13.11.2008
Address by the Archbishop of Armagh at the Service of Inauguration of the New Church of Ireland Theological Institute
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin
Address by the Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Revd Alan Harper OBE
The lips of the priest ought to preserve knowledge and from his mouth men should seek instruction – because he is the messenger of the Lord Almighty
[Malachi 2.7]
The oracles of the prophet Malachi are so ordered that they stand last of the books of the Old Testament canon and point excitedly and apocalyptically towards fulfilment in the New.
Malachi’s concern and his harsh strictures call, with a note almost of desperation, for renewal in the life of the nation, beginning with renewal in the seriousness with which people fulfil their spiritual obligations under the Law of Moses. The religious life of the nation was still observed in cultic acts but integrity had departed from it, formality had replaced sincerity:
Sacrifice was no longer costly – blemished animals were offered rather than the perfect specimens the law required;
Worse still, the priests of the day were complacent about these things, perhaps even complicit;
Other signs in wider society witnessed to the inner decay of the nation through the decay of spiritual values;
Idolatry had become tolerated, even acceptable;
Faithfulness in marriage and family relationships had become negotiable;
The exercise of power through violence or the threat of violence was undermining the life and stability of the community;
Critically, some people had begun to believe that God was blind to, indeed indifferent to, excesses in their conduct;
While others, observing that wickedness seemed to be rewarded rather than punished, began to question whether God is, indeed, a God of Justice.
Malachi’s warning was this:
God will quickly come near for judgment. He will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud labourers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and who deprive aliens of justice but also do not fear God. [Mal 3.5]
At the heart of the national malaise there stood a failure of spiritual leadership, hence the words with which I began this sermon:
For the lips of a priest ought to preserve knowledge, and from his mouth men should seek instruction – because he is the messenger of the Lord Almighty.
Allow me to explore some of the nuances contained in Malachi’s words.
First, I observe, that Malachi puts deliberate emphasis on “the lips” of a priest. Here he is voicing a strong implication that there is a need for things to be spoken and a need for things to be heard. The priest must be articulate in pronouncing a message which society at large will hear, for he is a messenger of God.
Second, the priest is to speak out of what he knows, out of knowledge. This knowledge is a knowledge preserved. New knowledge should be revered, assuming that its quality has been established, but the knowledge out of which the priest must speak is knowledge of God, preserved over generations of encounter with God and passed to successive generations of priests for them to be, in their turn, contemporary guardians of ancient truth. The lips of the priest must speak out of the tradition.
Malachi then goes on: “from his mouth, men should seek instruction”. There are assumptions here
first that the knowledge of which the priest is guardian is not something one is entitled to keep to oneself: knowledge is given and preserved in order to be spoken;
second, the prophet assumes that people will naturally and quite properly seek instruction from the priest: in other words, at the heart of the vocation of the priest is a requirement to be constantly available and constantly engaged in a dialogue within the context of which it is the priest’s task to apply the knowledge he or she preserves to the issues of life confronting folk at every level in contemporary society.
I am particularly struck by Malachi’s assumption that people will (or at least should) seek counsel from a priest – it might be in the highest matters of state or in the most personal details of private life. However, he seems not to be saying, at this juncture, that the focus of the priest’s contribution should be on high profile interventions in the public forum. Rather, that the voice of the priest is heard in individual guidance to those who seek it personally. Perhaps Malachi has in mind an essential distinction between the work of a priest and the different work of a prophet such as himself.
If the interpretations and distinctions I am making have merit then something else follows, namely, that the personal reputation and stature of the individual priest: qualities of integrity, approachability, trustworthiness in matters confidential, must be such as will persuade people that they are safe in seeking instruction and that they may do so willingly, respectful of the authority of the words that may fall from his or her lips.
Clearly then, there is more to the work of a priest than simple access to the authentic stream of knowledge, there is also the obligation to develop and deploy gifts of communication so that knowledge can be both appropriated and applied by the one who sought it in the first place.
The more highly esteemed the integrity and wisdom of the priest, the greater will be the opportunity to share such knowledge and shape the outcome of the encounter between seeker and speaker. This is why the formation of a priest is so much more than the mere acquisition and preservation of biblical knowledge. That knowledge is the most important component of the resource base, but thereafter there is required the “formation”, the equipping of a reflective heart to speak wisdom when words are called for, to remain silently attentive when they are not, and to possess the capacity to know the difference.
Formation is also about establishing the routines of an attentive life. Attentive through prayer and reflection to the promptings of the God whose messenger and servant the priest is pledged to be. Furthermore, it is about personal integrity which is the wellspring of authority. The priest cannot too often be reminded that compromised integrity swiftly devalues the coinage of personal reputation and even more seriously undermines respect for the truth of God.
At the core of the work required of the Church of Ireland Theological Institute there stands the challenge of priestly formation for a new day. Malachi recognized in the Israel of his own day that there no longer existed any automatic loyalty towards or respect for the institutions or the authenticity of the national religious tradition. We also must accept that the situation of the Christian Church today is little different.
There is no longer any automatic deference towards what used to be called “the Cloth”.
There is no longer universal acknowledgment of the existence, let alone the spiritual authority of God.
Both the capital of the Church in terms of its constitutional authority and the credit worthiness of the Church in the form of its good name and reputation in the public estimation are seriously devalued.
What is more the social and occupational patterns of community life have changed beyond recognition and with them the patterns and ways of inter-personal relating.
Old systems and old approaches, therefore, to clergy training, based on models and the social assumptions of a bygone era no longer fulfil the requirements of the God in whose mission to the world we are engaged. There is no implication in this that the old no longer has value. Rather it is that we must make things new in order to be better fitted and more effective in meeting the demands of a new time. This is the lofty aspiration of the nascent Church of Ireland Theological Institute.
Welcoming and initiating the new does not denigrate the provisions of the past, it affirms them as of their time whilst recognizing that the times have changed and that the changes are irrevocable.
Furthermore, the new serves a vision not better than but different from the past
a broader vision of ministry as the work of the whole People of God;
a broader vision of vocation than one that focuses merely on a single strand and style: that of ordained ministry;
a new evaluation of the mission and ministry of the Church as a pioneering endeavour working outside traditional comfort zones on the frontiers of faith;
a larger vision of the access to and the content of varieties of training for varieties of ministry, with a clear commitment to the raising of standards across the board to equip confident reflective practitioners of the art of living as messengers of the Lord Almighty, for we live now in a society and among a people more highly educated and better informed than ever before;
a larger vision of the Church which recognizes the rich diversity of its ecumenical and cultural expressions and avails more confidently of the gifts of spirituality and insight offered by other traditions of Christianity whilst still drinking ever more deeply of the wells of our own;
a more generous vision of an entity, this new Institute, that may serve not only the Church of Ireland but friends and partners of other provinces and churches who wish to taste the things we can offer through exchange and distance learning.
In the days since training for ministry in the Church of Ireland began with the foundation of the University of Dublin, Trinity College, that training has undergone frequent re-evaluation and continual change: from Divinity School to Divinity Hostel, from Mountjoy Square to Braemor Park, from Divinity Hostel to Theological College; and now from Theological College to Theological Institute.
Throughout this long history of change and progress, the University of Dublin has been our constant partner (I use the word “constant” in the full range of its meaning!) That partnership continues as the Church of Ireland Theological Institute takes its place in the aspirant School of Theology and Religion.
Furthermore, because the vision for the Theological Institute incorporates a significant requirement for both distance learning programmes and supervised internships, the university has had to develop, in partnership with the Church of Ireland, radical new ways of providing access, teaching and evaluation. The willingness and also the urgency with which Trinity College has seized this opportunity are both deeply gratifying and immensely encouraging. On behalf of the Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of Ireland I wish publicly to salute the Provost and his colleagues for sharing this venture with us.
The engine room in which this project has been driven has been manned by a relatively small but very talented team led by the Bishop of Clogher. A sermon is perhaps not the place to hand out bouquets but I have to say that with advisers of the calibre of Dr Claire Amos and Professor Aine Hyland, and with a project coordinator of the energy and commitment of Andrew McNeile, the team has been particularly blessed. However, the word that really matters here is the word “team”, for this has been and remains a corporate exercise. This is especially apposite since one of the most significant developments we need to realise for contemporary ministry is the acquisition and deployment of skills that permit ministry to be understood and offered as an exercise in teamwork. Needless to say, this has not always been the way in which ministry has been either understood or delivered in the past.
I have spoken about change and the aspirations we all have for the new. What will not change, however, is the continuing requirement to provide formation for priestly ministry at the very heart of the ministry of the whole People of God. It remains of the essence that we ensure that the lips of a priest preserve and articulate sacred knowledge, and that from his or her mouth people shall feel free and confident in seeking instruction. For the priest remains, through both Word and Sacrament, the accredited messenger of the Lord Almighty.