Author: admin

The parable this evening from St Matthew, is primarily about relationships between people. It’s about not judging and not assuming that you and I are wheat and others are weeds. When we judge others and dismiss their contributions and value, we ourselves become weeds among the wheat.
There may be something in this parable that helps us in introspection as well. Maybe it could help us survey our own inner landscape and evaluate the weeds among the wheat in our lives that perhaps need pruning, but not plucking out. That means that you and I ought not to criticize ourselves so harshly about our flaws and faults. Because, while there are aspects of our personality that shouldn’t be allowed to take over the whole field, however these flaws in the fullness of time may play their part in contributing to our life’s harvest and may make a useful contribution to the world.
The judgmental attitude of the weeders towards others, is a prime indication that their thoughts and actions have been sown by the “enemy” rather than by God. Jesus did not weed out Judas from the twelve, even though, according to some accounts, Jesus knew about the upcoming betrayal before it occurred. Jesus did not weed out Peter from the twelve, even though he knew about his upcoming denials. Jesus knew that all the disciples would run away — they all had their faults. They weren’t producing the fruit that was expected — but he did not weed them out of the fellowship. If Jesus were to weed out all the imperfections, who would be left?
Jesus says the enemy sows the weeds. Ironically God probably finds it easier to deal with his enemies, as his friends can be more difficult to control. The theologian Karl Rahner put it this way: “The number one cause of atheism can be Christians themselves. Those who confidently proclaim God and then deny Him with their lifestyles is what an unbelieving world finds simply unbelievable.” Perhaps the best defense of God would be to live like He told us to. The gospel would then have such power and attraction that we wouldn’t have to worry about defending it.
A sense that there is an enemy is common to many societies and even the religious. It is almost as though we need an enemy, an other, against whom to define ourselves. A perfect example of this were the Jews in Hitlers Germany. This need can maintain the important concept of the enemy, by creating enemies for survival. Paranoia keeps some people going and gives their lives meaning, Stalin was a prime example. There’s ‘them’ and there’s ‘us’. The simpler, the better. And Religion doesn’t escape, it can be exploited to keep prejudices in place.
The psychologist Carl Jung would have approved of the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Jung explored the nature of the unconscious “shadow” that lives in each soul. The shadow gets filled with all the things that we repress because we don’t want to know them. It is the rubbish bin of the soul where we try to throw out our unexamined greed, narcissistic selfishness and all other things which we find difficult to rid ourselves off. Out of site, this garbage rots and pollutes, and unconsciously drives our actions. We think we have rid ourselves of our junk, yet it controls us behind the scenes of our conscious thought. Jung believed that we needed to learn to recycle our waste. By acknowledging our junk and knowing it is always there, we are better able to understand ourselves, to grow and to act with true compassion towards ourselves and others. Just as we are learning to recycle and to compost, so our waste isn’t such a big problem, examining our shadow side, is healthier than trying to pitch our sins into a huge bin bag. This metaphor of junk and recycling is a modern translation of wheat and weeds. Whether we are talking about weeds or garbage, the danger is that our quest for purity can lead to the wrong result when we ignore the unrecycled issues what is within our own souls.
This theme can also be seen in Shakespeare’s early plays, where all issues are settled in the play. In later plays it is not so, even though divine intervention occurs at the end to adjust inequities. But when you read the great tragedies, such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, the problem becomes too complex to bring closure at the end. The problems are pushed forward to the next world, till the final harvest.
This parable warns us against making premature judgments until the final judgment is to takes place. After all, doesn’t this parable take its meaning from within our own lives? C. S. Lewis notes that he once had considerable difficulty in the saying that one should “hate the sin but love the sinner.” It didn’t seem to make sense to him until one day it occurred to him that it was within himself that the saying showed its truthfulness. Did he not “love himself” while at the same time he “hated the sin” that so dominated his life? Is this not a reflection of the words of St Paul when he speaks of the great distress created within himself, when he did the things he did not really want to do, while not doing the things he very much wanted to do? St. Theresa of Avila prayed, “Oh, God, I don’t love you. I don’t even want to love you, but I want to want to love you.” Do we not recognize ourselves in reflections like these? The great physicist Werner Heisenberg said, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will, what he wants to will.” He spoke for all humankind, did he not? This recognition of the weeds in our lives and how they can suffocate the wheat of God’s grace that’s planted within us.
Ultimately this parable teaches us that sometimes there is not much, if anything, that we can do about the weeds amongst our wheat. Here Jesus teaches us that there are situations in life where the weeds and the wheat are so tangled up together, that they can never be separated in this world. There are knots which no mortal can untie. Thankfully at the final harvest, God will remove the weeds from us and will gather the good wheat that is in us. Amen.

The Bible readings set for this evening beg the question – what does it mean to be faithful? We have the psalmist fixing his eyes on God, seeking refuge, asking the Lord not to be left unprotected. We have the Israelites, storming their way through Canaan, taking possession of the Promised Land. And we have Jesus, following his own divine conscience, bringing about the Kingdom by healing a man with a withered hand.

There is a note of desperation in all of this too. David, the psalm writer, is as ever, fearful. He speaks of being trapped, snared in the nets of those who do evil. We hear of people being driven out, violently, from the Promised Land. And we learn of the Pharisees, who once again, outsmarted by Jesus, start plotting to bring about his death.

Faith is brutal and faith is bloody. Having faith puts our lives on the line.

At this point in the church year our calendar reminds us of some truly remarkable stories. Last Wednesday we had St Ignatius of Antioch, one of the earliest Christian martyrs, who, when facing death in the Roman circus, expressed a longing to die for his faith. He said ‘I want to be mauled, ground fine by the lions’ teeth, so that I may be as wheat for the bread of Christ’.

And just ahead of us now is the Feast of All Saints; that great company of witnesses, so many of whom chose to surrender their lives rather than compromise their belief. And the sad truth is that there has never been a time in history when someone, somewhere has not died rather than give in to the powers of oppression, and the reality is that it seems to be getting worse – with more martyrs being created in the last century than in any era before. Think Maximilian Kolbe. Think Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Think Martin Luther King.

Faith is brutal and faith is bloody. Having faith puts our lives on the line.

What we see in the example of Jesus is an unflinching approach to the truth. For him there is no other way. Although it is stated that on the Sabbath they can’t pick corn, his people are hungry and there is food there ready to eat. Likewise, performing an act of healing on the Sabbath was seen as breaking the law prohibiting work. Yet Jesus ignores this and tells the man to stretch out his hand.

No doubt Jesus was conscious of what this would mean; that many would follow him, but that others would be completely outraged. They started to plot his death. And the moral of the story is this – that if following our own conscience makes us at times unpopular, for some maybe even detested, then take heart, this might well mean that you are doing something right and good.

This is what Jesus means when he says ‘take up your cross’, ‘follow the narrow path’ – for he gives us an example of service that breaks through social and religious conventions, revealing to us a higher, faith-filled vision, not based on rule-keeping, but founded on justice, respect and truth.

The word ‘Gospel’ of course means the ‘Good News’. And it’s only good news for those who those don’t like things as they are, who long to live in a better world. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat’, proclaims the Virgin Mary, ‘and hath exalted the humble’. And today we hear that ‘The hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent empty away’.

To have faith means then to surrender yourself to this radical inversion of power. To be saintly means to submit your life to God. To live by faith means accepting that whilst we may not glow with worldly success, we may nevertheless be assured that our chosen path is right. We are to be, as St Paul says, Holy Fools, yet wise in the sight of Christ.

May God give us such wisdom, and the courage to live out our convictions. Not courting popularity, but higher truths, a more profound sense of justice. And may we be strengthened on our journey of faith, with the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not yet seen. Amen.

In the Christmas holidays when I was 12, I took the (for me) rather major step of going to spend 2 weeks on my own with a family in France. I knew one of its members already because Charles had been my elder brother’s French exchange; but the rest, including my own exchange, Francois, were unknown to me. As you might imagine, in 1970, some years before Britain entered what was then called the Common Market, and with my faltering French, there was plenty for me to find exotic. So in retrospect I excuse myself for the fact that it was probably 10 days or so before it dawned on me that there was an especially remarkable quality to the Duponts’ family life: they were Jewish. They had particular rituals and food for Friday evening, I went along with Francois to evening classes to learn Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah, and so on.

Since then of course I’ve been much more alert to Jewish background and identity and have had numerous other friends and acquaintances; included among them several who have owed their lives to their own, or their parents’, flight from the reach of the Nazi regime; who knew the loss of everything they had owned, and lived with the knowledge of the disgusting humiliation and murder of family members, among millions of other innocents. Current attitudes, including towards politics, are affected by living with this background: later in the mid-1970s Mme Dupont told me that in the forthcoming presidential election, all the French Jews would be voting for the opposition candidate, because of the attitude the incumbent had taken towards Israel. Which was the kind of sweeping statement which was probably an exaggeration, but it was no surprise to hear if from someone who had grown up under occupation in north Africa.

To my knowledge of, and affection for, that family, I ascribe my concern about people whose livelihoods, homes, security and public respect have been threatened. Which brings us to a massive international irony, which I’ve heard summed up thus: ‘The first victims of Hitler were the Jews; his latest victims are the Palestinians’. These people now live with the daily fact of exclusion, dispossession, humiliation, and sometimes worse – and largely provoked by events on another continent, or in another age. They have no state, they have little political leverage. To abandon them, to regard their condition as merely an unfortunate by-product of a greater good in rectifying past wrongs, would be an affront to human dignity and to God whose children they are.

Which is why I was happy to agree, when some months ago I was asked to chair a forum in Salisbury in November on the thorny issues of Israel-Palestine, with a range of speakers to represent the range of ethnic and religious and political strands. Some while later I got a rather anxious late night email from my bishop, forwarding an email which had been sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury, drawing to his attention my involvement in this event and saying that “it would not be good for Salisbury Cathedral and its diocese to be seen actively peddling anti-Semitic/anti-Israeli hate would it?”

There are really two things I want to say to you tonight. Both bear on what each of you is doing in this place. The first is, never to lose sight of the preciousness of the right to diversity of expression, and of the good which can come from debate, discussion, difference. The ferment of ideas, contrasting and contending views, the capacity to argue: these things are necessary to the health of human society. So we need always to beware censorship, whether formal or, as in this case, attempted through moral pressure. The forum in Salisbury in a few weeks’ time may hardly advance the cause of peace in the middle East – but if discussions like that cannot happen, then there are no prospects for that peace at all.

The second thing I want to say is similarly, an apparent platitude when said against the background of a great university like this: be critical, test your sources of knowledge. Under God we have a duty to open-minded, unprejudiced, honest research; not to let special interests, including our own, obstruct the workings of our minds.

This can sometimes be a special challenge for Jews, Christians, and Muslims – those of us with scriptures we hold to be revelatory and which can bear directly on today’s practical reality. Earlier in this service we quietly sat and listened through the stirring account of a city on the west bank of the Jordan being conquered simply by marching around the walls and shouting; we finished at verse 20, and so were spared verse 21: ‘Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys.’ Now of course most of our scriptures are not this shocking: but you can easily see how belief in a God who not only condones but actually orders this, smooths the path for the most intransigent of Israeli settlers and their fundamentalist Christian supporters in the USA and elsewhere. And you can see why generations of faithful people have engaged in archeology in the Holy Land with the express purpose of reinforcing their belief: the mother of the 4th century Roman Emperor Constantine dug out what she earnestly believed to be the true cross, and bits of it went all round the world as objects of devotion, and similarly questionable digs go on to this day, largely intended to demonstrate the truth of the biblical record.

Life is rarely as simple as we may wish it to be. If we retreat into social, intellectual or political enclaves, sealed off from things we find distasteful, we abandon the truth of God’s creation, whose complexity provides both its beauty and its challenge. When in the gospel Jesus says ‘Father… you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants’, and tells us to ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest’ – he is not offering us a lazy shortcut from the use of the gifts God has given us. He is offering us the hope of the redemption of all things under God, the hope which sustains every moment for the Christian. It was a redemption whose first fruits were yet to come, when Jesus went to the heart of the Holy Land, a multicultural place which groaned resentfully under foreign rule, and there was put to death. It is God’s very nature, revealed in Christ, to bring good from ill,
universal freedom from the confusion of human existence. We serve God, not by seeking false simplicity, but by embracing the complexity of the life he has made.

‘As a piece of simple decorative and beautiful art it is perfect, and the windows very artistic.’ This is how Oscar Wilde described this Chapel, believe it or not, and you can’t really see the windows at the moment, but it is very good to welcome all new-comers to Chapel and welcome back those who are returning for another year. It’s always a very special date in the academic calendar to welcome new students, staff, fellows, choristers, parents and families who will be sharing life together in this college, of which this Chapel has been a part for generations. The history of this Chapel is nothing without the community it serves, for this building has been focus for people’s prayers, profound life events and worship. It’s story is composed of the many thousands of students, fellows, staff, choristers, parents and visitors of all kinds who have come here and found it a place to be still, or to celebrate or to mourn.

So, tonight I do not wish to give you words of advice for the coming year, or even preach to you about how you should behave or what is expected of you. I wish simply to explore together what it means to be in this place and what it might mean to you in the coming months and years. Because, as I was considering the place of the Chapel in the life of this college I came across those words from Jeremiah from the set lectionary readings for this evening: ‘Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord” and it struck me that they apply directly to the place in which we sit, which was designed, in part, to resemble a temple. To quote from Dr. Gillingham’s guide to the Chapel:

‘If you stand at the very back of the Chapel, you can see that its layout is like an ancient Temple, with its sixteen pillars, pilasters and ornate capitals. The space divides into three: by the door is the ‘antechamber’ (outer Temple court); the middle is the nave (inner court); and the altar end is the chancel (‘holy of holies’). The Chapel’s prototype is the Jewish Temple, whose founder was King David, and whose executor, King Solomon. Walk up to the middle window on the North (left) side to see both David and Solomon in the gold-leaf frieze under the window: Solomon is ahead of David, and he is holding a model of the Temple. Look up to the dome: there four of the most important kings of Jerusalem look down on you: you should be able to David and Solomon there as well, with Hezekiah and Josiah, later reformers of the Jerusalem Temple.
If you now walk back to the antechamber and look around the walls, you’ll see there a good deal of Jewish imagery – the cherubim over the Ark, the seven-branched candlestick, the scrolls of the law and the Ten Commandments – set amidst skins and curtains which make the whole space resemble ancient Israel’s Tent of Meeting.’

So William Burges, in his decoration on the 1860s wished us to imagine ourselves in the Jewish Temple here, and yet so much of the ornate decoration is overtly Christian. It has been described therefore as ‘A Temple Masking a Church’ and perhaps Burges was trying to show us that Jesus is the ‘new temple’, where God meets humanity and this Chapel represents that encounter of the divine with our human lives. So are we in a Church then? The answer is no. As a Chapel we are not under the authority of the Church of England or the Diocese of Oxford, we do not have to pay a parish share because we are not a parish church. If you wish to get married here, you do not have your banns read out as in a parish church, you have to apply for a special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury, for this is, in legal and ecclesiastical terms, a private Chapel, albeit open to the public. For those of you here, it is your chapel, and whenever you return you will be welcomed back.

So what does this place mean to us? In a sense the Chapel is a meeting place like many others in college where communal events happen: the dining hall, the bar, seminar rooms, JCR, MCR, shared kitchens and so on; it is a place where we hear concerts, watch plays and hear talks; it is one of the places in which enhances that sense of community through gathering. Of course, the chapel is a place of worship, day in and day out, where regular services sing the praises of God and many special occasions are marked at wedding and baptism and funerals. At times of sadness the chapel becomes a focus for members of college, perhaps lost in isolation, sorrow or grief, as Philip Larkin wrote in his poem, Church Going:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

But the serious moments are mixed with the light-hearted in the decoration of this Chapel and there is much humour in Burges’ work, reflecting the truth that all life passes through this place and moments of joy and laughter are marked just as moments of sadness. Our community here and this place help each build the identity of the other over time.

But I wish to emphasise another aspect of this building, which I hope you will use in your time here. It is a house of prayer and the spiritual centre of the College. Come here to meditate or to pray, to worship or to reflect, to have some time aside from the frantic busy-ness of term.

This is a place where you do not come to be judged or to judge. It is a space into which you can come just as you are and find acceptance and understanding. It is a room that has been set aside and consecrated, for the past 300 years, and another just like it for many centuries before that, to represent something of the timeless truth of God’s love for us, depicted as it is on the walls of this chapel and in the windows, in the story of Jesus Christ who gave himself for us and gave us an example of Christian living. To use this place takes time and the time we spend here, whether in silent contemplation, as a community, sharing words or listening to music, reflects the truth that, to believe in the faith that this building represents, counter-cultural though that may be in some ways today, is to be part of a body of people, the body of Christ of earth, who have gone before us, and millions more who will come after us. We are only here to dwell in this moment of space and time and encounter the ineffable, inexpressible reality of God. Each time we come here we are challenged and encouraged to look deeper into our faith and our doubts, to discover, once again, a glimpse of the mystery and the glory of God and to take that out into the world so that we may see that God’s redemption is there for all places.

Two weeks ago members of the choir were in the South of France at a specialist music summer school and we were given some coaching by a former singing colleague of mine, Francis, who helped the choir find a deeper level of communication and responsiveness in their singing and to find the essence of what each composer has written on the page of music. But Fran started the session by quoting T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ from his Four Quartets, in order to offer a sense of what the choral music might mean within the Chapel setting and I think it summarises what I want to express tonight so I will share it with you as we start this new academic year together:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Amen.