May I speak in the name of the God, who calls, Redeems and Saves. Amen

Just yesterday we welcome into the Diocese ten new Deacons, one of whom stands here today, Jeanette.

There is a terrible truth about being  professionally religious; someone who gets paid to be godly; it sounds just crazy doesn’t it put like that, but that difference; the fact that I am paid to be here today, has some truly profound consequences for all our relationships in the church.

It has the potential to distort relationships. It probably lies at the heart of  clericalism; that club of clergy who believe that they are the masters of the church and the laity who conspire with them.

Money also has the potential to distort the relationship the other way round. Sometimes congregations can feel that this priest is their priest because they are paying for him or her. Obligations and expectations based on the idea that there is some contract between congregation and clergy. Tell us what we want to hear and the coins (and the notes) will keep on coming.

 Doesn’t that sound awful and probably isn’t even true, but it doesn’t need to be true, to be corrupting. You just need to think it is and the relationship is twisted out of shape.

Would I come to church each and every Sunday if I was not paid? It is a question that even the most holy of clergy should occasionally ask themselves, I think.

But perhaps the most deadening thing about being a professional in this game, is that you think it is a game; moving the troops around, working hard for a small reward but some status. Helping people because that is what we do, and all the while the one key thing that undergirds everything we do, the one fact without which we cannot have any purpose, is forgotten or mislaid. Have you noticed that I have now already gone on for 300 words and I am still to mention even the idea of God?

It is God that so easily gets overlooked. Jesus becomes a figurine on the wall, a verbal gloss, that unspoken assumption that in the end becomes forgotten. Little by little, that which once filled a life evaporates away and we are left hollowed out.

Clergy can become (excuse the phrase from TS Elliot) hollow men

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

I do not want to be a shape without form, a paralysed force.

That is the fate of some of the professionally religious; it is also the fate of some of us in the pews.  That which once breathed life into us, has expired. All around us is death.

It is death that starts the first of the three readings we had today. In the year that King Uzziah died… It must have been so easy for Isaiah to withdraw into the secure shell of reminiscence and nostalgia.

But instead there is a powerful vision of the Lord seated on a throne.

And far from being overjoyed or filled with peace, Isaiah is overcome with doom; the recognition that he is a man stuffed with sin, a man hollow of goodness

This happens too in the Gospel Reading when Jesus meets Peter and helps him catch two boatloads of fish. Far from being overjoyed this fisherman is overcome with a sense of Sin; Peter too is a man stuffed and yet hollow.

This seems to be the start of so many religious journeys, not the self satisfied ah ha of a confident traveler, but the “what have I become, what can I possibly offer” of the penitent pilgrim. We spend much of lives looking at the surface of things; it can be shocking to venture into the depths of our beings.

And then in that reading from Isaiah, comes the most extraordinary moment; “your sin has been wiped out”

That which has been lurking in the dark, that which has darkly been our preoccupation, the shadow that has kept us awake at night is no more.

God comes just when we do not expect, and also into the very places we do not expect.  That part of our lives that we think we have truly controlled by killing it off, or squashing it down, into those areas evacuated of anything at all, God breathes new life.

And isn’t this is almost as a terrible truth that we die, the fact they we can be alive.  The idea that we are not complete, finished done with things, but that God might have some plan, some idea of what we might become, might still have some desire for us. That into this husk life might still come.

And so perhaps it is no wonder that in the end it is God who calls out. In the Isaiah reading it is with a great question; in the Gospel reading it is Jesus himself who calls.

You are called. Today we celebrate that calling being listened to by Jeanette, and Daniel and all the others making their way to the Deaconate. This is a God who has breathed into their lives, making new things possible. Life has been filled with promise; they are all far from hollow men.

And for any of us, who know ourselves that we are less than we could be, that we are at times, both stuffed and yet empty, hollowed out. There is hope today, that through God’s mercy and the work of each of us here today, we can keep faith stirred up and keep ourselves from going hollow.