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Worcester College Oxford

8^th May 2016

Sunday after the Ascension

The Dean of Westminster

 

 

I wonder what you thought last week when you heard that some parents had kept their 6 and 7 year olds off school for a day rather than taking them in to sit their SATS. Some sympathy? Memories of SATS past? The generation of undergraduates here must be amongst the most publicly examined of all generations in history.

On the other hand I am quite sure you love learning. And I am pretty sure that you love displaying your learning, in a suitably modest but authoritative fashion. So, it follows that the prospect of examinations in a few weeks’ time must fill those of you preparing for them with joyful anticipation. That must go for those setting and marking them as well.

Well, I know. It may not feel quite like that. I seem to remember facing examinations with a mixture of fear and confusion, of terror and of hope. But of course we face them; we get through them; we come out the other side, with pride and pleasure. That’s the hope; though I have to say that when I had sat my last public examination at the age of 26 before I was ordained I also had a sense of relief at the prospect of never having to sit an exam again. Of course, you then go on to the far more exacting and exciting test of making your own way free from constraints other than those you impose on yourself.

Constraint, fear and confusion, persistent terror and longing hope: that could I imagine be a description of the circumstances and feelings of our Lord’s apostles and close disciples in the days after the Ascension and before the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost: the very days the Church invites us to contemplate and ponder today, as we move forward from the celebration of the Ascension of the Lord on Thursday and look towards the celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in one week’s time.

The apostles, with Mary the Mother of the Lord and some other women, remain incarcerated in the Upper Room, their place of safety in Jerusalem, the room where they had last sat in relative comfort with their teacher and master before the terrible events of his arrest, trial and crucifixion. Although they have ventured out at the Lord’s instruction, it seems that they have always returned to the safe place, still afraid for their lives, no doubt pondering the things they have witnessed, including the Lord’s resurrection appearances, turning over in their minds the Lord’s words and trying to extract some meaning from them.

So, the disciples wait, constrained, afraid and confused, but full of longing hope. They wait, although they will only be clear for what they are waiting if they remember the Lord’s words to them in his farewell discourses, ‘The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.’ [John 14: 25-27] We wait too, during this brief interim period between the celebration of the Lord’s Ascension and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

But there is a far more profound sense in which we are waiting and continue to wait, in which we perhaps from time to time feel ourselves to be constrained, afraid and confused, though full of longing hope. At Easter the Church celebrates the gift of baptism into Christ and confirmation. Those who have been baptised have died to ourselves and risen from the deep waters to a new life in Christ. In confirmation we receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit: the gifts of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and might, of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord. And through these sacraments of initiation we are open to receiving the blessings of God’s grace in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

And yet…! And yet! Sometimes we feel very far from God himself. And if we are at all honest with ourselves, we know that we are far from what in our best moments we want to be, far from what in our best moments we suppose God wants us to be. A decision to follow Christ, to be his disciple, does not suddenly transform us from a person who thinks only of our own needs and desires – and devil take the hindmost – to the most loving and generous and un-self-conscious person who ever walked this earth. We need the gifts of grace, a daily fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit transforming our lives, to free us from our obsession with ourselves, from our overwhelming urge for self-satisfaction, for self-fulfilment, and free us to place our own lives and our own wills at God’s disposal.

Full of longing hope, we wait. ‘We wait for thy loving kindness, O God, in the midst of thy temple.’ We wait for a full revelation of the power and the wonder and the beauty of God. That will surely come. As St Paul understood, ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’

A powerful image in the book of Exodus is perhaps remembered by St Paul as he dictates those words. Moses wanted to know better the Lord who had led his people out of slavery in Egypt into the wilderness. He asked the Lord to show him his glory. ‘Show me your glory, I pray.’ God responded that Moses would not be able to see his face and live. But he should stand on a rock and God would cover him with his hand, while God’s glory passed by, and then take away his hand so that Moses could see his back.

A little later in the wilderness, when Moses went up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, he had such a strong and vivid encounter with the Lord that when he came down from the mountain his face was shining and he covered his face with a veil. He would take the veil off to talk with God and then cover his face again. Charles Wesley evoked this image in the last verse of his Ascension Day hymn, ‘Hail the day that sees him rise.’

Lord, though parted from our sight, far above the starry height, grant our hearts may thither rise, seeking thee above the skies. There we shall with thee remain, partners of thy endless reign, there thy face unclouded see, find our heaven of heavens in thee.

In the Incarnation, at Christmas, God united himself with our humanity. At the Ascension he took our humanity to the glory of heaven. God’s love for us, God’s engagement with us, will never tire, will never end. God is faithful. God is generous. God is kind. God is humble. God is long-suffering.

How can we know this? We cannot imagine what God is like. We cannot see God. We certainly cannot look on his face and live. But we can know who God is, we can know God, through God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. We see Jesus Christ fully engaged with our humanity, because he shares our humanity; we see Jesus Christ never tiring of doing good; we see Jesus Christ being faithful unto death; we see Jesus Christ acting generously; we see him being kind; we see his humility as we washes his disciples’ feet before the Last Supper; we see his long-suffering as he endures the arrest and trial, the mocking and scourging, the rejection, the sense of isolation from his Father as he bears the sins of the world on his back and as he dies on the cross. Thus he shows us what God is like, who God is. And his Ascension, where he takes our humanity to the glory of heaven, blazes a trail that we can follow, a path that takes us to our heavenly homeland.

Then we shall see God and we shall know God, just as God sees us and knows us. Then we shall see him face to face and we shall live in him. God himself is full of longing hope that we will persevere on our Christian journey, on the pilgrimage of life, and come to be fully one with him as the Father and the Son are one. Now we wait, as it were constrained here on earth, sometimes afraid and confused – but full of longing hope.

One day, in due time, we shall see God face to face and we shall shine with his radiance, transformed from glory to glory. In the meantime, we catch glimpses of the glory of heaven in its reflection here on earth, and day by day, in ways that are open to us and offered to us through the grace of the Holy Spirit, we serve God and the kingdom of God with and through our fellow human beings. There is much for us to do between now and then.

Sermon: 24^th April 2016, Eve of St. Mark

Isaiah 52 and Mark 1

 

When I was growing up in rural Middle England, my Christian family’s concept of theology, specifically its Christology (about the nature of Christ) and soteriology (about the nature of salvation), were not only in line with that expounded by Handel’s 1741 oratorio Messiah, but also positively influenced by that great choral masterpiece. Whether attending cathedral concert performances, singing it with my school choral society, or listening to the vinyl record versions, with huge orchestral and choral forces, conducted by the likes of Sir Thomas Beecham with trombones and all, the juxtaposition of the New and Old Testament texts, set to the beautiful choruses, recitatives and arias, made a powerful impact. Little did I know, at that tender age, that I would grow up to become a professional singer and perform over a hundred renditions of the piece often with the smaller musical forces which were a feature of the performance practice of the early music revival from the 1980s onwards. I sang the piece so many times that, at one point in my career, I made a self-imposed embargo and refused all offers to sing it. Performing Messiah with the likes of The Sixteen took me all over the world. On one Christmas tour to Spain, we had caught an internal flight and all our luggage was sent to the wrong destination. With a concert that night, we had to perform in our casual clothes. The audience took it all in good heart, even when the bass soloist changed the final words of his last aria ‘The trumpet shall sound’ from ‘and we shall be changed’ to ‘… and we shall get changed.’ Sacrilege indeed!

The notion that Handel’s Messiah was a salvific gift to the world bearing Christian truth was most urgently expressed in Stefan Zweig’s collection of “historical miniatures” The Tide of Fortune (1940), in which an absurdly melodramatic fictionalized version of events suggests that “Truth had issued from the pen of an indifferently gifted man”, that “Tears flooded Handel’s eyes as the fires of inspiration invaded him”, and that “Humanity did not know the blessedness of the salvation that was beginning to shine down in this very hour [of composition]”. In such a portrayal Messiah is idealized as a perfect, untouchable work of divine truth.

But the oratorio Messiah was not Handel’s idea at all, but that of the librettist Charles Jennens, who compiled extracts from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and used Old Testament verses as a typology for the New. Typology in Christian theology and Biblical exegesis is a doctrine or theory concerning the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament. For instance, the first man, Adam, is a type of Jesus (the antitype). For instance, in his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul wrote that: “Since by man came death [Adam], by man came also the resurrection of the dead [Jesus]” (1 Corinthians 15: 21). By so doing Jennens created a triumphalist exaltation of Christianity.

We see this kind of typology in our readings this evening, where New Testament writers interpret contemporaneous events as the fulfilment of Old Testament sentiments. For instance, in Isaiah 52: 7-10

 

How beautiful upon the mountains    are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news,    who announces salvation,    who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’

 

This Isaiah passage is echoed, and indeed quoted, in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: 10: 15, when he asks: ‘But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’ But not all have obeyed the good news;^* for Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our message?’ So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.^*

With St. Paul using such typology, connecting Old Testament prophecy with New Testament events, you can see why Charles Jennens was so keen to do the same in Handel’s Messiah. All of this fulfilment theology is encapsulated in the aria from Messiah ‘How beautiful are the feet of him who brings the gospel of peace’.

And it is particularly appropriate that we should be thinking, this evening, about those who first brought the ‘gospel of peace’ to the world, for this is the eve of the feast of St. Mark, author of the earliest of the gospels and one of the first in history to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah. In fact, we don’t know much about Mark. He is called John in three of the texts of the New Testament (Acts 12:12,25; 13:5,13; 15:37). The early Christians gathered at his family’s house in Jerusalem (Acts 13:13). He accompanied Paul and Barnabas on Paul’s first missionary journey as far as Perga in Pamphylia. The last mention of Mark is in the Acts when it is noted that he journeyed to Cyprus with Barnabas.

Mark’s closest relationship seems to have been with Peter, from whom he may have received much of his source material. Mark is the first author to use the term Gospel, which originally seems to have referred to the sufferings, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To this basic core of early Christian teaching Mark added other elements of Jesus’ early life, thereby creating the Gospel format we find in the other Gospels. So Mark himself turns out to be the person who is the bringer of good news, the gospel, as we can see from the very start of his work: ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” This quotation from Isaiah 52 is an early example of the typology I have mentioned and is again echoed in Charles Jennens choice of text for the first aria in Handel’s Messiah, ‘Comfort ye, my people, when he employs the words: ‘The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God’ (Isaiah 40).

It is out of wilderness and desert that the good news comes, and I love Mark’s gospel because it is mercifully uncluttered, unvarnished in its account of Jesus; it is action-packed and a gripping story that is propelled from one event to the other with dramatic use of language, such as ‘…and immediately’ then this happened, and then this, and so on… The Greek used is rather basic and unsophisticated, adding a greater sense of urgency and authenticity to the account, made so close to Jesus’s own lifetime. In fact, if you have never read a gospel all the way through, I highly recommend that you try Mark. It only takes about 2 hours to read right through, but it is well worth the time.

So what is this good news? If we read Mark we might find that good news does not bring immediate or even lasting happiness. John the Baptist comes from the wilderness and is seen as almost a crazy prophet; after his baptism, which we see depicted in this window here by Henry Holiday, Jesus is driven by the spirit into the wilderness to face hunger, temptation and suffering. The gospel is full of people who are confused, in pain or desperate and end with the horrific crucifixion. The original ending of the gospel at Ch. 16: 8 sees the women at the tomb in anguish at the empty grave not knowing what to do but fleeing in terror and saying nothing to anyone. We know, from later New Testament writings, that the proclamation of this good news by disciples, led to their persecution, torture and death. The history of Christianity over the last two thousand years is littered with pain and death, both towards Christians and from Christians.

So what’s the good news? I think that, to answer this question we need to return to the gospel itself and see what is going on. The good news, the gospel, brings confusion and difficulties, no doubt, but at the heart of this story we see the lives of men and women transformed by the words and deeds of one man. So compelled are they by his message and his calling that they give up everything they have known and follow him, even to his gruesome end. But something happened which was so life-changing and life-giving to those people that they dedicated their lives to proclaiming the words and deeds of Christ, even if that meant persecution and death to them. Such conviction has to be taken seriously if we are to accept that Jesus was a real historical figure. The good news for those early followers was that they were people of the resurrection. They saw a vision of the world and universe that went beyond their locality and traditions. In this Easter season, it is no less true for all of us. We are people of the resurrection, which bring salvation to all and life-giving abundant joy, comfort, beauty, peace, hope, and glory, which transcend the ‘changes and chances of this fleeting world.’

St. Mark gave us a story about the greatest gift to the world there has ever been, long before Charles Jennens and George Frederick Handel. It is Messiah, and to those who first heard it and for thousands of years since, for billions and billions of people, it has, and remains, good news.

 

 

 

 

“Give us this day our daily bread” Worcester College Chapel, Oxford, 21^st February 2016 Lent 2 Evensong

Readings: 1 Kings 17.1-24 & Matthew 25:31-46

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing to thee, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

 

Last week, the ‘world cup of dough’ was held in Paris.

 

The Coupe du Monde de Boulangerie is, what it says on the loaf tin, ‘the world cup of baking’ and, in the presence of no less a guest than the President of the French Republic, the prize went not to the French but to the South Koreans.

 

Although sales of bread in the UK have fallen by 40% since 1974, bread is still big business – at least, as most high streets will testify, smart bread is big business, smart bread sold through even-smarter outlets.

 

Yet, despite the best efforts of the high-priests of bread, Mary Berry, Paul Holywood and their acolytes in the Great British Bake Off, our real, daily, hands-on connection with bread has long since been left behind. As the priest poet David Scott has written,

We have come so far from bread. 

Rarely do we hear the clatter of the mill wheel; 

see the flour in every cranny, 

the shaking down of the sack, the chalk on the door, 

the rats, the race, the pool, 

baking day, and the old loaves: 

cob, cottage, plaited, brick. 

 

We have come so far from bread. 

Once the crock said ‘BREAD’ 

and the bread was what was there, 

and the family’s arm went deeper down each day 

to find it, and the crust was favoured. 

 

We have come so far from bread. 

Terrifying is the breach between wheat and table, 

wheat and bread, bread and what now goes for bread. 

Loaves come now in regiments, so that loaf 

is not the word. Hlaf 

is one of the oldest words we have.[i] 

 

If it is true that we have come ‘a long way from bread’, and that we have indeed lost our deep hands-on ‘connectedness’ with the softness of milled flour, the grittiness and pungency of yeast and the heat of the oven, how much truer is it that we have lost the deep connectedness between our prayer to God to give us our daily bread and our cry for God’s Kingdom to come?

 

The Lord’s Prayer, given by Jesus, through his disciples, to the world has, to a large extent, become bankrupt and irrelevant[ii] . Its once urgent petitions have now, largely, lost their meaning, and not just for those outside the Church but within.

 

Over two thousand years of constant use, the words of the Lord’s Prayer have become increasingly distorted and misunderstood, eviscerated of their urgency and power

 

Whilst the prayer has everything that needs to be said – about God, the Kingdom, this life – it is a prayer whose petitions we need to rediscover afresh over and over again.

 

Jesus left us only one prayer in response to his disciples’ request that he teach them how to pray and, at every moment of every day, somewhere in the world, someone prays the prayer once used by Christ himself but, all too often, the words simply glide over she who prays them, untouched, forgotten as quickly as they are uttered.

 

But back to bread, or rather, back to praying for our ‘daily bread’ and the distance we have travelled from linking our request for bread to our prayer that God’s Kingdom come.

 

Each of the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer is interlinked inexorably: the intimacy of knowing God as Father with an acknowledgment of God’s holiness; the search for the forgiveness of our sins with our exercise of forgiveness towards those who have sinned against us, and so on.

 

If we engage in Jesus’ work of living the Kingdom, so that God’s will be done here on earth as it is in heaven, then we open ourselves up to the most enormous of risks; we set ourselves the challenge of living and dying as Jesus lived and died, of living and dying as those who first prayed the Lord’s Prayer lived and died.

 

If we are serious, really serious, about our praying for God’s Kingdom to ome, and if we truly want God’s will to be done here on earth as it is in heaven, then we must accept that the Kingdom must come through me: through my actions, through my words, through my choices.

 

The ‘Kingdom’, wrote Alexander Schmemann, is what lies at the very heart of the New Testament. It is the “core and central understanding, the very nucleus of the gospel message” but it has also become a “riddle, whose answer” seems to have been “lost along the way”.[iii]

If the Kingdom is, as R S Thomas, put it[iv], evidenced in,

 

Festivals at which the poor man Is king and the consumptive is Healed;

mirrors in which the blind look At themselves and love looks at them Back;

and industry is for mending The bent bones and the minds fractured By life

 

then who is to be the agent through whom the consumptive finds healing and through whom dignity is restored to the poor to the poor? Who is going to hold up, before others, the mirror that reflects God’s perfect love? Who is it that sets out, consciously, to transform society in such a way that bent bones are straightened and minds fractured by life are healed?

 

Teresa of Avila[v] knew the answer to the “riddle. Teresa knew that she had to be the agent of God’s Kingdom, the one through whom God’s Kingdom would be enacted here and now.

 

Christ has no body but mine, No hands, no feet on earth but mine, Mine are the eyes with which he looks Compassion on this world, Mine are the feet with which he walks to do good, Mine are the hands, with which he blesses all the world. Mine are the hands, mine are the feet, Mine are the eyes, I am his body.[vi]

This is all heady and dangerous stuff. The stuff of revolution, but it is none other than the Way of the Cross.

 

No wonder then, that we pray that God give us “our daily bread”; that God provides for us all that we need to survive as we go about God’s business in the world.

 

The “bread” for which we pray is not only “bread” nor even food in general, but absolutely everything necessary for life, everything which makes possible our existence, everything we need to be Christ’s hands and feet and eyes as we seek, by and though God’s grace, to build the Kingdom, to usher-in the Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven .

Perhaps this is why we choose to glide softly over the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer when we pray them; why the words have largely lost their power and meaning for us; for if we really pray as Jesus taught us to pray, for what Jesus taught us to pray; if we take the words seriously to heart; if we set out to live them and to live by them, we know that we shall find our feet walking the Via dolorosa and shouldering the cross to Golgotha.

 

Our Father, give us today our daily bread. In your love, give us all that we need to live and to build your Kingdom here on earth as it is heaven, for

 

if the bread is holy, 

all that has to do with bread is holy: 

board, knife, cupboard, 

so that the gap between all things is closed 

in our attention to the bread of the day[vii]. 

 

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] We have come a long way from bread, David Scott, Beyond the Drift, New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe, 2014

[ii] Alexander Schmemann, Our Father, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002

[iii] ibid. p. 37

[iv] R S Thomas, The Kingdom, in Collected Poems, 1945 – 1990, Phoenix, 1993

[v] Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

[vi] Italics are mine and replace the third person of the original with the first person of this translation

[vii] Scott, op. cit.

A Sermon for Worcester College, Oxford

Sunday 14^th February 2016

 

Thy will be done

 

In nomine . . .

 

I’m delighted to be here; delighted to have this title to preach on: ‘Thy Will be Done’; and equally delighted to be able to tell you that if you type ‘Thy Will Be Done’ into a well-known search engine (who probably pay less tax than you do) the first thing that will appear is a magnificent lurid green graphic informing you that ‘Thy Will Be Done’, a legal firm who are, and I quote, ‘Worthing’s first choice for pre-paid funeral plans’[1] , were winners of the 2015/2016 Splash FM Best Business Award. This gave me, as I’m sure it gives you, immense satisfaction. I do hope that ‘Thy Will Be Done’ will find their way into the Pantheon of appropriately named business, such as the legal firm near my old haunts in Coventry rejoicing in the name of Wright Hassall Solicitors.[2]

 

I wonder how many of the good folk of Sussex twig, as they go to visit ‘Worthing’s experts in lasting power of attorney’, that the name of the firm comes from the Lord’s Prayer. One fairly recent study suggests that, while 92 per cent of adults surveyed said they knew the Lord’s Prayer as a child, only 55 per cent knew it today.

 

Frankly I was surprised that it was that high – when I arrived in my present parishes just north of this city six years ago, I discovered that the Lord’s Prayer was never said, nor had it been taught in recent times, in our three Church of England schools. It is now.

 

I think that scripture gives us plenty of evidence to suggest that doing God’s will matters.  To flick through the Gospels gives us a good idea of just how essential, how non-negotiable this is. For example, it’s clear that God’s will is that people should not be lost – such as in the parable of the lost sheep.[3]

 

It’s clear that doing the will of God brings one into intimate relationship with Jesus. [4] It’s clear that Jesus sought to do God’s will, and not his own.[5] It’s clear that those who perform God’s will – and only those – will enter the kingdom of heaven. [6] It’s clear that God’s will is life-giving: it is bread – my food, says Jesus, is to do the will of him who sent me.[7]

 

1. S. Lewis wrote that

 

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”[8]

 

That seems a long way from Narnia – but is it true? Can we be that definitive? There are those who do what God wants; and those who do what they want? And it is, ultimately, a matter of heaven and hell. Are we really going to be divided into sheep and goats?

 

Our bible readings tonight gave us two highly contrasting examples of submission to the will of God. Let’s start with Jonah. Poor old Jonah. As you know

 

he lived in de whale, Fo’ he made his home in Dat fish’s abdomen. Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale[9]

 

Not one you’ll be hearing at Choral Evensong any time soon. I love Jonah. He’s such a mixture. He is obedient – sort of. And then he’s disobedient – sort of. Eventually he is definitely obedient – but that doesn’t quite work out either. Rather like Peter in the Gospels, he never quite gets it right. After all, he does obey God’s will – he gets up and going, as soon as God tells him to. Trouble is, rather than head for Nineveh as God requires, he chooses Tarshish instead: ‘away’ we are told in doom-laden words, ‘from the presence of the Lord.’[10]

 

Jonah uses the command of the Lord to run away from the Lord. Ironic. Thy will be done? Yes – and no. Well, no, in fact, but you see the point.

 

Eugene Peterson, the American pastoral theologian, suggests that this is key to understanding our vocation as Christians. This is what we tend to do. We get what he calls ‘a taste of God’,[11] and, somehow, it’s twisted into a tendency to behave like God. Look at Eden. Look at Jonah. Look at us. We prefer Tarshish to Nineveh. Or perhaps I should say Barcelona rather than Bridlington – Tarshish, some scholars think, is what we now call Spain.

 

Avoiding God’s will, if Jonah is to be believed, means we end up in very stormy weather. And the less said about the whale, the better. Except that bit about him being in dat fish’s abdomen for three days and three nights –Jesus said something, didn’t he, about the sign of Jonah?[12]

 

Talking of Jesus, our second lesson gives us rather a different take on what it might mean to pray ‘Thy will be done’. A former Chaplain of this college has written

 

I used to think of this clause [Thy will be done] simply as a prayer of resignation. ‘Thy will be done’ with a shrug of the shoulders . . . no: this is the risky, crazy prayer of submission and commission . . . it is the way we retune our instruments, to play God’s oratorio for the world to sing.[13]

 

 

 

 

There was dark music that night in dark Gethsemane, the place of pressure, ‘the night for weeping, when powers of darkness overcame the day’.[14] When you go to Gethsemane today, it’s hard to get hold of the pain, the pressure, as the cars and coaches zoom past on the road alongside the Kedron Valley. But that night, we are told by Luke, the Saviour sweated blood.[15]  Jonah ran. Jesus didn’t. Jonah chose his own destination. Jesus didn’t. ‘Father if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done’.[16]

 

Professor Christopher Evans, in his classic work on The Lord’s Prayer, suggests that there is more to Jesus’ submission to God’s will than we might first realize. He writes

 

The context of the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane shows the temptation which he undergoes there to be not simply a temptation, but the temptation, which has the destiny of the world at stake, and the prayer uttered there ‘not what I will but what thou wilt’ is not simply a prayer for the performance of one amongst other moral duties, but a prayer for the doing of the final will which preserves the world’.[17]

 

 

 

 

 

In other words, had Jesus done a Jonah, you and I would be damned. No cross. No resurrection. No Good Friday. No Easter. No heaven. Only hell.

 

Ok. So I seem to be saying that all you good Christian folk of Worcester College ought to be more like Jesus and less like Jonah. Head for Nineveh. Head for Calvary. Neither, on the face of it, sounds that much fun. Furthermore, how exactly are we meant to know God’s will? How are we meant to discern the destination?

 

I think one way forward is the gift of the season we find ourselves in – the springtime of the church’s year, the heart’s time, Lent. Like Jesus, and, to an extent, like Jonah, we are called out to spend time in the wilderness. The wilderness can be a good place, a place where some of our dafter notions about God get knocked out of us, leaving us with a faith that is stronger, deeper, more gentle, more real. It is a place of testing. But it is also a place of calling. It is full of prowling beasts. But it is also a place of solitude, of contemplation, a place, as the poet Jean Watt describes, of

 

. . . starkness after all has been withdrawn

Of surplus and superfluous,

Leaving no hiding-place . . .[18]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jonah sought a hiding-place, and was sacrificed to the waves. Jesus sought no hiding-place, and was brutally executed. To pray ‘thy will be done’ – and to mean it – is dangerous; the ‘risky, crazy prayer of submission and commission’, remember? But what choice do we have, if the Lord and his Prayer are going to shape our praying, our witness, and our worship?

 

The business of discerning God’s will is always stretching, always costly, whether we are on the quayside at Joppa, or in the agony of the olive grove. But it is our life’s calling, our life’s prayer.

 

It is our final destination.

[1] http://www.thywill.co.uk/

[2] https://www.wrighthassall.co.uk/

[3] Matthew 18.12-14

[4] Mark 3.35

[5] John 5.30

[6] Matthew 7.21

[7] John 4.34

[8] C. S Lewis, The Great Divorce (Geoffrey Bles 1945)

[9] It ain’t necessarily so, from ‘Porgy and Bess’; Written by: Dorothy Heyward, Du Bose Heyward, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin; Lyrics © Imagem U.S. Llc , Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.

[10] Jonah 1.3

[11] Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Eerdmans/Gracewing 1992), p. 12

[12] Matthew 12.38-41

[13] N. T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer (SPCK 1996), p. 32

[14] Peter Abelard (1079-1142) Nox ista flebilis praesensque triduum

quod demorabitur fletus sit vesperum; from In Parasceve Domini: Notturno III

[15] Luke 22.44

[16] Luke 22.42

[17] Evans, The Lord’s Prayer (new edn. SCM Press 1997), p. 41

[18] Jean M. Watt, ‘Lent’, from ed. Robertson, A Touch of Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry (Lion, 1989)

Sermon. Sunday 7^th February 2016, Worcester College

Micah 4 and Luke 15: ’Thy kingdom come’ – the Lord’s Prayer

 

Here’s a true story, told to me by one of my Church history students after we had discussed the European Reformation, with apologies to the choir who have heard this before. The student’s mother is Roman Catholic and her father is Anglican. When they were first married they would sometimes go to each other’s denomination of Church- He would go to the Catholic church and she would go to the C of E church. All was well except for a few of the lady’s friends, who were aghast at her attending Anglican services. ‘It’s alright’, she would respond, ‘we’re all Christians – we’re all travelling in the same direction.’ ‘Yes, my dear, her friend would reply, but some of us are travelling first class!’

I love the idea that there is a ‘first class’ Christianity with a superior route and carriage leading to the final destination – the kingdom of God. And perhaps there is a lesson in the story too, not that Catholics are inherently better than Anglicans (although this may be true), but that it is not just the destination that counts, it is the journey and the manner of our travel.

As we consider the phrase ‘Thy kingdom come’ from the Lord’s prayer in our sermon series, I want to explore that we mean by the kingdom and what we’re asking for when we pray ‘Thy kingdom come’. Last Monday, in the Woodroffe society lunch, we got round to the question: ‘What is the purpose of the Christian life?’ Perhaps to worship God, or, as someone suggested, ‘to bring about God’s kingdom’. As it happens the Archbishops of Canterbury and York seem to agree with the latter solution, because they will soon be sending out letters to all parish clergy encouraging them to pray in the week of prayer for evangelisation and mission in May this year. That week is going to be called ‘Thy kingdom come’, making the clear connection between the making of disciples and the building of the kingdom. But, as you might expect in our discussion group, the question regarding the purpose of the Christian life, leads not to a clear answer but to yet more questions. Is the kingdom to come now? Or is it in the life hereafter? How do we bring it about? If it is to come, is that a present possibility or a future reality?

One theologian who considered the kingdom as impossible in this earthly life was Martin Luther. As Richard mentioned last week in his sermon, theologians are always in danger of practising idolatry because they insist upon making claims about what God is and what he does. Luther would have echoed this warning. Those who claimed, in their arrogance, he wrote, to know the nature of God, were deluded. He called them ‘theologians of glory’ who glorified and exaggerated their own abilities to apprehend the attributes of God. This is a falsehood, claimed Luther. All we can know about God’s work is encapsulated in the cross. The only positive and true statement we can make about God’s immanence is Christ’s life and crucifixion – the rest of divine reality is hidden. Thus, any true theologian is a theologian ‘of the cross’. Our response to the cross is to live a life of penitence and humility, acknowledging our (Augustinian) indelible stain of original sin, and hoping that, through repentance and faith we may receive God’s grace to do some good, and await the fulfilment of God’s kingdom, either in the afterlife or at the second coming of Christ.

Conversely, the twentieth-century writer, C.H. Dodd, posited the idea that the kingdom could become a reality in the here and now, the fulfilment of the end times (in Greek the eschaton) could be brought forward, or realized, in the Church on earth now. He called it ‘realized eschatology’. I imagine each of us can think of people and events where the kindness, generosity and self-sacrificial values of God’s kingdom have been visible in the deeds of people today, which gives us hope of a better future, and perhaps faith that humanity can be redeemed. On the other hand, the continued rise of violence, whether in the name of religion, autocratic rule or nationalism, makes it improbable that Micah’s prophesy, where spears shall be made into pruning hooks and swords into plough shares will be fulfilled soon.

That is why Jesus gives us this command to pray ‘Thy kingdom come’. Because, although we may glimpse the goodness of the divine from time to time, the world is yet to be healed from its brokenness. Jesus knew this before his crucifixion for, as he was brought to trial he declared ‘My kingdom is not of this world, for if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight’ to slay his opponents and save himself from the suffering of the cross.

But he does not do this. Any why? Because, to risk the idolatry of trying theology again, this is not the nature of God, and He is not that kind of King. The wisdom of the cross, wherein the essence of the kingdom lies, is illogical in worldly terms, it is ‘foolishness’ in the eyes of humanity, as St. Paul argued. It is paradoxical to say the least. The kingdom of God, according to scripture, is a place where the greatest power is found in the greatest weakness; where children are more readily  where the first must be last; where to gain one life one must lose it; where, to become rich, one must give everything away; where the greatest must be the servant of all. It is a place where, in Mary’s words, where the powerful are out down from their seat and the humble are exalted; it is where the poor, the meek, the bereaved, the persecuted are the most blessed. God’s kingdom is sometimes seemingly given to those who deserve it least. In the parable of the prodigal son which we heard tonight, the elder brother is jealous and angry at the great feast given to his wayward younger brother. There is a clear salutary lesson for us to learn here. God invites us to feast with him in his kingdom; he invites us to a party, a heavenly banquet. In response, we can either stand outside in critical self-righteousness, refusing to sit down with those with whom we disagree, leaving us without friends, family or welcome, or we can accept the invitation and join the party, if we can also accept being with everyone else who has been graciously invited. If we can accept that invitation then our community might become a place where we can learn to practice true harmony and peace.

So, are we travelling first class, as Christians, to this kingdom? In fact, are we travelling in the right direction at all? One reason that the train might be stuck at the signals is that we don’t really want the kingdom to come at all. That, when we pray ‘Thy kingdom come’, we don’t really mean it. For instance, when the rich young lawyer asked Jesus how to gain eternal life, Jesus replied, ‘Sell all you have and give your money to the poor and follow me’ and the lawyer went away very sorrowful for he was very rich. ‘How difficult it is to inherit the kingdom’ sighed Jesus. Who here tonight is willing to give everything away to the homeless outside our college gates? Who is willing to give their position or status away? I do not point a finger, for these questions are addressed to myself and I preach to myself as much as anyone.

But, as we ponder the Lord’s prayer this term, the next time we pray it, perhaps we can pray with a little more conviction that God’s kingdom really will come; give thanks that Christ’s death and resurrection gives us hope of an eternal joy in his heavenly kingdom and that we may have the humility and strength to consider the lowly, the meek, the bereaved, the poor, the persecuted. Then perhaps the best side of our human nature, through God’s grace, can join in the holiness of the Trinity – the Father, whose kingdom is in heaven, the Son, whose hallowed name is above every name, and the Holy Spirit, who gives fallen humanity the hope of living in the joy of the kingdom, both now and in whatever comes next. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

A sermon preached at Worcester College, Oxford at Evensong on Sunday January 17^th. The first of the term’s series on The Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:1-4).

 

Chaplain, when you decided the theme for this term’s sermon series, you would have had little idea of how topical it would be become. For a moment in time, this most ancient of prayers became global news via an attempt by the Church of England to show an advert featuring it prior to screenings of Star Wars. This attempt to awaken another kind of force (not the kind that involves light-sabers) backfired when the advertising Empire struck back to ban it.

 

For a while, I wondered if I could make Lord’s Prayer fit a Star Wars theme; an Oxford education (particularly at the finest College, Worcester!) after all, surely prepares you for any adventure, literary or otherwise. And so I reflected briefly that although Jesus would have likely taught the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples in Aramaic, our record comes to us in the form Greek of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

 

Greek has a habit of placing verbs at the end of sentences. This would make a literal rendition of the Lukan version sound something like this: Father, your name hallowed be; your kingdom come; each day our daily bread, give us; our sin, forgive us…to the time of trial do not bring us. Uncannily close to that most noble of Star Wars languages spoken by the wise sage Yoda who also placed verbs at the end of sentences.

 

Realising that a whole Star Wars related sermon on the Lord’s Prayer was probably not what you were expecting this evening, but nonetheless seeking an Oxford connection, I sought inspiration closer to my present home in the north island of New Zealand. 40 minutes away from where I live, and within my Diocese, is the parish of Matamata, which contains the farm on which the film set of Hobbiton is located. Tolkein himself translated the Lord’s Prayer into Elvish, and specifically reflected on the line ‘and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’ in connection with Frodo’s struggles against the power of the One Ring.

 

This perhaps provides us with a useful connection to the Gospel context of the Lord’s prayer: namely that the landscape of faith is filled with challenges and trials, but the disciple’s quest is for a Godly kingdom that scripts how we are to live in relationship to one another and to God in a way that is as relevant now as it was 2000 years ago when the disciples first asked Jesus: Lord, teach us to pray.

 

So what can you look out for over the coming weeks in your quest to ponder this prayer?

 

Firstly, for all its apparent familiarity, the Lord’s Prayer requires us to slow down and dwell with its words and phrases, so that the prayer may dwell in us. In his book ‘How to pray’, the former Bishop of Oxford John Pritchard says this: ‘A naval officer was once praying the Lord’s Prayer with a friend in a remote corner of Iceland. ‘Say it slowly’, he said, ‘each phrase weighs a ton.’’

 

Secondly, the Lord’s Prayer tells us something important about the nature of discipleship. The disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, as John taught his disciples. You cannot be a disciple if you are not open to being taught something new; that is the very meaning of the word ‘disciple’: one who is a pupil or an apprentice. Remarkably resonant with this are words from the new vice-chancellor of this University, Professor Louise Richardson who in her inaugural speech on Tuesday called on students to be open-minded: ‘how do we ensure [she said] that they appreciate the value of engaging with ideas they find objectionable, trying through reason to change another’s mind, while always being open to changing their own?’ To be a disciple is to be open to learning something new, that our lives may be enriched and in so doing be more fully formed into the likeness of Christ. The life of discipleship is all about the company you keep, those from whom you are willing to learn, and more often than not, it was and is about keeping the company of those with whom we are most unlike.

 

Thirdly, there is an intimate connection between our prayer, and our care for the world that is our home. The prayer that Jesus taught begins with the hallowing of the name of God, giving praise for the unmerited gift of life in creation, and immediately turns to pray that the kingdom of peace, justice and righteousness might be a reality here and now. Communities in which human beings flourish, creation is treated with respect, and the resources of the earth are sustained for those who are to follow us. A message perhaps, for the life of an Oxford College, where traditions are honoured, and buildings, grounds, and indeed human souls are tended with care knowing that we are entrusted with handing them on to generations to come.

 

Fourthly, the Lord’s Prayer is not a prayer just for the individual. It only achieves its fullest meaning when it is prayed together by the whole body of Christ, or with an awareness that even if we pray it on our own, we are joining in a chorus of languages and cultures around the world: E to matou Matua i te rangi, kia tapu tou ingoa, kia tae mai tou rangatiratanga. Kia meatia tau e pai ai ki runga ki te whenua, kia rite ano ki to te rangi. So begins the Lord’s Prayer in Maori, the indigenous language within the context in which I live and work. Most days, I pray the Lord’s Prayer in that language, and it forces me to raise awareness of my relationship to the land and people around me.

 

Finally: while the Lord’s Prayer is very here and now focused, the present always stands under the scrutiny that is possible when the light of the Gospel and the Kingdom it proclaims, is shining on what is happening. We are constantly called to work for the new community of peace, justice and righteousness which the Lord’s Prayer assumes and which the Gospel sets out.

 

While it is true to say that Jesus taught this prayer to his disciples a long time ago in a Roman Province far far away, we are invited to learn, re-learn and live this prayer out here and now, in this place, and on into the places where we go. May you so be inspired as you journey with this prayer throughout these coming weeks, and, may the force be with you!   Amen.                                                       +Helen-Ann Waikato