The Bishop of Beverley - Sermon for the Chrism Masses 2009

Chrism Masses 2011

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

Luke 4 v18

I can still remember when I first gained the confidence to swim. There was a step at the shallow end of the swimming bath, about a foot high. Time after time I would stand on it, stretch out into the water, and glide forward just for a few seconds before speedily placing my feet firmly on the bottom of the pool. Then, one day, I found myself moving my arms in a rudimentary swimming stroke and travelling forward for as long as four or five seconds. Alas, the confidence soon went and my feet were once again replaced on firm ground. That first swim, though, gave me the confidence to try again and again. I managed gradually to travel even further. It took much more confidence eventually to start swimming at the deep end and to know that the depth of the water beneath me no longer mattered. I would not now need to touch the bottom with my feet. I could swim! There is a wonderful description of living by faith that says it is rather like swimming in water, knowing its depth is some forty fathoms, and then continuing to swim.

This Chrism Mass is very much about confidence building. At a very basic level, over the past nearly twenty years, you and I, as well as our predecessors, have been coming together annually for this great act of worship. The Chrism Mass has been a particular confidence booster to our constituency. We have gathered together around our bishop, renewed our commitment to ministry and mission, and have been renewed by God’s Spirit for His service. The sheer exuberance of being together, in what have often been difficult times, has been a great confidence builder. You and I have found that we can still keep swimming even though the waters beneath us often seem to be even deeper than forty fathoms.

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

Jesus displayed great confidence on that first day he stood up to preach in the synagogue at Nazareth. Jesus started by quoting word for word from Isaiah, a great prophet who had also been confident enough to tell his people things they had not particularly wanted to hear. Jesus comes into the synagogue and many there expect their particular prejudices to be reinforced. Human beings, you and I as much as anyone else, so often know just what it is that God should be doing in order to make the world just as we think it should be. Jesus says, by contrast, that He is sent to set the downtrodden free and proclaim the Lord’s year of favour. What a nuisance it is when we hear of an economic policy that will free people from their debts and give them a new start but all at our cost! And it is perhaps a pity that our Gospel reading today does not continue with just a little more of the story as S Luke tells it. For, in S Luke’s Gospel, Jesus goes on to say that if the synagogue’s congregation is not prepared to listen to him then, like Elijah and Elisha, he will go to the most outcast of all. Jesus will go to the Samaritans and the Syrians, to those whom everyone in that congregation would have known were quite outside its accepted viewpoint as to who were the people of God. Most, if not all of us, know that it takes great confidence to challenge the accepted outlook of an established congregation, long settled in its ways. Jesus, anointed by the Spirit, is confident to do just this thing. Here, today, in this Chrism Mass, Jesus offers to each of us that same assurance. We Christians can, when it is needed, dare to challenge one another. We can be confident, too, in challenging the wider world. We can dare to make our challenge even when the establishment of the day might want us to be quiet, be our challenge about debt relief for the world’s poor, the proper rights of a Catholic adoption agency within a widely secular society, or the sanctity of life from the moment it first becomes present within the womb.

Jesus tells the congregation in the synagogue: This text is being fulfilled even as you listen. Here is a display of self-confidence if ever there was one. Jesus is certain that God’s Spirit is at work in the here and now. The signs can be seen as people are healed of their sickness and liberated from the injustice that enslaves them. No one need now wait for the future in order to experience God’s Kingdom. God’s kingdom can be experienced in this very present moment. So it is that each and every time a sinner turns to Jesus, he or she can know through absolution that there is immediate restoration to a harmonious relationship with God. Every sick person who meets Jesus through the Sacrament of Healing this very day can know that he or she is whole in God’s sight here and now. Every time you and I partake in the offering of the Mass, we can be confident that Jesus is present, at that moment, in that one perfect offering that He has made for the sins of the whole world. Here then is ultimate reason for each of us to experience a renewal of confidence at this Chrism Mass. My brother priests, especially; you and I can know with confidence that whenever, in the power of Jesus we celebrate His sacraments, we have a guarantee that God’s new age is immediately present, both with us and with those to whom we minister.

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

Those stories of Jesus’ early ministry, as S Luke tells us of them in his Gospel, often feel as if there is no particular plan as to what is happening. It can seem that Jesus goes from place to place. Jesus tells some parables here, does a miracle there, finds time to pray somewhere else. Then, suddenly, Jesus can deliver timeless teaching, like as when He proclaims the Beatitudes or provides instruction on how to pray. Jesus’ ministry might, at first sight, come across to us as being quite unplanned but, yet, amazing things are happening within that ministry time and time again. S Luke’s Gospel, though, wants us to take something more on board. From the moment that God’s Spirit overshadows Our Blessed Lady, in great events such as Our Lord’s Baptism, until Jesus stands up in the synagogue to preach, Our Lord’s ministry, however unpredictable it might be in terms of this world, is one continually under-girded by the presence of God’s Spirit. Apparently random incidents are exactly that, only apparently random. Jesus confidently says:

The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me.

It does not matter how others might see things. God is in control.

Here, again, is the true confidence that God provides for us through this Chrism Mass. The Oil of Chrism is the sign of God’s anointing Spirit still continuing to empower the Church in what at times can seem to be a somewhat unfocused life of ministry. And, occasionally, it might be that, just as in the Gospel story something happens to Jesus that superficially seems to comes from nowhere but then turns out to be completely in tune with the overarching purpose of God’s Spirit, so it will be for us. The Chrism Mass is hardly the time for trespassing into church politics. Yet, perhaps, you and I should at least be alert to the possibilities of what God might be doing even through our current difficulties which, to our human eyes, seem to come out of nowhere. You and I cannot know how our future is going to work out. Perhaps, though, even something like the recently proposed Society, to which we are being encouraged to sign up, might just be the prompting of the Spirit as He seeks to hold in creative tension the counter claims that otherwise might pull our church apart.

My brother priests; you and I know all too well how our most carefully laid plans for exercising our daily ministry can seem, all too soon, suddenly to be blown off course. Today you and I can take heart. S Luke’s Gospel suggests that the same thing seems often to be happening to Jesus, save that the wind that is thought to blow the Lord off course, turns out to be, in fact, nothing less than the life-giving breath of God’s Holy Spirit. You and I seek to live as God’s anointed ministers. We need to hold on in confidence to the great truth that God who calls us to ordination does, indeed, give the means by which you and I can be faithful to our calling.

Confidence needs to be rightly placed. Your confidence and mine is placed not in ourselves but in God. That is what each of us seeks to deepen as we share in this Chrism Mass. You and I once again open ourselves to the Lord who empowers us with His Spirit of confidence as He comes among us once again within this Eucharistic offering.