The Rector's Corner: “Be My Priest” – Reflections on the Lenten Embertide

The Ember Days in Lent naturally bring up a question about the effect personal sin has in ordained life. Today, this question is rarely asked out loud…though it is thought about quietly and with pain behind-the-scenes often enough. We tend to focus on corporate or societal sin in the Episcopal Church today, pretending that personal sin is an artifact of our benighted ancestors, or the province of televangelists and the like.

Sadly, though, personal sinfulness remains a fact for us all, and to the degree we as clergy are not engaged in an active life of ascesis, repentance, and discipleship, the ministries we have received from Christ will become increasingly mired and compromised by what we have not cared to see or offer up to Christ in humility and desire for transformation.

When each of us was ordained, we were personally addressed by the Risen Christ, through the Holy Spirit’s presence and power, to “be my deacon/priest/bishop.” We were not given a franchise in ministry—something proprietary of our own, something we may use as we please—nor were we allowed to place our confidence in the opinion of others. We have a constituency of One (in Three): God the Holy and Undivided Trinity, alone.

Sin in our life causes us to forget this. We begin to put our focus on what the “majority” says, or on how the political winds blow, or mere numbers, techniques, personal comfort. We may also retreat into our own frustration, pain, fears, and anxieties…creating impoverished fiefdoms that gradually come to acknowledge no Lord, no sovereign. When these things happen, our ministry becomes an act of ego, and it is only a matter of time before we will do great damage to those we serve and to our selves.

The Lenten Embertide is the time par excellence for each of us in Holy Orders to “come to ourselves” as Prodigal Sons and Daughters; to peer into the mirror of self-awareness (as opposed to the blank wall of being self-absorbed) and see the degree to which we have ceased to be God’s minister and become the minister of our own unredeemed selves. We all need truly skilled confessors, spiritual fathers and mothers who are unafraid to speak the truth to us. Above all, we need the courage to see the truth of our lives as they are.

This is, of course, an act of humility. Such humility, St. Benedict shows us, is the result of a life lived in prayer, work, and stability-lived-in-community. There is no escaping it: we are all part of a Body—Christ’s own Body—and we cannot become fully ourselves until we have surrendered everything to Him. For, in Christ alone is our peace, our rest—and, I might add, our freedom. This is the hidden power of obedience to our vows, wherein we join Christ in what it means to take up one’s cross and live under an obedience of Love itself.

The sacred vows at ordination are the means by which we gain our freedom. Like the baptismal vows on which they are based and through which they live, those made at ordination establish a context, a mold in which we are formed by Love into the persons we are not yet. For us, faithfulness to these vows—as in a marriage—is at the center of our active discipleship. Thus, coming to see where we have tossed the vows behind our backs is essential not only for the well-being of the Church at large, but for us individually. For the Church, individual sin becomes corporate sin; individual healing becomes corporate health.

Today, the Friday in Embertide, is a particularly solemn day on which to recall Christ’s words, as hands were laid on us at that most solemn hour: “Be my deacon.” “Be my priest.” “Be my bishop.” Where we have sought (in effect) to hire ourselves out to others, we must repent and return to the Lord.

Today, as we “come to ourselves,” we know we may return to the Father who awaits us with open arms, back to the joy, the source of the energy making Living Water flow from the hard rock of human strife, human limitation and failing, human sin.

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Litany of Remembrance

Commonly called “The Southwell Litany”

For the use of clergy at the Embertides & other times of the year.

[Dr. George Ridding, first Bishop of Southwell, who composed this Litany for use at meetings of his clergy, was accustomed to introduce it with the following words:

Seeing, brethren, that we are weak men but entrusted with a great office, and that we cannot but be liable to hinder the work entrusted to us by our infirmities of body, soul, and spirit, both those common to all men and those specially attaching to our office, let us pray God to save us and help us from the several weaknesses which beset us severally, that he will make us know what faults we have not known, that he will shew us the harm of what we have not cared to control, that he will give us strength and wisdom to do more perfectly the work to which our lives have been consecrated--for no less service than the honor of God and the edifying of his Church. I will ask you to let me first say the suffrage to each petition, and then all join in repeating it together; after which a short pause shall be made.

Let us pray.]

O Lord, open our minds to see ourselves as Thou seest us, or even as others see us and we see others, and from all unwillingness to know our infirmities,