Vocation Sunday – a living or a life?

 4th Sunday of Easter– Eucharist – 21.iv.2024

(Acts 4.5-12; 1 John 3.16-24; John 10.11-18)

‘We know love by this, that the Son of God laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.’ (1 John 3.16)

There are days when you can wake up and think, “I just don’t know how much longer I can go on doing this.” Perhaps that’s not something that everyone feels, I’m not sure that even most people have felt it, certainly I hope not most of the time. But at least some people will say those words – and say them some of the time.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take this…” It might come out in words like these, and it might be said about marriage or some other relationship which is being endured – which saps the spirit rather than builds it up. It might be the experience of illness, borne personally or in caring for a loved one who gets no better and whose needs are ever greater and more demanding. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand this…” someone might say when they are the victim of misunderstanding or find themselves in the midst of a mess of their own personal making. Or it might be work and pressures which overwhelm rather than fulfill the individual.

What allows you to be the person you really are, rather than the individual you are forced into being? And what keeps you going regardless of all those pressures bearing upon you? I ask these questions because today is observed by the Church as “Vocations Sunday” – and vocation is about the recognition of calling, about seeing what I am called to be… more than a job, beyond planning a career, and where you need to hold in balance circumstance and reality.

From time to time I get asked – frequently by children and teenagers, “How old were you when you decided to become a Vicar?” I remember being asked that by one of my children! I didn’t normally expect questions like that from him that might require some profound attention to what I’ve been doing with my life. But the question arose from the vulnerability that young people might feel when the pressure is on them to make choices… How you decide when you’re that young what subjects you want to pursue at A-level or university? How do you know what job you might want to do? What if you might make the wrong choice? These days it’s the case that most people will be expected to make several career changes during the course of their working lives, but that’s not much comfort when you’re starting out and that first big choice confronts you. I suspect that it was much easier when I was growing up. There were no fees to find for a university education, you could do what you want, many people finished their degrees not much clearer about what they were going to do with their lives – there just seemed to be much more time available before those critical choices had to be made.

But of course the question that gets put to me, “How old were you when you decided to become a Vicar?”  - it’s the wrong question. I’m not sure I ever decided to become a Vicar. Being a “Vicar” is a job – in fact it’s a job-title, though a convenient one and rather easier to get your tongue round than “priest-in-charge” which is what my job title is in the parish of Castleside, as opposed to being Vicar of Benfieldside. I’m only a “Vicar” because first of all I’m a priest – and being a priest is both more and less than a job. A job is something you do. A priest is only something you can be. You’re ordained to it – something about you is said to be changed by ordination, but only after it’s first recognised that it has to do with the person you are. There’s careful assessment in the selection of clergy, but fundamentally the issue which prevails above any question of abilities and skills is, “who is this person? – what is at the root of their being? – how are they being called to respond to God’s calling?” And if that sounds terribly profound, it’s not because there is a set of answers which can be ticked, and mean you can go forward successfully to be ordained. It’s because they are questions which need to be answered about each and every person if we are truly to respond to God. Everyone has a calling if we are truly God’s people. It’s a calling that needs to be addressed from the time of our baptism – individuals known by name, baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. From that time on God lives in us, we live our lives in God. But do we recognize it? What difference will it make to our lives? What is God calling me to be? 

And the answer can be worked out in many career choices, as people do many jobs. The call to priesthood doesn’t necessarily require working it out by doing one particular job. Many people continue a secular job day-by-day in a variety of careers. Our own Phil Carter has been ordained after retirement from a life of teaching. Since ordination I’ve always been one of the stipendiary clergy – paid by the Church – but it doesn’t always have to be that way, and I would still go on being a priest, whether paid or not. I might be nearing the time when I have to retire, but I’ll still go on being a priest. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this…” That’s a statement that perhaps in the future won’t be so much an indication of desperation as a statement of financial reality if the Church simply finds itself unable to pay its clergy – but they wouldn’t stop being priests.

Vocation – and the question of what constitutes a call from God – is something that sometimes has to be addressed in the most difficult of circumstances. When I have found the going tough, I have had to recognize just how many other people have to carry on with their own lives and in their own calling. If I found it tough to be a single parent and a priest, just how tough is it for anyone else? Can you be a single parent and a Christian? Yes, of course! So whatever people might have gone through in difficult times, everyone has to ask the question, “What is God saying to me?” “What particular task or calling does God have for me?” A church which recognizes the realities of daily living will be a church in which clergy and lay people with a particular call to ministry will find those realities bearing personally upon them.

“How much longer can I go on like this?” For me as a priest there needs to be a reality to my calling. For anyone I’d say that being tested in your calling – in the circumstances of daily life – is not the same as the denial of that calling. Asking myself - where should I be now? - I’ve learned to appreciate so much more where other people are in their lives, how they fulfil their callings. You can change a job, but it doesn’t mean that you give up a calling. I could stop being a Vicar, but I’d go on being a priest. I’ve learned that you can cease to be a husband, but I can’t envisage not being a father.

That’s about being what I am… who I am. Priesthood is not just about me – that wouldn’t be priesthood, because the priest should exercise priesthood to enable people in their own vocation and calling. You can’t be a priest on your own. You need support – support which I’ve learned to value so much. And you need to recognize what other people must be enabled to do by the fact of your priesthood.

Prayer is fundamental. “How can I go on?” There are those disciplines which you simply do. Like prayer. And if the priest needs to get on with prayer as part of the stuff of daily living, then it’s something for every other Christian too. Love is the other fundamental. Love in which we so frequently fail, but which is nevertheless our motivation and the basis of our calling. The recognition of love is the recognition of our being in God. Which brings me back to those words from our 2nd reading with which I began: ‘We know love by this, that the Son of God laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.’

Calling us by name

Easter Day – Eucharist – 31.iii.2024

(Acts 10.34-43; John 20.1-18)

“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God…”

Today we have a choice of Gospel readings – either Mark’s or John’s account of the Resurrection. I’ve been very much torn as to which to choose. But the reading we’re told always to have is not from the Gospel at all. It’s from the Acts of the Apostles where we find these words spoken by Peter the Apostle. However confused the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection might have become – and we find marked differences in the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – there are two things that are clear: that Jesus died on the Cross; and on the third day he rose again… and he rose because God raised him. This is the heart of the Easter Gospel: Passion and Resurrection; the coldness, reality and inescapable fact of death – and the new life of the Risen Christ. 

But how we experience that will vary from person to person. There is some confusion between the Gospels as to who is the first witness to the Resurrection. In today’s choice of Gospels, Mark and John agree that it’s Mary Magdalene who first finds the stone which had blocked the entrance to Jesus’ tomb now rolled back. But while in Mark’s account Mary and the other women enter the tomb to find a young man dressed in white telling them that Jesus has risen, St. John’s Gospel has Mary leave as soon as she finds the stone moved, so that it’s Peter and an unnamed disciple who first make their way into the tomb to find it empty. We might wonder what is going on? And perhaps this is part of the truth of Easter - that the writers of the Gospel don’t feel obliged to get their story agreed between them. This is not a fiction artfully constructed. It’s the simple record – with all the confusion of the day - of the undeniable fact of the Resurrection. So our readings today start with Peter’s testimony in the Acts of the Apostles. Jesus died – and he rose again. The risen Jesus has appeared and there are people who saw it, but it’s not for everyone to need to see it. The Resurrection is more than an event you need to witness personally for yourself.

And Resurrection is more than finding a resuscitated body. It’s first of all an empty tomb. But an empty tomb is not proof of Resurrection. In St. John’s account, Peter does not know what to make of this vacated space with its empty grave clothes. The disciple who accompanies him says that he went in and believed – but he still hasn’t put it all together… as John tells us, “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” It will take time before the truth of what they are witnessing sinks in. The Easter story is something that tells us that we can believe – and faith can be a very real thing – but we still won’t necessarily be able to make sense of every problem or setback that life has in store for us us. That’s what Resurrection is about: God active and alive, something we can believe in, even when we don’t feel or understand it.

How is it for Mary Magdalene, the first person to discover the tomb disturbed? St. John tells us that she found the stone moved,.. and she ran for it! Someone must have taken the body of Jesus away. There’s more agreement between Mark and John as to what happened next: when she finally looks into the tomb she finds either one or two men dressed in white. In Mark’s Gospel she and the other women are told that Jesus has been raised – and the disciples will see him… at which they flee in terror. St Mark’s account ends saying that they couldn’t tell anyone about this, because “they were afraid.” And there’s little comfort in St. John’s account. The angels ask why she is weeping. She can only state the obvious that she weeps for her Lord, killed on a cross, and it seems his body cannot even be left in peace. Mary, before she can experience the fullness of Christ’s Resurrection has to acknowledge her loss. For us Easter faith is not a miracle cure for all our woes. It can come only when we recognise the extent of our fears and anxieties, all those issues we would rather not own up to which sap our spirit...

There’s an Easter hymn that strikes a chord for me:

When our hearts are wintry, grieving or in pain,

thy touch can call us back to life again,

fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:

love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Easter is not a matter merely of addressing the historical facts of the Resurrection, the emptiness of the Tomb, and the nature of Christ’s Risen Body. Easter is the time when we need to let God address us, to bring before him in Christ those ‘fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been.’ At Easter we do not shy away from the darkness within our souls, the wintry hearts, the grief and pain we may bear. But we find this one man who has been through it all before us: loving those about him, bringing life into broken bodies and relationships, a man who knows the full extent of human joy and sorrow, yet also experiences the pain of betrayal, the anguish of being deserted by friends in his time of greatest need; even on the Cross he has spoken words of care and forgiveness; until finally he has entered even into death itself and the darkness of the tomb. 

Only when Mary can say why she weeps does she turn to find the risen Jesus standing by her all along. She thinks he’s just the gardener, though something moves her to share her grief with him. It’s his response which brings home the truth of Easter to her. He simply speaks her name: “Mary.” It was Jesus who by his touch had brought her healing when they first met. Now he touches her by saying her name – this is how God comes to her in Christ; this is how we know that God knows us and is alive to touch our hearts.

Jesus loves us literally to death – his own death. So that his risen life is life for us all, if only we are ready to accept it. He speaks to us as he spoke to Mary. ‘I have called you by your name, you are mine,’ go the words of a chorus. And how true that is! That is why the use of our name at Baptism is so important. Christ calls to us from the start, whether we hear him or not. 

In a few moments we will renew our Baptismal Vows. As you declare your faith, remember that at your Baptism you were called by your name as the water was poured over you. As we are baptised in Christ he calls us by our name. Will we recognise him as he calls? Will we see him in the stranger, even as Mary finds him in a man she thought was a gardener? Will we find him in our neighbour, in our friends, in those from whom we are divided by misunderstanding and the inadequacy of communication or the frailty of our love?...

... love lives again, that with the dead has been:

love is come again like wheat that springeth green....

 

Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,

he that for three days [....] in the grave had lain,

quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen:

love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Alleluia. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Holy Week at St. Cuthbert's Church, Shotley Bridge

 

Holy Week at St. John's Church, Castleside

 

Night Prayer for use in Passion-tide

Night Prayer for use in Passion-tide. Use any time up to Easter - but having been prayed first on 17 March, there's also something about St. Patrick...

Night Prayer for Lent

It's been some time since we went "live" - but here we are with the service of Compline for Lent, and celebrating the priest & poet George Herbert.

Holy Seasons – Holy Time…

Look towards the final pages of the March issue of our Parish Magazine and you’ll see that we are carrying two short articles about Good Friday and Easter. I was interested to read how Sir Isaac Newton had tried to calculate the date of the first Easter – was he right? What we do know is that the date of Easter as we celebrate it now moves around. This year it’s quite early on 31st March – though only for western Christians; most Eastern Orthodox Churches won’t celebrate Easter until 5th May this year, which is almost as late as they can do so! It all depends on the moon and how it corresponds to the calendars which are in use today.

How many people notice these things? Well, schools are having to this year since it’s making the current teaching term very short! And most people will be looking forward to an extended Bank Holiday Weekend, regardless of their faith. Another season has been mentioned in the News over the last few days – Ramadan – not simply because it’s a season observed with great seriousness by millions of Muslims, but also because it begins on the date of the deadline which the Israeli government has given to Hamas for the release of hostages if there is to be any cessation or pause in the hostilities in Gaza. For a month from the evening of 10th March, faithful Muslims will fast and pray. It’s a time which will coincide with the second half of the Christian observance of Lent.

How will we all use that time? I’d just like to point out that the whole of the month of March should be special to us as Christian. If you feel you haven’t got started on Lent – here’s your opportunity to use it as we seek to come closer to God in Christ. Every day but one  during March is a day of Lent with the final week coinciding exactly with Holy Week; and the final day of the month will be Easter Day – the culmination of our Lenten journey as we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection to new life. So every day of the month can be put to good use – if only we have the will.

If anyone would be my disciple let him take up his / her Cross every day and follow me, says Jesus. It’s an invitation to an everyday faith – let’s take it seriously every day in this month of March. Let us find, at its end, the Risen Lord waiting for us.

Martin Jackson