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Worcester Chapel, 1 Feb 2015

‘Feed the Hungry’ (Second of the Seven Acts of Mercy)

 

The so-called ‘seven acts of mercy’ are often associated with Lenten works of charity, but as Lent does not begin until the middle of February, this sermon series clearly has a much broader remit. In fact, ‘works of mercy’ are not only known in the Christian faith, but they also play a vital part in other world faiths, not least Judaism and Islam, for each agrees that ‘mercy’ and ‘compassion’ lie at the very heart of true religion. It is important we recognise this, as this is one way of answering the popular criticism that religion causes nothing but bloodshed and fear. As the chaplain said in his sermon in First Week:

‘We are increasingly living today with a false portrayal of God as a violent might which must be imposed on others by force… But murder in the name of God is an aberration, a catastrophic consequence of a distorted notion of the divine. ‘When religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong’, as Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, recently stated as he and his community fled their Church in Iraq because of terrorism.’

 

All too often religion can go horribly wrong. One reminder was only last week, when on ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ we heard again the terrible accounts of survivors of Auschwitz. Another reminder was at the beginning of the week, in the news reports of the mass murderer Anders Breivik, who has been trying to orchestrate an uprising from his Norwegian prison cell: all in the crazed belief that Europe needs to be ‘re-Christianised’ and rescued from what he calls ‘Islamification’ – a belief which led him to slaughter and maim over one hundred people on the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011. Other reminders of religion going ‘horribly wrong’ are the all too frequent attacks on both mosques and synagogues in Palestine and Israel, as well as on churches in Iraq, many of them disputes over ‘holy sites’. Add to this the ongoing horrific attacks by Boko Haram militants on Christians in northeast Nigeria, and it is all too obvious that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are each caught up with the effects of barbaric acts committed in the name of ‘religion’. It is easy to forget that ‘true religion’ is about mercy, and its terrible aberrations have little to do with what its founders once taught.

‘Mercy’ is a word used many times in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: each shares the common belief in a ‘Merciful God’, whose mercy is to be the inspiration for every believer. Take Judaism, for example: the phrase ‘the Lord is a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’ is an early creed found several times in the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible.   And in Christianity, the New Testament testifies repeatedly to a God who is ‘rich in mercy’: the parable of a father’s mercy towards his ‘prodigal son’ is just one illustration of the mercy which God offers to all who turn to him. And in Islam, too, ‘Most Merciful’ (al-Rahman) is one of the names of Allah, whilst ‘Compassionate’ (al -Rahmin) is repeatedly used in the Qur’an. Both derive from the Arabic root rahmat – ‘to have compassion’ or ‘to show mercy’. A very similar verb exists in Hebrew: raham means ‘to have mercy’. (Interestingly, in both Arabic and Hebrew the noun, ‘raham’ means ‘womb’, thus comparing ‘mercy’ with a mother’s love towards her child.) So all three faiths espouse that because God is merciful to us, we are to show mercy to others. In Judaism, the last six of the Ten Commandments can be seen as ‘acts of mercy’ to family and friends; in Christianity , ‘acts of mercy’ lie at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount (‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy’); and in Islam, ‘acts of mercy’ in the form of almsgiving (zakat) are the fourth of the Five Pillars of the Faith.

In Matthew 25, which is a key text in this sermon series, Jesus makes it clear that by showing mercy to others it is as if we do it to him. ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me’.   A similar teaching is found in the Qur’an: the righteous are those who feed the poor , the orphan and the captive, saying ‘We feed you for the sake of God alone’. By being compassionate and merciful we are imitating the character of our God.

The particular act of mercy I have been asked to focus on is ‘feed the hungry’. I shall look at this in two ways, one practical, the other more theological. I shall ask, firstly, how do we give to the hungry?   And, secondly, why do we give to them?

Statistics tell us that almost one in seven of the world’s population is hungry, and 90% of the hungry are predominantly in Asia, the Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa, and that 50% of the world’s wealth is held by 6% of the world’s population. So the people of the West have a huge debt to pay. Yet it is clear that few of us can literally ‘feed the hungry’: we have to use aid agencies as a medium. And we have to be discriminating: there is much truth in that Chinese proverb,   ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ There is of course spontaneous crisis aid, in times of terrible famine, but there is also educational aid, which builds for a better future. ‘Works of mercy’ have often to be about us using our minds as well as our hearts.

It is nevertheless all too easy to harden both our hearts and our minds against the hungry of the third world, for we never see them.   So it should be very different when we hear the statistics about the number of people who go hungry in our own country, as the book by the Archbishop of York (On Rock or Sand?), published last week, argues; Archbishop Sentamu challenges both the Government and the Church to recognize how immediate and urgent the cycle of deprivation and hunger is in our own land. Yet even here, it can again be a case ‘out of sight, out of mind’:   we can forget what we do not often directly encounter. So perhaps our greatest challenge is when we come across those who are hungry in our own neighbourhood, some of them on the streets of Oxford. Here again we face the choice of immediate crisis aid or longer term aid (through, for example, The Hub or the Gatehouse), and again we have to ‘feed the hungry’ with minds as well as our hearts.   But that we should respond generously, in some way,   to those who are hungry is a Christian, Jewish and Islamic imperative: how we do it and to whom we do it is very much an individual act of conscience.

So what about the second issue – why do we give? Here our two readings throw some light on this. Deuteronomy 8 is an extract from a ‘sermon’ of Moses; first the ancient Israelites are reminded about God’s provision when they were miraculously fed with manna in the wilderness, and then they are warned that when they enter Canaan, a land of plenty, they are not to forget that the same God is their provider, and they are not to assume that the land and its produce are theirs by right. ‘And you shall eat and be full… Take heed lest you forget the Lord your God… Beware lest you say in your heart ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth’ (Deut.8:10-11). Hence having an abundance of food and wealth is quite acceptable: God is a generous giver, and the real issue is about how we view it and use it.

There is a passage in the Gospel of Luke which in part expands the teaching in Deuteronomy. It begins with Jesus teaching the disciples the Lord’s Prayer; you may recall the very first request is ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (Luke 11:3). In Luke this incident is followed immediately by a parable of a man who seeks out his friend, late at night, to ask him for ‘three loaves of bread’ as he has unexpected visitors. The friend initially refuses to get out of bed to help: he is too well fed to bother with the needs of others. ‘Give us today our daily bread’ is not just a prayer for ourselves, but a prayer for others, too.

Our second reading today was the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. It has echoes of the sermon in Deuteronomy about God feeding his people with manna in the wilderness. This is the only one of Jesus’ miracles to be recorded in all four Gospels – indeed in Matthew and Mark it is reported twice – so we night deduce that something must have happened which had an effect on the different Gospel writers. Some have argued the small offering of five loaves and two small fish encouraged others in the crowd to share what they were holding back; others read it more literally. However one explains it, it is a reminder of how God can freely and abundantly provide for us in times of need. But it is also a reminder that we must give out of our plenty to serve those in need, and whoever does so, whatever their faith of creed, is reflecting to others the character of God the Merciful.

However, God’s resources are infinite, and ours certainly are not. But the implication is  that we are required, nevertheless, to give as generously as we can. I think of two stories – both again in Luke’s Gospel, which of all the Gospels is the one which champions the cause of the poor and needy. One is of Jesus observing a poor widow putting two copper coins into the Temple treasury. Jesus commends her as follows: ‘She out of her poverty has put in all the living that she had’.   She may not have given much, but she gave beyond her means (Luke 21:1-4). The other story occurs just before it, and concerns a rich young ruler, anxious to know how to inherit eternal life, who is challenged by Jesus not just to keep the commandments but to sell all that he has and distribute to the poor. ‘And then’, says Jesus, ‘You will have treasure in heaven. Come, follow me.’ But when the ruler hears these things, he becomes sad, for he was very rich (Luke 18:18-23). Whether rich or poor, what counts is being prepared to give abundantly out of whatever we have – for the simple reason that the God of mercy- the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – has given to us and so we owe Him, through others, His due.

I am acutely aware that, within half an hour of the end of this service, many of us will be dining in Hall or eating at home and the plight of the hungry may well be far from our minds. So is this a contradiction of what has been said tonight? Is this, in effect, ‘cheating’ the hungry and the poor? I think not.   Here I draw from the Rule of Benedict, which is an ancient monastic rule which influenced the founding of our very first Chapel, built almost exactly on this site in 1484. Gloucester College, lasting from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, was very much a Benedictine foundation. The Benedictine Rule has often been seen as ‘living with contradictions’, and one of those, apposite for today, is the paradox of living with plenty and living in want. Saint Benedict – who is depicted twice in this chapel, once amongst the saints of the church, and once behind this lectern in an act of giving Gloucester College over to God – has a good deal to say about plenty and want. The Rule of Benedict speaks about feasting, and fasting; about kind and generous hospitality, and self-control; about times of celebration, and acts of compassion. Chapters 39 and 40 of the Rule, on ‘The Proper Amount of Food’ and ‘The Proper Amount of Drink’ make surprising reading.

As we heard in our reading last week, Jesus’ first appearance in his public ministry was at a wedding in Cana, and according to John’s Gospel his first public miracle was changing water into wine. So Jesus affirmed celebration and generous hospitality. Yet just before this, by contrast, we read in other Gospels that Jesus was in the desert, where, hungry and parched, he survived the temptation to turn stones into loaves of bread. So deprivation and plenty were both part of the rhythm of his ministry. So to live ‘in abundance’ is not to be despised: we could not respond practically to the command to ‘feed the hungry’ if we did not have the means to do so. This is what is meant by those words attributed to Moses in Deuteronomy: ‘And you shall eat and be full… but take heed lest you forget the Lord your God…’   So let us rejoice in what we have been given, but let us also discover in practice the words of Jesus, ‘Truly, I say to you, feed the hungry: and as you did it to one of the least my brethren, you did it unto me’. (Matt. 25:40).

Mercy and compassion lie at the heart of true religion, and the more we, as individuals, practice this – Jews, Christians and Muslims alike – the more we will expose as a lie those who use religion to try to take the world by force. ‘Acts of mercy’: these can prevent religion going ‘horribly wrong’.                     Amen.

Sermon: Introduction to the Seven Works of Corporal Mercy

18^th January 2015

Isaiah 58: 6-10; Matthew 25: 31-46

 

Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

 

Words from Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poem As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame: the acceptance of God’s grace, brings grace into our everyday behaviour and actions, allowing a person to be “in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is”— that is, in Christ. It is then that Christ plays in ten thousand places, in our limbs, our eyes and God can be perceived in the faces of others.

 

Hopkins’s ideas reflect those of Isaiah in our first reading. Actions of justice and kindness, rather than malice and spite, are the true way in which all are called to reflect the divine image.

 

If you remove the yoke from among you,    the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry    and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness    and your gloom be like the noonday.

 

This term we are going to explore these ideas further by looking at the seven corporal works of mercy, those practical and down-to-earth acts can reflect God’s grace in the world. The list of the seven works was formed Thomas Aquinas, in the 13^th century, as they are to be found in his summary of all theology, the Summa Theologicae, but the importance of performing these duties was urged from the earliest days of the Church, in fact, from Christ’s declaration of the two highest commandments:

 

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it; You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

 

Fulfilling the works of mercy fits hand in hand with loving God and our neighbour, for, as St. John of the Cross wrote: “At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love.”

 

Of the virtue of mercy, Aquinas wrote:

 

“. . .The sum total of the Christian religion consists in mercy, as regards external works: but the inward love of charity, whereby we are united to God preponderates over both love and mercy for our neighbour. . . Charity likens us to God by uniting us to Him in the bond of love: wherefore it surpasses mercy, which likens us to God as regards similarity of works.” (Secunda Secundæ Partis, Question 30)

 

Thus, the virtue of practising mercy becomes part of the greater command and virtue of love, which is the essence of the divine. Many of the corporal works of mercy are mentioned by Christ in our second reading this evening, from Matthew 25:31-46:

 

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. . . Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:35-36, 40)

 

Now I mention that these works are corporal, pertaining to the body and physical needs, thus the seven works of corporal mercy are to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to visit the imprisoned, to visit the sick and to bury the dead. This last work is not mentioned in Matthew 25 but several times in the book of Tobit.

 

The seven works of corporal mercy are complimented by the seven spiritual works of mercy, whose purpose is to relieve spiritual suffering. These are, traditionally, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to admonish sinners, to comfort the afflicted, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive offences willingly, to pray for the living and the dead. But it is the works of corporal mercy that Christ emphasizes in Matthew 25 and which concern us this term, for they are the concrete actions that bring us closer to the divine nature, to God’s grace and the true purpose of our lives.

 

Of course this passage from Matthew 25 has caused theological debate throughout history, insisting as it does, that according to our merciful deeds, or lack of them, we shall be judged and sentenced to everlasting heaven or hell. In Catholic theology, this seeming endorsement of justification by works stands against the traditional view that God’s grace is offered to us freely in the sacraments. In Protestant theology, Jesus’s words in Matthew 25 seem to contrast with the Lutheran imperative that we are justified to God by faith alone. Such debates will remain as we struggles to understand that nature of creation and our place within in it, but what can unify theological or religious differences, especially as we begin the week of prayer for Christian Unity, is the fundamental sense that all of us are made by a merciful God, in his image and our purpose to is worship and love that creator, and to exercise love towards each other as we are best able to do. This involves following treating others, especially those with whom we strongly disagree or dislike, as holy, uniquely loved children f God. We are commanded to treat the stranger as Christ by offering what we can to help or comfort, thus showing that God’s grace is at work in this world.

 

The tragedy, with which we are increasingly living with today, is a perversion of religion and a false portrayal of God as a violent might which must be imposed on others by force.

We hear much about the greatness of God, and in our time, as in many other times throughout history, atrocities are being committed in the name of God of an almighty and powerful God who will judge the world. But murder in the name of God is an aberration and an absurdity and a catastrophic consequence of a distorted notion of the divine. ‘When religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong’, as Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, recently stated as he and his community fled their Church in Iraq because of terrorism. That is why our speaker this term, for the Woodroffe Society dinner in fifth week, is Imam Monwar Hussain, Muslim Chaplain at Eton College and head of the Oxford Foudation, which promotes education of young, challenges extremism, and promotes inter-faith relations. He will be speaking about challenging extremism from an educator’s perspective. In a recent open letter to ‘Islamic State’, Monawar and his colleagues from around the world, concluded with these words:

 

God has described Himself as the ‘Most Merciful of the merciful’. He created man from His mercy … Reconsider all your actions; desist from them; repent from them; cease harming others and return to the religion of mercy.’

 

What he, and his moderate friends are calling for, is a humble turning back to the God of mercy and compassion and to the true image divine, and to be touched by the ‘Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love’ of God in each other. I end with words by William Blake:

‘For Mercy has a human heart Pity, a human face: And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.’

 

University Sermon on the Sin of Pride”

preached by Provost Jonathan Bate in Worcester College Chapel,

23 November 2014

 

The preacher of the University sermon on the Sin of Pride is given a selection

of texts upon which to expatiate. I have chosen, you will be relieved to hear,

the shortest of them, the second half of the first verse of your second reading:

“Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.”

In Book VII of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the affable archangel

Raphael delivers a lecture – a sermon – to Adam, on the subject of the revolt

of Satan in heaven and God’s creation of the world. Adam asks some

questions about astronomy and metaphysics – the business, much debated

by philosophers, theologians and natural scientists, of what moved the prime

mover, how the creator was created. Raphael encourages him not to push too

far. He has been commissioned from above to answer Adam’s desire for

knowledge but to keep it within bounds. To go beyond bound would be to

trespass into the dangerous territory of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.

‘Beyond abstain / To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope / Things not

revealed’. Human knowledge must have limits. There are certain areas where

the language of reason and inquiry is inadequate, inappropriate. As a later

philosopher from Milton’s university – the other one, not ours – put it, whereof

one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Thus Wittgenstein, in the

seventh proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)

” Enough is left besides to search and know, reiterates Milton’s

archangel:”

 

“But knowledge is as food, and needs no less

Her temperance over appetite, to know

In measure what the mind may well contain,

Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns

wisdom to folly, and nourishment to wind.”

 

Milton is allowing himself a pun here, a bit of a joke: if you eat to much you

may become flatulent; if you are too indulgent in your appetite for learning,

you may end with an analogous intellectual afflatus, a lot of academic hot air.

Moderation in all things, he is saying: with surfeit comes sickness.

This sequence in Paradise Lost subtly alludes to our verse in St Paul’s

letters to the Corinthians: the idea of knowledge puffing up. It perhaps helps

to explain the oddity of this chapter of the epistle, which begins with the

question of knowledge and then proceeds to some rather detailed musings

about diet.

It was a passage that drew the attention not only of John Milton but

also, a generation before, of Sir Francis Bacon (like me, another Cambridge

man, I am afraid). What interested Bacon was Paul’s repeated imagery of the

worshipping of idols. What is the proper balance, he asked, between the

Advancement of Knowledge and the Sin of Pride? You will recall his great

meditation on the four idols, in his 1620 Novum Organum Scientiarum (‘new

method of science’), that foundation text of modern academic method

(inductive reasoning as opposed to presumption from a priori principles).

 

The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human

understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset

men’s minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance

is obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet

and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger fortify

themselves as far as may be against their assaults.

There are four classes of Idols which beset men’s minds. To these

for distinction’s sake I have assigned names, calling the first class Idols

of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market

Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theatre.

The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt

the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away

of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use; for the doctrine of

Idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation

of sophisms is to common logic.

 

Idols of the Theatre: the limitations imposed by particular systems of thought,

traditions, customs of belief.

Idols of the Marketplace: the limitations imposed by the insufficiencies

of human language. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Idols of the Cave: the limitations resulting from the quirks of every

individual mind.

Idols of the Tribe: the limitations of all human knowledge, bound as we

are by our senses (“by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the

human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and

deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh

things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important”) and

equally bound as we are by the pattern-making of our brains (“The human

understanding is of its own nature prone to abstractions and gives a

substance and reality to things which are fleeting”).

It is pride to suppose that in our quest for knowledge we can transcend

the limitations imposed by these idols.

 

So Bacon and Milton can tell the modern university much about the need to

accept limit in the quest for research novelty, can warn us of how Knowledge

Puffeth Up. As for the contrasting clause in the rhetorical chiasmus, we do not

need seventeenth-century scientists, poets or divines to tell us that charity

edifieth. This university and this college, all our colleges, are charities. We

came into being through charitable enterprise, through philanthropy on which

we still depend. Here at Worcester, once the home of Benedictine monks who

had taken vows of poverty, and always a place of poor scholars, lacking the

resources of our grander neighbours, we continue to rely upon – not the

kindness of strangers – but the charity of friends, in particular of our

philanthropic Old Members who in the Tercentenary Year of our re-foundation

are building a new endowment to see us through the storms of the next three

centuries, in which the world of knowledge will change beyond all our

imaginings.

 

But the particular verse says that Charity edifieth. Edify, as in edifice, a

building. The Greek text reads ἡ γνῶσις φυσιοῖ, ἡ δὲ ἀγάπη οἰκοδομεῖ.

Oikodomei: “(the act of) building, building up; metaphorically edifying,

edification; the act of one who promotes another’s growth in wisdom, piety,

happiness, holiness.” The metaphor comes, of course, from oikos, that

resonant word meaning a home, a dwelling-place, a household, a community,

the word from which we get economy and ecology – the nomos and logos, the

laws and the words, of the oikos. To teach and to learn with charity and

humility is to build a college and a university into a home, a dwelling-place, a

household, a community.

 

I am constantly impressed, meeting our students today, at how many of

them wish to put the knowledge they have gained here in Oxford to use that

is truly charitable: in public service, in the third sector, in development and

the developing world, in the quest to make our world a better dwelling-place,

whether through the alleviation of poverty and inequality or the addressing of

climate change and ecological crisis. They are a special generation, of whom

we should be proud in a good way.

And that’s a thing to remember. There is a thin dividing-line between

the celebration of excellence, the quest for the best (the Greek ideal of

Ἀρίστων), and the arrogance of pride. As someone who has witnessed

wonderful students passing through other universities in which I have taught –

Liverpool, Warwick, the University of California Los Angeles – I am sometimes

troubled by the thought that Oxford can be guilty of the sin of pride, or worse,

of a complacent assumption that our history and our reputation are enough,

that we can still be among the best without embracing some of the

innovations of our peers. Is it a sin of corporate pride to disdain the MOOC –

the massive open online course, available for free to the entire world – that is

now part of the charitable mission, the outreach, of Harvard, Stanford and

MIT? Are we puffing ourselves in a belief that Oxford will always be the best

place to gain knowledge?

What should our attitude be to our teaching and learning? We should

not, our text tell us, be like Milton’s Satan, “Blown up with high conceits

engendering pride.” We should instead approach knowledge with the kind of

humility that Eve shows towards Adam. Times have changed and we no

longer wish for submission on the part of females, far far from it, but an

approach to knowledge that doth not puff up might very well have a tone such

as this: “And by her yielded, by him best received, / Yielded with coy

submission, modest pride, / And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”

 

 

Have you heard of ‘manspread’? It is a new term coined, not to express the middle-aged spread in men’s physique, but of the phenomenon that occurs when a man takes up a seat, perhaps on the London underground, or in a cinema or theatre, or whatever, and manages to spread himself beyond the confines of his seat, with arms, legs or even bags, thus taking up space meant for those sitting next to him. Apparently, manspread has become such a problem on the New York subway trains that they have had to legislate against it and those caught doing it are now going to be fined.

 

The whole bizarre notion reminds me of a mosaic that I used to look at every day in St. Paul’s Cathedral. High above the East end altar there is a depiction of Christ in glory, sitting on an enormous throne and posing as if recently crowned with what I can only describe as a posture of manspread. He is king, he is glorious and he is judge. Today we celebrate Christ the King as the highlight of the relatively new liturgical season of Kingdom, which stretches from All Saints Sunday, when we remember the kingdom of the faithful, to Advent Sunday next week, when we begin to prepare for the coming of the child king at Christmas. The collect that was prayed at Matins this morning echoed the kingship theme as we prayed for our own monarch:

 

‘O Lord, our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen ELIZABETH …’

 

The idea that Christ the Messiah brought about a new kingdom, which is to be made complete at the eschaton, the end times, is repeated throughout the gospels. In fact, the very first verse of St. Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Christ comes from a line of kings. Matthew wrote ‘An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham’. Thus, Christ is immediately introduced to us as a figure of authority and kingship, just as he is in the final verses of the gospel that we heard read out this evening.

 

Indeed, Jesus’ ancestor, David, was a great king. He was, as we heard tonight, the anointed, exalted, favourite and strong one of Israel. A king. A judge. A great authority. But David’s final words makes it clear that his authority for all his great reign has come from the greater power of God: ‘The Spirit of the Lord speaks through me, his word is on my tongue. The God of Israel has spoken, the Rock of Israel has said to me: One who rules justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’

 

David acknowledges that his success in ruling justly and with great favour and authority is because he acted in obedience and not out of his own human pride. Now we do not need another sermon on the sin of pride, as the Provost has already preached eloquently on the subject in this chapel already today, in this morning’s University Sermon, but perhaps we might end this day reflecting upon the attendant virtue to the sin of pride, which is the grace of humility.

 

When Henry Holiday, the pre-Raphaelite artist, designed the windows for this Chapel, he themed each window on a scene from the life of Christ, from annunciation to ascension. Unlike St. Paul’s Cathedral however, Holiday chose not to have the East end of the Chapel depicted Christ the King in glory, but rather the crucifixion. I, for one, am grateful for Holiday’s theological insight in so ordering his design, for the theology of this Chapel is all the stronger for it. For Christ’s kingship is one of the servant king, the suffering king, the humble and obedient son of God who saves humanity by sacrifice and pure love. As St. Paul wrote to the Philippians, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.’

This is why the crucifixion window is different from the other windows. They are more a celebration of life, whilst here, we have the struggle with death. Holiday has depicted the darkened sun, the crescent moon, the skull, and the dereliction of Christ.   Look up at this scroll above this window, and you will see Daniel 9: 26 which reads ‘The Messiah shall be cut off and have nothing’.

 

That suffering and self-giving love of Christ is one of the main themes in this Chapel. If you walk through the nave here you can see the unusual bench-ends on the pews. They’re all symbols from the story of the last week in Jesus’s life, when he was tried, tortured and killed.  There is the seamless robe, the crown of thorns, the nails, the thirty pieces of silver, and the ladder to take Jesus down from the cross.

 

So when, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, the risen Jesus takes his disciples up onto a mountain top, with some of them still doubting as to his reality, and he tells them that ‘All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations’, we still have, as the disciples had, the very fresh memory of Christ crucified, of the suffering, compassionate, loving face of Christ. Any authority the disciples are given, is only licensed to them because it is in the gift of the servant king. If they are called to be leaders, then they are servant leaders.

 

A good friend of mine and Emma’s, Robert Atwell was made Bishop of Exeter in July and we went down for the induction ceremony. The cathedral was, of course, packed with people, and the beginning of the service opened with the dramatic scene of the Bishop elect, banging on the outside of the cathedral doors to be let in. When the doors are opened the dean asked who is knocking, to which Robert replies that he has come to be the next Bishop of Exeter. Quite rightly the Dean asked what qualifications Mr. Atwell had for the post, ‘None’, he replied, ‘I am only a sinner seeking the forgiveness of Christ and humbly wishing to share the love of Christ with others’.

 

I found this to be a powerful point of departure for leadership of a Diocese, or indeed any leadership. Christ’s own humility, even though he is God, is our example as well as out salvation. It for these reasons that we celebrate Christ as King – that by his life of service, of love and compassion, and self-giving death, he has given life to all. That is why we sing with George Herbert: ‘Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and king’

 

 

 

 

I hope that tradition and the Chaplain will forgive me if I take as my text this day a verse not from the Bible but from a poem by a member of this college. It reads as follows and I will talk about it later in this sermon:

Yet this inconstancy is such

          As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

          Loved I not Honour more.

This is Worcester’s year of remembrance. All year we have remembered and given thanks for the foundation of our college three hundred years ago, in 1714. We have welcomed back many of our Old Members; we have launched a Campaign to honour our past by securing our future; we have danced all night at our Tercentenary Commemoration Ball; we have remembered our benefactors in a special service in this Chapel. So it is fitting that on this Remembrance Sunday on the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, we should remember with particular attention those members of our society who fell in that war.

          We remember them every year when I read their names, together with those who gave their lives a generation later in the fight to free the world of fascism, and after this short sermon I will read them again, and—as he has done each year during my time as Provost—Tomi will sound the Last Post and the Reveille in their honour. But for the special attention of the First World War centenary we must thank our archivist Emma Goodrum for the exhibition that is currently gracing the Chapel. Thanks, too, to Jessica Goodman, my fellow-editor of our tercentenary book, Worcester: Portrait of an Oxford College, for the chapter on Worcester at War, where you may read more of our college and its people during the two world wars.

          Let us remember the many who fell, but to stand in for the many here are some snapshots of a very few.

          An anniversary is always an occasion for a family reunion and an opportunity for reconciliation of old differences, so it is especially pleasing that we are joined in Chapel and Hall tonight by Wolfgang Ahrens, nephew of our alumnus Richard Hirschfeld, a member of the German Army who was killed fighting the Bolsheviks in 1918. Hirschfeld loved England, loved Oxford and his time at Worcester, so it was a great relief to him that he only ever fought on the Eastern Front, not the Western. He died, heroically, in the Ukraine, trying to retrieve his wounded comrades.

          Another Old Member recently sent me a memoir of the short life of Captain David Hirsch, the only Worcester man to have been awarded the British nation’s highest badge of honour, the Victoria Cross, conferred posthumously. The citation reads

For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty in attack. Having arrived at the first objective, Capt. Hirsch, although already twice wounded, returned over fire-swept slopes to satisfy himself that the defensive flank was being established. Machine gun fire was so intense that it was necessary for him to be continuously up and down the line encouraging his men to dig in and hold the position. He continued to encourage his men by standing on the parapet and steadying them in the face of machine gun fire and counterattack until he was killed. His conduct throughout was a magnificent example of the greatest devotion to duty.

The extraordinary thing about Hirsch is that he was so young that he never even matriculated. In December 1914, he was awarded a Scholarship to read History at Worcester the following Michaelmas. He was seventeen years old. But he joined the Yorkshire Regiment before coming up, so never began his degree. He had been Head Boy of his school, the best bowler in the First XI and the holder of the mile record. One cannot but help think of Henry Newbolt, ‘And England’s far and Honour a name, / But the voice of a schoolboy rallied the ranks / “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”’ We remember him.

          But that Worcester should have lost a Hirsch on one side and a Hirschfeld on the other is a mark of our kinship with the German people, and we should give thanks now and always for the unity of our two nations in the last sixty-five years. That unity perhaps began with the magnanimity of the Marshall Plan. I find it moving and symbolic that whereas one of my predecessors at Provost, J. C. Masterman, spent the First World War as a prisoner in Germany and the second as overseer of the XX Committee that succeeded in turning every Nazi spy in Britain into a double agent and deceiving the enemy into the belief that the D-Day landings would take place at Calais, another of our Provosts, Oliver Franks, was the man who oversaw the implementation of the Marshall Plan. He said that it was an easier job than chairing the Governing Body of an Oxford College.

          But to return to the First War. Let the few stand in for the many. Here is a typical obituary from the Oxford Magazine of 1916, remembering an undergraduate who took up residence as a freshman in the autumn of 1913, ensconced in rooms on staircase 16 in Pump Quad, which we renovated this summer:

Lieutenant Charles Fabian Saunders, Northamptonshire Regiment, youngest son of the late Edward Saunders F.R.S., and grandson of William Wilson Saunders F.R.S., was born on January 20, 1895.  As a boy he was very delicate and was therefore not sent to a Public School.  He matriculated at this College as a Commoner in 1913, and joined the O.T.C.  When War was declared he enlisted in the University and Public Schools Battalion, and a few months later he obtained a commission in the Northamptonshire Regiment.  Before joining he returned to Oxford for a course in the Officers’ Training School, and spent part of it in his own College.  In early life he had been obliged to avoid any great physical exertion; but he was well made, and while at Oxford he was found to be a fast and graceful runner, and during his training distinguished himself at two inter-regimental sports meetings and was spoken of in the newspapers as a “beautiful quarter-miler”.  On September 1, 1915, his regiment was ordered abroad, and on the 25th of that month, when it was taking part in the attack at Loos, he received shrapnel wounds in the head.  After three months’ sick leave he joined the Reserve Battalion for light duty.  On July 13, 1916, he rejoined his old regiment and took part in the attack at Guillemont on Friday, August 18.  He was slightly wounded on getting over the parapet, but remained on duty.  Later in the day he was hit again while holding his position in the Quarries exposed to heavy machine-gun fire from both flanks.  He was the only officer of his company left, and was encouraging his men, as a brother officer writes, “both by his word and example”.  He went back to have his wound dressed, but collapsed while returning after this to the remnant of his men.  Another officer wrote that he was “just about the straightest and best man God ever made”, and another “he was a capital fellow, always so awfully cheery; I don’t think I ever saw him lose his temper with anyone”.

          He was rather shy at the beginning of his time at Oxford, feeling the disadvantage of not having shared like others in the life and activities of a big school; but he was much liked, and, as he was gaining strength and developing his powers, gave promise of a successful career here and in after life.

We remember him.

          And here is Willie Elmhirst—we thank his great-nephew Colonel Marcus Elmhirst for reading the Second Lesson tonight—writing to his mother just a week before his death at Serre in 1916:

Out here one becomes so used to the idea of death, and that in most unpleasant forms, that it comes to seem a very small thing indeed. I have seen some far from pleasant sights during the last few days, but it is astonishing how little it affects one.

In the memoir of Elmhirst that accompanies the diary of his Freshman year at Worcester, published half a century later with an introduction by Masterman, his brother writes that ‘the intimate and liberal freedoms of Worcester were, for him, without doubt a Paradise Regained.’ We remember him.

          The eternal sorrow of the war is the loss of friends who shared that paradise. Among those to whom Elmhirst was closest were Golightly, Rhodes Scholar, Senior Colonial student, killed in action July 1916, and Curran, Commoner, Military Cross and Croix de Guerre, killed in action, October 1916. We remember them as we remember the words of Jesus in the Gospel of St John that we heard in the second lesson: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’

          Elmhirst’s very British understatement—the carnage of the Western Front merely described as ‘some far from pleasant sights’—and the youthful gallantry of such boys as Hirsch and Saunders were shaped by the public school code of honour that drew on classical ideals: the Dulce et decorum set pro patria mori of the Roman poet Horace. The idea of honour has a long history. Back in the seventeenth century, when our nation descended into civil war, people had to make choices: to retreat from the world of action and political engagement, or to do the honourable thing and engage. And, if they engaged, to do so on the part of the cause they thought was right. Richard Lovelace of Gloucester Hall—Worcester in its older incarnation—made the choice and signed up to fight on the royalist side. His celebrated poem ‘To Lucasta going to the Wars’ contrasts the bliss of love with the call of honour. But what he says to his beloved in the verse that I cited at the beginning of this sermon is that his ‘inconstancy’ to her in putting his military calling above his love for her should really make her love him more not less. He is giving up the easy life of lying in his lover’s arms for the tough choice of doing what he believes to be the right thing. Whether or not we believe that he fought on the politically correct side, we should honour the idea that it is worth making personal sacrifices in order to make your college, your community, your country, your world a better place. Even today we may say to our own loved ones, with our alumnus Lovelace, ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, / Loved I not Honour more.’

          The First World War shattered for ever the old classical and public school code of honour. Most famously:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! …

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

 

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen.

          But even as we argue causes and question the meaning of nation, of patria, in a globalised world, we should continue to honour those who have the courage to say goodbye to their loved ones and answer the call to risk laying down their own lives in defence of the right of us all to dissent from any single faith or ideology, to risk laying down their lives in the fight against tyranny, be it that of Hitler or of Islamic State.

          The least that we can do is to honour their memory and to shed a tear for the way in which the brevity of their lives gives special poignancy to their time at Worcester. Let me end by quoting another poem by a Worcester man. In the penultimate line you might take the liberty of substituting the name of his college for that of his county.

          In 1914 Nowell Oxland was Captain of the College rugby team and Secretary of the Lovelace Club. In 1915, he wrote this poem on a ship bound for Gallipoli, where he fell at Suvla Bay:

We shall pass in summer weather,

We shall come at eventide,

When the fells stand up together

And all quiet things abide;

Mixed with cloud and wind and river,

Sun-distilled in dew and rain,

One with Cumberland for ever

We shall not go forth again.

Isaiah 65: 17-end; Hebrews 11: 32-12.2

All Saints Day 2014    Worcester College Oxford

 

Alan Bennett’s short story ‘The Laying on of hands’ tells of a memorial service in a central London church built by Inigo Jones. The great, the good and the heartbroken gather for Clive’s memorial. This memorial service like so many began with a well-known actress reading immaculately a piece about death not really being the end but just like popping next door followed by a reading from 1 Corinthians 12 in the rolling cadences of the Authorised Version, swiftly followed by a saxophone rendition of the Dusty Springfield standard, ‘You don’t have to say you love me’. It had been billed as a celebration, the marrying of the valedictory and the festive. Bennet writes ‘ To call it a celebration also allowed the congregation to dress up not down, so that though the millinery might be more muted, one could have been forgiven for thinking this was a wedding not a wake. But some did cry. Bennet comments ‘funeral tears seldom flow for anyone other than the person crying them. They cried for Clive, it is true, but they cried for themselves without Clive. His death meant that he had left them with nothing to remember him by’.

 

Our society increasingly can’t handle death. My Irish cultural heritage still keeps death within the domestic context with open coffins at home and children becoming familiar with dead bodies from a young age. Whilst many adults – even within this congregation – may not have been so up close with death – its colour, its smell, its cold feel. Yet death has not gone away and further attempts to legislate for its control are unlikely to disappear from public discourse but they are just as unlikely to deliver what many hope for – a way to manage death. We seek out new rituals to try to make sense of death in the modern era. Funerals now straddle the line between celebration and grief – the coffins of celebrities are applauded!

 

I find myself responsible for the re-interment of King Richard III. He is not a canonised Saint but an anointed child of God. This will take place in Leicester Cathedral next March with the principal service being broadcast live on television. I find myself looking back to the ritual of the 15^th century and recognising that it will not do both in terms of the particularities of this story and in the need to address our contemporary reality of death and the hope of resurrection. Note for example that unlike a funeral this is not exactly a ‘goodbye’ but more of a ‘hello’. What symbols or actions or ways of memorialising might cut through our cynical, fearful or technological reliant carapace to help us address our metaphysical wonderings?

 

We enter the month of November to celebrate All Saints Day and All Souls Day. This is the month of reckoning with the thought that we are indeed dust. The Hebrew word Adam comes from the word for mud or soil. We are people of the humus yet in faith we can also shine with the divine light which is eternal and which means that not even the sun or any scorching heat can strike. Shakespeare put it like this – ‘And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then’. This is the real power of All Sainstide – the proclamation of the death of death.

 

The poet Elizabeth Jennings puts it like this:

 

We are dust from our birth

But in that dust is wrought

A place for visions, a hope

That reaches beyond the stars,

Conjures and pauses the seas.                                    Elizabeth Jennings, from Dust

 

 

The early Christians worked out that they had to change their practice of dealing with the dead if they were to demonstrate what they believed and the practice itself also helped to shape their belief. I recently visited Rome and we went on a tour underneath the basilica of St Peter. There is an extraordinary underworld preserved because Emperor Constantine who colonised the site simply filled the existing architecture with rubble which has now been removed. The early Christians colonised the necropolis, the city of the dead which sat outside the many city of Rome. This was a place shrouded by mystery and far away from everyday life like shopping or eating or entertainment.

 

The early Christians did this to show a way of embracing death and making it a part of life. They wanted to emphasise the continuing role and place of their departed friends in their midst. The graves of the martyrs and those who have particularly exemplified the faith took on special significance. So churches got built on the sites of these graves and grave yards were built surrounding them. Leicester Cathedral was a medieval parish church with graves right up to the boundary of the building. We’ve found maps showing them to be buried 22 deep in the churchyard. And in the current building works inside the cathedral we’ve gone down five levels of burial in the chancel. We are literally surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. The theological belief reshaped the physical environment of the city.

 

Contrast that with the marking of physical space as we have dealt with mental illness up until fairly recently. You could work out the established ancient edge of a city by the sight of a psychiatric hospital or lunatic asylum. Mental illness regarded as alien is built on the edge of community.

 

Bringing in a new set of human remains into the middle of a modern multi-cultural city puts us back in touch with this radical Christian practice. King Richard’s tomb thus in addition to being marked with his biographical detail will not just so much celebrate him and his deeds but rather point also to the hope of resurrection. So he will have a human sized stone made of elegant fossil stone – that in itself speaking of transformation. It will rise slightly towards the east in hope of resurrection. And like the stone of Easter morning, cracked by the sacrificial love of the cross, so the tomb will be marked by a cross so that light flows in and through the stone.

 

John Inge, Bishop of Worcester describes place as ‘the seat of relations and of meeting and activity between God and the world’ (A Christian Theology of Place, Ashgate). He makes the distinction between space and place. Space being purely physical and neutral whereas place is relational and contains memories and embodies values. So Christians marked space to create place by using the iconography of the Saints, those who carry for us the imagery of the eternal life of heaven to differentiate from the purely ordinary and temporal. By doing this they wove the eternal in and around the temporal. We might do well to do likewise to try and reverse our inability to address death and live the hope spoken of in scripture that ….

 

‘We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, so that we lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,^* and run with perseverance the race that is set before us,‘ Hebrews 12:1

 

 

© The Very Revd David Monteith, Dean of Leicester, 2^nd November 2014

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

 

Some words from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. In Little Gidding he writes,

 

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

 

For many people the traditional time of new beginnings is when we mark the turning of another calendar year in January. Reflecting on all that has taken place in the last twelve months, it is then that we turn our faces like a confident Janus away from the dying days of December and take up the promises and challenges of the New Year. But for us who are still so governed by the structures and traditions of educational establishments, be it college or school, it is this time of year, the autumn or Michaelmas, that marks a beginning, a new start. I was struck, last weekend, when those who attended the Gaudy night dinner on Saturday – old members who seemed to have wealth, power and influence in their own worlds – left on the Sunday morning, the college scouts arrived, the beds were changed, rooms cleaned, and the college was made ready for a new generation of students to arrive. New life, new blood. It is one of my favourite times of year, because this college thrives on the new. Without it, we decay.

As Eliot’s words so wonderfully reflect, intermixed with this sense of a new chapter in the book of life is also the poignant sense of loss and something coming to an end. You don’t have to be embarking on a new course at university to experience it, for the world all around us is dying away as the golden days of summer slowly darken into the barren landscape of winter. All of us live with the constant mingling of beginnings and endings, of the new emerging from the old and an ending that is a dying back to reveal the new. I am sure that none of us that live on this seashore of undulating change underestimate how it can feel at various times. Thrown about in the flotsum and jetsum of life, new beginnings can at one moment bring the elation of change and possibility mixed with the fear and deep insecurity of letting go whilst at another the depths of sadness at an ending can drown out any sense of new life. We all in our different ways and at different times both swim and sink with the transience of our existence.

 

Our readings today do not so much give us a way out, as a rock on which to cling that will see us through both the times of new beginnings and endings, and so enable us to embrace them with that sense of trust and acceptance that Eliot manages to convey in his poem. For the Israelites, this rock comes in the form of advice, encouraging God’s people to remember and obey God’s way of living as set out on those two solid stone tablets on which are etched the Ten Commandments. In these literal stones God gives his people the words and tools of guidance on which they can construct their lives. They are not simply a list of rules which a dictator God gives to his chosen servants to ensure they uphold their covenant with him and become a successful, law-abiding nation, but, they are given as the ten best ways by which to live. If we are tempted to think of God’s commandments as out-dated forms of morality, ask any child about the impact of a broken marriage or wanting what others have, and we soon see that they have as much relevance today as it did thousands of years ago. The writer of the Proverbs, admonishes us to trust and honour God by our obedience

‘My child, do not forget my teaching,
   but let your heart keep my commandments;
for length of days and years of life
   and abundant welfare they will give you.

 

The key items the writer wishes to stress are loyalty and faithfulness: ‘bind them round your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.’ Again the stone metaphor emphasises the permanent nature of these decrees, and further paraphrases of the ten commandments follow: ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
Honour the Lord with your substance and with the first fruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty.’

But these are not idle commands to be blindly obeyed to no purpose except obedience itself. To follow God’s will is to seek a path of true wisdom that brings true wealth.

 

‘Happy are those who find wisdom,
   and those who get understanding,
   for her income is better than silver,
   and her revenue better than gold.
   She is more precious than jewels,
   and nothing you desire can compare with her.
   Long life is in her right hand;
   in her left hand are riches and honour.
   Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
   and all her paths are peace.
   She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;
   those who hold her fast are called happy.

 

Again I am reminded of those successful old members who returned for their Gaudy last week. When they arrived as students over twenty years ago, did they come to this university simply to obtain the means by which to gain a good job, or great wealth? My conversations with those I met convinced me otherwise. For their stories and their friendships spoke of a deeper wisdom, perhaps not fully realised in their lives, but acknowledged and aspired to. In this place we gather to ponder that deeper wisdom and seek to find it.

 

The story of Jesus and the rich man is well known and salutary. He wants eternal life, and so Jesus points him towards the Ten Commandments, no doubt knowing full well that the rich man had kept them since his youth and yet wanted a deeper reassurance. He is met with the challenge of giving up everything and it is a hard thing for him to do. The mystery is who will inherit eternal life is not solved by this meeting. Will it be some? Will it be all? We do not know, only the enigmatic ‘Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’ It is not for us to know or conjecture. Our task is to seek the wisdom of God, day by day, as we follow his ways and trust in him.

 

So as we reflect on this time of change all around us, of new beginnings and endings, let us once more seek to build our lives on the rock of Christ (and not to mistake him for the shifting sands of our own illusions and pride). I leave you with the words of T.S. Eliot once again:

With the drawing of his Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. Amen.