Category: Sermons

‘Anti-ageing research deserves a much higher priority, since age-related disease is the most common cause of death globally’ says Nick Bostrom, an associate of the university’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. Ultimately, he predicts, ‘our risk of dying in any given year might be like that of someone in their late teens or early twenties. Life expectancy would then be around 1,000 years.’I read this astonishing stuff last night in the Michaelmas issue of Oxford Today, the glossy news-mag sent to all alumni, as we are now called in the corporate fund-raising world. It’s in an article entitled ‘Woe, Superman’ on the ethics involved in the very real possibilities that are emerging of significant human enhancement. You don’t have to look further than the adverts on the Television for anti-aging remedies – ‘Because you’re worth it’ – to be reminded that ‘eternal life’ in modern parlance no longer refers to what used to be called heaven, the ultimate goal of our life, but to the ideal of endlessly prolonged physical existence.For people who inhabit a ruthlessly three dimensional physical universe, this endless existence may I suppose be all they can look forward to – more and more of the same. But is that what human life is for?The presumption of the modern, post-renaissance world is that the question most worth asking is how something works, whether it’s the human body, a computer or your motor car, or even the world itself. Armed with knowledge of how things work, we can conquer the world and solve every problem. But can we? And should we, even if we can? The debates we have in public life over and over again, and that the article in Oxford Today raises, show that we are moving inexorably into a position where a ‘can’ is now assumed to imply a ‘may’, or even a ‘should’ if that will increase the sum of knowledge, or some other supposed good, like human longevity or increased wealth. As Julian Savulescu, Director of the Centre for Practical Ethics says with reference to human enhancement, ‘To be human is to strive to be better. We have a duty to use our knowledge to achieve worthwhile goals.’While ‘worthwhile’ seems a highly tendentious word in this context, I suspect that what we are unconsciously taking for granted is an engineering-style pattern of thinking where a ‘can’ assumes a ‘may’. Patterns that derive from a precise, mechanistic language structure are ideal tools to use for examining how things – even the human body – work. In the west, we are the inheritors of thought-forms that are essentially Latinate, depending on a clear, temporal language-structure where cause and effect provide the linguistic framework through which we understand history and law, as well as the sciences. But reflection on what things are for requires a more allusive, speculative mode, where contemplation and wonder may provide the key to unlock the mysteries, and where knowledge might give place to wisdom. Few people these days are sufficiently fluent in classical Greek, with its moods and aspects, to appreciate that there are real alternatives to the Latin-based patterns of thinking we assume are the norm.These reflections are the preamble to my asking the question posed by today’s marking of Remembrance-tide. The context is the conflation of Armistice Day – the celebration of a longed-for peace after the bloody attrition of four year’s trench warfare in 1918, and the victory over the forces of darkness – as the conclusion of the Second World War was hailed – in 1945. This year it is given added sharpness by the escalating casualties in the conflict in Afghanistan. In a world where living as long as you can is assumed to be the ultimate goal, how can we make any sense of the loss of young life? Can there be any justification for keeping our troops there? How can we create the conditions to achieve that peace of which Jesus speaks, and which Isaiah pictures so vividly in the first lesson?When our Government was searching for an iconic centerpiece to place in the Millennium Dome, they decided to enthrone the source of our achievements, a gigantic model to show how the human body works. This provoked me to write a letter to The Times to propose an alternative. Instead of seeking to answer the question ‘How does the human body work?’ I suggested that what was needed was something which asked that more important question: ‘What is the human person for?’ Contrasting the post-renaissance and Enlightenment obsession with the mechanics of how things work – the scientific and stereo-typically male question – with the important one of asking what human life is for, I proposed that they hang in the middle of the dome not some inflatable doll with it’s tubes and organs, but an enormous crucifix.That is because the Christian answer to what human life is for has traditionally been answered in terms of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. This is the most challenging way of putting before people the upside-down values of the Kingdom of God. Most people in our society believe in getting all they can for themselves – in amassing wealth and possessions as a bulwark against the chaos and decline they see around them. The Christian vision, expressed vividly in the dominical sacraments, offers the reverse: we believe not in getting, but in giving.In baptism, the new Christian is plunged thee times below the waters, that they may know dying to self in order to live for God and their fellow human beings. In the eucharist we rehearse daily – weekly at least – the central proclamation of the gospel, that dying is the way to life: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit’, as Jesus declares in John’s gospel.This is the way in which we pattern our life, how Christian formation takes place. It is from this that the word ‘sacrifice’, so much part of the vocabulary of today’s celebration, takes it meaning, and why the image of the crucifix is still so powerful that an Italian court last week thought it worth banishing a crucifix from a classroom wall. After all, it wouldn’t do to have the modern educational dogma of each person striving for his or her potential undermined by that antique notion of sacrifice, would it? What would that do to competition, the mainspring of our consumer society?So where do you stand about what’s worthwhile this Remembrance-tide, not just in relation to the remembered past but also in dealing with the present? Because the present – even our present here in Oxford – is full of choices and their attendant risks. How do you cope with the risks of the road traffic, the Chemistry lab, of sexual encounter, of a blow to the head from a hockey puck, of too much alcohol, or coke or crack, the risk of just being alive, let alone considering the risks our armed forces are exposed to, day by day? There’s a lot around in the Health and Safety directives about avoiding risk. Haven’t even our own archbishops repeatedly urged us in this time of perilous danger from swine-‘flu to minimise the risks of the common cup at the eucharist? Yet, do we really want a cotton-wool society? Can there be such a thing as a risk-free world? Can anyone – even if they stay indoors – avoid contamination? How will they build up the antibodies necessary to gain a natural immunity if they never meet a germ, till the one that carries them off? Ought we not rather to learn how to live with risk, and manage it, as a part of our growing up, our becoming fully alive? Isn’t death itself an important and inevitable end to life, not just something to be avoided at all costs as a sign of our failure to control our destiny?For it’s that death – the only thing we can predict with absolute certainty about our future – it’s death that puts the question mark over the language of achievement, of what we think we are on this earth for. Is it simply to live as long as possible, to gain as much wealth as we can and to avoid risk at all costs? Or do we have some more dynamic aim in life? Is it to achieve a good, to free the world of disease or bring just and lasting peace to its peoples – a billion of whom live under tyranny or with constant war? For many of us personally, these global goals may seem a bit daunting. But we can all learn to be givers, not getters; to change the way we engage with people from what we can get out of them to what we have to give them. That’s what the gospel offers as the way, not as a burdensome imposition, but as the only way to true life and deep happiness.And anyone who’s been in love knows it.

Rt Rev’d David Stancliffe, Bishop of Salisbury
8th November 2009

First of all, thank you for the kind invitation to be with you this evening as we celebrate the Communion of Saints. Part of the difficulty with this feast is that it’s actually quite difficult to define, as it were, the terms of the engagement. On one level, today is about those who have attained to the beatific vision in Heaven: those whose self-emptying enables Christ’s presence to increase, while ego decreases; and whose lives are lives of many dimensions, lived to the full, since they are lives lived in full consciousness of God’s grace, mercy and glory. Throughout the church’s year we learn of the qualities and stories of specific saints throughout the church’s year, seeing those lives as reflections of the glory of Christ himself; and then tonight we consider the Saints en masse, in what Eric Milner-White referred to as the multitude which none can number – a glorious image which resonates within Isaiah’s vision of new heavens, a new earth – words later on re-stated in the book of Revelation. Within that multitude we celebrate not only those whose sanctity is well known to the church on earth, but also those whose saintliness is known to God alone, or who, whilst lacking the formal processes of canonization, have been saintly people in local communities, familiar contexts, perhaps in our own personal stories. So we are drawn to a more general reflection upon the nature of holiness itself – of what it means to be holy, both in the contexts of history and in the confusions of the present day. All these lives – the well known, the un-remembered, the half-acknowledged – are lives lived out in response to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the image of the invisible God. Many good, holy and faithful men and women came before Christ, and in their way point to him, but they were lives lived in messianic hope rather than a sense of response to Christ’s witness. Isaac Watts, who penned the memorable words for tonight’s anthem, reminds us of the truth that saints point to Jesus; We ask them whence their victory came, They, with one united breath, Ascribe the conquest to the Lamb, Their triumph to his death. That’s all well and good, and saints form a considerable part of the connection between Jesus’ story and ours; we are sustained by stories of saintly living, whether they be distant or closer to home, because they are stories shaped by Jesus’ story; we cheerfully acknowledge that, human nature being what it is, the fact and detail about a saint’s life can become obscured over time by legend and embroidery in much the same way that we treat the cult of celebrity today. Maybe we don’t mind that too much, since it’s part of our essential recognition of the saint – and therefore a sign of love – to treat them in this way. Perhaps we should also pause at this point to acknowledge that the doings and dealings of the saints are not always popular: holiness can, in some forms, be a downright irritant. I think it was Clive James who once observed ‘You can always tell a person who lives for others by the looks on the faces of the others.’If that’s true, then the appeal of the saint is far from unconditional. Sanctity is attractive to some, unappealing to others. To some the way of the saint stands in the way of freedom rather than pointing to it. Newman’s portrayal of the demons in The Dream of Gerontius paints the saint as antithetical to the notion of independent thinking and intellectual freedom for which an august College such as this self-evidently stands. Newman penned these words for the demon’s mouths:The mind bold and independent,The purpose free, So we are told, must not think to have the ascendantWhat’s a saint? One whose breath doth the air taint before his death;A bundle of bones, which fools adore…when life is o’er; These are words which still resonate, given the recent visit of the relics of St. Therese of Lisieux to this country and city. Here relics were accorded the kind of attention normally only given to those at the height of celebrity – an estimated 300,000 visitors across the country – and, according to one pilgrim interviewed by the Times Online, (and clearly anxious to plug in to the prevailing zeitgeist,) ‘She’s got the X Factor.’ To others, she was indeed a bundle of bones, adored by fools. In contemporary Britain, this is the theme which will not go away. That which is holy to some is mistrusted in a new and overt way by others in a way which would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. It is a debate being conducted freely, in newspapers and on the internet, on radio and television, on the shelves of Blackwells and (no doubt) in common rooms.The task of defining sanctity today is therefore, as ever, a challenging one. On one level, the counter cultural nature of sanctity means that it is what it has always been – an appeal to the divine, defying opposing tides and currents, to risking unpopularity, or worse. It’s well known that there were more Martyrs created in the last century than in any other before it – we at St. Stephen’s House were reminded of this last week as we commemorated those who lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – an historical event which receives relatively little attention when compared to the Holocaust or to Stalinist Purges, but where over one million Christians lost their lives. We should remember, too, that Martyrs, in many instances, died not only at the hands of those who wished to kill Christianity, but also at the hands of fellow Christians in conflict and disagreement. Oxford is full of examples of the holy who chose their historical period less wisely, whether you gravitate to Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer, or Nichols, Yaxley, Belson and Pritchard. All of them encountered an understanding that matters of faith and belief were important – that they, alongside of the political trends of the day, were the things which shaped lives, and were sufficiently important to need to silence those who pointed in another direction. Today’s church is operating in a very different context, where apathy and open ridicule are more likely to be the response. One indispensible trait in the genuinely holy is a disturbing, prophetic edge which can lead to uncomfortable encounter. To try to follow Christ at all is an invitation out of places of comfort into wilderness places: the saints are those who, in word and action, showed an integration of living and believing in which no part of their lives were immune from God, where nothing was held back, where the free response sought to equal the measure of God’s generous gift in Christ. Their words, lives, deeds and writings beckon humanity out of the darkness of soulless, inanimate living into the fullness of life which is the very glory of God. Saints are good for all of us, whether we are of faith or not. For the faithful, they point to the very root of our being, who is God himself. For the seeker after truth, they remind us that in a celebrity – ridden world of narcissism and veneer they represent the humility which lies at the heart of all compassionate human dialogue. Their calling is, of course, the calling of all Christian people – God’s desire that we should be numbered among them, living signs of the reality of His presence, activity and love in his world. May their lives, their witnesses, and their prayers surround our steps as we journey on, until Christ is all in all.

Rev’d Damian Feeney
1st November 2009

It’s a great pleasure to welcome students, fellows and staff back to Worcester and to their Chapel in this first Sunday service of term, and a particular privilege to welcome the Freshers. If Douglas Adams is right in saying that ‘time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so!’ then it is doubly true of time in an Oxford College. I can’t think where my first year has gone – one minute we are celebrating the beginning of term, the next we are singing Christmas Carols. Christmas comes early at Worcester, wait and see!
Whatever we have in store for us this term, there will certainly be work, but I doubt that one of your first essays will be entitled ‘What I did on my summer holidays’, although maybe some of the choristers may have written such a piece, I don’t know. But one thing I did in the long vacation was to attend my children’s sports day at their pre-school nursery – they are aged four and three. This was unlike any sports day I had ever been to before, because all the children participated in all the races and each of them was given a medal at the end and a certificate regardless of whether they were first across the finishing line or last. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland and the wonderful race of the Mock Turtle where Alice is astonished to discover that everyone wins a prize. This was all well and good, we thought, taking away the competitiveness of such days and making sure that everyone was made to feel a winner and that it was the taking part that counts. All the children were delighted and there were no tears. All very well, that is, except that, as a parent, one couldn’t help feeling just a little disappointed that, when our little girl finished first or second in a race, she was not given her just reward. As it turned out, it was probably just as well when it came to the parents’ race. In the mums race Emma came last and in the Dads race I came second to last, even though I was sure I could beat the other young fogies lined up with me. With the adults, there was no lack of competitive spirit, I can assure you.
Well, whether this is your first year at Oxford or not, getting into this institution is a competitive business and, when you did, you were certainly among the top students in your school and in the country. And, of course, in order to come here you have to obtain at least three As at A level, which is no mean feat, whatever John Humphries implies about them getting easier every year when the results come out. So, getting here is a real prize for being the best. But I wonder, how does it feel as a fresher, or how did it feel for those of us who can remember, to realise that now everyone around us has at least the same level of intellectual ability as we have if not more. Does it feel any less gratifying getting 3 As or more, knowing that everyone else has them too. Like the Mock Turtle’s race, a prize for all, but whose the best now?
Luckily here at Worcester we hope students leave here as rounded and well-balanced people, not just academic geniuses who keep their college at the top of the Norrington table, or dare I say it, Oxford University at the top of the Times League table of the best universities. Nevertheless, student life at the highest level does involve an element of competition, even if that competition is with oneself: ‘How can I prove myself now, a first, a double first? A congratulatory viva or a D Phil with distinction’? As Chaplain I know from first-hand experience that such pressure, whether external or internal can cause some anxiety and stress. And for those of you who are not students. Fellows, Research Fellows, and parents how was the summer for you? Was it ‘productive’ or does the work now have to be crammed into the next busy academic year to meet the deadlines. A friend of Dr. Scullion once mused that if a scholar is asked ‘How was the summer?’ and he or she answers ‘It was productive’ that means they did a little work. If they answered ‘Not as productive as I hoped’ then that means they did nothing at all!
Recently, the writer and journalist Keith Waterhouse died. He was famous for his columns, books and plays, but also for getting up early to work and finishing early in order to have a long and liquid lunch with friends. When one of his friends once wanted to see one of his plays in Bath and asked him: ‘How long is the train journey to bath?’ he answered ‘About a bottle and half of Chardonnay’. Anyway, Waterhouse was also plagued by a recurring nightmare that when he died he would be visited by an angel, and taken by the hand and led to an enormous library where he was shown a long shelf of books. When he asks the angel why he is looking at this particular shelf of books, the angel replies, ‘Those are all the books you should have written.’ However successful we may become, anxiety is often never far away.
Now I know that the cure for anxiety is never to say: ‘Don’t worry, everything will be fine’. It simply doesn’t work like that. But I am going to suggest that this evening’s readings and psalm provide three very important practical guides to building a good life. One: Build your life upon God. Two: know that God created you, redeemed you and called you and that he is always with you. Three: seek the kingdom of God and live its values. The first of these precepts can be found in psalm 127 sung to us by the choir: ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.’ Unless we want to know the power of Godly love, kindness, justice, forgiveness and peace, all the anxious striving for wealth, fame or success is mere triviality. God’s goodness will work in us if we allow it to. The second guide comes from Isaiah, in the promise of restoration and protection we heard read earlier: ‘But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you: I have called you by name, you are mine.’ These are powerful words indeed and one can spend an entire lifetime meditating upon the enormity of their significance – not as a creationist manifesto, but as a simple expression of humanity’s ultimate goal and purpose, to be in relationship with God, creator, redeemer, sustainer, who is with us in the good times and the bad. And lastly, Jesus’ own words, assuring us that we do not need to replace a simple relationship of love between God and each other, with a pride of self-importance that leads to stressful breakdown of trust. Seek first the kingdom of God and its values of righteousness, that is of having one’s will aligned with that of a loving God, self-importance will wither away.
Everyone has a contribution to make in this college, whether in academia, sport, art, drama or music; whether as a chorister parent, student, fellow, porter, chef, waiter or cleaner. But the greatest contribution you will make will be your love, kindness, gentleness, gratitude and humility to one another. Take comfort in Jesus’ words and consider how lovingly God has created you, how much you owe to those who have helped and guided and befriended you. Consider how you may give a little of the goodness of yourself to your fellow human being, knowing how much God has blessed you. Amen.

The Chaplain
11th October 2009

We have had some challenging readings this term for the preachers but, given the context of this service, I find myself unwilling to delve the Pauline mysteries of predestination tonight, so here’s another reading:‘Gandalf said, “Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth … and the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West.’I’m sure some of you will know that passage from Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or perhaps have seen the film. Perhaps fewer of you will remember a BBC radio adaptation of the trilogy made over twenty years ago. This thirteen hour marathon is now available on CD and my wife Emma and I sometimes listen to it. But whenever we get to the thirteenth episode, where Frodo departs and says farewell to his friends, Emma will refuse to play the CD, preferring to listen to episode one again rather than hear the end and weep. Endings can indeed be very sad, containing as they must, a sadness of loss, of letting go and of leaving something precious. However, without endings you cannot have beginnings. Along with sadness, there is the excitement and anticipation of a new beginning, a new start. For some here that might mean a new school, with new friends to make, new challenges and changes and growing to maturity and wisdom. For older leavers there is the prospect of further study in a favourite and specialised area, or the tantalising possibility of a new job and earning money. For others till, there is that most wonderful of changes, of starting a new family.But I am not underestimating the challenge and anxiety of change. In Garsington one member of our congregation is an eminent psychologist and, as he was asking us about how we were settling into our new home this year, we were chatting about the psychological stress of the big changes of life: marriage, divorce, bereavement and so on. Two of those big changes were moving house and changing jobs. I asked: ‘So really you would recommend not doing too many of these events too close together then.’ ‘Well yes, he said, for good mental health I would recommend trying to space out big changes in life.’ I wondered if he would like to recommend this as a policy to the Church of England or an Oxford College.It is only to be expected therefore, that the prospect of change for anybody here provokes a mixture of emotions, some of which are comfortable and some of which are not. Therefore, I’d like to offer two thoughts, which I hope will be of reassurance. Firstly, that certainly in the short time that I have known many of you here, not only through this year but also from the summer of 2006 when I was acting chaplain, that you are very precious people, who do good work and sacrifice much for the good of others, often under difficult circumstances, and not least for this college and chapel. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to know you. And, for once, the words of St. Paul come to mind from 1 Philippians:‘I thank my God, every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy for all of you. And this is my prayer, that love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help determine what is best.’Secondly, we have the reassurance that, whatever the changes ahead, you do not go alone for Christ goes with you. I am sure many of you know Mary Stevenson’s poem, footprints in the sand, but it is worth repeating:One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only.This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord,“You promised me Lord,that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand. Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?”The Lord replied, “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.”And so, as you journey onward, we ask forgiveness where we have failed you; we give thanks for all you have given us; we assure you of our love and prayers. As you experience the pain of change, and the insecurity of moving on, we pray that you may also experience the blessing of inner growth. And, as you meet the poor, the pained, and the stranger on the way, we pray that you may see in each one the face of Christ. As you walk through the good times and the bad, we pray that you may never lose sight of the shelter of God’s loving arms and that the peace of Christ may reign in your heart.Amen.

Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain
14th June 2009

A schoolboy puzzling over the doctrine of the Trinity suggested to his teacher that it was like three men travelling in one car. He was pleased with his analogy, but the teacher thought about it for a few minutes and replied that it was not so much three men in one car as one man in three cars. So that’s all clear then. The teacher wasn’t being perverse. The Trinity is notoriously difficult to understand – but then, as Augustine points out: ‘if you can comprehend it, it is not God’. Alister McGrath suggests that the doctrine of the Trinity can be seen ‘as a safeguard against simplistic or reductionist approaches to God, which inevitably end up by robbing God of mystery, majesty, and glory.’ Preaching on Pentecost Sunday, I’m glad about this. I can now assure you that my failure, in this sermon, to explain the significance of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity will be motivated purely by my desire to preserve in your minds the mystery of the divine. (Ahem). The passage from Acts which is the New Testament reading this evening is the dull bit of the account of Pentecost. In the twenty-one preceding verses, we’ve had violent winds, tongues of fire on the apostles’ heads, miraculous speaking in foreign tongues, and the Apostle Peter’s invocation of Joel’s prophecies – the sun turned to darkness and the moon turned to blood. But here Luke, the writer of Acts, takes a change of direction, turning to a historical narrative, putting into Peter’s mouth three verses summarizing the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This narrative is not obviously connected with the events of Pentecost which surround it: commentators suggest that Luke incorporates some traditional material at this point. For we are not, of course, to think that Luke here inscribes word-for-word the first Pentecostal sermon, recorded by some far-sighted friend with good shorthand: rather we know that he records the pattern and message of that sermon which, scholars have noted, is a common pattern and message of Christological proclamations recorded in Acts. It is an oddly matter-of-fact narrative, and yet Peter’s message is later said to have brought three thousand to faith. How does it do this? The speech is very simple in what it has to say about Christ, much simpler than many passages in Paul’s writings, for example. Firstly, Jesus was a man, and he was a man marked out, or accredited, by God who performed miracles through him: secondly, you put him to death: thirdly, God raised him from death ‘because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.’ There is no statement about Christ as Son of God; no assertion of Christ’s nature as divine or sinless; no discussion of Christ’s death as salvific through sacrifice or atonement. Instead, there is a simple, stark contrast drawn between God’s purpose and the actions of the listening ‘Men of Israel’ who put Christ to death: though they knew of the miracles God worked through him, they did not appreciate their significance; they did not grasp that death could not hold Christ, and so they killed him.But, the Book of Acts declares, ‘God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.’ And then there is the jump to a quotation from the Psalms, in which David writes that ‘you will not abandon me to the grave’. What is this about? We all know that David died. ‘I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried and his tomb is here to this day’, says Peter. An immediate, human understanding of David’s words is deceptive – the words appear to be a lie. But David was a prophet, and he perceived things in a different way: seeing what was ahead, he ‘spoke of the resurrection of Christ.’ This passage of the speech also, then, draws attention to the gap between human understanding, and divine purpose and perception. The speech which Luke records Peter delivering at Pentecost does not extrapolate on the complexities of the Holy Spirit’s position within the Trinity, or come anywhere close to Paul’s sophisticated development of the doctrine of atonement. Simply, it emphasizes the gulf which separates our feeble misunderstandings from divine reality. The Men of Israel ‘know’ Christ’s miracles (v.22), and now ‘see and hear’ the effects of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the disciples’ preaching in tongues. But even though, as the witnesses of Pentecost declare, miraculously ‘each of us hears them in his own native language’, they recognize the words but not the meaning. The speech recounted in Acts does not entirely explain what Christ was, but it makes clear that he has now become ‘Lord and Christ’, and so highlights the dramatic nature of the error of those who did not appreciate his significance. C.K. Barrett writes: ‘It is presumably the reminder, uttered in this context, that you crucified this Jesus, that pricks the conscience of the hearers.’ The realisation of error – of the gap between human and divine perception – and of the awful violence resulting – achieves repentance, conversion. ‘About three thousand were added to their number that day.’ One of the most alarming and also most exhilarating things about studying is the daily realization of new depths of ignorance in oneself. The more we read, the more we discover new fields of knowledge, the very existence of which we may not previously have suspected, and which we then long to explore: and exploring this new field will hint at other, unsuspected fields, so that we are more and more extensively ignorant. Sometimes new learning adds up, but more often it modifies, challenges, or even reverses previous learning – and this too can be exhilarating. As the scientist Valentine, in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, puts it: ‘It’s the very best time to be alive, when everything you thought you knew is wrong.’ And yet we often resist being wrong. Because we think being right is what makes us valuable, we will argue endlessly to prove our point, even when we ourselves feel it becoming indefensible. I undertook, to some of you present, not to discuss a certain matter of expenses which has been dominating the headlines of late, so here I will simply suggest that defending the indefensible sometimes seem to be an art form in Parliament. I fear that academics might be able to give MPs a run for their money, too!‘It’s the very best time to be alive, when everything you thought you knew is wrong’ – how liberating it would be to believe that! How liberating it was for those who heard Peter’s preaching, at Pentecost, to realize that they were wrong – not suddenly to understand all the divine mysteries, or to grasp the complexities of soteriology, but just to know that God’s point of view was different, and bigger and better. The experience was not pain-free – Luke tells us they were ‘cut to the heart’, but that heart-piercing was itself witness that God had fulfilled his promise, made through Ezekiel in this evening’s Old Testament reading: ‘I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’ And then they were able to turn to God in a new way of knowing: the word which is translated as ‘Repent’ is rather richer in the Greek, meaning something like ‘Embrace a new view of things.’ So let’s embrace the idea that we are likely to be wrong, and that we are unlikely ever to know anything much fully and completely. But let’s remember too that this is not an excuse for intellectual idleness or passivity. We cannot appreciate our intellectual fallibility unless we ask more questions, with more energy – for if we stop questioning we start to think we know, and then we become credulous of the lies or deceptive half-truths which are for example, daily pedaled in the racist, sexist, ageist trash of the tabloids and more than occasionally broadsheets, too. And we must question like Piglet’s friends, in Winnie the Pooh. When concerned that Piglet might have been blown away by a very strong wind, Eeyore explains that people will start to ask questions: ‘People will ask, ‘Where’s little Piglet been blown to?’ – Really wanting to know!’

Dr. Elisabeth Dutton, Worcester College
31st May 2009

There is – or was – a curious small painting on display at Wimpole Hall, a slightly Soanic house run by the National Trust in Cambridgeshire. The canvas depicts a group of people in classical dress and pose, more or less in a chariot, ascending through the clouds into the heavens. Slightly to my surprise this is entitled ‘The Apotheosis of the Family of George III’; I suspect painted to commemorate the king’s jubilee in 1810. Sure enough there is the principal character, King George at the height of his powers, presiding over a family more familiar to us for their failings. Contrary to general reputation, not least among Americans, George III was widely loved and when he died, deaf, blind and mad, he was profoundly mourned. King George was religious – he would not, for example receive Communion shortly before seeing his ministers because he would be in too bad, too impious a mood. But the same cannot be said for his children; the dissolute and feckless Regent and his variously compromised brothers and frustrated, dessicated sisters. Perhaps the painting is not hinting at conspicuous virtue but at the dynastic triumph of the Hanoverians. An anti-Jacobite icon which the owners of Wimpole would have been proud to display.Yet the idea of immediate access to the heavenly places is not so unlike the contemporary conviction, noted by me at countless funerals over the years, that departed loved ones can be assured of a place in heaven, because their virtues and sufferings will be remembered and their sins quite forgotten – by whom I am not sure. I hazard that the desire for secular funerals may prove less than strong (they are invariably more expensive), because it denies belief in heaven, even if that belief is seemingly aside from any confidence in God. I have seldom encountered a bereaved person who doubted that virtue, however modest, would be rewarded.It is of course rather difficult for us to divorce the feast of the Ascension of Christ, the return of Jesus to his heavenly home, from its rather colourful spatial imagery, even if it is somewhat unsatisfactory both scientifically and theologically. Theologically, because it can look like a curious species of victory, a reward for virtue if you like; a rather tidy wrapping up in an albeit amazing homecoming. The Ascension of Jesus, which we celebrate today, may seem unusually like the confirmation of courage and virtue; the final scene in the drama of his birth, self-giving life, brave death and victorious resurrection – a signal statement that for all his rejection and isolation upon the Cross, he was, if we had but realized it, the Lord of our worlds. In this view the celebration of Ascension is a tribute to the return of Jesus to his rightful place in the heavenly realms, after his painful sojourn upon the earth; a restoration of the rightful order – God in his heaven and all well. And this rather spatial view of the Ascension lies behind some quasi-liturgical traditions. Did we sing an Ascension carol from the top of a College Chapel tower because now Jesus would hear better? Do the Spaniards throw a donkey off a tower to prove that if God has gone up, the rest of creation certainly hasn’t? – a practice I believe now outlawed! Are fireworks let off so that Jesus can now spot them? Curious and harmless.At its worst the Ascension, in its spatial suggestion, plays to some of our less happy notions of power and patronage; of a God who invariably looks down, condescends and probably judges – as if those dangerous and dramatic days of passion had taught the Godhead nothing. Of course we should not ignore some of the rich ambivalence of the imagery of power in Christian iconography. In Spain there is a particular devotion, popular in the south, but elsewhere as well, of Jesus, bound and trussed like a lamb and vested in a gorgeous purple coat, head held down and awaiting the weight of the cross. In many places this statue is known as Jesus del Gran Poder – Jesus of Great Power; a sort of irony, because at one level it is the moment of Jesus’ least power – gone the supporters and the crowds and the palm branches; alone, silent and judged within the limitations of a humanity he shares. There is another image which you may perhaps know – that of Our Lady of Pew in the Henry V11 (or Lady) chapel in Westminster Abbey; of a medieval origin when ‘pew’ was, I have learned, perhaps an abbreviation for ‘puissance’ (although on this the OED is silent). A pew I take it is not really a seat for the likes of me, but was originally for a person of some quality or unique dignity (hence the historic readiness to pay pew rents in our parish churches!) –derived from puissance, powerful. Our Lady of Power then, as Jesus of Great Power. But this, I venture is not the naked power of arms and authority, but the power of influence – the power which belongs to some one of particular standing with others. The power of those who have perhaps recommended themselves by their actions or their heredity; a power which, quite simply is credible to others; power which as our political lords have discovered lately is not easily recovered once lost. Jesus is puissant, not because of his political strength or supernatural energy (which largely he rejected), but because in his life, suffering and death he has recommended himself to us. His influence with us is not that of a master who cajoles or a prince who commands or a ruler who coerces, but of a brother who understands the test and humiliation of living. The Ascension should not be seen to subvert this.But for all our nervousness about spatial imagery, we should not deny that Christian believing has its own cosmology, in the sense that some thinkers write of all cultures as having a cosmology. I am indebted to Hans Engdahl, of the University of Cape Town, who has made some intriguing parallels between Christian liturgy and the fashioning of the worlds in which we live by imagination and fact. He suggests that those who worship are cosmologically transformed; we see our cities differently and we have an altered relationship with the natural world. In particular – from his own context – he argues that in the face of apartheid Churches in South Africa remained miserably passive and in practice adopted segregation legislation – mirroring a cosmology not the Church’s own; only now are they discovering once again that the Church is a place where the world must be viewed differently. There are of course similar risks in those parts of Britain and other European nations where the Churches are heavily wedded to the State. Engdahl warns especially against the false cosmologies represented by first, hierarchical leadership and secondly the liturgical assembly as a closed circle. More usually we would talk about this as ‘ecclesiology’, but I value the term ‘cosmology’ as suggestive of the fact that how we view our life together as disciples in community is really about more than just practical and historical features of order and discipline, but rather how we view the orientation of life and our world (and not just the Church) now that we know Jesus.The Ascension plays to these themes. For we could imagine that if Christ has ascended into the heavens then a top-down order of governance and power is both ordained and endorsed, as if the Christ in heaven is not that same Jesus who washed feet on the night before he died. This is a typically Catholic dilemma. There is a kindred dilemma by which we imagine that Christ is uniquely available to those who believe, and have received the sacramental marks of faith and justification, as if in his Ascension, Jesus has not shown that he is present equally in each place, in every age and to all communities. That is the Protestant dilemma. There is a distressing tendency for Anglican churches to display photographs or snap shots of the parish clergy and the entire congregation as a means of welcome – thus turning the church into an enclosure, into which people wander with difficulty – what is intended as affirming to those inside, will be interpreted quite other by those not yet in.By contrast American priest friends of mine have come to a position whereby they will not deny the sacrament of the Eucharist to anyone who presents themselves at the rail, whether regularly initiated or not, thus asserting that the community is open and that the sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood may itself be a sacrament of entry. All of this I might add is yet done on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ basis.The promise of heaven which the Ascension denotes is in fact, as Augustine noted, nothing more or less than the confirmation that Jesus ministry was effective; his living, dying and rising worked; it was puissant. I believe that John Updike, in a poem I have yet to read – and written just before his recent death – posited that we would be better off to have heaven at the beginning rather than at the end of our lives; thereby perhaps drawn into virtue by what has been known, rather than what is promised. I get the point, yet for Christians the Ascension asserts that we must order our lives and imagine a cosmos only by the drama of the passion and resurrection of Jesus – thus and no other.

Rev’d George Bush, St. Mary-le-Bow, London,
24th May 2009

A sermon preached in Worcester College Chapel, Oxford, 17 May 2009So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I shall spew thee out of my mouth (Rev. 3:16)If ever you visit Norwich Cathedral, spend a few minutes away from the obvious delights of the building and go to the north transept. There you will find a statue of Bishop Henry Bathurst. The statue is an image of a particular kind of holiness. The bishop sits with his bewigged head inclined: his hands rest peacefully in his lap. He was a man who served his diocese long and carefully and who shot a cock pheasant at Holkham Hall on his 80th birthday, in 1824. His lifestyle was one which the excitements of the high-church Oxford Movement and the evangelical revival taught people to sneer at and, indeed, it was already under suspicion in his own day. His was a reasonable, rather than an emotional Christianity, of the undemonstrative kind that permeates the poems of his East Anglian contemporary, George Crabbe. The faith of Bathurst and his contemporaries in the early nineteenth century is still with us and it is still suspected of letting the side down by its coolness and detachment. It may be that something needs to be said in its defence; that a word needs to be put in for the Laodiceans.For such a faith as Bishop Bathurst’s really is a faith. People who share it also share what might be called the guilt of faith. This is the guilt that we are not making as big a splash as others, as big a bang of confrontation – not pushing as hard or making so much noise. How lucky are those who know what the Christian faith is all about and who can stand up and proclaim it loud and long! How inadequate we feel when we listen to them, knowing that we cannot give the same firm answers, or the same level of commitment. Yet it may be the Christian duty to explore the possibilities of a believing life which is less concerned with exciting happenings and ideological achievements than many Christians are at the moment – making the rest of us feel a little unserious and light-weight.Passionate and outspoken commitment to particular causes is not the monopoly of religious people, of course. I am often made aware during election campaigns, for example, of the similarities between the language and imagery of some political parties and the language and imagery of some churches. Both seem to be saying, ‘If you want to be saved, join us. If you have any intelligence at all you can’t possibly be taken in by the alternative solutions. Ours is the only way forward: we are the children of light.’ It all reminds me of the preacher’s note to himself in the margin of his sermon: ‘Argument weak – shout like hell.’We are suspicious of the language and posturing of confrontational politics and confrontational religion because something about them makes us feel uneasy. People are never fanatically dedicated to something they have complete confidence in. No-one is going around shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow: we know it is going to rise tomorrow. Or look at it the other way round. You are flying on an aircraft across the Atlantic. Every five minutes or so the pilot comes on the intercom to say that the flight is going smoothly and that everything is perfectly all right. After half an hour you’d be getting pretty worried!The give-away sign of this kind of fanaticism is its possessiveness. The fanatic hugs his or her concern to themselves so tightly that the distance between them and it is abolished. That is why you cannot reason with a fanatic: there is no space to reason in, simply no room. On a trivial level, that is why I was never able to convince my school friends that the football team I supported was so much better than the ones they followed; not even when my lot won the league championship and the F.A. Cup in successive years – 1964 and 1965, if you’re interested. The person who has that level of absolute commitment to a cause or idea is led into confusion in the literal sense of the word. The individual is swallowed up by the cause and the capacity for individual judgement and response is damaged and, in extreme cases, destroyed. And this can have worrying political and social consequences. The more you are committed to a particular cause, the higher become the stakes of success or failure, the more you have to clamp down on criticism of your objective, and the less freedom you give to individuals and groups to form and express their own opinions.Faith is different. Distance and space are part of its structure. That is why it allows reason: distance and space are essential for reason too. The bible begins with God creating the world. That is something quite different from possessing or being the world, on the one hand, and having nothing whatever to do with it, on the other. By letting the world be, by himself creating the distance between himself and it as his first great indispensible work, God makes the original act of faith and sets the pattern of his creation’s response to him. The picture here is not of a God who imposes his creation upon us and makes up all the rules in advance, but of a God who depends on our co-operation with him in the ordering and running of that creation: a God who even stands back, who hides himself, so that we will have the space and freedom in which to operate.The faithful response of the creation – which includes us – to this kind of a creator consists of two things which belong together. The first is the obedient exploiting of the independence he has given it by getting on with its business. The second is never to confuse any of this with God himself, even in its religious aspects. Faith says, ‘we are unworthy servants, we have only done our duty’ – our ‘reasonable service’, as the prayer book so aptly puts it. We get on with our responsibilities but are quite clear that they are just that – not God, but responses to him. We are not called to make a choice between God and the world. Rather, we are to affirm both, and in fellowship with our creator enjoy his creation, whose true order is ours to discover and proclaim.For Bishop Bathurst, in his unassuming way, life was all of a piece. Whether as a faithful pastor and teacher, a husband and father, a lover of literature, or a supporter of the less fortunate in contemporary society, all was grist to his mill. One of the last acts of his long ministry was to go to the House of Lords at the age of 90, to cast his vote in support of Lord Melbourne’s reforming government. Bathurst recognised the truth of St Paul’s discovery, towards the end of his life, that ‘all things cohere in Christ.’It is this Christ who shows in our world the graciousness of the God, who, in Thomas Traherne’s words, ‘courts our love with infinite esteem.’ We celebrate the new life he brings, not with raucous proclamations and agitated concern, but with quiet and watchful confidence, alert to the signs of the kingdom of God in our midst.Christopher CunliffeArchdeacon of Derby

Ven. Dr. Christopher Cunliffe, Archdeacon of Derby
17th May 2009

At first sight and first reading Revelation is a very peculiar book. There’s nothing else quite like it in the New Testament, or in the Scriptures as a whole, with the possible exception of the second part of Daniel. We are therefore not used to this style of writing and to the conventions of apocalyptic literature, with its careful structures, literary devices, symbols and images. If we dip into Revelation as unwary readers we may find that it consists of the kind of lurid dreams and visions that may stand as a warning against eating cheese just before going to bed. I’m glad, therefore, that the reading appointed for this evening doesn’t take us into the stranger parts of the book. They have been a happy hunting ground for interpreters ranging from the harmlessly eccentric to the frankly certifiable. We are asked instead to address ourselves to a couple of the letters with which the book opens. Revelation is a kind of circular letter with seven different introductions, each one tailored for a particular Christian community in Asia Minor, probably towards the end of the first Christian century. So we’re going to look briefly at the letters to Sardis and Philadelphia, but before we do, let me quickly introduce those two places to you.Sardis was a famous city in the Ancient World, the city of the legendary King Croesus, whose fabulous wealth rested partly on local gold deposits and partly on the position of Sardis at a junction of important trade routes. Badly damaged by an earthquake in AD 17 and rebuilt by the Romans, Sardis was a powerful and populous city, maybe two thirds of the size of modern Oxford. It was a place with an influential Jewish community and one with an impressive reputation.Philadephia, about thirty miles from Sardis, was an altogether less imposing place. Flattened in AD 17 by the same earthquake as Sardis and then rebuilt, it suffered such regular tremors that the geographer Strabo reported that fresh cracks appeared daily in the city walls and few people actually dared to live in the city itself. Philadelphia depended on agriculture for its prosperity, particularly on the cultivation of vines, and it has been suggested that this was under threat at the end of the first century because the Roman government had decreed the destruction of provincial vineyards to boost grain production. Philadelphia, then, may have been an anxious place.Two cities. Near neighbours, but very different in culture, character, confidence and reputation. And the church in each place reflects its particular context.One theme running through the seven letters in Revelation 2 and 3 is the injunction: ‘Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.’ So, what is the Spirit saying, to these particular churches, and to the Church as a whole, and to the churches we ourselves know best? Let me suggest four messages, one each to those contrasting communities of Sardis and Philadelphia, and two to both churches. We’ll start with the specifics.First, then, in the letter to Sardis, with all its wealth and power, a warning to the self-satisfied. ‘I know your works; you have a name for being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains.’ (3:1, 2). The church in Sardis, like the city itself, seemingly has a high reputation. It looks good, and is well spoken of, but it fails to deliver. Its reputation is a carefully crafted pretence, a façade concealing a disappointing reality. It reminds me of a church in East Anglia I used to visit, with a pretentious Classical portico in stone tacked on to a building of cheap brick. Unfortunately, the job hadn’t been well done, and the stone portico was gradually falling away from the rest of the building. In a world of spin and poise – or should that be pose? – God is concerned with our inner selves, with the sincerity of our faith, our obedience and our love. That’s what matters. And if we’ve slipped away from that, we need to wake up and to repent, to turn around and go back to where we ought to be. However good we look, God isn’t taken in.Second, in the letter to Philadelphia, with its wobbly walls and shaky economy, an encouragement to the faithful under pressure. ‘Look, I have set before you an open door, which no-one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.’ (3:8). It seems that the Philadelphian Christians are a small group, and perhaps in conflict with a well-established Jewish community in the city. Whatever the precise details, there are people around making life difficult for the Christians and pressurising them to abandon their loyalty to Jesus Christ. That story has been repeated in every age of the Church, and it isn’t at all unusual today for Christians to feel out of step with the general drift and tone of society. Pressure to conform, to let the world squeeze us into its mould, in Paul’s phrase (Romans 12:2) is strong and pervasive. This letter encourages us to recognise the pressure and to resist it, confident in God’s presence, power and love.Third, in both letters, a reminder of the challenge of discipleship. All seven letters share a reference to ‘the one who conquers’: maybe an athletic metaphor, but more likely a military one. Christian discipleship isn’t a pleasant afternoon stroll: it’s a struggle. It means living a counter-cultural lifestyle, and resisting external pressure, as we’ve seen. It also means self-discipline: cultivating a pattern of prayer, Bible study, worship and fellowship and developing a sensitivity which can detect and sidestep temptation. These qualities don’t come naturally. Sometimes they may seem easy and straightforward, but at other times we may find that prayer is a chore, the Bible a closed book, worship uninspiring and other Christians a pain in the neck. Then it’s hard work. The closest I got to rowing when I was an undergraduate was living next door to someone who went out at what seemed to me like the middle of the night to practise. I had a sneaking admiration for his commitment, even though I didn’t want to do it myself. Sometimes as disciples of Jesus Christ we need that sort of determination, and it’s hard.Fourth, and finally, the promise of belonging. Someone has said that Revelation is a book full of graffiti. Time and again John speaks of things written: in books, on scrolls, on gates and foundation stones and even on people. The Christians in Sardis have their names written in the book of life, a heavenly version of the roll of citizens common in the cities of the Hellenistic world. The Philadephians go one better: they are personally inscribed with the name of God and the name of the New Jerusalem. The point is that they belong. They are known and accepted by God. Their standing is secure. As Christian people we are already citizens of the New Jerusalem. Our calling and our joy is to live up to what we are.There is warning here, and encouragement; a reminder of the challenges we face, and an assurance that faithful discipleship confirms our place as citizens of heaven. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. So be it. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Martin Wellings, Wesley Memorial Church, Oxford
10th May 2009

Today, as many of you will know, is the Sunday known as Good Shepherd Sunday. I don’t know about you, but I find that shepherds and sheep don’t generally loom very large on the horizons of my life. It’s a shame: it’s not often realised quite how much sheep resent the lack of interest that human beings show in them. Do you remember, for instance, when it was reported a couple of years ago that scientists had discovered how to clone sheep? They were going to be able to create tens of thousands of identical sheep. Even the sheep’s mothers weren’t going to be able to tell them apart. They were going to look the same, bleat in the same way, smell the same, talk about the same things, support the same football teams, wear identical clothes, watch the same television programmes, have the same opinions about everything, and so on. The story broke on the Ten o’clock News; and all over the country sheep drinking their Ovaltine burst out into wild celebration as they realised that the morning papers were going to be full of the story – perhaps even with interviews and photographs of some famous sheep. At last humans would have to take sheep seriously. But it was a different story when they actually saw the morning papers. The Times led with the headline, “Hitler Superman fears revived by Frankenstein scientists”. The Guardian had “No woolly thinking pledge by ethical dilemma genetic engineers”. The Sun’s headline was, “My day with Posh Spice’, by kiss-and-tell weightlifter.” Nowhere was there any hint that anyone had considered what the news might mean for sheepdom.And really, I suppose, that’s about how it is with humans and sheep. We don’t have a lot of time for them. They don’t seem to have minds of their own. They need to be led. They constantly fall prey to parasite worms and maggots; if they haven’t got sheep scab or scrapie; if they’re not finding some poisonous plant or rolling onto their back, then you can be sure that they’re wandering off into the path of a fox or dog or some other predator. As a farmer once told me, “A sheep is an animal looking for a reason to die.”And yet this is so unfair to the sheep. The sheep is an animal that we should never underestimate. Sheep may not be the brightest of God’s creatures; and yet there is probably no other animal in the world which is so completely useful. In addition to its wool for clothing, meat for food, hoof horn and bone for fertiliser and lanoline for ointment and cosmetics, the sheep gives fresh life to the soil, turns grass into protein by natural feeding quicker and better than any other animal, and under good management provides the farmer with a satisfying livelihood.And that’s why, in the Old Testament, God’s people are referred to as the sheep of his pasture. For the nomads and Patriarchs of Israel’s primitive years, sheep were the most valuable possession. They were walking wealth; something to be cherished; something to be valued; something by which a man’s worth was measured. Nothing was more important than to protect your sheep properly; no other kind of work gave a better return. Shepherds were consequential and responsible people: Moses and King David were both called away from their flocks to play their part in the destiny of the Nation. So it was natural that people should be described as the people of God’s pasture and the flock of his hand.And what we celebrate today is Christ’s affirmation of his role in the Christian’s life as our shepherd. “I am the Good Shepherd, and I know my flock and am known by mine.’ I am the Good Shepherd”; or, more idiomatically perhaps; “The Good Shepherd is me.” Christ finds good pasture for his people; he protects his sheep from thieves who come to steal, to kill, to destroy; he defends them from the attacks of wolves that harry the flock and scatter the sheep.Why does he do this? Well, don’t say this too close to a sheep, but he has an end in view for them. An economic end. He wants a return from them. Christ’s parables are much more often about business than about prayer. Next week we’ll be hearing about a vine that doesn’t give good grapes, that provides a bad return to the one who planted it. Somewhere else we hear about a fig tree that was threatened with being axed because it failed to bear fruit; we hear about people being given money to invest and being sacked if they don’t make a decent profit. And it’s the same with sheep. Sheep are about wool, about mutton. It’s all about sitting on a plate next to a spoonful of redcurrant jelly. That’s the return a shepherd gets for his work, that’s why the owner has invested in his sheep. And mark my words a return is expected of us. We’re being fattened up to be the body of Christ in the world. We’re here to do his works, to love his love, to work with him in bringing in his kingdom. And if we’re going to do that we have to be kept together; and we have to be fed.The role of the shepherd in Christ’s world was to protect the flock, keep it together, and ensure it was fed. Remember Palestine is a dry country; vegetation is sparse and slow-growing for most of the year. A flock has to move on quickly to pastures new when there is nothing left to feed on. That’s where the idea comes from that the shepherd is a leader. But for most of the time the shepherd is ensuring that the flock is being fed and watered. Pasco pascere pavi pastum, to feed. The pastor is the one who feeds you. My flesh is meat indeed, said Jesus; my blood is your true drink. You cannot live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. A balanced diet of word and sacrament.And what’s all this for? What end does the great shepherd have inmind for us?Let’s look at that word end. The word end is something we hear a lot of in the Bible. Christ loved his own and loved them to the end. I am with you until the end, he said to his disciples. The end can sound quite frightening sometimes, straing as it does with earthquakes and wars and rumours of wars and goijg on to plagues and angels and the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Some people prayed that God would make the end short. But the end is the whole point, and we need to take it on board. It’s often hidden in the translations from the Greek, and we need to search it out. It’s the same word as perfection, completeness: be perfect, even as God is perfect, means ‘be people of the end, even as God is of the end’. All things returning to perfection, to endfulness, through him from whom they took their origin. Returning to perfection, returning to endfulness – this strange nostalgia for the future by which Christians sense the purposes of God’s creation.The purpose of God’s creation is the end. And we have the option of working with God towards that end or not.The word that Paul uses in one of his letters in synergy, and let’s never forget that synergy is a Christian word. We can choose to work with God or not – we can choose to live in all abundance or to tread the paths of futility and decay. We can choose to rebel, we can choose to do it our own way and see where it gets us. We’ve got free will, we can choose to reject God’s purpose, to turn our backs on what he asks of us. We can choose to walk in light or to walk in darkness.Or we can be seduced by the world. Because the world may have other plans for us. Did you see what Susan Greenfield said about young people last week? ‘We are rearing a generation who are in danger of becoming emotionally stunted, inarticulate hedonists, with the attention span of a gnat.’ How do you feel about that? What they’re blaming is consumerism; and the economists are coming right back and saying don’t blame capitalism, it’s not inherently evil, and if you don’t like it why don’t you see if you can come up with something better?I don’t want to make this a long sermon, but I want to say something about consumerism. When I was young Erich Fromm wrote a book called to have or to be. The idea was that we were turning away from love, from relationship, from the pleasure of being alive and purely existing, and getting our kicks from the things we own. That may have been true once, but things have moved on. Perhaps that was maetrialsim, but we’ve moved on from that. Consumerism is a next setp. Because when you buy something you’ve become economically inert. If you buy a car, you’re not likely to buy another one for some years, so you’re no use any more. The market isn’t getting your money, Revenue and Customs aren’t collecting any VAT from you. So you have to be persuaded to buy again, and again; to be dissatisfied with what you have so that you can satisfy the demands of the market. This can become the purpose of your life. Just as a Bible loses its proper purpose if it’s used to prop up a broken piano leg; just as a beautiful grand piano loses its purpose if you keep it closed and just use it for displaying photos; so you can devote your life to being a consumer. We can refuse our high calling as the children of God and devote all our energy to consuming, filling our garbage cans and consuming again. Humans can live the life of cattle, Aristotle said, and that’s how it goes. And what goes for cattle, I suppose, goes for sheep as well.Because you can lead a sheep to grass; but you can’t make it eat. The sheep have to want the food and drink that’s on offer; they have to be willing to be fattened up; they have to accept the calling to be part of the flock that is asked to give a return for its investor. God didn’t make his promises to blocks of wood, said St John Chrysostom; we have to be prepared to acknowledge our hunger, to open our mouths, to accept the feeding that is offered. It is open for us to refuse our calling, or neglect it; we can decline to stand just a little lower than the angels, and revert to being creatures of appetite and passion.Every minute of every day that choice is ours. Become a mere consumer or follow on to glory.Lord, as you have called us to your service, make us worthy of our calling. In the name of Jesus Christ, our shepherd and our great High Priest. Amen.

Rev. John Paton, Precentor Christ Church
3rd May 2009

I,like many people this week, have been mesmerised by the accounts of Barack Obama’s inauguration. The whole event was captivating for so many reasons: such as the sense of hope in the air; the apparent defeat of the ghosts of racism in the USA and a sense of renewed purpose in global relations. Alongside all of these for me, however, was the incredible sight of over a million people gathered in Washington drawn to celebrate but also to give voice to a deep hunger for peace, for change and for a better world. One of Barack Obama’s talents seems to be to awaken in people a hunger for something deeper and more nourishing that the current political scene has been able to provide.
It is striking, therefore, to read this evening’s gospel reading with this great crowd in mind. Here, almost immediately, we meet another crowd who were also following a leader and whose whole discussion with Jesus — which reached its famous culmination with the words ‘I am the bread of life’ – was also about hunger. John’s crowd, excited by the feeding of the five thousand, that came just before this in John’s gospel sought out Jesus in the hope of something more. What they seemed to be hoping for was a steady supply of miraculous food; no wonder they were drawn by the thought of miraculous bread that would last forever – the ultimate in long-life bead.
The ensuing conversation between Jesus and the crowd, as so often in John’s gospel, led to layer upon layer of confusion. It seem that the author of John’s gospel like all the best comic writers knew that the profoundest truths can often be communicated best by people getting the wrong end of the stick over and over again. After an extensive amount of Jesus talking about one thing and the people thinking he is talking about another, eventually Jesus reveals that what he is really talking about is himself: not something that you can carry off, hide in a cupboard and use for your own advantage, but something that provides eternally lasting nourishment and refreshment.
An intriguing part of John’s narrative is the words that he uses for bread. The bread that Jesus provided in the feeding of the five thousand was barley bread, which was, by all accounts, the worst possible quality bread. It was made from the cheapest grain and often contained grit and other substances that wore people’s teeth away and made it very difficult to digest. The bread he talks about here when he declared that he is the ‘bread of life’, is a different kind of bread – the best you can get. Not only will this bread last for ever, it is the tastiest, most nourishing kind of bread you can possibly hope to find.
What Jesus really seems to be challenging the crowd to think about is what it is that nourishes them. They became excited and pursued Jesus after experiencing poor quality, hard to digest bread the nourishment of which would soon pass, causing them to be hungry again. What Jesus was trying to show the crowd was that even their most exaggerated vision of what they might have was too small, too narrow and ultimately unsatisfying. Jesus was trying to get them to see – and to choose – an entirely different kind of nourishment: the best quality, eternally lasting, deeply nourishing kind.
Of course the problem is that then as now, people – myself included – are notoriously bad at choosing good quality nourishment. Given an entirely free choice of food, despite the fact that I know its bad for me, has no lasting value and positive negative qualities I will time and time again choose a piece of chocolate cake rather than a piece of fruit. It is an odd quirk of the human make-up that most of us seem almost congenitally unable to choose those things that are best for us. Even saying that phrase — ‘best for us’ — makes me feel overwhelmed by the desire to rush out and choose something inappropriate.
So often that which we think we need, is comforting for a while but quickly passes to leave a sense of deep emptiness which just grows and grows. What the crowd thought they most needed was physical nourishment; what Jesus was trying to get them to see was that there are deeper and greater needs even than food.
Of course the problem is, that if we take this passage too literally, we end up with a deeply unhealthy attitude – this passage, among others, can be seen to lead to what Rudolph Bell memorably and disturbingly called Holy Annorexia – the tendency, particularly but not exclusively among women, to fast to the point of death as a result of their Christian faith. This is not what Jesus means here: the sustenance that Jesus provides is not instead of normal food but over and beyond it. The nourishment that Jesus offers fills the hunger and thirst that lies deep down at the very core of many of our beings.
In a sense, the world in which we live is a living, breathing testimony to this fact. We have, in fact, invented long-life bread, and meat and vegetables, and fruit and almost any other nourishment we might hope to find. Technically it is no longer necessary for anyone to be malnourished – though it is the tragedy of our age that we have the means but not the capacity to ensure the nourishment of everyone.
Reading the Newspapers and watching the news this week, reinforces Jesus’ point. Even in these worrying, cash limited, financially concerning times, most people in Britain have enough food to eat and enough water to drink…and yet we find ourselves to be a nation of people malnourished by too much food, addicted to self-destructive life-styles, driven to borrow and spend far more than we can sustain. Statistics show that 20% of people will suffer depression at some point in their life. Now I’m not trying to suggest, in a facile and saccharine way, that Jesus will solve your problems and make you happy.
Instead, what I think that Jesus was trying to draw our attention to is this deeper question about nourishment. We, like the crowd that followed Jesus, seem to give so much of our attention to activities that cannot with the best will in the world fill the gnawing, nagging hungers deep within. To return to Barack Obama for a moment, in his autobiography, Dreams from my Father, Obama talked about his time in Chicago as a community organiser and the importance of the task of helping people to work out what it is that they really need. I think that the genius of Obama is that he has not lost this skill and seems to be adept at drawing out what American society, and indeed the world as a whole, might need.
To those people gathered to welcome Obama this week, to the crowd who pursued Jesus with such passion, and to us here this evening two questions resound
– what is it that makes you achingly and yearningly hungry?
And
– what might fill your need?
Barack Obama is clear that he, alone cannot provide the world’s answers; Jesus did provide an answer, in the somewhat enigmatic words: ‘I am the bread of life’. What I believe he was pointing to here is that a life centred not on what we want or even think we need but on Jesus, the bread of life, in prayer, in worship, in community and in action, we will find – sometimes to our surprise – our deepest needs met, our yearnings fulfilled and our hunger satisfied.
Amen.

Dr. Paula Gooder, Canon Theologian, Birmingham
25th January 2009