for Revd Caroline Gepp

delivered by Revd Dr Bill Loader at Beldon Uniting Church 29 January 2000

Caroline

We have ordained you to the ministry of the Word.

By your ordination you have been placed within a succession of women and men who have been authorised to exercise leadership in a special way within the Christian community. Peter and Andrew, Mary and Salome, were among those who first responded to the challenge, travelling with Jesus around Galilee and up to Jerusalem, becoming equipped for this role. You, too, have spent time in intensive learning and are about to embark upon this special ministry.

Ministry belongs to all. All are called to compassion. All are called to participate in the life of God in the world, in joy and pain, in celebration and service, life in the garden. Your special role will be to tend that garden and make it grow.

You will be surprised and delighted by its colours. Never hesitate to lay earnestness aside and enjoy the good gifts of God’s creation. Your ministry will not be rich if it is wearing. Sometimes your efforts will seem little more than holding the watering can over seedlings, whose blooms you will never see. The reward is in giving.

Sometimes vicious storms will sweep through and you will weep as you see brokenness and, remembering your own brokenness, sit down beside broken stems, uprooted plants, leaves flayed to mere strips by the wind. Weep with them, cry with them, lift them up where this is possible, offer them support and binding. Nurture their recovery with the patience with which you nurture your own.

The garden will be beyond your control. It has its own claim to tidiness and untidiness, dependence and independence. Don’t be obsessed with having everything in order. Unswept leaves are sometimes nature’s carpet of riches for beauty and for growth. But do not hesitate where change must occur; replanting, pruning, even wielding the chainsaw if need be, but with care. Most gardens have known vandalism in various forms.

You will find some plants would have you tend them all the day and reward you with pleasantries. They flower almost at whim and turn their heads to greet you as you come. They would have you always, while in its furthest reaches the garden fights neglect or simply withers in waiting. Don’t let your garden become the decoration of the rich, the comfort of those who do not want to know about the pain and impoverishment that engulfs not just individuals but whole communities, whole nations. For as your ministry belongs to a succession far beyond time’s horizon, so compassion calls to us to love the world, to belong as much to the destitute abroad and at home, as we do to the fertile and favoured lands and people who can afford to employ us. We fail both when we think we can save them and save the world. We fail both when we conspire in the anaesthesia of comfortable Christianity.

The garden is most rewarding when we see ourselves as part of it, when the image collapses as all good images do, into the reality in which we know we are talking about ourselves and the truth becomes impossible to grasp. For you become the gardener and you are the garden, the lover and the loved, the minister and the ministered to. You, too, need the refreshing waters with which you baptise, the nourishment of bread and the wine which you distribute, the enrichment of scripture and tradition which you bear to others. You, too, do not exercise this ministry alone, but among the people, within the network of colleagues, congregations and presbyteries. These relations need also careful cultivation. Effective structures of support have enabled many to survive where in isolation they would have fallen to the wind.

Caroline,

We have not ordained you to ministry; that happened at your baptism;
We have not ordained you to be a caring person; you are already called to that;
We have not ordained you to serve the Church in committees, planning activities, and organisation; that is already implied in your membership;
We have not ordained you to become involved in issues of justice and peace, in the struggle, personal, social, political, against all forms of oppression and idolatry; for that is laid upon every Christian.

We have ordained you to something smaller and less spectacular:

to read and interpret those sacred stories of our community so that they speak the Word to people today;

to remember and practice those rituals and rites of meaning which in their poetry address people at the level where change operates;

to foster in community through Word and Sacrament and pastoral care that encounter with truth which will set people free to minister as the body of Christ.

We have ordained you to the Ministry of the Word. Amen.