Category: Sermons

‘The letter kills but the Spirit gives life.’ Three weeks ago I was sitting in the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester soaking up the exhilarating sounds of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand. Now you wouldn’t expect me to speak for long here without giving a little BBC plug – so I have to tell you straightaway that you too can hear this extraordinary performance – ‘cosmic’ as one critic described it – tomorrow evening on Radio 3 when it will be broadcast as part of the Mahler in Manchester series. Any rendition of Mahler 8 is an occasion of course. It was first performed almost exactly 100 years ago in Munich with over 500 voices, an orchestra of over 150, a children’s choir of 350 and 8 soloists – so it’s no wonder it became known as the Symphony of a Thousand, a title deplored by Mahler himself because he thought it suggested a circus!

Mahler was a deeply religious man, more by temperament than faith. Though he was Jewish by birth, Judaism held little attraction for him. He was more drawn to Catholicism, though his Catholic conversion at the age of 37 was more a pragmatic necessity in order that he could be eligible for the post of Director of the Vienna Opera. He put his religious ideas into his symphonies, three of which, the Second, the Third and the Eighth, present a comprehensive spiritual view of life. But it is the Eighth which seems to sum up his central belief in the aspiration of every creature towards God. His wife, Alma, looking back on her husband’s life saw it almost as a mission. ‘His battle for the eternal values,’ she wrote, ‘his elevation above trivial things and his unfailing devotion to truth are an example of the saintly life.’
Now you may think I’m putting Gustav Mahler on too high a spiritual pedestal, but it struck me three weeks ago, when listening to that performance – and on the two occasions I’ve sung the symphony too – how Mahler’s musical inspiration is no mere contemplation of an idea. It’s a strongly willed plea for a renewal of the inward fire from the source of all life and light. And that’s why it’s appropriate, I believe, to draw your attention to it on Pentecost Sunday – not least because the first movement is a setting of the ancient hymn for Pentecost ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ – that great invocation to the Holy Spirit as creator and inspirer with its central prayer: ‘Accende lumen sensibus, infunde amorem cordimus’ – ‘Guide our minds with your blest light and with love our hearts inflame.’

And that’s what the Apostle Paul is wanting for his friends in Corinth, as we heard in the New Testament reading tonight. ‘The letter kills but the Spirit gives life,’ he says. He compares the old written covenant that God gave through Moses (our first reading tonight) with the Gospel – not contrasting bad with good but good with better. The new covenant isn’t a matter of written words alone, but the word is animated, brought to life, by the activity of God’s Spirit. Real encounter with the Christian Gospel changes us on the inside – and what Paul is doing is urging his readers to see God in a new way, to recognise the glory around them and allow that glory to infuse their inner being. So how do we do that?
I remember when I first joined the BBC a few months after leaving university, one of the programmes I worked on as a sound engineer that made a deep impression on me was a series called ‘Priestland’s Progress’ – one man’s search for Christianity – Gerald Priestland, then the BBC’s Religious Affairs Correspondent, armed with his tape recorder interviewing nearly a hundred people about their experience of God. It had a huge following. Strangely enough what I recall most about the series was the ritual, repeated nearly everywhere we went, of concluding each interview by recording at least three minutes of the silence of the room – whether it was a bishop’s study or a suburban front parlour. Each time we explained our curious custom and told our victims that they were free to go and put the kettle on. Almost without exception though they chose to stay – and I mean no disrespect to their eloquence when I say it was usually the best part of the interview! Words about God are not to be despised. But when the words are done, there’s still more, unsaid, in the silence.

I really ought then to finish there! But let me spend just another minute or two trying to define the recognition of the work of the Spirit in our lives by citing one of Gerald Priestland’s most perceptive interviewees, the saintly John V Taylor, one time Bishop of Winchester, who over twenty years ago led a Mission to this University and gave five memorable addresses on consecutive evenings in the Sheldonian Theatre. I remember him talking about ‘bumpings into God’ (an expression which annoyed the atheists) – those experiences which are very common to us all – experiences of recognition, sudden insight, an influx of awareness when you wake up and become alive to something. It may be another person or the solution to a problem – and suddenly the penny drops. Every time a human being cries ‘Ah! I see it now.’ That’s the work of the Holy Spirit – what the Christian creed calls ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life’. And that Creator Spirit has always been quietly, anonymously at work within every human life, within me, within you, drawing our attention to this, to that, opening our eyes, awakening all that is truly human in us, all that is most real.
Of course we can resist the Spirit. Sometimes it’s too painful, too disturbing, to be made fully alive. It’s more comfortable to be a bit insensitive, a bit dead. There are times when we’re stirred with the excitement of a new project, a different interest, an issue of justice that calls for support – but it’s too much trouble to make room for it. Then there are the moments when something strangely beautiful claims our attention, demands that we stand and stare – but it’s too embarrassing in front of our friends. When, unexpectedly, God has become more real, we can’t let ourselves stay with it. These experiences are common to every life, whether they’ve taken a religious form or not. But thank God that his Spirit isn’t easily rebuffed for it’s the Spirit of love, the Spirit of life, striving with our dull, frightened spirits to bring us alive.
‘The letter kills but the Spirit gives life,’ says Paul. He was speaking of what he felt constantly, that what Jesus had brought into the world was a life, an energy and a transforming power. And on this day, the day of Pentecost, we can know this power for ourselves. For this isn’t something that happened in the past and has now died down like a mere gust. The question is rather whether the world will allow this Spirit of God to transform the way we live, or fail to grasp what is possible for us with God. There are in truth innumerable books to read, and vast amounts to learn if we wish. But it’s all vain and stultifying if the Spirit of God doesn’t fill our lives. Come Holy Spirit and fill the lives of those who without you are dead! And teach us to lift our hearts to life with you! Amen.

Canon Stephen Shipley, Senior Producer, Relgion, BBC
23rd May 2010

At this time of year, the Christian church celebrates the Ascension of Christ, and it’s a season that always takes me back. In this particular environment, I hardly need remind you of the importance of good teaching. Those who teach are in particular positions of authority. We rely on our teachers both to be able to pass on genuine knowledge, and to stimulate interest in the application of that knowledge. Unreliable teaching is a very dangerous thing. Those of you studying history would be surprised to be told in a tutorial that the English Civil War was basically a dispute between people who disagreed about fashion. Medics would be rightly suspicious of a lecturer who told them not about hormones, but about humours. And so on.

Theological teaching might wrongly be thought to be above reproach. Certainly, if you study theology in this college, your teachers are unimpeachable. Or at least, I am. But when I was studying for the priesthood, I was bemused to discover at my theological college the following annual practice: each year on Ascension Day the pews would be removed from the chapel. We would have to sit on the floor, or cushions, or whatever, for the rest of term. And this was done to remind us of – and I quote – “the goneness of Christ”.

Now first of all, that is absolutely daft. But far more dangerously, it is also absolutely wrong, because the doctrine of the Ascension of Christ is not about absence, it is about presence. Jesus has “gone” only in one very limited sense, that is that the flesh and blood of the human being Jesus of Nazareth are no longer walking around this earth in the way that you are and I am. But that is the case precisely because the presence of Jesus has been transformed into something which cannot be contained. What Christians call the Ascension takes Jesus not from here to there, but from here to everywhere.

Even the transformed presence of Christ is not enough, however. Where Westcott House went so profoundly wrong in its understanding of the Ascension was firstly in its assumption that the doctrine teaches the absence of Christ, rather than his presence: but also in its failure to understand that there is another presence central to the Ascension, at that is the presence of humanity at the right hand of God. It is not so much Christ who has gone, as we, because humanity is changed decisively by being drawn into the perfect life of the Trinity.

What does this really mean? Well, something like this. Christianity teaches that the reality of God is what we call the Trinity, the perfect self giving of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is nothing in the life of God, which is not always and eternally being given in love. Human beings are created in the image of God, they are created with this capacity, the selfless love, but all too often they fail to realise it. We recognize this in our own experience. However well we would like to do, the fact is that most of the time we human beings are not very good at being loving, but all too good at being selfish. But God’s will for us is so much more. The love of God which overflows in the life of the Trinity, pours itself out in the creation of the world, and will recreate that world. In what Christians call the doctrine of the incarnation, the taking on of human life by God himself God-made-man transforms humanity, because he lives on earth the life of God himself, a life of perfect self giving. This selfless love is, of course, not quite what we expect. It is challenging, unsettling, disconcerting. And so we try to do away with it, we condemn it to death, we remove it from our sight and shut it up in the cold sterility of the tomb. But Love will not be contained, and the life of God, which is love incarnate, bursts forth at Easter, bringing the new life of the resurrection to all. The doctrine of the Ascension forms part of this teaching. By uniting himself to humanity, God draws it up into his own life, so that the perfect offering of love which we are unable to make for ourselves, is made for us by Christ, who represents, who re-presents, human life in the life of God himself.

I am rather fond of the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose remarkable sonnet beginning “As kingfishers catch fire”, contrasts the world of me, mine and self with the world of gift with which we are entrusted in creation. “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same, selves, goes itself, myself it speaks and spells, crying, what I do is me, for that I came.” Rather than this individualistic world, Hopkins sees another: “I say more. The just man justices, Keeps grace, that keeps all his goings graces, Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – Christ.”

For Hopkins, as for Christian orthodoxy, creation and redemption are not to be held apart. I am redeemed because, in the incarnation, death, resurrection and – importantly- the ascension of the Lord, Christ has become my humanity, Christ has transformed my nature so that when God looks on me in my sin, what he sees is Christ in his love.

The ludicrous ignorance of my theological College might well be improved were it to read more Hopkins. Indeed, were it just to read more theology. For the Ascension of Christ is not about absence. It is about the presence of Christ in you and me and the presence of you and me in the worship of heaven itself. The just man, Hopkins writes, “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is”.

The doctrine of the Ascension teaches us that we – as human beings – are present and active in the worship of heaven because the perfect love of Christ has transformed humanity into something which can at last stand and live in the presence of God, because humanity has been, and is represented, re-presented, by Jesus Christ the Word made flesh. When God looks on you and me in our sin and our weakness what he sees is Christ in his selflessness and love “for Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his / to the Father, by the features of men’s faces”.

Rev’d Dr. Peter Groves, St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford
16th May 2010

An Anglican priest and a Methodist minister, both wearing dog collars, were hammering a sign into the verge of a road. The sign read “The end is Near! Turn yourself around now before it is too late!” Almost immediately, a car drives past and a voice from the car window yells, “Leave us alone you religious nutters!”. The car speeds on, there is a screeching of tyres and a splash. The priest turns to the minister and says: “Oh dear! Do you think the sign should say: Danger Bridge Collapsed?”

I mention this story to illustrate how it can sometimes be a dangerous thing to wear a dog collar in public, especially at a time when the image of a male priest might not conjure up the happiest of associations. To walk down Cornmarket or travel on a train in clerical dress is to risk a few stares, bizarre conversations about religion, being asked to give someone or something a blessing, or even receiving verbal abuse from a disaffected church-goer or sometime believer. I remember a former Chaplain to the Bishop of London, Mark Oakley, telling how he went to work in an ordinary shirt and tie, instead of dog collar one day. When the Bishop asked him what he was doing, Mark simply said that he was fed up with travelling on the tube dressed as a priest and being stared at or harangued. The roadside story might also point to how religion, especially religion that calls you to repent and turn your life around, in western secular society, is seen as a minority and unpopular interest, and I want to explore why this might, paradoxically, be a really good thing.

This Sunday is vocation Sunday, when you might think we celebrate and pray for those who have been called to the increasingly rare vocation of ordained ministry. But I think it is particularly appropriate, at the beginning of Trinity Term, when so many students are thinking about their future lives and careers, that we remember exactly what vocation is, and who it affects and I have chosen the readings for the eve of the feast of St. Mark deliberately to illustrate that vocation is something that relates to us all very deeply regardless of our occupation.

The readings from the prophecy of Isaiah and Mark, demonstrates how blessed is the person who witnesses to the gospel of peace and heralds the good news of Christ in their lives. The beginning of Mark’s gospel also places baptism as a central act of faith, a seal of the commitment to follow the calling of Christ: a vocation. Following this call can be done in many ways: John the Baptist fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy and came preaching a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins and is arrested and imprisoned for his troubles. The history of an unpopular and persecuted Christian faith has its origins at the very beginning of the life of Christ and unpopularity has always been, to some extent, part of the Christian story.

I found this illustrated recently in the most unlikely of people. I have known the work of the comedian Frank Skinner for many years. But, until recently, I hadn’t realised that he was a commited Roman Catholic Christian. And this I found out through reading an article that he wrote in the Times a few weeks ago. It was entitled: ‘Persecute me, I’m after the brownies points.’ In the article he wrote about how Christians should not be ashamed of who they are in an increasingly secularized country and shouldn’t worry about being laughed at.

‘To many British people’, he writes, ‘Christianity seems like a weird but unexciting theme park. Personally, I like our ever-dwindling status. I even like our ever-dwindling numbers. There was a time when social pressure made people go to church. If anything the reverse is now true. Most adults you see in church nowadays are there because they want to be there. That’s not decline, it’s progress.’ He goes on, ‘Christians have always worked best as an unpopular minority. We were surely at our most dynamic when we knelt, eyes to Heaven, hands clasped in prayer, with a Colosseum lion bounding towards us. … Surely the central image of Christianity is someone who can shoot fireballs out of his fingertips allowing himself to be nailed to a wooden cross — submission as the ultimate show of strength — love as impenetrable armour. Most British Christians are badly dressed, unattractive people. We’re not pushy and aggressive members of society. We’re a bit like Goths — no one can remember us being fashionable and we talk about death a lot. I love the glorious un-coolness of that.’
Christians tend to save their best work for the “voice in the wilderness” genre. We are most impressive when operating as a secret sect, kneeling in small, candle-lit rooms and scrawling fishes on walls. I’m enjoying this current dose of persecution. It’s definitely good for the soul.’

Sometimes being a Christian is hard, and the minor inconveniences we may experience from a lack of tolerance in this country are nothing compared to real persecution that people of faith in other countries have to endure, but whatever difficulties we go through for our faith, we, as followers of Christ, have a calling, a vocation, to remember, that Christ’s victory has already been won. In this Easter season witness to the gospel that Jesus’s death and resurrection are the ultimate demonstration of love and that love is victorious. If we are to acknowledge the vocation that we all share, we must remember that our armour against the persecution, or mockery of the world, is to be love – love for God and love for one another.

At the beginning of this Trinity term, which may be the last in this college some, questions of what is the right path for the future may loom large. But whatever we do with our lives, let us all remember our primary calling to serve Christ in love, a vocation sealed at our baptism, into whatever denomination. Whatever you do, if you have faith, I urge you to cherish it, and nurture it and not to be ashamed of it, regardless of whether it happens to be popular or not. It is the greatest gift you have and the greatest gift you will ever have. Amen.

Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain
25th April 2010

Faith schools, faith communities, inter faith, multi faith – the word faith litters the lexicon of contemporary politics, but scratch the surface just a bit, and it becomes all too apparent just how little understanding or agreement there is about what the word ‘Faith’ really does mean.
Listen to some people and you would think that faith is something that no normal person would have anything to do with – it’s like swallowing 12 impossible things before breakfast. For others faith seems to mean little more than simple minded credulity, easily ridiculed by anyone with a rational mind – faith in the lucky charm worn around the neck; faith in quack medicine which takes no account of how the human body actually works; faith in the horoscopes at the back of so many weekly magazines. It’s the kind of faith that touches wood and hopes for the best. Then there is faith as a system of dogma or credal forms, or just the cultural norms with which a person has grown up; it’s that which gives a sense of identity and causes around 70% of the population to describe themselves as Christian, whether they have much thought through the impact of their ‘faith’ on their lives or not. For yet others, it is the outward expression of such a faith system that is all important – they may call themselves Catholics, or Muslims, or Jehovah’s witnesses, but theirs is a faith that depends for its strength and assistance on belonging to a tight community that believes and/or practices the same things that they do. Then for yet more, faith may be that outcome of a long and painful process of thought and reflection leaving them with no alternative but to affirm ‘Here I stand and I can do no other’.
So, we use the language of faith so much, but with so little agreement about what we mean. How very different from the first century and the context which gave us the writings of St Paul, as in our first lesson tonight. When Paul wrote of living by the law of faith, both he and his correspondents would have had a pretty good shared understanding of what he meant. In their minds would have been all the rich heritage of the Jewish scriptures and the Hellenistic culture in which they lived. In the Old Testament the word that shaped this meaning of Faith had a Hebrew root which gives us our word ‘AMEN – So be it. Yes, indeed!’ It is a word which describes that on which a person or community comes to depend. Isaiah likens it to a secure peg on which to hold on the face of a cliff. And in the Greek world the most commonly used word for faith means just the same: it describes that confidence and trust which is the hallmark of a relationship in which you feel truly confident and secure.
So for Paul, and those to whom he was writing, to live by faith is to live by a conviction based on historical evidence which then shapes both behaviour and belief. And here we do come to something which is common to almost everyone in our society today, because it is simply an accurate description of the way in which most of us live our daily lives. So on Friday I sat in a dentist’s chair whilst a man I barely know injected a toxic substance into my gums, drilled bits out of my teeth, and packed the hole with a substance I could not see. I thereby demonstrated a touching faith in people I have never met, processes I do not pretend to understand and skills that I will never ever possess. As I sat there I believed, but I could not immediately prove, that the anaesthetic was of the right strength , the equipment had been properly tested and designed, and that the dentist was not incapacitated by an all too liquid lunch. Even more extraordinarily a couple of weeks ago I sat strapped into a seat at the end of a runway whilst snow was falling all around outside. Had the engineer checked the gauges properly when the air-craft was refuelled? Did the fitter ensure that the doors of the hold were tightly closed? Had they used the right de-icing mixture for the leading edges of the wings? Had the pilot just come on duty after a blazing row with his wife and with blood pressure sky high? Of course, I didn’t think these things at all. I sat there calmly reading my newspaper, because experience – and not just mine but that of millions of other people over nearly a century – had given me the necessary faith; faith to believe that which I could not fully prove, but in which I was prepared to trust, even to the point of quite literally staking my life on it.
And so it was for Paul and his faith in God. He did not have all the answers. There were times he said when it was like ‘looking through smoked glass’, but his own experience and the experience of millions of people through not just one century, but many, gave him the basis for such trust, such faith, to utter a firm ‘Amen’ to the promises of God, and make a confident decision that in God he would trust.
And the word decision here is important. For Paul the law of faith was a particular faith in the particular person of Jesus Christ; a person in whom he had not always had faith; indeed one whom he had specifically rejected. But then came that particular moment of transformation on the Damascus road. Paul, we know, was a man with a deep pride and faith in his Jewish ancestry and upbringing; he was a man deeply moved by Greek culture and philosophy, he was a citizen of an empire which had created the Pax Romana by faith in the civil institutions and armed might of Rome. But Paul, in that moment, put his ultimate faith in Jesus Christ. It was a moment that I am sure was shaped by all the years of faith experience and reflection that had gone before but, from that specific point of decision that here in this one life, the life of this man Jesus, really was focused that whole life and purpose of God, that whole meaning of human existence on which it is worth staking your own life and saying ‘Amen – Yes’ to that, from that decision and that conviction then flowed that extraordinary and breath-taking life of intense activity and equally intense suffering, which changed not only Paul, but (and it is not too extravagant to say this) changed so much in later human history, and not only here in the Western world.
That is because Paul saw so clearly that general conviction and particular decision about something which really can be trusted absolutely, and held to utterly seriously and without reserve, must have universal application as well. If something is true and worth staking life on for one, then it has to be for all. You can’t have an aircraft which is truly trustworthy for you and not also for me.
To have faith is not, as some would suggest, to shut down our critical faculty, to stop asking questions, or to retreat into a world of fantasy into which no thinking person would wish to go.
The reality is that our human critical faculty can only operate on the basis of faith. So, a scientist will proceed with an experiment on the basis of what he or she believes to be true. They then submit that belief (based as it is on the observation and experience of their own and others) to critical questioning and experimentation. But the questioning is always secondary to what is first believed. As St Augustine said: ‘Credo ut intelligam’ – ‘I believe in order that I might understand’; and I am sure that here he was recalling the older words of the prophet Isaiah who said (7/9) ‘Unless you believe you will not understand’ or, perhaps a better translation: ‘you will not endure’. Without that secure underpinning framework of belief and faith, you’ll be all over the place – as are so many people today.
Faith – it’s not an end in itself, as it is sometimes made out to be. Rather it is entering into that relationship of trust that may lead to hope and to love. It is the starting point from which our thinking and our understanding begin. But not just thinking and understanding – which is just head stuff. Faith involves behaviour and action – life stuff, too. As one Classical scholar has put it: ‘Faith is not just belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.’ (Edith Hamilton). Faith is that steadfastness in belief which shapes character, which leads to action, and then remains committed to that action even when the final outcomes may not yet be seen. Like planting an acorn knowing that you will be dead before the oak tree is fully grown, acts of faith are also acts of deeply profound hope.
Without faith there can be no start to understanding, and so no meaning to life, and so no grounds for real hope. The only question for all of us is; where are the grounds for our faith to be found?

Romans 3.19-31
Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For ‘no human being will be justified in his sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
Righteousness through Faith
But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.
Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.
Matthew 9.18-22
A Girl Restored to Life and a Woman Healed
While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, ‘My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.’ And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.’ Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And instantly the woman was made well.

Rt. Rev’d Michael Langrish, Bishop of Exeter
21st February 2010

A southern minister was completing a temperance sermon. With great expression he said, ”If I had all the beer in the world, I’d take it and pour it into the river.” With even greater emphasis he said, ”And if I had all the wine in the world, I’d take it and pour it into the river.” And then finally, he said, ”And if I had all the whiskey in the world, I’d take it and pour it into the river.” Sermon complete, he then sat down.

The Choir Master stood very cautiously and announced, ”For our closing song, let us sing Hymn number 365: ‘Shall We Gather at the River?”’
Last week the dean of Worcester Cathedral mentioned how pleased he was to be here and to be invited, and added that once his slot as a preacher here had been confirmed, that he was a little disappointed to find himself preaching on Prudence: ‘The dull virtue’ he called it. ‘Never mind’, he said, ‘it could have been worse. It could have been Temperance!’ Well, this week it’s temperance, the even more boring virtue, you might think. But you’d be wrong.
For some of you may be thinking that I am about to attempt to make you feel guilty about the lovely formal dinner with wine that you are going to have, or the night cap later on perhaps. For there is a popular conception that temperance, as in the joke we heard, is only about abstinence from alcohol and a synonym for prohibition. In fact, these are two misconceptions, as Temperance is not primarily concerned with alcohol and it is not about abstinence, even with Lent approaching. It is merely, as St. Iganatius of Loyola, that great spiritual writer relates, about the use of created things. We ought to make use of created things just so far as they help us to attain our end, the end for which God created us, and we ought to withdraw ourselves from them just so far as they hinder us.
So, the purpose of the virtue is to enable us to attain the end for which we were created, that is to say, it is directed towards the fulfilment of the will of God, rather than the production of a strong ego. Of course, this is a religious point of view. Anyone can practise temperance in a completely secular way, and any other of the cardinal virtues for that matter. There is natural prudence, temperance, courage and a sense of justice in just about everyone. The point about practising temperance as a Christian virtue is twofold: firstly, it is for the higher purpose of serving God and neighbour, rather than simply keeping one’s own body in good condition for selfish motives and, secondly it is an ‘infused virtue’, that is to say, it is practised in the knowledge that when our spirits are weak and we are likely to over indulge in something or other, let’s say, over eating, drinking, not enough eating perhaps, smoking, too much exercise, too little exercise, too much rest or not enough, then we are helped by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, because we offer our lives to God an we are his.
Now you might think this a bit morbid, but Emma and I have this idea that, if one of us dies first, which is almost certainly inevitable, that the deceased will wait for the other one in a heavenly version of the Savoy Hotel’s American Bar, a place we frequented in our London days and to be highly recommended. And as time is of no consequence in these arrangements, how ever long the surviving one, me or Emma, lives after the other one, it will only be a second in heaven so, just as the drinks are served and the piano plays in the celestial bar, we will be together again.
Temperance is, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, about freedom, not about guilt. Don’t become a slave to unfettered gratification and addiction, for these things limit our lives, not only in terms of their quality, but sometimes in their longevity and that is not the purpose of a God who came to bring life in all its fullness. Self control, practised as an offering of oneself in service is immensely powerful and empowering. Through self control, God’s love can shine through in the most amazing circumstances to help others and can bring wonderful spiritual enlightenment to the soul. Self control is often simply the most loving action we can take, for in seeking self control, temperance, as an infused grace, with the help of the Holy spirit, we are best prepared to love God and our neighbour, which are the primary commandments.
Now I’m younger than some of you and older than some others of you and, to make a little confession, I think I’ve participated in my fair share of indulgence and over-indulgence over the years, and perhaps I won’t tell you whether I inhaled or not, but in my experience, it is certainly not worth letting things that we consume having mastery over us for that leads to St. Paul’s now clichéd list in Galatians:
Fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.
Rather the practise of self-control means that we can focus on the much greater things in life. Things that Paul call the Fruit of the Spirit:
22 Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
These are the things that really matter and, ultimately, the things which make life worth living. But remember, temperance is not about abstaining from anything. After all, isn’t Jesus the one who turned the finest water into wine and isn’t the afterlife supposed to be a heavenly banquet?

Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain
7th February 2010

WHEN the chaplain invited me to preach, I was very glad to accept the invitation. When, having secured my acceptance, he wrote to say that there was to be a series of sermons on the virtues, and that mine was prudence, I must admit to having had second thoughts. Why prudence? Why me? One could make something of fortitude or justice, one could go far with faith, hope or charity. But prudence? The virtue of caution, I thought; the boring virtue; a virtue for bank managers, investment brokers and chancellors of the Exchequer. But then, I thought, cheering myself up, at least I’ve not been given temperance; that might have spoiled my enjoyment of high table.
And then I thought of Dante Alighieri. Dante’s great poem the Paradiso, the third part of the Divine Comedy, is a magnificent imaginative reconstruction of the cosmos, as conceived by intelligent mediaeval people, in which Dante matches up the seven virtues of classical and Christian tradition with the spheres of heaven. Not surprisingly, he connects fortitude (that militant virtue) to the sphere of Mars; he assigns justice (that kingly virtue) to the sphere of Jupiter; but prudence is found in the sphere of the Sun. And that surprised me. Dante must have seen something in the virtue of prudence that I hadn’t seen: something brilliant, something dazzling, something that reminded him of sunlight. Perhaps there was more to prudence than I had thought. It might be an idea to listen to the people Dante listened to.
The vision of human life set out so comprehensively, movingly and excitingly in the Divine Comedy was shaped by many influences. Foremost among them was St Thomas Aquinas, who brought together the spiritual insights of the Christian tradition (most notably expressed by St Augustine) with the philosophical reflections of Aristotle. That doesn’t make Aquinas infallible, but it does mean that he draws on an astonishingly wide range of human wisdom.
First of all, Aquinas helps us to think about virtue as such. Moral virtues are not the same as moral rules. To talk, for instance, about the virtue of charity is not just to say that people ought to be charitable. The virtue of charity is the strength to be charitable. The word ‘virtue’ translates the Latin word for strength or power, which in turn translates the Greek word dunamis, from which we get words like ‘dynamo’ and ‘dynamism’. So a moral virtue is not just a rule about what we ought to do; it is the dynamism, the energy with which to carry it out.
Turning to the virtue of prudence in particular, Aquinas sees it as an intellectual virtue as well as a moral one: that is, it is the ability to discern, and then, on the basis of that discernment, to act. The prudent person is one who accurately discerns the world around them, sees it as it really is; and so is able to act effectively. We now see, perhaps, why Dante assigned the virtue of prudence to the sphere of the sun. It is seeing things in the broad light of day. It is another word for realism.
Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and Dante shared a common world-view at least to this extent: that they all believed that trying to live a good life was a rational thing to do, and it therefore belonged in the public forum; it was open to scrutiny, criticism and debate. In other words, morality is more than a matter of purely private or personal choice. That is the gulf which separates their world-view from that of so many people today. A common assumption today is that the private individual is the final arbiter of their own actions, and that questions of right and wrong belong solely to that inward world. A variation on that view is that there are indeed ethical questions that belong to the public world – issues of peace and justice, for example, or issues of poverty or climate change – but personal behaviour is of a different order, and remains firmly tucked out of sight in that other world of personal lifestyle and private choice.
Aquinas challenges us to see reality as a whole, not compartmentalized into public and private sectors; not separating out the ‘ethical’ issues of the public world from the ‘moral’ issues of private life. And in the centre of it he puts the cardinal virtue of prudence, the capacity to see the world as it is and to see it whole, and to act rightly and effectively within it.
This means at any rate that prudence need not be boring; and sometimes it should not be cautious. ‘Prudence’, for example, would describe the gifted politician who sees several moves ahead of his opponents, and recognises that decisive action now will bear fruit later, though no one else can see it. ‘Prudence’ would describe the supreme artist who has a vision and pursues it in the face of public scorn, knowing that one day others will see what she has seen and will applaud it. ‘Prudence’ would describe the skilled military commander who sees the sure chance of victory by one bold move, and takes it. (Valour, we might say, is sometimes the better part of prudence.) In each of these examples, I find that I have spoken of prudence in terms of seeing further: it is, as Aquinas says, a ‘cognitive’ virtue; and so it is the opposite of how we often use the word. We think of the prudent person as one who thinks that the way ahead is hard to see, and therefore acts cautiously. The prudence that Aristotle, Aquinas and Dante celebrated was precisely the capacity to see far ahead, and therefore to act boldly.
Is there a specifically Christian character to the virtue of prudence? In a remarkable passage, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once described Jesus Christ as ‘the most prudent of men’. By which he did not mean that the Lord was cautious, timid, anxious to avoid failure, or over-attached to his comfort-zone: far from it. He meant rather that Jesus discerned unflinchingly the way that God had marked out for him, and having discerned it he followed it unswervingly; in the conviction that even if his life ended painfully and prematurely, God would give that apparent failure some meaning and some point.
Prudence in this sense describes a life lived in the Spirit of Christ. And how is such prudence acquired? Thomas Aquinas tells us that it’s gained in two ways. He uses the word ‘habit’ which for him has an active sense: a habit is something you put on and wear, a piece of clothing. The habit of prudence then is matter of deliberate practice: the habit of assembling the facts before jumping to conclusions; the habit of careful consideration before acting or speaking or hitting the ‘send’ button; the habit of seeing reality and seeing it whole. Anyone can practise the habit of prudence. But for the person who seeks to live their life in the Spirit of Christ, says Aquinas, there is also prayer. By which he doesn’t mean just coming to God with a list of requests, like a sort of Father Christmas, but prayer as Aquinas himself understood and practised it: the prayer of meditation, the prayer of quiet reflection, the prayer of attentiveness and receptivity, the prayer that enables one to stand back from the busyness of life and regain one’s balance. In that sort of prayer, God gives the gift of prudence, the secret of effective action.

PETER ATKINSON Dean of Worcester
31st January 2010

Any of you who have children – and I expect many of you are hoping you don’t – but those of who do will know that one learns as much from them as one ever tries to teach them. My eldest son is a great fixer. He fixes cars when they are ailing; he fixes things electrical; he fixes deals. Drive him to just about anywhere in England and he’ll mention the location of the latest car scrapyard. Travel the length and breadth of the country and he’ll know someone who can help with a deal. (I should add that he is a law-abiding citizen!)

I saw this in operation when he was very young. I suppose he was about five years old and had just returned from Sunday School. His Sunday School teacher had taken the whole class (fifteen under 8’s) to visit an elderly man who was poorly; I’m not sure it improved the old-timer’s health. On the way back Aidan looked sad. His teacher asked why. ‘Well’, said Aidan, ‘that nice man gave us all fun-size Mars Bars.’ ‘Well that should have made you happy!’ said David, his teacher. ‘Yes,’ said Aidan, ‘but he gave us three Mars Bars and there’s Gregory and me and mum and dad.’ Later on the journey David noticed Aidan looking more cheery. ‘You look happier now.’ David said. ‘Well, yes.’ said Aidan. ‘You see I’ve been thinking. If I eat one Mars Bar then it’s all right, ‘cos then we can break the two in half and all four of us will have something.’

It seemed to me to be a marvellous piece of logic. In Aidan’s mind, the issue was one of fairness or justice. At the start someone would lose out. By the end of his reckonings, in his mind, justice was satisfied – and it was, in a way, even though he would have eaten one and a half Mars Bars. For Aidan, justice or fairness was ultimately about love. He knew about love because that was what brothers and mums and dads were about. Anyway in Sunday School he’d also already learnt that God wishes us to love one another.

So on that basis, justice is love distributed. Each shall receive their share. There is, indeed, originally much more about love in the New Testament – and even in the teaching of Jesus – than about justice. It is there in the two great commandments in the gospels. We are to love God and also we are to love our neighbours as ourselves. So, at the heart of it are three destinations for love – God, our neighbour – that is our fellow human beings – and ourselves; proper self-love is encouraged.

Love is there, too, woven into the writings of St Paul. Again, love which is not purely self-regarding, is at the centre. Paul is also a theologian of justice – although this is not often recognised. The Greek word dikaiosunē is usually translated righteousness but it could also be justice. For Paul, then, the church as a community incarnates the justice of God. In the second letter to the Corinthians he writes, ‘For our sake God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the justice (righteousness) of God.’ (2 Cor 5.21). In the upside down world of the Gospel, Christ takes on our sin and we take on God’s justice. Paul links this to the message of reconciliation with which the church is entrusted. The community makes visible God’s justice through its work of reconciliation. Here love and justice come together.

In John’s gospel and in the letters of John – almost certainly the products of different authors but probably the same school – in these writings love again is prominent. Again, it is about loving one another. So it seems to be about ‘love in the community.’ Love is what identifies a community which is living within the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. ‘See how these Christians love one another.’

There are hints of justice in Jesus’ teaching. Perhaps it is best summarised in the so-called ‘Golden Rule.’ Act towards others as you would have them act to you. But that saying was one which went well beyond the bounds of early Christianity. It was almost an accepted truism. So what did Jesus teach?

Well, we had something of his teaching set out in the amazing gospel reading about the labourers in the vineyard. I don’t need to remind you of the tale. Those who were employed last were paid just as much as those who had borne the heat of the day. The final response from the vineyeard owner is breathtaking: ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage (a denarius)? Take what belongs to you, and go. I choose to give to this last as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ That final question captures the essence of Jesus’ radical teaching. It is certainly not about justice if justice is fairness. It is certainly not about justice if justice is a sort of convention within society as perhaps the most famous definition of justice from contemporary moral philosophy suggests.

Jesus simply has the head of the winery saying: ‘Do you begrudge my generosity?’ It is that same generosity that allowed Jesus to offer his own life as a sign of the most radical generosity that humankind can imagine.

This is a classical time to reflect upon justice, as a general election approaches. Each of the political parties will be making an appeal to justice. Each will be offering ‘lollipops’ to attract voters – lower taxes, higher pensions or whatever. None, I imagine will be using Jesus’ parable of the labourers in the vineyard as the model of their policies or indeed as a slogan.

Isaiah’s prophecy which we heard alongside our gospel is sharp: ‘Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth has fallen in public squares.’ That is virtually a perennial truth. With Jesus’ parable it is different. As the winemaker indicates, there is justice; he is paying what he agreed. But the parable presses us well beyond justice. Young Aidan was not far from the point with the Mars Bars: ‘Do we begrudge him his generosity?’

But the message underneath this is more radical still and will be played out in a week’s time in the bitter-sweet feast of Candlemass. Here, in the Temple, Mary is told of her son’s ultimate destiny ‘a sword shall pierce your own soul too.’ Jesus lives the generosity he teaches, a generosity well in excess of justice, but never leaving justice behind. It is summarised movingly in Samuel Crossman’s most powerful Passiontide hymn:

‘Here might I stay and sing
No story so divine
Never was love, dear king!
Never was grief like thine.
This is my friend,
In whose sweet praise,
I all my days could gladly spend.’

Amen.

Rt Rev’d Stephen Platten, Bishop of Wakefiled
24th January 2010

We should all feel sorry for Peter Parker. Consider his lot. He is a shy, college nerd, in love with his next-door neighbour, Mary Jane; teased and bullied by his so-called friends. And then, one day, you all know the story, he is bitten by a spider and given extraordinary powers to climb walls and spin enormous webs that carry him from tower block to sky scraper over the city. Being the wholesome young man he is, he makes a choice: to use his powers for good against crime and evil in the city. He becomes the anonymous Spiderman, who saves babies from burning buildings and brings robbers to justice by catching them in the act and leaving them in a webbed net for the police to deal with. What a hero! But have pity on poor Peter, a student by day and a hero by night. It must be exhausting. His work suffers, he is ridiculed more than ever, and the superhero lifestyle puts pay to any chances he has with his would-be girlfriend. She thinks Spiderman is great, but poor Peter’s great deeds go unrewarded and unnoticed. Well, if you want to know how the story develops, read a Marvel comic or watch one of the latest Spiderman films. Number three is particularly bad!

Hollywood tries to offer many of us an idea of what virtue is. It is great deeds of heroic proportions that require super-human strength that are, in the end, recognised and praised by the people. In the films, virtue, practised by the goodies against the baddies, is clear-cut, satisfying, simple and most importantly of all, really, really cool.
But is that our experience of virtue in real life and what is virtue anyway? Don’t we sometimes think of the word in derogatory terms: a series of ‘Thou Shalt nots’ that we heard read from the book of Exodus, that stop us from having any fun? Doesn’t virtue mean an abstinence from the thinks that we enjoy doing? And surely morality is relative anyway, certainly in this day and age? In this sermon, I want to suggest not only that real life virtue is unlike its Hollywood caricature, but also that the truly virtuous life has virtually nothing to do with our own powers at all.

But first, I must explain what this term’s sermons are all about. They are all about virtue: not the seven contrary virtues, which are the specific opposites to the seven deadly sins: Humility against pride; kindness against envy; abstinence against gluttony; chastity against lust; patience against anger; liberality against greed, and diligence against sloth. Neither are the sermons about the seven corporeal works of mercy – the medieval list of things you can do to help others: feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty; give shelter to strangers; clothe the naked; visit the sick; minister to prisoners; and bury the dead. Nor indeed shall we be looking at the seven so-called, Bushido Virtues of Japanese culture, used by the Samurai: right decision, valour, benevolence, respect, honesty, honour and loyalty. Rather we shall be hearing from four bishops, two deans and myself and what they, and I, have to say about the four cardinal virtues: justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude, and the three theological virtues: faith, hope and love, the greatest of which, St. Paul tells us in the famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13, is love, and it is this virtue that will finish the series at the end of term.

Why choose these particular virtues? Well, firstly, they are portrayed on the ceiling above us: the theological virtues here … and the cardinal virtues there … so if you get bored with the sermon you can always look upwards in contemplation without guilt. But also, because, unfashionable though they may be, within these virtues, together sometimes known as the heavenly virtues, lies the essence of the spiritual life. For, within the Christian life, morality is intertwined with spirituality because, the supernatural creator of the world, revealed to us, completes, corrects and develops the natural world. Participation in the life of God, given by the Holy Spirit, is in the virtue, not of ourselves, but in the virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ. As St. Paul reminds us ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me’. By this indwelling, we are adopted as children of God, and therefore, really are children of God.

But before virtue can reveal itself in us, we receive the gift of grace. The fruit of God’s dwelling in us is a sanctifying grace. This is ‘habitual grace’: a permanent gift that completes us as human beings, made in the likeness of God. We are also given ‘actual grace’, which is that transitory power which God gives to enlighten the mind and strengthen the will that we may act according to his will.

Just as God gives us grace, he also is the giver of virtue. God is the giver of justice: our love of what is right; he is the giver of temperance: the desire to look after ourselves and each other so that we are ready for the purpose given to us; God gives us fortitude, or courage, enabling the soul to achieve its goal and giving us character; and he gives us prudence, which emulates the practical wisdom of Jesus and seeks to reconcile humanity to God. But the given-ness of virtue is even more sharply focussed when we consider the theological virtues: Faith is not an intellectual or rational virtue, it is an entirely spiritual movement towards God. It is given by God and merely accepted by us, and advanced through prayer. Likewise, Hope, which refuses to be disquieted by evil, brings joy and is an anchor in hard times; the object of real hope is always God; and lastly Love, which is nothing less than grace working upon our God-given loving instinct.

There are times in life when all this is shaken and tested, when all is black and there seems nothing, as exemplified in W.H Auden’s poem, ‘Stop all the Clocks’, which ends with these words:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

These are times when there seems a lack of goodness in the world. Perhaps especially now in the light of the earthquake in Haiti: we might feel that there is no hope for 50,000 dead and many injured and trapped; surely there is no faith in a God who can do this; where is the love and courage and justice of those who could help and do not?

This is, indeed, a rational response to a ghastly situation. But a natural human response is compassion and action. Moreover, the spiritual response within us, cries out for hope and faith and love, for justice and courage and prudence in what we do. For by engaging these God-given gifts now, we can hope to make this broken world a better place. To the purely rational mind, there seems no sense in a disaster like Haiti. But if we believe in Christ, then we believe in a God who suffers with the world, who became human, not only to redeem it, but to transform it through the grace and virtue that flows through us by his goodness. Therefore I urge you to give money to the disasters appeal agency and pray that Christ may enlarge our wills to do selfless, life-giving good.

The classic fight between good and evil, light and dark, is the subject of a thousand Hollywood films, but also of many books. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, pondered the question of evil from his prison cell in a Soviet concentration camp and wrote in his Gulag Archipelago, 1958-68:

‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being … One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.’

We are all capable of giving in to temptation, especially when it is in secret or when a particular wrong-doing has become socially acceptable, but we are also capable of living lives of kindness and generosity, justice and courage, lives full of faith and hope and love. St. Paul tirelessly emphasises good daily practise, as in the passage from Philippians 4 we heard this evening, for the more we can build up the good and positive in ourselves and in each other, the closer the kingdom of God will be to us. Therefore, ‘whatever is honest, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise’ think on these things, be transformed by God’s grace and the merit of Christ’s virtue dwelling in us and then go and do what is good. Amen.

Jonathan Arnold
17th January 2010

For a Bishop of Gloucester to preach in this chapel is to be reminded of an important piece of Worcester College history. Medieval Gloucester was, like Oxford, a great religious centre, and more precisely a centre of the religious life, in the more technical sense, with Dominicans, Franciscans, Benedictines and more, and the jewel in the crown was the great Benedictine abbey of St Peter. In Oxford, meanwhile, there stood on this site the Benedictine Gloucester College, founded in the 13th century. That is an important historic link. With the coming of the Reformation, both institutions underwent a change. In Gloucester the abbey became the cathedral of a new diocese; for the first time Gloucester had a bishop. In Oxford the college experienced something of the fate of most of the monasteries and, though it survived as Gloucester Hall, it had to wait until the eighteenth century for a rich benefactor to re-found the college and give it a new name. The association with Gloucester was lost. Today I would celebrate that historic connection with a certain delight and pride, were it not for the subject of this sermon.Among the clergy of the Diocese of Gloucester in the second century of its existence was one William Master. He ministered in the parish of Preston, near Cirencester. It is a village of less than 500 souls, with a beautiful 14th century church, on the site of one going back to Saxon times. In those days the incumbent of Preston had only this one parish for which to care. Now his 21st century successor has four. When William Master died in 1684, he bequeathed a sum of five pounds per annum to the University of Oxford to maintain two sermons. And, again as the Bishop of the diocese in which he ministered, I would celebrate his benefaction with delight and pride, were it not for the subject of this sermon. For one of the two is a sermon on the grace of humility, to be preached on the Sunday before Lent, and the other, that you hear today, on the Sunday next before Advent, is on the sin of pride.William Master gave twelve New Testament texts on which the sermon should be preached. The one I have chosen is Acts 20.24. In the King James version of the Bible, authorised in the same century through which Master ministered at Preston, it readsNone of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. Or, to hear it in a contemporary translation:I do not count my life of any value to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I have received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the good news of God’s grace. The setting, of course – we heard it in the second reading this evening – is the eve of the apostle Paul’s journey to Jerusalem that he is convinced with lead to troubles of various kinds and to another and final journey to the city of the Rome where his ministry will eventually come to an end. He has a strong sense that he will never see again those from whom he is now departing. This is serious leave-taking. And so he summons the elders of the church at Ephesus and speaks to them in impassioned tones before they embrace him and accompany him to the ship that will take him to Jerusalem. And, as part of that farewell discourse, come the words that William Master wanted to hear explored in a university sermon. But to make sense of the context of this verse, we need to have clearly in our minds the four verses that precede it. Listen again – this is from Verse 20.I did not shrink from doing anything helpful, proclaiming the message to you and teaching you publicly and from house to house, as I testified to both Jews and Greeks about repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus. And now, as a captive to the Spirit, I am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and persecutions are waiting for me. And then comes William Master’s verse:I do not count my life of any value to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I have received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the good news of God’s grace.Master asks for a sermon on the sin of pride, but provides a verse in which there is no hint of pride. “I do not count my life of any value to myself,” says Paul. There is a kind of self-emptying, a humility, worthy of Jesus himself. I think we need to explore those preceding verses a little to find out why the sin of pride has not taken foothold in Paul. And I detect four ways in which pride has been held at bay.First Paul lays emphasis on our human failure, on sin that spoils so much. He reminds his hearers how often he has testified to both Jews and Greeks about repentance towards God. And indeed that has been a key part of his message in place after place. Like John the Baptist, like Jesus, Paul has called his hearers to repentance. And repentance is always about facing up to the truth, not deceiving oneself with a false and flattering image of one’s goodness. “I’m good,” nearly all of us say nowadays, when asked how we are. But the classic Christian answer is that I am not entirely good, for sin has its foothold, but, praise the Lord, I am forgiven.” A sober and honest estimate of ourselves, warts and all, as they say, will always save us from that most pernicious sin of pride, a sin that will make us blind to our folly, our failure, our foolishness and to our need of the forgiveness of God and of our fellow humans. That is Paul’s first key to avoiding the sin of pride.The second, perhaps more positively, is to hold constantly in one’s mind the picture of Jesus Christ. Paul says that he has testified to both Jews and Greeks about repentance, but also about “faith toward Jesus Christ”. Now partly that may be simply an extension of repentance. We fix our eyes and our minds on Jesus and we see one who lived quite wonderfully in the light and grace of God, one who modelled magnificently how to be a human being, living life to the full, and our response is repentance as we see how hopelessly far short we fall of the ideal that Jesus present to us. But it goes further than that. From birth to death Jesus models the humility that makes all attempt at human pride look pathetic. Looking towards Jesus and responding in faith banishes pride. Paul himself explores this fully in his letter to the Philippians, when he writes about the self-emptying of God to become a human being in the person of Jesus.Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, 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 to the point of death – even death on a cross. The one who comes into the world as a little child, born in poverty and in obscurity, is the humble Son of a humble God. The one who never wants his deeds of power or his divine nature spread abroad is the humble Son of a humble of God. The one who gets down on his knees to wash the feet of his disciples is the humble Son of a humble God. This is humility unsurpassed and, those who have looked into the face of Jesus and seen humility in it, looked into his mind and try to be conformed to it, will always understand that there no place for human pride in the face of divine humility. A recognition of our failure, a looking to Jesus, and, thirdly, a sense of fragility in the face of trial and persecution. You can catch some of the emotional intensity of Paul’s meeting with the Ephesian leaders. As a captive to the Spirit, I am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and persecutions are waiting for me.When he had finished speaking, he knelt down with them all and prayed. There was much weeping among them all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, grieving especially because of what he had said, that they would not see him again. Paul is in a vulnerable place. Already in his ministry he has experienced persecutions and calamities. Now he is living with a strong conviction that more of this awaits him. He is sure he will not see his friends again. The lives we lead are not often surrounded by such danger as his. But within each one of us there is fragility and vulnerability, even when it doesn’t always show. And Christian discipleship, because with it goes always the adoption of a risky adventurous embracing of a life of faith and a willingness to abandon security, a vocation to turn up side down the conventional wisdom of the world, is often an invitation to embrace that fragility and that vulnerability and not to fight it off by erecting strong barriers, which will often be barriers of pride. Pride sometimes comes with a determination to be strong, never to allow oneself the liberation of weakness. But the way of Jesus is the risky path, the vulnerable encounter, the fragile hold on life. Paul is clear that this is what he is called to now as he sets out for Jerusalem. There is no room for the sin of pride here in this man who recognises his weakness.A recognition of failure, a looking to Jesus, a fragility in the face of trial. But, fourthly, and perhaps at first surprisingly, pride does not get a foothold because of Paul’s unshakable sense of calling. It is there in William Master’s choice of text.I do not count my life of any value to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I have received from the Lord Jesus.And I say “surprisingly” because Paul’s ministry might be the very thing of which he might be proud. He has been an effective missionary. He has been a creative theologian of the first order. He has laboured hard. He has come through many trials already. He has, as he says elsewhere, “fought the good fight” and he does look forward to the reward. So might this not be a source of quite a lot of pride? Well, it might be, except that Paul has long since discovered for himself and insisted in his writings that God chooses not the wise and the successful, but the weak vessels, and that he delights to work in this world through a kind of divine foolishness that chooses unlikely people to be his collaborators.Paul shared something of this with the church at Corinth.Consider your own call, brothers and sisters, not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. And he adds, to ensure the point makes its mark, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” He is making the same point in a later letter to the church at Corinth, when he writesWe have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. Because Paul understands his calling in these terms, his vocation as an apostle, a highly effective one at that, does not develop within him the sin of pride. Rather it reinforces humility, for it reminds him that he is an effective minister because God has chosen him as one of the foolish, one of the weak, one of the low and despised. If he is going to boast at all (and he does feel the need to sometimes), he will boast in the Lord. All that is implicit in our text when Paul saysI do not count my life of any value to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I have received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the good news of God’s grace.For it is the good news of God’s grace that is at work in him, and that is he is commending to his hearers. It is God’s grace that, despite (perhaps because of) Paul’s failure and his fragility, is making him an effective minister of the gospel.So, if we are to avoid the sin of pride, Paul’s message to us has at least four elements. First, look at yourself honestly and repent. Second, look to Jesus and put your faith in him, Third, embrace fragility and live the adventurous Christian life of risk. Fourth, consider your calling, whatever it may be, and recognise that it is simply by the grace of God that you are enabled to fulfil it. And that is a sobering message from Paul and sends us off, determined not to so neglect reality that we fall into the sin of pride, opening ourselves to receive the grace of humility. Paul, like William Master, wants to undo our pride, but it is important to say that he is not wanting to undo our confidence, which is quite different. We are to boast, but not to boast about ourselves, but to boast in the Lord. His message to us is, in the end, a confident one, just as it was a confident one to the church leaders from Ephesus, even if they heard the message through tears.I commend you to God and to the message of his grace, a message that is able to build you up, and to give you the inheritance among all who are sanctified. We are to be confident Christians, confident in God, confident in Christ, confident in grace, but there is no room for the sin of pride. In the end what God asks of us is what he asked of Micah.What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and – this is the key – to walk humbly with your God? +Michael Gloucester:

Rt. Rev’d Michael Perham, Bishop of Gloucester
22nd November 2009

While everyone was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat…” Matthew 13 v 25Too much of my life is spent in committees, trying to find policies acceptable to enough people around the table to be put into action. If it is not your life already, it is likely to take up a good deal of your working time in the years ahead. It provides a good opportunity to watch your fellow human beings and their characteristics. In remember working for some time on a piece of work with a colleague who caused a particular problem. Being a highly intelligent man, he was for ever in search of the answer not to the matter in hand, but to the question that lay hidden behind the matter in hand. There was always, with him, a principle at stake which we were in danger of overlooking, and therefore a set of questions, not just one question, that needed to be answered first. And having broken our carefully prepared agenda with this semtex, he would then explain that what we were seeking to do was not the important thing at all, but would require (wait for it) a much more radical solution. With him, nearly all subjects went the same way: there must be first of all a major demolition of all that was there now. Then there would be space to build anew and without the impurities of the proposed design. I never decided whether this Jacobin was really a liberated radical committed to change and improvement or a mischievous reactionary who deployed this argument to prevent any change taking place at all. For the latter, as it happens, was far the most likely outcome of his interventions.People such as I am, who are less ambitious about changing things, but am genuinely interested to seeing how change can be steered and used have to learn patience. And therefore these words of the Lord about the tares in the field sown among the wheat are deeply reassuring. The farmer in Jesus’s parable has to live with the frustration of seeing his field far from the weedless prairie that our industrial farming techniques would make it. He knows it’s a mess, and the harvest in danger. But he must wait; wait for the sort-out that will surely come at the harvest time. And not lament or complain that it must be so: for the danger is that a radical solution is in danger of uprooting what is good along with what is bad.The kingdom of heaven is like this, Jesus said. That is the way God works with the difficult matter of our human world. He is holding back his hand, not because he does not want to uproot what is bad, but because he is most concerned not to destroy what is good. This is a clue to the way Jesus lived with his friends, too: if he saw, with the clarity that some people have, truly “uncannily”, about the people they meet, that Judas was a betrayer, he let him go on with what he would inevitably do. “Let it be so now”, Jesus said at his baptism. And as he is portrayed in the Gospels he is one who may provoke the troubles that fall on him, but who does not take the initiative in provoking them. He waits for what he calls the “hour”, the moment, the “kairos”, which is not his but the Father’s. In worldly things, we meet people who have a great gift for striking at the right moment: laying the right bet, buying the right stock, launching the right take-over, carrying out the radical restructuring of the business come what may. They take your breath away, these people, these children of this generation who are so much more effective than the children of light. Perhaps you have this gift: in which case I can only wish you well in your tightrope walking that may bring you to riches or damnation – or both.For Jesus’s restraint is no more the result of feeble will, or indecision, than the farmer’s in his parable. It is, what ours should be, a restraint of mercy. The farmer first of all, before he is horrified at the tares, concerned for the wheat. So we, in living with others, learn of the Lord to see and understand and cherish the good in them. Faith in Jesus helps us in other ways. That mercy is made easier by sharing His deep trust that God will care and protect what is good. I have no experience, I’m afraid, of living as if God was not there: an experiment I have ventured but had no stamina to sustain. Such glancing and temporary entertainments of atheism as I have dared have been for me intolerable and like a constriction to the spirits, and I don’t care to go there of my own will. A waste of life, moreover. For if somebody asks what does faith in the God of Jesus give you, I would say it gives me happiness in seeing what is good and confidence that it is lasting. For the good is not, in that Christian view, a threatened species, a beauty being hunted to extinction, or a doomed phenomenon with no lasting substance. The good wheat God will keep until His day. And this delivers the farmer from anger and keeps us from bad temper too. For God will have the last word, and his anger is kept until then. Jesus was not without anger: you feel it in his words and sometimes his actions. But it is summer storm, energy of decision fully owned and absorbed, not like a weak man’s outbursts and ill aimed fists and the cruel joke or sarcasm we too often repent of afterwards.God wants us, who hear his word, to be strong like this in our inner selves, that is our souls. We learn from Jesus Christ to desire steadily and deeply the flourishing of the wheat – that master image he used to describe the human life in its fullness. For that he labours rhythmically and expertly, doing all he can while he can do it, as a student takes care of the foundation of her study, assimilated to the deepest passions of what he desires of life: I’m sounding like John Ruskin, but no apologies for that. But then there are so many things, the world the flesh and the devil, that choke and frustrate his longing, and threaten great ruin. Only wisdom and being tuned to the heart of the Father will help us to discern when to act and when not to act. But mostly it is patience and fortitude that win. Anyone who wishes to manage human beings, and take them along a road, must have that quality of loving patience. And progress, measured by a genuine longing for another’s good, is glad of small advances, small changes. We rarely have a true chance of starting again. But we never cease to pray for the Kingdom to come, and to prepare for it with patience.

Very Rev’d Keith Jones, Dean of York Minster
15th November 2009