Monday November 30th 2015, St Andrew’s Day
Dublin City University, Commissioning of Philip McKinley as Chaplain
Readings: Isaiah 52.7-10; Romans 10.12-18; St Matthew 4.18-22
Romans 10.13: … And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent?
a sermon preached by the archbishop
INTRODUCTION
St Paul is not always clear; but when he is clear, he is usually very clear. The argument he sets out in Romans chapter 10 to give flesh and bone to his theological statement that there is no distinction between Jew and Greek in the life of resurrection is an invitation to engage, it is an invitation to believe and it is an invitation to proclaim. The argument runs like this: If you are telling me that salvation is genuinely and freely available to all of those who call on the name of the Lord, how is this to happen and how can I make this happen for me and for other people? St Paul works backwards in the argument, not by giving a series of answers but by posing a series of questions; and the sequence is as follows:
How can you call on, appeal to, someone, if you have not believed in that person?
How can you believe in someone, if you have never even heard of that person?
How can you hear of someone, if someone does not proclaim, tell you about, that person?
How can there be such an intentional proclamation unless someone is sent to do it?
The argument is interesting not only because it has a tight logic to it but because it is built up through a sequence and succession of questions. And in a context of university and of chaplaincy, questions are the building-blocks of understanding; and understanding is the capstone of wisdom; and wisdom and discernment, working together, open the window on faith and action, responsibility and the public good. In this way, the objective and the subjective elements of who we are and who we are yet to become meet one another; and they meet in the sending and in the proclamation as the primary invitations to believing and to calling on someone we trust, a person in whom we believe. And so we find that there is a life beyond and within a concept. Ideas and experience combine interactively.
THE CONTEXT IN DCU
Dublin City University rapidly established itself as the university that engages with the secular from the very start. This is reflected in its educational ethos, in its core principles and in its range of courses and in the reach of its research. From the outset, it has focused on the clustering of intellectual capacity around the forward movement of modernity and in this way has established a cross-disciplinary self-understanding that is infectious to all its members and is the envy of the rest of us. At the same time, in its living secularism, it has not disrespected the Faith component of what modernity and post-modernity are. It, therefore, has an Inter Faith Centre where faith and Faiths can flourish and The Centre stands geographically at the hearth of the campus. It radiates warmth without presupposing belonging on the part of any or all who use and enjoy its hospitality. The opportunities for integrating care of members of the university into the life of chaplaincy are there in ways that are open-ended and exploratory. What is unique is that very open-ended care of others because of their being fellow-human beings, because of there being no distinction in our approach to and understanding of them as children of God. It can be modelled in a truly post-denominational way while keeping belief at the core of response. We, and they, make space for each other in our genuine difference.
Please do not, however, think that I am starry-eyed about the witness of faith in a secular world. It is a hard thing to do and it requires a combination of innocence and courage that few today possess. The background has long ago shifted from one where there was an active or a nodding acquaintance with religious practice as something that either does no harm or does some good; the movement is to a background where religion itself is seen as a curiosity for those who cannot otherwise cope with ‘reality’ or a force that actively undermines freedom and independence of individuals and communities. More and more, the assumptions that God does not, never has and never will exist create the climate in which indifference is fast moving to aggression - yet often still with the hope that religion or something like it will be there ‘for us’ when something terrible happens. I am not in fact suggesting that we would be better living in an ideal fantasy world. I am suggesting that what I have described is the context for us all as we witness as disciples and as we proclaim as those who are sent to be in and of this world in our time and place.
ST ANDREW AND CHAPLAINCY
The Season of Advent started yesterday and this gives us the scope to explore the active relationship between darkness and light. It is the obvious time of year to do this and the need for accommodation of the one to the other is required and activated by the fact that each has to respect the other. In this way, Advent is a good time publicly to inaugurate chaplaincy in both a denominational and an Inter Faith context because respect is urgently needed between and across Faiths in Ireland and internationally when caricature and distorted understanding abound. St Andrew is among the first four disciples whom Jesus invited to follow him. The calling of the disciples was to followership before it was to leadership; the calling of the disciples was in two pairs of siblings in order perhaps to show us that, within what would emerge as the body of Christ, companionship and instinctive relationship carry us further than any amount of knowledge about something extraneous to ourselves; the calling of the disciples was from a secular and a professional context where sentimentality and talking were not going to take you far in the long run. They were people of strategy and of action as well as faith and trust.
The gifts of followership, of companionship and of practicality are integral to chaplaincy.
PROSPECT
Philip is well known to many of us; and I would suggest that if you do not know him, you soon will get to know him. His human instinct overlaps with his theological instinct and he is ready at all times to engage, to learn, to share and to teach. His capacity to communicate in a wide range of media interacts with his innate grasp of something I describe as caritative altruism. Caritative altruism is caring for The Other as a primary focus of the fuller expression of self, properly understood and, in a self-consciously Christian context, an expression of the grace of God properly understood. God is a God of giving; God is a God of incarnation; God is a God of equipping us to receive what we never knew was there to receive; God is a God of adventure into areas of human joy and dignity we never thought had anything whatsoever to do with religion as we have made it to be. All of this lies before you in Philip McKinley.
INVITATION
In the work that he did in setting up the Irish School of Ecumenics, Michael Hurley SJ encouraged all Irish Christians to tithe/set aside one tenth of spiritual time ecumenically. We have moved well beyond this now that we are in 2015. I have often made the suggestion that we tithe/set aside one tenth of our spiritual time for Inter Faith understanding. I make this suggestion again this evening as we stand on the second day, the first weekday, of a new Christian Year. In a world of religious standoff, in a world of religious caricature and in a world of religious distortion – this need is urgent as the world staggers through a globalized and virtual conflict with devastating practical outcomes, having already decided that God is dead and that religion is no more that strange-looking people doing silly things on TV with the sound turned down. It is therefore urgent that we embrace chaplaincy with a confident openness in an Inter Faith space. This space is the only one of its kind. DCU remains poised, as indeed it does in other things and in other ways academically and intellectually, it remains poised spiritually to lead the way in the Ireland of today in the proclamation of respect for difference and openness to enquiry and in the interplay of respect and openness to the love of God in the discernment of a wisdom that is humble enough to do two things: Follow me and Come&C. We in our own time and place can do both.
St Matthew 4.20: At once they left their nets and followed him.