Author: admin

This short period between Ascension and Pentecost is always an interesting time to consider how the Holy Spirit can lead us in our own lives. On Easter Sunday we celebrated the resurrection, which was an event that nobody saw happening, that happened at night or at early dawn, that was only predicted obliquely. And after the resurrection, the disciples still met behind locked doors, for fear of the religious authorities.

But the ascension as written about in the Acts of Apostles happened in clear sight, “he was lifted up before their very eyes.” But before he was lifted up Jesus said “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you”. The mood of the disciples was very different: they confidently went back to Jerusalem, waited and prayed, and actually went to work to choose a new apostle to replace Judas. And sure enough on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came to them as a community, something we will celebrate next week.

So this is a time of waiting and expectation for something we can be sure is going to happen. It’s rather as if we’ve done our exams and in fact we’ve been tipped off we are going to pass, but we’re just waiting for the public announcement. In these few days, we can imagine we know that the Holy Spirit is going to come to us, and it is a period of waiting where we can consider how the Spirit will lead.

Jesus already had a reputation as a preacher and teacher, so it isn’t surprising that the people in his local synagogue asked him to read and preach on this occasion. There probably wasn’t a fixed lectionary, so the preacher would have had to look in the scroll for the passage he was going to read. The one he chose (at least approximately) is that we ourselves heard, the prophecy of Third Isaiah written about 500 years previously, of the coming of the messianic age, the kingdom of God.

We’ve only heard the part of the sermon that the congregation liked. “Today in your hearing this text has come true.” It’s not surprising. This was an obscure place in an occupied and oppressed country, with poor people living a hard life, so what would be more welcome than the carpenter Joseph’s son proclaiming the fulfilment of the old prophecy and the old hope: good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go free, the year of the Lord’s favour. We all want that, don’t we, especially if somebody else will do it. Later, when the penny dropped that Jesus was talking about a complete turn around in their way of thinking and their way of life, they got rather angry and wanted to throw him off a cliff, but fortunately for me there isn’t much high ground round here.

It would do us no harm to consider how the Spirit will call us, to consider our own vocation, as individuals, as a society, as a Church and indeed as a College and a University. The Isaiah passage has these interesting two verses: “Foreigners will serve as shepherds of your flocks, aliens will till your land and tend your vines, but you will be called priests of the Lord and be named ministers of our God. You will enjoy the wealth of nations and succeed to their riches.”

The “Wealth of Nations” is of course the title of the book published by Adam Smith in 1776 which is seen as a foundation text of modern economics and the market economy. Smith explored the consequences of a plural economy where people did different things, and he saw that often this could be a win-win situation. He criticized those who act purely out of self-interest and greed, and warns that, “[a]ll for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

In that context, Isaiah’s little picture is truly prophetic, because it portrays a world where other people, foreigners and aliens, people somewhere else, guest workers and asylum seekers, do all the work and we reap the benefits and have a “holy” life doing higher things. At the risk of being thrown off that cliff, I’m almost put in mind of the Fellows of an unnamed College voting themselves a pay rise on the back of a windfall gain.

What’s particularly interesting is that Jesus didn’t mention any of this. He quotes Isaiah rather selectively. The holy life he calls us to is not one of separating ourselves from the world. He sets before us the outward looking motivation we should have whatever we do:

· To bring good news to the poor: Do we seek out and follow opportunities all the time to help those who are poor in all sorts of ways?

· Recovery of sight to the blind: Do we help others and ourselves to look outwards not inwards, and to see good and liberating things that we ourselves have seen?

· To proclaim release to the captives, let the oppressed go free:
A major cause of imprisonment was debts. Do we release those financially indebted to us? Perhaps more importantly, what about those emotionally imprisoned because of our inability to mend broken relationships where a word of forgiveness or reconciliation on our part might be a step towards healing?

· To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour: the biblical jubilee year was probably an ideal rather than something that actually happened. It needed everyone to work together to bring in the signs of God’s kingdom.

Is there any chance that today this might happen in our hearing?

Rev’d Prof. Bernard Silverman, Master of St. Peter’s College, Oxford
28th May 2006

§ Take
– the top tailors from Saville Row
– best consultants from Moorfield’s Eye Hospital
– add the Governors of the Bank of England
– and group them round the Water Springs at Bath Spa
– and you have a picture of Laodicea
– a famous financial centre renowned for its wool and clothing
– its medical school with a specialism in eye salve
– drawn from the tepid lime laden sickly waters

NB: the colony the 7000 Jewish males who had managed to keep their culture
– so rich that after an earthquake in AD60 rebuilt their city and economy without a Roman subsidy or loan
– resilient, self reliant, autonomous, sustainable
– and what does Jesus say to the church in this place
– how does he react?
– What is his criticism / assessment?

1. We see Christ sickened by their self opinionated manner

– “I know your works; you are neither hot nor cold. I wish you were either hot or cold. Because you are luke warm and neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, I need nothing. You do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

– They were smug, complacent and Jesus seems sickened by this
– nominal religion “in extremis”
– it is so nauseating to Jesus Christ that he even preferred cold to tepid
– these Christians in Laodicea lacked whole heartedness
– rather reminiscent of much Christianity today
– respectable nominal, rather sentimental, skin deep religion, a Christianity which is flabby and anaemic

§ Christ makes the case he wants us to be either hot or cold
– the idea of being on fire for Christ will undoubtedly strike some as dangerous emotionalism
– surely we are not meant to become hot-gospel fanatics
§ If by fanaticism you really mean whole heartedness, then Christianity is a fanatical religion and every Christian should be a fanatic
– BUT
– whole heartedness is not the same as fanaticism
– fanaticism is an unreasoning and unintelligent whole heartedness
– it is the running away of the heart from the head

QUOTE Conference on Science Philosophy and Religion, Princetown University, 1940, USA
“Commitment without reflection is fanaticism in action but reflection without commitment is the paralysis of all action”

– surely what Jesus Christ desires and deserves is the reflection which leads to commitment and a commitment which is borne of reflection
– this is the meaning of wholeheartedness

QUOTE Lord Melbourne 19th Century Prime Minister once said:
“Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life”

e.g. South aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral
large monument to Thomas Middleton Fanshaw first Protestant Bishop in India; who when consecrated and sent was commissioned to “Preach the Gospel and put down enthusiasm”

– The truth is unless the Christian, and indeed the Christian church, is on fire for Christ we stand rebuked by him

2. Jesus Christ strives to save them from themselves v18/19

“Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent.”

– Because Christ loves us he rebukes us and disciplines us
– Christ is striving to save us and so he has to be blunt
– “I counsel you”. This is the Lord God, the creator of the universe, stars, heavens
– he could order, demand obedience, command us… but what does he do?
– “I counsel you”
– they say I am rich, I prospered, I need nothing
– Christ says, “I counsel you.. take a look at yourself, wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, naked”
– He respects the freedom which he has given us
– Christ by his spirit confronts and counsels

– Christ is sickened by the self opinion
– Christ strives to save them

– Christ strikes at their conscience

v20: “Listen! I am standing at the door knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”

§ “Be earnest and repent”
– Christ the Holy Spirit says to each and everyone of us “be serious, reflect, face up to reality”
– To repent is to turn with resolution from all that is known to be contrary to God’s will
– Like the Laodiceans, we have to renounce the whole life of easy going complacency
– Smug self satisfaction is not appropriate in those who would bear the name of Christ
– Shallow piety never saved anyone
– We have to break with these things

§ If the first need is repentance, the second is faith
– This is what Christ describes
– “here I am standing at the door of your heart and life knocking”
– this is very much a personal appeal although the words are addressed to the church
– they apply obviously to individual members of the church

§ This is a visit from the Lover of our Soul
– The love scene in the Song of Songs echos:
– “listen my lover’s knocking… open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one… my lover thrust his hand through the latch opening; my heart began to pound for him. I arose to open for my lover”.
[Song of Songs 52-5]
– this, of course, is the iconography of Holman Hunt’s famous painting – the original in Keble College – a famous copy in St Paul’s Cathedral, London

e.g. Mrs Corbachova / Dean Eric Evans

1. Jesus sickened by self opinion
2. Jesus strives to save them
3. Jesus touches their conscience

4. Jesus Christ Shares with us
“If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”

§ Eating, as the Greek word shows here, is not breakfast nor lunch but supper
– the main meal of the day
– the notion is of dining
– long relaxed in the intimacy of friendship
– the sharing is not just in the present of such friendship but also the future
– “I will give a place with me on my throne”

§ Here are great alternatives facing every thoughtful person
– to be half hearted, complacent, intermittently or casually interested in things of God is to prove ourselves not indeed a Christian at all and to be so distasteful to Christ as to be in danger of vehement rejection
– But to be wholehearted in devotion to Christ having opened the door and submitted to Christ is given the privilege both of supping with him on earth and of reigning with him in heaven
– Here is the choice – surely no choice at all

Rt. Rev’d George Cassidy, Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham
21st May 2006

Earlier this month I went to see a production of the musical ‘Half a Sixpence’.

The story is, at heart, quite a simple one. A young man, called Arthur Kipps, and his girlfriend, Ann Pornick, go through all sorts of ups and downs. But they each keep one half of a sixpence that Arthur has managed to file into two pieces.

The half sixpences are ‘a token of their eternal love’, as one of the songs puts it. When apart, Arthur and Ann can each look at their own half, and think of the other person as they imagine the whole coin joined together.

One of the hazards faced by Arthur, who is a mere apprentice shopman, is a mysterious advertisement in the newspaper. It reads: ‘If Arthur Kipps, son of Margaret Euphemia Kipps, born on September 1st 1880 will communicate with Messrs. Watson and Bean, he may hear something to his advantage.’

Sure enough, Kipps inherits a fortune – enough to build a new house with eleven bedrooms. But for a while it looks as though the sixpence is destined never to be made whole again. Arthur, with new-found fortune, gets engaged to another much grander lady, and Ann flings her portion of the coin down on the ground before him.

Of course, it being a family show, everything turns out well in the end – the sixpence is reunited – and I enjoyed the production very much. But it set me thinking about the significance of inheritance.

Whenever we inherit something – maybe a fortune like Kipps – or maybe something much more personal – we are connected into a kind of dynastic succession; a list of owners. An inheritance connects us with those who have gone before; but it also depends upon our predecessors having faded from the scene.

Our reading from Deuteronomy this evening, if we were listening carefully, contained within it reference to three of the great Old Testament themes.

The context is God’s gift to His people of the statutes and ordinances that are to govern their collective life. This is the Old Covenant – the Law. (v. 11)
Secondly, the point of reference, looking backwards in time, is the Exodus – the escape from Egypt. (v. 8)

And then, thirdly, there is the future promise, the land that God will give to his people; literally, ‘the promised land’. (vv. 12-13)

It is this promised land which is the Israelites’ inheritance. It is almost as if, like Arthur Kipps, they were to read in a newspaper, ‘If the Israelites, descendants of Abraham, will communicate with the Lord, they may hear something to their advantage.’

And just as any inheritance depends upon the demise of a predecessor, so too the promise of the land depended upon the previous owners fading from the scene; hence Jericho and the rather blood-thirsty conquest of the promised land.

As Christians, we look back to these three great Old Testament themes – covenant; exodus; promised land.

But we understand them in the light of Easter Day – in the light of our risen Saviour.

So it is that we talk of a New Covenant, made in Christ’s body.
And we see the exodus as foreshadowing Christian baptism, when we come through the dark waters of death and discover the freedom of life in Christ, just as the Israelites escaped to freedom through the waters of the Red Sea.

But what of the promised land? What of the inheritance? What does ‘inheritance’ mean in the light of Easter?

Because if Easter means resurrection – if Easter means that death is conquered – then that old style of inheritance, which depends upon the death of a predecessor, is impossible.

Resurrection destroys material inheritance, just as it destroys all varieties of dynastic succession.

In ‘Half a Sixpence’, Arthur Kipps loses his fortune. The brother of his grand fiancée, who is supposed to be looking after Arthur’s money, speculates rashly.

Arthur and Ann fall back on the symbol of their love for one another – the two halves of the coin. They find a new kind of life, rooted in something much stronger than an inherited fortune.

And that story of Arthur and Ann is a kind of parable of the promise that God makes to us through our baptism into the risen Christ.

As we receive the promise of the resurrection life, we let go, like Arthur Kipps, of any worldly inheritance which depends on death, and we gain instead a different kind of inheritance – an inheritance with all the saints in God’s kingdom.

Somehow we must be able to turn away from the attractions that the mysterious newspaper advertisement holds, with its tempting message of death and inheritance. As we renounce those temptations, we discover the fullness of life with Christ.

Even the sixpence itself, made one again, can act as a parable of the wholeness and peace of the resurrection life in God’s kingdom to come.

That is the promise we have, by God’s grace. It is the promise that we affirm whenever we proclaim our faith in Jesus Christ, raised from the dead. It is the promise that we affirm when we say in the creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body”.

Above all, it is the promise that we affirm as we give God the glory in our lives, each and every day.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed; alleluia!

Rev’d Edward Carter, Priest in Charge, St. Peter’s Didcot
30th April 2006

Readings: Isaiah 26, 1-9,19; Luke 24, 1-12.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

There was once a wealthy millionaire who held a big party for his friends. In the grounds of his mansion was a swimming pool. During the course of the evening he made an announcement, setting a challenge for his guests. To whoever can swim one length of the pool he would grant anything in his power to give. A simple enough task for such a great reward, his friends thought, until the host added, with a warning, that the swimming pool was also home to his pet shark. Well, nobody ventured in, as you can imagine, for obvious reasons and, as the evening wore on, the millionaire began to give up hope of his challenge being met when, SPLASH! Looking over to the pool, they all saw a figure swimming as fast as he could across the length of the pool with the shark in hot pursuit. The onlookers watched in gripped excitement to see if the anonymous daredevil would make it. The crowd roared with delight when the swimmer finished his length and emerged, unharmed and dripping wet, from the pool.

“Wonderful”, cried the rich man. “I said I would give anything in my power to the man who took up my challenge and succeeded. What do you want?”
“I’ll tell you what I want”, said the wet swimmer, breathing heavily, “I want to know who pushed me in!”

I hope that none of us has had to go through such an ordeal. But even if we have not, we may have found ourselves in new, unusual, unsettling or perhaps scary places. This service marks the beginning of a new term. The observant among you will have noticed that I am not Emma Pennington, Chaplain of Worcester College, but Jonathan Arnold, Emma’s husband and, for this term, Acting Chaplain, whilst Emma is on maternity leave, expecting our second baby in around two weeks – I’ll keep you posted. It is perhaps worth saying at this point that I will be occupying Emma’s room in Nuffield 11, on the same phone line and on Emma’s email, and am happy to talk to anyone at any time about anything.

So, in this Easter season, we are expecting new life; the countryside and gardens are budding with new life as we enter the Trinity Term. It is an exciting time. But along with this newness, excitement and anticipation, comes a certain amount of apprehension, of what will happen over the next few weeks, how is life going to pan out, and how are we going to deal with it, be it tutorials, essays, theses or exams, or whatever makes up our day-to-day lives. How are we, in this family of Worcester College, going to relate to each other? We feel, perhaps, mixed about the future.

There are conflicting emotions reflected in this evening’s readings. A contradiction exists between the truth of God’s action and the human response to it: the fact of Christ’s resurrection, for instance, and the reaction of the women and disciples. Whichever gospel writer relates this story, it is always dramatic because of this inherent juxtaposition of fact and faith.

The shortest and simplest of the gospel resurrection accounts comes from Mark, who has Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome encounter the empty tomb. They flee, saying nothing to anyone because they are terrified. In Luke’s account, Salome is replaced with Joanna and there are other women there too. Luke has two men in shining garments explaining the significance of the death and resurrection of the Son of Man, so that the women ca begin to comprehend the incomprehensible. The disciples are incredulous, but Peter, characteristically rushes to the tomb, only to be left with feelings of fear and wonder. In all the gospel accounts, those who encountered the resurrection first hand found it hard to understand.

Indeed it is hard for us to preconceive the afterlife now. A hell and brimstone sermon was once given by a zealous preacher. “In the afterlife there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth” he declared. “Ain’t got no teeth” a confident old woman declared from the front pew, smiling top reveal her toothless gums”. “Teeth will be provided” the preacher retorted! I hope this is not our idea of eternity. It is, naturally, inconceivable.

Perhaps for us, therefore, it is hardly surprising that we find it hard to fully comprehend that, by our baptism, we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection. For, as St. Paul tells us in Romans chapter six, if we are baptized, that is, if we believe, then we are baptized with Christ death. Our old self has been crucified, so that we are free from sin and now live with Christ for all eternity. Isaiah’s words pre-echo the Pauline theology “The dead shall live together with my body”. This is an awesome thought to carry with us through the term. Whether we fully understand it or not, it is a reality now nevertheless, so that we can declare with joy, for ourselves and our loved ones, that Christ is Risen.

As we enter this new term with many different feelings, concerns and hopes for the future, let’s take reassurance from the fact of Christ’s resurrection, from our bond with that resurrection through our faith and keep with us the words of Isaiah for our comfort:

“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee.”

Amen

Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold
23rd April 2006

Thank you for your kind invitation to join you for Evensong in the College and for your generous welcome. And thank you also for setting me a rather interesting challenge to preach on such a topic as “Sloth” in your series on the Seven Deadly Sins.

I have to admit that my first reaction on receiving the invitation was to ask myself, “Oh, can I really be bothered to say yes”: my next thought was “And why exactly has Emma asked me preach on this particular sin” (as no doubt some of your other preachers this term may also have asked!). I guess the answer to my question could be provided by my initial reaction: you have probably invited me as an expert on the subject.

But what exactly is the subject of sloth. Even more than the word sin, sloth is not the kind of word one often hears even in an Oxford college, let alone in Cornmarket or (supposing you could hear it being spoken) in one of the clubs along the road to the station. In most places it means a two- or three-toed small mammal from the forests of south America which eats, sleeps and mates upside-down, and all at a sluggish pace, though apparently it is quite a brisk and good swimmer when it can be bothered to get into the water.

So quickly recapping on the Christian moral tradition about sloth, it appears in the list of the seven deadly sins assembled by Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome and former consul or governor of Rome (a well-organised and unslothful man, if ever there was). He names it, interestingly, in Latin tristia, “sadness”, and more of that definition shortly. Moving on through history briskly and with no hint of sloth, Dante places sloth in his hierarchy of sins slap bang in the middle, an appropriate spot for a sin, I suppose, if you don’t really want to make a big effort either way. Sloth for Dante is more vicious than avarice but less vicious than anger: he describes it in this way, as “a failure to love God with all one’s heart, all one’s mind and all one’s strength”.

And what about the current moral view? Putting the word “sloth” into Google, I was led to the Seven Deadly Sins website, and then straight to the Merchandise page which told me “With fascinating full colour depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins, these shirts, mugs and mousepads may be the most important products you buy in the new millennium” a statement which may be an illustration of pride above all…. So I moved on and was then led to contemporary depictions of the seven deadly sins in unlikely literature, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which Roald Dahl’s characters represented at least four, Augustus Gloop for gluttony, Violet Beauregarde for pride, Veruca Salt for greed and finally Mike Teavee for sloth itself.

Fortunately, as I thought, I then discovered that the University Press has come to the rescue by publishing among its recent series of books on the seven deadly sins, a slim volume on sloth. But this finally crystallised one of the problems about any discourse about sloth in our kind of culture and society. The book turns out to be mostly in defence of sloth as an act of moral agitprop against the prevailing tide of hyperactivity, overcommitment, workaholism, intemperance and “getting the max” which characterises the life most of us observe and to some extent all participate in, not least in Oxford. So is sloth a problem, or is it actually a solution to the work/life balance, a slower pace of living?

At one level there is some wisdom in this. Sloth as an act of countercultural negation of the shallow contemporary worship of speed, especially in the developing of relationships, would have a good deal to commend it. But that would be to diminish the meaning of sloth to something like laziness and it seems to be more interesting and rich as an idea than that.

Let’s try going into the subject from the point of view of the corresponding virtue, which is generally taken to be zeal, promptness, readiness to engage in activity and with people. In terms of attitude rather behaviour this is about something deeper than just activity. Returning to that interesting early understanding of sloth as “sadness”, sloth seems to have something to do with a kind of resignation, and at the deepest level, resignation about oneself: a modern commentator has called sloth “sadness, deliberately self-directed” which leads to not doing, not knowing and not finding out what one must do. Strangely, it is therefore possible to be both busy, even hyperactive, and also slothful, if we have no sense of what is meaningful and purposeful in our busy activity. For example, it could be described as slothful to continue busily and expensively producing goods, services and wealth while neglecting to think about the meaning of the signs of climate change. It could also be said to be slothful to want to make a personal fortune at the expense of knowing why and what effect it will have on me or those whom I love.

There is no time to go into the psychological roots and springs of slothful behaviour, though there is little doubt that Freud and more than a century of the practice of pschoanalysis has something to tell us about what stops many, if not all of us, from the kind of engagement which goes with psychological and spiritual well-being, particularly in late adolescence and in middle age.

However, the problem and the dilemma are age-old, even as far back as St Paul. For he knew that “ I do not understand my own actions: for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”. The remedy also seems to be age-old: for discipline and determination can only go a short way to remedy sloth without deepening the despair. It is the bond of peace and of all virtues, love itself which seems to be the remedy for sloth and the source of the good life which is made up, as someone put it to me recently of the maximum of work and the maximum of pleasure. Sloth is conquered by love of self, love of our neighbour and love of God.

The Ven. Julian Hubbard, Archdeacon of Oxford
5th March 2006

I welcome the opportunity to preach on greed – or what the Authorised Version of the Bible and the BCP call ‘covetousness’. I confess that I have never coveted my neighbour’s ass, for the record; but I have had my eye on his Aston Martin DB7 – a very desirable car, by any measure. Greed: that word which describes insatiate longing; covetousness and avarice; desire that possesses us so that we can longer see or think straight. Rapacious appetites that will not be satisfied until the hunger is fully sated. Voracious, intense, ravenous – whenever we think of the word, we think of excess; desire unbounded.

It would, of course, be a bit of a cheap jibe to say that much of consumer-based culture is desire-driven to the point where greed is what we feed. Many of us are more than aware of this. Greed is something that has possession of us. The object we seek is, in fact, the object that has us; we can be imprisoned by desire. Like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, we do not understand that excessive desire can actually destroy us. Or consider the studied characters in the recent film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – superbly hammed-up by Johnny Depp playing Willy Wonka. In Dahl’s moral fable, we meet the virtuous Charlie Bucket, a poor but kind-hearted child who is the antithesis of greed; he is open-hearted, generous and self-sacrificing.

But in some ways the real grit of the tale lies in the write-ups the other characters receive. Augustus Gloop, a gluttonous kid who stuffs his face with sweets; Violet Beuragarde, a champion trophy gum chewer; Veruca Salt, a spoiled rich girl; and Mike Teavee, a kid who spends more time watching TV and playing video games than anything else. Each of them is a study of greed and possession. Rather like the novel of the same name (i.e., Possession) by Patrick Suskind, desire has long ago turned to all-consuming greed, which distorts and dominates all the relationships it touches.

Make no mistake: greed is a subtle, insidious sin. In questioning it, we are required to go deep into our hearts and minds, and to challenge our own motivations and desires. What really drives us? Why do we really want this or that for ourselves, or for another? We are called to a life a discernment – to split the atom, which is a fusion of selfless love and deep desire. Our English word ‘greed’ comes from a fairly innocent source. You can trace the use of the word back to early Saxon times, and find the root of the word amongst the Germanic tribes that one dominated Northern Europe. All the word means is ‘desire’ or ‘hunger’ – but disproportionate. The word suggests that the very things we long to consume, may instead, consume us.

This is, after all, the genesis of those early folk fables – like that of Midas, who longs for wealth beyond compare, such that all he touches will turn to gold. But such stories easily translate. The company or corporation that longs for global dominion. The university department that longs for the top international accolade. The person that longs for a position or recognition. Such things can be fine. But in excess, the greed for reward that they produce corrupts all other relationships, and distorts our humanity and sociality.

So like Midas, we must be careful what you wish for – which is the moral of the tale – for what you most desire to possess actually may become your possessor. We can be trapped by unconstrained desire; by hunger that has no discipline. It imprisons us. Sp just in case you are starting to feel a little smug, let me remind you that there can be such a thing as spiritual greed, or even a kind of distorted Christian greed – a desire for perfection and knowledge that leads to false elevation, and draws us away from wisdom. A longing and a lust to be ‘more-holier-than-thou’ which distorts the very object of desire, and clouds the judgment of the person pursuing the path of righteousness.

Indeed, many apparently laudable desires can turn into a kind of distorted greed. I remember working in an organisation some years ago that longed to repeat its award for achievement – it had achieved two awards for international excellence, and badly wanted the hat-trick. But this desire to reach this goal was also corrupting. People who contributed to that goal differently, or less single-mindedly, were quickly marginalised. That which the organisation longed to possess, in truth, already possessed that organisation.

Small wonder, then, that the first time Jesus appears, in the first gospel, the first instruction he gives is ‘Repent’. He asks us to self-examine; to turn around; to forsake. To not get consumed by our desires. The very things we want to consume can end up by consuming us. So Jesus warns: ‘repent’.

Interestingly, many Christians think that repentance is about a kind of ‘kill-joy’ severity; a life-sentence of abstinence. But in fact, most of the early Christian literature on repentance is about the rightful control of desires, and about setting the heart aright. It is not about setting aside desire, but about desires being redeemed. Woody Allen has a nice line on this. Question: How do you make God laugh? Answer: Tell him your future plans. It is not that the plans themselves are bad, per se. It is, rather, that the desires we have for our lives always need redeeming, and placing in line with God’s higher purposes. Life is not about ‘my career’, ‘my goals’ or ‘my fulfilment’; it is about service, which is perfect freedom. And in such a context, greed has no place, because is the language of excess and self-absorption, not of self-emptying love and service.

Our first step, then, is to decide where we want to go. If we are resolved to move daily further into union with Christ, we must be ready to face the very conditions that enslave us; the things that hold us back, and to let God begin to heal them. Repentance is the way back to the Father. It is both the door and the path to a new life. It is the door to a new freedom.

So, greed has to go. But it’s more insidious nature needs to be recognised as well. Challenging the greed inside us is, in the end, about recognising that all the glitters is not gold. And to have the heart set on God is to choose wisdom, and to follow him who calls us. Not to a life where desires are fulfilled, but to one where the restless heart is finally set at ease and at peace. R.S. Thomas, in his poem ‘The Bright Field’, puts it well:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I have to posses it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Desire then, is good. But can we learn to turn aside from the object of desire itself, and examine our motives. They will, invariably, be mixed. That is alright, however, for we are all human. But faith asks us to probe deeper, and examine real motives for real ends, and perhaps ask that most awkward of question, which faces everyone – the priest, the academic, the lover, the worker and even the student. Does our hunger for glittering prizes sometimes consume us, such that we are possessed? Can we see something deeper in our desires that needs examination? And perhaps repentance?

Remember what Jesus says: ‘for where you treasure is, so will your heart be’.

The Rev’d Canon Prof. Martyn Percy, Principal of Ripon College Cuddesdon
26th February 2006

‘Lord Sandwich is best known for putting a piece of meat between two slices of bread; more remarkably, he kept a mistress who was murdered by a clergyman, an unusual occurrence, even in the Age of Reason.’

Professor Richard Jenkyns is writing about the 18th century society of Dilettanti. ‘The members’ interest in the fine arts’ he comments, ‘was often of a salacious kind. One of them was painted caressing a bronze Aphrodite, another as a friar adoring the Medici Venus in a blasphemous parody of the mass. Sexual rebellion, licentiousness, and that strange species of religious revolt which is almost a sort of religiosity, fired by a prurient fascination for the object of its attack, were features of English Hellenism that were soon to disappear; or rather to lie dormant, for lubricity and a febrile religiosity were both to be elements in the decadent and decaying Hellenism of the later Victorian age.’

Well: the tradition of lurid prose writing is alive and well and living in Oxford! The clashing contrasts in the Age of Reason that Professor Jenkyns sketches are echoed by the duality in Haydn’s motet, which we have just heard, where the swirling storms of self-doubt in d minor yield to the Elysian calm of F major.
Insanae et vanae curae invadunt mentes nostras,
Foolish and groundless cares assail our minds,
Saepe furore replent corda, privata spe,
Often with madness they fill our hearts, bereft of hope,
Quid prodest O mortalis conari pro mondanis,
What does it profit you, O mortal, to strive after earthly things,
Si coelos negligas.
If you neglect heavenly.
Sunt fausta tibi cuncta , si Deus est pro te.
All things are favourable to you, if God is with you.
Even in a world of classical order, with Palladian houses and the music of Mozart and Haydn, there is a dark, sensual underside. ‘What’s new?’ you may comment about our life today. Here among the dreaming spires is conducted the ordered pursuit of learning, an induction to the ladder of intellectual endeavour, while beneath the surface of the beautiful young things – and indeed, some not so young things – the ancient serpents of slimy self-satisfaction are entwined around licentious passions and bubbling hormones.
At least, that is how our inherited Christian tradition, particularly since Augustine, has often described it. From early times, sex has been suspect. It was, of course, all the fault of the woman. As the panel in the ceiling above my head illustrates, from the moment that the serpent beguiled her, and she ate, sin entered the world. As for the man, he was too wet – or bedazzled by her glamour? – to say no. And, says the writer in Genesis, their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked. So they sewed themselves fig-leaves, and made aprons, or – as one rare and remarkable version has it – breeches; and ever since, man has lusted after what is so suggestively concealed.
Certainly it’s true that from that time on, the mainstream Christian tradition has appeared to offer us an almost Manichaean, dualistic choice, rather as Haydn does musically in Insanae et Vanae Curae: the body, gripped by swirling sensuality, is bad, and the mind, freed from earthly passions, is good. Powerfully reinforced by the latent neo-Platonism of much English educational theory, such a divorce between body and spirit has come to pervade our art, our culture and even our basic presuppositions about what it is to be human.
But there have always been other voices. Instead of the rigid dichotomies between spirit and body, good and evil, intellect and passion there have been those who do not believe that things are intrinsically good or bad in themselves, but that it’s how we use them that introduces the moral quotient. The human heart, suggests Irenaeus, is a battleground between the forces of good and evil; it’s how you use your bodily passions, how you use your emotional energy, how you use your mind that counts towards your formation, as we try and grow up to become the people that God has called us to be.
It’s more like a game of snakes and ladders: both are there on the board, as they are in the early books of the Bible. There, serpents are the agents of destruction, whether in the Garden or the Wilderness. They trip us up in our attempts to clamber up the rungs of self-satisfaction and we slide down into the dust. And what about the ladders? In Genesis of course, the ladder is only a dream. On the run from his brother, whom he’d cheated, Jacob lay down with a stone for a pillow and dreamed that there was a ladder linking earth to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending on it. One day, please God, there will be link between earth and heaven. But it needs to be real – to have both ends secure: if there’s nothing at the other end, ladders fall flat.
St John picks up this image in his Gospel. To an astonished Nathanael in Chapter 1.43 Jesus says, ‘You will see greater things than these. .. Truly, truly I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’ If for Jacob the ladder was only a dream, in Jesus we can see it for real: he is the ladder that links heaven to earth; set your feet on those rungs, and you will find yourself drawn up into the life of the Godhead. As Jesus says in John 3.13-15, ‘No-one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’
So, if it is a world of snakes and ladders, and we are all playing the game, how do we set our feet on the ladder, and avoid the serpents?
The sign of healing is a bronze serpent on a pole; the sign of redemptive love is the crucified one on the cross; type and antitype are very close, as the twined serpents of Aesculapius, the god of healing, or an Orthodox bishop’s pastoral staff declare, and the human body equally can be the agent of either love or lust.
The Christian faith says that we belong to one another like limbs and organs in a body, and that we are made for one another and for God. His purpose for us is union with him, and we are to model that by our union with one another. What is the difference between this love, and lust?
First, ours is an incarnate faith: our bodies are temples, says St Paul, of the Holy Spirit. It’s how we use them – their passions, emotions and physical longings – that counts. We can use them to build up or to destroy; to create bonds of affection or to gain our own self-satisfaction.
Second, lust belongs to a world of partial concealment, and febrile imagination, like Edwardian piano legs. It gains its power from the serpents of self-referential imagination, not from confessed adoration. To be drawn into the worship of the Father by the ladder of the cross is to come out of the shadows of self-concern into the light of Christ.
Third, love – the subject of Pope Benedict’s first Encyclical – is a gift, not a possession. Try and keep it to yourself, and it withers and dies. It’s a dynamic energy, not a static substance, and demands to be shared. It’s a transparent force: you can’t do love on your own.

Love – the love that moves the sun and other stars – is the eternal dance of the persons of the Trinity. God gives it to us, and draws us into his life.

By way of postlude, and to put a different complexion on the 18th century to where we began with the Dilettanti in pursuit of their own version of the Greek myth, here are some verses of one of Charles Wesley’s finest Eucharistic hymns, reflecting on that divine banquet which is already ours by grace.
Victim Divine, thy grace we claim
While thus thy precious death we show;
Once offered up, a spotless Lamb,
In thy great temple here below,
Thou didst for all mankind atone,
And standest now before the throne.

Thou standest in the holiest place,
As now for guilty sinners slain;
Thy blood of sprinkling speaks and prays
All-prevalent for helpless man;
Thy blood is still our ransom found,
And spreads salvation all around.

We need not now go up to heaven
To bring the long-sought Saviour down;
Thou art to all already given,
Thou dost e’en now thy banquet crown:
To every faithful soul appear,
And show thy real presence here.

The Rt. Rev’d David Stancliffe, The Bishop of Salisbury
12th February 2006

I don’t know about other preachers in this series of sermons, but this one is in some peril in the light of the fulsome invitation he received. The letter made much of the largesse which he would be offered after Evensong: hospitality so alluring, indeed, that he felt he had almost been lured into sin even by accepting the Chaplain’s courteous invitation.

In truth, however, few if any of us could approach the subject of tonight’s address without being aware of the unmistakable sound of stones clattering on the roof of a very large and vulnerable greenhouse.

But there it is: something must be said on the subject of gluttony, and it is my task – as one sinner among others – to make something of it. But that is perhaps the very point. Of all the so-called seven deadly sins, gluttony is the one that makes me most uncomfortable; for whilst a hungry person’s desire for food cannot be sinful, my own desire, and that of very many of my contemporaries, for much more than I need, is harmful for reasons both practical and spiritual.

Why? Because excess has undesirable consequences; dulled faculties (if I may dare to use that word in this setting); impaired concentration and, at the extremes, a disabling inability to control the appetite.

I remember a certain bishop, speaking indiscreetly at the dinner-table about one of his more eccentric priests. “Can’t control himself,” he said, “Always comfort-eating, that’s his trouble. I know all about that from a psychiatrist chum. By the way, Tom, could I trouble you for another slice of that excellent syrup-roll?”

Well, there is of course a more serious dimension to all this. Gluttony – and not only of food – can provide relief, in the same way as seemingly more harmful drugs, and can enable us to forget for a time those aspects of our life which we find difficult, from the merely boring to the disturbing and terrifying.

Gluttony, viewed in this light, is not a matter of digestion so much as a manifestation of a real and very alluring spiritual problem – the desire – the need, perhaps – to escape from reality. It hinders the awakening of the imagination, and the ability to see, in the sense of that word often employed by Jesus.

The heart of the Good News which he proclaimed is to be found in the 5th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel – usually and misleadingly known as The Sermon ion the Mount. The deceptively straightforward beatitudes – that list of those people whom God counts as especially blessed – are indeed little more than a list when taken at face value

The pure in heart and the poor
The peacemakers and the persecuted
The meek and the merciful.

To discover the riches of the text and for that matter the revolutionary nature of the teaching, it is necessary to have an awareness of the unpalatable truth of our own emptiness, and our need, as Gerard Hughes puts it, to ‘throw ourselves on the mercy of God’. The Sermon on the Mount is an oblique but unmistakable challenge to an attitude of mind which is concerned with self-sufficiency, and which seeks its security in anything but God and the pursuit of his Kingdom.

That is the besetting weakness – dare I say sin? – of the most righteous of religious people who, as the American priest Barbara Brown Taylor has written,

‘I’m not referring to sinners: their hearts have already been broken. I mean the righteous. They are like vaults. They are so full of their precious values, and so defended against those who do not share them, that even the dynamite of the Gospel has little effect on them. “Woe to you Pharisees,” wails Jesus, “for you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God.”’

…which is only another way of saying that tax-gatherers and prostitutes will be the first to find their way into the Kingdom…

This does not make for cheerful hearing, but it may prompt us reflect on another saying of Jesus which is less about physical food than spiritual priorities (John (6:27)):

‘Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life.’

Those words seem to echo the First Book of Samuel (12:16-22) which we heard this evening:

‘Do not go after vain things that cannot profit and save…but serve the Lord with all your heart, and he will not cast away his people.’

But can that be so? In what sense can the service of God, the pursuit of his Kingdom, lead to deepened faith and heightened spiritual awareness?

Maya Angelou makes a helpful suggestion:

History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage need not be lived again.

To face up to the deep things of faith and daily living with the courage that Maya Angelou counsels, is a rich and potentially liberating process. For sure, it is likely to be uncomfortable, as we contemplate our own history, our besetting sins and weaknesses, but we may well discover that these are in reality ‘the highway of our virtue’.

Like the psalmist before us, we shall find some hard questions – the whys and wheres and hows of faith, but we shall stand a much better chance, like the man in that strange little parable of Jesus, of discovering a faith which is built on rock and not on shifting sand, and with it the food that endures to eternal life.

I have no means of knowing what the hard questions are for you, but I do know, at least in my better moments, that to face such questions thoughtfully and theologically is productive of an attitude of mind and heart which finds its sense of meaning and purpose in God.

The film actress Mae West, who was known for gluttony of a rather exotic kind, once remarked, ‘I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it’.

Well, we might agree with her, but the food which endures to eternal life, which is to be found in the life, the teachings, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is well worth the seeking, not just because it endures to eternal life, but because the pursuit itself provides a means towards knowing the one who is true.

There is no need to seek gluttonous relief, whether of food or other fleshly appetites, in order to forget those parts of life which we find difficult to acknowledge or to live with. All that stands in the way of our facing up to the hard questions of faith and daily living has been overcome by the God who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, ‘and he feeleth for our sadness, and he shareth in our gladness’.

That ought to be comfort and sufficiency enough for the time being, for did he not come that we might have life, and have it more abundantly?

The Very Rev’d Nicholas Frayling, Dean of Chichester Cathedral
4th February 2006

The Sin of Pride and the Annunciation Window

In last week’s sermon, our chaplain illustrated how sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins were very much a fourteenth century phenomenon, epitomized by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now I would never dare to argue with Emma as an authority on the piety in the Middle Ages, but my own reading has made me see that the numbering of deadly sins can be traced back to biblical times. The seven oracles against the sins of seven foreign nations is a frequent feature in the prophets; and in the Gospels, Mary Magdalene has seven demons which need casting out; and the Apostle Paul offers a list of fourteen ‘sins of the flesh’ in Galatians 5. The counting of sins, even using the number seven (sometimes, intriguingly, seven plus one) was not unique to the Middle Ages, although it was clearly popularized then. It was an early tradition. Even by the fifth century, John Cassian, from southern Gaul, argues that Adam and Eve were guilty of all the seven deadly sins when they took from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. A century or so later, Gregory the Great, writing from Rome, develops Cassian’s ideas and lists the seven sins of Adam and Eve in order, starting with the spiritual and ending with the carnal. The Sin of Pride heads Gregory’s list as the cardinal spiritual sin, out of which come Envy and Anger; and then, the carnal sins – Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony, and Lust. By the fourteenth century Chaucer, in The Parson’s Tale, similarly speaks of the ‘barren tree of sin’ which has its roots in Pride, and ‘of this roote spryngen certain branches’. And as we heard from our chaplain last week, Dante, in The Divine Comedy holds the same view: of the deadly seven sins which are purged on their way to purgatory, Pride comes first.

But Medieval preaching and teaching did not just focus on vices and evils. The Books of Hours and the Morality Plays had a good deal to say about Christian virtues as well. Several lists of seven virtues ‘offset’ the seven sins – the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, the seven penitential psalms, the seven gifts of the spirit, the seven words from the cross, the seven wounds of Christ. The cardinal spiritual virtue underlying these lists is Humility, for as Pride takes us far from God, Humility leads the sinner to repentance. In a sense, Pride and Humility are two sides of the same coin: we overcome the Sin of Pride by the Grace of Humility.

It may surprise you that this chapel, designed in part to echo the theology of the Middle Ages, offers several insights into this theme. Clearly the nineteenth-century architect, William Burgess, enjoyed the number seven: look around at the seven stained glass windows, each in their different ways designed to show Christ as the Light of the World; look at the seven scrolls above each window, showing how the narrative in the window was foretold in the Old Testament; look at the seven friezes below the windows, which develop a theme in the window and also echo parts of the Te Deum on the dado underneath; and in the antechapel there are seven symbols of Judaism, representing what Burgess saw as the ‘old order’. Burgess even developed the ‘seven + one’ theme in his illustration of the eight virtues, four from natural religion (justice, perseverance, purity and moderation), and four from revealed religion – adding, most appropriately for this sermon, the virtue of ‘humility’ to the usual trio of faith, hope and charity.

Some of you will know that in recent sermons I’ve chosen to focus each time on one of the stained glass windows. I have to date preached on five of them. It might not take you long to discern which window I am intending to use tonight, as an illustration of the Grace of Humility overcoming the Sin of Pride: you have a copy of it in your pew, as the window cannot be seen at this time of day. It is on the north side of the chapel, nearest the door – the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel to Mary.

By the Middle Ages, Mary, as one representing so well the Grace of Humility, was often contrasted with Eve, associated, as noted in the works of John Cassian and Pope Gregory, with the Sin of Pride. Interestingly, Burgess always placed these two figures in close proximity. Steeped as he was in Medieval typology, one cannot help think that this was intentional. Mary is a key figure in the East Window, where beneath the cross she mourns the death of her son. By contrast, in the ceiling above her, you can see Eve in the Garden of Eden, about to take the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Mary is also portrayed in the windows on either side of the entrance to the chapel – one is our Annunciation window, and in the other, now darkened, is of the visit of the Magi. Her self-sacrificial love is evident at the beginning of her son’s life as well as at the end of it. Look up at the ceiling between these two windows: we again see Eve, ironically surrounded by the four natural virtues, being expelled from the Garden. Eve’s Sin of Pride is that she thought she loved herself more than she loved God; she had hoped the fruit would give her a power equal to his. Eve’s choice, freely given to her by God, takes the couple out of the paradise garden and so to mortality and death; Mary’s choice, without understanding how or why, leads her to the foot of the cross, although from there, to immortality and life beyond.

Let us reflect for a moment on this Annunciation window. Burgess’s artist, Henry Holiday, has produced a design with a typically stylized account of the scene. Mary is sitting (usually she is either reading or sewing, in receptive mode: here she is reading, probably from a text in Isaiah), with the Angel behind her. The scroll above the window identifies her as the ‘virgin’ spoken by the prophet Isaiah who will conceive and bear a son, thus highlighting that this moment is not accidental, but is part of the divine plan. We see the white lily near Mary, a symbol of purity – and death. We see the vines behind the angel, symbols of fecundity – and life. There is no dove, but the rose-hued colour of the angel’s wings signifies the cleansing power of the spirit. What is particularly unusual about this scene is that seems to set outside, rather than in the house in Nazareth: did Burgess intend to suggest that the promise of new life is made in another and different Garden than the one Adam and Eve had to leave?

The problem with stylized representations, typical of Medieval and Renaissance art, is that the human aspects of this dreadful choice, and its awesome consequences, are rarely brought out. As we see in this window, and indeed in all the four windows where she appears in this chapel, Mary remains an enigmatic, mysterious figure, passive, resigned, perhaps too devoid of personality to attract us to the Humility she represents. For human details we need to turn instead to the narrative itself. We heard in our earlier reading, from Luke, that Mary was ‘espoused’ to Joseph: her likely age would thus be between sixteen and eighteen. She is thus both vulnerable and innocent: our window has at least depicted something of this as she looks up at the angel. We also know that Joseph (who perhaps also deserves a sermon on the Grace of Humility) was known as a te,ktwn in Greek – one skilled in wood and stone, a carpenter and builder – perhaps what we would call a ‘skilled laborer’. And from the sacrifice of just two pigeons that Mary and Joseph made in the Temple as a thanksgiving for a safe birth, it is clear that Joseph’s craft did not bring in much wealth. So her age, her social class, her poverty made her an extraordinary choice for the ‘Mother of God’.

Immediately after the Annunciation, Luke accords to Mary a song we hear sung every Sunday Evensong – the Magnificat. It illustrates so clearly God favours those of low estate, scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts. ‘…He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. ’ This suggests that Mary’s material poverty encouraged a spiritual dependency which enabled her to trust in God alone. The Grace of Humility was at work in her before her calling, rather than being a result of it, and it was this was equipped her for a lifetime of self-sacrificial love.

But doesn’t this picture of Mary, materially and spiritually poor, equally distance her from us thus making the Grace of Humility an impossible goal to imitate? Our chapel window offers a part-answer to this. Look at the frieze under it, above the dado. There you see various figures of authority in Church and State – a Bishop, a Priest, two monks, two nuns, a King, a Queen, a Noblewoman, a Lawyer, an Academic; some of them, such as the King, were drawn in the likeness of well-known figures in and around Oxford (King Olaf, it is argued, was remarkably similar to a Tutorial Fellow called Daniel who later became Provost). It seems that here Burgess invites us to enter the story of the Annunciation and the Magnificat: each of these figures, with their various gifts and vocations, different from each other and certainly from Mary, are shown as making their own choice of seeking that poverty of spirit which Mary exemplified. And so we, the onlookers, each with our own various gifts and vocations – Provost, Chaplain, Preacher, Fellows, Lecturers, Teachers, Politicians, Parents, Graduates, Scholars, Undergraduates, Sacristans, Choir Boys – we, the onlookers, whoever we are, whatever are calling, are offered that similar choice: to put aside self-esteem and self-absorption and to pursue instead poverty of spirit whereby all that we are and all that we have is offered back to God.

We will often get it wrong. We might even be so pleased to have achieved a small part of the Grace of Humility we end up falling back into the Sin of Pride. But we need not give up. As you walk out of chapel tonight, under the frieze of Adam and Eve expelled from the garden, aware of Mary facing her challenge within that other garden, do look up at the last text Burgess has given us, above the West Door: ‘Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts’: – ‘Be it unto me according to your word.’
Amen.

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
22nd January 2006

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

“Sirs, I find that there is seven spiritual illnesses, the which may be likened to seven ears of corn stricken with a mildew. By these seven spiritual illnesses I understand the seven deadly sins, pride, lechery, covertousness, wrath, envy, sloth, and gluttony. Pride destroys in man humility and meekness, lechery destroys chastity and purity, covertousness destroys alms giving and pity, wrath destroys love and charity, envy destroys joy and gladness, gluttony destroys temperance and sobriety, sloth destroys the service of God and all other goodness.”

From preaching manuals of the time it would seem that during the fourteenth century sermons on the seven deadly sins, such as I have just read, would not have been a one off series but a weekly event. Along with the many references to the sins in art, sculpture and devotional writings it is not surprising that we are left with the impression that the medieval church was obsessed by the sins and their punishment. This is epitomized, of course, in Dante’s great Divine Comedy where midway through his life Dante awakes to find himself lost in a dark wood. With Virgil as his guide he begins a journey of self-discovery, which will lead him through the levels of hell where he sees sin in all its vile, degraded and dangerous state. In his turning away from the horror and futility of sin he begins the road of ascent towards God. It is on this path through purgatory that each of the seven deadly sins are purged through penance. So the heads that were held high with pride are now bowed in a necessary humility beneath the weight of sinfulness externalised as cold and heavy stone. The envious, who looked with grudging hatred upon other men’s gifts and good fortune, have their eyelids sealed from the sun. The wrathful must endure smoke and suffocation just as the sin of wrath blinded their judgement and suffocated their natural feelings. The slothful, who cared for nothing in life, are whipped into constant activity. The covertous are fettered face downward so that they can see nothing but the earth they so loved and hoarded. The gluttonous who indulged on a high standard of living are purged by starvation within the sight of plenty, and the lustful are purged not by an all consuming but all cleansing fire. Only when Dante is branded on the forehead with the seventh and last P for penance does he enter the earthly paradise before his ascent to the heavenly realms. In his writing Dante is not simply producing a poetic masterpiece for entertainment, instead he seeks to take the reader on the same journey of self-discovery. For both Dante and the Church at the time, this path began with the reality of sin and its effects, a decision to turn away from it and the work of purging the seven deadly sins through grace by the practice of virtue.

By this point I am sure that you are rather relieved that we no longer live in the dark ages of the medieval period and that a sermon series on the seven deadly sins is a one off. But you may also be wondering what the weeks ahead are going to be like. Hilary term is bad enough without enforced self-mortification and a good grilling from the pulpit. Well, to be honest, I can’t say. I don’t know what our distinguished lineup of preachers will have to say but I do know that they were each horrified when I gave them their sin.

It seems that from an age when preachers could quite happily go on for hours about the seven deadly sins or just sin in general be it gossiping or picking one’s nose, we have ended up in an age when for many the prospect of preaching on the nature of sin is anathema. Similarly for the average medieval person the seven deadly sins were all around, personified in plays and art whilst to us I wonder if we could even name them all without getting stuck at around five or six. Now I would hate to imply that the medieval person was more holy and devout than us today but it does seem that whereas sin was a living reality and a cause for concern, for us it is often seen as someone else’s problem.

One of the interesting side effects of being a priest is that you are never “off duty” as the saying goes. So its often with intrepedation that in casual meetings with strangers you let on that you are one of those odd people who are professionally “holy” because invariably the conversation will end up as a quasi – confessional. This happened to Jonathan one day when the plumber called at our flat in the Rectory in Shepperton. Entering a holy house seemed to be enough for him to pour out to Jonathan a catalogue of things he had done, like taking a camcorder someone had left behind, flirting behind his wife’s back, boozing till four in the morning and so on, all ending with the general observation that he was a really good bloke who never did anything wrong. We may not talk about sin but sin is still definitely all around, and it will continue to have a grip on our lives and linger like the foul, degrading and distorting stench it is until like Dante we name it and reject it. Not as something in other people but as something in ourselves.

A man arrived early at the station to catch his train. So he went and bought himself a newspaper, a coffee and a packet of biscuits. He sat down at a table where a woman was already sitting, and started to drink his coffee. All of a sudden the woman opposite reached out and opened the packet of biscuits and without saying a word started to eat one. Now as you can imagine the man was rather annoyed by this and not knowing what to say picked up a biscuit in an obvious way and started to crunch it nosily. The woman took another biscuit so he took another one too. This continued until the packet was finished and the woman got up and left. Furious by this time and thinking a hundred different accusations at the barefaced cheek and wrong of this woman, he stood up and picked up his paper to catch the train only to find his own packet on biscuits lying underneath.

Sin is something which afflicts all of us but it is often all too easy to see it only as someone else’s problem and be quick to judge another of sin and forget our own. For this is the very nature of sin itself. In her Revelation of Divine Love Julian of Norwich describes a vision she had of the full extent of sin on a person. She sees a servant, noble and loved by his lord, who falls into a ditch. There he is afflicted by seven great wounds, which rend his flesh and consume him with pain so much so that he is unable to lift his head to see the loving and pitying eyes of his lord. The servant is Adam, everyman, who in this earthly life is wounded and disfigured by sin and the lord is God. For Julian the most damaging aspect of sin is that it stops us seeing God’s love and leads us to believe that God is full of anger and blame for our sin, that God looks on us as we would look on each other. Instead God looks on us in our sin not with judgement and anger but with pity and love, for “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved”. Julian’s revelation shows us how God sees us in our sin and in turn how we are to look on the nature of sin in ourselves.

Dante’s description of the seven deadly sins comes from this perspective of God’s love and he sees them as a perversion, weakness or misdirection of our own natural inclination to love God in turn. For example pride, envy and wrath pervert our natural inclination to love ourselves, to love goodness and to love justice. Whilst sloth is the failure to love any good object in its proper measure and especially to love God, and avarice, gluttony and lust are all excessive loves of firstly money and power, secondly pleasure and thirdly of people.

The most important consequence of this perspective of sin is that it takes away the power sin has over us. The emphasis is no longer on sin but on the love of God, no longer on punishment but on forgiveness. For Julian the cross is a revelation of the extent of that love where Christ, though he is the fairest flower of heaven, becomes disfigured like us and takes on the pains of sin, so much so that not even sin is now able to separate us from the love of God but, through penance, it can become the path back to him. So Julian is able to boldly say that through recognizing our sin for the scourge it is, by rejecting it and receiving Christ’s saving ointment of grace and love which heals our wounds, God can even bring good out of our sin and in heaven we will stand before him and the scars that we bear as a result of sins forgiven will be our badges of glory and tokens of love.

So may I suggest that this term as we linger on each of the seven deadly sins we do not become disheartened or shameful, but hold in our hearts the truth of how God sees us in pity and love, so spurring us on to reject all that prevents us from receiving and knowing his healing love in our lives. Amen.

The Chaplain
15th January 2006