Friends of the Lord of the Harvest; † Bishop Chris Green
A sermon given on the 18th of February, 2024 at the ordination of priests and deacons in Nashville, Tennessee.
First, to those about to be ordained, let me say: the Lord needs you, and we need you. The Lord needs you because we need you. The Spirit and the Bride together have called you to come to this work. Because of you and the grace being imparted to you, all of us are invited to enter once again into the heart of the mystery of the promise of the Gospel, so together we might be made anew what we already are.
***
In October 1888, when she was only 15, and not long after she had become a nun, Thérèse of Lisieux wrote to her older sister, Céline, also a Carmelite, in the hopes of comforting her:
Do not let your weakness make you unhappy. When, in the morning, we feel no courage or strength for the practice of virtue, it is really a grace: it is the time to “lay the axe to the root of the tree,” relying upon Jesus alone. If we fall, an act of love will set all right, and Jesus smiles. He helps us without seeming to do so; and the tears which sinners cause Him to shed are wiped away by our poor weak love. Love can do all things. The most impossible tasks seem to it easy and sweet. You know well that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them. What, then, have we to fear?
In a later letter, Thérèse urged her sister to remember to rest in humility and not to fret too much about dryness of spirit: “Let us remain far from all that dazzles, loving our littleness, and content to have no joy. Then we shall be truly poor in spirit, and Jesus will come to seek us however far off we may be, and transform us into flames of love.”
In yet another letter she offered this striking assurance: “If you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, you will have made a perfect resting place for Christ.”
I was reminded of those letters by today’s Psalm (Psalm 132), which we prayed together only a moment ago:
8Rise up, O Lord, and come to your resting place,
you and the ark of your might.
9Let your priests be clothed with righteousness,
and let your holy ones shout for joy.
10For your servant David’s sake
do not turn away the face of your Anointed.
Tonight, I want to ask you—all of you, especially those about to be ordained—to hear those words as the Word of God for you at his moment, as you’re standing on tiptoe at the threshold of the future the Spirit has been creating for you.
Try to take this thought seriously: you have been called into ministry in answer to prayers prayed to the Lord of the harvest—almost certainly prayers prayed by people you’ve never met and will never meet in this life; people perhaps who speak a language you do not know, and who may have lived long before (or long after) you.
In answer to those prayer, you are being set aside today—anointed and authorized, vested and gifted for the work of the Gospel. You will be ministers of the Presence, bearers of the Ark, servants in the house of the Lord. You’re receiving the graces needed to be, as the ordinal says, “agents of God’s purposes of love.”
Deacons, you will be sharing in pastoral ministry and helping to lead the people of God in worship: preaching the Word, assisting in administration of the sacraments, interceding for the needs of the world, ministering to the sick and forsaken.
Priests, you will be our heralds and shepherds, watchmen and healers, waiting on the Spirit, alert for signs of new creation. Formed in obedience, you will proclaim the Word of the Lord and preside at his table, leading the people in their worship, blessing them by placing God’s name upon them.
Together, you will do all this to build up the church in the unity of the Spirit and the unity of the faith for the sanctifying of the Name of God and the renewal of the world.
We need you to do this liturgical and sacramental work. Quite literarily, we can’t be ourselves without it. And yet we need more from you than that. We need you to be people of deep prayer, deep study, and deep sorrow, people who help us remember not to forget our neighbors, never to fall out of love with Jesus.
The grace you are called to offer does not originate in your heart, and it does not depend upon either your gifts or your character, much less your talents or expertise. As Bishop Michael has said, you are called not to have the heart of a servant but the heart of Christ, the Servant; you are to share with others not your own compassion, but God’s.
But how can that be true? How is that to come true, for you, for me? It will happen as you lean on the breast of Jesus, as you are present to him and with him in his ongoing intercessory work. It will happen because of what being with him will do to you and to your self-awareness.
You are, the Gospel tells us, being sent as laborers into the field— because of the vision of the Lord: “When he saw the crowds… harassed and helpless…, then he said…” (Mt 9:35-38). The Epistle rings with the same truth. The apostle Peter identifies himself as a priest and “a witness of the sufferings of Christ” (1 Pet. 5:1). So, let me put it as directly as I can: before you can see to the needs of anyone, you must see the one who is all they need. You must see how he is seen by the Father. You must see how he looks at others, especially those most desperately in need. You must see how they look to him (in both senses of that phrase). You must feel in your own heart what happens in his when he sees people lost like sheep without a shepherd.
***
How do we come to have Christ’s heart, the heart of the Lord who is not a master but a slave? By seeking his face, seeking to and into the beholding of his beauty, and by watching with him in his sorrows. As Maggie Ross says,
To behold God in everything is the antidote tο frenetic activity, to stress and busyness. It enables us to live from, continually return to, and dwell in the depth of silent communion with God. And as this is something God does in us: we have only to allow it, to cease our striving and behold…
But what is this beholding? And how do we enter into it?
Behold[ing]… describes a reciprocal holding in being, the humility of God sharing the divine nature with what it creates. God, the creator of all, God who is beyond being, in humility allows us, created beings, to hold God in being in space and time, even as God is sustaining us in existence and holding us in eternity.
Everything, really, turns on this:
Seek to the beholding, and everything else will be added unto you, including holiness; it's just that you won’t know about it. You won’t know about it because you won't care any longer: your attention will be focused elsewhere, into the love that is a single embrace of God, neighbour, self.
But, again, how do we do this seeking? The answer is deceptively simple. We put our bodies where Christ has told us he is present. At his Table, as the gathered people of God, we learn to recognize him as he wants to be known. To quote Maggie Ross again:
Behold. Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring—and we need to remember that humility and humiliation are mutually exclusive. Humility knows only love, and God is love. The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us, and, in utter silence, given over into our hands and hearts. And it is in the depths of this beholding, in the silence of the loving heart of God, that the divine exchange takes place most fully, where each of us in our uniqueness and strangeness is transfigured into the divine life. And it is for this that God comes tο us, the Word made flesh, stable-born and crucified…
***
As ministers of the Gospel, we must contemplate the mystery of Christ. And we must learn to be his companions, watching with him in his sufferings. Remember the line from the Psalm: “Rise up, O Lord, and come to your resting place…” Where is this resting place? His cross. Our triumphalist theologies make it hard for us to understand how it can be so, but Christ’s sufferings, mysteriously, are not behind him. As Pascal says: “Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time.” The crucifix does not lie. Christ, the risen and ascended one, the one whose body and blood are the life of the world, is enthroned on the Cross—not at the mercy of death, not under the sway of the powers, but exalted by the Spirit as the revelation of the glory of God’s goodness and ours.
In Warsaw of the early 1940’s, under the terror of Nazi occupation, a Hasidic rabbi, Rabbi Shapira, delivered a series of sermons in a secret synagogue in the ghetto. Week after week, as the horrors deepened and widened, he shifted his focus more and more from human to divine suffering, contending at last that the Lord is hidden, not because he has forsaken his people, but because he has withdrawn in anguish into the inner chamber of his own presence to weep in seclusion. In his next-to-last sermon, Rabbi Shapira urged his congregation to “burst into the inner chamber, and commune with God in His sorrow”:
How can we lift ourselves up at least a little bit in the face of the terrifying reports, both old and new, which tear us to bits and crush our hearts? With the knowledge that we are not alone in our sufferings but that He, blessed be He, endures with us (as Scripture states), ‘I am with him in trouble” (Ps. 91:15). But more: there are some sufferings which we suffer on our own account—whether for our sins, or as sufferings of love in order to purge and purify us—in which case He, blessed be He, just suffers along with us. There are, however, some sufferings which we just suffer along with Him, as it were. These are the sufferings of Kiddush ha-Shem.
Sanctifying the Name: that’s what we’re all called to do. But you cannot place the Name on others without it being worked into you—and that happens only as you come to share the Lord’s sufferings.
None of you will suffer what Rabbi Shapira and his congregation did, of course. You will be forced to deal not with Nazis but with nitwits—stupidity, more than malevolence; petty annoyances, mostly, not persecution. Still, you will suffer. Not because God wants you to, but because God needs you to go to those who are suffering, to be present with him as he cares for them. In that way, you will become his presence, his face, before them.
Recently, I learned about a rule for the Houses of Transfiguration connected to Roland Walls’ community in Scotland. It holds together perfectly what I have been calling the beholding and the watching, the contemplation and the companionship:
The ordering of your life must have in view the end and purpose of your special calling—the contemplation of the glory of Christ as we allow the transfiguring of ourselves and this world in the light of his glory. Let there be in each house of the Community a chapel set apart for corporate and private prayer and let each brother and sister be ready to spend their time in generous intercession and communion with the Lord.
The Eucharist and the Divine Office is the Prayer of Christ continued in His Church which is His Body. Let the offices of Morning, mid-day and evening be performed joyfully and simply, and with loving attention. Be careful to show the joy of heaven come down to earth by your singing. Always make your offices available to guests and let them sit among you as brothers and sisters in Christ.
The hour of adoration may never be omitted except for grave reason. Like Peter, James and John were called up to the mountain of the Transfiguration and into the Garden of Gethsemane to watch and pray with Christ in His glory and his passion. We shall do well to remember that the hour is not for our comfort, though often it will be. We spend it as companions of Christ, as He intercedes for the world He died for.
I am so deeply moved by this call. And I want to impress it on you. You must learn to sit with Christ in silence, fully awake to the fact that he is doing what no one else can do. You must train yourself to be present to the glory of his passion and the passion of his glory, remembering your time with him as his companion is not for your comfort but for his. He prays to you to pray with him.
It is one thing to be sent into the harvest. It is another thing to be a friend of the Lord of the harvest, to stay with him when he is left alone. You will never a good shepherd if you do not learn to care for the Great Shepherd as he grieves, witnessing his tears—even when you can’t wipe them from his eyes.
***
One final word: God’s burdens, mysteriously, are not burdensome. It is our yokes that are not easy, our burdens that are not light. By far the heaviest burden we have to bear in this life is our own shadow. This is what Thérèse means by “the trail of being displeasing to yourself.”
Please hear me: you’re not meant to live in conflictedness. You are not meant to be anxious, dis-eased, unsettled. The Father takes no pleasure in you being displeased with yourself. The Spirit never leads you into war with yourself. Christ never gets sick of you, so you should never be sick of yourself. You are meant to be at peace, just as surely and completely as Christ is at peace—with himself and with his Father.
For this reason, ministry must find its source in silence. Not the silence of indifference, intimidation, apprehension, or despair but the silence of prayer— sometimes jubilant, sometimes troubled, but always grateful, ever awed. This is the wise silence that will quiet your spirit in humility and make you a resting place for God, his ark. And it will also allow you to suffer in ways that bring succor to him, taking some of his pain away by bringing healing to someone he loves.
Listen again to St Thérèse’s words, and hear them as the Spirit’s wants you to hear them, here and now:
Do not let your weakness make you unhappy. When, in the morning, we feel no courage or strength for the practice of virtue, it is really a grace: it is the time to “lay the axe to the root of the tree,” relying upon Jesus alone. If we fall, an act of love will set all right, and Jesus smiles. He helps us without seeming to do so; and the tears which sinners cause Him to shed are wiped away by our poor weak love. Love can do all things. The most impossible tasks seem to it easy and sweet. You know well that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them. What, then, have we to fear?
Amen.