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Glory to God on high,
God of power and might.
You are my God.
I can neither add to your glory
Nor take away from your power.
Yet I will wait upon you daily in prayer and praise.

In a few minutes, Ailsa you will make this statement of praise and faith in the living God. And in these words you will acknowledge that God is so much more than we can barely begin to imagine. I can neither add to your glory nor take away from your power. We have had a glimpse of God’s glory and power. We have seen in Jesus what Love looks like, and we are each beginners in seeking to work out the implications of that in our own lives. That is what you are doing here tonight

And praise be to God we are ordaining a woman here amongst your church whanau, in our interim Cathedral of St. Mary's, on our patronal festival, the Feast day of Mary the mother of Jesus.

How do you picture Mary, mother of Jesus? How would you describe her? Obedient? Meek? Servant?

Overall the rather gaudy sacred art and Church history have given us a view of Mary as humble, in obedience to the messenger of God or in adoration of her infant son, or quietly regal, as the Queen of Heaven, or as St Mary the Virgin, kept eternally in a state of perfection despite biblical evidence that she went on to have several more children after Jesus.

Where in sacred art is the spirited Mary who sings a revolutionary song of praise to God? Where is the Mary who decides her son is mad and takes his brothers to sort him out (Mk 3:21)? Where is the

Mary who searches endlessly for the lost 12-year-old Jesus and really lays into him when she finds him and promptly bundles him back off to Nazareth.

We don’t often think what it must have been like for a teenage, single and pregnant Mary in Nazareth, with gossips round every corner, trying to hold on to the truth of the angel’s message when everyone else must have had serious doubts about her sanity and her virtue. We don’t think of her as a normal woman, fetching water, doing the cooking like other women.

Gill Lovell, a priest in the diocese of Oxford in England has pondered on this and describes a striking sculpture of Mary outside Salisbury Cathedral. She says; 'It is of a peasant woman, strong with all her physical work, tough with bringing up many children and being widowed at a young age; not physically beautiful, but with a dignity which shines out from her that’s far more enduring than a pretty face. Is this closer to the real Mary? This is the sort of woman I can relate to' she says,' not a wee quiet wimp looking adoringly at a child from morning till night; but is a real mother with a tough life. We can see this woman, as the priest Simeon prophesied, being able to endure the sword that will pierce her own heart when her son is betrayed, abandoned and murdered.'

Yes this sounds like the woman who can shout out that revolutionary song of praise we had read to us by Char.

Luke’s picture of Mary is of a poetic theologian of the new age: she sees the events of her world, makes connections between them, draws deeply on her religious roots and pours this out in a beautiful hymn of praise.

Maybe it was she who taught him of God’s great deeds and moulded him into a truer understanding of his destiny as the healer of the sick, the outspoken prophet, the one who eat and drank with outcasts. Perhaps it was Mary who taught him the words he would use as his mission statement from Isaiah that he would use 30 years later in the little synagogue in Nazareth, where he grew up: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to captives, and release to the prisoners.”

No as Gill Lovell says, This is not a wee quiet wimp, but an intelligent, articulate and bold woman, unafraid to sing her song for all to hear. And to my mind we are coming to ordain such a woman tonight.

Glory to God on high,
God of power and might.
You are my God.
I can neither add to your glory
Nor take away from your power.
Yet I will wait upon you daily in prayer and praise.

You are where you find yourself this evening Ailsa because God has called you. You have heard that call and somehow or other you haven’t been able to resist it. For some reason, you like me and most of us who are ordained, have needed to go through this ritual, to have these people with funny pointed hats lay their hands upon our heads, and in this sacrament to make an outward and visible sign of what is a most profound inward and spiritual grace.

It has been a delight for me to begin to get to know you Ailsa and I am thankful to God for what you are teaching me as we explore with our colleagues here what it means to be a priest, for we always beginners on this journey into personhood. You are here because of a mysterious and wonderful longing and yearning within you to be who you are. Most of all a priest is who I am, before what I do.

And it is from our beingness that our unique ministry, is moulded and hopefully guided by God, by the Christ, the Holy Spirit moving and working within and through us. So, if we are to become who we are, then we must wait upon God daily, in fact constantly in prayer and praise. We are here because we have been touched to the core with a presence we cannot truly explain. We are standing in grace filled with mystery touched with the eternal, embraced by goodness and love. And for a moment we tremble in the face of such graciousness, as I know you tremble today..

Glory to God on high,
God of power and might.
You are my God.
I can neither add to your glory
Nor take away from your power.
Yet I will wait upon you daily in prayer and praise.

Pope Francis talking about the ordained ministry a wee while ago said this ' I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbour. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. The people of God want their priests to be pastors,'. People of God, in Ailsa we have a priest pastor,

And when the job seems all too much, remember these words of Archbishop Oscar Romero, that great and brave priest who in the face of the injustice in his own country became an outspoken champion of the poor and was assassinated as he celebrated the holy Eucharist –

‘It helps now and then to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond out efforts; it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No programme accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

‘This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

‘We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realising that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

‘We are workers not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own’.

Glory to God on high,
God of power and might.
You are my God.
I can neither add to your glory
Nor take away from your power.
Yet I will wait upon you daily in prayer and praise.

Amen