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It is November. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is a dead month. Dead leaves are being stripped off the trees; the darkness seems all-pervasive; and November contains, of course, Weeks 5 and 6 of Michaelmas Term, when it is obligatory for all undergraduates to experience those 5th (or, according to taste, 6th) week blues, something akin to The Wall that Marathon runners hit at about 18 miles. This is the moment when students realise that there is absolutely no hope of getting to the end of term, or of coping with the absurd demands of their tutor. For these, and other reasons, we feel ourselves in this month surrounded by death, bereft of hope and meaning. So we celebrate All Souls Day, to pray for the dead, on November 2nd; and it is a healthy tradition within the Catholic church, to pray all month long for those who have died. Next weekend we shall have Remembrance Sunday, to remember and honour those who have died in war. And, in Halloween, we have an ancient ritual for keeping the darkness at bay. Which is why on Friday evening, if you remember, you were rushing about Oxford in those strange costumes and those odd masks. And today, celebrating the feast of All Saints, the Church wisely gives us a glimpse of that that hope and meaning that seems so far off in dark November.

For the saints whom we recall today are not those plaster statues of doubtful artistic merit that you sometimes find in Catholic churches, wearing those unattractively pious expressions. Saints are flesh and blood human beings, with flaws and frailties of their own, who, on their journey to God have their own share of battles to fight, and have marched, or limped, or crawled, to the end, and, in the process, have given us a glimpse of God, and the consequent recognition that there is hope and meaning in life.

Consider the readings that you have just heard. The first was probably written for that extraordinarily difficult time in Israel’s history, when the exiles came back from Babylon to Jerusalem; Jerusalem had functioned for them, all during that half-century of being away, like the thought of an oasis in the desert (or of home after a term at boarding school or university). And they get there, and find that no one wants to know. They are not welcome, nor are people queuing up to restore to them the property that had once been theirs. The city’s infrastructure was a shambles; sin and corruption were rife. There was no Temple any more, and no enthusiasm to rebuild one. (I was in South Africa in July and August this year, and found something of these reactions among those who had most looked forward to the aftermath of the first democratic elections in that country, in April 1994). Where, they must have asked, is all this hope and meaning? To those baffled returnees, the prophet offers a wonderful vision of the world that God is creating: Jerusalem is to be a ‘joy’; instead of a shambles, it will become a place where there is no premature death; and instead of a desert, the prophet depicts a remarkable picture of unexpected fertility, a place where the ‘wolf and the lamb will lie down together’, and, beyond all belief, but still capable of inspiring and moving us, the affirmation that ‘none shall hurt or destroy on my holy mountain, says the Lord’. We notice, of course, that at this stage in Israel’s development there is no hope at all of Resurrection; but there is, after all, meaning and hope, in the view of this unnamed prophet. It is a glimpse of God at work in our world; and that glimpse is what saints, the saints whom we recall today, give to us.

The second reading comes from the Letter to the Hebrews, which has sometimes been attributed to Paul; but we shall do well to listen to Origen, the great Greek biblical scholar, who said, ‘Who wrote the Letter to the Hebrews, only God knows’. Certainly, the author had an extraordinary theological mind, one of the best in the New Testament; and we listen with awe as he reflects on the difficulties of being Church in the world today, and on the awkward question of who Jesus is, a question that he resolves by saying, in effect, that ‘Jesus is the Real Thing’. This is an appropriate enough reading for All Saints, because it offers a list of our forebears, who gave us the glimpse of God that saints can present. And it may help you to consider that there were some pretty ropey characters among the names he mentions: have a look, if you have nothing better to do this evening, at the doings of Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah in your favourite translation of the Book of Judges. And reflect also on some of David’s less appealing characteristics, for his was another of the names listed there. Nevertheless, these somewhat hairy individuals did extraordinary things under God, and so can you (although I have to urge that, at any rate just for the moment, you don’t try closing the mouths of lions or being sawn in two). And, says the author, ‘they were stoned’. I suppose that in this company I do not have to make it clear that this term is used literally, not in the vernacular sense which you saw exemplified last night.

Notice, however, that even though these characters have given us a glimpse of the vision of hope and meaning that God has on offer for us, they have not quite made it. What you and I need, to complete the picture, is the one whom the author describes as ‘Jesus, pioneer and perfecter of our faith’. Jesus, you remember, is for this author ‘The Real Thing’, the one who experienced the hopelessness and meaninglessness of the Cross, and is still God’s ultimate affirmation that there is hope and meaning, even in November. So even on this dark and damp evening you should be glimpsing the vision of a promise that hovers just around the corner.

How, then, can this work in your life? Let me speak of three events that took place this week that gave rise to a vision of meaning and hopefulness.

On Monday, we buried a member of our community. He was 92 and had heart problems, so his death, which happened quietly in his armchair, was not a surprise; but it was something of a shock. He was an old man, very deaf, but startlingly observant, who saw everything, and gazed upon it with a patrician benevolence and a deft touch of humour. I was enormously impressed with the range of people whom he drew to his funeral, the more so in that much of his working life had been spent in Africa, so that a good many of his friends could not be with us on the day. In particular, I was touched by the grief of two young men, brothers in their 20s, who had flown in from Boston and from Kathmandu in order to be there. Because, you see, he had given them a glimpse of hope and meaning. And that is how God uses us human beings.

Then on Wednesday, we started to hear of two murders, of Jesuits, who belonged to the tiny Jesuit community in Moscow. It did not attract much attention in this country, but it was on the various Jesuit networks, and, in particular, we at Campion Hall got to hear a good deal about it because one of our current students is a member of that Moscow community. So it came home very much to us, as our brother spoke of what had happened: the two had been quite brutally murdered, 20 hours apart, in the apartment that was their community residence, by a killer who apparently waited in the apartment, having killed the first, for the second one to appear. Where, you ask, is the meaning and hope in all that? Simply, I think, in the fact that that the community will continue its work, and will not think of ceasing to do so. There is a glimpse of God, even in those circumstances.

Finally, yesterday, I was in Newcastle, at a meeting, a part of which took the form of a religious service for sick people and those who care for them. Before the service started, I overheard a wife talking about how difficult and demanding her wheelchair-bound husband was being. Then, at the Lord’s Prayer, I happened to see her, standing by his wheelchair, unobtrusively, but with enormous tenderness, place her hands on his. That was a glimpse of God, of hope and meaning.

And what of you? There are people in your life who speak to you of God. And they may be unexpected people, for all of us, including your tutor and the homeless man whom you hurried past yesterday because he looked a bit unkempt, all of us are saints made in God’s image and likeness; and all of us offer a glimpse of the hope and meaning that are found only in God and in Jesus.

And do you see what that means? It means that you too are saints, made in God’s image, and that you too can give people a glimpse of that God. So today is your feast, and you must be prepared to leave this Evensong ready to radiate your God-likeness, and so to proclaim to a dark November world that there is meaning and hope in life. It is a great invitation that the Lord lays before you this evening.

Rev’d Nicholas King, Lecturer in New Testament at Worcester College
2nd November 2008

I wonder if any of you were surprised by our Old Testament reading from Ecclesiastes. It could not be more different from the readings from Proverbs in the first two Sundays of term: in those readings, it was clear that the author believes God is close at hand and that he intervenes in the world; proverbial teaching on morality is positive, clear-cut and black-and-white: there are material rewards for good behaviour and punishments for bad, and trust in God gets special rewards. Our the two readings from Proverbs 3 and 4 which we heard in weeks one and two of term offered the following advice: ‘Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh, and refreshment to your bones’. ‘Happy is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gets understanding’. ‘Get wisdom, get insight! Do not forsake her, and she will keep you’. ‘Hear my son, and accept my words, that the years of your life may be many.’ ‘Keep hold of instruction, do not let go: guard her, for she is your life’.
The teaching of Ecclesiastes could not be more different. God is utterly transcendent and he does not intervene in the world; and what practical teaching there is offers more questions than answers. Good behaviour is rarely rewarded: faith in God has few advantages, and certainly does not result in his presence becoming close to us. Indeed, all that is left is to ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. Our reading today revealed just how pessimistic this world-view is: ‘Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when you will say ‘I have no pleasure in them’. ‘Remember… before the silver cord is snapped, the golden bowl is broken..’ ‘Remember…. before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit to the God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity’.
The rabbis used to say that Proverbs was written by Solomon as a young king, with all the enthusiasm, ambition and positive thinking of youth, and Ecclesiastes has the imprint of Solomon in his old age, with failing health, fear of death, and an uneasy faith. Although these books are very different, the reasons the rabbis gave for their differences are not very convincing. The two books have very distinct literary styles and the Hebrew in each of them is quite different It is hard to presume the same author influenced both books. Furthermore, it is hard to accept that those who are young never face profound doubts about faith in God, and, conversely, that those who are old do not possess a positive faith which is based upon a lifelong experience of God. But, nevertheless, I see why the rabbis distinguished between the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in this way: it is quite clear that anyone reading Proverbs comes away with the impression of a clear-cut affirmative faith, and anyone reading Ecclesiastes feels that sense of despair which is the result of posing unfathomable questions about God.

So what are these two books doing, side by side, in our English Bibles?

Before we look for an answer, we need to be reminded that these ‘opposing voices’ are not only represented in Proverbs and Job but are evident throughout the Bible as a whole. Within the Old Testament, the confident teaching of the prophets and the uncompromising teaching on the Law correspond closely to the more upbeat and unquestioning world-view in Proverbs; whereas the prayers of despair in the Book of Psalms and the questions about God’s justice in the Book of Job fit more with the more sceptical and pessimistic world-view of Ecclesiastes. The New Testament, too, has many examples of these two approaches to faith. Think of the extraordinary confidence in matters of faith and practice expressed within the letters of Paul – indeed, such as we heard in that second letter to Timothy tonight – and compare this with the accounts individuals searching, questioning and reaching out to Jesus in, for example, the Gospel of John: in the very first chapter we read of John the Baptist asking ‘Who are you?’; this continues through to the questions of Nicodemus who comes to Jesus by night (‘How can a man be born again?’) and, at the very end of the Gospel, we read of ‘doubting Thomas’ who will only believe in the resurrection if he place his hand in the marks of the nails in Jesus’s side.
If the Bible embraces both responses of faith, then surely there should be room for both in Jewish and Christian communities today. And yet it self-evident that this is far from the case. Those who are more open to doubt tend to find those whose faith is confident and strong too shrill and simplistic and superficial; and those whose faith is confident and strong find those who are more open to doubt and questioning too introverted and ineffectual. The challenge facing the church today – and one which impinges upon our chapel community here at Worcester as well as on the church at large – is how to become a ‘broad’ and ‘inclusive’ church which recognises and respects different expressions of faith.

How can we really achieve this? How can we as Christians learn to love and respect those whose faith in God is very different from our own?

A brief phrase, used somewhat differently in both Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes, might give some guidance here. It has occurred in all three Old Testament readings thus far this term. In Proverbs it is termed ‘the fear of the Lord’; for example, ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ It is used again and again throughout the entire book -some fifteen times. What does it mean?
Primarily, ‘the fear of the Lord’ is about having a God-centred, not human-centred view of life: it is a faith about being focused on God, and not on ourselves. Trying to see ourselves and the world theologically, as God sees us, does not come naturally, but it can certainly re-shape our world-view, and it is probably harder for those who think they already have the answers than for those who know they have very few. Discovering that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ requires quiet reflective prayer; it requires listening to God before we purportedly speak about him. Small wonder that the book of Proverbs, with its tendency to assume it has all the answers, reminds us of this phrase so often.
Secondly, ‘the fear of the Lord’ is about recognising that nobody, however intelligent, however confident in faith, however skilled in debate, has all the answers: there will always be a mystery to life because it is always full of paradoxes and contradictions, and because life is a mystery the key to it is with God, not with us. ‘God only knows’ is a slick turn of phrase, but it’s one we all need to heed.
The book of Job, whose teaching falls midway between the utter confidence of Proverbs and the despair and scepticism of Ecclesiastes, is very much about learning that ‘God only knows’. Job 28 is one of my favourite chapters in the entire Old Testament. It is a reflective hymn on how wisdom and understanding has been hidden from us: ‘Whence comes wisdom? Where is place of understanding?’… Only God understands the way to it, and he knows its place’. The hymn ends with that familiar phrase: ‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding’. The whole book is about the hero, Job, discovering the real meaning of what it means to ‘fear the Lord’ and so acquire ‘divine wisdom’ – which means knowing he, Job, does not have all the answers. So, whether taken from Proverbs or from Job, ‘the fear of the Lord’ is a warning for those who think they have all the answers: they need to discover a quiet humility in the presence of God.
So much for those who think they have all the answers: what of those whose faith seems to be one ongoing question about the meaning of life before God? Ecclesiastes has I another similar turn of phrase, although, perhaps predictably, it is used in a less assertive way. It is not the more intimate expression of Proverbs, ‘the fear of the Lord’, but a more nostalgic longing: ‘fear God’ (The more distant term for God is used in the Hebrew in this case.) Whereas the ‘fear of the Lord’ in Proverbs was to challenge the certitudes of faith, in Ecclesiastes ‘fear God’ is a way of bringing reassurance in doubt and uncertainty. ‘When dreams increase, and empty words grow many: fear God’ (5:7). ‘I know it will be well with those who fear God’ (8:12). ‘The end of the matter: all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments’ (12.3, from our reading tonight). ‘Fearing God’ in Ecclesiastes, although taken from such a different perspective, results in the same conclusion as ‘ the fear of the Lord’ in Proverbs. It is about seeking out God’s perspective on life; and it is about recognising that it is only by living in awe of God the Creator that the mysteries of life on earth can in any way be resolved.
One of the most important challenges for us all, when at the beginning of this academic year we seek to establish a new chapel community, with a new chaplain, new members of choir, new parents, new fellows, new members of college and new students, is to learn how to live with those whose expressions of faith are very different from our own. Whether we are thinking of members of the CU, the chapel choir, the Catholic chaplaincy, or just middle-of-the-road church goers, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes when taken together should remind us that neither an upbeat nor downbeat response to faith should exclude the other. They can and should both be held together. Our challenge as a chapel community is to learn when it is appropriate to ‘comfort the disturbed’ and when it is better to ‘disturb the comfortable’.
I end with a prayer which has meant a good deal to the Provost and me at various moments when faith and doubt have each been challenged. It is known as the ‘serenity prayer’ – initially ascribed to Reinhold Niebuhr in the mid 1930s, written for Alcoholics Anonymous, but it is now known to have its roots back into the fourteenth century. It sums up so well the issues I’ve been trying to put before you tonight:
‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.’
Amen.

Ecclesiastes 12:1-7
The Four Calls
The Spirit came in childhood and pleaded, “Let me in,”
But oh! the door was bolted by thoughtlessness and sin;
“I am too young,” the child replied, “I will not yield today;
There’s time enough tomorrow.” The Spirit went away.
Again He came and pleaded in youth’s bright happy hour;
He came but heard no answer, for lured by Satan’s power
The youth lay dreaming then and saying, “Not today,
Not till I’ve tried earth’s pleasures.” The Spirit went away.
Again He called in mercy in manhood’s vigorous prime,
But still He found no welcome, the merchant had no time;
No time for true repentance, no time to think or pray,
And so, repulsed and saddened, the Spirit went away.
Once more He called and waited, the man was old and ill,
And scarcely heard the whisper, his heart was cold and still;
“Go leave me; when I need thee, I’ll call for thee,” he cried;
Then sinking on his pillow, without a hope, he died!

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Reader in Theology, Worcester College
26th October 2008

“Bilbo used often to say that there was only one road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous thing, Frodo, going out of your door’, he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’”.

So says Frodo Baggins as he and Sam begin their adventure in Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring and, whether you have realised it yet or not, we have all just embarked upon a new exciting adventure. Some of you may even be wondering where you have been swept off to. For, at the end of Freshers’ week, this Evensong marks a time of new beginnings: for those joining the college for the first time, for those returning as students, staff or fellows, and for choristers and parents entering upon another year with the choir and school. Indeed, it is a time of fresh horizons for me too as I begin the role as Chaplain with you. It is the beginning of a journey that we will take together, and we do not know exactly what is going to happen to us or precisely how we will be effected by our experiences along the way. We hope to grow, to learn and to gain, as the Proverbs writer advises, wisdom, a quality more precious than jewels.

But our gathering here today also signifies that we are not on this journey alone for, although we may have left family behind to be here, to be part of the Worcester College community, is to be part of a family – a network of friendship, fellowship, guidance and support, to which, I hope, you will always feel connected, wherever your path may take you in years to come.

Last Saturday, at the Gaudy meal for old members, I was lucky enough to sit next to one of the oldest living members of that family. Colonel Edward Lewis came up to Worcester in 1933, exactly seventy-five years ago. The story of his adventurous life in the army took him to 14 different countries and 36 different homes, and to listen to him was as gripping as reading a John Buchan novel. What struck me most about his conversation was how very grateful he was for is life and everything that had happened in it. Several times he said. “I’ve been so lucky, you see.” Well, whether you make your own luck or not, if Solomon was right in connecting wisdom with longevity, then I surmised that Col. Lewis must have some wisdom to impart after all these years, and he did not disappoint me.

“If he could preach one sermon”, he said, “it would be this: Abolish Human Rights”. “How dramatic”, I exclaimed. “Why?” Because, Col. Lewis explained, the world has become obsessed with individuals and their own rights at the expense of their responsibilities. Responsibility involves changing the focus from one’s own needs to those of others, being grateful for what one has and mindful of those who are less fortunate. Well, I promised colonel Lewis that I would probably use his idea, and so I have.

In fact, the more I have reflected upon the notion of responsibility this week, the more it seems essential to a healthy community. In this place, people are responsible for each other, I have responsibilities towards you, you have responsibilities towards each other and we all have responsibilities towards the wider society. Responsibility encompasses a number of virtues: humility, generosity, diligence, thankfulness and patience amongst others. These are all virtues that require certain amounts of self-sacrifice and discipline. The advice of Proverbs touches upon other qualities that will assist in the active mindfulness of others: remember God’s commands, be loyal and faithful, trust in the Lord, do not be wise in your own eyes, seek wisdom.

Responsibility and family, or community, life go hand in hand. For if we were to be left to our own devices as individuals unaided and uncared for, and not helping others, on our great adventure we could only fail. However, transcending all our actions is the gospel of Christ as we have heard read in St. John’s first epistle, which tells us that we are members of God’s family. “See what the love of the Father has given us that we should be called children of God: and that is what we are.” The fact is, that we have no right to be the children of God – it is not one of our human rights – it is a free and unconditional gift that allows the love and grace of God to work in our imperfect lives. As one of the desert fathers, John Climacus, put it:

“God is the life of all beings. He is the salvation of all: of the pious or the impious; of those freed from the passions or those caught in them; of monks or those living in the world; of the educated or the illiterate; of the healthy or the sick; of the young or the very old. He is like the outpouring of the light, the glimpse of the sun or the changes in the weather, which are the same for everyone without exception.”

Implicit in this family membership is a future of hope for “we are God’s children now: what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him.” To be like Christ is to live in love. That is the kind of love, self-sacrificial and life-giving, that we can only know because he first loved us.

Responsibility, virtue, wisdom and long life have no worth at all unless there is love. “For this is the message you have heard from the beginning,” St. John Says “that we should love one another.” Indeed, love is the mark of life in all its fullness. “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another.”

This Michaelmas term, let us chiefly remember this: we do not have to strive to be children of God, we just are. There is no entrance exam and no condition. We can love each other because he first loved us. With a light heart, therefore, let us respond to each other, and those outside these college walls, with the responsibility of love, and may God’s freewill offering of grace be with us as we journey on together.

Amen.

Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain
12th October 2008

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there lived a rich man and his three daughters. One day, the rich man asked his daughters, “How much do you love me, my dears?”
“Why, Father,” said the first, “I love you as much as life itself.”
“Oh, Father,” said the second daughter, “I love you more than all the world.”
The rich man was very pleased. Then he turned to his youngest daughter and asked, “And how much do you love me, my little one?”
“I love you as much as salt, Father,” she replied, quietly.
This made the rich man very angry. “You don’t love me at all,” he exclaimed. “You will no longer live in my house or be my daughter!” he said and threw her out of the house.

The poor girl wandered across the land until she came to a large house where she was taken in by the cook and worked as a scullery maid. No one knew who she was for she had woven a cloak and hood of rushes to hide her beautiful clothes and cam to be known as Cap O’ Rushes.

To cut a long story short, the master’s son came to fall in love with Cap O’ Rushes and asked her to marry him. Soon the wedding was arranged and people from all over the land were invited to the feast including Cap O’ Rushes’ own father. Before the feast, Cap O’ Rushes went into the kitchen and told the cook tp put no salt in any of the dishes she prepared.

All the guests arrived and duly sat down to enjoy the sumptuous fare placed before them but as they started to eat they could not swallow a bite for the saltless food tasted so terrible. Suddenly, Cap O’ Rushes’ father burst out crying, “What is the matter?” asked the others. “I once had a daughter who said she loved me as much as salt,” he wept. “I didn’t understand what she meant, and threw her out of the house. Now, eating this food without salt, I realise she loved me very much.”

Then Cap O’ Rushes stood up and put her arms around her father. “Here I am Father,” she said. “Your very own daughter!” Her father was overjoyed to see her safe and sound.

I am sure that most of you will be familiar with the more complex and political version of that fairy tale as rendered by Shakespeare in his King Lear. But the original tale is a more simple, homely fable about the value of something as ordinary and everyday as salt. Salt, like love within a family, can all too often be taken for granted yet it is essential for the flavour and even the enjoyment of food. If it is taken away the food not just become less palatable but inedible.

It is not for nothing that Jesus describes those who believe in and follow him as being the salt of the earth. Whilst Jesus does not go on to explore the precise meaning or implication of this image, it is Paul, in his advice to the church in Ephesus, that the notion of being the salt of the earth is given practical expression and significance.

Paul has often been criticised in passages such as these for what appears to be reinforcing the status quo and thereby not only legitimising social injustice but also subverting the radical message of the gospel of Christ even before it has started. To a certain extent our second reading this evening seems to bear this criticism out as Paul addresses those members of the community who are in unequal relationships of power and tells them to uphold the societal norms. Children and servants are to obey their superiors and parents and masters are to act responsibly over those whom they have power and control. Paul is encouraging them to be like everyone else, to be an ordinary member of the society to which they belong and to adhere to its forms and conventions and yet within these very norms of everyday life he calls them to be essentially different, to be like divine salt.

Children are to obey their parents but because it is right, as laid out in the Ten Commandments. Fathers are not to upset their children and bring them to anger but to have the Lord as the model of fatherly care and authority. Servants are to obey and serve their masters but in so doing they serve Christ and masters must act knowing that they too are under authority, that of their Lord in heaven. In Paul’s eyes the life of a Christian is a normal life but what makes it different is this divine dimension which radically informs and alters how one sees oneself in society and as a result, how one acts and is. Like salt, it is this divine essence or orientation to God, that brings the flavour which savours the whole of life, making it in turn good, and true, and godly.

And yet, as Jesus says, it is all too easy for salt to lose its saltiness, it is all too easy to be distracted by the things of everyday life to forget our divine essence and the person from whom our strength and life comes. I remember once when I had been asked to lead the intercessions at a conference for London clergy telling a fellow curate how anxious I was about what all these eminent clergy were going to think of my prayers and of me. His salutary reply was that all I really needed to worry about was whether my prayers would offend God. All too often we can be caught up in ourselves and slowly lose our saltiness as we lose sight of our Maker and Redeemer.

Paul is ever ware, probably form his own experience, of our capacity to get it wrong and lose our way. As a result he tells his brothers and sisters in Christ to encase themselves in the protection of God. Putting on the armour of God, with its shield of faith, breastplate of righteousness, helmet of salvation and sword of the spirit, is not so much an act of aggression but one of intent, to be so enclosed within the nature of God that we can withstand the evil that afflicts us. For the choice to follow God or not is an ever present reality.

Peter Thompson Jones expressed this very powerfully in a programme he made recently called Extreme Pilgrim. In the last one in the series he followed the early desert fathers and went into the desert alone for three weeks. At one moment during that retreat he looks into his handheld camera and expresses all those old experiences of battles with demons when he says that every moment is a choice, to do good or to do evil. Our amour is to help us at every minute of the day to choose God, to choose life in all its flavoured fullness.

It has never been easy to be a follower of Christ. We may not, in this country, have to live with the fear of persecution but our own time and place brings its own concerns and trials. One of these is the sense that today slat is seen as something which is bad for you and must be eradicated from our lives. Of course too much salt can indeed be a bad thing. Fundamentalism, be it Muslim or Christian, wherever religion is used to separate people one from another and God, can only lead to a kind of sickness or even spiritual death. But if God were removed from our lives altogether, then as our fairy tale warns, life would become not just unpalatable but unbearable.

But it seems to me of more pressing concern not that there is a minority who wishes us to live in an unflavoured world but that the Christian gospel of love and virtue is so much part of our ordinary lives, that just like salt we are in danger of forgetting that it is there. I was reading an article the other day by Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney, who was commenting on just how Christian Dr. Who is. Regardless of its strongly atheist writer and overt anti-religious comments, it is still a programme which shows the overcoming of evil by good by an incarnate and resurrected lord on behalf of humanity. So deeply had salt flavoured our thinking that all too often we do not notice it. But if, as in the fairy tale, we forget or underestimate it too much then we run the risk, like the rich landlord of casting our that very person who savours our lives by his love and goodness.

We who are the salt of the earth, who enable the flavour of God to savour the world, we are the reminder of who it is who loves us and makes life flavoursome. Though we are few, it only takes a pinch of salt to make God’s presence real, do not lose heart, wrap yourself in the being and nature of God, walk in his ways with confidence and trust and continue to be the salt of the earth and in particular of this college. Amen.

The Chaplain
25th May 2008

‘Trinity Term’ – two words which we have all used many times over the last few weeks. But the term ‘Trinity’ – now that is a conundrum. And yet on this particular Sunday, we normally expect to hear a ‘Trinity Sermon’.

There have been countless attempts to explain the belief in ‘One in Three and Three in One’. One I remember from student days was the ‘water analogy’: water is liquid; water is vapour; and water is ice, forming three parts of the same substance. But the problem with this illustration is that liquid, vapour and ice do not simultaneously subsist as ‘water’ – they are three separate aspects of water – yet ‘God as Trinity’ implies there are three persons co-existing at one and the same time.

Another illustration I remember is of one actor playing three parts in one play. Unlike the water analogy, this preserves the notion that God is as One Being, like the one actor – but this time it fails because God as Trinity is also three persons, not one person playing different roles. Similarly, the human analogy, that we are body, spirit and mind, yet one ‘being’, also fails, because it is again about one person in three different roles; an additional difficulty is that at death the body and the mind are separated from the spirit- whereas the Trinity is inseparable and co-eternal.

Perhaps a better analogy is a triangle. The three corners of the triangle are linked to each other by the three sides (1+1+1 = 3) yet make up the one figure (1x1x1 = 1). Yet even for my simple mathematical brain this seems to be too neat; as a theologian, anyway, I have problems, because it does not take into account that God the Son is unlike the Father and Spirit, because He comprises two natures, the human and divine: so the ‘oneness’ of the Son is not the same as the ‘oneness’ of the Father and the Spirit, which, using this geometrical analogy rather crudely, makes one corner of the triangle different from the other two.

Although attempts to describe God the Trinity consistently fail, this doctrine became the benchmark of orthodoxy. From as early as the second century those who stressed too much the unity of God were called ‘Modalists’- because they did not place enough emphasis on Jesus Christ, and because they did not stress enough the decisive break of Christianity from Judaism. Those who stressed too much the distinctive parts of God were termed ‘Tritheists’, because they failed to give due weight to a monotheistic faith, one which is in continuity with Judaism in the common affirmation that there is only one God.

One of the compulsory papers which theology undergraduates take here is called ‘Patristics’. They have to look at early Christian debates about heresy and orthodoxy, and attempt to understand how and why the early Church Fathers formulated Christian doctrines in a particular way. All undergraduates agree that the debates about the Trinity are notoriously difficult to comprehend: the eastern churches emphasized the Father gave life equally to the Son and to the Spirit, but the western churches stressed that the Father and Son together gave life to the Spirit. The western church’s Nicene Creed reads ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son’. The phrase ‘and the Son’ does not occur in the eastern church’s version of this Creed. This different understanding of the interrelationship of the three persons of the Trinity divided a fledgling church, and contributed to the eventual schism between the churches of the east and the west.

I have a satirical cartoon on my door in College which is headed ‘Judge orders God to Break up into Smaller Deities’. It is a send-up about a US District Judge who ruled that God was in violation of the anti-monopoly laws because he wilfully thwarted competition from other deities and so created an ‘illegal monotheopoly’. If God were to allow for a coalition of lesser deities, the Spoof Judge advised, the benefit to worshippers would be vast: with a wider selection of specialized gods and goddesses, there would clearly be a quicker ‘prayer-response’. This ‘tongue-in-cheek’ report is making a serious point: why promote the worship of one God, when the worship of many gods might be a better ‘theological insurance policy’? But surely this misses the point? The doctrine of the Trinity – that God is One in Three, and Three in One – is a safeguard both against polytheism and against monotheopoly.

So, despite its problems, the doctrine of the Trinity actually does make sense. And it should not be surprising that the idea of God being Many and God being One actually existed long before Christianity: it was a vital part of Jewish faith as well, for given that polytheistic cultures also a threat to the writers of the Old Testament, they had to provide a middle way of understanding God as the ‘One in the Many’ and the ‘Many in the One’. Our reading from Genesis chapter 1 throws some light on this. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ The very first three verses of the entire Old Testament already introduce the idea of the different parts of the Godhead bringing creation into being: God the Creator is eternally present ‘in the beginning’; God the Spirit, brooding like a bird over the waters, is the sustainer of the world as it comes into being; and God as spoken Word brings form from the void and light from the darkness.

The same idea of the plurality and diversity within the one Godhead is again expressed later in Genesis 1: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over… all the earth.’ Why should God speak in the plural form? I believe it shows us how the writer understood enough about the diversity in the Godhead to use plural verbs and plural possessive adjectives. Admittedly, some see this as an expression of polytheism – that God, like the Most High God in surrounding pagan cultures, is addressing a pantheon of deities in his heavenly council. I personally think that the writer of Genesis 1 is too subtle for this. Throughout this chapter he has used a plural name for God – Elohim – but given it, up this point, a singular verb. God makes the sun; there is not another deity, who is the sun. Similarly he makes the moon, and the stars. No other astrological deities exist alongside him. ‘Elohim’ is a rich diversity of many parts; it is a way of stating that God is both One and God is Many.

The Unity and Diversity of God is actually a dominant theme throughout the Old Testament. Within the Temple God is known as ‘Glory’ (in Hebrew, Käböd and Shekinah ); in his relationship with his people, He is known as ‘Redeemer’ (gö´ál) and as ‘everlasting mercy’ (Heºsed ) and as ‘the Lord’ (Adonay); He is also known as wisdom (Hokmâ), and as ‘the voice’ ( häqôl ). And he is simply ‘the name’ ( häšëm ). In surrounding cultures some of these names were referents for separate male and female deities. But in Hebrew, the maleness and femaleness of the many parts of God (‘spirit’ and ‘glory’ and ‘wisdom’ for example are female nouns) are contained in the one Deity. So in Genesis 1: ‘…Let us make humans in our own image’ is a way of expressing how the diversity and unity in the Godhead in a mirror image of the diversity and unity in the humanity he has created.

So this idea of God as One in Many and Many in One surely paved the way for those first Jewish Christians to think about God as Trinity – now as about God as One in Three and Three in One. These first Christians, Jews by birth, already knew that God is Creator and Father of us all; that God could be present in the world through His Word, now ‘made flesh, and dwelling among us’; and that God is Spirit, the rûªH of God -which, because the word also means breath or wind, also describes how the effects of God’s presence are seen in the world.

As an undergraduate I once had to do an essay on whether God could really known as Trinity within the New Testament. The tutor who marked that essay was one George Carey, later Archbishop of Canterbury. I still have that essay, with his comments on it. I would never have dared to disagree with him then, but actually I would now: I think that those early Jewish Christians had a sufficient understanding of God as One and God as Many to deduce that God could be known as Creator, as Redeeming Word, and as lifegiving Spirit. So although the doctrine of the Trinity is incomprehensible, it is, nevertheless, explicable.
‘Incomprehensible but explicable’. We started by seeing how the term Trnity is a conundrum. And we have ended by seeing how the development such a doctrine makes sense. But even so, the Trinity is still, in essence, beyond our understanding. It is one of those mysteries about which T.S. Eliot says: ‘words strain, /Crack and sometimes break under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide and perish/ Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place’.

So to say more about the essence of the Trinity is superfluous. We have to learn to understand this Triune God in a different way. This can only be by faith and human experience, once our intellect and critical analysis have taken us as far as they can. For, ultimately, the mystery of God as Trinity can only be made known to us through contemplative prayer and reflective worship as we meditate on what all three persons of the one God might mean to each of us: ‘Holy Holy Holy, God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity’. So, falling silent before God as transcendent Creator, before God as incarnate Word, and before God as sustaining Spirit, is perhaps as helpful a way to start as any.

And now to God our Creator, God our Redeemer, God our Sustainer, Three Persons in one God, be ascribed, as is most justly due, all honour, might, majesty, power and dominion, now, henceforth and for evermore. Amen.

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
18th May 2008

+ ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.’

Considering the remarkably cold spring that has followed this year’s early Easter, I imagine that Easter must have fallen rather later in the year when Philip Larkin wrote his poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. For heat is one of the recurrent themes of Larkin’s account of that train journey; not the gentle warmth of the last week, but a full-blown heat-wave. The heat of the train itself – ‘all windows down, all cushions hot’ and of the Lincolnshire landscape through which they travelled: ‘the tall heat that slept for miles inland.’ Whitsun, White Sunday, is the late Old English name for this, the seventh Sunday after Easter, the fiftieth day after Easter Day, which is what the Greco-Latin name Pentecost means. One of the major feasts of the Christian year, celebrating the occasion described in our second reading from Acts, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, today represents both an end and a beginning. Pentecost marks the end of the Easter season, the period when the risen Christ remained among his disciples; it is a moment of leaving behind what is past (most vividly reflected in Christ’s physical departure from the world and his ascension into heaven). But this feast also launches something new: it marks the formal initiation of the Church’s mission to the world. ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father and he will give you another advocate to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth. (John 14.15-17). This gift of the Spirit is the fulfilment of that promise Jesus made to his disciples: ‘I will not leave you comfortless’.

In his narrative in the book of Acts, Luke located the gift of the Spirit as coming on the day of the Jewish festival, the Feast of Weeks, when the first fruits of the corn-harvest were presented and Moses’ giving of the Law commemorated, a festival which fell fifty days after Passover. ‘When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place and suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind … Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.’ We might recall here John the Baptist’s prophesy as recorded in Luke (3:16) that Jesus would baptize with ‘the Holy Spirit and with fire’. Because of its direct association with new life, in the Early Church the feast of Pentecost was the other time of the year as well as Easter Eve at which catechumens (new converts to the faith) might be baptized. The English name, Whitsun, probably derives from the white clothes the newly baptized used to wear for the eight days after their baptism. In the Middle Ages, Pentecost was thought a suitably solemn date for royal coronations; the royal anointing of the king in that ceremony acting as an outward sign of the reception of the Holy Spirit. The newly-crowned king would thus be rendered both Christ-like and a vessel of God. Pentecost, or Whitsun weekend is also a popular occasion for weddings, as Larkin came to realise on his train journey south; for though,

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at:
Gradually, his train filled up with newly-wed couples:
A dozen marriages got under way
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side …
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

Larkin’s poem is about the transition that marriage makes, entirely appropriately for this season characterised by change, when the gift of the Holy Spirit effects its transformation upon each of us.

The gift of tongues given to the disciples, which Luke here interpreted as the ability to speak in different languages, but which Paul tended to explain as the uttering of incomprehensible babble, baffled the crowd who witnessed it. Some of the sceptical present wondered if the disciples were drunk, just as –were this event to occur in a contemporary context – we might wonder if the Apostles’ ecstasy were chemically rather than spiritually induced. But Peter’s speech which we just heard explains that it is not that the disciples are out of their minds, rather than the prophesy of Joel is being fulfilled. And then he repeats much of the text of our first reading from the book of Joel, ‘‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.’

Quite when the Old Testament prophet Joel was writing is unclear; what is obvious from his own text is that he wrote in response to a devastating invasion of locusts which swarmed over all the crops of the fields but also over all the people in their houses. He interpreted this plague as a sign of judgement of the Lord and urged the need for the Israelites to repent, and throw themselves on the mercy of God. From the passage we heard read, that petition seems to have been successful, for God has sent the autumn rains, and as the newly-planted crop sprouts, the hope is offered of full granaries once more, repaying what have clearly been years of famine. Yet, then at the end the prophet moves into eschatological mode; he starts talking explicitly of the last things: ‘Then afterward, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.’ The young will prophesy and see visions, old men will dream dreams and God will show portents on heaven and earth, turning the sun to darkness and the moon to blood, all prefiguring the coming of the terrible day of the Lord. There will be those who escape – specifically those who call on the name of the Lord – but the portents for Joel are, none-the-less predominantly forecasts of destruction and death. Yet on Peter’s lips, as we heard in the passage from Acts, these become a declaration of new life. Note how Joel’s ‘then afterward’, became on Peter’s lips ‘In the last days’. For Peter the wonders that Joel prophesied were fulfilled in the life and deeds of Jesus’ ministry on earth; what is being prefigured now is the second coming with its latent promise of the redemption of humankind.
‘Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams’. This vividly evocative passage reminds us of the limitless possibilities available to the young. Whether you are sitting here trying not to agonise about the imminence of finals, or whether the prospect even of applying to university still seems a long way off, you all have this essential thing in common: the possibilities of what you might do, what you could achieve, how you might harness your own gifts and talents lies before you. You may not exactly have visions about your future – perhaps you think visions are things visited only on people in the past, people like the fourteenth-century spiritual writer Julian of Norwich, whose feast we celebrated on Thursday last week – but you can all identify with Vision. Boris Johnson successfully persuaded voters that he had a fresh ‘Vision for London’ to re-invigorate the capital. Poor old Gordon Brown suffers at the moment not least because it is David Cameron, not he whom the media believe to have the ‘vision thing’. Perhaps this is in part about age; visions are for the young, those with their futures still stretching before them. Your minds are – or should be – filled with visions, aspirational images of the various potential futures open to you, in public and private arenas. Everything is possible as you stand on the threshold of adult life. For those of you who are about to take finals this is, just like Pentecost, both an ending and a new beginning. You are leaving behind that which is past and launching forward into something that may now be starting to be revealed, or perhaps its precise form still remains entirely unclear. Even though the ultimate fulfilment of your visions is yet to be realised, the promise and hope you can, and should have in the future are clear. Whatever you do, even if in the first instance you return to studying, that too will represent a new beginning and open new vistas of opportunity. Adapting the words of tonight’s anthem: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon you, because he hath anointed you to … preach the acceptable year of the Lord’.

But for the old, such visions are past. ‘Your young men shall have visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’ The old have their memories, they can dream about their own youthful visions and reflect on their past glories, but their futures are narrower, less fluid, more closed as the reality of the imminence of mortality can less and less be ignored. My father, now in his late eighties, says that some days he can scarcely bear to open The Times for fear that it will tell him that yet another one of his contemporaries, and perhaps worse another of his younger friends, has died. Yet old men’s dreams, too, are touched by Pentecostal fire; remember Eliot’s vivid depiction:
a glare that is blindness in early afternoon
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but Pentecostal fire.

That Pentecostal fire touches each of us. And touched, we too are changed. Wherever we stand, on the threshold of adult independence, in middle years, or at the end of life, every year Whitsun takes us back to this pregnant moment in the life of the people of God and the relationship between God and his people: us.

For the gift of the Spirit fulfils Christ’s promise to all of us, his children; it confirms what he told us in his life and in the time he was among his disciples after his resurrection, that his purpose is our redemption, our salvation. The coming of the Spirit shatters expectations; while Christ’s Ascension seemed to bring an end, yet now we have another beginning, a promise of new life: ‘then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’. Pentecost, Whitsun is about that changes which arise from the outpouring of God’s grace and power. The spirit touches all our lives, young and old alike, effecting a transformation from which we cannot emerge unchanged. In ending, I return to my beginning, and to Larkin’s, Whitsun weddings. In his poem the railway journey acts as a metaphor for the journey of life, a journey each of us makes and to which, whatever our life stage, we can all relate. Larkin’s message is about transformation, too:

…………and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give.
AMEN

Professor Sarah Foot, Regius Professor in Ecclesiatical History
11th May 2008

At Harvard there are resonances with Oxford, not least a fast-flowing river and oarsmen rowing. Connecting the boathouses with Harvard and crossing the Charles River is a bridge with, on either side, gate piers, as in some 18th century Oxfordshire Palladian parkland, and on those gate piers are inscribed words from tonight’s second lesson: “On either side of the river stood a Tree of Life, which yields twelve crops of fruit, one for each month of the year; the leaves of the trees serve for the healing of the nations”.

I’m not quite sure why that moved me so much when I first crossed that bridge to the Memorial Church at Harvard. Perhaps it was something to do with the countless names emblazoned on the wall of the chapel of those who’d come to Europe and then beyond Europe to the Pacific to die in the Great Wars of the 20th century, those young oarsmen transposed into names on that war memorial. So it is with this Revelation to John and its poetry. We’re not quite sure where it carries us, but we believe the Revelation, this apocalyptic from the hand of John the Seer, was intended to be read aloud, for its kaleidoscopic visions have an effect upon us more like music that logical argument. Like a symphony this book needs to be heard as a whole, the overall structure carrying demand for discernment and message of redemption. Everything illuminates a crisis of which the seven churches of Asia Minor in the Roman Empire were unaware.

Written on Patmos, off the west coast of modern-day Turkey, the Seer speaks to his time, the time of the formation, persecution, and perhaps worse than persecution, a time of compromise, of settling in to civil society of the early Church. Nero’s persecution, AD 60-70, perhaps, but more likely Irenaeus was right, that leading Greek theologian of the 2nd century, in dating the Revelation toward the end of Domitian’s reign, AD 81-96, with its time of peace with some local persecution; the moves and pressures more subtle than persecution, to make Christians conform to local culture, as in chapter 2, to eat food sacrificed to idols and practise fornication, a common metaphor for religious infidelity.

This book is both an unveiling, for that’s what apocalyptic is, and also prophecy in the form of a letter, illuminating a crisis in a series of three disasters: war, death and famine, with the pictures of God as Creator and Redeemer, and of the renewal of heaven and earth, and that rainbow around the throne, signifying that God has not forgotten his promise to Noah in the 9th chapter of Genesis. All this memory from Ezekiel and memory from Daniel, re-worked by the Seer, the Seer’s imaginative ability, the Lion of Judah transposed into a Sacrificial Lamb, a profound change, a change which makes this seemingly violent and vindictive book profoundly Christian, a fitting climax to the biblical story.

“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb” – a temple which has become a lamb. The metaphors and images shimmer and recede, advance and brighten, darken and are transposed, like some Baroque opera. The scene changes, with gods descending and hell opening up beneath, to puzzle, inspire and appal by turns. What is it that’s at work here, that makes an American carve words from this apocalyptic on gate piers, either side of a bridge over the Charles River at Harvard, with its resonances of Oxford, its memories transposed, a gateway to a memorial of appalling cost and sacrifice on the walls of the Harvard Memorial Church?

More than forty years’ ago, when the preacher was himself at university, there was a question in the New Testament paper for theologians: ‘Should the Revelation to John form part of the New Testament?’ The suppositions around it were that to read it literally left one with a sub-Christian vindictive cruelty, a miasma rather than a vision, more fog than sunrise. For this priest, remembering next year forty years of ministry, listening to the human experience of others has brought the preacher to see that John the Seer speaks truths which only his music can embody with any justice. But, the warning of this book is that those who are literal-minded will die through lack of imagination. Perhaps here, with what leads one to another, the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, both in Oxford and in Harvard; perhaps what is borne towards us, sometimes overwhelming and sometimes almost engulfing, in our human experience. As we get older, more battered and buffeted by the pains of others and of ourselves, we come to value more deeply the strange kaleidoscopic, shifting lights, T S Eliot’s ‘fancy lights’ of the Revelation to the Seer, John.

The late Kathleen Raine, poet and visionary, founded an academy called Temenos, for the transmitting of the perennial philosophy. In Surrey, near the Cathedral where I work at Guildford, a founder member of Temenos lived in a little studio in a field called Pasturewood. Dr Thetis Blacker made for Winchester Cathedral a great set of banners, which at the Christian festivals unfurl in the nave, illuminating themes of Creation and Recreation, dazzling the beholder with apocalyptic vision. The literal-minded either writes the book of Revelation off as incomprehensible, 1st century muddle or, and this has recurred throughout Christian history, a key to the political and religious events of the time of the reader. Rome equals Babylon, or the Reformation period’s Roman Catholicism, or the Ottoman Empire, and there are plenty of such religious people about today in the 21st century who give this extraordinary book a bad name. But as Surrey’s Pasturewood was transformed into a foothill of the Himalayas, so Thetis Blacker rediscovered and displayed the great archetypes of Revelation.

Perhaps we too are invited here to be carried along by this river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, for it does indeed flow from the throne of God and of the Lamb. Perhaps the suffering of Tibet and the injustice of Zimbabwe, and the chaos of Iraq and the horrors of Afghanistan require a broad and deep canvas behind them, against which some of the great themes of religious life can, if not understood, at least be approached: God, Creator and Redeemer, the renewal of heaven and earth, the rainbow round the throne, the not-forgotten promise to Noah, the Lion of Judah transposed into a Sacrificial Lamb.

Those young university oarsmen at Harvard were transported, not only across the Charles River but across the world, and their names now adorn, and adorn is the right word, the war memorials of the University Church – ‘But their name liveth for evermore’. For the titanic struggle between good and evil to which the Revelation to John bears witness is not over and the struggle happens not only in the battle field, but in the study, in the costly engagement of one human person with another where there is sickness, suffering and desperate need. The water of the river of life is offered to us at a cost, for we, the thirsty, receive this water from the one who himself cried out on the Cross, “I thirst”, and who in himself renounced the power of the Lion of Judah for the weakness of the nailed Saviour, and by his death showed us, who dare to approach these mysteries, what it costs God to be God.

“‘Come’, say the Spirit and the Bride. ‘Come’, let each hearer reply. Come forward you who are thirsty, accept the water of life, the free gift to all who desire it’ ….. Amen, Come, Lord Jesus!”

Very Rev’d Victor Stock, Dean of Guildford Cathedral
27th April 2008

On 4th April this year at Westminster Abbey we held a day conference and a special service to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. on 4th April 1968. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, of which he became the figurehead, was seeking to right a wrong in America where black people were segregated from white. The spring of the movement for King, a Baptist pastor in Montgomery Alabama, was when Rosa Parks in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. The rest of her story is American history…her arrest and trial, a 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, and, finally, the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1956 that segregation on transportation was unconstitutional.

In 1963, Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC gave his most famous speech: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”

People in America and beyond were inspired by King’s dream. In 1964, he became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Laws were changed in his country. Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986. His influence is still honoured. The US Embassy supported the Westminster Abbey conference and service to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his assassination.

150 people attended the conference, young and old, black and white, Christian, Jew and Muslim. 900 people came to the special service in the Abbey itself. Our purpose was to pay attention to the dream which Martin Luther King had of a United States in which black and white could live together in equality, justice and harmony. We wanted to apply his vision to our day and country, where, although the law forbids segregation and discrimination, divisions between black and white, Christian and Muslim, appear deep and damaging. To build an inclusive, harmonious and peaceful society here and throughout the world is one of the greatest challenges we face as a civilisation.

The life and death of Martin Luther King made a difference. No doubt many of his friends and associates supposed that his death would mark the end of his dream, and that what he had proclaimed would now be ignored. The friends of Jesus must have had much the same thought. His death must have seemed like the end of all their hopes. Some of them terrified remained locked in a place of safety not knowing where to turn.

That is where history would have left them, had it not been for the experiences of Simon Peter, Mary Magdalen, the other apostles and other disciples and ultimately of many more, which led them to believe that Jesus who had been dead was alive and that his love was still powerful. Nothing less than the resurrection of Jesus can explain how these demoralised and terrified disciples, afraid for their lives, were transformed into people who could go out and proclaim to all that would listen the fact that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Now they no longer feared for their lives, indeed were willing to give their lives for the truth they were proclaiming. Many of them gave their lives.

Jesus came to bring life, to free people from the darkness of sin and death and to enable us to live together in love, joy and peace. That is why Martin Luther King’s vision of a world in which all are equally valued and all can live in harmony is a truly Christian vision. The task of establishing justice and peace cannot be achieved by political or social activism alone.

Jesus could not achieve his vision without being prepared to give up his life. As he said of himself, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” His death was the gateway to life not only for himself, but for all who trust him. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Martin Luther King’s death might have been a key factor in allowing his vision to be caught by people who otherwise would never have seen. As they said of Jesus, “He saved others; himself he could not save.”

This evening’s readings hold out a vision of a world transformed, completed and perfected by God. The first lesson comes from the 6th century BC when God’s people of the kingdom of Judah have been in exile in Babylon for 50 years but are now allowed by Cyrus King of Persia to return to the holy land. They begin to rebuild the ruined Temple in Jerusalem. Zerubbabel who is amongst the first returning exiles begins the task but is almost overwhelmed by the demand. The prophet Zechariah promises that the work does not in the end depend on human effort and human strength but on God’s will. “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also complete it. Then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you.” The Apocalypse or Revelation, the last book of the bible, completes the vision of a world transformed, completed and perfected by God. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth… And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

The task of building a humane and just society, a world order in which all live together in peace and harmony, in which none is preferred and none disadvantaged on the grounds of the colour of their skin or accidents of birth, a task to which many politicians and social activists have set their hands in the 19th and 20th centuries, seems from the perspective of the early 21st century impossible of achievement. There seems no basis for human optimism, but, based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and in the assurance that the great work of completing and perfecting the creation, in a new heaven and a new earth, is God’s work and he will perform it, there remain solid grounds for Christian hope. The work of Christians is to collaborate with God in achieving his ultimate goal: that all should live in unity with him and thus with each other in a world transformed.

“I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Very Rev’d Dr. John Hall, Dean of Westminster Abbey
20th April 2008

What will be my last words here on earth? What will be yours? Lying in hospital or at home – surrounded I hope by a group of our closest family and friends – I wonder what we will want to communicate in those crucial, dying moments.

Over past years famous last words have been collected and treasured. They range from the funny – Oscar Wilde’s ‘Either that wallpaper goes or I do’ to the tragic – Princess Diana’s ‘My God – what’s happened?’ They move from the romantic, Napoleon’s last word ‘Josephine’ to the mundane: Humphrey Bogart’s ‘I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis!’

They encompass the deluded – the Roman Emperor Vespasian’s ‘Oh no: I think I’m turning into a god!’ and the genuinely faithful: the French King Charles 5th’s ‘Ay, Jesus’. They include the plain unfortunate: General Sir John Sedgewick’s ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from that dist…’, and the visionary – Thomas Eddison’s ‘It is very beautiful over there’.

And in the final instalment of this series on the Seven Words from the Cross we come to Jesus’ last words – at least the last words before his glorious resurrection: words based on a verse from the Psalms – ‘Father into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

There had been a time, just an hour or so before, when Jesus had not been able to utter the word ‘Father’: when the only Psalm he could quote from was one of the deepest abandonment: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Yet now that hour was past. Jesus had paid the full price for the sin of humanity. He had been declared guilty so that we could be pronounced innocent; alienated from God so that we could be reconciled to God. The great curtain in the Temple that divided ordinary worshippers from God’s presence had been ripped in two from top to bottom; the clouds had parted; and once again Jesus could pray,

‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

Jesus had passed through many hands over the previous twenty-four hours. Judas had handed him over to the chief priests and the elders; the chief priests and elders had duly handed him over to Pilate. Pilate had washed his hands, before sending Jesus to be manhandled by his guards who’d mocked and beaten him, blindfolded him and taunted ‘Who hit you that time?’

Others had used their hands to weave a crown of thorns and thrust it onto Jesus’ head; still others to take up hammer and nails, to do the dirty work of the public executioner before lifting up the cross, then throwing dice for Jesus’ clothing. ‘The son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners’, Jesus had said at the end of the vigil in the garden of Gethsemane, and from that moment on his experience was of hands that whipped and stripped and nailed and impaled – treacherous hands, guilty hands, bullying hands, murderous hands. And what a relief after all that for Jesus to pray:

‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

To the outsider it seemed that Jesus had lost control of the situation: that from the moment he was seized in the Garden of Gethsemane he was simply a victim of his circumstances, powerless to respond. But that was not the reality. As Jesus himself put it, ‘the reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life, only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord’. Despite all appearances, the spirit had not been ripped from Jesus’ body: no, it was deliberately, carefully placed by Jesus himself into the loving hands of God:

‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

And Jesus’ dying words, of course, could be taken as a model for all Christian believers, an expression of the deepest trust and security, and definitely more profound than ‘Either that wallpaper goes or I do!’ But commending our spirit to the Father – placing our lives in his hands – is not simply for the dying: it is also for the living.

Jesus’ words could be taken on our lips before we go to sleep: in the ancient office of compline, members of monastic communities pray every night, ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit; you will redeem me, O Lord God of truth’. Yet commending our spirit to the Father – placing our lives in his hands – is not simply for the sleeping: it is also for the waking.

The conscious decision to live for God, to follow him, to seek his direction, to acknowledge that He knows best is, of course, a distinctly counter-cultural way to behave. While we willingly place our bodies into the hands of fallible surgeons when we know that there’s something wrong, we are somehow far more reluctant to place our spirits, our very selves, into the hands of an infallible God. Yet God’s service is perfect freedom: living for him is life at its best. And anyone whose first miracle was to turn 120 gallons of water into rather good wine could hardly be described as a kill-joy!

A true story with which to finish: the great 19th century acrobat Blondin had chosen, for one of his stunts, to stretch an 1100 metre tightrope over the Niagara Falls, and to walk across it. ‘Do you believe I can do it?’ he shouted out to the assembled crowd. ‘Yes, Blondin’, they shouted back, ‘you can do anything’; and he duly walked across.

A week later the crowd assembled for another feat. Blondin was going to walk across the Niagara Falls once more, but this time pushing a wheelbarrow in front of him. ‘Do you believe I can do it?’ he shouted again. ‘Yes, Blondin’, the crowd shouted back, ‘you can do anything’. ‘Do you believe I can do it with someone sitting in the wheelbarrow?’ Blondin persisted. ‘Yes Blondin, you can do anything!’ ‘So who’s going to sit in the wheelbarrow?’ – and there was a deathly hush!

Who’s going to sit in the wheelbarrow? Who is going to entrust their very lives into the hands of our all-knowing, all-loving Heavenly Father. It’s a prayer for our waking and a prayer for our sleeping, a prayer for our living and a prayer for our dying:

‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit’.

Rev’d Andrew Watson, Vicar of St Stephen’s Church, East Twickenham
2nd March 2008

The earliest evidence of sermons on the ‘seven words from the Cross’ is from the Jesuits, but this is not until the seventeenth century; and it was as late as the nineteenth century that the ‘seven words’ were used in the Anglican Church. Perhaps it was influenced by other sevenfold practices – the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, the seven canonical hours, the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, and so on. For whatever reason, it is now a well-established custom at Easter time. There is just one problem in this practice: by bringing the ‘seven words’ into one composite liturgy, it is easy to forget that they are a contrived compilation, taken from all four Gospels.

Perhaps the deeper meaning of these cries from the cross is better understood when we take into account their context within each individual Gospel. Matthew and Mark, for example, are the only two Gospels to use the cry ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’, which is a quotation from the first verse of Psalm 22: we looked at this last week. Because this is the only cry that they use, the focus for Matthew and Mark is on Jesus’ complete ‘God-forsakenness’ at the hour of his death. Luke, by contrast, has three cries, all completely different: he believes that Jesus was not abandoned by God in his last hour, so instead Jesus’ final words are a quotation from Psalm 35: ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’. And because Luke also sees Jesus as the man for others, he uses two other cries which show Jesus’ concern, firstly, for his enemies (‘Father, forgive them; for they know now what they do’) and secondly, for the penitent thief (‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’).

John’s Gospel, like Luke’s, does not see Jesus as God-forsaken. John also uses three cries from the cross, but they are different again. Jesus’ first cry addresses the two he loved most dearly – his mother and his beloved disciple – as he commends them to care for each other after his death (‘..Behold your son… behold your mother..’). The other two cries highlight the two most important aspects of Jesus’ ministry – his humanity (‘I thirst’) and his sense of completing his God-given mission (‘It is finished’). These are poignantly brief – one word in each case in the Greek – but they reflect so concisely John’s understanding of both Jesus’ humanity and his divine calling as seen on the cross.

All four Gospels concur that Jesus died with the words of a Psalm on his lips. In part this was to show that Jesus, in his humanity, identified completely with the hopes and fears of those early psalmists. In part it was a way of demonstrating that Jesus was even greater than King David, whose name was associated with most of the psalms, by showing how Jesus’ sufferings could accomplish even more than those of the earliest ‘King of the Jews’. For Matthew and Mark, Psalm 22 was an ideal commentary on Jesus’ passion; for Luke, it was Psalm 35. However, for John, it was Psalm 69, which was our Old Testament reading tonight.

Matthew and Mark and Luke allude to Psalm 69. Each records how Jesus was offered wine to drink, mixed with myrrh, and each Gospel makes it clear that this was at the very beginning of Jesus’ crucifixion, and at that point Jesus refused to drink it, for he wanted to approach the hour of his death in full control of his senses. Their audience, who unlike us would know their psalms, would perceive the flashback to Psalm 69:21 –‘They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink’.

John engages much more with Psalm 69. ‘After this Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfil the scripture), “I thirst”. A bowl full of vinegar stood there; so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth.’ (John 19:28-29). John tells us that Jesus was offered vinegar to drink at the very end of his three hours on the cross and that then he readily accepted it. There is an irony here: the one whose first miracle in John’s Gospel was the turning of water into wine – not only good wine, but the best wine, as the host of the wedding of Cana discovered – has in his last moments to succumb to foul vinegar to pacify his thirst. But John takes the irony even further than this: the reference to hyssop would remind John’s Jewish audience of the way they took this herb with the Passover lamb, and here at this Passover is the one whom John the Baptist called the Lamb of God, the one who would take away the sins of the world (John 1:29), who is himself becoming the Lamb about to be slaughtered- at Passover time. Small wonder that when John uses the cry of ‘I thirst’ it is to show that Jesus is both speaking from scripture –sharing with us the ‘mess and muddle’ of life – and yet expanding its meaning by ‘fulfilling’ it once and for all.

Psalm 69 is an important psalm elsewhere in John’s Gospel. It is also used at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, just after the wedding at Cana, when Jesus expels the money changers from the Temple. There we read ‘His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for thy house will consume me” ’ (Jn. 2:17): these words come from an earlier part of Psalm 69, when the psalmist complains ‘Zeal for thy house has consumed me, and the insults of those who insult Thee have fallen on me’ (v. 9). Again we may note the irony here: Jesus would indeed be (literally) consumed by his zeal for true worship of God his Father, for it drove him eventually to his death. So John uses Psalm 69 at the beginning and end of Jesus’ ministry: he does this to illustrate that the rejection of Jesus was no mere accident of history, but was something which had been spoken of in the words of Scripture and was now being fulfilled.
Psalm 69 is used a third time in John’s Gospel. When Jesus is trying to explain his forthcoming rejection to his disciples – just before his arrest and trial – he says to them ‘It is to fulfil the word that is written … “They hated me without a cause” ’. The quotation is deliberate: ‘More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause’ (Psalm 69:4). So three times over, Psalm 69 is used to show how, in the life of Jesus, the words of this Psalm are now being fulfilled.

So the cry ‘I thirst’ has layers of meaning. It is certainly intended to show us a very human Jesus who needs physical refreshment in his pain: John’s Gospel is full of insights into the humanity of Jesus, who sits ‘wearied’ at a well and asks a Samaritan woman for a drink (John 4:6-8), who asks questions (John 6:5 and 11:34), who weeps at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35) and who is troubled as he enters Jerusalem (John 12:27). But ‘I thirst’ is also intended to show us Jesus’ divine calling as well – and here this is mainly by reference to Psalm 69.

‘I thirst’. The motif of ‘thirst’ occurs several times in John’s Gospel. Just after the cleansing of the Temple is Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman, and the theme of ‘thirst’ dominates the scene. Jesus, wearied and thirsty by Jacob’s well asks this unnamed woman twice for a drink, and twice she refuses – ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (John 4:9). So Jesus turns the question back on her – if she had known who it was who was asking her for drink, she would have asked him instead – and he would have given her living water. ‘Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ – ‘Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw!’ (John 4:14-15). So from very early on in the Gospel, ‘thirst’ is not only about wanting water but about needing God. The same point is made after the feeding of the five thousand, when Jesus says ‘…he who believes in me shall never thirst’ (John 6:35). This miracle thus shows Jesus is able to offer not only physical food but spiritual nourishment as well. The point is made a third time: this is at the Feast of Tabernacles, as the water was being ritually carried, in a golden pitcher, from the Pool of Siloam up to the Temple. Jesus proclaims: ‘If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink!’ (Jn.7:37); ‘Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive’ (Jn. 7:38).
So ‘I thirst’ is certainly a cry from the human Jesus, emphasising his physical agony and hence his need for drink, but it also emphasises Jesus’ spiritual needs – for that ‘spring of water welling up to eternal life’. Yet again we perceive a dreadful irony in this: the one who earlier had offered that ‘living water’ for others now cries for refreshment himself. A verse from another psalm is implied here: ‘My soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is’ (Psalm 63:1)

So we have seen how the cry ‘I thirst!’ affords us a deeper understanding of Jesus. But does this cry afford us a deeper understanding of ourselves? The use of the psalms, which are after all the prayers of every man and every woman, would suggest so. And John’s Gospel is full of Jesus meeting individuals whose self-understanding completely changes as a result of their encounter with him: we see this in the woman at the well, Nicodemus, Mary and Martha and Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of Jesus, and Philip, Thomas, Peter, Nathaniel, and the unnamed disciple (?John himself?) whom Jesus loved. So this scene at the cross must surely be as much about us as it is about Jesus.

Mother Theresa of Calcutta offers us an extraordinary contemporary insight into the meaning of this cry for us. In every house of her order, the Missionaries of Charity, the words ‘I thirst’ are written alongside the images of the Crucifix. For Mother Theresa, these two words symbolised what she called ‘the thirst of Jesus for our love’. In her public ministry she used to speak of her work amongst the poor of Calcutta as ‘saturating the thirst of Jesus on the cross for his love of souls’. Mother Theresa gave these words a radical dimension. Instead of us looking at Jesus on the cross, and observing his suffering, both physical and spiritual, we find that Jesus is looking down at us: he is not the object of our gaze, but rather we are the object of his. The cry of ‘I thirst!’ was not only directed to God his Father but to us as well, so that we too may be drawn into this mystery of Jesus’ thirst for humanity. “Diyw/Å” – the Greek for “I thirst” . This was not just a cry from Jesus to God; it was a cry to us- to plead for our response to his love expressed on the cross. The question is, are we really prepared to drink from his cup of his suffering, too?

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
17th February 2008