The Irish are famous for their blessings and I shudder, just a bit, to think how many kitchens around the world have an Irish blessing refrigerator magnet. But today is a day of blessing: Janice is blessed, we are blessed, the church is blessed.
There has been a theological shift in recent years in the church’s understanding of blessings. The dualistic view of the middle ages, in which something profane is taken and through special holy words uttered by a bishop or priest (or a deacon in the case of inanimate objects) and perhaps sprinkled with holy water, becomes sacred, has been challenged by a more holistic view. In this new view, creation, human beings, the work of human hands, our world, have all already been blessed by God; thus, liturgical blessing is more a recognition of that already-existing divine blessing with a thanksgiving to God for it.
There is the shadow here of the controversial baptismal theology of the great 19th century English theologian, F.D. Maurice. As Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics argued when and if, during or after Baptism, the grace of baptismal regeneration began to operate, Maurice put forward a very different view: that at birth every child is a child of God, already graced, and Baptism is but the recognition of that grace already existing, and thanking God for it, confident that it is bound to increase.
I believe this new understanding of blessing and Maurice’s baptismal theology give some insight to what we are doing here today. Janice is already a well-practiced servant; she has lived half a lifetime of Christian service; God’s grace has already been abundant in her life. She has already been blessed with God’s grace of servanthood. She has already strengthened the service of others through her ministry to them. What I say of Janice, might, I hope be said of all of us here simply as Christians. But in Janice and other Deacons we, the church, recognize exceptional ministries of service and want to see them continue and flourish. So, we recognize and bless that servanthood in ordination, with the prayers that it will go from strength to strength and never cease.
But first we listen to Scripture and what it says about this ministry of diakonia, servanthood. The story of God’s call to Isaiah reminds us that it is a call, not a selfish act of the ego. Jesus called his apostles to servanthood. Jesus himself was among us as one who served. Service and servanthood, like mission, are part of the esse, the very being of the church. We discern that call both individually and corporately. We are also called to be sent; but we are also called to return home. Servanthood is God’s business, God’s work, part of God’s Mission, and we are called into it.
The psalm reminds us that God has created and knows our most inward selves, our broken bodies, our most intimate desires, our deepest needs. But God knows us with love, not judgement, and helps us make the best of how we have been created and how we have grown (or even been damaged) over the years. God will continue to know and love us to the end.
The passage from Philippians speaks of confidence and joy in the Christian life, including the Christian life of service. Janice, already your friends and the church have seen your tremendous capacity to bring joy out of suffering and grief. Here you have followed Jesus who says, “I no longer call you servants, . . . instead, I call you friends”. You have knit us together in friendship. Part of the ministry of service, diakonia, is making this move from Christian service to Christian friendship. May you (and all of us) take Paul’s words to heart: “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me [and I would add, in Christ], and the God of peace will be with you.”
But there is also the Cross. In the Gospel we heard today, a group of Greeks ask Philip, “Sir, we would see Jesus”. (Like many 19th century Evangelical Anglican churches, those words are written on a brass plaque in the pulpit lectern at Ascension to challenge every preacher there.) Jesus, about to go to his glorification on the Cross, speaks of his death and resurrection: “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”.
Ordination is also a commitment to stay closer to the Cross, to be willing to take on even more burdens. “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” But with the Cross comes Resurrection and Glorification. “Whoever serves me, the Father will honour”.
God’s ongoing call to new ministries of service and friendship, divine intimacy, confidence and joy, the Cross and glorification: what better signposts are there for the life of a Deacon, the servant of all God’s people? Janice, you will be examined and make promises, the community will invoke the Holy Spirit, the bishops will lay hands on you and we, as a community, will celebrate that the church has a new deacon. Anglican theological magpies that we are, we can even dip into the middle ages and say that your sacramental character as a deacon will now become permanent. It is all an enormous blessing, both to Janice and to the church. But it is a blessing that must continue to be nourished by prayer, the sacraments, fellowship, rest, leisure and, indeed, solitude.
To bring together the blessing that is today with the continued call to solitude and sustaining intimacy with God, I shall end with a poem of blessing by the Irish Catholic priest and theologian, John O’Donohue, from his book of blessings, “To Bless the Space between us”. While I shall read it especially for Janice, may it also be a blessing for all of us and a reminder that blessed for service, we are also called deeper into a boundless God who is both perfect activity and perfect solitude.
Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
the blueprint of your life
would begin to glow on earth,
illuminating all the faces and voices
that would arrive to invite
your soul to growth.
Praised be your father and mother,
who loved you before you were,
and trusted to call you here
with no idea who you would be.
Blessed be those who have loved you
into becoming who you were meant to be,
blessed be those who have crossed your life
with dark gifts of hurt and loss
that have helped to school your mind
in the art of disappointment.
When desolation surrounded you,
blessed be those who looked for you
and found you, their kind hands
urgent to open a blue window
in the gray wall formed around you.
Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
your health, eyes to behold the world,
thoughts to countenance the unknown,
memory to harvest vanished days,
your heart to feel the world’s waves,
your breath to breathe the nourishment
of distance made intimate by earth.
On this echoing-day of your birth,
may you open the gift of solitude
in order to receive your soul;
enter the generosity of silence
to hear your hidden heart;
know the serenity of stillness
to be enfolded anew
by the miracle of your being.
[Silence]
And let there be a coda, the same tune, the same melody, out of the prophetic fire, incense and deep silence of God, whether amongst your diaconal service to seafarers, the parish or beyond, especially as entropy and disorder begin to take hold globally, the words of Micah from this morning’s lesson: “O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Amen.
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