An Anglican bishop advises new priests on the eve of their ordination.

“Fret not thyself because of the ungodly” (Ps. 37:1).

Is this rather a negative charge to give you on the eve of your ordination: “Don’t fret”? No, the Christian gospel is largely concerned with the issue of fretting and not fretting. We live in a fretting world, and the gospel can be paraphrased, “Fret not, only believe.” More particularly, the people to whom you minister will be full of frettings, and you will be leading them from frettings into Christian peace. But as you do this the spirit of fretting will press persistently against your own defenses. You may fret through your Christian sympathy with people’s griefs. You may fret about troubles and frustrations in the church, where there is a good deal of “loss of nerve.” You may fret about your own failures and disappointments. And your own fretting may weaken your witness to the joy of the gospel. Therefore it is right for me to charge you, “Fret not.”

There is certainly much to fret about. In the world there are ugly and frightening specters; the contrasts of affluence and poverty; racial conflict mounting higher; the drift of the Western democracies into spiritual aimlessness. Who would not fret with these specters at the door? Not only the world but the church as an institution makes you fret. Many, I know, find it difficult to serve it with happy contentment. Sometimes it frets by its old-fashionedness, its inability to reform itself, its shirking of challenging issues. And sometimes it frets in the opposite way: by a seeming loss of historic values, by a playing down of the supernatural, by a concern to be “with it.” If we are ourselves conceited, we fret about what others in the church are doing or not doing in a “we and they” superiority; if we are humble, we include ourselves within the criticism. In either case, we may fret; and a kind of nervous fretting can bedevil the church’s life. So the world may fret you, the church may fret you, and there will be the frettings of a more personal kind always round the corner. Tiredness, monotony, staleness, the small results which seem to come from immense expenditure of labor. So, all in all, there will be times when you find yourself saying, “Who will show us any good?”

So a mist comes to hide from your awareness some of the realities in which you believe: sin and judgement, mercy and joy. The answer is drawn from the scriptures, from our divine Lord, from the lives of the saints, and from your own experience as a Christian. The answer is a deep, sparkling well of truth, which is Christ himself, and from it our fears are washed away and our thirsty spirits are refreshed.

First, when you fret about the world and wonder whether God has gone away or whether God is “dead,” turn to the doctrine of judgment. Recapture the lost biblical theme of judgment. God is indeed here – but here in judgment upon a world which has wandered from his righteousness. Let the prophets and the apostles speak to us again of how nations which neglect God, stifle conscience, and prefer selfishness do bring calamity upon themselves. That is what is happening in our world. God has not disappeared: God is here – in judgement. As the psalmist vividly puts it, “He gave them their hearts’ desire, and sent leanness withal into their souls.” Turn your fretting into the thought that God is here as judge – and you will once again be near to God himself. Knowing God’s nearness as judge, we know at once his nearness also in mercy and forgiveness.

So the God whom we accept as here in judgment is at once known to us as here in sovereignty, the sovereignty of a faithful creator. The world is in his hands. But, the gospel teaches us, it is sovereignty which is only and always the sovereignty of self-giving love, of cross and resurrection, of life through death; the sovereignty of suffering transfigured. There our fretting has its supreme answer. You know this already in your theological study, for you have read great books about the union of love and omnipotence, of the Lamb and the Throne. You know it a little already in your own experience. But you will in your ministry be learning from some of the people you deal with how suffering can, through the nearness of Christ, be made wonderfully different. You will see the truth of cross and resurrection in men and women whom you try to serve.

Then there is our fretting about the church. One word only. Remember that the church is both divine and human. It is human, inasmuch as its members all share in our sinful and fallible human nature. Thus our “we and they” talk about the church melts into our contrition. It is divine, inasmuch as the principle of its life is the risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit, whose presence the sins of Christians never prevent being somewhere at work. Let us then be as critical, as discontented as we may be, and never complacent. But our discontent, without losing its integrity or its sharpness will not turn into fretting if we remember that it is God who judges and church in its human element, and after judging can raise up a faithful remnant.

Whenever fretting threatens to get you down, turn to our Lord. He is grieving. Think of his sorrow, and the sting of self-pity will be drawn from yours. We should often recall the scene when our Lord drew near to the city of Jerusalem and wept over it saying, “If you had known the things that belong to your peace, but now they are hid from your eyes.” Every ordained man must come near to this grief of Jesus, seeing with his eyes, feeling with his heart. We learn that any disappointment, any setback, any personal sorrow, or any wound to our pride can be made different if we are near to the grief of Jesus. You will have the experience of being able, after some grievous happening, to say, “It is good for me that I have been in trouble.” May you have the faith in Christ that can go a step further and say, with another of the Psalms, “Thou of every faithfulness hast caused me to be troubled.”

Then there is our thanksgiving and our penitence. We are taught in our years of training that thanksgiving is the heart of prayer. It is, I know, in deep thanksgiving that you are approaching tomorrow’s ordination. But as time passes when the pressures of work mount up and the vexations multiply, it is all too easy, while giving thanksgiving its liturgical priority, to take it for granted – in other words to neglect it as a personal act. Be thankful to God. Take trouble in thinking over what you are thankful for, and in telling God of your thankfulness. Remember how the Greek word εξομολογούμαι is used both of “confessing” sins and “confessing” God’s mercies. I believe that our neglect of the latter is an all too common failing.

So with your penitence. Nicholas Berdyaev wrote somewhere that one of the characteristics of Christianity is to transpose a sense of grievance into a sense of sin. It is the work of the gospel to bring about that transposition and so to expose human lives to the divine forgiveness. That will be your message, and your task with men and women and children. So nothing matters more than that this divine work should be repeating itself in you, turning the fretting of the natural man into the penitence of the man whose heart God has touched and renewing for you the miracle of forgiveness. We are poor priests if there is ever blurred in our consciousness either the recurring fact of divine forgiveness, or the wonder of its miraculous character. Here, surely, is the line between authentic Christianity and a secularized substitute for it.

So I give you these counsels about fretting, all of them drawn from the gospel and the wisdom of Christian experience. But the Psalm from which our text comes has itself wise counsel to give, prefiguring the Christian answer. Many times I have found that “the seventh evening of the month,” when Psalm 37 is said, has revived my drooping courage.

Here are some of its counsels:

Be doing good. When depression comes, find at once something to do, and get on with it. Go and help someone.

Delight thou in the Lord. Let your heart go towards him.

Hold thee still in the Lord. Be quiet. Stop talking to other people or to yourself. In stillness recover the true perspective.

Leave off from wrath. While you are bitter there can be no true perspective, no wise decision. Vision and judgement are clouded. And the secret is in the next quotation.

He shall make thy righteousness as clear as the light, and thy just dealing as the noonday. You do not have to vindicate yourself: God vindicates you as and when he knows best.

A small thing that the righteous hath is better than great riches of the ungodly. What is the small thing? Had you forgotten how precious it is, or had you “despised the day of small things”?

Dwell in the land and verily thou shalt be fed. Remember your inheritance, the catholic church of the ages, the country of the saints. Claim this as your own country and go on living in it.

I went by, and lo he was gone: I sought him, but his place could nowhere be found. If you are faithful you sometimes find that “tiresomeness” suddenly vanishes.

Tomorrow in the ordination service the answer of Jesus Christ to a fretting world will once again be proclaimed, and you will receive his commission and power to bring peace to many fretting lives. Many such lives will be healed and made strong by your teaching, your care, and your love for them. At the ordination there will be as in every sacrament the seen and the unseen part. You will see the archbishop who ordains you and the many people who will be there praying for you. You will not see that which give meaning to it all, and this is the re-enactment of what happened on the first Easter evening. Our Lord will be there, with the words “Peace be unto you, as the Father hath sent me, even so send I you”; and the words “Peace be unto you” go always with the wounds in his hands and his side. In the coming years you will know the wounds more than in the past, and you will also know the peace more than you know it now. And one day many will thank God for all that you will have done to make the wounds and the peace known to them.

From Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today (SPCK, 1972, 1985), 82–87. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.