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‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy’ Matthew 5:7

Mercy, it’s said, is when we deserve something bad but don’t get it. It’s pre-eminently a gift of power or status, a gift of the stronger to the weaker, of the powerful to the dependent. So kings can dispense mercy, but on the whole peasants can’t.

The Bible is full of examples of this kind of mercy. The king who had mercy on a servant who owed him an enormous sum, and cancelled it – only for the man to go out and have a fellow-servant thrown into prison for not paying him a much smaller debt. Or, on a different level, Joseph having mercy on his brothers, who had earlier sold him into slavery, when eventually, as second ruler of Egypt, he had them in his power.

The poor in spirit, the bereaved, the persecuted, even the peace-makers, may not be in a position to show mercy. This beatitude is an invitation to those who can.

Mercy is a fundamental characteristic of God. In fact, the Hebrew word which most closely parallels it, chesed, is probably the most frequently quoted abstract noun in the book of Psalms (we had it in our psalm tonight) – and always it refers to God. The King James Version translated it as ‘loving-kindness’, and no one has really bettered that. ‘Steadfast love’ and ‘mercy’ are also used to translate it, but the sum total of those properties is to be found supremely only in Yahweh, the living God. God is a God of mercy, who uses his power not arbitrarily or punitively, but in acts of mercy – of which, for Christians, the supreme expression is in the self-sacrificial life of Jesus.

Micah summed up memorably the heart of God’s moral requirements in these words: ‘O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God’. These beatitudes are like a fugue woven around those themes!

I said that mercy is the prerogative of power, but in one sense we all exercise power. A society without mercy in its everyday existence would be barren, ugly and vicious. Sadly, a loss of a sense of mercy marks much of modern life. Judges who exercise it are vilified. Offenders are demonised. Lock them up for life, hang them, chuck them out, shut your eyes to the world of injustice and suffering. Where there is no chesed there is no blessing, because from mercy flows blessing and from that blessing flows true happiness.

Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, said that mercy blesses twice over – it blesses the one who receives it, and the one who shows it. That is precisely how Jesus expresses its effect here. Those who show mercy, receive it, and are blessed.

Kyrie elison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. We have prayed those words tonight. No one is more ready to hear the cry for mercy than Jesus. Indeed, in Luke’s Gospel his last two actions, while dying on the cross, were of mercy. He forgave the Roman soldiers who, a couple of hours earlier, had nailed him there. ‘Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing’. Then he forgave the thief hanging on the cross alongside him. ‘Jesus, remember me,’ he said, ‘when you come into your kingdom’. ‘Truly’, Jesus replied. ‘today (not at some future date of kingly power) today you will be with me in paradise’.

To practice mercy is to reveal the likeness of God, to follow the example of Christ, to bring blessing to ourselves – and to a world crying out for mercy.

Canon David Winter, Former Head of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC
11th February 2007

‘In some languages,’ said the linguistics lecturer, ‘a double negative means a negative; in some languages a double negative means a positive. But in all languages, a double positive means a positive. There are no languages in which a double positive means a negative.’
And a voice from the back row called out, ‘Yeah, yeah.’

We have become the ‘Yeah, yeah’ culture. ‘Don’t try to take us in; we’ve heard it all before; it’s all promises, promises, spin and no substance.’ And there are many things in our world where that reaction, sadly, seems all too appropriate.
And I suspect the only reason why Jesus’ Beatitudes don’t come in for the same treatment is that we hear them as a kind of religious wallpaper: someone may have thought about it one stage but now we take it for granted. A pleasing background noise, murmuring its sotto voce blessings while the business of the room goes on unaffected. But in Jesus’ day, and to anyone who reads them seriously today, the Beatitudes surely cry out for the ‘yeah, yeah’ treatment. ‘Blessed are the poor? Blessed are the meek? The persecuted, the pure in heart, the merciful, the peacemakers?’ Yeah, yeah, give me a break: it sounds like the revenge of the no-hopers: we haven’t made it in the present world, so we’ll detach ourselves, escape into a private piety, and hope for a better future by and by in the sky.
And if you think that’s what Jesus meant – and, sadly, there have been many Christians, not to mention non-Christians, who have seen it like that – then the decline of faith seems inevitable. Swinburne’s picture of the pale Galilean, or Nietzsche’s critique of wimpish Christianity, seem to have their finger on the button. And today’s world of politics, business, the arts, the media – wherever you look, they’ve all gone along for the ride. ‘Jesus? Yeah, yeah.’

But this is, of course, a way of avoiding the sharp and dangerous challenge that Jesus’ words present. He is saying what millions then and now desperately want to hear, and could hear if only his followers would get off their whatevers and do what he said. He is saying, ‘Let me tell you: this world could be different. Actually, it’s going to be different. It’s going to be turned upside down – or rather, it’s going to be turned the right way up. And that process is starting right now! Why don’t you get on board and help make it happen?’ That was, and is, the challenge of Jesus’ preaching, and if this were a lecture rather than a sermon it would be fun to explore it in much more detail.

But tonight we reach one of the best known and loved of the Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ If you know Brahms’s German Requiem you may be able to imagine the wonderful opening chorus which sets those words: Selig die Trauernden, denn sie werden getröstet werden. A lovely word, getröstet; Trost, with echoes of our ‘trust’, a word which says ‘here is something you can rely on, lean on, find fresh strength from’. And ‘strength’ is of course what our word ‘comfort’ is all about. Comforting someone doesn’t mean explaining that things aren’t as bad as they seem. They often are, or even worse. Comfort is what happens when someone comes alongside and gives you strength. How that happens is one of the mysteries of human life and love.

All that is implied in this Beatitude, but it goes much further. When God turns the world the right way up, declares Jesus, then those who presently have nothing but grief in their hearts will find comfort, not simply because someone has come alongside them but because the world will be put to rights at last. And when that happens, death itself, the great bringer of mourning, will be overthrown. This ancient Jewish hope, which is not the same as the cyclic myths of reincarnation that we find scattered across the ancient near east, but is a hope for an eventual future in which, as John Donne insisted, ‘death shall be no more’ – this hope insisted that one day the creator God would make a new world, new heavens and new earth, and would raise people to a new and immortal bodily life to live in it, to look after it, to fill it with justice and joy. And Jesus’ promise of God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven means just that: that this tired, battered old world will be renewed from top to bottom, not thrown away, leaving us as mere disembodied spirits in a non-spatio-temporal heaven, but given a new, incorruptible bodily existence in comparison with which our present life is like a passing cloud. That is the promise of God’s kingdom; and that is the promise which undergirds, and comes to sharp expression in, the full set of Beatitudes.

So what do we say about mourning, about death and what lies beyond, about God’s promises to renew all things and us along with them?

First, get clear on the shape of Christian hope. For many modern Western Christians, the idea of a still future resurrection of the dead has retreated, and in its place has come simply the language of heaven: you die, you go to heaven, and that’s it. But the hope of the earliest Christians, and of many in non-Western traditions to this day, is for an eventual bodily resurrection. That’s what Paul is talking about in the spectacular passage we heard as our second lesson. When God will be all in all, in the new world over which Jesus will rule as king, then all those who belong to Jesus will be raised to share in it and indeed to rule over it. That’s the promise. And therefore, rather to our surprise, the early Christian writers aren’t very interested (as we are very interested) in where or indeed what people are immediately after their death, in between their death and the final resurrection. St Paul says simply, ‘My desire is to depart and be with Christ, which is far better’. Jesus himself speaks of going ahead to prepare lodgings for us – not our eventual home, because our eventual home will be God’s new creation, not some heavenly mansion.

Once we get this straight, we are given back a proper acceptance of grief, of mourning. Jesus doesn’t say we shouldn’t mourn; he says, ‘Blessed are the mourners’. If the person who has died has simply ‘gone to heaven’, then for many Christians mourning seems inappropriate. When my father-in-law died, my mother-in-law, as a devout Christian, believed that since he was now in heaven we shouldn’t be sad and cry, but should celebrate. So she did. Eighteen months later, her only and beloved daughter emigrated to Canada, and she wept bitterly for a fortnight. That parting, itself sad but not that sad, brought to the surface at last all her previously buried and undealt-with grief.

In a key passage, St Paul doesn’t say that Christians shouldn’t grieve; he says we shouldn’t grieve in the manner of people who have no hope. There is such a thing as hope-less grieving; and there is, thank God, such a thing as hope-ful, or we might say hope-filled, grieving. That is part of the Christian paradox, and indeed hope-filled grieving could stand as a metaphor for what the wise Christian thinks when looking out at this entire world the way it is, filled with bitterness and violence, with injustice, oppression and every kind of human misery. The Lamentations of Jeremiah, from which our first reading came, could stand as a heading for an appropriate Christian viewpoint on the world: grief, with powerful hope at the middle of it.

During my first year as Chaplain here, our much-loved Head Porter, Ray Smith, died quite suddenly and quite young. His daughter was my scout on Staircase 3. I was preparing to take the funeral, and she told me she wouldn’t come to it. Why on earth not, I said, of course you must come. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I know I’ll just cry and cry.’ ‘That’s precisely why you must come,’ I said. That’s what a funeral is for, and don’t let anyone tell you different. Grief is the shadow side of love; not to grieve implies that you haven’t loved, and, if you have, then not to grieve is to live a lie. But truth will out sooner or later, and sooner is better. She came; and she grieved; and she was comforted.
And so the comfort which Jesus promises as part of the blessing of the Kingdom, the comfort which will be fully ours in the new world which God will make, comes forward from that world to meet us in the present. Thank God, there is both a future hope and an anticipation of that future hope in the present. And this means that we are called to be people of comfort, as well as people of grief, in the present: people through whom comfort comes to others. The Beatitudes are not only promises; they are agendas. We learn their meaning for ourselves so that we may make them real for others. But that is a whole other sermon. For now: Blessed are those who mourn; for they shall be comforted. And the response is not ‘yeah, yeah.’ It is: ‘Amen; Amen.’

Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham
21st January 2007

Humility – or being Poor in spirit
has always been an admirable quality.
However, there has always been a double bind associated with it.
That is,
if we feel we are humble;
we probably are not.

Or as an American religious was reported to say once:
“I’m the humblest monk in Texas!”

Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ novel is obsequious,
#But that is a phoney sort of being poor in spirit,
Because his apparent humility masked an inner malignant pride and deceit.

Perhaps to be poor in spirit
Is actually to be accurate about oneself
Which can be both positive and negative.

*There is a story of Winston Churchill towards the end of his life being in
bed at Chartwell. A small child comes through the doors of his bedroom and
says:
“Please Sir, my Mother said you were the most famous man in the world. Are
you?”

To which the reply was:
“Too right I am; now buzz off.”

That is an example of humility,
Because at the time, he was. It would have been inaccurate for him to deny
it out of a false sense of modesty.

Sometimes being poor in spirit is essential for one’s work.
I suppose the opposite of being poor in spirit,
Is someone who is full of themselves.
Some people in their work have to get themselves out of the way almost to
the point of being a non-entity:

There is a beautiful description of Smiley, the spy in Smiley’s People,
which said: “Smiley was a good spy. For instance, if he were sitting alone
in a pub and someone opened the door and looked around and left, they would
have sworn that the pub was empty.”

A good counsellor or listener often has the quality of forgetting
themselves and losing themselves in what someone else is saying in order to
identify what the meaning of what is being said is for the person saying it.

Someone who is poor in spirit in a spiritual sense, would be much like
Mother Theresa, who would essentially look at the world through a
God’s-eye-view, rather than her own.

It might be described as being like a stained-glass window in which God’s
love shines through our own particular window in the unique colours of our
own personality.

Like the stars, the heavenly light shines most clearly when it is not
diminished by the light pollution of our own ego trip.

In the New Testament lesson read this evening, the Centurion, who is a
high-ranking officer in the Roman Army occupying Israel, sent some Jewish
elders to see Jesus, to save his servant’s life.
He did not come himself, nor did he send one of his own men.

Then when they approached his house, he sent word to say:
“Do not trouble yourself, for I do not deserve to have you come under my
roof. That is why I did not even consider myself worthy to come to you, But
say the word, and my servant will be healed.”

Jesus calls his poverty of spirit, faith, for that is what it is.

He is putting absolute trust in God’s power acting through Jesus.

The degree to which he is able to trust Jesus, rather than his own
authority, is a poverty of spirit, which results in the healing of his
servant. Jesus’ says ” I have not found such great faith even in Israel.”

Perhaps it is like the laws of physics, that 2 things cannot occupy the same
space at the same time. Either we or our pride can be there
or others’ needs and God’s power can be present, though it probably is not
as absolute as that when we look at it on a paradoxical level.

On a paradoxical level, it can be the ultimate selfishness to be unselfish,
because we certainly receive far more. This is backed by research that
someone’s ability to be fulfilled is largely dependent on whether they can
live a considerate style of life.

Many ask the question “How can I allow myself to get close to another
person, without my pride or bossiness getting in the way?”

In short, how can I become intimate with another person or with God?

Perhaps the basic response is how can we become poor in spirit.

How is this done?

Think of a continuum:
On one side, there is power – on the other side there is intimacy.
We are somewhere in between.

Power is where I can get what I want, when I want it.

Intimacy is where I give up power, and allow myself to be vulnerable to
another person. When I am vulnerable, they have power over me.
They can hurt me, reject me, shun me, or say they do not love me.”

As a rule, the more power we have, the less intimacy.

To a powerful person, intimacy is shunned because the vulnerability feels
like.

* I learned a valuable lesson about this from a strange cat I
once owned. It displayed strange behaviour, which I had to consult a vet
about. I would pet the cat who was lying on my lap. The cat would purr and
go to sleep. All of a sudden, , the cat would waken, jump up, bite and
claw me severely, often drawing blood, hiss and run off as if I had become
an enemy.

What the vet said, is that the cat, in going to sleep, would forget it was
being rubbed by a friend. It would suddenly wake up, and register the
closeness as danger. It would then attack as if its life depended on
defending itself from an enemy who had got too close, as it would in the
wild. He suggested only giving the cat a few rubs, and not letting it fall
asleep on my lap.

I thought, how similar to people who develop an intimacy, then suddenly
reject the partner, who is too close, because they register intimacy as
being powerless; the partner as being a foe.

Likewise when 2 wolves are fighting, when one wants the fight to stop it
lies on its back and bares its neck in a gesture of intimacy. The other
wolf could easily rip its opponent’s throat out.
It doesn’t, in the face of such an act of intimacy, hostility stops.

Perhaps this is similar to Jesus’ approach to violence by suggesting turning
the other cheek. This plays judo to power, through a display of intimacy.

In order to achieve intimacy with another person or with God, we have to
give up power, to become poor in spirit.

Power can take many forms. It can be by achieving dominance over another;
it can be to become addicted to drugs.
How is addiction power?

To take drugs is to feel better instantly. It places my feelings entirely
within my control. I can feel better now, without waiting for it to be in
the gift of others or a change in my own attitude toward what is happening.

This instant power comes at a heavy price. The heavy price is that we lose
our capacity to handle stress.

The interesting side effect is that if someone achieves a position of power,
or becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol,
the side effect is that it freezes one’s emotional age from the age the
power or addiction starts.

For instance, if someone starts drinking at 16 and stops at 45, then they
are a 16 year old in a 45 year old body.

When they stop drinking, they go through all the stages of development and
growth between adolescence and 45.

You can tell the emotional age often by the tone of voice, sometimes getting
it down to a year or two.

One such client said “It’s not fair, nobody loves me.”
“How old are you?” I asked
” I’m 35″ said the client
I replied, “Listening to the emotional age of the voice, it sounded like age
15 or younger.

Anyway, as they grew up emotionally, the voice changed to late adolescence,
then adulthood and took on a deeper and more understanding tone. The client
was listening to their own voice as well. We stopped when the emotional and
physical age were the same.

The poor in spirit, sometimes speak with the wisdom of an elderly person,
even when they are young in years.
I once was given a tape of a child aged 6 who had suffered and was in a
hospice. I said that it sounded as if the child were 6 going on 100. I could
even imagine myself sitting at his feet and learning something, despite the
age difference.

It makes it interesting to listen to politicians on the news, to hear their
emotional age.

Here power does the same as drugs in bringing about arrested development:
Statements from world leaders like “We’re going to whup their ass”
” Or nobody is going to tell US that we can’t develop nuclear weapons”
betrays being stuck at a particular emotional age.

Isn’t it reassuring that many weapons of mass destruction in the world are
in the capable hands of a few emotional adolescents?

There is a spiritual paradox here. The more we have under our control in
possessions and power, the less intimacy, and the capacity to enjoy what we
have.

In Zen, this truth is illustrated by a circular elliptical figure, which is
a complete circle, called MU.

MU means two things simultaneously: it means both everything and nothing
It reflects a divine truth that the more of everything we have; the less we
have.
(Gadgets and worldly possessions cannot love us back)

The paradox it represents is one who is without possessions, owns the world.
And the one who owns everything, enjoys nothing of what he or she has
because of the worry of defending their possessions,
and therefore really enjoys nothing.
If we own nothing; we possess the world because no possessions own us.

*This truth was illustrated in a Zen tale.
A Zen master asked one of his disciples to reflect on the koan : “Do cats
have souls?”
The disciple went away for several days and reflected.

Finally he came back to the Master, sat down and answered in one word: “Mew
(Mu).”

To be poor in spirit is to have no power
and to feel no burden of wealth.
It means to be able to be open to what life has to offer
— the intimacy of another
–the intimacy of the beauty of nature and the universe
but most important, the intimacy of God.

Both the hand and the heart
which wishes to receive, must first let go and be empty of lesser things
in order to receive the greater.

To be poor in spirit is indeed to be able to receive all that the kingdom of
heaven has to offer.

In a moment of silence:

Reflect-
At what time of your life were you the most full of joy, contentment and
love?

(silence)

Now reflect
on what particular loss or what poverty of goods or of spirit
made that joy possible? ///

Canon Beaumont Stevenson
Chaplain, the Psychiatric Hospitals of Oxford
Pastoral Care Adviser, Diocese of Oxford

You might have been wondering where the stained glass window on the front of your service sheet is from. It’s actually one of our chapel windows – the one on the right of the door as you come in. I’ve been giving a series of sermons on all seven windows, and this, the last one, fits well with the theme of our service tonight. You can see a full detail of it on the last page of your service sheet.

William Burgess, the architect behind the refurbishment of this chapel in the 1860s (you can see the date of its completion on the ceiling) was a Victorian who believed passionately in the power of the visual to communicate spiritual truths. So he covered the walls, ceilings and floors and furniture with people and themes from the Bible, church history, classical tradition and the natural world, whilst his glazier, Henry Holiday, applied his skills to the windows, on the theme of ‘Christ the Light of the World’. To say this chapel is rich in symbolism is an understatement. The illustrations often also served as a commentary on theological and social issues of the mid nineteenth century: the friezes around the windows reflect the debates about Darwinism and creation, for example, and the ceilings and the narthex reflect the nineteenth controversies about the relationship between Jews and Christians, and on the floor, behind the altar and in the windows we find suggestions of the disputes about the role of the church in society. In the 1860s, both undergraduates and fellows would have had to attend chapel daily for morning prayer, so there was plenty of opportunity for meditation on these things. Some hundred and fifty years later, we have lost so much of this interaction; and that is why I am trying to revive some of it in this series of sermons.

Our window tells its story just as the great cathedral windows would have done; predictably, its depiction of the visit of the magi, seems to reflect particular nineteenth-century British concerns about the nature of monarchies and the extent of their powers. The window is certainly a stylized depiction of the Gospel story. We no longer look into a stable, with the ox and ass, but rather look outwards from the entrance of a house; you can see the porticos, the silhouettes of the trees against the darkened sky, and the star casting its piercing shaft of light – almost like a sword – onto the Virgin and Child. Most importantly the visitors are no longer magi from the East, in traditional Oriental garb, but they are rulers of the kingdoms from the Western Christendom. Admittedly, the third figure in the background has a turban, but even he might typify the kingdom of the Turks – itself a relevant topic given the Crimean wars of the 1850s. But the other two – the one in red presenting myrrh, the one in gold and silver offering his golden crown – are distinctly Anglo-Saxon in physique and dress. The blue and black canopy, in the top left of the window, is embossed with royal symbols, and it protects the Virgin Mary, who in turn protects her baby son and holds a serene and regal pose. The infant Jesus, supported by Mary resting on a purple pillow, looks upwards and outwards: although only a few weeks old, he possesses a wisdom and composure way beyond his years. And we are included in this scene; together we can observe the contrast between the rulers who hold earthly but temporal power and the simple authority of the Christ-Child, whose kingdom we already know is in this world but not of it.
The details of this scene are taken from Matthew’s Gospel; they follow the reading the Provost gave a few minutes ago. Matthew records no stable, no ox and ass, no angels, no visit of the shepherds; all those details are in Luke’s Gospel. The setting is some time after Jesus’ birth, still in Bethlehem, but in a house. Matthew actually describes the visitors as ‘magi’- astrologers, following signs and portents through a star – not kings. But the kingship theme is undoubtedly a key part of Matthew’s story: the magi enquire in nearby Jerusalem as to the whereabouts of the ‘one born king of the Jews’, and the jealousy of king Herod, the references to Bethlehem, the birthplace of king David and the city where the promised ‘King of the Jews’ would be born, is deliberate.

So the scene in our window, with a certain artistic license, interprets Matthew’s account. It depicts the ‘kings of this world’ – in its nineteenth century setting probably from the kingdoms of Europe- paying homage to a baby whom they partially understand has a kingdom which surpasses theirs. It is a bizarre sight: those who hold power give it back to one who, in all the vulnerability of birthing and infancy, is utterly powerless. But this is what Burgess intended: if you look up above the window you will see a scroll held by the prophet Zechariah. Each window has its own caption through an unfurled scroll; the one over our window is taken from Zechariah 14:9: ‘And the Lord will become king over all the earth’.

The theme of ‘Christ the King’ has been a golden thread running throughout our service tonight, and given that we are starting the season of Advent, it is deliberate. We encountered it in our very first hymn, ‘Once in royal David’s city’, where we sang of Jesus’ first coming as a baby and his second coming as King over all the earth. We encountered the theme again as we prayed the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy kingdom come… for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory…’. We heard it in the reading from Isaiah 9 which spoke about one who was to be born from the house of David and who would bring in the rule of God. And in the hymn ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ we sang of how ‘the hopes and fears of all the years’ have been met in this Bethlehem birth.

So we could in fact end this sermon here. By looking at this window we could simply note that those who possess power and authority – and in our day we might choose instead those in government at home and abroad, and those leading our churches and, most relevantly in Oxford, those determining our education – we could simply note that those who possess power and authority serve their cause best when they recognize the temporal and temporary nature of their calling. This is an important message, and would that those who are in positions of power and authority could apply it more in their lives. But – because of our participation in the theme of Christ the King, we have to raise a further question: as we look through this window, together, what does all this mean for us?

The scene can mean a good deal to us. But we can only begin to take something from it when we appreciate that here we have just one example of what might be called the ‘upside-down’ nature of the Christian Gospel: it’s a theme which is developed not only in this window, but in the others as well, where in each case ‘Christ the Light of the World’ confounds human expectations of what a redeeming figure should be like. This reversal is there in the very first window, on the left of the door, which is of Mary receiving the message from angel Gabriel that she will give birth to Christ; we heard this story in an earlier reading, and it speaks of God confounding the mighty and powerful and rich and choosing the meek and powerless and poor through whom to bring about his work of salvation. The most vivid illustration is in the crucifixion window, behind me: here we have a moving image of Christ, the ‘King of the Jews’, who refutes worldly power and who affects salvation by being as vulnerable in his death as he was in his birth. The title over his cross is in fact, again, ‘King of the Jews’: it links together his birth and his death and shows us how the one who was born to be a different sort of king –for us- also dies as a different sort of king – for us. T.S. Eliot, in his poem The Visit of the Magi, also dwells on this theme. In the words of one of the magi, having returned to his land from that visit to Bethlehem, we hear:
Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We have evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

So the story of the Light of Christ, in its various stained glass hues, is of God’s attempt to penetrate the darkened human mind and the indifferent human heart through an element of ‘reversal’ and ‘surprise’. And our response? That even though we don’t fully understand, we try to believe. In the Christian Gospel we see again and again that Christ’s life and death is about the power of love, not about the love of power. Our response therefore has to be as simple yet as profound as that of the kings. In the words of the carol by Christina Rosetti which we heard the choir sing so movingly earlier:
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man,
I would do my part.
Yet what I can I give Him
Give my heart.

Perhaps as you sing our last hymn, ‘O Come all ye Faithful’- one which you might have sung so many times that you are in danger of ignoring its meaning – perhaps you can take time to ponder these things, reflect on this window, and make your own homage to the one whose purpose in coming into this world was to demonstrate, again and again, the power of love over and above the love of power.

Amen.

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
26th November 2006

There would be a certain delicious cruelty in preaching only tonight on the last verse from our reading from Ecclesiastes: ‘youth and the dawn of life are vanity.’ There is enough to be gloomy about in fourth week of Michaelmas Term, and on the day that we have to admit it is nearly winter because the clocks have gone back, without dwelling upon intimations of mortality.

The words of the Preacher – the writer of Ecclesiastes – whose studied indifference to the vicissitudes of life, and refusal to be beguiled by novelty, fame or riches which might be summed up with the one word, whatever, do however give me a way in to this address. For the Preacher recognises mystery at the heart of existence. ‘As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child,’ he writes, ‘so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.’ Creation and Creator, life and the author of life, are both mystery. And here – as in any theological use of the word, from the Old Testament or the New – mystery does not mean an inexplicable puzzle to be solved, a riddle to which we will one day know the answer: it means an unknowable certainty. A man may love his wife, and may know that he does with all his heart – yet try and explain that to somebody else, and the chances are that after a few moments, their eyes will glaze over with boredom. The love between two people may be utterly real; and yet it cannot be put easily into words, or represented as a scientific formula or algebraic equation. But it is no less true for that.

Some people cannot cope with the concept of mystery. Racing up the bestseller’s list at present, I’m sorry to say, is Dr Dawkins latest book, The God Delusion. Here, we find what can only be described as materialist fundamentalism: if a thing cannot be seen, touched, measured, proven according to physically observable criteria, then it cannot be true. Terry Eagleton – a Professor of Literature and literary theory, and by no means a blindly loyal son of the Church – describes Dawkins’ book in a notable article published just a week or so ago, as not only the work of an enraged atheist, but of a brisk, bloodless rationalist, a product of a certain kind of English middle class liberalism which generally finds its home in North Oxford. (As a resident of North Oxford myself, I’d like to assure Terry Eagleton that it ain’t necessarily so.) In opposing the God who is the superdaddy in the sky, the big boss above who acts arbitrarily and even capriciously in allowing suffering to exist in the world and not putting all to rights with the wave of a magic wand, Dawkins is forgetting the very first thing which the Church holds about God in her doctrine of Creation. God is not an item of the universe; God is the reason why there is a universe, why there is anything at all rather than simply non-existence. It is the freedom which God gives to creation – what has been called, God’s willingness to let creation create itself – that allows for the possibility of science (creation can be investigated, explored, understood more deeply and more thoroughly), and, indeed, scientists – even Dr Dawkins himself. Because God is not part of, but outside, creation, he is mystery: and we can never fully express the mystery of God.

Yet neither can we leave things at that. It is the Christian claim that God who is mystery has made himself known; initially, and in part, to his first chosen people, through a series of covenantal relationships; but then perfectly in Jesus Christ, who reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature; who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; and who has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of God’s will. Not only – so Christians believe – do we see in Jesus Christ the fullness of the revelation of God; but we also find in him the fullness of the mystery of man. Think back to the words from Ecclesiastes, who wrote of the mystery of the conception of a new life. However much, however massively, our medical and biological knowledge has increased – and it has, in ways which in themselves, we surely glimpse more, not less, of the wonder of God’s creation – however much more scientifically advanced we are so that we can create the circumstances which make new life possible in a variety of ways which would have been unimaginable to the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures (or indeed the Christian Scriptures as well), yet there is still a mystery about human existence which Christianity understands like this. At the moment of our conception, God gives to each one of us, newly, separately, and uniquely, that part of us which most nearly reflects the divine likeness, and which is immortal: which we call, our soul. Created as both spirit and matter, it is God’s purpose for us, that we should live to know and to love God, who creates us in love, and to reflect back to him, perfectly, the image of his glory. And – so Christians claim – it is only in Jesus, only in the Incarnate Word who is both God and man, that human existence does indeed find perfection and fulfilment. It is for that reason that the Scriptures and the Tradition speak of Jesus as our great high priest: the one who alone is able to present humanity before the throne of grace, an acceptable sacrifice of thanksgiving, love and praise.

How can we share in the priesthood of Christ? How can we so unite our lives with his, that they too might be conformed to the divine purpose in creating mankind? In our second reading tonight, there is a rather extraordinary verse, in which Paul, writing to Timothy, urges him to share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. That verse may well strike us as odd, for two reasons. First, because the church has lost confidence in the notion of Christians as the battle-squadrons of Our Lord. Sabine Baring-Gould’s Christian Soldiers rarely march onwards as to war (though they still do in Pusey House Chapel). Secondly, the verse may disturb us because of its association of our discipleship with the suffering of Christ – an altogether too uncomfortable a notion for much Christianity, especially in the prosperous West today, although one which represents a theme which runs through the New Testament from Our Lord’s injunction to James and John that if they are to share his glory, they must drink from the cup of his suffering. I shall not pursue that theme further this evening.

However, I do want to end by saying something about one way in which we can – indeed, as Christians, must – seek to unite our lives ever more closely with that of Christ, and one for which the image of a soldier is not unhelpful. I mean, prayer. Christian spiritual tradition has long understood prayer to involve a struggle – a battle; and as the great masters (and mistresses) of prayer down the ages have shown us in their writings, that battle grows more intense, the nearer one draws to God: sanctity, so Christian history would suggest, seldom brings serenity, in this world at any rate. The battle of prayer can be with ourselves. We can become distracted, our attention taken easily away from God, and directed towards – and this can be uncomfortably revealing – what we are really attached to, what really matters to us: and when this happens, it can be a wake-up call to look again at what is actually motivating, controlling and absorbing us. We can become despondent when prayer does not appear to be answered in the way that we think it ought to be. We can become prone to – here’s a technical term for you – accidie; spiritual torpor, sloth and laziness, which quickly becomes our habit of body and mind, when all we want to do is stay in bed, or drink another pint, or watch daytime TV (does it sound familiar?). Or the battle can be with our environment – with the many material things, the goods, the images, with which our world bombards us, which can bury our true selves, our best selves, and so erect a barrier between us and God. Or the battle can be with Satan, the Accuser (and whether he is real as you or I are real seems to me to be quite beside the point) – the one who so confronts us with our own faults and failings, our own sins, that we feel so low and wretched that prayer becomes impossible.

On each of these fronts, there will be a battle in our attempt to pray, in our struggle, as St Teresa put it, to ‘take time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.’ Yet we must never lose heart; for we are not alone. We are just now coming into the wonderful season of All Saints-tide, when we celebrate that great cloud of witnesses who have been – each one of them – where we are, and now encourage us by their prayers, offered in the nearer presence of God, to follow along the trail which they have blazed, God’s purpose in the creation of mankind made perfect in them as it can be in each of us. We never pray alone: but always in the communion and fellowship of all who have run the race – who have fought the fight – before us: and who now rejoice in the presence of the unveiled mystery of God, the source and origin of all things, all things ending and perfection.

Rev’d Jonathan Baker, Principal of Pusey House
29th October 2006

Over the last few years a number of comic book superheroes have made the leap from the glossy page to the silver screen. Out of all of these movies the one I have enjoyed the most has been Spiderman, not that I was ever a great addict for the comic, but because the 2 movies have grappled with the important question of, is it worth being and doing good in a world where you just get knocked down for it and receive no reward or recognition? It dares to ask the question of what is the point of doing good?

If you have seen especially the second Spiderman movie I am sure you will remember if not empathize with the slightly nerdish Peter Parker who, in both his personal and superhero lives always tries to do the right and decent thing but somehow his life is worse for this rather than better. Regardless of the fact that he has plucked a child from a burning building and saved countless other lives, he is still repromanded by his tutor with that most terrible condemnation of his work as disappointing. He loses his job because of his unreliability and must give up the girl he loves because of his concern that he may put her in danger. Even his life as a superhero comes in for criticism as the national press relish in portraying him as the masked menace in order to increase sales. It seems that doing the right thing, even bending down to pick up your books which someone has knocked from your hands leads to you being smacked in the face by other people’s bags, it seems that being good just doesn’t pay.

In his very astute way, Diarmird McCullough, on In Our Time last week, which was on Luthur, commented that this is the small problem the Protestant Church is left with if it follows the doctrine that salvation is by faith alone. For, if we are justified by faith and faith alone then what is the point of doing good or more worrying, what is the point in not doing bad. If our actions have no bearing on our salvation then what is the incentive to do the right thing or not to do the bad?

This is certainly not the situation we find in our first reading this evening, taken from that most troubling of books, Joshua. Here we see that doing the right thing really does pay and pays very well as Caleb comes to Joshua and asks for the land which Moses promised him as a reward for “wholeheartedly following the Lord”. However difficult we amy find it to hear a story of territorial ancestry at this time of war and suffering in the Middle East over dispossession, it is clear that for the writer of this section of the book, the Lord not only rewarded those who followed him but rewarded them in a very tangible and visible way, namely victory and the riches of land.

I often feel rather sorry for the Pharisees and the bad press they have had down the ages, probably because I suspect that if I had been around at the time of Jesus I would have been one of them. In our reading from Matthew it seems to me that, from their point of view, the Pharisees were trying very hard to do the right thing. The law was their path to salvation and to keep it wholeheartedly was to be good in the sight of the Lord, and the reward for this was to be in that right relationship with him, like Caleb. For them, goodness is about keeping a set of laws or rules but these are not just any old human laws, they are God’s laws and so have a divine as well as a moral precept to them. Given this, it is therefore not very surprising that, the Pharisees, the real specialists in the law, are annoyed by Jesus and his disciples. For them Jesus is not just doing something naughty, like standing on the main quod grass when he shouldn’t, he is breaking God’s divine law, he is, metaphorically, sticking two fingers up at God, is doing wrong, he is being bad and therefore should be punished.

I think there is something deep within us that yearns for Christianity to be a simple set of rules which we can follow, knowing that we are good and will be rewarded when we keep them and bad when we don’t. But we must fight this urge within us for this is not the freedom, the salvation which Christ brings. In a sense what Christ offers is much more difficult. He does not give us a rulebook which is held over us to show when we are good or bad. There are no laws which we can tick off. We cannot win God’s favour by our deeds of goodness but neither can we lose God’s love by our sins. the free gift of salvation through Christ cuts through all our commercial bargaining with God. We often speak of ourselves as children of God, and rightly so for that is what we are, but here it seems to me we are confronted by the most adult of relationships, one not based on getting rewards for being a good little girl or a bad little boy but one based on responsibility.

The only thing that keeps Peter Parker going through all the sacrifices and troubles which doing the right thing brings are the words his uncle says to him in a dream, “with great power comes great responsibility”. From this he choose that to do good outweighs everything else even his own happiness. And Jesus says to us “from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded” Luke 12:48. I do not think we can wriggle out of this and say that his words only apply to leaders ot clergy, they apply to all of us, who call ourselves Christian. For I do not believe that God wants us simply to be followers of Christ but to be his hands, his feet, his presence in this world, and we can only do this if we realise the great gift of salvation that has been given to us, that there is nothing we can do which will make God love us more and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.

Christ, in our reading this evening, does not change the rules, he does not give us a new set to abide by but he cuts through them s one who does not obey God as a child but as one who is in a loving, responsible relationship with him. It is this relationship that he makes possible for us.

To realise that this is our relationship with God is simply overwhelming because it not only strips us of our bargaining tools but also makes us realise our absolute inability to fulfil our responsibility of doing good. Of living up to the love and trust God gives to us. Our response can therefore be only one of repentance, we can no longer be like the Pharisees, for our bargaining tools have been taken from our hands. We can instead only cry out in wonder and repentance in response to God’s love for us. The more we open ourselves to God in all humility, the more he can use us, his broken tools, as vehicles of his goodness, his grace and his love in the world. His work through us is not for our glory or our reward, for us who know that ours is the liberating yet uncomfortable place of standing before God, for us are the words of Isaiah: “Here is my servant, whom I have chose, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.”

The Chaplain
22nd October 2006

This passage from Matthew’s Gospel opens with some stark reproaches to those who had received so much from God. It reminds us of what Jesus said in another place: “When someone is given a great deal, a great deal will be demanded of that person; when someone is entrusted with a great deal, of that person even more will be expected.” Lk.12:48

Matthew is, very likely, concerned with the lack of enthusiasm for the message by many in his congregation and wants them to beware of lukewarmness and lack of commitment. The Gospel message needs to be taken seriously and much more wholeheartedly especially by those who should know better. Capernaum, after all, was where Jesus had made his headquarters!
Jesus reveals how receiving the message actually works. Revelation comes from the Father, to the Son and then to those who are open to it, and these are not necessarily the most highly educated. Sometimes it might seem that faith is all very complicated when we consider the many controversies, debates, and the numerous books for and against it. It can often be difficult to see the wood for the trees. And yet, fundamentally, it is quite simple. The Lord himself tells us so when he says to the Father: “you have revealed these things to the humble or the simple – i.e. to those able to see and accept the messagewith their hearts.” They are those who have experienced the bruises and burdens of life, ‘those who turn naturally and with a childlike confidence to God’s word. Those who know from experience that Jesus’ ‘yoke’ is not burdensome because they are given the grace to carry it lovingly.

Among the loveliest and most consoling phrases in the whole New Testament must be these words of Jesus which we heard in this Gospel today:
“Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

In the Gospels we see Jesus being true to his promises. So many had heavy burdens lifted from them : the woman at the well in Samaria, the poor widow who lost her only son, Zaccheus, Bartimeus, the lepers, the blind, the lame and the deaf. All those who felt themselves to be on the fringes of society, those crushed in body and spirit. He who said
“I am the Resurrection, and, ‘I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly’ is true to his word, and not only then, 2,000 years ago, but also in our own time.
But we need faith and love, a faith which is not in our heads alone –which would keep God outside of us, a distant aloof figure. But we seek a faith also of the heart which sees God as close and loving, as the Father who looks out for the Prodigal, who forgives, restores and nourishes. A God who says
“Come back to me with all your heart; don’t let fear keep us apart.” (Hos.13) This is a God who has shown himself to us in human flesh, who, ‘in his greatness has let himself become small’ as Pope Benedict puts it. God has taken on a human face in Jesus who said
“He who sees me sees the Father; I and the Father are one.” (Jn.14:9) And then God, in Christ says those amazing words ‘learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart’. How could we fear such a God?
This is an awesome love.

Humility and gentleness are not the most popular attributes in today’s culture. Yet, we know that nothing is so strong as gentleness and nothing so gentle as real strength. It takes a strong self-confident person to be gentle. Gentleness is one of the most necessary, most humanising qualities of life. I for one am grateful for the gentle hands and heart of my mother. And just think of the gentleness required in the hands of a surgeon.
Deep within each heart is a longing for gentleness because we can’t open up and grow without it. Henri Nouwen says this “A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly and touches with reverence.”
A gentle person knows that healing and growth result from maturing not forcing. On the other hand the lust for power is rooted in weakness not in strength. Those who need to dominate others feel little self worth.

It is Jesus above all who shows the astounding strength of gentleness. “He opened not his mouth” before the cowards who sought to crush and humiliate him. Yet he it was who had the power to lay down his life and the power to take it up again.
To the gentle and humble Jesus promises peace of soul. Pride and arrogance do not bring peace but rather confusion and unrest get projected onto others through the anger and frustration of such people. Humble people disarm others and bring out the best in them: think of people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or Nelson Mandela.

The words of St Seraphim still ring true today ‘Acquire inner peace and a multitude of people will find salvation near you.’
“My yoke is easy and my burden is light” Jesus could say this because he carried it with so much love. Only love can lighten the load. G.K. Chesterton, that great wit said ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.’
If we are deprived of food for a day we can barely last out – at least that’s true for me! But a mother who gives up food for a day so that her children may eat, hardly notices it.
Ofcourse some of the baggage we tend to carry, we could and should let go of.
There is a Zen story about an old man going on a spiritual journey with a heavy bag on his back. On his deathbed he passes on the bag to his disciple. When the disciple opens the bag he finds that it is completely empty. Yet he wonders why it weighed so much.
The old man says,
‘It is the weight of everything in my life that I did not need to carry.’
Our religion is not meant to be a burden. The only command Jesus gives us is that of loving one another and bearing one another’s burdens.
While faith makes all things possible, it is love that makes all things easy. Let us remember always those words of St. John:
“My little ones, I am writing this to keep you from sin. But if anyone should sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one” (1 Jn2:1).
So –
“No matter what our hearts may charge us with – God is greater than our hearts and all is known to him – who is life eternal.” (ibid.,3:20)

Sr. Nora Coughlan, Assistant Chaplain at the Roman Catholic Chaplaincy
15th October 2006

They were carved to adorn a papal tomb, but they never quite made it. Today – if I remember rightly – they can be seen in one of the churches or galleries of Florence. Four stone figures – carved by Michelangelo – with one unmistakeable characteristic: they are unfinished. Yes, a good deal of work has been done on them. The figures have shape and form. They possess a vitality, an energy, that is coming through; and – more than that – there is striving, something almost approaching pain, as though the figures are still tearing themselves out of the rough stone. There is the promise – a good deal more than just the promise – of what they might be. But they are still becoming.

There is something about those four figures that seems to me to be particularly pertinent. Pertinent – yes – at the beginning of a new term, of another academic year, but pertinent for all of us at every stage of the journey. Somehow they represent something of the truth of our experience. We are living, learning, questioning, growing. Stone figures bear the marks of the hammer and chisel. We bear the marks of our experience, and we are changed by it. We are – like the stone figures – unfinished, not complete, still becoming.

Those who are familiar with the stories of the Old and the New Testaments will know that there is something here in this understanding of ourselves that is to be found time and again in the pages of scripture. I think, for example, of Abraham, called to go from his country and his kindred and his father’s house to a land that God would show him. I think of the children of Israel, delivered out of slavery in Egypt, and discovering over long years in the desert their identity as a people, their faith, their law, their God. I think of Jesus, travelling with the disciples in the road to Jerusalem, aware – or was he aware? – of all that lay ahead; but still journeying, still travelling, still discovering for himself the meaning of his Passion. I think of the Apostle Paul who, mindful of all that he had counted as loss for the sake of Christ, could still say, “Not that I have already obtained or am already perfect, but ….forgetting what lies behind and striving forward to what lies ahead I press on towards the goal”. That’s it: straining forward, pressing on; living, learning; still journeying, still discovering – discovering that vision and the possibilities that are there within ourselves; changing; growing; unfinished, not complete, still becoming.

Many will say, Yes, of course. How can it be otherwise? But it is not self-evident as we look around that this is how people always see themselves. And even if they recognise in their personal relationships, in their working lives, the need to learn from experience, the need to change, to grow; it does not necessarily follow that this is how they approach religious faith and religious practice. How else do we account for the hard-line fundamentalism that we find in so many places, including at times some parts of the Christian Church? How else do we account for the quiet, untroubled acceptance of pieties and platitudes that are simplistic, nostalgic. How else do we account for the disregard, even the disdain, with which some people – in all other respects fair-minded people – treat religious faith?

What happens to that spirit of openness, of free enquiry, of adventure, that we judge to be appropriate – necessary even – in so many other areas of life? What happens to our critical faculties, to our honesty, to our awareness of mystery, to our sense of wonder, to whatever modest reserves of imagination, of patience, of courage we might possess? Why are these things so often left behind, abandoned, not thought to be relevant when it comes to faith, to prayer, to discipleship?

Perhaps what I am pleading for – and I go back to those stone figures – is a faith which is sufficiently honest, imaginative, self-critical, robust to live with incompleteness: the questions that we cannot answer; the ambiguities that life presents; the contradictions of our experience; the absence – certainly the perceived absence – of God. There is that marvellous sentence in Doris Lessing’s book The Golden Note-Book, in which she reflects that life is crude, unfinished, raw tentative. But then she insists that the “raw unfinished quality in my life was precisely what was valuable in it”. And what is true for life must be true for faith.

Of course, the rock on which we stand as we approach all these things is what we have seen of the truth and the grace and the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Some will say that for them faith is too tentative, too elusive; but I can only rely that I don’t know any other kind. And that’s why I go back to Michelangelo’s stone figure. They have shape and form. They possess a vitality, an energy, that is coming through; and – more than that – there is striving, something almost approaching pain, as though the figures are still tearing themselves out of the rough stone. There is promise – a good deal more than just the promise – of what they might be. But they are unfinished, not complete, still becoming. And there – in those words – I find the only approach to the Christian life that makes any sense to me: not just at the beginning of a new term, a new year, but at every stage of the journey.

Stone figures, I said earlier on, bear the marks of the hammer and the chisel. We bear the marks of our experience. And that is where God’s meaning is to be found: where we are now in the world. It is in the world that we find God. It is in the centre of life that we find the meaning of faith. And that is why we can say, “It is in the grit of earth that we find the glory of heaven”. Yes, our time is the present. Our place is the world as it is. Our first resource is the gospel. Our basic stance is of one faith seeking understanding.

Of course, we have no authority to speak about God unless it is with the mind and in the spirit of Jesus Christ. And, as we journey, dare we ask that we might claim for ourselves something of his integrity, something of the quality of his obedience, changing and being changed into his likeness, so that finally we might say, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me”.

Very Rev’d Dr. John Moses, Dean Emeritus of St Paul’s Cathedral
8th October 2006

Ezekiel 1:4-10, 22-28a; Mark 1:1-13

If two people get married, it is invariably the case that they employ a photographer for their wedding day, either a professional at great expense, or a friend. In either case, it is not uncommon for the photographer to ask the couple, at some point during the day, to pose looking at each other. If you are a budding photographer or plan to take photos at a wedding in the future I would recommend that you ask this of the bride and groom, because what you will probably capture is that very special look of love between the two people – amongst all the finery, food and festivity, there comes a moment when the two lovers look at each other, encapsulating the essence of the event – the celebration of love.
When St. Augustine was trying to find the words to describe the mystery of the Godhead as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he remembered this most unique of human experiences – a loving gaze- and saw how it could express something of the divine community of love. Just as the lover and the beloved gaze at each other in mutual love, so God the Father looks at God the Son and the love, which passes between them is God the Holy Spirit. Three persons made one through their love.
To use this unique experience of the uniting power of love between two people as an analogy for the Trinity is very helpful but it does highlight a profound difference. Each one of us has, not only a deep capacity to love but also a need to be loved. People often talk these days of the importance of “loving oneself” as if it is impossible to love another or receive love unless one first loves oneself. There is some truth in this but experience teaches that invariably we are unable to love ourselves until we learn to love another and receive their love in turn. To be able to love we must look outside ourselves, only then is our true need to love and be loved fulfilled and life takes on a richness and vulnerability, which was not there before.
Christian theology says that this need has been met and fulfilled within the being of the Godhead. As William Vanstone writes:
“In the dynamic relationship within the being of the Trinity, love is already present, already active, already completed and already triumphant, for the love of the Father meets with the perfect response of the Son. Each, one might say, endlessly enriches the other and this rich and dynamic interrelationship is the being and life of the Spirit. Therefore, nothing beyond the being of God is necessary to the fullness or fulfilment of God.”
That dynamic interrelationship is evident in this evening’s reading from Mark. Even at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry the Father proclaims Jesus to be his beloved Son, with whom he is well pleased, and the Spirit moves Christ into the wilderness.
God is not like us who must look beyond ourselves to another who, by responding, will satisfy our need to love. Within the mystery of the divine being there is present both the power to love and the triumphant issue of love in the response of the beloved.
If this is so then it has profound repercussions for how we see our relationship with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Just as when we look upon couple is love and feel as if our presence makes no difference at all to their love for each other, so we must look upon the Trinity of love and know that we and every other created being are not necessary to the being or fulfilment of God. God is complete in himself and is not reduced or unfulfilled or even incomplete if we did not exist. In no way can we claim that without us, without our being or without our response, God is in any way unfulfilled. God needs no response from us, or anything in creation to be divinely fulfilled, for he is whole, complete, satisfied within himself the Trinity of love.
If God has no need to look outside himself to have his love made whole and fulfilled than the fact that God loves us is pure gift, which flows from the fullness of his being of love. It is not the kind of love, which springs from need or emptiness but from an overwhelming generosity. It is the kind of love, which a family has who, united in mutual love, take an orphan into their home. They do not do so out of a need but in the pure spontaneity of their triumphant love. Nevertheless, in the weeks that follow, the family, once complete in itself, comes to need the newcomer. Without him the circle is now incomplete; his absence now causes anxiety; his waywardness brings concern; his goodness and happiness are necessary to those who have come to love him: upon his response depends the triumph or tragedy of the family’s love. In spontaneous love, the family has surrendered its own fulfilment and placed it precariously in the orphan’s hands. Love has surrendered its triumphant self-sufficiency and created its own need. This is the supreme illustration of love’s self-giving or self-emptying, that it should surrender its fullness and create in itself the emptiness of need.
In the revelation of such love cannot be easily understood by humans beings, nor readily described as to be comprehensible, as our reading from Ezekiel this evening demonstrated. The awesome, terrifying vision Ezekiel called the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. All he could do was fall on his face. More awesome still is the fact that, if God has taken us, and all creation, into the perfection of his community of love, then who we are and what we do matters. It matters to God if we are absent or not, if we are wayward or not, if we are good or not. Our response to God’s love affects God himself.
This does not mean that God is like Big Brother watching, judging our every move, but that you and me and all creation, are part of that divine look of love. To know this and experience it is to be fulfilled and for life to take on the richness and vulnerability of knowing that we are looked upon in such love and that love in turn, turns our eyes towards him and all he loves so that we are lost in wonder love and praise.
Amen.

Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold
11th June 2006

Today is one of the most important festivals in Christendom. Pentecost, also known as Whitsun. The day when the story of the Holy Spirit coming upon the men and women of the early church is told and retold. It can seem a remote, supernatural even spooky story with its metaphors of flame and wind and speaking in tongues. But the receiving of the Spirit by the early believers is a way of understanding the Church’s call to engage with society in a distinctive way.
This evening I would like to reflect for a few moments on the Pentecost story and consider what it teaches us in relation to a topical question about which there is much debate: human rights.

Christians, while supporting the concept of human rights often feel anxious about the language. In the recent debate in the House of Lords over assisted dying, bishops argued successfully in the end, that life was not so much a right as a gift; and this basic standpoint informs Christian engagement on this subject. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in 1945, French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) observed, “We agree on these rights, providing we are not asked why. With the ‘why,’ the dispute begins.” Those of all religions and none will have different rationales for supporting human rights, but I would like to suggest that Pentecost is where we should start to look for the Christian.

A life of faith asks that the orientation of a person is that of one seeking God, acknowledging that our lives are lived in response to the numinous, a basic orientation that searches for meaning, that receives life itself as a gift and lives in response to that gift. The hallmark of a Christian life is one lived in response to the love of God and the continuing presence of the Spirit.

It is the Spirit, in Hebrew – ruah – or breath – of God, who brooded over the waters at Creation, who brought order out of chaos, who made the dry bones in the valley live in the book of Ezekiel, who gave speech to the apostles at Pentecost, who turned Peter, from the frightened follower who denied he ever knew Jesus, into the orator who speaks from the pages of Acts in our second reading tonight.

The Pentecost story is literally vital in helping the church define its character and purpose in society. It is an enlivening story, of empowerment, of mutual accountability, of communal experience and shared vision.

We are called to discern the movement of the Spirit, to read the signs of the times, and to speak about it like Peter.
The story of Pentecost tells us several things about ourselves in relation to God; The Spirit did not come to one lone disciple asking him or her to bear the weight of the mission alone; the Spirit was poured out onto the community And this revelation of what God is like – showing us the 3rd person of the Trinity, gives us a model of personhood that governs our common life in the world.

And this is also where we start to engage with the modern, mostly secular language of human rights.

There is much controversy surrounding human rights in our public debates; in response to heightened fears about terrorism, the nature of human rights and at what point they are qualified is part of our political conversations. The mistake in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menendez last year after the 7th July bombings in London, the proposals for identity cards, legal arguments over the detainees in Guantanemo Bay all in the arguably still early years of human rights language post 1945 means that the Church can make its own distinctive contribution to the public debate.
And this springs from our celebration of this festival of Pentecost.

First, the engagement in debate at all. The pouring out of the Spirit on the apostles had the effect of making them able to speak, in a way that their hearers could understand. The Spirit enabled a translation from the language of faith to the language of the marketplace and the effect of Peter’s message, on the crowd, we are told cut them to the heart.

Second, the fact that the Spirit was poured out onto the community and in a way that affected them physically is a sign of the presence of God and the characteristics of that presence.

Third, the revelation of the third person of the Trinity, the revelation that God is three persons, that God is somehow the space between the persons as well as the persons themselves gives us a model for engaging with society’s anxiety over human rights.

The Spirit dignifies and ennobles us, the Spirit inhabits us, stretches and draws us out.

With these principles, we can draw from the Pentecostal experience that human rights as far as the church is concerned are not so much individualist but personalist.

Personal rights are inalienable and come from our understanding of ourselves as created in the image and likeness of God, and also our acknowledgement that an essential element of the flourishing of a person is within community.

The concept of personhood comes from a Christian understanding of God: not a man with a beard on a throne, not a despot, albeit benign, or a CS Lewis’s type vivisectionist God experimenting on his creatures, nor a watchmaker God who winds up the world and watches it run itself down; but a Trinitarian God; God in the Christian tradition is three persons and one God. God is relational, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. From this doctrine combined with the Incarnation; the belief that God became human in Jesus Christ, comes a strong platform of human dignity and right relation on which to rest the notions of justice, and human rights.

If at the centre of a circle is Human Dignity, then springing from it is a series of concentric circles

First circle we might say contains personal rights (inalienable)
Second Social rights
Third Instrumental rights (mediated by institutions)

Bodily rights, political rights, rights of movement, associational rights, economic rights, sexual and family rights, religious rights, communication rights.

Bodily:
Personal is RIGHT TO LIFE AND BODILY INTEGRITY
Social is RIGHT TO FOOD, SHELTER, REST, MEDICAL CARE
Instrumental is SECURITY IN SICKNESS, INABILITY TO WORK, UNEMPLOYMENT (ie Welfare Sate)

Associational rights;
Personal: RIGHT TO SOCIAL INTERCOURSE
Social; RIGHT TO ASSEMBLY AND ASSOCIATION
Instrumental: RIGHT TO FORM SOCIETIES AND ORGANISATIONs

A Pentecostal definition of human rights will recognise not only that a person has the right to self determination, but that that person is unique and mysterious. That the person has a soul not just a body and a mind.

Our acceptance of the spiritual dimension to our lives, our lives lived in response to the quickening presence of the Spirit mean that this primary relationship with God turns us outwards from ourselves and from our church towards our neighbour; whoever that may be. Our interpersonal relationships flow from this one primary relationship. The quality of our spiritual relationship with God is an inescapable function of how well we treat our neighbour.

This can be summarised in the Christian commandment: Love God, you’re your neighbour as yourself.

An appreciation of human dignity derives from our resting in the Creator: we are made in the image of God. Personal inalienable rights flow from this as human nature has been taken into the nature of God in the incarnation; human experience has been made sacred by God becoming human. The concept of a person as social flows from an understanding of God as Trinity. Social and instrumental rights flow from our reading of Pentecost; a communal, ordered inspirational experience of God.

Pentecost illuminates and envigorates the current rights debate to the extent that it will always turn us first to God and to our neighbour in whom we will find God. We will then be able to name the lie that an individualistic understanding of society or rights teaches us: I don’t need you, I deserve the possessions I have, I owe you nothing; I can do what I want; anything is possible if I try hard enough.

There is no security in such mantras, there is no peace in possessing the whole world at the expense of your soul. There is conflict and even war at the end of the conversation that begins with I don’t need you.

There is peace, security, justice and right relationship in knowing that we belong to God, the source of our being and we belong to one another.
This central theological question will inform our attitude to rights: to whom do we belong, in whom do we trust, to whom do we return?

The Spirit teaches us an obliged freedom; an absolutely unfettered liberty that is at once bound in service of others. A Christian human rights ethic is one which mirrors the action of God in the world; God’s life poured out into JC; kenosis and at Pentecost, the Spirit poured out into the life of men, women and children. As Isaiah reminds us, this is the Spirit who, when upon us, will send us to bring good news to those who are oppressed, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and comfort to all who mourn.

The Spirit teaches us a dynamic definition of human rights, relational, biased towards those who are marginalized, dependent on the belief that God created each person. The Spirit teaches us that when we approach another human being, we act justly not only in order to receive justice ourselves; but we approach any other human being in the knowledge that in doing so, we approach holy ground.

Amen.

Canon Lucy Winkett: Precentor, St. Paul’s Cathedral
4th June 2006