Commissioning the Diocesan Vocations Team

A Sermon preached at St Oswald’s, Ashbourne on Sunday 19th February 2012

By Bishop Humphrey

Mark 9. 2-9

A moment on a hillside: Jesus, flanked by two iconic heroes of the faith in dazzling, impossible light – Christ in glory.

Another moment on a hillside: Jesus, flanked by two icons of sin and failure, each – like him – stretched out upon a cross, in thick, impenetrable darkness. Christ in glory.

And lying between the two (liturgically speaking) is the season of Lent, which starts on Wednesday (in Ashbourne after the football, of course!). Lent: the time of growth and flourishing as the days lengthen and spring unfolds, as much a spiritual as a natural reality (if we use it properly, of course) – a time of attentiveness and faithfulness to our calling and our status as beloved sons and daughters of the Father.

Lent, as we know, is – in the tradition of the Church – closely linked with the wilderness retreat of Jesus following his baptism and before the start of his public ministry. It is in this sense a time of vocational reflection and in the history of the Church the season was classically the time of preparation for the Easter mystery of Baptism, the sacrament by which every Christian is ordained into ministry. Again, then, a period of vocational reflection.

So: two hilltop epiphanies and, between them, a time for vocational reflection, for giving attention to our calling, or status and our ministry as we journey from glory to glory.

In the accounts of the Transfiguration Peter (as so often in the Gospel story) comes off rather badly: faintly ridiculous, a bit of a buffoon. But Peter’s instinct to construct shelters for Jesus, Elijah and Moses is – and this should not surprise us in the Foundation of the Church – sound, and soundly ecclesiastical. Peter wants to build a structure by which to preserve a moment of clarity, certainty and promise.

This is what we do – or seek to do – as Church in our scriptures and liturgies and traditions: to make structures of words and actions which preserve and re-connect with moments of grace given, moments when God’s voice was heard.

That, in an important sense, is what sacraments are. That is what Scripture catches and sets down: the Peter instinct, the calling of the Church. It’s a good instinct, even if (as the Transfiguration showed and our experience attests) one that is destined never to be more than partially successful. Moments of eternity are not to be pinned down absolutely within the temporal.

But it’s worth pondering the challenge: instants, moments of grace given and the voice of God heard – “This is my Son. Listen to him” – somehow needing to be hung on to, held and re-connected with so that the grace can be realised and the voice heard in succeeding generations and (as it sometimes may be) less confident circumstances.

And I want to suggest that what is true for the institutional Church – the Body corporate – in terms of holding the moment and bringing the eternal into the temporal, is true for the individual disciple also.

Some of us may just be blessed enough to be able to say that – once,  twice, a tiny handful of times, maybe – in a particular text, a special place, an extraordinary conversation or thread of music or whatever – we heard the voice of God. “This is my Son … This is my daughter … This is who you are … This is my will for you…” But few of us would claim the experience as common or that such intimacy was a permanent or frequent characteristic of our walk with God. (Maybe I speak only for myself here, but somehow I suspect not!)

The moment of grace given and the voice heard is precisely that: a moment – a fleeting glimpse in time of that which is eternal and ineffable.

And so the Peter instinct is strong in us. We want to hold on, to not let go, to feast and to bask in the light and the certainty of that instant of insight, of knowing this is who I am before God; this is my status and my calling.

And it seems to me that the ministry of vocations advisers – indeed much of the pastoral ministry of the Church, and the ministry of Spiritual Direction: the Lent ministry, as we may say, that we can offer to one another of encouragement and flourishing – is about this very thing: building healthy, realistic and authentic structures through which to access and real-ise the grace once given, the voice once heard.

And that is why I am so thankful for the happy coincidence that it is today that we gather to commission this Vocations Team, early in the year in which vocations is to be so much a theme and emphasis of our common life in the diocese. We stand (as it were) on the mountaintop and look out over the plain – the weeks of Lent that are ahead of us and the journey from glory to glory that they represent – reaching towards the dark triumph of that other mountaintop and the garden that lies beyond it. And we gather to dedicate and ask God’s blessing on our ministry of vocational discernment – of hearing the voice and receiving the grace, of knowing “this is my child … this is who you are …” – and interpreting it and building appropriate institutional connection with it for individuals and for the Body.

This is a Lenten ministry of springtime flourishing (and we should all rise up in rebellion against the negative and gloomy reputation we have allowed Lent to attract in our tradition): it’s the ministry  by which we grow, and help one another to grow, in the light and warmth of the Father’s love and the knowledge that it is to each of us that he says: “This is my daughter … This is my son … This is who you are … This is my will for you.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.