Vocations and God’s Gracious Initiative.
St Michael’s,
Trinity 4 (Yr A) 2008.
‘When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said ‘The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few.’’
+ In nomine …
When one hears that verse in Church, ‘the harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few, therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into the harvest’, it normally leads into a recruitment appeal, whether for priests, or just people in Church. It can certainly often seem that we have more work to do than people to do it all, as I’m sure many of you know only too well.
St Michael’s is actually rather good at nurturing vocations to the priesthood, particularly amongst that group which the Church finds hardest to reach, the under-thirties. We can think of Fr Richard in Wales, Fr James in Essex, and more recently Richard Bastable who is to be ordained deacon in a few weeks, James Bradley and Brutus Green who are at theological college, Tom Plant who is due to start this Autumn and someone else who is currently waiting to hear the results of his selection conference. We should pray for them all, particularly at this embertide, and also rejoice and take a proper pride in this extraordinary achievement from one congregation! And yet we shouldn’t rest on our laurels! There may well be more vocations here today, waiting to be discovered. Most of our ordinands go on to leave us and we give them, as it were, as a gift to the wider Church, but we are also being asked particularly at this time if we might find vocations to self-supporting ministry amongst our number that will remain here in the parish where they have been grown. If this might be your call, there is a day in July at St James’s to explore this further.
Beyond these specific vocations though, we are all called to be labourers in the vineyard, to show forth our faith in our lives and to draw others to Christ’s love. Sometimes in St Michael’s it seems like there are enough priestly labourers but not so much congregation to harvest… Perhaps we need to pray the Lord of the Harvest, and to labour ourselves as I now many of you do, for growth as much in the congregation as for more priests! So go out and tell people why they should come here, what they’re missing out on!
Well that’s the recruitment drive over! But beneath these questions, lies a deeper one: Christ has compassion upon the crowds because they are harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. This goes to the heart of a crucial problem with our society. It is not only that we feel lost in the crowd, like a herd without individuality or community, or even that we are harassed and helpless because we have no common direction or leadership. It is more basic than this: we moderns tend to find the very notion of being sheep and needing a shepherd offensive. We would rather all be shepherds than sheep, or perhaps lions. We find leadership suspicious, whether it’s anticlericalism in the Church, chaos in the classroom, or anarchy on the streets. We’re terrified that someone will take away our precious freedom and so we cling to this above all else, even when it becomes nothing more than chaos. There are good reasons for some of this, there have been enough tyrants in history to value freedom and be suspicious of people telling you what to do. But Christ’s rule is not like this. Because he is God, his will is not in competition with ours. He wants nothing less than our salvation! His rule is one of service: he pours himself out in love, to the sick and the outcaste, the weak and the despised, sinners and prostitutes, lepers and soldiers, and corrupt collaborators. He washes his disciples feet and gives his life for them. And so when we say ‘thy will be done’, this is not slavery to some tyrant, this is our response to the God who has served us first, this is the ‘service which is perfect freedom’.
All this is far from obvious. Extraordinarily, some people seem to really believe that if you leave children alone they will somehow teach themselves everything! Or that if you don’t pass on the faith to people, they will somehow ‘make up their own minds’… This is a philosophy of education that would be laughable if it wasn’t so disastrous in its consequences. We cannot just sit down and work it all out for ourselves. We need to see this to believe it, we need someone to show us first. We need to be loved before we can love, we need to be served to know how to serve. We need a shepherd! ‘How can they believe without someone to teach them?’ as
This need for initiative is why Christ appoints apostles in our gospel and why we have shepherds, the apostolic succession of bishops, in the Church today, to continue the work of the One Good Shepherd. And the gospel that they have handed on to us, which we celebrate, is all about this initiative, or to give it its theological name, ‘grace’. We believe that this is God’s very nature, to take the first step, to be the one who is always ahead of us, taking the initiative for peace and reconciliation. This is what
In nomine…
AMEN.