• What the calendar actually added
• The paperwork of a rescue
• The three days
• One clause, and what it will not let us do
• Whom I am naming, and why the text requires it
• The room where nothing is decided
• Back to the Advent this sits inside

Look forgivingly on thy flock.

Four words in and the prayer has already done the thing I want to spend this morning on. It has named who is being prayed for, and it has named them as one thing.

Not the sound ones. Not the ones in good standing. Not the ones whose position has been looked into and found satisfactory. The flock.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and the flock is everyone who is there.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and then the second thing the prayer asks for, which is that the same undivided body be kept. One object, singular, and no sorting inside it.

I want to say plainly what today is before I go on. This is the third hearing of one Mass in four days, and I said on Tuesday that a text handed back is not a text worn out. I am not going to make that argument twice. Today has something Tuesday did not have, and it is small, and it is this prayer.

Look forgivingly on thy flock. Four days of one Mass, and this is the clause that has been kept back until now.

What the calendar actually added

A commemoration is a modest thing. The Mass of the day stays where it is, and a second, shorter prayer is said after the first, for a saint the calendar keeps but does not give the day to.

Before I come to the man, one thing about where the prayer lands. The entrance chant we have now heard three times already calls God the Shepherd of Israel and the Guide of the flock of Joseph, and it asks Him to hearken. So the flock is not a word the commemoration imports from outside; it is the day’s own, sitting in the first thing said this morning.

Look forgivingly on thy flock simply picks that word up and asks something of the one already addressed by it.

The Gradual does the same work from the other end. It asks that His faithful ones be gathered before Him, and gathering is not sorting. A gathered body has been brought into one place, not divided into two piles at the door.

Today’s belongs to Melchiades, also written Miltiades, and the Catholic Encyclopedia gives the outline of him. A native of Africa. Elected to Rome in 310 or 311, most probably 311. Dead on the tenth or eleventh of January, 314, and laid in the catacomb of St. Callistus.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, through a man who was bishop of Rome for a very few years.

Between those two dates sits one of the strangest stretches any bishop of Rome has lived through. Look forgivingly on thy flock is being asked this morning through the intercession of a man who took office inside a persecution and died with the persecution over.

The great persecution was ended by an edict of toleration signed by three emperors, Galerius, Licinius and Constantine. Then came the Milvian Bridge, the twenty-seventh of October, 312, and Constantine entering the city. Melchiades was in Rome for it.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, prayed through somebody who saw the thing stop.

The paperwork of a rescue

Here is the detail from that year that I cannot put down.

Constantine granted the pope the right to receive back, through the prefect of the city, all the buildings and possessions the church had lost. And the way that was done was that Melchiades ordered two of his deacons, Strato and Cassianus, to go and discuss the matter with the prefect.

Two men with a list, in a municipal office, going through premises one at a time. That is what the end of the worst thing that had ever happened to them looked like on the day it arrived. Not a vision. An appointment.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and the answer may well come back stamped.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and notice that the prayer’s second petition, the one about keeping, had in this man’s own lifetime been answered in exactly that register. Deeds. Addresses. A clerk’s assent. The church got its roofs back the way anybody gets a roof back, which is slowly and in writing.

I find that steadying rather than deflating. Most of what holds a community together is administrative, and the ordinary hands doing it are usually junior and usually unnamed. Strato and Cassianus are named because somebody wrote them down.

Look forgivingly on thy flock. Two deacons and a prefect, and the church has its doors back.

The three days

Now the part of Melchiades I actually want to preach.

On the second of October, 313, less than a year after the emperor came into Rome, eighteen bishops from Gaul and Italy assembled in the Lateran Palace with Melchiades presiding. A dispute had come out of the African church, and one party in it had gone to Constantine and asked that bishops from Gaul be appointed as judges. The synod considered the matter for three days and found for Caecilian, declaring his election and consecration as Bishop of Carthage legitimate.

Read the shape of that and not the verdict. The verdict is not my quarrel and I am not qualified to reopen it now.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and hold that sentence beside a three-day hearing.

The shape is this. A body that had spent years being hunted got its safety, and its buildings, and its emperor. And then it convened, sat down, and spent three days determining whether one of its own bishops counted.

Look forgivingly on thy flock.

I do not think that is hypocrisy. I think it is the most ordinary thing in the world, and that is exactly why the prayer is worth having.

Look forgivingly on thy flock is a sentence written for ordinary failures, not spectacular ones.

When a group has been in danger for a long time, it learns to ask one question constantly: is this person one of us. In danger the question keeps people alive. Then the danger stops, and the question does not, because no meeting is ever called to switch it off. It simply carries on running, on people who are no longer a risk to anybody, and it goes on being felt as vigilance long after it has become something else.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, because the question that kept a body alive does not know when to stop.

Look forgivingly on thy flock is a prayer for the year after. It asks for the whole body to be looked at in one glance, forgivingly, at precisely the moment a church has the leisure to start looking at it in parts.

One clause, and what it will not let us do

Take the grammar seriously for a moment, because the grammar is the argument.

The petition has one object and it is collective. It does not say look forgivingly on the worthy in thy flock. It does not say and keep the sound part of it. There is no adjective anywhere in the sentence dividing the body it is asking about, and there is no procedure named for producing one.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, said as one clause, forecloses the move that most church trouble is made of.

The move is this: that belonging is conferred by a determination. That a person is inside the fold provisionally, pending a ruling, and that the ruling is what makes it real. It is rarely stated that baldly. It is usually stated as care, as prudence, as taking something seriously.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, with nothing pending, is the exact refusal of that.

And for anyone who does not pray, the ethical version of the same sentence is plain enough: a group does not become safe by working out which of its members are legitimate. It becomes safe by deciding it will not run that process on people at all.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and you do not need the theology to want the sentence.

Whom I am naming, and why the text requires it

I am naming trans people this morning, and I am naming them on the specific harm of ratification.

The teaching I mean is not the one that says you are wrong. It is the quieter one that says your place here is pending. That there is a body, or a panel, or a leadership, or a working group, or a season of prayerful reflection, and that when it reports, your standing will be settled. Until then you may attend.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and the flock in that sentence has already been let in.

Look forgivingly on thy flock cannot be prayed alongside that and mean anything. The prayer asks for the flock as a whole to be looked on now. It does not ask for a review.

On the twenty-fifth of last month we kept a virgin martyr and I named the same people, under thou hast been my helper, on description: on the account of a person that gets written by somebody else and believed instead of them. Today’s claim is next door and it is not the same one. That day asked whose version of you is treated as true. This one asks whether your place in a room waits on that room voting.

You can be described accurately and still be pending. That is the difference, and it is why the two days do not collapse into each other.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, said of people who have been waiting on a finding for years.

Judge that teaching by what it grows, inside Christianity’s own record, because that is the only record we are entitled to examine. It has produced people who have attended one congregation for years and are still spoken of as a question. It has produced committees that meet annually about human beings who are in the building while the meeting is going on. It has produced the counsel to be patient with a process, offered to people for whom the process is the injury. And it has produced a great many quiet departures that were recorded as a loss of faith.

Look forgivingly on thy flock is a prayer with no committee in it.

The room where nothing is decided

There is a story sometimes told of a man whose sister came out of hospital and into a rehabilitation ward on the far side of a city, and who went to see her on Tuesdays and Fridays for fourteen months.

The ward held its reviews on Wednesdays. Her case was discussed there, her placement was decided there, and the door of that room was shut. He was never asked to a Wednesday and never asked to be. He did not know most of what was said in it until it had already become a fact.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and mark where the deciding was done.

What he had was the visitors’ room, which was the opposite kind of room in every way that matters. The blind was up, the urn was on, four other families were in it, and anybody at all could walk through. He came in his work clothes on the Tuesday and after his shift on the Friday, and he sat in an armchair with a wobble in it that everyone knew about.

He brought the wrong newspaper for the first month until she told him. He learned the names of the staff and the names of the other families. He was, in the plainest sense, part of the furniture of that room, and nothing he did there was ever entered anywhere.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and count the Tuesdays, which went into no record at all.

Look forgivingly on thy flock. He was party to nothing, and he was there twice a week.

I am not going to tell you it ended well, because it did not end at all in the way stories are supposed to. She was moved to a unit forty minutes further out on a Wednesday he heard about on the Thursday. The Tuesdays became one Saturday a month, and then less. He was not thanked, and there was no reason he should have been; there was no mechanism for it, because he had never been part of anything that produced findings.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, on a body that keeps no minutes of the good in it.

The Wednesday room made every decision in that fourteen months. The Tuesday room made none. And I would put it to you that the second one is where she actually lived, and that a church which cannot tell the difference between the two has mistaken its committee for its life.

Look forgivingly on thy flock. The prayer is asking for the Tuesday room.

Back to the Advent this sits inside

None of that floats free of the week. The Lesson we heard on Sunday and again on Tuesday ends by asking that we receive one another as Christ received us, and it gives no test to apply first.

The Gospel has a man in a cell sending out a question and getting an answer made entirely of things that had happened to other people: the blind, the lame, the deaf, the poor. Christ answers a question about his own standing by pointing at a body of people who have been helped. That is a strange way to establish a credential and it is the only way he offers.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, and let the flock be the evidence rather than the docket.

Look forgivingly on thy flock belongs in that week rather than beside it. The Advent Collect asks that we be made ready. The commemoration asks that while we are getting ready, the whole flock be kept inside the sentence.

And the last thing I will say about Melchiades is the thing the encyclopedia will not let me embroider. He died in his own bed in January, months after the synod, with the persecution finished and the buildings back and the dispute nominally settled. The great crisis of his life was over and he lived a very short time in the peace after it.

That is the position most of us are praying from most of the time. Not in the emergency and not yet in the resolution. In the odd, unheroic stretch afterwards, where the danger has gone and the habits it taught us have not, and where the only real question is what we are going to do with the people who are already here.

Look forgivingly on thy flock, this morning, with nothing pending.

↑ The order resumes below.