The Bishop of Beverley - Sermon for the Northern Provincial Festival

Chrism Masses 2007

The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me.

Luke 4 v18

It is, apparently, much easier to teach near babies to swim than it is either older children or adults. The older you and I become then the harder it is for us to trust that something as seemingly unstable as water is capable of bearing our weight. Swimming requires not only confidence in our own abilities. It also requires confidence in the capacity of water to keep us afloat and not, inevitably, to swallow us up.

In similar vein our Chrism Mass, today, is an expression of confidence. Jesus Christ stands in the synagogue at Nazareth and says that He is the Lord’s Anointed One. Come what may, Jesus is secure in the gift of God’s Spirit. Jesus can undertake His Father’s mission to the world confidant that He is filled with divine power. You and I who share in the life of Jesus can, therefore, know that God’s Spirit will keep each one of us afloat in our service of God. We have only to trust ourselves to that supporting Spirit of God in similar manner to the baby who learns to entrust him or herself to the waters of the swimming bath.

Today, those of us who are ordained come, once again, to the annual renewal of our ordination vows. We can only make such a renewal today because, first of all, each of us is confident in God. We bishops, priests and deacons come, first of all, in trustful gratitude that, like Jesus, Himself, we have been anointed by God. God’s Spirit lives and works in us. That is the one thing, above all else, that keeps our ministries afloat and so gives us confidence.

That great Jesuit spiritual guide, Anthony de Mello, tells the story of a disciple who felt frustrated by his master’s apparent tendency to destroy every statement of belief in God. The disciple complained that he was left with nothing to hold on to.

‘ “That’s what the fledgling says when pushed out of its nest,” said the master. “Do you expect to fly when you are securely settled in the nest of your beliefs? That isn't flying. That’s flapping your wings.” ‘

Those of us who are ordained know that, even as we are pushed out of the nest and then start to flap our wings, we are destined to fall straight to the ground. It is God’s Spirit that provides the current that keeps us airborne as we seek to serve Him.

The Spirit of God keeps us afloat in a mystery that is always able to drown us. The Spirit of God keeps us airborne in a wind that could so easily blow us away. The Oil of Chrism is a sign to us all that God’s Spirit ever rests on His Church. That Church, remember, S Paul sees as nothing less than the Body of Jesus, the Anointed One, on whom God’s favour rests.

God’s Spirit is to be found ahead of us, leading us into truths we cannot yet either fully fathom or properly discern. So it is that the Oil of Baptism, or the Oil of the Catechumens, which we bless today, is applied before ever we are baptised. That oil serves to remind us that God is at work, leading us into truth before even we realised there was an ever greater truth into which we might be drawn.

S Augustine in his famous Confessions, marvelled how God was already at work within him, even while he, Augustine, was looking in another direction:

“You lifted me up,” says Augustine, “so that I might see that there was something to see, but I was not yet the man to see it.”

And a little later S Augustine goes on to say:

“For behold you were within me, and I outside.”

The Oil of Baptism reminds us that there is nothing relative about God’s truth. Even while we are lost in a vast supermarket of claims and counter claims, God is at work, gradually but surely, beckoning us into the radiance of His definitive truth.

In the same way, the Oil of the Sick reminds us of God’s healing power that has been at work in this world before ever we understood it. You and I are rightly thankful that we live in a world that makes one fantastic medical advance after another. Those very advances, however, only serve to underline the horrors of those things we cannot yet keep at bay. It seems, sometimes, that we have even made death a far more frightening visitor than he was beforehand if only because we can keep him at bay for longer than ever before. Today we bless the Oil of the Sick. You and I are reminded once again that God is the source of healing and of wholeness. God offers you and me renewed confidence as we experience what, so often, is a broken and a bleeding world.

The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me.

This Chrism Mass is, then, a statement of confidence in God. Yet, when Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, His expression of confidence in God was not to be celebrated as an end in itself. God’s anointing of Jesus was so that He could be secure in reaching out into the world. The Gospel is quite clear. Jesus says that God's Spirit has been given to Him because:

He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour.

It is no secret that those of us who gather here today are, yet again, plunged into uncertainties about the future, as our Church of England seeks to decide how close or otherwise it wishes to remain to the rest of Catholic Christianity. I must be asked, more than any other, the question: “What do you think is going to happen, bishop?” I do not know. Indeed, none of us do. What we do know is that, even on the evening of Maundy Thursday, when the future was becoming all too clear, our Lord and Master got on with the job in hand. There were feet to be washed. There was teaching to be given. There was a sacramental ministry to be inaugurated. That sounds remarkably similar to the programme pressing at every parish’s door at the present moment.

One of the things that has most impressed me this past year has been the care that parishes are showing towards asylum seekers. In parish after parish I am introduced to such folk. Occasionally I have the joy of baptising and confirming them. Their needs will not wait the outcome of the Bishop of Manchester’s Working Group. Theirs are feet that need to be washed here and now and, thank God, many of us are doing that very thing. None of us knows what the future holds but we do know that we are sent into the present to be confident builders with Christ of His kingdom. The most precious thing, of course, that you and I can share with anyone is our faith. Jesus’ good news to the poor may not be reduced to the promise of a good life to come. That does not alter the fact that every human being, rich and poor, can know that he or she is created in God’s image, is uniquely important to Him and that Jesus died for him or her. The Mass that you and I treasure so much is, among other things, the foretaste of sharing in God’s kingdom. You and I may not know what the future holds. Indeed, in one very real sense, when did we ever know such a thing? We do know that, to the very moment each of us can do no more, we will seek to draw others into the mystery of the Eucharist.

God keeps us afloat. God keeps us airborne. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon the Church and so upon each one of us. There is confidence; confidence in God; confidence in what we are empowered to do in His name. Let us pray for the gift of such confidence, to be found within ourselves, as the Anointed One, His Self, comes to nourish us in Holy Communion.