The Rev Oliver Coss Column: How to be perfect

The arrival of our curate our All Saints’ has brought all sorts of excitement. Much of that is about the newness, and of attempting to show someone who has never come to Northampton before something of the parts that make it special. There have been lots of firsts, as a new minister’s first trip into the pulpit, or first pastoral visit, or the first time they lead worship on their own are treasured moments. As a famous saint remarked, it is their purpose to make offerings to God, and to continue making them until their offering is perfect. We are none of us perfect, but we hope eventually – and within the love of God – to be made so, and the parts that come in between are a matter of a generous God and our response in Christian Discipleship.

It has all summoned up some interesting memories for me, not least of presenting myself, a recently un-spotty 21 year-old, before the Bishops’ Selectors because I believed God was calling me to be a priest. When you’re that age you don’t necessarily realise where you’re being naïve, but even in my naïveté I knew that while I knew what a priest was called to be, I knew neither what a priest had to do, nor had any idea of how to do it. It wasn’t a job interview, of course, and they weren’t going to ask me what I could do, rather they were trying to work out what I might become.

It summons up parables of those who build their homes on sand, together with some of the natty songs we sang about them at school. We’ll each have our own experience of taking risks or venturing into the unknown which, for hindsight is not as self-indulgent as we might think, will be shaped by what actually happened. The gifts of discernment and right-judgement are, however, a means by which we can live adventurously but on solid foundations, and for people of faith this will be grounded in the faithfulness of God. Despite our imperfections, he will always call us back even if the journey toward him is rugged, costly, and demands every part of us.

Our ordinations in the church sometimes seem a little reminiscent of graduations, of the completion of a part of life that is now behind us. Equally, there might be parts of life that we prefer to forget, or need to put behind us so that we know that past harms are no longer going to afflict us. A life focussed on faithfulness, however falteringly, is the gift of coming (at whatever stage of life we are in) to God as his children, with all our sense of who and how we are, knowing we shall always be more fully ourselves in the light of his grace. As a great prophet once heard, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine.”