m preaching as much to myself here as to you, as we preachers
so often do). To say Yes fully to the way of Jesus, to the path of life, to the
God in whose presence is fullness of joy, you will often find yourself having
to say No even to those demands that seem of the utmost importance, from even
those people whom you love most dearly. Because to follow the way of Jesus, the
path of life, with urgency, is also to learn the art of not-doing, of an
attentive stillness.
The priest, poet and Shropshire lad Mark Oakley was once
revisiting the county of his childhood when he came across a shepherd, leaning
on a traditional shepherd’s crook. Joking with the shepherd that his boss, the
bishop of London, had a very similar crook, Mark asked him if he used it to
haul in the naughty stray lambs. “No,” said the shepherd, “that’s not what it’s
good for. I’ll tell you what I do with this crook. I stick it in the ground so
deep that I can hold onto it and keep myself so still that eventually the sheep
learn to trust me.”
So Catherine – and those with whom you travel here in Kings
Norton – as you take this next step, together today, on your journey into
priesthood, may God gently, patiently, kindly make in you an undivided heart,
that with Francis and Clare you may more firmly say No to the ways of
indifference, division and death, and more joyfully say Yes to Jesus’
life-giving way, to the eucharistic, Sabbath time, of love, joy and peace.
Amen.
