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We have had some challenging readings this term for the preachers but, given the context of this service, I find myself unwilling to delve the Pauline mysteries of predestination tonight, so here’s another reading:‘Gandalf said, “Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth … and the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West.’I’m sure some of you will know that passage from Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or perhaps have seen the film. Perhaps fewer of you will remember a BBC radio adaptation of the trilogy made over twenty years ago. This thirteen hour marathon is now available on CD and my wife Emma and I sometimes listen to it. But whenever we get to the thirteenth episode, where Frodo departs and says farewell to his friends, Emma will refuse to play the CD, preferring to listen to episode one again rather than hear the end and weep. Endings can indeed be very sad, containing as they must, a sadness of loss, of letting go and of leaving something precious. However, without endings you cannot have beginnings. Along with sadness, there is the excitement and anticipation of a new beginning, a new start. For some here that might mean a new school, with new friends to make, new challenges and changes and growing to maturity and wisdom. For older leavers there is the prospect of further study in a favourite and specialised area, or the tantalising possibility of a new job and earning money. For others till, there is that most wonderful of changes, of starting a new family.But I am not underestimating the challenge and anxiety of change. In Garsington one member of our congregation is an eminent psychologist and, as he was asking us about how we were settling into our new home this year, we were chatting about the psychological stress of the big changes of life: marriage, divorce, bereavement and so on. Two of those big changes were moving house and changing jobs. I asked: ‘So really you would recommend not doing too many of these events too close together then.’ ‘Well yes, he said, for good mental health I would recommend trying to space out big changes in life.’ I wondered if he would like to recommend this as a policy to the Church of England or an Oxford College.It is only to be expected therefore, that the prospect of change for anybody here provokes a mixture of emotions, some of which are comfortable and some of which are not. Therefore, I’d like to offer two thoughts, which I hope will be of reassurance. Firstly, that certainly in the short time that I have known many of you here, not only through this year but also from the summer of 2006 when I was acting chaplain, that you are very precious people, who do good work and sacrifice much for the good of others, often under difficult circumstances, and not least for this college and chapel. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to know you. And, for once, the words of St. Paul come to mind from 1 Philippians:‘I thank my God, every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy for all of you. And this is my prayer, that love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help determine what is best.’Secondly, we have the reassurance that, whatever the changes ahead, you do not go alone for Christ goes with you. I am sure many of you know Mary Stevenson’s poem, footprints in the sand, but it is worth repeating:One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only.This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord,“You promised me Lord,that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?”The Lord replied, “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.”And so, as you journey onward, we ask forgiveness where we have failed you; we give thanks for all you have given us; we assure you of our love and prayers. As you experience the pain of change, and the insecurity of moving on, we pray that you may also experience the blessing of inner growth. And, as you meet the poor, the pained, and the stranger on the way, we pray that you may see in each one the face of Christ. As you walk through the good times and the bad, we pray that you may never lose sight of the shelter of God’s loving arms and that the peace of Christ may reign in your heart.Amen.

Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain
14th June 2009

A schoolboy puzzling over the doctrine of the Trinity suggested to his teacher that it was like three men travelling in one car. He was pleased with his analogy, but the teacher thought about it for a few minutes and replied that it was not so much three men in one car as one man in three cars. So that’s all clear then. The teacher wasn’t being perverse. The Trinity is notoriously difficult to understand – but then, as Augustine points out: ‘if you can comprehend it, it is not God’. Alister McGrath suggests that the doctrine of the Trinity can be seen ‘as a safeguard against simplistic or reductionist approaches to God, which inevitably end up by robbing God of mystery, majesty, and glory.’ Preaching on Pentecost Sunday, I’m glad about this. I can now assure you that my failure, in this sermon, to explain the significance of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity will be motivated purely by my desire to preserve in your minds the mystery of the divine. (Ahem). The passage from Acts which is the New Testament reading this evening is the dull bit of the account of Pentecost. In the twenty-one preceding verses, we’ve had violent winds, tongues of fire on the apostles’ heads, miraculous speaking in foreign tongues, and the Apostle Peter’s invocation of Joel’s prophecies – the sun turned to darkness and the moon turned to blood. But here Luke, the writer of Acts, takes a change of direction, turning to a historical narrative, putting into Peter’s mouth three verses summarizing the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This narrative is not obviously connected with the events of Pentecost which surround it: commentators suggest that Luke incorporates some traditional material at this point. For we are not, of course, to think that Luke here inscribes word-for-word the first Pentecostal sermon, recorded by some far-sighted friend with good shorthand: rather we know that he records the pattern and message of that sermon which, scholars have noted, is a common pattern and message of Christological proclamations recorded in Acts. It is an oddly matter-of-fact narrative, and yet Peter’s message is later said to have brought three thousand to faith. How does it do this? The speech is very simple in what it has to say about Christ, much simpler than many passages in Paul’s writings, for example. Firstly, Jesus was a man, and he was a man marked out, or accredited, by God who performed miracles through him: secondly, you put him to death: thirdly, God raised him from death ‘because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.’ There is no statement about Christ as Son of God; no assertion of Christ’s nature as divine or sinless; no discussion of Christ’s death as salvific through sacrifice or atonement. Instead, there is a simple, stark contrast drawn between God’s purpose and the actions of the listening ‘Men of Israel’ who put Christ to death: though they knew of the miracles God worked through him, they did not appreciate their significance; they did not grasp that death could not hold Christ, and so they killed him.But, the Book of Acts declares, ‘God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.’ And then there is the jump to a quotation from the Psalms, in which David writes that ‘you will not abandon me to the grave’. What is this about? We all know that David died. ‘I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried and his tomb is here to this day’, says Peter. An immediate, human understanding of David’s words is deceptive – the words appear to be a lie. But David was a prophet, and he perceived things in a different way: seeing what was ahead, he ‘spoke of the resurrection of Christ.’ This passage of the speech also, then, draws attention to the gap between human understanding, and divine purpose and perception. The speech which Luke records Peter delivering at Pentecost does not extrapolate on the complexities of the Holy Spirit’s position within the Trinity, or come anywhere close to Paul’s sophisticated development of the doctrine of atonement. Simply, it emphasizes the gulf which separates our feeble misunderstandings from divine reality. The Men of Israel ‘know’ Christ’s miracles (v.22), and now ‘see and hear’ the effects of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the disciples’ preaching in tongues. But even though, as the witnesses of Pentecost declare, miraculously ‘each of us hears them in his own native language’, they recognize the words but not the meaning. The speech recounted in Acts does not entirely explain what Christ was, but it makes clear that he has now become ‘Lord and Christ’, and so highlights the dramatic nature of the error of those who did not appreciate his significance. C.K. Barrett writes: ‘It is presumably the reminder, uttered in this context, that you crucified this Jesus, that pricks the conscience of the hearers.’ The realisation of error – of the gap between human and divine perception – and of the awful violence resulting – achieves repentance, conversion. ‘About three thousand were added to their number that day.’ One of the most alarming and also most exhilarating things about studying is the daily realization of new depths of ignorance in oneself. The more we read, the more we discover new fields of knowledge, the very existence of which we may not previously have suspected, and which we then long to explore: and exploring this new field will hint at other, unsuspected fields, so that we are more and more extensively ignorant. Sometimes new learning adds up, but more often it modifies, challenges, or even reverses previous learning – and this too can be exhilarating. As the scientist Valentine, in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, puts it: ‘It’s the very best time to be alive, when everything you thought you knew is wrong.’ And yet we often resist being wrong. Because we think being right is what makes us valuable, we will argue endlessly to prove our point, even when we ourselves feel it becoming indefensible. I undertook, to some of you present, not to discuss a certain matter of expenses which has been dominating the headlines of late, so here I will simply suggest that defending the indefensible sometimes seem to be an art form in Parliament. I fear that academics might be able to give MPs a run for their money, too!‘It’s the very best time to be alive, when everything you thought you knew is wrong’ – how liberating it would be to believe that! How liberating it was for those who heard Peter’s preaching, at Pentecost, to realize that they were wrong – not suddenly to understand all the divine mysteries, or to grasp the complexities of soteriology, but just to know that God’s point of view was different, and bigger and better. The experience was not pain-free – Luke tells us they were ‘cut to the heart’, but that heart-piercing was itself witness that God had fulfilled his promise, made through Ezekiel in this evening’s Old Testament reading: ‘I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’ And then they were able to turn to God in a new way of knowing: the word which is translated as ‘Repent’ is rather richer in the Greek, meaning something like ‘Embrace a new view of things.’ So let’s embrace the idea that we are likely to be wrong, and that we are unlikely ever to know anything much fully and completely. But let’s remember too that this is not an excuse for intellectual idleness or passivity. We cannot appreciate our intellectual fallibility unless we ask more questions, with more energy – for if we stop questioning we start to think we know, and then we become credulous of the lies or deceptive half-truths which are for example, daily pedaled in the racist, sexist, ageist trash of the tabloids and more than occasionally broadsheets, too. And we must question like Piglet’s friends, in Winnie the Pooh. When concerned that Piglet might have been blown away by a very strong wind, Eeyore explains that people will start to ask questions: ‘People will ask, ‘Where’s little Piglet been blown to?’ – Really wanting to know!’

Dr. Elisabeth Dutton, Worcester College
31st May 2009

There is – or was – a curious small painting on display at Wimpole Hall, a slightly Soanic house run by the National Trust in Cambridgeshire. The canvas depicts a group of people in classical dress and pose, more or less in a chariot, ascending through the clouds into the heavens. Slightly to my surprise this is entitled ‘The Apotheosis of the Family of George III’; I suspect painted to commemorate the king’s jubilee in 1810. Sure enough there is the principal character, King George at the height of his powers, presiding over a family more familiar to us for their failings. Contrary to general reputation, not least among Americans, George III was widely loved and when he died, deaf, blind and mad, he was profoundly mourned. King George was religious – he would not, for example receive Communion shortly before seeing his ministers because he would be in too bad, too impious a mood. But the same cannot be said for his children; the dissolute and feckless Regent and his variously compromised brothers and frustrated, dessicated sisters. Perhaps the painting is not hinting at conspicuous virtue but at the dynastic triumph of the Hanoverians. An anti-Jacobite icon which the owners of Wimpole would have been proud to display.Yet the idea of immediate access to the heavenly places is not so unlike the contemporary conviction, noted by me at countless funerals over the years, that departed loved ones can be assured of a place in heaven, because their virtues and sufferings will be remembered and their sins quite forgotten – by whom I am not sure. I hazard that the desire for secular funerals may prove less than strong (they are invariably more expensive), because it denies belief in heaven, even if that belief is seemingly aside from any confidence in God. I have seldom encountered a bereaved person who doubted that virtue, however modest, would be rewarded.It is of course rather difficult for us to divorce the feast of the Ascension of Christ, the return of Jesus to his heavenly home, from its rather colourful spatial imagery, even if it is somewhat unsatisfactory both scientifically and theologically. Theologically, because it can look like a curious species of victory, a reward for virtue if you like; a rather tidy wrapping up in an albeit amazing homecoming. The Ascension of Jesus, which we celebrate today, may seem unusually like the confirmation of courage and virtue; the final scene in the drama of his birth, self-giving life, brave death and victorious resurrection – a signal statement that for all his rejection and isolation upon the Cross, he was, if we had but realized it, the Lord of our worlds. In this view the celebration of Ascension is a tribute to the return of Jesus to his rightful place in the heavenly realms, after his painful sojourn upon the earth; a restoration of the rightful order – God in his heaven and all well. And this rather spatial view of the Ascension lies behind some quasi-liturgical traditions. Did we sing an Ascension carol from the top of a College Chapel tower because now Jesus would hear better? Do the Spaniards throw a donkey off a tower to prove that if God has gone up, the rest of creation certainly hasn’t? – a practice I believe now outlawed! Are fireworks let off so that Jesus can now spot them? Curious and harmless.At its worst the Ascension, in its spatial suggestion, plays to some of our less happy notions of power and patronage; of a God who invariably looks down, condescends and probably judges – as if those dangerous and dramatic days of passion had taught the Godhead nothing. Of course we should not ignore some of the rich ambivalence of the imagery of power in Christian iconography. In Spain there is a particular devotion, popular in the south, but elsewhere as well, of Jesus, bound and trussed like a lamb and vested in a gorgeous purple coat, head held down and awaiting the weight of the cross. In many places this statue is known as Jesus del Gran Poder – Jesus of Great Power; a sort of irony, because at one level it is the moment of Jesus’ least power – gone the supporters and the crowds and the palm branches; alone, silent and judged within the limitations of a humanity he shares. There is another image which you may perhaps know – that of Our Lady of Pew in the Henry V11 (or Lady) chapel in Westminster Abbey; of a medieval origin when ‘pew’ was, I have learned, perhaps an abbreviation for ‘puissance’ (although on this the OED is silent). A pew I take it is not really a seat for the likes of me, but was originally for a person of some quality or unique dignity (hence the historic readiness to pay pew rents in our parish churches!) –derived from puissance, powerful. Our Lady of Power then, as Jesus of Great Power. But this, I venture is not the naked power of arms and authority, but the power of influence – the power which belongs to some one of particular standing with others. The power of those who have perhaps recommended themselves by their actions or their heredity; a power which, quite simply is credible to others; power which as our political lords have discovered lately is not easily recovered once lost. Jesus is puissant, not because of his political strength or supernatural energy (which largely he rejected), but because in his life, suffering and death he has recommended himself to us. His influence with us is not that of a master who cajoles or a prince who commands or a ruler who coerces, but of a brother who understands the test and humiliation of living. The Ascension should not be seen to subvert this.But for all our nervousness about spatial imagery, we should not deny that Christian believing has its own cosmology, in the sense that some thinkers write of all cultures as having a cosmology. I am indebted to Hans Engdahl, of the University of Cape Town, who has made some intriguing parallels between Christian liturgy and the fashioning of the worlds in which we live by imagination and fact. He suggests that those who worship are cosmologically transformed; we see our cities differently and we have an altered relationship with the natural world. In particular – from his own context – he argues that in the face of apartheid Churches in South Africa remained miserably passive and in practice adopted segregation legislation – mirroring a cosmology not the Church’s own; only now are they discovering once again that the Church is a place where the world must be viewed differently. There are of course similar risks in those parts of Britain and other European nations where the Churches are heavily wedded to the State. Engdahl warns especially against the false cosmologies represented by first, hierarchical leadership and secondly the liturgical assembly as a closed circle. More usually we would talk about this as ‘ecclesiology’, but I value the term ‘cosmology’ as suggestive of the fact that how we view our life together as disciples in community is really about more than just practical and historical features of order and discipline, but rather how we view the orientation of life and our world (and not just the Church) now that we know Jesus.The Ascension plays to these themes. For we could imagine that if Christ has ascended into the heavens then a top-down order of governance and power is both ordained and endorsed, as if the Christ in heaven is not that same Jesus who washed feet on the night before he died. This is a typically Catholic dilemma. There is a kindred dilemma by which we imagine that Christ is uniquely available to those who believe, and have received the sacramental marks of faith and justification, as if in his Ascension, Jesus has not shown that he is present equally in each place, in every age and to all communities. That is the Protestant dilemma. There is a distressing tendency for Anglican churches to display photographs or snap shots of the parish clergy and the entire congregation as a means of welcome – thus turning the church into an enclosure, into which people wander with difficulty – what is intended as affirming to those inside, will be interpreted quite other by those not yet in.By contrast American priest friends of mine have come to a position whereby they will not deny the sacrament of the Eucharist to anyone who presents themselves at the rail, whether regularly initiated or not, thus asserting that the community is open and that the sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood may itself be a sacrament of entry. All of this I might add is yet done on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ basis.The promise of heaven which the Ascension denotes is in fact, as Augustine noted, nothing more or less than the confirmation that Jesus ministry was effective; his living, dying and rising worked; it was puissant. I believe that John Updike, in a poem I have yet to read – and written just before his recent death – posited that we would be better off to have heaven at the beginning rather than at the end of our lives; thereby perhaps drawn into virtue by what has been known, rather than what is promised. I get the point, yet for Christians the Ascension asserts that we must order our lives and imagine a cosmos only by the drama of the passion and resurrection of Jesus – thus and no other.

Rev’d George Bush, St. Mary-le-Bow, London,
24th May 2009

A sermon preached in Worcester College Chapel, Oxford, 17 May 2009So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I shall spew thee out of my mouth (Rev. 3:16)If ever you visit Norwich Cathedral, spend a few minutes away from the obvious delights of the building and go to the north transept. There you will find a statue of Bishop Henry Bathurst. The statue is an image of a particular kind of holiness. The bishop sits with his bewigged head inclined: his hands rest peacefully in his lap. He was a man who served his diocese long and carefully and who shot a cock pheasant at Holkham Hall on his 80th birthday, in 1824. His lifestyle was one which the excitements of the high-church Oxford Movement and the evangelical revival taught people to sneer at and, indeed, it was already under suspicion in his own day. His was a reasonable, rather than an emotional Christianity, of the undemonstrative kind that permeates the poems of his East Anglian contemporary, George Crabbe. The faith of Bathurst and his contemporaries in the early nineteenth century is still with us and it is still suspected of letting the side down by its coolness and detachment. It may be that something needs to be said in its defence; that a word needs to be put in for the Laodiceans.For such a faith as Bishop Bathurst’s really is a faith. People who share it also share what might be called the guilt of faith. This is the guilt that we are not making as big a splash as others, as big a bang of confrontation – not pushing as hard or making so much noise. How lucky are those who know what the Christian faith is all about and who can stand up and proclaim it loud and long! How inadequate we feel when we listen to them, knowing that we cannot give the same firm answers, or the same level of commitment. Yet it may be the Christian duty to explore the possibilities of a believing life which is less concerned with exciting happenings and ideological achievements than many Christians are at the moment – making the rest of us feel a little unserious and light-weight.Passionate and outspoken commitment to particular causes is not the monopoly of religious people, of course. I am often made aware during election campaigns, for example, of the similarities between the language and imagery of some political parties and the language and imagery of some churches. Both seem to be saying, ‘If you want to be saved, join us. If you have any intelligence at all you can’t possibly be taken in by the alternative solutions. Ours is the only way forward: we are the children of light.’ It all reminds me of the preacher’s note to himself in the margin of his sermon: ‘Argument weak – shout like hell.’We are suspicious of the language and posturing of confrontational politics and confrontational religion because something about them makes us feel uneasy. People are never fanatically dedicated to something they have complete confidence in. No-one is going around shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow: we know it is going to rise tomorrow. Or look at it the other way round. You are flying on an aircraft across the Atlantic. Every five minutes or so the pilot comes on the intercom to say that the flight is going smoothly and that everything is perfectly all right. After half an hour you’d be getting pretty worried!The give-away sign of this kind of fanaticism is its possessiveness. The fanatic hugs his or her concern to themselves so tightly that the distance between them and it is abolished. That is why you cannot reason with a fanatic: there is no space to reason in, simply no room. On a trivial level, that is why I was never able to convince my school friends that the football team I supported was so much better than the ones they followed; not even when my lot won the league championship and the F.A. Cup in successive years – 1964 and 1965, if you’re interested. The person who has that level of absolute commitment to a cause or idea is led into confusion in the literal sense of the word. The individual is swallowed up by the cause and the capacity for individual judgement and response is damaged and, in extreme cases, destroyed. And this can have worrying political and social consequences. The more you are committed to a particular cause, the higher become the stakes of success or failure, the more you have to clamp down on criticism of your objective, and the less freedom you give to individuals and groups to form and express their own opinions.Faith is different. Distance and space are part of its structure. That is why it allows reason: distance and space are essential for reason too. The bible begins with God creating the world. That is something quite different from possessing or being the world, on the one hand, and having nothing whatever to do with it, on the other. By letting the world be, by himself creating the distance between himself and it as his first great indispensible work, God makes the original act of faith and sets the pattern of his creation’s response to him. The picture here is not of a God who imposes his creation upon us and makes up all the rules in advance, but of a God who depends on our co-operation with him in the ordering and running of that creation: a God who even stands back, who hides himself, so that we will have the space and freedom in which to operate.The faithful response of the creation – which includes us – to this kind of a creator consists of two things which belong together. The first is the obedient exploiting of the independence he has given it by getting on with its business. The second is never to confuse any of this with God himself, even in its religious aspects. Faith says, ‘we are unworthy servants, we have only done our duty’ – our ‘reasonable service’, as the prayer book so aptly puts it. We get on with our responsibilities but are quite clear that they are just that – not God, but responses to him. We are not called to make a choice between God and the world. Rather, we are to affirm both, and in fellowship with our creator enjoy his creation, whose true order is ours to discover and proclaim.For Bishop Bathurst, in his unassuming way, life was all of a piece. Whether as a faithful pastor and teacher, a husband and father, a lover of literature, or a supporter of the less fortunate in contemporary society, all was grist to his mill. One of the last acts of his long ministry was to go to the House of Lords at the age of 90, to cast his vote in support of Lord Melbourne’s reforming government. Bathurst recognised the truth of St Paul’s discovery, towards the end of his life, that ‘all things cohere in Christ.’It is this Christ who shows in our world the graciousness of the God, who, in Thomas Traherne’s words, ‘courts our love with infinite esteem.’ We celebrate the new life he brings, not with raucous proclamations and agitated concern, but with quiet and watchful confidence, alert to the signs of the kingdom of God in our midst.Christopher CunliffeArchdeacon of Derby

Ven. Dr. Christopher Cunliffe, Archdeacon of Derby
17th May 2009

At first sight and first reading Revelation is a very peculiar book. There’s nothing else quite like it in the New Testament, or in the Scriptures as a whole, with the possible exception of the second part of Daniel. We are therefore not used to this style of writing and to the conventions of apocalyptic literature, with its careful structures, literary devices, symbols and images. If we dip into Revelation as unwary readers we may find that it consists of the kind of lurid dreams and visions that may stand as a warning against eating cheese just before going to bed. I’m glad, therefore, that the reading appointed for this evening doesn’t take us into the stranger parts of the book. They have been a happy hunting ground for interpreters ranging from the harmlessly eccentric to the frankly certifiable. We are asked instead to address ourselves to a couple of the letters with which the book opens. Revelation is a kind of circular letter with seven different introductions, each one tailored for a particular Christian community in Asia Minor, probably towards the end of the first Christian century. So we’re going to look briefly at the letters to Sardis and Philadelphia, but before we do, let me quickly introduce those two places to you.Sardis was a famous city in the Ancient World, the city of the legendary King Croesus, whose fabulous wealth rested partly on local gold deposits and partly on the position of Sardis at a junction of important trade routes. Badly damaged by an earthquake in AD 17 and rebuilt by the Romans, Sardis was a powerful and populous city, maybe two thirds of the size of modern Oxford. It was a place with an influential Jewish community and one with an impressive reputation.Philadephia, about thirty miles from Sardis, was an altogether less imposing place. Flattened in AD 17 by the same earthquake as Sardis and then rebuilt, it suffered such regular tremors that the geographer Strabo reported that fresh cracks appeared daily in the city walls and few people actually dared to live in the city itself. Philadelphia depended on agriculture for its prosperity, particularly on the cultivation of vines, and it has been suggested that this was under threat at the end of the first century because the Roman government had decreed the destruction of provincial vineyards to boost grain production. Philadelphia, then, may have been an anxious place.Two cities. Near neighbours, but very different in culture, character, confidence and reputation. And the church in each place reflects its particular context.One theme running through the seven letters in Revelation 2 and 3 is the injunction: ‘Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.’ So, what is the Spirit saying, to these particular churches, and to the Church as a whole, and to the churches we ourselves know best? Let me suggest four messages, one each to those contrasting communities of Sardis and Philadelphia, and two to both churches. We’ll start with the specifics.First, then, in the letter to Sardis, with all its wealth and power, a warning to the self-satisfied. ‘I know your works; you have a name for being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains.’ (3:1, 2). The church in Sardis, like the city itself, seemingly has a high reputation. It looks good, and is well spoken of, but it fails to deliver. Its reputation is a carefully crafted pretence, a façade concealing a disappointing reality. It reminds me of a church in East Anglia I used to visit, with a pretentious Classical portico in stone tacked on to a building of cheap brick. Unfortunately, the job hadn’t been well done, and the stone portico was gradually falling away from the rest of the building. In a world of spin and poise – or should that be pose? – God is concerned with our inner selves, with the sincerity of our faith, our obedience and our love. That’s what matters. And if we’ve slipped away from that, we need to wake up and to repent, to turn around and go back to where we ought to be. However good we look, God isn’t taken in.Second, in the letter to Philadelphia, with its wobbly walls and shaky economy, an encouragement to the faithful under pressure. ‘Look, I have set before you an open door, which no-one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.’ (3:8). It seems that the Philadelphian Christians are a small group, and perhaps in conflict with a well-established Jewish community in the city. Whatever the precise details, there are people around making life difficult for the Christians and pressurising them to abandon their loyalty to Jesus Christ. That story has been repeated in every age of the Church, and it isn’t at all unusual today for Christians to feel out of step with the general drift and tone of society. Pressure to conform, to let the world squeeze us into its mould, in Paul’s phrase (Romans 12:2) is strong and pervasive. This letter encourages us to recognise the pressure and to resist it, confident in God’s presence, power and love.Third, in both letters, a reminder of the challenge of discipleship. All seven letters share a reference to ‘the one who conquers’: maybe an athletic metaphor, but more likely a military one. Christian discipleship isn’t a pleasant afternoon stroll: it’s a struggle. It means living a counter-cultural lifestyle, and resisting external pressure, as we’ve seen. It also means self-discipline: cultivating a pattern of prayer, Bible study, worship and fellowship and developing a sensitivity which can detect and sidestep temptation. These qualities don’t come naturally. Sometimes they may seem easy and straightforward, but at other times we may find that prayer is a chore, the Bible a closed book, worship uninspiring and other Christians a pain in the neck. Then it’s hard work. The closest I got to rowing when I was an undergraduate was living next door to someone who went out at what seemed to me like the middle of the night to practise. I had a sneaking admiration for his commitment, even though I didn’t want to do it myself. Sometimes as disciples of Jesus Christ we need that sort of determination, and it’s hard.Fourth, and finally, the promise of belonging. Someone has said that Revelation is a book full of graffiti. Time and again John speaks of things written: in books, on scrolls, on gates and foundation stones and even on people. The Christians in Sardis have their names written in the book of life, a heavenly version of the roll of citizens common in the cities of the Hellenistic world. The Philadephians go one better: they are personally inscribed with the name of God and the name of the New Jerusalem. The point is that they belong. They are known and accepted by God. Their standing is secure. As Christian people we are already citizens of the New Jerusalem. Our calling and our joy is to live up to what we are.There is warning here, and encouragement; a reminder of the challenges we face, and an assurance that faithful discipleship confirms our place as citizens of heaven. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. So be it. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Martin Wellings, Wesley Memorial Church, Oxford
10th May 2009

Today, as many of you will know, is the Sunday known as Good Shepherd Sunday. I don’t know about you, but I find that shepherds and sheep don’t generally loom very large on the horizons of my life. It’s a shame: it’s not often realised quite how much sheep resent the lack of interest that human beings show in them. Do you remember, for instance, when it was reported a couple of years ago that scientists had discovered how to clone sheep? They were going to be able to create tens of thousands of identical sheep. Even the sheep’s mothers weren’t going to be able to tell them apart. They were going to look the same, bleat in the same way, smell the same, talk about the same things, support the same football teams, wear identical clothes, watch the same television programmes, have the same opinions about everything, and so on. The story broke on the Ten o’clock News; and all over the country sheep drinking their Ovaltine burst out into wild celebration as they realised that the morning papers were going to be full of the story – perhaps even with interviews and photographs of some famous sheep. At last humans would have to take sheep seriously. But it was a different story when they actually saw the morning papers. The Times led with the headline, “Hitler Superman fears revived by Frankenstein scientists”. The Guardian had “No woolly thinking pledge by ethical dilemma genetic engineers”. The Sun’s headline was, “My day with Posh Spice’, by kiss-and-tell weightlifter.” Nowhere was there any hint that anyone had considered what the news might mean for sheepdom.And really, I suppose, that’s about how it is with humans and sheep. We don’t have a lot of time for them. They don’t seem to have minds of their own. They need to be led. They constantly fall prey to parasite worms and maggots; if they haven’t got sheep scab or scrapie; if they’re not finding some poisonous plant or rolling onto their back, then you can be sure that they’re wandering off into the path of a fox or dog or some other predator. As a farmer once told me, “A sheep is an animal looking for a reason to die.”And yet this is so unfair to the sheep. The sheep is an animal that we should never underestimate. Sheep may not be the brightest of God’s creatures; and yet there is probably no other animal in the world which is so completely useful. In addition to its wool for clothing, meat for food, hoof horn and bone for fertiliser and lanoline for ointment and cosmetics, the sheep gives fresh life to the soil, turns grass into protein by natural feeding quicker and better than any other animal, and under good management provides the farmer with a satisfying livelihood.And that’s why, in the Old Testament, God’s people are referred to as the sheep of his pasture. For the nomads and Patriarchs of Israel’s primitive years, sheep were the most valuable possession. They were walking wealth; something to be cherished; something to be valued; something by which a man’s worth was measured. Nothing was more important than to protect your sheep properly; no other kind of work gave a better return. Shepherds were consequential and responsible people: Moses and King David were both called away from their flocks to play their part in the destiny of the Nation. So it was natural that people should be described as the people of God’s pasture and the flock of his hand.And what we celebrate today is Christ’s affirmation of his role in the Christian’s life as our shepherd. “I am the Good Shepherd, and I know my flock and am known by mine.’ I am the Good Shepherd”; or, more idiomatically perhaps; “The Good Shepherd is me.” Christ finds good pasture for his people; he protects his sheep from thieves who come to steal, to kill, to destroy; he defends them from the attacks of wolves that harry the flock and scatter the sheep.Why does he do this? Well, don’t say this too close to a sheep, but he has an end in view for them. An economic end. He wants a return from them. Christ’s parables are much more often about business than about prayer. Next week we’ll be hearing about a vine that doesn’t give good grapes, that provides a bad return to the one who planted it. Somewhere else we hear about a fig tree that was threatened with being axed because it failed to bear fruit; we hear about people being given money to invest and being sacked if they don’t make a decent profit. And it’s the same with sheep. Sheep are about wool, about mutton. It’s all about sitting on a plate next to a spoonful of redcurrant jelly. That’s the return a shepherd gets for his work, that’s why the owner has invested in his sheep. And mark my words a return is expected of us. We’re being fattened up to be the body of Christ in the world. We’re here to do his works, to love his love, to work with him in bringing in his kingdom. And if we’re going to do that we have to be kept together; and we have to be fed.The role of the shepherd in Christ’s world was to protect the flock, keep it together, and ensure it was fed. Remember Palestine is a dry country; vegetation is sparse and slow-growing for most of the year. A flock has to move on quickly to pastures new when there is nothing left to feed on. That’s where the idea comes from that the shepherd is a leader. But for most of the time the shepherd is ensuring that the flock is being fed and watered. Pasco pascere pavi pastum, to feed. The pastor is the one who feeds you. My flesh is meat indeed, said Jesus; my blood is your true drink. You cannot live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. A balanced diet of word and sacrament.And what’s all this for? What end does the great shepherd have inmind for us?Let’s look at that word end. The word end is something we hear a lot of in the Bible. Christ loved his own and loved them to the end. I am with you until the end, he said to his disciples. The end can sound quite frightening sometimes, straing as it does with earthquakes and wars and rumours of wars and goijg on to plagues and angels and the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Some people prayed that God would make the end short. But the end is the whole point, and we need to take it on board. It’s often hidden in the translations from the Greek, and we need to search it out. It’s the same word as perfection, completeness: be perfect, even as God is perfect, means ‘be people of the end, even as God is of the end’. All things returning to perfection, to endfulness, through him from whom they took their origin. Returning to perfection, returning to endfulness – this strange nostalgia for the future by which Christians sense the purposes of God’s creation.The purpose of God’s creation is the end. And we have the option of working with God towards that end or not.The word that Paul uses in one of his letters in synergy, and let’s never forget that synergy is a Christian word. We can choose to work with God or not – we can choose to live in all abundance or to tread the paths of futility and decay. We can choose to rebel, we can choose to do it our own way and see where it gets us. We’ve got free will, we can choose to reject God’s purpose, to turn our backs on what he asks of us. We can choose to walk in light or to walk in darkness.Or we can be seduced by the world. Because the world may have other plans for us. Did you see what Susan Greenfield said about young people last week? ‘We are rearing a generation who are in danger of becoming emotionally stunted, inarticulate hedonists, with the attention span of a gnat.’ How do you feel about that? What they’re blaming is consumerism; and the economists are coming right back and saying don’t blame capitalism, it’s not inherently evil, and if you don’t like it why don’t you see if you can come up with something better?I don’t want to make this a long sermon, but I want to say something about consumerism. When I was young Erich Fromm wrote a book called to have or to be. The idea was that we were turning away from love, from relationship, from the pleasure of being alive and purely existing, and getting our kicks from the things we own. That may have been true once, but things have moved on. Perhaps that was maetrialsim, but we’ve moved on from that. Consumerism is a next setp. Because when you buy something you’ve become economically inert. If you buy a car, you’re not likely to buy another one for some years, so you’re no use any more. The market isn’t getting your money, Revenue and Customs aren’t collecting any VAT from you. So you have to be persuaded to buy again, and again; to be dissatisfied with what you have so that you can satisfy the demands of the market. This can become the purpose of your life. Just as a Bible loses its proper purpose if it’s used to prop up a broken piano leg; just as a beautiful grand piano loses its purpose if you keep it closed and just use it for displaying photos; so you can devote your life to being a consumer. We can refuse our high calling as the children of God and devote all our energy to consuming, filling our garbage cans and consuming again. Humans can live the life of cattle, Aristotle said, and that’s how it goes. And what goes for cattle, I suppose, goes for sheep as well.Because you can lead a sheep to grass; but you can’t make it eat. The sheep have to want the food and drink that’s on offer; they have to be willing to be fattened up; they have to accept the calling to be part of the flock that is asked to give a return for its investor. God didn’t make his promises to blocks of wood, said St John Chrysostom; we have to be prepared to acknowledge our hunger, to open our mouths, to accept the feeding that is offered. It is open for us to refuse our calling, or neglect it; we can decline to stand just a little lower than the angels, and revert to being creatures of appetite and passion.Every minute of every day that choice is ours. Become a mere consumer or follow on to glory.Lord, as you have called us to your service, make us worthy of our calling. In the name of Jesus Christ, our shepherd and our great High Priest. Amen.

Rev. John Paton, Precentor Christ Church
3rd May 2009

I,like many people this week, have been mesmerised by the accounts of Barack Obama’s inauguration. The whole event was captivating for so many reasons: such as the sense of hope in the air; the apparent defeat of the ghosts of racism in the USA and a sense of renewed purpose in global relations. Alongside all of these for me, however, was the incredible sight of over a million people gathered in Washington drawn to celebrate but also to give voice to a deep hunger for peace, for change and for a better world. One of Barack Obama’s talents seems to be to awaken in people a hunger for something deeper and more nourishing that the current political scene has been able to provide.
It is striking, therefore, to read this evening’s gospel reading with this great crowd in mind. Here, almost immediately, we meet another crowd who were also following a leader and whose whole discussion with Jesus — which reached its famous culmination with the words ‘I am the bread of life’ – was also about hunger. John’s crowd, excited by the feeding of the five thousand, that came just before this in John’s gospel sought out Jesus in the hope of something more. What they seemed to be hoping for was a steady supply of miraculous food; no wonder they were drawn by the thought of miraculous bread that would last forever – the ultimate in long-life bead.
The ensuing conversation between Jesus and the crowd, as so often in John’s gospel, led to layer upon layer of confusion. It seem that the author of John’s gospel like all the best comic writers knew that the profoundest truths can often be communicated best by people getting the wrong end of the stick over and over again. After an extensive amount of Jesus talking about one thing and the people thinking he is talking about another, eventually Jesus reveals that what he is really talking about is himself: not something that you can carry off, hide in a cupboard and use for your own advantage, but something that provides eternally lasting nourishment and refreshment.
An intriguing part of John’s narrative is the words that he uses for bread. The bread that Jesus provided in the feeding of the five thousand was barley bread, which was, by all accounts, the worst possible quality bread. It was made from the cheapest grain and often contained grit and other substances that wore people’s teeth away and made it very difficult to digest. The bread he talks about here when he declared that he is the ‘bread of life’, is a different kind of bread – the best you can get. Not only will this bread last for ever, it is the tastiest, most nourishing kind of bread you can possibly hope to find.
What Jesus really seems to be challenging the crowd to think about is what it is that nourishes them. They became excited and pursued Jesus after experiencing poor quality, hard to digest bread the nourishment of which would soon pass, causing them to be hungry again. What Jesus was trying to show the crowd was that even their most exaggerated vision of what they might have was too small, too narrow and ultimately unsatisfying. Jesus was trying to get them to see – and to choose – an entirely different kind of nourishment: the best quality, eternally lasting, deeply nourishing kind.
Of course the problem is that then as now, people – myself included – are notoriously bad at choosing good quality nourishment. Given an entirely free choice of food, despite the fact that I know its bad for me, has no lasting value and positive negative qualities I will time and time again choose a piece of chocolate cake rather than a piece of fruit. It is an odd quirk of the human make-up that most of us seem almost congenitally unable to choose those things that are best for us. Even saying that phrase — ‘best for us’ — makes me feel overwhelmed by the desire to rush out and choose something inappropriate.
So often that which we think we need, is comforting for a while but quickly passes to leave a sense of deep emptiness which just grows and grows. What the crowd thought they most needed was physical nourishment; what Jesus was trying to get them to see was that there are deeper and greater needs even than food.
Of course the problem is, that if we take this passage too literally, we end up with a deeply unhealthy attitude – this passage, among others, can be seen to lead to what Rudolph Bell memorably and disturbingly called Holy Annorexia – the tendency, particularly but not exclusively among women, to fast to the point of death as a result of their Christian faith. This is not what Jesus means here: the sustenance that Jesus provides is not instead of normal food but over and beyond it. The nourishment that Jesus offers fills the hunger and thirst that lies deep down at the very core of many of our beings.
In a sense, the world in which we live is a living, breathing testimony to this fact. We have, in fact, invented long-life bread, and meat and vegetables, and fruit and almost any other nourishment we might hope to find. Technically it is no longer necessary for anyone to be malnourished – though it is the tragedy of our age that we have the means but not the capacity to ensure the nourishment of everyone.
Reading the Newspapers and watching the news this week, reinforces Jesus’ point. Even in these worrying, cash limited, financially concerning times, most people in Britain have enough food to eat and enough water to drink…and yet we find ourselves to be a nation of people malnourished by too much food, addicted to self-destructive life-styles, driven to borrow and spend far more than we can sustain. Statistics show that 20% of people will suffer depression at some point in their life. Now I’m not trying to suggest, in a facile and saccharine way, that Jesus will solve your problems and make you happy.
Instead, what I think that Jesus was trying to draw our attention to is this deeper question about nourishment. We, like the crowd that followed Jesus, seem to give so much of our attention to activities that cannot with the best will in the world fill the gnawing, nagging hungers deep within. To return to Barack Obama for a moment, in his autobiography, Dreams from my Father, Obama talked about his time in Chicago as a community organiser and the importance of the task of helping people to work out what it is that they really need. I think that the genius of Obama is that he has not lost this skill and seems to be adept at drawing out what American society, and indeed the world as a whole, might need.
To those people gathered to welcome Obama this week, to the crowd who pursued Jesus with such passion, and to us here this evening two questions resound
– what is it that makes you achingly and yearningly hungry?
And
– what might fill your need?
Barack Obama is clear that he, alone cannot provide the world’s answers; Jesus did provide an answer, in the somewhat enigmatic words: ‘I am the bread of life’. What I believe he was pointing to here is that a life centred not on what we want or even think we need but on Jesus, the bread of life, in prayer, in worship, in community and in action, we will find – sometimes to our surprise – our deepest needs met, our yearnings fulfilled and our hunger satisfied.
Amen.

Dr. Paula Gooder, Canon Theologian, Birmingham
25th January 2009

The theologian Frances Young describes her experience of driving through the lanes near her home in Birmingham, with her very handicapped son Arthur, and coming across a woman trying to lead a reluctant horse, tugging at its reins, next to a field. As they passed she said, “He can’t stand the Shetlands”. And there, in the field, was a group of tiny Shetland ponies. The horse had recognised that they were the same and yet different; and Frances Young reflected on that, and on her own reactions, and those she encountered in other people, to the disabilities of her son; the awkwardness and embarrassment that can be a part of our response to the ‘Other-Abled’ is mirrored in the reaction of that nervous horse.

This week, we have rightly celebrated the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America; and I have been reading his autobiography, and in particular his account of community organisation among black people in Chicago, and how different and how difficult it is to be black in the United States (or, for that matter, in this country) today. This in turn made me reflect on my own experience of working for many years in South Africa, mainly with black students, under both apartheid and the present democratic arrangement. Some people speak of Africa and blacks as the white person’s dark twin, with whom we are inextricably linked, and whom we unconsciously seek to destroy, the Other who is also very close to us.

Last Sunday, Sol Campbell was booed, whenever he had the ball, at White Hart Lane, not because he is black, but because he is a former Spurs player who now plays for Portsmouth, and is therefore recognised as the Same and yet Other.

In November, there was a conference on disability in Lourdes, a place that has shaped my life over the last +40 years, and I was invited to give a Scripture input, in which I talked about Jesus’ attitude to the Other-Abled. Also speaking at the conference, and far more impressively, was the great Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities, where the people whom we label as “mentally handicapped” and “normal” live together in villages, and care for one another. He shared with us two very important, because hard-won, insights in his painfully honest talk. The first was that what we too easily call (and so dismiss) as “disabled” reveal to us something of what it means to be human, something at odds with the celebrity culture of Youth, Beauty and Fame, into which we can get trapped. Secondly, and very impressively, he shared with us how “disabled” people revealed to him the violence that lurks deep within him, and in all of us. Those who have had to look after the elderly, or the disabled, or babies who do not stop screaming will, if we are equally honest, recognise what he is saying.

We react, you see, in a very odd, and mistaken, way to what is Other and yet the Same. Oxford and Cambridge, Worcester and St John’s (or whatever college is your traditional enemy), Everton and Liverpool, Catholic and Protestant. There is that in us that looks at the Other, yet very Similar, and sees only that which is Different, and Dangerous and Wrong, that which must be eliminated: so I can and may employ violence against it.

This is simply a fact about us. The trick is to know what we are to do about it, and not just during this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity; but this is a good time at least to raise the question.

Well, for one thing, we can watch Jesus. Consider the two readings that you have just heard. The first is from Hebrews, presenting Jesus to us as “The Real Thing”. Jesus is the Same and yet Different. The author of Hebrews, in order to express this “real thing”, reaches for a metaphor, that of High Priest, and uses the metaphor to compare Jesus to the High Priests in the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus, he says, unlike that priesthood, really is able to save, and to provide “access” to God. How? Because, in the words of that particular translation, he is “holy, innocent, uncontaminated”, which is to say that Jesus is not trapped in the violence and the insecurity that drives us to condemn others, and to mark them out as Different and Dangerous, like the horse alarmed by the Shetland ponies. So Jesus has, as he argues, no need to offer sacrifice for his own sins: Jesus is the Same and Different. He does not, the author points out, belong to the Right Tribe, if he is to be a High Priest (he is from Judah, they from Levi); nevertheless, Jesus is the real thing.

In the gospel that you have just heard, Jesus is beset by crowds from all over the area that we call the Holy Land. Why is this? Because he has power over everything that threatened them, and because he refused to exclude anybody. So much did this attract them that he needed a boat to protect him from being crushed. Mark lists, under two headings, those who came to him:

· the afflicted, including, of course, the ritually impure, who made Jesus in turn ritually impure by touching him; and he never turned a hair.

· And the unclean spirits who recognise him (in the way that we know our enemy who is the Same and yet Different).

So what of us today? What about our journey as Christians together? We too have to learn about the violence, born of insecurity, that lies deep within us. We too have to learn to reach out in love to the Other, and there recognise the human face of Christ.

Who or what, then, is your Dark Other? Is he (or she) Catholic, black, crippled, mentally handicapped, male, Welsh, or a supporter of the wrong team? Who is the person of whom you find yourself instinctively disapproving, when you pass them on Beaumont St, or shy away from in the Cornmarket? Who is the member of your year the mention of whose name is guaranteed to bring a sneer to your lips? They all carry to us an invitation from the God who is both Other and closer to us than we are to ourselves. That God always calls us out of our “comfort zones”, often into places, and towards people, where we thought we could not go, only to discover, with a shock of pleasure, that God was, after all, waiting for us there, and inviting us deeper into the mystery of what it is to be human. That is something we need to pray for, as we celebrate our week of praying for the unity of the body of Christ.

Fr. Nicholas King, Campion Hall
22nd January 2009

A warm welcome back to College, to students, staff, Fellows, choristers, parents and visitors. It has been a recent tradition to have a sermon series in the Hilary term, and this term I have chosen the ‘I am’ sayings in St. John’s gospel, or at least some of them, which I shall explain in a moment.

Incidentally, I recently tried to get into Ripon College Cuddesdon, a theological College, and found that I couldn’t because there was an IAMS conference going on. On the front door was the sign: “The IAMS conference”. And I thought that really, to be grammatically correct, this egocentric gathering it should be the “WE ARE” conference shouldn’t it? Of, course those of you with cats will know that IAMS is a brand of cat food, one that we feed to our own cat.

Anyway, this term’s sermons will have nothing to do with cats, I expect, but you can never be sure. We have seven eminent preachers who are going to examine seven sayings of Christ: “I am the Bread of Life, I am the Light of the World, I am the Good Shepherd” and so on. So it is my task this evening to try and introduce the series and to put the forthcoming gospel readings and sermons into some kind of biblical and theological context, and who knows, you might have your appetite whetted for the subject and get hooked.

For it certainly seems like a fascinating subject to me, the idea of who is God anyway. It is fundamental isn’t it? Why are we here to worship, on what do we base our lives, what is our basic ideology, morality, our purpose for being. These essential questions of human existence are radically influenced by these questions: who, or what, if he exists, is God and what is his character, purpose and will? Now this may get a bit technical, so hold on, and for the theologians among you, you will almost certainly get a question on the signs and sayings in John in Finals, so it’s an essay question worth revising.

So let’s start with some essential information: firstly, John’s gospel is the only one to use the “I am” statements. Now, whether this is because that was John’s recollection of Jesus’s ministry, or the way John particularly wanted to depict Jesus’s ministry, or just a useful device to communicate his theology is not clear. If we consider John’s gospel to be quite a late gospel, written after the others, then there could be some element of refined and considered theology about it. And that idea is collaborated by the structure of the gospel, in that the “I am” sayings contrast with the “I am not” sayings of John the Baptist at the beginning: “I am not the Messiah (1.20); are you Elijah, I am not (1.21); I am not worthy to untie the thongs of his sandals ( 1.27)”, and again, “I am not the Messiah” (3.28).

Now, when it comes to Jesus, it’s important to clarify that there are three different types of “I am” sayings. Firstly, the metaphorical (“I am the bread of life, light of the world” etc.), which we will look at this term, where Jesus identifies himself in comparison to something else, often following an action or miracle, which becomes a sign, an identification, of who Jesus is and an explanation of Jesus’s actions.

Secondly, we have the self-identification sayings (“I am he, I and the Father are one, I am from above”, and so on). These sayings identify Christ in relation to his Father and usually follow some kind of inquiry, when Jesus is in discussion and his identity is called into question or needs verifying, either for the person with Jesus, or for us the reader.
The third kind of statement is the simple statement of existence and this only occurs once in 8.58: “Verily, verily I say to you, ‘Before Abraham was I am’.”

So what is the point of all these ‘I am’ sayings. Is John labouring the point somewhat? Well, if we consider the opening lines of the gospel: “In the beginning was the word” etc. then we have a gospel that is fundamentally Christological in its purpose. John is writing in order to explain that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and introducing the idea of pre-existence, which was developed later in the Church’s history: the idea that Jesus existed before his human birth, thus proving his Divine status.
But the real purpose of the gospel, beautifully structured as it is, becomes apparent at the end. The beginning is an teaser, as it were, the end is the answer:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
In this context the metaphorical “I am” sayings and the self-identification ones are relatively clear as ways to paint a picture of Jesus in terms of his actions and his relationship to God the Father.

But what about the simple, “Before Abraham was, I am (not even I was, which would seem more grammatically correct, because Jesus is quoting the Hebrew, “Yahweh”, in Exodus 3, which has no tense). But now we get to the nub of the issue:
There is precedent in Old Testament traditions for a similar enigmatic “I am” statement. As we have heard, Exodus 3 recounts Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush on Mount Horeb. When Moses asked whom he should tell the people sent him to deliver them from Egypt, God revealed himself as “I am” or “I will be” (Ex 3:14).

It is not so much a statement about ontology, proving the existence of God, but more a statement about the character of God, which becomes more clear, as we hear in the later books of the bible, through His involvement with humans history. He is not only a creator God, but active and creative within history. The name God takes for himself in the burning bush is almost a challenge: I am in every moment of time and space, and thus, Moses, I will be in every part of your future and your people, so look out! It is the same challenge that He sets us “I am”: here, active, living, involved.

So, this is the background to the verse in St. John that we heard tonight: “I am he”. John is applying the Greek version of the Hebrew “I am” Thus, Jesus identifies himself with the same God who manifested himself in his saving relationship with the Jewish people. John’s whole gospel, from its beginning to its end, attempts to show that Christ is God’s Son, who existed before creation, lived, ministered, died and rose again, according to his Divine character and purpose, which is at one with his eternal Father, who is active in all the pain and joy of human history. Each saying and sign points to this Christological truth, and as John points out at the end, the purpose of encouraging the reader to believe it is so that they might have life “in his name”: the very name itself represents his saving, sacrificial, loving purpose.

The metaphors that Christ uses to describe himself in the seven sayings we will be examining this term are very special and beautiful. They are well-known phrases that perhaps we take for granted, but I hope you will enjoy this term, as I will, looking a little deeper into the power of Christ’s language and his message. For the words are, after all, the words of life. Amen.

The Chaplain
18th January 2009

‘War will continue to the end’ (Daniel 9:26)

The national movement of remembrance started after what was called ‘the war to end wars’ in a combination of grief and loss, pride and hope. This mixture is kept alive in the Albert Hall (last night) and at the Cenotaph and in hundreds of cities, towns and villages (this morning), on web sites and even in an extra historical pamphlet distributed in yesterday’s edition of a national newspaper.

There is hardly a family in the land that cannot refer to at least one member in the past 100 years who was affected by violent conflict at home or abroad. In the 1st World War alone some 2700 of this University died (18% of combatants, of whom many were from Worcester College).

And now we have not mainly inter- but intra-national conflict. This was brought home vividly to me in my first visit to Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (in 2003) to minister to a community where the local bishop had had to flee because of tribal violence between the Hema and the Lendu. The tiny Cessna plane landed cautiously on a grass runway and my journey was made secure by a band of heavily armed child soldiers.

Added to this is the murderous intent of global ideological assassins. In the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Tuesday the wreath laying ceremony at the Diplomatic Service Memorial will name 18 members from Sir Christopher Ewart-Biggs in Dublin in 1976 to Mr Ali Ghazi Abdulhussein in Basra in 2006 who have died in terrorist attacks.

If these are not our memories, and we missed the school trip to the Western Front or the Concentration Camps, [Auschwitz] there are still numerous feature films that remind us of the violence and the emotions that are expressed in war, terrorism and tyranny. The opening minutes of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ are a graphic illustration of 6th June 1944, (but you might also turn to Bobby Sands’ Northern Ireland in ‘Hunger’ or Idi Amin’s Uganda in ‘Last King of Scotland’)
where the still-present themes of patriotism, bewilderment, bereavement and relieved thankfulness are woven through the stories.

But what are we to think and do with the unpalatable evidence that ‘war will continue to the end’?

We do right to remember the dead (here in Oxford we have just erected a new memorial plaque to centuries-old martyrs! we might visit the courageous patients with their mangled bodies in Birmingham’s Selly Oak military wards) but how do we keep a clear vision and practice of peace;
how do we secure and nurture our values for a flourishing society;
how do we strengthen ourselves when violence impinges again and again?

The writer of the Book of Daniel (over 2000 years ago) hoped, as we do, for a resolution to all this and offered a pattern of putting things right.

‘to finish the transgression
to put an end to sin
to atone for iniquity
to bring in everlasting righteousness
to seal both vision and prophet
to anoint a most holy place
(9:24)

Now this pattern of development does not encourage a naïve modernism, fuelling the myths of progress, but a profound realism about human weakness and fallibility.

‘To finish the transgression’ reminds us that we need power and authority to make and keep peace.
As a Highlander (an ethnic group from which came many who made military aggression both a pastime and a career)
I keep on the wall at home three 18th C broadswords of the kind used at Culloden and on a shelf the archetypical dented silver cigarette case that saved my grandfather at the 2ndBattle of Ypres. These serve to remind me of both the reality and the personal cost of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.
I also read (John Gray ‘Black Mass’ or Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern’)

Remember to PRAY for armed forces and for the diplomats, UN troops and national leaders in Great Lakes Africa.

‘To bring in everlasting righteousness’ reminds us that we require a clear understanding of the public values to which we subscribe, asking, for example, for gifts of unselfishness and co-operation in order to create a fruitful society.
Here we might benefit from reading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks ‘The Home we Build Together’ and a vision of a Covenant and a new language to articulate our human desires and aspirations.

Remember to PRAY for political and community leaders and particularly for President-elect Barack Obama that he is protected from the assassin’s bullet.

‘To seal the vision’ reminds us that humans need to have a firm personal faith to keep going when unreasoning tragedy strikes.

The image of Christ carrying his cross (John 19:17) takes us to the heart of God entering into this weakness and bearing suffering caused by deliberate violence. Through his death on a cross Christians believe that sins are forgiven [there is atonement]; in his resurrection, that life can begin again [the vision is sealed]; by the power of Holy Spirit that is possible to live [the righteous life].

Remember to PRAY for the ‘hope within you’
and to do so together.

Jesus in the midst of terrible suffering and imminent death, looking down from the execution cross, commissioned his friend John to care for his mother Mary. We can imagine them breaking bread and sharing the cup of wine, [this is my body broken for you, this is my blood shed for you] together at home with the words of Jesus in their minds
‘do this in remembrance of me’

‘War will continue to the end’ so as we know ourselves in the remembrance of all these things and as we bear responsibilities for the peace of our 21st C global village let us benefit from the
beautiful grounds here at Worcester and pause at four points, recommended on the web site, the Orchard, Lake, Lawn and finally the Chapel.
Here in this holy place the prayer recommended from the prophet Isaiah (43:1-3) encourages us to remember God’s promise even in war and terror

“Do not fear, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine”.

The Rt. Rev’d David Urquhart, Bishop of Birmingham
9th November 2008