As you may know, I haven’t been around much this week. That’s not because I was swanning off on holiday again. I have been serving on an Advisory Panel in Ely assessing people who want to become priests. I usually do about one of these a year. It’s very hard work, and I’m always exhausted at the end, but it’s a great privilege and joy too.
By the time they come to us on one of these Panels the
candidates will have already spent a long time reflecting with others in their
own Dioceses. There’s a very rigorous process to go through. You can’t just
walk in off the street and ask to be a priest. But this Panel is the bit that
will really determine the future. We make recommendations to their Bishops
about whether they should go into training for ordained ministry, and usually
the Bishops follow those recommendations.
It’s a very thorough process, and we don’t come to our
judgements lightly. There are three advisors to each group of eight candidates
and over a couple of days we watch them make presentations and lead
discussions, and each of the advisors interviews them in depth. One advisor
looks particularly at why they feel called to the priesthood, what their
experience of the Church of England is and what their spiritual life is like. Another
looks at whether they will cope with the intellectual demands of priesthood.
You don’t have to be a genius, but you need to be able to do the study, think
on your feet, communicate, relate your faith to the real world. The third advisor
– and this is my role at these Panels – is the Pastoral Advisor, and in many
ways I get to look at the most basic things of all, character and personality, how
the ups and downs of life have shaped them ? Are they mature enough, stable
enough, resilient enough? Do they know themselves and accept themselves? Can
they get along with others, take responsibility, be some use to those who are
suffering? We’re not looking for perfect
people – in fact we’re always suspicious of those who look too good to be true,
because they probably are . We are looking for people who have learned from
their lives, come to terms with their losses, accepted their limitations. It’s
not to do with age – I’ve seen some wonderful young candidates who have wisdom
far beyond their years, and old ones who don’t know themselves at all, whose
unhealed wounds would soon poison their ministry.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that those who aren’t
recommended for training are bad people, or any less able than others. It may
be simply that this isn’t the right role for them, and that they should be
using their talents in some other way, but we do have to look very thoroughly at
these very personal aspects of their lives to see if they could cope with
ordained ministry, for their sake and for the sake of those to whom they will
minister.
I’m telling you all this not just to explain why I might be
looking a bit tired – though I am – or just because I think you might be
interested, but because when I got home and started preparing today’s sermon, I
was struck by how well the readings fitted with what I had spent the week
doing. In the Gospel Jesus talks about good shepherds and bad ones; and in a
way that is exactly what I had been looking for. Were these the kind of people
who would stick with those they served when the wolf came and the going got
tough or would they panic or, worse still, just decide it was above their pay
grade and head for the hills? And in our second reading too there was a lot of
talk of what was in our hearts, which was just the question I’d been asking myself
about these candidates – what makes them tick, what is at the centre of their
being? When you peel back all the layers, who are they really? There was one
phrase in the reading which particularly struck home. John says that what is in
our hearts is important, but more than that, if we are to be the people God
intends us to be – whether we are priests or not – we also need to know that
“God is greater than our hearts.”
To understand what that’s about we need to know a bit about
what someone living in the first century like John meant when they talked about
the heart.
For us, the heart tends to be associated with feelings,
emotions. “Does your heart rule your head or the other way round? we ask. The heart is where the mushy stuff
happens, the head is where the logical thinking goes on. But ancient people
didn’t see it like that. They didn’t know what the brain for – in fact some
schools of thought believed it was just a cooling device. And they thought
their emotions were located in their guts, which makes sense really, since
that’s where we often feel them. The heart was the place where thinking
happened, the place where you made decisions, the place where you formed your
image of yourself, your idea of who you were. It was the centre of your being,
the essence of your Self.
So, when John talks about hearts in that second reading,
he’s talking about our sense of ourselves, of who we are. He talks about hearts
that need to be reassured, hearts that might condemn us, and most of all, hearts that need to be put in perspective. What
we think of ourselves is important, he says, but “God is greater than our
hearts.”
Let’s go back to those Advisory Panels I serve on. The
people who come to them have been through all sorts of experiences, good and
bad, just like all of us. My job is to help find out how those experiences have
shaped them, how they have affected the way they think of themselves – their
hearts, in John’s terms. Often I ask “What gifts and what scars do you think
your life has left you with?” It tells me how self-aware they are, but it also
tells me whether they see themselves as victims of their circumstances, or
whether they feel they can be more than that. Over the years I’ve seen people
who’ve been bullied or abused as children, told they were useless, that they’d never
amount to anything. But what I want to know is, do they still think of
themselves like that? Is that still what is in their hearts, their image of
themselves? It’s hard to shed those messages completely, but have they learned
that they are more than that, that God is bigger than their hearts, bigger than
that self-image? I’ve seen people who
have failed spectacularly, who’ve made a real mess of their lives and been convinced
at that point that they were beyond redemption. That’s understandable, but are
do they still think that, or do they believe in a God who is greater than their
hearts? Have they found forgiveness, and stood up on their feet again. Have
they learned from their mistakes? If they haven’t then they will probably come
crashing down again, but if they have they will have precious gifts to give to
those they meet in their ministry who feel the same.
I’ve also seen people – just a few – whose lives seem to
have been plain sailing when they were young – lucky them – and who grew up
assuming the world would fall at their feet. That sounds fine, but it often
breeds complacency, naivety, and maybe a desire to play it safe, just in case
they disturb that apparently life-long lucky streak. I want to know, though, whether
they’ve got the courage to beyond that charmed life, and put themselves in
places where they might fail or feel out of their depth. Only if they’ve done
that will they learn that God is greater than their hearts, and find the
resilience that will take them through testing times.
In our Psalm today we met someone who certainly had learned
that, who would, I suspect, sail through his Advisory Panel if he came to it.
The person who wrote the well-loved words of Psalm 23 was talking of his life.
He’s a shepherd – a good shepherd from the sound of it. As he thinks about his
life he realises that just as he’s led his sheep through all sorts of
landscapes, so he’s been on a journey too, through landscapes of his own. There
have been green pastures and still waters – places of rest and refreshment.
There have been right pathways to choose, times when the road has been long and
tough. There have been dark valleys too, frightening places where he wondered
if he’d survive at all. Was he up to the journey on his own? Was his heart, his
confidence, his ability great enough for it? No, of course not, no more than his sheep
would have survived without him to care for them. The important thing he has
realised, though, is that just as he has been there for them, God has been
there for him. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he says, and that is why he
can also say “I shall not be in want” or “Therefore can I lack
nothing,” or “I have everything I need” as other translations put
it. Looking back he has realised that God was always with him, and that meant
that it wasn’t all down to him, to what was in his heart, to what he thought
about himself, what he thought he was capable of. As he looked back he realised
that God had given him blessings he hadn’t expected or earned, green pastures
and still waters just when he needed them, joys that refreshed him. At other
times God had nudged him towards the right path, through the words of others,
or some inner sense of where to go – it wasn’t his doing. In the darkest
moments, when he was utterly stuck, he could see now that God had just been
there, beside him in the darkness, known in the touch of a friend, perhaps, who
had no magic wand or clever words, but just stuck around till the morning came.
Even in the presence of those who troubled him, in the face of his enemies,
there had been food aplenty, the oil of welcome, the cup that overflowed. His
own heart might not have felt big enough to meet the demand, but he didn’t have
to do it by himself. God’s vision of him was bigger. He had everything he
needed.
God is greater than our hearts, says John, and I think that
message would be echoed by the lives of many of those I’ve met this week. He is
greater than our selves, greater than our abilities. Whoever we think we are,
God’s picture of us is greater than that, deeper than that, better than that,
and when we know that we have courage to grow into what we can be, not victims
of our circumstances, but able to live in the freedom that God wants for his
children. You don’t have to be a priest, or someone who wants to be a priest,
for this to be true. It is true for all of us. Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment