Author: admin

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

 

There is a lovely scene in the recent film adaption of the Michael Bond Paddington Bear books, when Paddington meets Mr Gruber for the first time.  It’s tea time and a toy steam train appears, as if from nowhere, across the back of the study full of interesting sights and smells, until it stops in front of Mrs Brown, Paddington and Mr Gruber.  Hot chocolate or coffee is poured from a tap in the train’s engine and the carriages are full of delicious cakes that Paddington immediately devours.  Mr Gruber comments that a long time ago he had travelled on such a train.  ‘Was it hard to find a home?’ asks Paddington earnestly and Mr Gruber tells his story.  When he a young boy his home became very dangerous, so his parents packed him off on a train to travel the length of Europe alone.  He was met at the station by a great aunt who took him in.  ‘I had travelled fast a very long way,’ he wistfully said, ‘my heart, it took a little longer’.

We continue to hear of other terrifying stories in a catalogue of events which have described the desperate lengths whole families and children will go to leave their homes and risk journeys across high seas in overcrowded and inadequate boats for the hope of a new home.  From the thousands of Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, who are stranded in the Andaman Sea in south-east Asia to the many more fleeing atrocities in north Africa who are daily rescued from sinking ships or dinghies in the Mediterranean sea, that story Mr Gruber tells is for many a present and perilous reality, not a history of a more barbarous past.

For many of us living in Oxford and the surrounding villages the plight of those people who have lost their homes is tragic and calls for compassion and generosity.  We may not have experienced the fear and desperation that caused them to risk their lives but all of us can at some level relate to what it is like to have to leave a home which has been built up and loved to move to another place and start again.  The generation who can boast that they were born, bred, lived and died in one village or even one house is dying out, as most of us these days for one reason or another move around and live in a variety of communities or countries which may not originally have been our own.  From housing prices which young families cannot afford, to going where a job takes us, maybe to the other side of the world, we are a more transient generation.  Home is indeed where the heart is, but as the migrant in Paddington states, creating a home can take a little longer, for the heart does not always travel as quickly as may the body, despite the eagerness with which the body might wish to travel.

Worcester College has always strived to be a home for the fellows, staff and students working and living here. In years gone by a sense of community, or home, was encouraged by the imposition of compulsory chapel on Sundays. I see that we do not need such a rule today. I recently heard a story from an old member, John Davies, who was an undergraduate here in the 1950s. He told me that a student could only be excused chapel, either on a Sunday morning or evening, if they had a very compelling reason or if they were of a non-Christian faith, and then only by express permission from the Provost, who was Masterman at that time. One student petitioned the Provost and requested that he be excused chapel because he worshipped the sun. ‘Very well’, Masterman replied. The next morning the undergraduate was woken at 4 a.m. by a porter knocking at his door. ‘Compliments of Provost Masterman’, the porter announced, ‘he wishes to inform you that the sun has now risen and is awaiting your worship.’ After a week of the early-morning calls, the student decided that he would attend Sunday chapel after all. Those were the days.

Times change, but Worcester has continued to be a temporary home to generations, and today we say farewell to a number of people, students, choristers and parents, who have been part of Worcester and its chapel life for the past few years or months, and who must once again pack up their bags and move on to begin the process of finding and building a new home, a new job or a new school, of learning new names and making new friends. For others, it is a return to home after the temporary one of this college, and time to move back to the familiar, in order to reassess what the future might hold now. Either way, this is a time of ‘moving on’ and of saying goodbye. On this of all days, when we fondly say farewell to them we are given our gospel reading as a gift to us and them.  For, after your years of education in this august establishment, and in the cathedral school, we reflect upon the words from St. John’s gospel known as the Last Supper or Farewell Discourses.

 

In many ways it is the final words of someone who is moving on, who is worried about those he is leaving behind.  His words are all directed to the Father but as you know, if you have ever experienced someone praying over you, the words and intentions are really for you to hear, God of course already knows.  What he says is that he has done everything he was sent to do: he has made the Father’s name known to us, we have believed and in so doing glorified God.  Now he begs that the Father will look after us, for there will be difficult times ahead and he will no longer be around.  Up to this point, Jesus’ prayer is everything you would expect from someone who is going away to reassure those who are left behind that they will be all right, they will be in the Father’s keeping.

But, this is not just anyone who is embarking on a new venture, it is Christ and when he places us within the keeping of the Father, it is not just a hopeful blessing.  In the last section of the prayer he reveals that with his departure everything has changed for us, through our faith in him we have been sanctified and as a result our home has radically changed.  No longer is our home in this world, where we are born, live, work and die, but our home is with him which is above, within, beyond and around all that we have ever experienced or could ever experience as home.  It is as if it is we who have suddenly travelled a very long way and found that our heart was there all the time.

So we speed you all on your way as you journey to different places and new experiences. Remember that you will always be welcome in this place as part of a family to which you belong and that was, for a time, your home.  And rejoice that all of us share one home, our truest and most real home with our Lord above, mindful that we must always welcome the stranger amongst us, for we are all strangers until we meet in Christ and delight in the home to which our heart has already gone before.  Amen.

 

Trinity 1. 7.6.15.

Worcester College, Oxford.

Jeremiah 6.16-21; Romans 9.1-13

 

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

Let me begin by thanking the Chaplain for his kind invitation to be here.  It is a great pleasure and a privilege to be preaching in a chapel that was an important part of my life for seven years.  I bring you greetings from Derby Cathedral.

 

Who do you think you are?  Perhaps that sounds like a rude question, so let me recast that by saying that I am referring to the television programme in which well known people explore their family histories.  In my family, it was my Great Uncle Arthur who was the custodian of the family archives.  He was convinced that his Aunt May had a black box containing documents that would prove the family links to royalty.  When she died and no box was found, he was convinced that she had left a clause in her will that delayed the release of the black box for ten or twenty years.  I stand before you a commoner – no black box has ever materialised.

 

Who do you think you are? It’s a good question.  Who are we? Do we know who we are?  Both of our readings from the Bible this evening direct us to this question.  Jeremiah urges his hearers to “ask for the ancient paths where the good way lies” and warns of dire consequences for those who refuse to do so.  There are resonances here of warning that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana).  And St Paul in our second reading takes part in the practice, common in the Bible and beyond, of retelling the history of the people of Israel, trying to make sense of what God has done in the life of the people he called.

 

Paul’s puzzling over what God has done in the life of his people, may find a parallel in our own puzzling over what God has done in our own lives, and what God might be calling us to in the future.  I want to invite you this evening to take some time and look back over your own life, to notice things, and to try and gain some understanding about what God was doing in and with you. And as we look back at our lives, the first thing to notice is how much there is to celebrate.  For Paul, as he looks back through the history of Israel, there is a whole list of things to celebrate: the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, the Messiah.  Sitting here in this chapel, there are many things in our lives to celebrate: those who have loved us, the opportunities, the achievements, the victories, the friendships.  Take some time in the coming week to identify at least some of the things in your life that there are to celebrate, and give thanks.  There is much to give thanks for in this place, may God be blessed for ever.

 

So notice what there is in your life to celebrate, and give thanks.  Then notice what there is to surprise you.  As Paul ends his list of celebrations, he moves quickly to tell a story with twists and turns.  The birth of a son to a couple in their nineties, the reversal of importance in that son’s children.  God, it seems, rejoices in surprising us, in taking odd, unimportant and surprising people and working through them.  Think of Abraham and Sarah, called by God in old age to leave their home and have a child.  Think of Jacob, the liar and trickster, who wrestled with God and gave his new name Israel to a whole people.  Think of Ruth, foreigner who broke the rules and came to be the ancestor of Kings and of Jesus.  Think of David her great-grandson, eighth son and shepherd boy who became the great king of Israel.  Think of Mary, childless girl in an unremarkable town, who became the mother of Jesus.  There is hope for you and for me yet.  God who can find great value in these unlikely people may yet find value in us.

 

So notice what there is to celebrate, and notice what there is that surprises you.  And then notice where you have been weak, or failed, or hurt.  Paul performs his historical survey from a place of “great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart”.  We might not all know that, but in all of us there are wounds and failures, weaknesses and sorrows.  And it is in those places, that God can be at work beyond our strengths and our defences.  J.K. Rowling, writing of the darkest time of her life, when she considered herself to be a failure at life, says that “failure meant a stripping away of the inessential … Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way”.[1]  In my own life, I bear witness that my deepest wound – a bereavement when I was nine years old – is also the greatest source of compassion that I have.  I would not for a moment want to go through that again, but it has made me the person that I am.  St Paul knew this too.  In his second letter to Corinth he describes a “thorn in the flesh”.  This was an affliction Paul had, but we don’t know precisely what it was.  He begged God to remove it, but could only conclude that it enabled God’s work in his life.  He concludes: “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12.10).

 

So find some time to look back at your life, and notice what there is to celebrate, notice what there is that is surprising, and notice the times of weakness, failure and hurt.  See how God has been at work in you through them.  But the point of this is not the looking back, however insightful or interesting it might be.  Rather the point of this is to look forward.  Jeremiah in our first reading, takes us to the crossroads and tells us to stand there and “ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it and find rest for your souls”.  Jeremiah is not telling us just to find the ancient paths, this is not an advertisement for reading history (or even theology).  Rather, we are to look to the ancient paths, to look to our own histories, to find the paths that are good ways.  Those are the paths we are to walk in.

 

So what is it that God has worked in your life thus far that will take you on into the future?  What kind of a person has God made you to be?  The American journalist David Brooks recently wrote of two kinds of virtues: résumé virtues and eulogy virtues.[2]  The former are the skills we bring to finding a job, the latter are the things that will be spoken of at the end of our lives.  The former are about our accomplishments, the latter are about our character.  In the rush of the need to develop a CV, don’t forget the sort of person you are, the person that God made and calls you to be.

 

So take a moment, perhaps stand on the apron outside the college – it is as good a crossroads as you will find – and ask that question, who do you think you are?  Then look for the way forward that will build on that.  The future, just as much as the past, will have much to celebrate, much that will surprise you, and times of weakness, failure and hurt as well.  Look for the good way and walk in it and you will find rest for your soul.  Amen.

[1] J. K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (Sphere, 2105) pp. 32, 34.

[2] David Brooks, ‘The Moral Bucket List’ in The New York Times, April 11, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html

Trinity Sunday 2015

Worcester College Evensong

 

Today is Trinity Sunday, a day which is notorious among clergy as one which preachers want to avoid. It is, I assure you, by accident and not design that the person speaking to you this evening is paid by the College to teach bizarre things such as Trinitarian theology to Worcester undergraduates. It is also a coincidence that some of those undergraduates begin their final examinations tomorrow. Any of them who have found their way into chapel this evening are far more likely to be placing their hopes in the power of prayer than in the power of my sermonising. And perhaps, a sermon is not the right medium anyway. The anthem we have just heard, Vaughan Williams’s setting of Herbert’s The Call is such an excellent example, both musically and poetically, of Trinitarian theology that it is tempting for me simply to sit down as invite the boys to sing it again. A friend of mine, who was for a long time a school chaplain, had a neat solution to the problem of teaching children this most difficult of theological ideas. He said, “I just tell them that it’s simple: three in one, and one in three. Any problems, go and ask your maths teacher.”

 

I’m going to try a slightly different approach. Picture the scene. A group of students gathers together, perhaps on a summer evening. Work is finished for the day, the sun is not long down, the wine is flowing. Idle chit chat puts the world to rights and all is as it should be. Except that two of the group are paying no attention to anybody else. You see, two of the group – as they will eagerly tell anyone prepared to listen – are very much in love, indeed have been very much in love for all of eight days – a practically matrimonial commitment in their eyes. And their time is spent not contributing, not participating but variously gazing into one another’s eyes, holding as much of the other’s hand as they can physically contain, and mostly, and all too prominently, snogging.

 

It is an experience almost all students are forced to endure at one time or another. It is a disease of the young, though not necessarily the young in years, since human behaviour tends to disobey the rules and regulations of chronology where matters of the heart are concerned. Many of us have been there. One of the worst fates in Oxford is to be stuck on the end of a long dining bench and table with only young lovers opposite. Conversation is hardly sparkling. I myself remember two friends from undergraduate days who, if separated by someone sitting between them, thought it acceptable to stretch out and hold hands across them. They were lucky that their neighbour didn’t respond by throwing up on their tightly clasped hands.

 

This is love, of a sort. And God, we are told, is love. So is such cringe making behaviour divine? Definitely not. It is no less a theologian than Rowan Williams who asks us to consider this kind of love, and try to map it on to the relationships which we call the Trinity. It will not work. The love of God is not entirely self-absorbed. The love of God is gratuitous, overflowing, it exceeds itself. When we say that God exists in a communion of love, we do not mean that the Father and the Son enjoy a relationship which is closed, in which they attend to nothing and no-one but each other. Instead their love has an openness, an outpouring which St Augustine of Hippo famously identified with the third person of the Trinity, with that which we call the Holy Spirit. In so doing, Augustine did not mean, as is often suggested, that Father and Son are rather like human persons, and that the Spirit is the abstract concept of love which flows between them. He meant that there are different ways in which scripture requires us to talk about God – as the source of all existence, as the divine presence which disrupts our tidy world of power at a particular time and in a particular place, and as the effect, the working out, the living out of that creativity and that presence in the world and in the lives of human beings such as you and I.

What follows from this is that everything that Christians do is done in the Spirit, done because of the life-giving presence of God which animates all creation. The Trinity, far from being the abstract concern of theological metaphysics, is actually the basis of the entire Christian life. Right at the beginning of Mark’s gospel, the first to be written, we see Father, Son and Spirit active in the baptism of Jesus, in the new act of creation by which everyone and everything will be reborn and renamed through the death and resurrection of Christ.

 

In the life of the church, the Trinity underlies everything which we call Christian. As I read scripture I do so seeking the God who sustains my existence in love, who himself seeks and sustains his people, and I am enabled to meet this God in the person of Jesus Christ precisely because the Spirit gives life to that scriptural encounter – without Father, Son and Spirit the Bible is simply another book. As I offer my prayers I do so knowing that the Father who loves his children sees not them in their sin but his son in their likeness, and so united with Christ I am able to pray, except that it is not I who prays but the Spirit who prays within me. The initiative here is grace itself: the love of the Father, in offering his Son in our likeness; the love of the Son in giving himself freely to the Father as our representative; the overflowing love of the Spirit which allows this relationship between Father and Son to spill out into the lives of every created thing.

 

Genuine love, divine love, is genuinely gratuitous. It is not simply selfless, in that it gives itself entirely to another; it is also endless, in that it cannot be exhausted by any single object of love, even an object as infinitely loveable as the person of Jesus Christ. When we struggle with the world in which we find ourselves, with the decisions, the relationships, the problems, the examinations, which make up our own little parts of that world, we are nonetheless living the life of the Spirit if we try, if only we try, to be loving. An act of love is an act of God, and the true act of God, the true act of love, is something which our own failures and weaknesses and selfishness can never diminish, however much they may knock us back, however determined we are to wallow in our own inadequacy. Divine love is not packaged up, a possession shared by Father and Son but kept to themselves and given to no-one else. It is an eternal act of self-giving which cannot end because the Spirit is always at work bringing life, bringing love, to every creature and person under heaven. The doctrine of the Trinity is the teaching that in the life of God himself there is something which overflows all attempts to contain it, there is an invitation for you and for me, a reminder that giving and sharing can be one and the same.

Worcester College Chapel, Choral Evensong, Sunday 17 May 2015

Luke 4.14-21: Jesus’ Manifesto

 

Introduction

I wonder what comes to mind when you think of Liverpool?  Anfield and Goodison, or Aintree, perhaps; or the Beatles?  The Ferry across the Mersey, maybe, or the Liver Birds (whether in the form of the statues themselves, or, for those of a certain age, in the form of the 1970s TV sit com)?  Maybe you think of Hillsborough, or of the Toxteth riots?  Or Ken Dodd, perhaps, or Cilla Black; maybe you think of Scouse; maybe one or two of you think in Scouse?

Or maybe it’s David Sheppard who comes to mind, the cricketing bishop and icon of ecumenism, who (together with the Roman Catholic Archbishop, Derek Worlock) drew the sting out of a sectarian city.  You may recall how he was a thorn in the side of Maggie Thatcher, a principal contributor to the Faith in the City report, and the author of that ground-breaking piece of practical theology, Bias to the Poor.  And if at least some of that story is familiar to you, then (given two other factors, neither of my choosing) you may by now be listening to me in a state of heightened expectation.  Factor number one is the outcome of the general election, in that, for the first time since 1992, the United Kingdom has elected a majority Tory government.  Factor number two is the particular pair of lectionary readings for this evening: the first from the prophet Isaiah and the second (sometimes called ‘Jesus’ Manifesto’), a passage from the Gospel according to Luke in which Jesus quotes the verses from Isaiah.  Both these texts are mission statements full of promise for the poor and the oppressed.

So: given Liverpool’s recent church history, and my association with one of the two Cathedrals which stand proudly at either end of Hope Street; given the frankly unexpected new political context in this country, which brings with it the prospect of further welfare reform and public sector funding cuts, with their disproportionate impact on communities such as my own; and above all, given the nature of the lectionary readings appointed for this evening, you may, as I say, now be listening to me in a state of heightened expectation – some perhaps in excited, and others no doubt in nervous, anticipation of a highly politicised sermon.  Well, you’ll have to wait and see, whether or not // that’s what // this is.

I want to begin by summarising the reading from Luke, in order to draw your attention to two things about it.  And then I want to illustrate how those two things currently shape our work at Liverpool Cathedral, because I take them to be hallmarks of authentic Christian mission in every time and place.

 

1. Jesus’ Manifesto

First of all then, the reading from Luke: in the Third Gospel, this is really Scene 1 of Jesus’ public ministry.  He’s been baptised and has been preaching in the villages of Galilee to some acclaim, and he comes to his home town on the Sabbath day.  As usual, he attends the Synagogue, where a key element in the worship on the holy day is the public reading of Scripture.  For one such reading, Jesus volunteers.

Luke tells the rest of the story with immense care and precision.  We are invited to savour Jesus, unrolling the scroll, delivering the reading and then rolling up the scroll once again.  And although the scroll of Isaiah is not one Jesus has chosen, it seems that once he has been given it, he does carefully choose the part of the scroll from which he reads – the opening verses of Isaiah 61.

In the light of the single sentence sermon Jesus subsequently delivers (‘Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’), what strikes me about the passage is how self-centred it sounds on the lips of the Lord.  ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me’, he says, ‘because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives’.  Actually, the Greek is arguably even more emphatic.  It could equally be translated, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me; to bring good news to the poor he has sent me’.  Me, me, me.  In our culture, those words almost always indicate an ugly preoccupation with oneself.  But generation after generation of Christians has found in Jesus’ self-reference, here, an absolute appropriateness, an extraordinary rightness.

Yet Luke is quite open about the fact that Jesus’ first hearers were by no means happy about his focus on himself.  At the start of our passage we’re told that the Lord’s early preaching in Galilee was praised by everyone.  In the course of Luke 4, however, that praise turns, first, to hesitation, and then, to hostility.  That’s the first striking thing about this passage: Jesus’ preaching is focused sharply on himself.

The second thing I want to stress is that the prophecy from Isaiah, which Jesus has apparently chosen as his mission manifesto, is focused also on the vulnerable.  Listen to these words once again, if you would: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’. 

For whom is the message of Jesus good news?  For whom is the year of the Lord’s favour proclaimed?   That is to say, are we to understand the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed, literally or metaphorically?

Well, Isaiah’s original prophecy was certainly addressed to those who were literally captive and oppressed – literally exiles in Babylon.  And Jesus certainly healed those who were literally blind.  But his gospel also brought sight to those who were metaphorically blind; it liberated those who were captive to sin and guilt, death and the devil.  So there’s no exclusive literalism here.  His good news is for all who confess themselves to be poor.

On the other hand, as I’ve just indicated, it really isn’t possible to evade that literal element altogether, any more than it is in relation to the words the choir sang for us just a little earlier, from the Magnificat, which is, of course, another excerpt from the early chapters of the Gospel of Luke: ‘he has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away’. 

It was precisely passages of Scripture like these, which led Bishop David Sheppard to coin that phrase, Bias to the Poor.  In his book, he shows (to my mind unarguably) that God has a particular care for the vulnerable: for those who are literally orphans and widows, aliens and strangers, literally poor  – although, as it happens, these same people are also, very often, the spiritually open too.

 

 

2. Liverpool Cathedral and the mission of the church

So, let me say something secondly, about Liverpool Cathedral and about the way those two emphases are currently shaping our life.   In my view, a focus on the presence and finality of Jesus, on the one hand, and on what in Roman Catholic social teaching has become known as God’s preferential option for the poor on the other, are the twin hallmarks of all authentic Christian mission, in every time and place.

In Liverpool at present, we express our allegiance to Jesus by ensuring that at the heart of our life is the call to discipleship: for us, the Christian life is simply this, the intentional following of Jesus.  For this reason we have on our staff a residentiary Canon for Discipleship, we run Alpha courses and offer to new believers a baptism by immersion.  We have conducted over 120 such baptisms in the past two years, and it’s fair to say our congregations are thriving.  Sometimes, it’s true, our unashamed proclamation of salvation in Jesus creates jitters.  We note this jitteriness not least in funders, who are, we think, unduly cautious about awarding grants to faith-based institutions.  We don’t often, thank God, face hostility on account of our Jesus-centred-ness; but we’re well used to facing tentativeness.  The prevailing liberal, inclusive ideology in our society hasn’t quite worked out what to do with the confident commitments of faith.  But in this aspect of our work, we believe, on the basis of Luke 4, that we enjoy the smiling approval of the Almighty.

And our focus on the Lordship of Jesus is matched by an intentional solidarity with the poor.  In the last two years, our Hope+ Foodbank has fed over 15000 guests – that’s about 150 guests a week on average.  Last October, we entered into a partnership with Liverpool Jobcentre Plus, to provide a programme to assist the longterm unemployed back into work.  We have a significant ministry to asylum seekers, supporting them through a tortuous and highly unpredictable legal process.  In the face of such work, again we find central government is not quite sure how to respond.  On the one hand, some seem all too ready to demonise our guests and clients; on the other hand, isn’t this the Big Society at work?  In all this work, too, we believe on the basis of Luke 4 that we enjoy the smiling approval of the Almighty.

Of course, every Christian community is different, and Christian mission is always thoroughly contextual.  And anyway, Liverpool Cathedral is far from perfect.  We could be doing more in both these two key areas of our work, and what we are already doing, we could doubtless do more effectively.  But my plea to you this evening is this: if you are ever tempted to ridicule those who use food banks, please don’t – at least unless you’ve met some them, and have heard their stories.  And if you are ever tempted to vilify those who seek asylum, please don’t – at least unless you’ve met some them, and have heard their stories.  And if you are ever tempted to condemn those who rely on benefits, please don’t – at least unless you’ve met some them, and have heard their stories.

Why?  Because the hallmark of Jesus’ ministry, and the hallmark of authentic Christian mission in every time and place is this: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because he has anointed us to bring good news to the poor; he has sent us to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’. 

Pete Wilcox, Dean of Liverpool

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

 

Thank you very much to the Chaplain for his warm welcome.  It is always a pleasure to return to this, probably the most visually stunning Chapel in Oxford.  Like yourselves, I have often studied its many intriguing images and messages during the odd moment in a sermon.  The Chaplain’s seat directly faces a rather salutary frieze that I am rather fond of.  It depicts only five of the traditional seven stages of man’s life: a child in arms, the toddler learning to walk, a youth, a young man as he is at this College, then him as a man of the world and finally, at the very top, a funeral pyre with a woman weeping beside it.  Nursing mothers and young children are not unknown in this college, thanks to the wonderful heritage of the boy choristers and now the new blossoming Frideswide Voices with its girl choristers, there are also a few young men and women about the place, but the sight of a funeral pyre or a coffin is a rare occurrence.  On the odd occasion when one is processed from a hearse round into the Chapel, it seems odd, strange, out of place in the world which is so full of life, and youth and expectation.  There are curious looks and awkward pauses from those who rush to get to lectures and have the misfortune to bump into this somewhat unusual spectacle.

 

As parish priest to three beautiful medieval churches and their equally idyllic churchyards the case is very different.  With up to thirty funerals a year I now find that one of my main tasks is to fulfil that work of mercy which is to bury the dead.  Death and the sacred rituals which surround the end of life is a normative part of my world and the world of the villages of Garsington, Cuddesdon and Horspath.   The sight of a hearse driving round the village lanes in which the deceased played and lived is a regular occurrence and the folk who come to pay their last respects invariably will have at least two or three such occasions to attend each month.  Saying that, one of the images which has most haunted me over the last six months has been a photograph on the Medicin Sans Frontiere website that showed an open grave in Sierre Leonne.  Unlike the open graves I see in Garsington churchyard this one was deep and ten times as large, because it was a mass grave that held about 20 bodies, wrapped up in white shrouds lying next to each other.  An aid worker stood at one end and a few people were dotted around including a young girl, not much older than my Katie.  All I could think was why was the grave still left open, why didn’t they cover them over and give them peace, who was there to say the funeral service for them, where was a priest?  At the height of the ebola pandemic last year who was it that was burying the dead?

 

During the equivalent catastrophe in England during the 1340’s and then again in the 1360’s the answer to that question was clear, it was the priests, the ordinary parson who carried out his duty to bury the dead.  Yet of all the victims of the Black Death it was these loyal servants of the church that most suffered with two thirds of them being wiped out in a matter of months.  Even today, so many years later, where our world view is radically altered, it is still the parish priest who buries the dead.  A humanist minister, or Funeral Chaplain may now have replaced the parson at the crematorium but no one can be lowered into a grave within a churchyard without the Incumbent or equivalent priest being present.  It has been commented before by those who have lived through the harrying experience of the death of a loved one, that in the days to follow it feels as if the professionals move in, from the police who must be called out if such an incident happens at home, to the funeral director that takes them away, to the priest who comes to arrange the ceremonial.  They may have a chance to see them in the chapel of rest to say goodbye but it is these professionals who lay the last human hand on their coffin and fills in the open grave.  The most a family is able to do in burying their loved one is to sprinkle some earth or flowers at the service.  For in our modern world burying the dead has become privatised by a series of professionals, who in the most sensitive and compassionate way, help a grieving family to navigate the dark waters of burying their dead.

 

Once I had got over the initial visualisation of the terrible toil that has been exacted on communities by the ebola epidemic, I guess what it was that so shocked me about the Medicin Sans Frontiere photograph was its lack of these figures who have become so necessary in the modern process of laying the dead to rest.  There was no funeral director, no priest and most telling of all no grieving family in this picture only a little girl and an aid worker.  This picture reminded me that to bury the dead is more than just the role of the priest or the responsibility of the family, it is a work of mercy that we are all bidden to do as we live out our faith in practical and real ways.

 

The scriptural basis for including this within the corporeal acts of mercy can be found in the book of Tobit which is one of the Aprocryphal or Deutercanonical books of the Old Testament.  Tobit is probably most famous for his son Tobias who had the archangel Raphael as his guardian angel, but Tobit like Daniel is an icon of a loyal Israelite who even in captivity under the Assyrians kept living out his faith in ordinary and practical  ways.  He fulfilled the corporeal acts of mercy by giving food to the hungry, clothing the naked and ‘if I saw the dead body of any of my people thrown out behind the wall of Nineveh, I would bury it’ (Tobit 1:16).  So he displayed the mercy of God to those he knew and did not know by ensuring that the dead were given some form of respect and burial.  I hope that none of us will find ourselves in such a desperate situation that it is down to us to physically lay the dead to rest, yet there are such people even now across the world whose task it is to do this.  So how can we, in the world in which we do live, fulfil this mandate to bury to dead?

 

At Christmas time in Garsington churchyard a remarkable transformation begins to slowly take place over the weeks which lead up to this central of all festivals as the graves begin to be visited and covered in beautiful wreaths of flowers and candles.  The sight of so many physical emblems of grief reminds everyone who walks down the path to the church that whilst Christmas is a time of family and fun for many it is a poignant reminder of loss and the empty chair that will no longer be filled.  Months even years after a loved one has been laid in the ground there is still the need for someone to act and speak those words of the kindness and mercy of God.  For the professionals soon leave, even though we would wish to be there every day to help that person through their grief there is the next funeral to do, so it is the rest of us who must overcome our timidity and fear of saying the wrong thing to reach out to those who still need help to bury their loved ones and release them into the eternal.  But here we must remember that it is not us who act or speak but it is the mercy of God and we are but his messenger, his angel who through a card or a kind word, a cake or a smile will enable someone to gradually let go into new life and help them bury the dead.  Amen.

 

 

Evensong Worcester College, Oxford 10th May 2015

Song of Songs 4:16-5:2, 8:6-7; Revelation 3:14-end

In nomine…

The college chapels of Oxford and Cambridge are among the great treasures of the Church of England. They vary in scale, prominence and grandeur, but, whatever their size, spiritually they are all places of depth and breadth. The chapel of King’s College, Cambridge must be among the most widely-recognised buildings in the world. But even the smaller, less celebrated chapels are a delight: this beautiful place, for instance, with its profusion of imagery in mosaic, paint, glass, alabaster and wood; or the chapel of my undergraduate years, Lincoln, largely unchanged since it was built in the seventeenth century. Its most famous Fellow, John Wesley, would recognise almost every detail. And then there are the modern college chapels: Fitzwilliam, Cambridge, has as its chapel a beautiful elevated space. Behind the altar is a vast transparent window which opens onto the foliage of a two-hundred year old plane tree in the court outside: at this time of year it is a marvellous place to worship.

Or the chapel at Churchill College, Cambridge. Here the preposition is all-important: not the chapel of Churchill College, but the chapel at Churchill College. Passions rose when the chapel was first mooted as part of the fledgling college: Frances Crick, an atheist, resigned his fellowship at the proposal to build a chapel, but Christian voices were equally strong and the college found itself in deadlock. Finally, a deal was reached. At the far corner of its 40 acre site, the college leased a small piece of land to a Chapel Trust, consisting of those fellows who wanted a chapel. And so, in 1967, a chapel was built. The Churchill chapel is a gem, a modern interpretation, in concrete, glass and timber, of a Byzantine basilica. The chapel may have been pushed to the fringes of the Churchill site, but it is a triumph of modern church architecture, once entered, never forgotten.

Architecturally and artistically the chapels of Oxford and Cambridge are treasures; but they are also treasures liturgically: for their musical and spiritual life. Again and again I meet Christians, lay and ordained, who, like me, identified their vocations amidst the liturgical life of an Oxbridge chapel, and had them tested and stretched there: not just clergy, but teachers, lawyers, civil servants, scientists and businesspeople. And the same can be said of the musicians whose careers began in these buildings and their round of worship: singers and organists, obviously, but instrumentalists too, conductors, composers and academics. These chapels are powerhouses of art, architecture, worship, music with a continuing ability to refine and nurture the gifts of those who pass through them.

I offer this paean to college chapels partly because of the splendour of this place, its life and worship, but also because of the readings that we have heard this evening. On first encounter tonight’s second reading is not the most inspiring passage of scripture. The last of the seven churches of Asia, that of Laodicaea has, uniquely, become proverbial. The Revelation to Saint John begins with letters to each of the seven churches and the writer’s judgement on the Christian community at Laodicaea is searing:

15 ‘I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. 16So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

We who lead our lives amidst the relative comfort of west European culture must stand under the judgement of those words. How far removed is our experience is from that of our fellow Christians in other parts of the world? Loko, for instance, the Ethiopian woman who describes her daily life on the Christian Aid website. ‘I pray to God as I walk’, she writes, ‘asking him to change my life and lead us out of this’. How many of us feel the need to offer that prayer?

17For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

But that harsh assessment is tempered by the words that follow it:

19I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. 20Listen! 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.

Those words are attributed by Saint John to the risen and ascended Christ. They encompass in miniature the grace of the gospel, which shows us that with God righteousness and mercy go hand in hand: we are judged with justice, but we are also judged with compassion.

‘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’. Once, in this country at least, those words were among the best-known in the Bible. The verse was so well-known because it was the text of which William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World was the illustration.

The Light of the World, of course, is one of the most celebrated of all English paintings. It exists in three versions, one of which is here in Oxford, in the side-chapel at Keble. The versions vary in size and colouring, but they all show the same image: the figure of Christ standing beside a door in an overgrown garden. In his left hand he bears a lantern, whose light shines out in to the dusk of evening; and his right hand is raised, poised to knock on the weed-infested door. When it was first shown in 1851, The Light of the World was more or less universally acclaimed as a masterpiece. And a few years later, when it went on a tour of the Empire it was viewed by tens of thousands of people, often queuing for hours. Many were deeply moved. An insurance clerk from New Zealand wrote this after seeing it: ‘the vast crowd stood gazing in silent wonderment at the picture… many [of them] in adoration, as though held by some irresistible magnet. And I, on viewing the wondrous face, was impelled to uncover my head in reverence thereto’. The phrasing is Victorian, but the sense of awe is palpable.

For many people that painting was and still is the definitive image of Jesus. But there are other ways of picturing Christ as the Light of the World. One of them is in another Oxbridge Chapel: Robinson College, Cambridge. The great window of the college chapel, stretching behind the altar, was made by the artist John Piper. The contrast between this Light of the World and Holman Hunt’s painting could hardly be greater. In the window there is no figure of Christ, instead there is a glorious explosion of colour. From out of the dark blue depths at the base of the window a great sun arises, drenching foliage and flowers with its brightness. Instead of the dimly glowing lamp of the painting, here we have an image of the radiance of God illuminating the whole of creation. The darkness covering the face of the deep gradually dispersed by the bright and manifold variety of God’s blessing.

Two great works of art, two depictions of the Light of the World. The first subtle, personal and intimate – the original is surprisingly small – and the second bold, colourful and direct. By their very contrast these two artworks remind us of the two ways in which Christ makes himself known to us. He comes to us personally – as in Holman Hunt’s painting – knocking at the door of my heart (and your heart) and asking to be let in. But Christ comes to us, is present with us, universally as well as personally, and that is what John Piper’s stained glass window in Robinson, Cambridge seeks to show. Christ is the light of the world in both senses: the lamp that gently illuminates the dark and hidden places of our hearts and souls, bathing them with his glow; but also the glorious light of the sun, revealing God’s glory in the world.

The risen Christ promises to come in and eat with those who hear his voice and open to him. This is the sense in which we should hear the words of tonight’s first lesson, from the ancient love lyric that is the Song of Songs: ‘Eat, friends, drink, / and be drunk with love’. Surprising words to hear in church – or are they?

The quickening of the soul and spirit and body that comes from falling in love is not perhaps that far removed from the quickening of the soul and spirit and body that come at the moments when one’s faith is illuminated – set on fire – in a place like this one. I cannot point to a particular moment of conversion during my time as an undergraduate at Lincoln. But I do know that the hours I spent in the chapel transformed me – and that they are transforming me still.

Worship is the primary meeting place between God and God’s people: worship is the time and place where we learn to abide in God as God abides in us. It is not merely an aesthetic or intellectual experience, but an encounter of body, soul and spirit with God, in whom we live and move and have our being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

 

I haven’t seen it, but Ridley Scott’s epic film Exodus: Gods and Kings received poor reviews last year and was even banned in Egypt due to historical inaccuracies. The censors objected to claims that the Pyramids were built by Jews and opposed suggestions that an earthquake caused the parting of the Red Sea, even though Scott had an explanation for his depiction.

You can’t just do a giant parting, with walls of water trembling while people ride between them,” said Scott, who remembers scoffing at biblical epics from his boyhood like 1956’s The Ten Commandments. “I didn’t believe it then, when I was just a kid sitting in the third row. I remember that feeling, and thought that I’d better come up with a more scientific or natural explanation.”

Scott’s solution came from a deep dive into the history of Egypt circa 3000 B.C. After reading that a massive underwater earthquake off the coast of Italy caused a tsunami, he thought about how water recedes as a prelude to such disasters. “I thought that logically, [the parting] should be a drainage. And that when [the water] returns, it comes back with a vengeance.”

However it has been depicted in film, the story of the Israelites in the book of Exodus is a remarkable tale, from Moses’s relationship with Pharaoh, the the ten plagues (7:8-13:16) the first Passover (ch. 12), to the guiding of the people to Sinai (13:17-18:27), receiving the Ten Commandments (19:1-24:18) and to the building and dedication of the tabernacle of the Lord (35:4-40:38). Exodus is a book of redemption in which God delivers His people out of bondage and brings them into a special relationship with Himself.

The part of the redemption story that we heard this evening finds the Israelites stuck in the wilderness, tired and very hungry and complaining ‘If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.’

But it is only in the previous chapter that there has been the great victory of their flight from the Egyptians through the parted red sea. That was a completely different story. Then there was rejoicing and singing: Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: ‘I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;    horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. ² The Lord is my strength and my might,^*    and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him,    my father’s God, and I will exalt him. ³ The Lord is a warrior;    the Lord is his name.

Likewise, the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. ²¹And Miriam sang to them: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.’

If you know your Handel Oratorios, then you will know his joyous, even aggressively victorious, setting of these words in his great choral work: Israel in Egypt.

 

Indeed, the connection between the salvation history of the Jewish people in the Old Testament, has long been associated with music. Isaiah 26:19, for instance, connects the notion of resurrection with song: ‘Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy.’ In addition, there are many verses of the psalms which refer to singing at times of salvation, rescue, or victory (33:3, 40:3, 96:1, 114:9, 149:1) and these are themes also witnessed in New Testament scenes of salvation, such as Revelation (15:2-3):

 

And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mixed with fire, and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands. And they sang the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb:

“Great and amazing are your deeds,

Lord God the almighty!

Just and true are your ways,

King of the nations!”^[1]

 

Michael O’Connor opines that, from the Biblical evidence, ‘Singing is what redeemed people do and in doing so they anticipate a consummation of their song in a future glory.’^[2] New songs represent redeemed people who live in a new covenant as narrated in the New Testament, as Augustine preached:

 

So anyone who knows how to love the new life knows how to sing the new song. So for the sake of the new song we need to be reminded what the new life is. All these things, you see, belong to the one kingdom – the new person, the new song, the new testament or new covenant. So the new person will both sing the new song and belong to the new covenant.^[3]

 

It is the same theology, or soteriology, that we heard expressed in this evening’s anthem:

 

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Which according to His abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

 

It is remarkable then how soon, after this redemption from slavery, the Israelites come to be despondent. Even when Moses turns undrinkable water into sweet water at Marah, and God gives them twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees to camp under, they seem fearful and alone. In the desert of Sin, between Elim and Sinai, they cry: “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

 

We too have, of late, been singing redemption songs, songs of freedom, salvation, resurrection. For this is the season of Easter, when we have time to reflect upon the good news of our freedom, bought by the blood of Jesus Christ. And yet, how difficult this is to see in a world where thousands of refugees flee north Africa only to be drowned in the Mediterranean, people are mindlessly slaughtered by terrorists, and Christians are burned alive or machined gunned down just because they are Christian. If God’s kingdom has come, on earth as it is in heaven, then surely something has gone wrong. What does the gospel have to say to us about such times and about God’s love for us?

 

Yesterday was the feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, author of the shortest, and most dramatic of the gospel narratives. The original ending of his gospel depicts the women at the tomb discovering that Jesus is not there but has risen. Mark uses these words: ‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’

 

The reality of resurrection, which heralded a new era of revolution, was, apparently, as shocking, terrifying and amazing in first century Palestine as it is today, and human reaction to it is equally flawed. And yet, the events of Christ’s life and death have transformed the lives of millions throughout the generations. Mark would never know the impact of his gospel upon Augustine, Aquinas, St. Francis, Mother Theresa, or countless unknown saints of the faith who have been transformed by God and thus enact the redemptive work of God in the world.

 

The story of the flawed people of God in Exodus continued with the story of the flawed early Church to which John wrote in the book of Revelation, and it continues with us today. The greatest story ever told has not yet finished. How it ends will depend on how we play our part in it.

 

 

 

[1] Revelation 15: 2-3, New Standard Revised Version, cited in O’Connor, ‘The Singing of Jesus’, p. 440.

[2] O’Connor, ‘The Singing of Jesus’, p. 440.

[3] Augustine, Sermons, The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21^st Century, Part III, vol. 2, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1990), Sermon 34, p. 166, quoted in O’Connor, ‘The Singing of Jesus’, p. 440.

WORCESTER COLLEGE OXFORD

3^rd May 2015

 

It was, I think, during last November that the poet, biographer, teacher and university academic Jon Stallworthy died. Well-known of course in Oxford, he did not quite live to see his eightieth birthday.

 

A few weeks ago, I found myself browsing through a book that I had received as a gift from some friends in 1980, thirty five years ago, and had hardly looked into since. Plucked from the bookshelves after all that time, it brought back memories, and it reminded me of the speed of the passing of the years. It was an anthology of some twentieth century poetry. In it, I came across a piece by Jon Stallworthy. I had not known or noticed it before. It somehow struck a chord with me.

 

The poem is called Sindhi Woman. It is about a poor Indian woman whom the poet spots in a Karachi market; a bazaar. In spite of her barefooted poverty, her grace and charm captivate the poet. The poem is only two short verses long. The first goes as follows.

 

Barefoot through the bazaar,

and with the same undulant grace

as the cloth blown back from her face,

she glides with a stone jar

high on her head

and not a ripple in her tread.

 

The woman moves with dignity, seemingly without effort, in spite of the load she carries. And the poet continues in the second verse:

 

Watching her cross erect

stones, garbage, excrement and crumbs

of glass in the Karachi slums,

I, with my stoop, reflect

They stand most straight

Who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

The ‘stones, garbage, excrement and crumbs of glass’ speak of the impoverished context out of which this elegant person emerges, carrying her load, and over which she somehow seems to triumph. And the poet notes:

 

I, with my stoop, reflect

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

The poem is simple, but I think it speaks profoundly.

 

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

I have no reason to believe that Jon Stallworthy was an especially religious person, in any conventional way. But the message he conveys through his poem certainly chimes in with a kind of wisdom that you can find in our great religious traditions; wisdom that both warns and reassures us that genuine human stature is not achieved, not arrived at, without some kind of struggle. This is most surely true of the Christian tradition.

 

Our New Testament reading tonight, from the Revelation to John, opened with a message addressed to the Church in Sardis. Apparently, Sardis was a flourishing economic centre near the end of the first century and was known for its influential Jewish community. It seems that the Christian community was well adjusted to its surroundings. There is no suggestion that the Christians in Sardis faced serious opposition or social conflict. In short, the Christians appear to have been having life easy. But the author of the Revelation claims that the Christians of Sardis “are dead” and not “alive”. And so it often happens that, when Christians become too comfortably adjusted to the world in which they live, too ‘acceptable’ to others, they lose what you might call their ‘cutting edge’. They become flabby, and really have little to offer.

 

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

The disconcerting fact is that what have been called the ‘eternal truths’ and ‘enduring values’ disclosed in and through the life of Jesus Christ are, in many ways, offensive; not only to everybody else but to us also. They constitute a burden and a weight that we almost naturally resist. The translation of the ideals of self-sacrifice, and self-forgetfulness in the interest of the good of others, into the vocabulary of everyday life is hard. Yet it is our vocation to engage in that exercise in order to contribute to the raising of our world to the level of what we understand in Christ to be its true humanity.

 

Nonetheless, perhaps like the Christians in Sardis at the end of the first century, we in our own time have developed a tendency to be too well-adjusted to the culture in which we find ourselves. In a rather uncritical way, we attempt to gain credibility by aping the world around us, by adopting its mores, and by blessing and baptising its assumptions. Perhaps this is seen most in what has become in the Church an obsession with ‘growth’, and the insistence on measuring so-called ‘success’ by reference to the expansion of the organisation!

 

This can happen at the expense of our providing any kind of challenge. Indeed, we offer an escape from real challenge, sometimes by trivialising and domesticating religion; trying to attract more followers by turning it into a kind of recreational entertainment to lift the spirit of those who will return to daily life refreshed and contented. Some will smile at us but we are generally looked upon as harmless creatures. We might be seen to be a bit eccentric but we ruffle few feathers. In a tolerant society, we shall be tolerated. But, to what end?

 

I am not advocating a retreat into sectarianism. I do not believe that the Church should be ‘counter-cultural’ but I do believe that Christians should be ‘culture-critical’; wary of those movements that seem to inhibit development into what we perceive to be God’s will as disclosed to us in Jesus Christ. In a way, I am asking for no more than that we should take our religion ‘seriously’, try to allow the very things in it that we resist to shape our own lives, and attempt to become conduits through which its flavour might seep into the world of which we cannot help but be a part; agents of some kind of leavening.

 

I am, I suppose, asking that we should bear the weight of a certain responsibility; a responsibility laid upon us by virtue of our professed discipleship. That responsibility must be to demonstrate something of the strange difference that Christ makes to life; what other reason could there be for us to take the name of ‘Christian’?

 

It is by bearing the weight of that responsibility that we, as individuals and as the Church, will grow in the only way that really matters; grow in faithfulness to our vocation; grow, you might say, in integrity.

 

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

Should you, at this stage, think that I am commending to you a life of earnest misery, let me remind you of some words of Jesus that put things into context. Somewhere in the Gospels, it is recorded that he invites us to take his ‘yoke’ upon us but always to remember that, in some odd way, his yoke is easy and his burden is light. A wonderful grace is given to those who emerge out of their spiritual comfort zone to bear witness to Christ. But that’s another story, and another sermon.

 

 

David Conner