It’s customary during Holy Week for the clergy to gather with their bishop for the reaffirmation of our ordination vows. I’m not a big fan of it, on the theory that either we mean what we say when we make our vows at ordination, or we don’t mean it. But I went, in part because I now have a new bishop and it seemed appropriate to reaffirm my vows. I also went because traditionally it is also the time when the bishop consecrates a new supply of oils (oil of the sick, chrism for baptizing, and oil of the catechumens).

Something Bishop Miller said in his homily struck home and the whole notion of reaffirmation began to seem significant. He began by mentioning 2 recent news items concerning Christianity: the continuing sexual abuse scandal in Roman Catholicism as well as the reports coming out of Michigan about the Christian militia group that was arrested. He pointed out the importance of trust–the trust our congregations in us as clergy and the trust that is important in our relationships with one another.

Once lost, trust is very difficult to regain and re-establish. Moreover, we live in a culture in which distrust of one other is profound and distrust of institutions is ubiquitous. Simple things like reaffirming the vows one made at ordination symbolize the work we all need to do to trust one another.

There’s a rawness about Holy Week. It feels like emotions are laid bare as we walk through the events of Jesus’ last days, that our defenses are stripped away as Jesus was stripped by the soldiers, and the altar is stripped on Maundy Thursday. In the end, we stand before the cross on Good Friday naked before God, with our only hope the prayer we say at the conclusion of the liturgy that day: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.”

When all of our self-deception and self-defenses are stripped away, that is how we stand before God, and what we have to hope for; and it might be a good place to begin to establish trust.