TRUTH, ABSOLUTION, BLESSING

 

What I said to friends about to be ordained priest

 

Words fall in and out of fashion. Who would have guessed the word curate would become so cool? When I was a curate, I felt like a walk on part in a Jane Austen novel. In 2025, the world is full of people who are curating life for others: booksellers, DJs, chefs, interior designers, art exhibitors, photographers. What once belonged to the museum and the Church has morphed into something bigger. Curators – or tastemakers – provide an interface between the creators of culture and its consumers. They seek out material that will resonate with audiences.

It is, if you like, an elite priesthood for consumer capitalism. At the popular end of this spectrum lie online

 

influencers, who are walking adverts for consumer brands. But their work exposes a fault line. We are brought up in this culture of the individual, where we are supposed to express our uniqueness by acting differently to the everyone else, while all the time we shamelessly copy what other people are saying and doing to ensure we are part of the crowd.

 

What, then, does this mean for those to be ordained priest in the next few minutes?

 

First up, you curate truth. In fact you should do more than this. The late Czech president, Vaclav Havel, was a leading dissident in communist eastern Europe and he called on people to ‘live in truth’ as a way of opposing the lies that governed communist politics. It’s a lovely expression – live in truth - not one literally taken from the Bible, but so true to God’s character it might as well be. In his prayer for the disciples, Jesus asked the Father that they may be sanctified in truth.

 

There is nothing abstract about the call to live truthfully. It is perhaps the defining ethical challenge of our generation and I expect it will crowd around all you say and do as a public leader. The avalanche of information we are buried under every day contains more lies than is good for any of us. It becomes difficult to distinguish the truth from the lie because we lack the time and resources to interrogate what we read and see, and this makes us apathetic. We are also faced with a public culture where the tactical fib has given way to the strategic lie. That is, we no longer resort to lies to get us out of a corner but as a way to control others and shape the story.

 

We are constructing new realities with these lies, but every lie we follow takes us further away from Christ. Jesus uttered those astonishing words: I am the truth. So every time we lie and hold to the lie, we deface his image in us. The author William Boyd perceptively said, the last thing we know is our effect on others. This is partly because we are the scriptwriters of our own lives. We build a story in our minds where we are usually the hero who does the right thing, blocking out any evidence to the contrary; ensuring we don’t grow as we ought. It’s a way of coping with our insecurity and justifying outcomes. The problem is, when everyone defends their own corner, we lose connection with each other; our stories simply don’t tally. This is one root of the breakdown in civility we are so exercised by today.

 

None of us finds this easy, but I encourage those being ordained today to create habits of honest self-reflection and a character that is gentle and undefended, because others will copy that. We are all offline influencers, and when we grasp this, it transforms the way we live and minister. Live in truth. It is a prophetic calling.

 

The second thing you curate for others is absolution. As Psalm 103 says:

 

As far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us

 

You are to call people to ‘repentance and to declare the forgiveness of sins’. And this call to repentance is about the transformation of character. Our culture is devoted to personality rather than character. We are praised for being loud and for being bold in taking the floor. For being funny and out there. For doing the talking while others do the listening. Fewer people seem to think there is virtue in quietly listening to others; we have to make our mark. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy and peace; it is patient, kind and generous. It is faithful, gentle and self-controlled.

 

You may know the impact on a church when people lose sight of this fruit; how damaging it can be. But also what an impression it makes on newcomers to see love shared so effusively.

 

The duty of absolution has enduring relevance. Unresolved guilt may, very quietly, be one of the most crippling states afflicting our world. There are so few places to go to talk about guilt, to face up to it and deal with it, especially in our non-directive society. Our emotions are being hardened against forgiveness today; instant judgement is preferred. A belief in the absolving grace of God, rooted in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, is an unpopular space to inhabit in a vindictive culture, but we should never vacate that place.

 

I think we all struggle with offering forgiveness, and when offences are serious, it is so very hard, and no-one should be compelled. But there are a whole lot of less tangled knots that we can unpick with a simple approach. Think about it. It is easier to forgive someone who says sorry. And it is easier to say sorry when you know you will be forgiven. Is this asking too much of us? Our reluctance to ever say sorry is leading us to a less trusting and unhealthy society.

 

The third thing you curate is the blessing of others. I wonder if we underestimate the strength of blessing. Words have remarkable power. Just think how you feel when someone praises you for who you are or what you’ve done. And how it is when someone runs you down – usually via a screen, where it’s easier to do and human empathy is less present. It’s a reminder to us that when we slag someone off (and there won’t be a person here who’s never done that) we act like our words have less power than a blessing when in fact they have just as much.

 

As St James observes of the human tongue:

 

With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.

 

We are more aware of the world’s cursing and spitefulness than ever before: it is delivered to our phones on a minute by minute basis. People are desperate for blessings which overwhelm the judgment that stalks them daily.

 

Truth, absolution, blessing. We can’t buy these things. They cost nothing financially and everything emotionally. Today’s curators offer fleeting aesthetic experiences for large sums of money. To adopt the language of the historian and podcaster Tom Holland, as priests in a secular world, you are here to curate some really weird, supernatural stuff. And to do so proudly and unashamedly. To show others a liberty only Christ can bring. And in doing so, to find it yourselves