17.04.2014
Chrism Eucharist At Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin
Clergy, Deacons and Lay Ministers from all over the Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough gathered in Christ Church Cathedral this morning, Maundy Thursday, for the Chrism Eucharist.
The service was celebrated by Archbishop Michael Jackson. During it the Lay Ministers, Deacons, Priests and the Archbishop renewed their commitment to Ministry. Oils for use during services and in pastoral care during the year were also consecrated. The Archbishop washed the feet of some of the congregation.
In his sermon, the Archbishop addressed the themes brought up during Holy Week and on Maundy Thursday. He said that Holy Week brought a heightened tension and in the final three days, an increase in pressure, power and patience.
He spoke of fear and the self–realisation and self–recognition it could bring. Self–delusion, stockpiles to keep questions about ourselves at bay, could be faced and addressed by the cold wind of fear in a way that would never be done without fear driving us, he said.
“As Holy Week is structured for us, in Word and Sacrament, we get a real sense of such fear growing and escalating around and within us. For all four authors of the written Gospel, there is a sense of surging, eschatological movement as Jesus, the living Gospel, makes his way authoritatively through the city of Jerusalem. There is also a strong sense of confrontation. People meet in narrow streets and they always seem to need more space than the geography of the place allows them. So many of the characters with whom we have seen Jesus engage in the three short years of his ministry resurface,” Archbishop Jackson said.
He talked about clergy who needed care and attention to enable them to do their jobs. He said that like roads which were resurfaced in order to provide infrastructure to support walkers, drivers and cyclists, clergy needed care and attention. “Like the roads, we also need to be resurfaced for a number of very good reasons: our role is to give to other people confidence and compassion in the name of Jesus Christ and through the ministries of the church; in order to do this we need a very well maintained spiritual infrastructure and the most important form of care and support is the care and support we offer to ourselves and to one another,” he explained.
The Archbishop’s sermon can be read in full below:
Chrism Eucharist and Blessing of Oils, Christ Church Cathedral
Readings: St John 13.1–17; 31b–35
A sermon preached by the Archbishop
1 Corinthians 11.26: For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Sometimes it is a rather good thing to find oneself with few or no resources to fall back on. It encourages us to dig more deeply within ourselves than we normally have the need, or even more interesting the nerve, to do. Whatever we think of ourselves, we in fact have nowhere else to go looking, so we need to start improvising and bargaining – rather fast. It is a moment when we realize something of our human need of others. I also hope it is a moment when we realize something of our need of God’s presence and we accept, perhaps for the first time, that in the simplest of terms we do need to feel God near. Something of this movement and emotional journey is captured for us every year in Lent. The heightening of the tension comes to us during Holy Week and especially in the final three days of pressure, of power and of patience – all shown in different ways.
Having few, or no resources also introduces into our lives a blast of fear. It doesn’t have to happen to us in a side street in a part of the city that gives all the air of not having changed since the seventeenth century, except for the brightly painted double yellow lines heralding the homing pigeon instincts of ‘The Clamper’ – but it might! It might happen to us when we pause to think – in our own back garden, or when we are with family members and friends enjoying ourselves and are in what looks like very safe territory. Fear can rush into the seemingly safest of places.
The most frightening part of this sort of fear concerns a particular realization and recognition about ourselves. It can also be the most formative and life–changing reality. The last fear to be confronted and addressed is that of self–delusion. All too often we have banked up, stockpiled a form of such self–delusion, with layer upon layer of activity and busyness, to keep questions about ourselves at bay. The cold wind of fear helps us to face this, and to address this head–on, in a way that we would never perhaps have done without fear driving us in this direction in the first instance and for the first time.
As Holy Week is structured for us, in Word and Sacrament, we get a real sense of such fear growing and escalating around and within us. For all four authors of the written Gospel, there is a sense of surging, eschatological movement as Jesus, the living Gospel, makes his way authoritatively through the city of Jerusalem. There is also a strong sense of confrontation. People meet in narrow streets and they always seem to need more space than the geography of the place allows them. So many of the characters with whom we have seen Jesus engage in the three short years of his ministry resurface.
How often have we, in the personal and pastoral circumstances in which we live and pray and work, how often have we heard people, frightened people, speak of fears and anxieties, phobias and ghosts indeed: resurfacing. And, how seriously have we taken or have we even wanted to take these people? In the life of giving and response, which is our life, there is no escaping this type of resurfacing. Our work is predictable; our range of people for whom we have direct responsibility is limited very significantly by the parochial system and by how many or how few people live within our boundaries; at times it can be quite claustrophobic, stifling and constricting. If we are in a chaplaincy situation, then there are different problems and concerns: people largely and rightly come and go, and our relationships with them are both intense and transient and occasional. Thirdly, and always, our own powers of creativity and imagination are limited by our capacity and our energy, the depth or shallowness of our prayer and our spiritual capacity for the distinction between good and evil.
These are the sort of things which, rightly, resurface on Maundy Thursday as we gather as servants of the Servant, as teachers of the Teacher and as deacons and priests of The Christ. Resurfacing is what difficult people do to us and resurfacing is what we do to them. We keep meeting one another! We need to use the time that we still have with the earthly Jesus imaginatively to address such resurfacing spiritual forces and energies in us and in other people. This is one of the last gifts of the living incarnation to us by Jesus Christ. We need to be able to have the goodness and the humility to go to the nether hell with this same Jesus Christ and with him to rise to live the risen life as the church of The Resurrected One. But on Maundy Thursday the focus must not and can not be on self and glory but on God and service, the self–emptying so ably articulated by St Paul in Philippians and by St Mark in his Gospel and so powerfully enacted by the Jesus of St John around the Table of Thanksgiving in the washing of sore and heavy feet.
Gathered in the tranquillity of this cathedral church in which a significant number of us was ordained, I wonder what sort of a place this is for us. To anyone who comes to visit or to worship here, it is bright and it is beautiful; it is loved and it is gorgeous; it combines sound and space in a way that is the most simple but most direct definition of liturgy itself. It is also a place where we can be helped to address and to deal with the sort of resurfacing of which I am speaking. The cathedral church lives through the cycle of the year with and for God in a way that none of the rest of us can. It carries us deep within itself in its spirituality, in this very journey, as our mother church; we trust it to do so; we entrust ourselves and our hearts and souls to it. It has the resources in terms of people and money to do this work of God, opus Dei, and we rejoice that such is the case. It endures the full barrage of the Scriptures, of people, of emotion, of comprehension and of incomprehension and it stands and will continue to stand in whatever form that standing will take in the future, stand for the place where God meets all God’s people.
When I preached here at Christmas, I said that in the Christian life we are going nowhere without words like: incarnation and resurrection. On Maundy Thursday, I suggest to you that we are going nowhere without words like: redemption and service. And sadly many of us might well prefer to do the work of ministry without the need for such ‘big words,’ seem by so many as words of stumbling and of incomprehension.
So, where does resurfacing feature in all of this? I am fascinated by the precision with which people who work as part of The Roads Service clear, prepare and then re–surface the places where there have been pot–holes, where submerged piping needs to be removed and re–placed or where, simply, there is need to re–configure the lay out of the road because traffic needs have changed. Resurfacing is not a matter of papering over the cracks but one of doing a thorough job of engineering; it means doing a proper job and much of the work that is done will never be seen again by anyone other than the people who do it; it simply lies beneath the surface and we trust that it has been done properly. The surface carries us along but it is the infrastructure that gives us the necessary support, whether we are walking, driving or cycling.
Perhaps the same can hold of us, as we gather with the Master who teaches us today of all days to be slaves. Like the roads which we take for granted, many people take us for granted. Like the roads which need repair, we ourselves need care and watching, careful preparation and invisible attention – from ourselves, in fact, even more than from others. Like the roads, we also need to be resurfaced for a number of very good reasons: our role is to give to other people confidence and compassion in the name of Jesus Christ and through the ministries of the church; in order to do this we need a very well maintained spiritual infrastructure and the most important form of care and support is the care and support we offer to ourselves and to one another. This spiritual care comes from an infrastructure of humanity, prayer, relaxation, humour, honesty, humility and friendship. The resurfacing concerns the public side and face of the work and the impression of consistency that this gives to others. In all of this we need constantly to keep in touch and in contact with the incarnate God. Although we might think that the Scriptures do not give us much of a coherent sense of this side of the life of Jesus, we get enough evidence to see this as the infrastructure of his life and interactions with other people.
Our Lord will take us with him to the cross, into hell and into the life of resurrection – if we can and if we long to travel with him in faith and in imagination. This is not too much for him who gave his life a ransom for many to ask of those who have responded to the invitation to serve with him and for him as slaves.
Exodus 12.14: This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; through your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.