Worcester College 5.6.16

Mark 4.1-20

 

Jesus’ parable of the sower is among the most familiar stories in the New Testament. A sower goes out to sow, and doesn’t seem terribly bothered about how he does it. The seed falls all over the place – some along the path, which seems particularly careless, some on rocky ground, some among thorns, and some in good soil. At the time of his throwing out the seed, the sower is making no attempt to pay attention to the spot at which every single seed falls. He is scattering, putting it out there, laying the groundwork for lots of possibilities. The results of his work will not be visible for quite some time. But, whilst it is the case that only one in four of the situations results in the bearing of fruit, the quantities of fruit which come about – thirty, sixty, a hundredhold – leave the sower in no doubt of the success of his task.

 

Now unfortunately for you who are listening, this gospel passage is one which always reminds me of my enthusiasm for the arcane delights of German New Testament scholarship. And since I stand before you as one employed by this college to teach the obscurities of theology to our splendid undergraduates, the temptation to indulge that enthusiasm is strong. It is a temptation which reminds me of my favourite PG Wodehouse story, The Great Sermon Handicap, in which a group of young men are running a book on the length of various pulpit orations. Some of them are so determined to keep a particular preacher’s efforts as extended as possible that they urge him absolutely not to omit his “rather exhaustive excursus on the family life of the early Assyrians.”

 

My equivalent would be the riveting details of first century Jewish agriculture. The question is this: which comes first, sowing or ploughing? It seems odd to ask. Surely one ploughs a field first before planting it. Well, that’s the case now and in England, but there’s some evidence that in the time and the place of Jesus’ life and ministry, the opposite was the case. And this, for some New Testament scholars, provides the key to the parable of the sower. The extraordinary abandon with which the sower casts his seed is explained by the process which will follow, whereby that seed will be ploughed into the land which is churned up to make it, or at least some of it, fertile. The seeds are thrown all over the place, but it is the subsequent violence of the ploughing which enables some of it to bear fruit. The parallels with the gospel message would then seem clear: the word is spread broadly, but the world in which it is spread is approaching the crisis of God’s judgement, a crisis which in Mark’s gospel is played out through the passion and death of Jesus Christ. At the end of the gospel we are left with an empty tomb but an open ended climax: the women who come in search of Jesus’ body are greeted with the news of the resurrection but they turn and run away in fear. The fruit of the gospel has yet to be harvested.

 

Far be it from me as a theology lecturer to downplay the importance of scholarship, but that reading might be said to qualify for as part of what Basil Fawlty describes as his wife’s specialist subject: the bleeding obvious. And it’s not clear that the details of the farming process make very much difference. The text is unequivocal that the sowing is done in a rather free for all manner, and that much of the seed is lost. Some, however, springs up in quite extraordinary abundance. Sevenfold was reckoned a good yield, but we have thirty and sixty and a hundred fold. It’s the growth which matters. The parables of Jesus are littered with this basic image of something small and unseen, something secret and unknown, manifesting itself as something new and striking, even entirely unexpected. The contrast between the before and the after is marked and remarkable, but the process itself is likely to be unnoticed.

 

As we come to the end of an academic year, and for some the end of an Oxford career, we will likely find ourselves reflecting upon all sorts of examples of growth and change, of events and ideas and experiences which are past, but which bear fruit in our lives and will continue so to do. The image of faith which the parables present is very far from the arid epistemological calculus of the new atheism, whereby religious faith is held to consist in the act of assenting to a series of propositions, rather as one might check off one’s list of necessities in Tescos or, perhaps more likely, try to remember what was on the list which we left on the desk in our room back in college. Christian faith is not so much something which is thought as something which is done, a way of living within, and looking around, the reality we call the world, a way which allows us to focus the journey of our lives not simply on ourselves but on something infinitely beyond ourselves, something which will – paradoxically – point us back to where we are and direct our attention to the needs of the other whom we cannot but encounter if we are engaged with the business of being human.

 

The seeds of such faith are unlikely to be noticed when sown. The effects of such faith are unlikely to be perceived as they begin to grow. Among the hardest lessons we have to learn is the truth that our determination for control, our desire to be in charge of everything about ourselves, is a false hope for something impossible. Having the courage to let go, to accept the gift of the other, the infinite possibility of relationship, the opportunity to give as well as receive, is a lesson in wisdom which Christian faith will teach as it searches out the truth of what it is to be a disciple, a word which means simply one who learns. The disciples are those who have the privilege of knowing the mystery, or the secret of the kingdom of God. The secret that manifests itself not in the instant of beginnings but in the gradual manifestation, the coming to fruition, which is the end of the journey of faith.

 

Growing in that faith, being taught the love of God, is something of which we will not be aware in the moment. But there will be glimpses to encourage our desire, there will be epiphanies, flashes of the extraordinary which engage us on the journey, signs of hope, acts of healing, moments of kindness, words of love. Above all, however, it will be the ordinary, the mundane, the unnoticed, in which we will do our growing. The things on which we look back, the patterns we see forming as we piece our lives together, are the gifts which open our eyes to the ever widening horizon towards which we are directed. The seeds of love are scattered far and wide, but they bear fruit thirty, sixty and a hundred fold.

Worcester College Oxford

29/5/16

Genesis 4. 1-16

Mark 3. 7-19

Doing the right thing

 

The 400th anniversary this year

of the death of William Shakespeare

has meant that it’s been a pretty busy time

in Stratford-upon-Avon the last few months.

 

We’ve found ourselves to be the focus of media attention

from around the globe,

have hosted royalty and stars of stage and screen,

all wanting to pay tribute to

Stratford’s most famous son.

 

There’s no evidence of

the actual dates of Shakespeare’s birth or death,

but what we do know,

are the dates of his baptism and his burial-

because they’re both recorded

in the Parish Register of Holy Trinity Church.

His baptism took place in the church on

26th April 1564

and his Burial

25th April 1616

 

It may seem an odd coincidence

that these dates are so close to each other.

-in fact the assumption has been made

that he was born and died on the same day,

23rd April.

 

But a possible explanation is provided by

an entry in the dairy of one of my predecessors,

the Vicar of Holy Trinity at the time,

 

suggesting that Shakespeare’s death

at the age of 54

was caused by a fever

brought about by drinking too much

whilst out celebrating his birthday with his friends.

Let this be a warning to us all!

 

400 years later, the popularity of Shakespeare’s work

continues to grow.

Over 250,000 people come every year

to visit his grave in Holy Trinity Church

and his plays continue to find

new audiences across the world.

 

One reason for this is surely

that Shakespeare’s drama

engages with the most fundamental

of human emotions and experiences:

love, hate, revenge, jealously,

mistakes, regret,

humour, joy, sorrow, victory, defeat.

Whether it’s a comedy, tragedy or history,

all of human life seems to be there, laid bare.

 

Our first lesson this evening,

from the book of Genesis,

contains some pretty raw human emotion

that wouldn’t be out of place

in a Shakespearean tragedy.

 

Between two brothers,

Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve,

there is at first jealousy,

then anger,

deception, murder

and finally a curse.

 

It’s not clear at first why,

but Cain gets things disastrously wrong.

Whilst the offering of his younger brother

is accepted by God,

Cain’s “fruit of the ground” is not received.

 

Cain’s failure to do the right thing

leads to his life unravelling:

he becomes homeless, without means

and estranged from his family.

 

The story of our own lives

might not be quite so dramatic,

but doing the right thing

-or rather a desire to avoid making a mess of things-

must surely be important to most of us.

 

But how can we know

what we are to do with our lives,

what decisions to take,

especially then they will affect our future?

What does it look like

for us to be doing the right thing in our lives?

 

 

 

 

A palliative care nurse

who counsels the dying in their last days

recently recorded the most common regrets

people have expressed at the end of their lives.

 

She observed the phenomenal clarity of vision

that people gain in these moments,

and put her observations into a book called

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

 

One of the regrets was: I wish that I had let myself be happier.

 

Apparently, fear of change causes

people to pretend to others,

and to themselves, that they’re content,

when deep within,

they long to laugh properly

and have silliness in their life again.

 

But the most common regret she records is this:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life

true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

 

How, then might we achieve some clarity

about how we should live our lives,

before it’s too late to do anything about it?

 

One answer lies in our second lesson.

Jesus has an important decision to make

which will profoundly affect the future.

 

He needs to get this right,

because he’s to choose his closest companions,

those who will continue his mission after he’s gone.

But before he calls his disciples

he goes up a mountain.

Mountains are important in the Bible,

they have a strong symbolic value.

Think of Moses on mount Sinai

and the giving of the ten commandments,

The sermon on the mount.

The Transfiguration, and so the list goes on.

In cultures where God was believed to dwell in the heavens, that it is the sky,

going up a mountain signifies being closer to God;

seeing things as God sees them,

finding a more expansive perspective

than our usual human experience allows.

 

One of the good things about living in Stratford

is that the Cotswold hills are not far away.

I love to sand on the western edge of the hills

looking out across the expanse

of the plain of the River Severn

towards the distant Malvern hills the other side.

 

The small details of our lives

especially the things that weigh us down,

can seem less of a burden when we look out

from a great height.

 

With our perspective opened up

we can perhaps more readily perceive

what is the right thing to do.

 

Many people encounter

as sense of being nearer to God

in these high places,

where the veil between heaven and earth seems thin.

 

In these moments,

we might recall the words of tonight’s psalm:

“mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee”.

 

I also find it helpful

to recall some words of another psalm:

“Be still, and know that I am God”

 

When we need to make a decision

about the right thing to do,

 

when we seek to know more clearly

who we are meant to be,

then we need to find a mountain moment.

 

And if you don’t happen to have a mountain

close at hand

then try using those words

to focus your mind and heart on God.

Be still, and know that I am God

 

You can use this simple phrase as a spiritual exercise

which helps us to discover the truth

about God and about ourselves,

by gradually shortening the phrase.

 

Be still, and know that I am God

Be still, and know that I am

Be still, and know

Be still

Be.

 

 

Our fundamental calling,

is simply to be.

To be, not in isolation,

but to be

in perfect relationship with God and with others.

 

We see this in the calling of the disciples

in our second lesson.

It’s another three chapters before Jesus actually sends the apostles out to do anything.

Until then they remain with him,

discovering what it means to be fully alive

and in relationship with God.

 

So it turns out that doing the right thing

begins with being not doing.

 

Even in those times when we’re hard pressed

with tasks to be done,

-perhaps exams to sit

or a looming deadline,

we still need moments when we can just be,

time to recall that

who we are

and what we must do

begin with God.

 

The classic film Chariots of Fire

with that famous scene of the athletes

running along a beach

to the music of Vangelis,

tells the story of the Scottish athlete Eric Liddel,

who competed in the 1924 olympic games.

 

 

Liddel, devout Scottish Presbyterian

declares

“if I win I win for God”.

 

Later on he says:

“God made me for a purpose.

When I run I feel his pleasure”

 

Ultimately our fulfilment is to be found when

doing our own thing

is the same as doing Gods thing,

when God’s pleasure becomes our pleasure.

 

When Cain offered his work to God, it was rejected. Perhaps he had failed to understand

what God wanted of him.

The land on which his produce grew

had previously been cursed by God,

following the trespass of his parents

in the garden of Eden.

Perhaps Cain might have sensed

that his offering was not right

if he had given himself some space

to be still and focus on God.

 

When we’re faced with decisions

about who we are to be and what we are to do,

there is no better place to start

than to recognise

the presence of the God who loves us as we are.

Be still, and know that I am God

 

By developing habits of prayer,

creating those mountain moments

which can be anywhere, any time,

we can discover

who God created us to be,

and what God created us for.

 

We find our true fulfilment

when being true to myself

becomes the same thing

as being true to God’s purposes for me.

 

I don’t pretend for a moment

that this is easy or straightforward.

 

When I was an undergraduate

I felt sure I was meant to be an engineer.

Eventually I realised that this was not the path

I was meant to take,

but it took me a while to work it out!

 

We nudge forward trying to make sense of

the unpredictable drama that is our lives.

The tragedies, joys and sorrows we experience

can often feel more like stumbling in the mist

rather than enjoying the view

from the top of the mountain.

The Christian spiritual writer Christina Rees,

reflecting on the story of her own faith, puts it like this:

 

“There has been no sense of arrival,

just the sense of knowing myself

to be on the right path.

I have no idea where the path will continue to lead,

only the confidence in the One who is leading.”

 

Whether or not our lives reflect

the drama of a Shakespearian play,

if we wish to have the courage

to live a life true to who we are meant to be,

rather than the life others expect of us,

then our story must begin and end with God’s story,

with the one who created us,

his Son who redeems us

and the Spirit who sustains us:

 

Be still, and know that I am God.

___________________________________________

 

 

Worcester College Chapel, Oxford 22nd May 2016

Trinity Sunday Ex. 3.1-15; Jn. 3.1-17

LIVING THE TRINITY

INTRODUCTION

Thank you for inviting me. Good to be back in Oxford and to be with you in Worcester Chapel.

Playing golf yesterday with one of the leaders of the Reformed Jews who asked about my sermon for today – what’s the Trinity? I explained it is why we are not Jewish!

A mixture of plurality and unity is at the heart of our faith in God as Trinity – three persons in one God.

Problem is that the Trinity seems very complicated – impression of threeness and oneness – but not much else. Many Christians are like that. Even the BCP talks in the old Athanasian Creed of the ‘father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible and the Holy Ghost – yet not three incomprehensibles’. Of course, you know that ‘incomprehensible’ = limitless, infinite rather than not able to be understood – yet many people do find the Trinity incomprehensible – in terms of sects, Jehovah’s Witness & Mormons. Also, it is what distinguishes us from the other great monotheistic religions of the Book, Judaism and Islam. Whatever the different Christian traditions, we share the distinctive faith in God the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – as seen in our readings and hymns.

Even some Christians, if we are honest, find the Trinity hard to understand. But what does it actually all mean, for us here in Chapel? You see, I do not want to talk about the theology of the Trinity, (you may be relieved to hear) but about the experience of God as Trinity in our worship and Christian life. The early church did not come up with the idea of the Trinity as a doctrine with which to befuddle future generations. They discovered in their Christian experience God as Father, known in Jesus of Nazareth and still present with them through his Spirit. The Trinity is to be experienced and worshipped before we come to doctrinal or theological debate. 2

A helpful Grove Spirituality booklet – Peter Adam, Living the Trinity, has greatly influenced my thinking over the years. He looks at the different Christian traditions and talks of three kinds of churches – Father, Son Holy Spirit. He suggest that many churches concentrate on one person of the Trinity in their life and experience which affects worship, beliefs and behaviour.

1 CHURCH OF THE FATHER

Amazing and wonderful scope of his vision of God the Father – everything starts with the Father and returns to him.

Stress God as Father, pater, of all patria, creator of Universe, care for the world. Stress on Transcendence.

God’s revelation to Moses in burning bush – name ‘I am’ – existence.

Hymns like Immortal, invisible, O Worship the king.

Concern for all life – catholic in the best and broadest sense – according to the whole – kath’ holos – holistic approach to all people of good will, annual services for different local groups, brotherhood of all human beings. No boundaries, inclusive.

The Eucharist will be central – seen as thanksgiving and offering of the whole of life to God – glorified Harvest Festival every week!.

Does this ring any bells? My curacy at Bromley – civic church. True also inevitably of a University Chapel – King’s or here in Worcester – involved in many areas of University life.

Positive aspects – but there is another side of the coin; strong on the Father, less allowance for the Son and Spirit. Strong on creation, weak on human sin. Strong on grace and love, but less on salvation through the death of God the Son, or the disturbing energy of God the Holy Spirit.

“It will be embarrassed by a sermon on the sinfulness of man and annoyed at a gospel which lets prostitutes into the Kingdom before respectable people . . . ‘decently and in order’ is the absolute test of worship, and any interruption of Matins by the Spirit would produce a horrified silence, followed by lengthy disapproval over Sunday lunch” (Peter Adam, p. 8)

2 CHURCH OF THE SON

Several versions depending on which aspect of Jesus – Christ the radical, the sufferer. 3

Fervent commitment to person of Jesus of Nazareth, prayers and hymns addressed to him

How sweet the name of Jesus in a believer’s ear.

O Jesus, I have promised

Stress on need for personal response to Christ’s death on the cross, salvation – believer.

John 3.3 – ‘born again’; 3.16-17 ‘God so loved the world’

Eucharist becomes the Lord’s Supper – stress on the saving and atoning death of Jesus.

Clear sense of those who are Christians – and those who are not boundaries, not vague and wishy washy like the inclusive Church of the Father.

Leads to a real commitment to evangelism and mission at the risk of suffering or persecution.

If Father is best seen in catholic, then the Son in the evangelical tradition.

Weaknesses:

Strong sense of identity can lead to isolation, even holy huddle

Mission restricted just to preaching, no social action and serving the whole community as in church of Father.

The warm response and devotion to Jesus and his salvation may lead to not getting hands dirty in real world.

If Father is true of University chapels, many of the student churches are churches of the Son – centrality of Jesus.

3 CHURCH OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Holy Spirit traditionally the neglected person the Trinity – partly because of the stress in NT of the HS bringing us to the Son and the Father.

Traditionally seen in Pentecostal churches – but recent renewal movements across all the mainline denominations means that you can find churches of the Spirit everywhere now.

Dynamic and lively worship – stress on Immanence.

Back to John 3: vv 6-8 ‘born of Spirit, wind blows where it chooses’

Lots of different people inspired to participate – share gifts of God

powerful and miraculous signs of God;s presence.

Eucharist is really only a warm up for the real free worship to follow, while communion is probably discovered in the fellowship over coffee afterwards

Weakness – can fall into sensationalism, a neglect of the quiet, missing presence of God in ordinary things of life, rather than the spectacular. 4

No need to go to doctor, just pray about it; believe six impossible things before breakfast.

To a certain extent this is true of our church in London now – seeking everything new – any songs over a year old are out, don’t bother to plan the worship, just let it happen. Can be good and lively, can be an excuse for terrible disorganization! Yet the converse it true – we can avoid the dangers by planning everything – and not being open to God the comforter and disturber, giver of life, whose tongues of flame and rushing wind upset our peace and quiet!

CONCLUSION – TRINITY IN UNITY

I wonder if these pen portraits have rung any bells. Think for a moment about your regular worship or church preference. How do you view the Eucharist or Communion. To whom are your usual hymns addressed? How do you respond to the community around – in service or evangelism or acts of power? Do you have a strong sense of boundaries as to who is a member or is it all rather fuzzy at the edges? What about your own personal spiritual life? do you respond to the steady moral demands of our Father in heaven, or in loving devotion to following Jesus, or go with the flow in unpredictable abandonment to the winds of the Spirit? Think about your favourite hymns or songs, or your prayers – and they will tell you a lot. I suspect that among us as individuals there will be all three traditions. So what are we to do?

One response is to look at our traditions. I have suggested that the church of the Father emerges from a catholic tradition, while that of the Son from evangelical and the Spirit from a Pentecostal or Charismatic. This does not necessarily mean the denominations – my three examples are all Anglican churches! This breadth of traditions is one of the gifts of the diverse life of God the Holy Trinity to the church – and it would be wrong to suggest that we solve the problem of this diversity by obliterating our differences and ways of worshipping into a dull grey lowest common denominator. That has been one of the problems affecting the ecumenical movement since its inception.

Another possible response is to use my simple caricatures to pigeonhole others – or yourself. After I had said some of the above in a previous sermon once, one rather grand lady confided to me on the way out of church that she was a ‘father Christian’. She was obviously very happy to put this label on herself and it explained to her why she could not stand all these fervent Son-Christians or happy clappy Spirit-Christians. 5

But neither the lowest common denominator, nor the pigeonholing approach will do. This is missing out on the richness and diverse fullness of the Trinity. Not a shallow agreement, nor a sticking on one edge enjoying our one bit – but entering into the whole lot. God the Holy Trinity is a diversity of persons in a unity of divine love – the everlasting dance of love which goes on between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – perichoresis – the whirling dance of love within the very heart of God – and he, not they, longs for us to be caught up into the dance.

In the end of the day we cannot be Father Christians, or churches of the Son, or Spirit congregations, but only Trinitarian Christians within the one church visible and invisible, militant here on earth and triumphant there in heaven.

That is why it is important that we come together in worship and in prayer to enrich each other and to learn from each other’s experience – and this is probably more fruitful as a way of recognizing the presence of the Trinitarian God in our unity than ecumenical doctrine commissions, important though they are. We all need to be a church of the Holy Trinity, trusting in our Father who made us and all the world, responding to Jesus Christ who died to save us and wants us to follow him rejoicing the power of the Holy Spirit so that all creation might transformed in the dance of love in the very heart of God.

And now,

To God the Father, who loved us and made us

accepted in the Beloved;

To God the Son, who loved us and loosed us

from our sins by his own blood;

TO God the Holy Spirit, who sheds the love of

God abroad in our hearts;

To the one true God be all love and all glory

in the church and the world

for all time and eternity, Amen.

Worcester College Oxford

8^th May 2016

Sunday after the Ascension

The Dean of Westminster

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaiah 52 and Mark 1

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

We have come so far from bread. 

Rarely do we hear the clatter of the mill wheel; 

see the flour in every cranny, 

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

the rats, the race, the pool, 

baking day, and the old loaves: 

cob, cottage, plaited, brick. 

 

We have come so far from bread. 

Once the crock said ‘BREAD’ 

and the bread was what was there, 

and the family’s arm went deeper down each day 

to find it, and the crust was favoured. 

 

We have come so far from bread. 

Terrifying is the breach between wheat and table, 

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

Loaves come now in regiments, so that loaf 

is not the word. Hlaf 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

if the bread is holy, 

all that has to do with bread is holy: 

board, knife, cupboard, 

so that the gap between all things is closed 

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

 

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

[iii] ibid. p. 37

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

[v] Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

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

[vii] Scott, op. cit.

A Sermon for Worcester College, Oxford

Sunday 14^th February 2016

 

Thy will be done

 

In nomine . . .

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

1. S. Lewis wrote that

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

. . . starkness after all has been withdrawn

Of surplus and superfluous,

Leaving no hiding-place . . .[18]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

It is our final destination.

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

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

[3] Matthew 18.12-14

[4] Mark 3.35

[5] John 5.30

[6] Matthew 7.21

[7] John 4.34

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

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

[10] Jonah 1.3

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

[12] Matthew 12.38-41

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

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

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

[15] Luke 22.44

[16] Luke 22.42

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

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

Sermon. Sunday 7^th February 2016, Worcester College

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

I suppose I must be one of the last people still alive who was taught how to ride a penny-farthing bicycle by a veteran of the Boer War. It was a bruising experience because he taught me how to get on but not how to get off. He was a veteran of Mafeking, and he once he showed me a scar on his arm and said, “I look at that each night and I remember my friends who died.”

 

And is that what Remembrance Sunday is about — the remembering of friends who might otherwise be forgotten? Edith Sitwell’s brother told her how, when he was an officer in France in the First World War, he had to censor letters, and how therefore he opened one which simply said, “Do not forget me, do not forget me, do not forget me.”

 

And we do not forget.  There are still some for whom Remembrance Sunday is a matter of personal memory, a “staring through smoky time,” as Ronald Blythe once put it, “at some face which only I can recognise and remember. “A friend of mine, a year ahead of me in the sixth form at school, was killed in Korea, and I can see him still.

 

We do not forget.  But for many the remembering will not be personal in that way.  It will be an act of participation, of belonging to a particular society with its own history, its own distinct character which generations before us have brought into being and have when necessary defended.

 

And that is why we have occasions of deliberate commemoration — most obviously of those who died in two World Wars, but also of those who died in conflicts much more distant in space and time than that. Two weeks ago we  commemorated the battle of Agincourt, and earlier this year we had “a national service of commemoration” on the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo — and none of us are likely to have personal memories of those battles — though oddly I do have an indirect connection even with Waterloo.

 

In 1940, when it seemed inevitable that the Germans would attempt an invasion, I was taken to see my great-grandmother who was then 90 years old.  She was very much of the Victorian age, and after the death of her husband she had draped herself and her room entirely in black. I was told to go and kiss my great-grandmother, but I was not too sure what a great-grandmother was.  Apparently I walked up to an aspidistra draped in black and gave it a hug. When we’d got that sorted out, she told me how, as a girl, she had been taught how to ride a horse by her uncle, my great-uncle, who had been at the battle of Waterloo as a young farrier.  When all his horses had been killed, he had been used to carry messages — including maybe to Lord Uffington; and if we remember nothing much about Waterloo, we are likely to remember Lord Uffington’s leg.  Indeed, when I was in the Army and I was stabbed in the leg by a bayonet, I turned to the man beside me and said, “By God, sir…”, and he immediately replied, “You’ ve lost your right leg.”

 

But Remembrance Sunday is about much more than personal memories.  It is a part of what has been called by sociologists, “the covenant of mutual loyalty between the living and the dead”. That covenant affects and gives a particular character to every kind of society, whether it’s large, as in the case of a nation, or small, as in the case of a College.  That is why the national service in St Paul’s commemorating Waterloo began with these words:

 

“We are gathered here to reflect on past conflict, to acknowledge human struggle and sacrifice known and unknown, to pray for peace between nations, and to respond with generosity and humanity. We pray that, from the lessons of history, we may learn and foster a new vision for God’s earth, for its people and for its future, as we strive to do God’s will and not our own.”

 

I’m not too sure about learning lessons from history.  If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that each generation faces its own momentous challenges and threats. That was certainly true of my generation. When I arrived here in this Michaelmas term exactly 60 years ago, the Second World War had ended only a few years earlier, and we were already engaged, not just in the Cold War but in actual wars in Korea, Malaya, Cyprus and East Africa.  Almost all of us had done National Service, and those who had been sent to zones of conflict had not particularly expected to return.  We were even trained what to do if an atomic weapon was exploded near us.  We were told to put a hand over our eyes, hold our nose, cover our mouth, and put fingers in our ears: try to do that some time and you will see that why you are unlikely to survive an atomic war.

 

So certainly we faced challenges, not just of war, but of trying to rebuild a shattered world.  But I reckon that you in your generation face immeasurably greater challenges and disasters and threats than we did. I cannot even begin to imagine how you will respond or what you will do.  But I am absolutely certain that you will respond.  And why am I so certain? Because you are here on this Remembrance Sunday keeping your covenant of mutual loyalty with the dead.

 

One of the truly great poems to emerge from the Second World War was Alan Bold’s ‘Buchenwald’:

 

“This is the way in.  The words

Wrought in iron on the gate:

Jedem das seine.  Everybody

Gets what he deserves

The bare drab rubble of the place.

The dull damp stone.  The rain.

The emptiness.  The human lack.

Jedem das seine. Jedem das seine.

Everybody gets what he deserves.

And it could happen again

And they could hang like broken carcasses

And they could scream in terror without light

And they could count the strokes that split their skin

And they could smoulder under cigarettes

And they could suffer and bear every blow

And it could happen again.

Everybody gets what he deserves.”

 

And it does happen again, and it is happening again, even at this moment, as you know only too well.  The realities of evil do not disappear.

And how do we respond? Alan Bold answers,

 

“We turn away.  We always do.

But it’s what we turn into that matters.”

 

That is the issue that lies before you in this place. Turn away? Yes, too often, sadly, we do

 

But: ‘Turn again’. That is a command issued, not just to Dick Whittington in a pantomime, but to us all. That is why, in the Bible, the verbs shubh in Hebrew and strefo/epistrefo in Greek are so important:

 

“Turn away from your evil ways,” pleads Ezekiel, “Turn back that you may live.” Or Paul arguing his case before Agrippa:

“I have been sent to open people’s eyes that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God.”

 

It is what we turn into that matters. Of course when you are young your choices and options will be limited – not least because you will be struggling to achieve what Antony Trollope called in Orley Farm, “that beautiful result of British perseverance, a credit balance at your bank”.

 

Equally when you are old your options will again certainly be limited: “Why should the agéd eagle stretch its wings?”, as Eliot asked. “Because I do not hope to turn again… Because these wings are no longer wings to fly.”

 

Even so, to continue with Eliot, you can still choose to turn to prayer: ‘Pray to God to have mercy upon us, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” And pray also, therefore, for those whom we remember today.

 

We are always, young or old, hemmed in by our own circumstance, but the fact remains that we always do have choices to make. And those choices create over time what it is that we turn into. To go back to Alan Bold’s poem:

“In a cosmic context

Human life is short.  The future

Is not made, but waits to be created.

We are not helpless creatures

Crashing onwards irresistibly to doom.

There is time for everything and time to choose

For everything.  We are that time, that choice.”

 

“This is the time of tension between dying and birth.” And that is why you are wise to take seriously what this place, this Chapel, is, and why it is, and why also it is here as part of a College. We need the help of God if we are to turn from dull clay into a work of God’s art, as Paul put it, a living work of beauty. But we need the friendship of each other in the proper and fundamental meaning of a College.

 

That word ‘college’ comes from the Latin word collegium, and that word ended up being used of people living together in community under common rules and authority.  But collegium originally was a translation of a Greek word έταιρια, and that word placed a much greater emphasis on friendship, on communities constituted by friends who together are seeking the common good.

 

That is exactly what this College has been and I am sure still is in your hands. For you are here in this Chapel and on this day, not just in a covenant of mutual loyalty with the dead, but also in a covenant of mutual loyalty with each other. “By this will all people know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  (John 13.35).

 

George Richmond, the great Victorian portrait painter, was once asked whether, in his portraits, he tried to tell the truth, and he replied, “The truth, yes; but the truth lovingly told.” It is what we turn into that matters: the truth, yes, but the truth lovingly lived.

 

That is why a chapel, with its life in this College, has so much to offer you. But you have much more to offer to it. We need each other in this place to receive from God the resource and the encouragement — yes, and sometimes the correction and judgement — that will turn us into a resource of goodness for others.  ‘Do this in remembrance of him’ who in this enacted way brings the dynamic and the love of God directly into your life, your being, your character.  Often, yes, we turn away, but it is what we turn into that matters.  May he who gave his own life for the redemption of the world give you the grace and courage to become a gift of goodness to others.  Amen.