I Kings 17.17-24, Galatians 1.11-24, Luke 7.11-17
Throughout June we are going to be concentrating on faith in the workplace, following on from Mark’s challenging sermon on this topic back in Lent. Starting next Sunday, for three weeks we will have a dialogue between the preacher and a member of this congregation about how their faith affects their working life and vice versa. Next Sunday it will be Gervais Williams, speaking as a hedge fund manager; on the 20th it will be Caroline Stauss, a palliative care consultant, and we will end on the 27th with Chi-Chi Obuaya, a psychiatrist. After each parish eucharist, the lay speaker will be invited to engage in a follow-up discussion with anyone who wants to continue the conversation.

Today we have no dialogue, I am afraid, but I want to start the series off by speaking about the day to day work of a parish priest. Every vicar knows the line about having a nice one day a week job, and of course the truth is rather different. But there are many different approaches to the work of parish ministry, and I can only give you my own interpretation of what this particular job involves. And that means that I am speaking about the particular role of being the incumbent of a parish, because that is my experience.

First a word of clarification. I am ordained to be a priest: that is a role that defines my whole life. But I have also been inducted as the vicar of this parish: that is a job with certain parameters. Actually, it is technically an office and not a job at all. I receive a stipend, not a salary. That means that I am paid sufficient expenses not to have to work at a paid job, so that my working time is wholly available to the parish. That’s the difference between a stipendiary priest and a self-supporting priest, who must earn a living or make other personal provision for their finances. The bishop has shared with me the cure of souls in this particular geographical parish, and I am answerable to both the bishop and to God for the way I carry out that commission. That is the special role of an incumbent, and it is a very serious responsibility.

I must say that the readings for today are a rather daunting background against which to speak about parish ministry. In the epistle to the Galatians Paul tells us how he received the message he had to preach by direct revelation from Jesus Christ. Most of us have a less dramatic calling. And in both the Old Testament and the gospel readings, a man of God or Jesus himself brings a dead son back to life. Every minister on a bereavement visit would love to be able to say “do not weep” and then to follow this up by restoring the dead person alive to the arms of their loved one, but of course we can’t do it. We have the hope of resurrection, but we live with the reality of human suffering.

This brings us straight to the hardest part of being in priestly ministry. There are moments when we have to stand in the dock where a hurting person needs to put God. In previous parishes I have had to try to minister to a mother whose daughter committed suicide, to a man whose young wife died of cancer leaving him with a motherless child, and to parents whose learning disabled son was murdered in the course of a bungled robbery. There was nothing to say on God’s behalf to any of those bereaved people. All I could do was to remain present and say I can’t make any excuse for this, I can give no reason for why such a terrible thing has happened to you, but I am still here in God’s name.

A hospital chaplain told me that on one occasion a man whose young daughter had died in a car accident came up to him in the casualty department and without warning punched him in the face. My friend understood exactly why he did this and bore him no ill will, despite the state of his nose. Rage against God is a healthy and natural reaction to the horribly unfair and painful events we all experience, and those who wear a collar will sometimes be the obvious target for that rage.

So the first thing to say about being a priest is the obvious one that although we may in some sense officially represent God, we are not miracle workers, nor are our prayers guaranteed to be successful in obtaining particular outcomes. I am a fan of the Sopranos series, and one of my favourite scenes is the one when a couple of mobsters call on the parish priest with a grievance. They have paid a lot of money to keep the church in good repair, but what happened? Someone important got sick anyway. The priest is obviously not keeping up his end of the bargain. They decide the church roof fund can do without their help in future.

I was a curate for four years in Poplar, in the East End of London, and got very used to the mentality of “say one for me” with the expectation of seeing some results. People have to be gently reminded that their vicar is not Jesus Christ, or even Elijah, with the power of life and death, and that God is not a powerful boss who can be bribed or cajoled to do what we want.

But of course asking for prayer is a perfectly reasonable request. In fact I would say that it is one of the three main things that a parish priest is for. Intercession is a task laid upon the clergy, and we are obliged to say morning prayer and evening prayer daily, ideally in church. In St Mary’s Church these offices are said every weekday morning and on Monday to Thursday evenings. Each office lasts only about twenty minutes and includes a psalm, a Bible reading, several scriptural canticles, and a period of intercessory prayer. When prayer requests have been made, these will be included in the daily offices. We also pray through the congregational list every month in alphabetical order. So whether or not you realize it, if we know who you are we are praying for you regularly.

And what is the point? I would suggest that it is to align our wills with God’s loving purpose. Against all the evidence that some people see for a meaningless or even malicious universe, Christians persist in believing that God loves his creation and that all will be well. When we pray “your will be done”, we are joining ourselves to his loving intent. We are offering ourselves to assist the doing of that will on earth, where there is resistance, as it is in heaven, where God’s purpose always prevails. If there is something practical we can do to help, prayer may reveal it to us and inspire us to do it. This is the foundation of all pastoral ministry.

If there is nothing else we can do, by joining our prayer to Jesus’ prayer we are offering each person in love to God. Just thinking of someone lovingly while we put ourselves in God’s presence is intercessory prayer. Archbishop William Temple said that worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. We offer ourselves to be remade in the image of Christ whenever we open our heart in prayer.
I said that prayer was one of the three main things a parish priest is for. The second is drawing together the eucharistic community around the table of the Lord. A Christian priest is not like a pagan priest, or even the Jewish priests of the Temple period, offering a sacrifice on behalf of others. Our priesthood is representative: it invites all the baptized to exercise their priesthood together, and it enables the community to celebrate the paschal mystery week by week. The paschal mystery is the good news of Easter, which is the point of every Sunday eucharist.

Christ’s victory over death means that we are free to live fully and joyfully, as priests of God’s good creation, mediating the love of God to everyone we meet. Together we are fed at the table of the Lord in order to live the gospel in all aspect of our lives. The leader of a eucharistic community has the responsibility to proclaim and teach the good news. It is then up to all the members of the church to spread the gospel by word and action in ever widening circles.

The third thing that I believe is a special duty of a parish priest is to have a representative role in the community. You have all heard Archbishop Temple’s other famous quote, that the Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. So whatever we do on Sunday is only the prelude: when our formal worship is ended, our service begins. This will take different forms according to our own vocation. We have a common calling as baptized people, but how our baptism is lived out will be unique for each of us. Over the next three weeks we will hear how some members of our congregation see their calling.

Much of a parish priest’s weekday work will be connected with preparing Sunday worship, with daily prayer, and with the pastoral care of the congregation. But there must also be time to become involved with the community outside the church, in the name of the church. Visiting schools, dropping into shops, meeting people of other faiths, engaging with community groups, and sometimes just being visible in a clerical collar are all part of this representative ministry.

Although each one of us is an ambassador for St Mary’s Primrose Hill, there will be times when the vicar needs to be seen or heard. On your behalf I am involved, along with many others, in setting up a cold weather shelter for the homeless at St Mary’s, overseeing our youthwork outreach, governing our church school, hosting music and dance events, supporting voluntary projects in Camden, organizing the Primrose Hill Summer Lecture series and promoting interfaith understanding.

In many aspects of my job, I face the same challenges of being a Christian at work as the rest of you. But of course in one very important way my job is much easier: in a collar, with the title of Reverend, the conversation about faith can scarcely be avoided. I can short-circuit all those getting-to-know-you conversations in which, at some point, one’s Christian faith is eventually revealed. Having spent forty years as a layperson, I know well that that can be the hardest thing to get right. It takes courage to “come out” as a believer, and it is getting harder all the time.

Jesus told his disciples to be salt and yeast: active ingredients, though often hidden and overlooked, that make all the difference to the whole. It is the vocation of each baptized Christian to be salt and yeast and light in the world, and in so doing to fulfil our mission statement of making Christ known. We may do this by public speaking, in private conversations, in the way we act at home or at work. As witnesses of the resurrection life, we are apostles – literally those who are sent out – to love the Lord through serving the world. I look forward, and I hope you do, to reflecting on the joys and challenges this brings as we listen to our fellow Christians speak about their work in the coming weeks.

I’ll end by quoting the famous reminder given by St Teresa of Avila: “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours; yours are the eyes through which is to look out Christ’s compassion to the world, yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good, and yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.”