Last Tuesday, 29th June, was the feast day of St Peter and St Paul. Because of the date of that feast of the Church, this time of year is often referred to as Petertide, and it’s the time of the Church’s year in which ordinations to the sacred ministry usually take place. Ordinations do take place at other times too, at Michaelmas which is in late September and gets its name from the feast day of St Michael and All Angels on 29th of that month, but most ordinations will have taken place over the past week during Petertide.
Part of the service of ordination involves those being ordained taking sacred vows and one of the things the clergy are asked to do during Holy Week, is to attend a Chrism Mass where they renew their ordination vows on an annual basis. But in addition to that, the anniversary of their ordination is a time when the clergy often like to think about their ordination vows and to perhaps reflect on how well they have, and are, keeping them.
That’s certainly something I’ve done this week and having done that, when I read this morning’s readings in preparation for this morning’s services, it brought the difficulty of keeping one ordination vow in particular, very much into focus. It’s the vow, or declaration as they’re now called, in which those being ordained are asked by the bishop, “Will you endeavour to fashion your own life and that of your household according to the way of Christ, that you may be a pattern and example to Christ’s people?” To which they answer, “By the help of God, I will.” The greatest difficulty with this vow is that, in addition to the help of God and our own endeavour, keeping it also requires the understanding and cooperation of our household and, as I’m sure we all know, our families can very often be the hardest of all people to proclaim the Gospel to because they know only too well how often we fail to fashion our own lives on the way of Christ.
The way of Christ, of course, is the way of God, and so to call people to fashion their lives on the way of Christ is a prophetic call. When we speak about prophecy today, we usually mean some kind of fortune telling or prediction of the future. But whilst the biblical prophets did make that kind of prophecy, their main role was to call a people who’d gone astray and who were neglecting God and his ways, to turn from their sins and live as God intended them to live. But, when we try to fulfil that prophetic call by urging people to turn to Christ, and it’s a calling that all Christians share, not just the ordained, we’re quite likely to be met with the response that the prophet Ezekiel was warned to expect, by God, in this morning’s first reading: it’s very likely that we won’t be listened to.
There’s no sense in Ezekiel that he wasn’t listened to because of his own previous life or behaviour. Ezekiel was a priest, albeit a priest in exile in Babylon, but a priest nonetheless and so he was probably a respected member of the Jewish community and faith. It seems that the people’s unwillingness to listen to him was rather a matter of hard-heartedness, stubbornness on their part, and a refusal to listen because they preferred their own ways to God’s ways. But if we ask members of our own family to change their ways, it’s quite likely that one of the main reasons they won’t listen to us, is because they know all about our own un-Godly ways. I certainly remember an occasion, not too long after I’d returned to Church in my late teens, when I was witness to a few members of the parish congregation taking part in some really quite nasty name calling and gossiping about other members of the congregation. When I pointed out that this wasn’t the way Christians should be carrying on, I was told very bluntly, by a member of my own family, to shut up. I was reminded that I’d only been going to Church for ‘5 minutes’ whereas they’d been going for years and so I was told that I had no right to tell them what to do. And that was followed by a litany of un-Christian things I’d done during my teenaged years when I wasn’t going to Church!
If we’re honest, we all know about the un-Christian things we’ve done in the past, and we’re all aware of the un-Christian things we incline towards in the present. Like St Paul, we might call our un-Christian inclinations our ‘thorns in the flesh’. We all have them. No doubt we all wish we didn’t because we’d be able to fashion our lives more closely on Christ if we didn’t. We might think that, if we could get rid of our thorns in the flesh and be better Christians ourselves, perhaps then people might be more inclined to listen to us when we ask them to fashion their lives more closely on Christ. But would they really? God’s warning to Ezekiel that people might not listen to him tells us that there’s no guarantee that people will listen to us, no matter how closely we fashion our lives on Christ. And the Lord’s answer to St Paul, suggests that it’s for our own good that we’re not perfect ourselves.
For one thing, it stops us from being too proud of ourselves and it also allows those who want to listen and see, to understand that the Gospel life we proclaim is from God, not from us. Our faults and failings, our thorns in the flesh, allow those who want to see and hear to understand that the Gospel life we proclaim isn’t about urging them to follow our example, but about urging them to follow the example of Christ.
And urging members of our own household to fashion their lives on Christ, in spite of any difficulty or opposition we may face from them, is in itself fashioning our lives on Christ because it’s something Jesus himself did. We read about it in this morning’s Gospel when Jesus tried to teach the people of his hometown. Rather than listening to what he had to say and taking it to heart, the people there, the people who thought they knew him so well, responded by saying what amounted to ‘Who does he think he is? He’s just a carpenter! We know him.’ In a way, that’s a similar response to the one I received when I questioned those people from my own parish and family about their name-calling and gossiping but it also reminds me of a story I was once told by a now retired priest. A good number of years ago, he’d been asked to consider becoming the vicar of the parish in which he’d grown up but, after he went to have a look round the parish, as you do when you’re asked to consider taking a parish on, he decided against it. And the reason he gave was that he didn’t think he would be able to command enough respect to be the vicar in a parish where so many people knew and remembered him but, where so many people had reminded him during his visit, they only knew and remembered him as a ‘cheeky young lad’.
The Christian calling to proclaim the Gospel is the call to a prophetic ministry. But, as Jesus said in this morning’s Gospel,
“A prophet is not without honour, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”
And so the most difficult people to proclaim the Gospel to, are the members of our own family, not least because they know us so well and know all about the times and the ways that we have and do fail to fashion our lives on Christ. But, whilst they may not want to listen to us, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still try to proclaim the Gospel to them. As God told Ezekiel, whether people want to listen or not, they still need to know that there are prophets amongst them. And so we need to be those prophets and proclaim the Gospel to them. Our families might well know all about our ‘thorns in the flesh’, and we might well wish they didn’t. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still try to proclaim the Gospel to them. As St Paul found, the fact that we’re not perfect ourselves can actually help us to proclaim the Gospel because our own faults and failings give us humility and allow us to point people away from our own example and towards Christ and his example. And, as it is Christ’s example we’re called to follow and on him we’re called to fashion our lives, regardless of who we are, our background and what people know about us, or think they know about us, regardless of the lack of faith we might find amongst our own household and family, we should still proclaim the Gospel to them because that is Christ’s example.
The question, ’Will you endeavour to fashion your own life and that of your household according to the way of Christ, that you may be a pattern and example to Christ’s people?’, is one that those who are about to be ordained to the sacred ministry of the Church are asked to answer in public, and in a formal way. But it’s a question which all Christians should ask, at least of themselves, because it’s something that all Christians are called to do. And it’s a question that all Christians, both ordained and lay, should answer in the same way. Regardless of the attitude of our household, our family, towards our endeavours to do it, the answer is, and always should be, “By the help of God, I will.”
Amen.
The Propers for the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 