Trinity 7 2023 – Sermon preached in St. Paul’s Athens. The final service of Fr. Leonard as chaplain. Readings: Isaiah 44, 6-8; Romans 8, 12-25; Matthew 13, 24-30, 36-43
Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
At the start of a forty year ministry you can calculate that there are potentially 2,080 Sundays for sermons to be preached – give or take a few for holidays. The few that you deduct for holidays will be more than counterbalanced by those Sundays when more than one sermon is needed – and then there are all those mid-week occasions, such as principal feasts, or saints days, as well as funerals and weddings. So over a trajectory of 40 years the scope for preaching is infinite – and a challenge to any ordained minister. Stamina is an essential characteristic to survive, and even thrive, in public ministry.
It has been my privilege, and indeed a joy, to be a preacher or God’s faithful people in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, Wotton, Glypton and Kiddington in Oxfordshire, the parishes of the Halesworth Team in Suffolk, The Ifield Team in Crawley, West Sussex, Cirencester in Gloucestershire, and lastly here in Athens and around Greece. In the last few years – even before Covid – I took to sending out my sermons weekly both in printed in pre-recorded form, and I am so grateful for the feedback and response I have had from some people over the years. I feel as if the sermons have indeed been appreciated.
But a priest is not only a preacher – there are all the celebrations at the altar, at the font, with couples getting married, at the deathbed of the dying, at the support of those who mourn. There are endless meetings – many of which have no end result, and a whole range of other duties and obligations too many to name.
So what does a priest do in the last sermon he or she preaches, when the 2,080 other possibilities are no longer on the horizon?
Well, I am going to fall back on the three main foundations that have sustained me for the greater part of my life, even from before ordination, and always I look to the holy scriptures for the inspiration, just as on every other occasion.
Of the foundations the first is God – proto o Theos – as the Greeks would say. I have built everything on the one who is the master-builder, the one to whom the prophet Isaiah directs us,
‘I am the first, and I am the last; besides me there is no god…You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one.’ Isaiah 44, 6-8.
