Ordination to the Priesthood of the Reverend Rachel Firth

Date:29th September 2009

Preacher: Revd Dr Joe Kennedy

Rachel or the angels?

Let us pray. May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I want to begin by thanking the Bishop of Wakefield for giving me the privilege of preaching this-evening. Tonight is a landmark in Rachel’s life – and it is also a landmark for Rachel’s husband Simon, for her daughter Kirsty and sons Isaac and Jonah, for her parents, and for so many others. A great occasion in the life of this marvellous parish. It is good for us to be here, as Rachel is ordained priest.

Tonight we also gather in Church to celebrate, and to think about, the angels. Today is the great festival of the Archangel Michael and All Angels. And that’s no accident. The Church often chooses this feast day of the angels for ordinations.

But in fact, especially if you’re the person being ordained, you might think this is rather a foolish day to choose for ordinations. Surely, you might think, the clergy would be better to avoid inviting comparison with the angels. There’s one competition, you might think, human beings are bound to lose. If we compare Rachel with the angels and archangels and the whole heavenly host, we might well imagine that the comparison will not, altogether, flatter Rachel. What do you think? Well, let’s give it a go anyway. Live dangerously!

So, let’s start with the thought that the angels are God’s ministers – God’s servants, if you like. An uncontentious thought. Think of all those times the angels appear in the Scriptural stories – they are mentioned almost three hundred times in the Bible. And always in these stories, there are the angels, doing what God has told them to do. The angels as God’s ministers. And Rachel, too, is ordained today to be God’s minister – to do God’s will. Well, who do you think is going to be better at this? Rachel or the angels?

You all know better than I do that Rachel brings many gifts with her into ordained ministry. A gift for music, a passion for liturgy and for pastoral care and for the connections between them. A good mind, and an infectious enthusiasm for God. An uneasiness with pigeonholes and an eagerness to make connections. All great gifts to bring to a pastoral and priestly ministry. And many others, too, no doubt. But it’s also true – Rachel would be first person to say it – that, like all of us, she brings weaknesses and failings. The angels always get things right. But all of us, including Rachel, sometimes get things wrong. Sometimes Rachel will lack the skills she needs; sometimes she’ll just mess up or fail through sin. So I’m afraid that Rachel loses this one. If God wants someone to do his will, he’d be better to send an angel.

Well, that didn’t go so well for Rachel, did it? Still: press on! Let’s try a second example. Consider this time the fact that the angels are God’s messengers. They come to tell us what God would like to do in our lives. Think of that lovely story we hear every Christmas – the angel Gabriel coming to a young woman in Nazareth to tell her that God wants her to bear a child. The angels as God’s messengers. And Rachel is ordained to do that, too. Like the angels, Rachel is to speak to us about what God wants for our lives.

Only, once again, compared with the angels, Rachel’s not going to be all that good at this communications thing, either. Sometimes, like all of us, Rachel’s not going to find the right words. She’s going to put things badly. But even more seriously, while angels have a hotline to God, priests don’t. So often, Rachel’s not going to know what to say in a particular setting. So, Rachel loses this one too. If God wants a messenger, he should definitely choose an angel, and let Rachel stay at home.

Looking at the evidence so far, we might conclude that God would appear to have made a mistake this evening. It seems that God ought to have sent us an angel. But instead God has sent us Rachel, a human being, one of us. So have we been short-changed? Well, no, I don’t think we have.

Gabriel was, after all, but a prelude, a warm-up act. The angels may be good at doing the right thing and delivering the right set of instructions. But when God wanted to save us from the effects of our own folly, he sent us not angels but our own flesh and blood. When God wanted to bridge the gap separating our fallen humanity from heaven, he sent not angelic armies but the Word made human. As St John tells us, the angels may climb up and down the ladder connecting heaven and earth. But the ladder itself is a human being, Jesus Christ.

No angel could defeat sin and death, for angels remain untouched by the effects of sin and death. Only by becoming one of us could God defeat sin and death – for their power could be defeated only by self-forgetful love, by an undoing of Adam’s fatal attempt at self-assertiveness, at going his own way.

Notice what our Gospel reading says. It doesn’t say we were like washing machines without an accurate instruction leaflet. It says we were like lost sheep. What we needed, most of all, was not an effective message about how to get home. What we needed, more than anything else, was a shepherd who would lay down his life for his sheep.

And that is why tonight, God sends us not an angel, but rather a human being.

It is true that in her ministry, Rachel is called to try to model Christian obedience as best she can. And it’s true, too, that in her ministry Rachel is called to speak to us about God’s call on our lives. And it’s true that angels would do these things much better than Rachel can. But God wasn’t just looking for a minister or a messenger; God wanted a priest. That’s why he called Rachel.

As a priest, Rachel is called to remind us, by word and action, that God has saved us by becoming one of us. As a priest, Rachel is called to remind us of the price that God paid, as a human being, to bridge the gap between heaven and earth that we had created. As a priest, Rachel is called to shepherd us, that we might know more fully the self-forgetful love of the Good Shepherd, who laid down his life for us. As a priest, Rachel is called to show us, and to bring more fully into our lives, the self-sacrificing love of God, made human, that we might also show that love to one another and to the world.

No angel could do that. Angels make good ministers and excellent spokespersons. But only men and women can point to, and participate in, the priesthood of Jesus Christ.