Sermon: Farewell to the Dean

Preacher:

Nicholas Thistlethwaite

Date:

Sunday 17th June 2012

Service:

Eucharist

Readings:

2 Cor 5:6-17

Exits and entrances are the stuff of theatre.  The comings and goings of the characters in a play advance the plot and change the dynamics between the actors.  Macbeth, his hands covered in blood and still gripping the daggers after murdering Duncan; Lear, bearing Cordelia’s dead body and howling with grief; poor Ophelia, driven crazy by Hamlet’s rejection and murder of her father: all these stage entrances mark significant moments in the drama at which the narrative rattles across the points and takes a new direction.

           Exits, too.  The death of Falstaff, cast aside by Prince Hal when he succeeds to the throne; John of Gaunt, foreseeing imminent disaster through the recklessness of another young king; Malvolio, humbled and ridiculed by Sir Toby Belch and his co-conspirators: moments of transition in which one story-line closes and another opens.

           Other departures are occasions for valedictory reflections accompanied by a sense of time passing, tasks completed, and the need to quit the stage to make way for others.  Prospero in The Tempest is the classic example.  He has done all he can.  His magical powers have made amends for past wrongs.  His lust for vengeance is exhausted.  The spectacle he has conjured up,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself … (4.1.1530

dissolves, and Prospero resolves to relinquish his magic powers and return to the world of men: 

I’ll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.  (5.1.50-57)

He returns from his enforced exile a wiser and a more compassionate being himself.

In this morning’s New Testament reading, Saint Paul is also in valedictory mood.  His Second Epistle to the Corinthians (from which the passage comes) is thought by scholars to be a conflation of at least two, and possibly as many as five, letters.  They all seem to date from around 56 or 57 AD.  So this is no longer the young Paul: the raw, zealous evangelist of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, with his uncompromising convictions and urgent message about the imminence of the End.  This is a mature, even mellow Paul, who has had to endure suffering, and has, as a consequence, grown in wisdom, on the one hand, and awareness of the deep mystery of God, on the other.  He’s no longer glib, no longer inflexible, and he can face the possibility of his own dissolution without fear.  Indeed, he welcomes it, assuring the Corinthians, ‘we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord’ (2 Cor. 5:7).

           These Corinthians were a fractious, disputatious lot, and their controversies and disagreements had cost Paul dearly.  He had spent eighteen months in the city, converting Jews and Greeks, and founding a vigorous, predominantly Gentile church.  But as soon as he departed, disagreements, quarrels, and scandals broke out, and then other evangelists showed up in this most cosmopolitan of cities and undermined Paul’s apostolic authority.

           Paul’s response was to write letters to his errant children.  His first letter tried to address some of the ethical issues that had arisen, and to counter the influence of a group obsessed with spiritual phenomena and ecstatic speech to the exclusion of other more important things, love among them.  The letter was not well received.  So Paul made what he later described as a ‘painful visit’ (2 Cor. 2:1) to Corinth, but it seems only to have made matters worse.  He followed this up with a further letter, written, he said,

out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain, but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you. (2 Cor. 2:5)

There matters rested.

           By the time Paul writes again, there has been a sea change in attitudes.  A reconciliation has been brought about, probably by Titus, and it appears that the Corinthians have expressed remorse for their treatment of Paul and rejection of his authority.  Nor would it be wrong to detect a change in Paul’s attitude, too.  He has learned to distance   himself from the controversies, the anger, the unreasonable accusations: he has learned to let go.

For the priest, letting go is a challenge.  Leaving behind the hazy world of the earliest Christian churches around the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, and thinking about our own experience, the vocation of the priest to be (as the Ordinal puts it) ‘servant and shepherd among the people to whom he or she is sent’, to preach, call to repentance, baptize, prepare for confirmation, preside at the eucharist, intercede, bless, encourage, teach, minister to the sick and prepare the dying for their deaths can only be discharged through a degree of involvement with people which is always going to make letting go hard.

           There is a privileged intimacy about priesthood.  For some, this will include acting as confessor, and having penitents share their most private failures, anxieties and fears before seeking spiritual encouragement and the assurance of God’s forgiveness.  For every priest it entails being privy to joys and sadnesses, family celebrations and personal tragedies.  This is bound to forge a particular kind of relationship.  A few months after I was ordained, I was called out late one night in the absence of the vicar to the home of a man in his mid-forties who was on the PCC.  He had just died.  He was an apparently healthy man in the prime of life, but he was dead.  And I, as a wet-behind-the-ears young priest, had to provide some comfort to his family as they stood over his body, trying to come to terms with what had happened so completely unexpectedly.  That sort of engagement with people creates personal bonds and makes it all the harder to ‘let go’ when the time comes.

           Then there is the priest as leader.  We have sometimes teased Victor by referring to him as the ‘Beloved Leader’; mercifully, the parallels with North Korea go no further.  But the priest is called to be a leader, and a leader of a very particular kind.  This ‘servant leadership’ has various strands.  Among them are encouragement and nurturing.  The priest encourages through his or her teaching.  Paul is at his most inspiring when he is doing theology; he is much less persuasive when he is agonising about ethics or ritual practices, when his tetchy,    prescriptive Pharisaic side reasserts itself.  Nurturing has special reference to the priest as minister of the sacraments.  It is a great privilege (as well as a great responsibility) for the priest to stand at the altar on behalf of the people of God, when, in the breaking and sharing of bread, the community becomes more visibly what it truly is: the body of Christ.  This is about a relationship with God.  But it is also about the relationship between priest and people, Sunday by Sunday.  And again, that extraordinary bond, ‘in Christ’, makes letting go when the time comes, very hard.

           Finally, there is friendship.  For the priest, the relationship with members of the congregation is complicated.  With individuals, it will have all the hallmarks of friendship, including time spent together, shared interests, hospitality.  But it is both more and less than that.  The priest as priest may be privy to things which, as a friend, he or she would not know; in order to minister effectively, there may need to be boundaries to friendship: a certain reticence or holding back.

           None of this means that priests cannot enjoy warm friendships with their congregations, but they are never entirely straightforward.  And (again), letting go is hard when the time comes, not least because unlike most people clergy when they retire tend to move away.

Prospero, quitting his magical island; Paul, learning to leave the future of his family of churches in God’s hands; Victor, coming to the end of ten years’ ministry at Guildford Cathedral: they all face the challenge of letting go, moving on, and letting others move on, too.  For Paul this becomes possible when he recognises that he is only an instrument of God’s unfolding purpose; he has played his part and the time has come to move on to new things: ‘there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!’ (2 Cor. 5:17).

           The work of grace goes on.

           We end where we began.  Old-fashioned actors who aren’t into Freud and Stanislavsky have a saying that their job is to get onto the stage, say the lines, and get off again without falling over the furniture.  I think this particular old actor (Victor) has achieved that: and if he hasn’t always spoken the lines he was expected to speak, and has occasionally fallen over the settee, I think we all know that behind the actor has been a faithful priest, that ‘servant and shepherd’ he was enjoined to be by his ordaining bishop forty-three years ago in St Paul’s Cathedral.

           For that we today give thanks to God.