Bishop Jack

Sermon by the Bishop of Sheffield
Bishop Jack celebrated his 40th anniversary of ordination on June 9th with a special service in Sheffield Cathedral. It was also the service to mark his retirement as Bishop of Sheffield. The text of his sermon is reproduced here:
If I were to give a title to this sermon it would be ‘The Gutter and the Stars’. It was Oscar Wilde who famously connected these two when he said “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”. Tonight I want to speak about being a priest. I have chosen to preach myself because I don’t trust anyone else not to make this slot into a (hopefully) very premature funeral oration. A priest needs to know the gutter and the stars. They need to have glimpsed the stars, the Glory of God, by the Grace of God and ALSO to know themselves well enough to realise that the gutter is a reality within. Let me give you two examples.

It wouldn’t do for me not to mention on this occasion particularly, my favourite saint, Seraphim of Sarov. For most than most followers of Jesus he glimpsed the stars and his life was filled with joy, so much so that he became joy and was joy to all he met. He literally radiated holiness and was transfigured by inward light. The story goes that a man walked 300 miles from Moscow to seek him out. He was burdened and deeply troubled and wanted the Saint’s help and advice. Seraphim lived alone in the forest of Sarov and the man came across him asleep on the ground.

On seeing him, the man’s burdens melted away. He didn’t wake him, he didn’t need to. He returned home free of his burdens. Seraphim’s most famous saying is “Have peace in your heart and thousands round you will be saved”. Only someone who had glimpsed the stars could have that effect on those he meets, all of whom he addressed as “My joy, Christ is Risen”. Yet he also knew near despair.

He spent most of his life in silent prayer and for almost three years prayed day and night, sleeping only briefly and sporadically. He faced the demons within himself which most of us spend a lifetime trying to avoid. He stood on the edge of the abyss of nothingness, emptiness, faithlessness and despair, but ended up for the last five years of his life knowing the Glory. Most of us poor priests cannot pretend to emulate Seraphim, but to glimpse the stars, maybe only once in a lifetime, is necessary if we are to be joy and to bring joy to those we serve. No joy, no Gospel. A joyless Christianity is no Christianity at all. Remember prayer AND parties are what we all need more of if we are to be a church worth joining. A priest needs a joyful heart for the praise of God.

My other example was not a priest, but was priestly. William Cowper, the poet, the author of the hymn we have just sung, glimpsed the stars; he writes about the moment as follows:

“In a moment I believed and received the Gospel. Unless the Almighty arms had been under me I think I should have died of gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears, and my voice choked with transport, and I could only look up to heaven in silent fear, overwhelmed with love and wonder.”

But it was only a glimpse. For most of his life William Cowper lived in despair. He died in despair, in the gutter, but his biographer, David Cecil, writes of his dying, most movingly:

“At five in the morning he became unconscious; twelve hours later he ceased to breathe. Then, and then only, was Johnny’s wish granted. As he took a last look at the still face, he noticed with awe and amazement that on Cowper, the healing hand of death had wrought a change. The strain and the apathy which so long had marked his wasted features were gone, and instead they lit up with a rapt, unearthly wonder, “a holy surprise”.

Was it a mere chance effect of dissolution? or could it be that during those hours of unconsciousness a momentous event had taken place in the unseen territories of Cowper’s spirit: that on the very threshold of the grave it was vouch-safed to him, for the second time, to behold the supreme vision and gazing with unveiled eye at the Beatific Glory, he learnt that, after all, his despair had been founded on delusion?”

The best priests I have known have touched the heights and depths; the stars and the gutter in their own lives; in their own hearts.

Priests are not essentially, teachers, preachers, pastors, leaders, prophets, strategists or managers, though they may be called to be any or all of these. Priests are justified only by their being and their seeing; by standing in that place which holds the stars and the gutter with a joyful heart for the praise of God and a big capacious heart for the pain of the world.

There is no other place to stand for a priest. Only such a priest meets the needs of a world thirsty for God. Only such a priest meets the needs of the old lady who, as she approached death, her final journey, said to her priest most movingly “I know that you cannot accompany me on my last journey, but I would be so grateful if you would buy a platform ticket”. There is no greater privilege in life than that, no greater accolade that can be given to any human being and it is given readily only to those who know the gutter and the stars.

On this day 40 years ago I was ordained a priest in the Church of God, the beginning of a journey with many ups and downs. It was also the end of a journey, for when I was not yet 15 years old on my first retreat to the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, the priest who was leading the retreat asked each of us to find a quiet place to pray and to ask God what he wanted of our lives. I did and knew then that I was being called to be a priest.

I have never for a moment, even at the worst of times, even though the Church is in a mess and I am in a mess, regretted my ‘yes’ to that calling and all this wonderful fuss tonight will have been all the more worthwhile if just one person who hears these words hears not me, but the call of God for themselves. Simply I ask, is God calling you to be a priest, to stand in the gutter and reach for the stars? It is said that the composer Franz Schubert did not know whether he belonged in the gutter or the stars. He certainly knew both, otherwise this genius who wrote more than 1,000 pieces of music and yet died at the age of 31, quite possibly of syphilis, could not have written with such sorrow, such joy and such longing. Let his music be my last word. It says all I want to say and much much more about the gutter and the stars, about the gift of priesthood for which I daily thank God.

+ Jack

Chrism Mass Address - 18th March 2008

I hope that you will forgive me if this evening I share with you something of what I believe it means to be an ordained minister of the Church, to be a priest.
In a few short months’ time I shall retire, not as priest but as Bishop of Sheffield. At Easter my dear friend Bill Ind, the Bishop of Truro, also retires. We have become close friends over a long number of years and last month he invited me to lead a day’s conference on Healing and Wholeness. At the end of the day he preached at the Eucharist and told this story. Among the many things that had been said about Bill leading up to his retirement, the thing he valued most so far, he said, was a letter from a man whom he hadn’t seen for forty years. At the age of 23 this man had succumbed to cancer of the nose, as a result of which he had to have his nose removed, and it was about this that he wrote to Bill to thank him for the visits at that time which changed his life. Bill, he said, was the only person to visit him and look at him. He thought he was unbearable to look at, that he was ugly, that he was different, that he was outcast. Simply by looking at him, Bill included him. To Bill he wasn’t ugly or outcast, but still enfolded in love, still human, still precious, still included.

Whatever one thinks about the ministry of Jesus and what it meant, there can be no doubt about one thing: Jesus included those whom others excluded. Not only did he look at the leper, he touched the leper. Whatever one thinks of the long, drawn-out saga about the death of Diana Princess of Wales, one thing I believe ought to be remembered is that in the days when AIDS created hysteria and its victims became the lepers of the 20th Century, Diana Princess of Wales visited and touched them.

At home I have a shelf containing about ten books, each of which has been formative in my journey. One of them is entitled ‘Go between God’, by Bishop John V Taylor. It is a book about the Holy Spirit and ends with the following story:

“A colleague has recently described to me an occasion when a West Indian woman in a London flat was told of her husband’s death in a street accident. The shock of grief stunned her like a blow, she sank into a corner of the sofa and sat there rigid and unhearing. For a long time her terrible tranced look continued to embarrass the family, friends and officials who came and went. Then the schoolteacher of one of her children, an Englishwoman, called and, seeing how things were, went and sat beside her. Without a word she threw an arm around the tight shoulders, clasping them with her full strength. The white cheek was thrust hard against the brown. Then, as the unrelenting pain seeped through to her the newcomer’s tears began to flow, falling on their two hands linked in the woman’s lap. For a long time that is all that was happening. And then at last the West Indian woman started to sob. Still not a word was spoken and after a little while the visitor got up and went, leaving her contribution to help the family meet its immediate needs.

That is the embrace of God, his kiss of life. That is the embrace of his mission, and of our intercession. And the Holy Spirit is the force in the straining muscles of an arm, the film of sweat between pressed cheeks, the mingled wetness on the backs of clasped hands. He is as close and as unobtrusive as that, and as irresistibly strong.”

To look, to touch, to include is I believe at the heart of a priest’s ministry. As Thomas Merton said, God has many names, but if he only had one it would be Compassion.

Do not be afraid of friendship, love and affection. It was the greatest of Sheffield priests, Alan Ecclestone, who said that one of the greatest challenges to the Church at the end of the 20th Century is to understand just what Jesus meant by friendship. In our society, closeness and friendship have been hijacked by talk about sexuality, political correctness and fear. Life is risky and complex, but Jesus approached life unafraid of being misunderstood. He said, “greater love has no one than this, that they laid down their life for their friend.” He called his disciples friends and one in particular was known as the beloved disciple.

Recently I came across a poem about friendship, written in Latin in the Middle Ages, to the Abbot of St Gall by his friend. May I share it with you:

Then live, my strength, anchor of weary ships,
Safe shore and land at last, thou, for my wreck,

My honour, thou, and my abiding rest,
My city safe for a bewildered heart.
What though the plains and mountains and the sea
Between us are, that which no earth can hold
Still follows thee, and love’s own singing follows,
Longing that all things may be well with thee.
Christ who first gave thee for a friend to me,
Christ keep thee well, where’er thou art, for me.
Earth’s self shall go and the swift wheel of heaven
Perish and pass, before our love shall cease.
Do but remember me, as I do thee,
And God, who brought us on this earth together,
Bring us together in His house of heaven.

Dear friends in Christ, I think that says it all. But, I must add one more thing. For a priest, friendship must also involve letting go, for friendship can too easily slip into possessiveness and, as has been said, “possessiveness kills, it clings so closely to the creature that he loses sight of the Creator”. Priesthood is about friendship and letting go. I learned this very early on, at least in theory. One of the other books on my life-changing shelf is one which I read as a teenager. “Naught for your comfort” by the then Father Trevor Huddlestone of the Community of the resurrection is the story of his time in the midst of Apartheid-ridden South Africa. He was forced to leave South Africa, the country he had loved and served for many years, and as he sailed out of Cape Town he wrote these words:

“Spiritual writers spend quite a lot of time talking about ‘detachment’. The lives of the saints are full of instances of this virtue, which indeed is a vitally necessary one in the Christian life. But generally the impression that such writers give is of a negative and cold quality: a refusal to allow oneself to become “attached” for fear lest in some way such attachment would mean a base disloyalty to Christ. No doubt there are souls who, for their own protection, must eschew all human affection if they are to cleave to God in purity of heart. I am not one of them. For me, detachment is only real if it involves loving; loving to the fullest extent of one’s nature – but recognising at the same time that such love is set in the context of a supernatural love of God. Then, when the moment of surrender, of parting, comes, one has a worth-while offering to make: an offering which is the love and affection of all the years, for all those one has known; it has some meaning, like the precious ointment poured out on the feet of Christ. And it is costly too.”

That is the cross which comes with priesthood. Amen.

+Jack