Sermon by the Right Reverend Robert Gillies
Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney
at the Convention Eucharist of The Episcopal Church in South Carolina
November 13, 2015 at Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church, Pawleys Island, SC
In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
My Dear Brothers and Sisters what an amazing privilege and blessing has been bestowed upon me to be your preacher for your Convention. This is my second visit to your State; Liz and I previously having been the beneficiaries of the wonderful kindness and generosity of Grace Episcopal Church in Charleston. And now here we are once more experiencing the warmth and goodness of the southern United States in this visit to Pawley’s Island.
I acknowledge, on behalf of Liz and myself, the generosity of your church in bringing us here as well as the kindness bestowed on us by those who have met us, provided hospitality, accommodation and transport as well.
As its representative I bring you the greetings of my own Scottish Episcopal Church as well as of my own Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney. Unashamedly we call ourselves the Episcopal Church!
We are the most northerly of all Anglican Dioceses in the United Kingdom with the greater part of the Shetland Islands stretching a hundred miles or so north of latitude 60o. Although that puts us well and truly on the same line as southern Greenland it is the Gulf Stream that you cook up for us very nicely in your hot summers which keeps our island winters relatively mild, even that far north. So just think, as you swelter in humid summers, of the gift your heat brings us over the winter months that follow!
But I recognise also that nature has its destructive side. I saw with deep concern the floods that came your way and as I watched CNN I voiced a prayer for you. On television I saw scenes, familiar from our visit to Charleston, under water and I heard of the Georgetown area being amongst one of the most affected places. When the water subsides the damage remains as do my prayers for God’s strength to be with you in your ongoing recovery.
Preparing this address has been an excitement. Your convention theme, ‘The Call to All’ emphasises the ministries that we all have. This theme is dear to my heart and has been the subject of much of my own developmental and missional theology for thirty years and more. When this missional theme is taken to heart and practiced I see congregations grow both in depth of faith as well as, let it not go unsaid, numerically as well.
And yet, and yet, even though I cannot see any alternative missional theology appropriate for our time, both in Britain and I suspect here as well, still I find clergy puzzled and at times in denial, and laity at times variously nervous or opposed through misinformation.
So let me lay out the broad terms of what I fundamentally believe is the call to all of us whether clergy or lay.
First of all, your Convention theme, ‘The Call to All’, could indeed be titled ‘God’s Call to All’. The explicit reference to God is crucial. What’s more it isn’t new. God has called people to Him and to His service since time began. Not everyone has been willing. There was Moses who was one of the reluctant ones. Likewise Jonah. To those who are sceptical take encouragement and let their change of heart lead you on.
There were also enthusiasts, not least Peter and James amongst the Disciples. It’s always worth following the disciples.
And today, there’s you and me. You may be a reluctant; you may be an enthusiast. Or a slightly apprehensive combination of the two.
Deep in my heart I can come to no other conclusion that whoever we are, wherever we are, and whatever our personal disposition, God is calling us personally, through the voice of the Holy Spirit, to live the life of Jesus Christ today.
This calling requires us to step up to the mark and then step out in faithful response to grow into that discipleship for which God is calling us. What’s more, God doesn’t only take people who are already trained for the job, but significantly takes and targets those who are open to Him, and then changes them as He did those first disciples of Jesus. And of course Moses and Jonah.
It is just over eight years ago that I came into the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney as the newly consecrated bishop and during that time I have come to value and treasure the many occasions when I have been privileged to walk alongside those who are seeking ways of expressing God’s call in their lives. In other words to accompany those who are explicitly and intentionally seeking to follow God’s call to be disciples of Jesus now, as well as creating the conditions for others similarly to do so.
There can be no room for complacency in this task for I’ve discovered that the same message needs to be repeated over and over again so that sooner, rather than too late, everyone will discern God calling each one of us to deploy gifts he has given us for those tasks he expects of us as his disciples.
How does God’s Call to us show itself in our lives, personally? It is through the gifts that God gives us.
In the New Testament Letters there are five locations where gifts are listed which God, through his Holy Spirit, gives to His people. Some are more general in tone – most famously Faith, Hope and Love in 1 Corinthians 13. Some are more specific. Here’s an example.
For about twelve years a man in my former congregation sought every which way to undermine and destroy the ministry I had as rector. I won’t bother you with the details but I cannot praise highly enough the support that came to me from the church vestry members, the ministry team and from the wider congregation who knew what was going on. In many ways all these people recognised they had a call in ministry to support me in mine. But there was one occasion when, at a conference on prayer for healing, I went forward and shared with two people, prepared to receive people with prayer request, what was happening to me. This was at a church in another diocese.
They followed up what I said with a few questions for clarification and then began praying for me and over me with laying on of hands. Prayer was their gift from God and it was to prayer for others that God was calling them. They were exercising that gift with me. They began in English and in due course moved into praying in tongues.
Now I don’t have and never have had a call from God to pray in tongues. Nor do I have a gift for the translation of tongues. Therefore I didn’t, and still don’t, have a clue as to what they said in that prayer. But after they’d finished I had a colossal smile across my face. I felt everyone was looking at me. Very disarming indeed, because I am British after all! However what came to me, as I walked back to my seat, were the words of scripture: ‘perfect love casts out fear’.
That was the outcome of their call from God to prayer, and of their specific prayer for me that day. From that moment in every dealing with that man, and his raging didn’t stop, I ran the mantra through my head over and over again: ‘perfect love casts out fear’. Since then, in every other situation of conflict I run that carousel in my mind, ‘perfect love casts out fear’.
It came from God and is now part of the call I live. I simply offer it to you as you face very different, but equally draining, conflict. ‘Perfect love casts out fear.’
So then, with God’s call to each of us come gifts from God so that we can work out the consequences of that call under His authority.
This isn’t automatic and no person will ever be able put the gifts God gives them to work, in building his kingdom around where their feet are, unless they know they are released for this and given permission for this to happen.
What are the conditions for this?
Quite some time ago I considered that I had the gift of song from God, of making music with my voice. Thankfully that period of my life didn’t last long. For there were others around me who, though putting me through three years of personal singing lessons aiming to correct my musical deficiencies, eventually came to me and said, “Look, God is giving you many gifts and to each of these you must respond, but we are saying to you quite explicitly that you do not have the gift of song and this you must accept.” I took their advice. I had never sung a correct note before that day and haven’t since, except by accident.
You each will have a personal call from God, but you will need the honesty of others around you to help you discern which gifts you have at your disposal and how they can be put to the building of God’s kingdom in those places where He has called you to serve Him, His people and His Church. And you’ll need to be robust enough to take correction from others and, when occasion demands, also to give it.
And this leads me into my final point. Take risks. Another story. A longisg one I’m afraid.
Julie once rang me up. Many years ago. It was a Friday morning and I was quietly minding my own business. In that phone call she told me that she had just got a Masters degree in Chaplaincy Studies and she wanted to work for the church in a nursing home as a chaplain.
To say that I nearly fell off my chair would be not far from the truth. Julie was a Californian (no problem about that) with a wonderful free and easy air about her. But I thought to myself, ‘How dare she almost say she wants a position when she hadn’t even told me beforehand she was doing a degree in Chaplaincy Studies. Her degree had been mostly by distance learning and had had no practical component.
By a wonderful piece of God’s providence I didn’t stand on my high horse, if you see what I mean, but I continued talking to her, finding out more, and gradually getting my head around and into her situation.
I commended chaplaincy look-see visits at a local hospital, likewise local care homes. All came to naught. And then there was what became a long vacancy in a neighbouring parish. Its Friday morning communions became my responsibility. One was a more formal communion in a residential home and the other something more informal in a day-care centre. Here’s where I could take Julie.
She was remarkable. Over the two years of that vacancy she accompanied me week-in, week-out. She taught me how to give the bread and wine of communion to people with dementia and who didn’t know what to do with the bread. She could do this not because she’d learned it in her chaplaincy degree but because God had given her a calling for pastoral care and an insight into pastoral and sacramental need. And in response to God’s call to her she, a lay person, passed on to me – a priest of, at that time, twenty five years’ experience – the gifts of liturgical and sacramental insight that arose from God’s call to her.
More than that, I saw her talk to people. She never got trapped in conversations, where there was no ending to the person’s flow of words. She was always able to re-divert the flow of conversation to a good ending. And she reflected back to me her views on what I was doing. Supreme. Superb.
Julie followed God’s call. Her sense of God’s will for her met with my acceptance (and yes, I admit, my initially skeptical acceptance). This, in turn, led to an opening up and working out of God’s call in real practical time. It was indeed a genuine real discovery of how God seeks each one of us and provides gifts sufficient to release the call at the point of need: Julie’s need, my need, and the needs of those wonderful people we encountered in those situations.
The initial lesson for me, as a priest, was not to assume there was some prescriptive protocol into which a person needed to fit before God’s call to them was acknowledged.
The next lesson for me was to be obviously open for what God was doing through Julie, and of His call to her and of how this would then evolve and grow in ways that were beyond my capacity to predict at the start.
Beyond that, there was the call to me so to shape the way I did things as a priest that this person, Julie – though it could have been anybody, could then be freed to work out the call that God had given her.
Julie grew in discipleship. She was stretched. So was I. And, without any shadow of doubt, God’s will was done.
As you’ll have by now realised, I could talk for hours on your theme for this weekend and I could give you story after story to demonstrate with empirical examples my absolute commitment that explicit acknowledgement of God’s Call to each of us is shown by our willing acceptance of the Gifts which He gives us to live out that call. I could develop theology upon theology to support what I’ve just been saying to you. And if you want textual analysis and scriptural hermeneutic to take it further there’s bucket loads of that as well.
But, no. None of that for now. Let me close by saying that God’s Call to All will sometimes be found outworked in licensed lay ministry. For a few of us it is to be through holy orders. Most times however it will be in more informal and unstructured ways for all the people of God’s church but still intentional and deliberate. Of one thing I am absolutely certain: God has a Calling for everyone here today and when that is accepted and lived then we will indeed see His Kingdom taking shape around us wherever we are. Whoever we are. And whatever our personal make-up.
Amen.
†Robert Gillies
Seabury Day 2015
Pawley’s Island, South Carolina
Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney
at the Convention Eucharist of The Episcopal Church in South Carolina
November 13, 2015 at Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church, Pawleys Island, SC
In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
My Dear Brothers and Sisters what an amazing privilege and blessing has been bestowed upon me to be your preacher for your Convention. This is my second visit to your State; Liz and I previously having been the beneficiaries of the wonderful kindness and generosity of Grace Episcopal Church in Charleston. And now here we are once more experiencing the warmth and goodness of the southern United States in this visit to Pawley’s Island.
I acknowledge, on behalf of Liz and myself, the generosity of your church in bringing us here as well as the kindness bestowed on us by those who have met us, provided hospitality, accommodation and transport as well.
As its representative I bring you the greetings of my own Scottish Episcopal Church as well as of my own Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney. Unashamedly we call ourselves the Episcopal Church!
We are the most northerly of all Anglican Dioceses in the United Kingdom with the greater part of the Shetland Islands stretching a hundred miles or so north of latitude 60o. Although that puts us well and truly on the same line as southern Greenland it is the Gulf Stream that you cook up for us very nicely in your hot summers which keeps our island winters relatively mild, even that far north. So just think, as you swelter in humid summers, of the gift your heat brings us over the winter months that follow!
But I recognise also that nature has its destructive side. I saw with deep concern the floods that came your way and as I watched CNN I voiced a prayer for you. On television I saw scenes, familiar from our visit to Charleston, under water and I heard of the Georgetown area being amongst one of the most affected places. When the water subsides the damage remains as do my prayers for God’s strength to be with you in your ongoing recovery.
Preparing this address has been an excitement. Your convention theme, ‘The Call to All’ emphasises the ministries that we all have. This theme is dear to my heart and has been the subject of much of my own developmental and missional theology for thirty years and more. When this missional theme is taken to heart and practiced I see congregations grow both in depth of faith as well as, let it not go unsaid, numerically as well.
And yet, and yet, even though I cannot see any alternative missional theology appropriate for our time, both in Britain and I suspect here as well, still I find clergy puzzled and at times in denial, and laity at times variously nervous or opposed through misinformation.
So let me lay out the broad terms of what I fundamentally believe is the call to all of us whether clergy or lay.
First of all, your Convention theme, ‘The Call to All’, could indeed be titled ‘God’s Call to All’. The explicit reference to God is crucial. What’s more it isn’t new. God has called people to Him and to His service since time began. Not everyone has been willing. There was Moses who was one of the reluctant ones. Likewise Jonah. To those who are sceptical take encouragement and let their change of heart lead you on.
There were also enthusiasts, not least Peter and James amongst the Disciples. It’s always worth following the disciples.
And today, there’s you and me. You may be a reluctant; you may be an enthusiast. Or a slightly apprehensive combination of the two.
Deep in my heart I can come to no other conclusion that whoever we are, wherever we are, and whatever our personal disposition, God is calling us personally, through the voice of the Holy Spirit, to live the life of Jesus Christ today.
This calling requires us to step up to the mark and then step out in faithful response to grow into that discipleship for which God is calling us. What’s more, God doesn’t only take people who are already trained for the job, but significantly takes and targets those who are open to Him, and then changes them as He did those first disciples of Jesus. And of course Moses and Jonah.
It is just over eight years ago that I came into the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney as the newly consecrated bishop and during that time I have come to value and treasure the many occasions when I have been privileged to walk alongside those who are seeking ways of expressing God’s call in their lives. In other words to accompany those who are explicitly and intentionally seeking to follow God’s call to be disciples of Jesus now, as well as creating the conditions for others similarly to do so.
There can be no room for complacency in this task for I’ve discovered that the same message needs to be repeated over and over again so that sooner, rather than too late, everyone will discern God calling each one of us to deploy gifts he has given us for those tasks he expects of us as his disciples.
How does God’s Call to us show itself in our lives, personally? It is through the gifts that God gives us.
In the New Testament Letters there are five locations where gifts are listed which God, through his Holy Spirit, gives to His people. Some are more general in tone – most famously Faith, Hope and Love in 1 Corinthians 13. Some are more specific. Here’s an example.
For about twelve years a man in my former congregation sought every which way to undermine and destroy the ministry I had as rector. I won’t bother you with the details but I cannot praise highly enough the support that came to me from the church vestry members, the ministry team and from the wider congregation who knew what was going on. In many ways all these people recognised they had a call in ministry to support me in mine. But there was one occasion when, at a conference on prayer for healing, I went forward and shared with two people, prepared to receive people with prayer request, what was happening to me. This was at a church in another diocese.
They followed up what I said with a few questions for clarification and then began praying for me and over me with laying on of hands. Prayer was their gift from God and it was to prayer for others that God was calling them. They were exercising that gift with me. They began in English and in due course moved into praying in tongues.
Now I don’t have and never have had a call from God to pray in tongues. Nor do I have a gift for the translation of tongues. Therefore I didn’t, and still don’t, have a clue as to what they said in that prayer. But after they’d finished I had a colossal smile across my face. I felt everyone was looking at me. Very disarming indeed, because I am British after all! However what came to me, as I walked back to my seat, were the words of scripture: ‘perfect love casts out fear’.
That was the outcome of their call from God to prayer, and of their specific prayer for me that day. From that moment in every dealing with that man, and his raging didn’t stop, I ran the mantra through my head over and over again: ‘perfect love casts out fear’. Since then, in every other situation of conflict I run that carousel in my mind, ‘perfect love casts out fear’.
It came from God and is now part of the call I live. I simply offer it to you as you face very different, but equally draining, conflict. ‘Perfect love casts out fear.’
So then, with God’s call to each of us come gifts from God so that we can work out the consequences of that call under His authority.
This isn’t automatic and no person will ever be able put the gifts God gives them to work, in building his kingdom around where their feet are, unless they know they are released for this and given permission for this to happen.
What are the conditions for this?
- First, a genuine acceptance that God is calling each and every one of us in his service for the expansion of his kingdom. If we don’t believe this then nothing else will follow. Your church will become clergy dominated and that’s no good for anyone!
- Next, a genuine acceptance that God’s call to us is in proportion to the gifts that God gives us and according to the capacity we have to respond. God will only give you gifts that are right for you.
- Clergy, and others amongst you who are theologically gifted, need to encourage this teaching and this release of gifts. This is a vital missional and catechetical imperative for our times. Acceptance of this has to be intentional and deliberate.
- And lay people if I may speak to you for just a moment, you need to accept that God has an individual and personal call to each one of you to serve Him and to serve His people. Yes, in worship. Yes, in wider church service. And yes, in the community beyond. This may not work out in quite the way you expect it to or think it should. An example to illustrate what I mean.
Quite some time ago I considered that I had the gift of song from God, of making music with my voice. Thankfully that period of my life didn’t last long. For there were others around me who, though putting me through three years of personal singing lessons aiming to correct my musical deficiencies, eventually came to me and said, “Look, God is giving you many gifts and to each of these you must respond, but we are saying to you quite explicitly that you do not have the gift of song and this you must accept.” I took their advice. I had never sung a correct note before that day and haven’t since, except by accident.
You each will have a personal call from God, but you will need the honesty of others around you to help you discern which gifts you have at your disposal and how they can be put to the building of God’s kingdom in those places where He has called you to serve Him, His people and His Church. And you’ll need to be robust enough to take correction from others and, when occasion demands, also to give it.
And this leads me into my final point. Take risks. Another story. A longisg one I’m afraid.
Julie once rang me up. Many years ago. It was a Friday morning and I was quietly minding my own business. In that phone call she told me that she had just got a Masters degree in Chaplaincy Studies and she wanted to work for the church in a nursing home as a chaplain.
To say that I nearly fell off my chair would be not far from the truth. Julie was a Californian (no problem about that) with a wonderful free and easy air about her. But I thought to myself, ‘How dare she almost say she wants a position when she hadn’t even told me beforehand she was doing a degree in Chaplaincy Studies. Her degree had been mostly by distance learning and had had no practical component.
By a wonderful piece of God’s providence I didn’t stand on my high horse, if you see what I mean, but I continued talking to her, finding out more, and gradually getting my head around and into her situation.
I commended chaplaincy look-see visits at a local hospital, likewise local care homes. All came to naught. And then there was what became a long vacancy in a neighbouring parish. Its Friday morning communions became my responsibility. One was a more formal communion in a residential home and the other something more informal in a day-care centre. Here’s where I could take Julie.
She was remarkable. Over the two years of that vacancy she accompanied me week-in, week-out. She taught me how to give the bread and wine of communion to people with dementia and who didn’t know what to do with the bread. She could do this not because she’d learned it in her chaplaincy degree but because God had given her a calling for pastoral care and an insight into pastoral and sacramental need. And in response to God’s call to her she, a lay person, passed on to me – a priest of, at that time, twenty five years’ experience – the gifts of liturgical and sacramental insight that arose from God’s call to her.
More than that, I saw her talk to people. She never got trapped in conversations, where there was no ending to the person’s flow of words. She was always able to re-divert the flow of conversation to a good ending. And she reflected back to me her views on what I was doing. Supreme. Superb.
Julie followed God’s call. Her sense of God’s will for her met with my acceptance (and yes, I admit, my initially skeptical acceptance). This, in turn, led to an opening up and working out of God’s call in real practical time. It was indeed a genuine real discovery of how God seeks each one of us and provides gifts sufficient to release the call at the point of need: Julie’s need, my need, and the needs of those wonderful people we encountered in those situations.
The initial lesson for me, as a priest, was not to assume there was some prescriptive protocol into which a person needed to fit before God’s call to them was acknowledged.
The next lesson for me was to be obviously open for what God was doing through Julie, and of His call to her and of how this would then evolve and grow in ways that were beyond my capacity to predict at the start.
Beyond that, there was the call to me so to shape the way I did things as a priest that this person, Julie – though it could have been anybody, could then be freed to work out the call that God had given her.
Julie grew in discipleship. She was stretched. So was I. And, without any shadow of doubt, God’s will was done.
As you’ll have by now realised, I could talk for hours on your theme for this weekend and I could give you story after story to demonstrate with empirical examples my absolute commitment that explicit acknowledgement of God’s Call to each of us is shown by our willing acceptance of the Gifts which He gives us to live out that call. I could develop theology upon theology to support what I’ve just been saying to you. And if you want textual analysis and scriptural hermeneutic to take it further there’s bucket loads of that as well.
But, no. None of that for now. Let me close by saying that God’s Call to All will sometimes be found outworked in licensed lay ministry. For a few of us it is to be through holy orders. Most times however it will be in more informal and unstructured ways for all the people of God’s church but still intentional and deliberate. Of one thing I am absolutely certain: God has a Calling for everyone here today and when that is accepted and lived then we will indeed see His Kingdom taking shape around us wherever we are. Whoever we are. And whatever our personal make-up.
Amen.
†Robert Gillies
Seabury Day 2015
Pawley’s Island, South Carolina