Sermon by the Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt
Rev James Jones
Oxford University
28 January 2007
John 1 v 1-5
In my twelve years as a Bishop I have listened to hundreds of people tell me the story of their vocation. I am struck by the number who trace the beginning of the call back to their childhood. In his novel “The Power and the Glory” Graham Greene writes, “There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in”. This is the novelist’s rendering of the Jesuit saying “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”. Or, in this case, the woman. Because what has surprised me in particular is the number of women who can trace their call to priestly ministry back to their childhood. This has the silvery hallmark of the Spirit because whatever picture came to their childhood imagination it was not projected by the culture of the church where priestly women did not exist – at least, not at the Lord’s Table!
The deliberately ambiguous title of my sermon highlights the fact that inspite of the decision 13 years ago to ordain women to the priesthood their ministry is still overlooked and not fully recognised in and by the church. Fewer than 40 of the 2,000 women priests are in senior positions as Deans, Archdeacons and Canons and not many women are found in the leadership of civic churches and the large suburban churches especially in the Evangelical tradition. And the process of admitting women to the Office of Bishop has all the signs of becoming a protracted and debilitating affair.
The media flurry following an article in the Catholic Herald on the eve of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s visit to Pope Benedict felt to many of us (and not just women) like a tugging of the rug beneath our feet. Commenting on the ordination of women the Archbishop said: “I don’t think it has transformed or renewed the Church of England in spectacular ways. Equally, I don’t think it has corrupted or ruined the Church of England in spectacular ways.”
I am more positive than that both as Chair of Wycliffe Hall, a theological college within this university, and as a Bishop nurturing vocations in a diocese where 45% of our parishes are in areas of multiple deprivation . Some of our outstanding ministers in tough, urban areas are women priests. I have seen with my own eyes their sure pastoral touch, their effective representation of the community, their courageous advocacy and their prophetic leadership not just gathering the urban chicks under their wing (which in Liverpool requires nerves of steel!) but feeding the Body of Christ with word and sacrament. Without them we might well be retreating from some of our grassless pastures. It is inconceivable in the Diocese of Liverpool that we should ever come to a time when women cease to exercise priestly ministry.
In the service to ordain a Bishop in the Book of Common prayer the Collect, the Epistle and the Gospel emphasise the essence and function of Episcopal ministry. The Collect says: “Charge them to feed thy flock”. The Epistle says: “Overseers to feed the Church of God”. The Gospel says: “Feed my sheep”. Then after the laying on of hands by the Bishops, the Archbishop gives the Bible to the elected Bishop saying “Be to the flock of Christ a shepherd … feed them”.
The character and purpose of Episcopal ministry is according to the Book of Common Prayer unequivocally the apostolic ministry of feeding the Body of Christ. When in the current debate about the ordination of women to the episcopate various voices demand (rightly) that we need to ask what a bishop’s ministry is about and for, then Anglicans will properly go to the Prayer Book (Canon A5) to enquire about its essence and function.
We will also search the Scriptures and there find that the Prayer Book has drawn heavily from the New Testament for its understanding of a bishop’s ministry as one of feeding the Body of Christ. The apostle Peter describes “oversight” as “willingly tending to the flock of God” (1, Peter 5, 2) and the apostle Paul favourably compares his own ministry with that of a nursing mother tenderly nurturing her own children (1, Thessalonians 2:7). Apostolic ministry in the New Testament is emphatically a call to feed the Church, the Body of Christ. This needs to be emphasised because I fear that in all the debates about the role of the Bishop, for example as a focus of unity, we are losing sight of this one essential feature of Episcopal ministry.
Furthermore, and importantly, the question: “can a woman be ordained to the episcopate?” could also be formulated as: can a woman feed the church, the Body of Christ?
In my sermon in Liverpool Cathedral on the 10th Anniversary of the Ordination of Women to the priesthood, I noticed a parallelism in the Gospel of Luke. In the nativity narrative Luke writes (2:7) “(Mary) brought forth a son, wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger”; then in the passion narrative he writes (23:53) “(Joseph) took down (the body of Jesus) wrapped it in linen and laid him in a tomb”.
At the beginning and the end of his life Mary his mother and Joseph of Arimathea, in the absence of Joseph his father, minister to Jesus. In parallel, in the nativity and in the passion they care for the body of Jesus. Mary brings the body into the world; Joseph takes the body out of the world. They both wrap the body in cloth. Then, Mary lays the body in a manger; Joseph lays the body in a tomb. A woman and then a man both exercising a ministry of oversight in relation to the body of Jesus.
Who was it that first fed that body? Who, to use the images of the apostle Paul, first tenderly nurtured the one who would one day charge his apostles in their turn “Feed my sheep”? It was Mary who first had oversight of the Body of Christ.
I put these questions in all seriousness. If a woman could feed and minister to the Body of Christ in the flesh, can a woman not also feed and minister to the Body of Christ in the Spirit? Was not the ministry of Mary in the gospels a ministry of oversight in relation to the Body of Christ and therefore truly an episcopal ministry.
Not only does Mary feed the one who feeds the sheep but she is also given unique charge of the apostle John at the Crucifixion of our Lord. Commenting on Jesus’ words from the Cross to his mother and his beloved disciple “Woman behold your son … Behold your Mother” the recent ARCIC document on Mary observes “Jesus’ dying words give Mary a motherly role in the Church” (Para 26). My own view is that all the debates down the centuries about the status of Mary have overlooked this essential aspect of her ministry namely that she was the first servant of God to have oversight of the Body of Christ.
Shortly before the Archbishop went to meet with the Pope the Bishops of the Church of England met for 24 hours with the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales. it was a time marked by genuine friendship and by worship which was if I may use the puritan word without causing the crypt to crumble – soul fattening.
In a small group I shared this biblical reflection on the role of Mary in relation to the Body of Christ after which my colleague from Liverpool, Archbishop Patrick Kelly, declared it to be ‘the most exalted view of Mary that he’d ever heard’!
Obviously it is the impact on our ecumenical relationships with Rome which weighs heavily on and against the move to embrace women into the episcopate. Even though some of us felt that the issue was settled the moment women were admitted to the priesthood.
The relationship with Rome was all brought into much sharper focus when Cardinal Walter Kasper in June 2006 was invited to address the Bishops of the Church of England on ‘The Mission of Bishops in the Mystery of the Church’.
Two things stand out from his address. The first was a bold and bald statement. “A resolution in favour of the ordination of women to the episcopate within the Church of England would certainly lower the temperature once more; in terms of the possible recognition of Anglican Orders, it would lead not only to a short-lived cold, but to a serious and long-lasting chill”.
The second was the emphasis Cardinal Kasper placed on the “thorough theology of the Episcopal office” offered by Bishop Cyprian of Carthage and in particular the sentence “episcopatus unus et indivisus” (The Episcopate is one and undivided).
Before commenting on this I want to recognise something which may look as if it’s in parenthesis but might turn out to be the climax of the argument. You may already be tiring of this sermon and the subject thinking to yourself that this seems to be going backwards in time. You are right. What is more the world has moved on. The world for which God out of love gave his child Jesus is no longer interested in these things that divide Christians. Instead they want to know whether Jew, Christian and Muslim can all live together in harmony without blowing the earth apart.
But bear with me. The argument based on Cyprian holds that the undivided unity of the episcopate is the means of maintaining the unity of the church. The episcopate is to be the instrument of the Church’s unity. But there was little in Cardinal Kasper’s paper on “The Mission of Bishops in the mystery of the Church” about the place of the Church in the will of God namely, “to reconcile to himself all things whether on earth or in Heaven” (Col 1 20). The unity of the episcopate and the unity of the church are not ends in themselves. They are but the means of uniting the whole of creation.
I was longing to ask Cardinal Kasper how an episcopate that was divided along the lines of separating women from men could be said to be “one and undivided” ,and how could an episcopate that was so divided be seen as an instrument of the unity of the Church; and, further, how could a church that was thus divided hope to be an effective means of unifying and reconciling a divided world. If the episcopate is to be a one and undivided instrument and sign of a one and undivided Church, then it surely too must embrace and manifest in its own body and in the episcopate the truth that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 2, 28).
This oneness is what the world in its finest moments aches after. They see it threatened at every turn of the media spotlight. Sadly, they see Christianity as part of the problem, not part of the solution. However much we may preach sermons to ourselves with lofty ideals, we are part of the problem not just because some have used crusader imagery to interpret current global conflicts but because when the light shines on us it shows our body divided between men and women and our table of fellowship reserved for some but not for all.
We have erred and strayed far from the New Testament vision where men and women are engaged together in the work of Christ. Where Junia and Andronicus were together apostles (Roman 16 7); where Mary and Peter were together witnesses of the Resurrection (John 20); where Simeon as well as Anna spoke as prophets about Jesus; where Mary and Joseph both ministered to the Body of Christ. Men and women, together apostles, together prophets, together witnesses of the Resurrection, together overseers of the Body of Christ – in the flesh and in the spirit. In short, together Bishops. Amen.