Category: Sermons

The theologian Frances Young describes her experience of driving through the lanes near her home in Birmingham, with her very handicapped son Arthur, and coming across a woman trying to lead a reluctant horse, tugging at its reins, next to a field. As they passed she said, “He can’t stand the Shetlands”. And there, in the field, was a group of tiny Shetland ponies. The horse had recognised that they were the same and yet different; and Frances Young reflected on that, and on her own reactions, and those she encountered in other people, to the disabilities of her son; the awkwardness and embarrassment that can be a part of our response to the ‘Other-Abled’ is mirrored in the reaction of that nervous horse.

This week, we have rightly celebrated the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America; and I have been reading his autobiography, and in particular his account of community organisation among black people in Chicago, and how different and how difficult it is to be black in the United States (or, for that matter, in this country) today. This in turn made me reflect on my own experience of working for many years in South Africa, mainly with black students, under both apartheid and the present democratic arrangement. Some people speak of Africa and blacks as the white person’s dark twin, with whom we are inextricably linked, and whom we unconsciously seek to destroy, the Other who is also very close to us.

Last Sunday, Sol Campbell was booed, whenever he had the ball, at White Hart Lane, not because he is black, but because he is a former Spurs player who now plays for Portsmouth, and is therefore recognised as the Same and yet Other.

In November, there was a conference on disability in Lourdes, a place that has shaped my life over the last +40 years, and I was invited to give a Scripture input, in which I talked about Jesus’ attitude to the Other-Abled. Also speaking at the conference, and far more impressively, was the great Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities, where the people whom we label as “mentally handicapped” and “normal” live together in villages, and care for one another. He shared with us two very important, because hard-won, insights in his painfully honest talk. The first was that what we too easily call (and so dismiss) as “disabled” reveal to us something of what it means to be human, something at odds with the celebrity culture of Youth, Beauty and Fame, into which we can get trapped. Secondly, and very impressively, he shared with us how “disabled” people revealed to him the violence that lurks deep within him, and in all of us. Those who have had to look after the elderly, or the disabled, or babies who do not stop screaming will, if we are equally honest, recognise what he is saying.

We react, you see, in a very odd, and mistaken, way to what is Other and yet the Same. Oxford and Cambridge, Worcester and St John’s (or whatever college is your traditional enemy), Everton and Liverpool, Catholic and Protestant. There is that in us that looks at the Other, yet very Similar, and sees only that which is Different, and Dangerous and Wrong, that which must be eliminated: so I can and may employ violence against it.

This is simply a fact about us. The trick is to know what we are to do about it, and not just during this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity; but this is a good time at least to raise the question.

Well, for one thing, we can watch Jesus. Consider the two readings that you have just heard. The first is from Hebrews, presenting Jesus to us as “The Real Thing”. Jesus is the Same and yet Different. The author of Hebrews, in order to express this “real thing”, reaches for a metaphor, that of High Priest, and uses the metaphor to compare Jesus to the High Priests in the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus, he says, unlike that priesthood, really is able to save, and to provide “access” to God. How? Because, in the words of that particular translation, he is “holy, innocent, uncontaminated”, which is to say that Jesus is not trapped in the violence and the insecurity that drives us to condemn others, and to mark them out as Different and Dangerous, like the horse alarmed by the Shetland ponies. So Jesus has, as he argues, no need to offer sacrifice for his own sins: Jesus is the Same and Different. He does not, the author points out, belong to the Right Tribe, if he is to be a High Priest (he is from Judah, they from Levi); nevertheless, Jesus is the real thing.

In the gospel that you have just heard, Jesus is beset by crowds from all over the area that we call the Holy Land. Why is this? Because he has power over everything that threatened them, and because he refused to exclude anybody. So much did this attract them that he needed a boat to protect him from being crushed. Mark lists, under two headings, those who came to him:

· the afflicted, including, of course, the ritually impure, who made Jesus in turn ritually impure by touching him; and he never turned a hair.

· And the unclean spirits who recognise him (in the way that we know our enemy who is the Same and yet Different).

So what of us today? What about our journey as Christians together? We too have to learn about the violence, born of insecurity, that lies deep within us. We too have to learn to reach out in love to the Other, and there recognise the human face of Christ.

Who or what, then, is your Dark Other? Is he (or she) Catholic, black, crippled, mentally handicapped, male, Welsh, or a supporter of the wrong team? Who is the person of whom you find yourself instinctively disapproving, when you pass them on Beaumont St, or shy away from in the Cornmarket? Who is the member of your year the mention of whose name is guaranteed to bring a sneer to your lips? They all carry to us an invitation from the God who is both Other and closer to us than we are to ourselves. That God always calls us out of our “comfort zones”, often into places, and towards people, where we thought we could not go, only to discover, with a shock of pleasure, that God was, after all, waiting for us there, and inviting us deeper into the mystery of what it is to be human. That is something we need to pray for, as we celebrate our week of praying for the unity of the body of Christ.

Fr. Nicholas King, Campion Hall
22nd January 2009

A warm welcome back to College, to students, staff, Fellows, choristers, parents and visitors. It has been a recent tradition to have a sermon series in the Hilary term, and this term I have chosen the ‘I am’ sayings in St. John’s gospel, or at least some of them, which I shall explain in a moment.

Incidentally, I recently tried to get into Ripon College Cuddesdon, a theological College, and found that I couldn’t because there was an IAMS conference going on. On the front door was the sign: “The IAMS conference”. And I thought that really, to be grammatically correct, this egocentric gathering it should be the “WE ARE” conference shouldn’t it? Of, course those of you with cats will know that IAMS is a brand of cat food, one that we feed to our own cat.

Anyway, this term’s sermons will have nothing to do with cats, I expect, but you can never be sure. We have seven eminent preachers who are going to examine seven sayings of Christ: “I am the Bread of Life, I am the Light of the World, I am the Good Shepherd” and so on. So it is my task this evening to try and introduce the series and to put the forthcoming gospel readings and sermons into some kind of biblical and theological context, and who knows, you might have your appetite whetted for the subject and get hooked.

For it certainly seems like a fascinating subject to me, the idea of who is God anyway. It is fundamental isn’t it? Why are we here to worship, on what do we base our lives, what is our basic ideology, morality, our purpose for being. These essential questions of human existence are radically influenced by these questions: who, or what, if he exists, is God and what is his character, purpose and will? Now this may get a bit technical, so hold on, and for the theologians among you, you will almost certainly get a question on the signs and sayings in John in Finals, so it’s an essay question worth revising.

So let’s start with some essential information: firstly, John’s gospel is the only one to use the “I am” statements. Now, whether this is because that was John’s recollection of Jesus’s ministry, or the way John particularly wanted to depict Jesus’s ministry, or just a useful device to communicate his theology is not clear. If we consider John’s gospel to be quite a late gospel, written after the others, then there could be some element of refined and considered theology about it. And that idea is collaborated by the structure of the gospel, in that the “I am” sayings contrast with the “I am not” sayings of John the Baptist at the beginning: “I am not the Messiah (1.20); are you Elijah, I am not (1.21); I am not worthy to untie the thongs of his sandals ( 1.27)”, and again, “I am not the Messiah” (3.28).

Now, when it comes to Jesus, it’s important to clarify that there are three different types of “I am” sayings. Firstly, the metaphorical (“I am the bread of life, light of the world” etc.), which we will look at this term, where Jesus identifies himself in comparison to something else, often following an action or miracle, which becomes a sign, an identification, of who Jesus is and an explanation of Jesus’s actions.

Secondly, we have the self-identification sayings (“I am he, I and the Father are one, I am from above”, and so on). These sayings identify Christ in relation to his Father and usually follow some kind of inquiry, when Jesus is in discussion and his identity is called into question or needs verifying, either for the person with Jesus, or for us the reader.
The third kind of statement is the simple statement of existence and this only occurs once in 8.58: “Verily, verily I say to you, ‘Before Abraham was I am’.”

So what is the point of all these ‘I am’ sayings. Is John labouring the point somewhat? Well, if we consider the opening lines of the gospel: “In the beginning was the word” etc. then we have a gospel that is fundamentally Christological in its purpose. John is writing in order to explain that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and introducing the idea of pre-existence, which was developed later in the Church’s history: the idea that Jesus existed before his human birth, thus proving his Divine status.
But the real purpose of the gospel, beautifully structured as it is, becomes apparent at the end. The beginning is an teaser, as it were, the end is the answer:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
In this context the metaphorical “I am” sayings and the self-identification ones are relatively clear as ways to paint a picture of Jesus in terms of his actions and his relationship to God the Father.

But what about the simple, “Before Abraham was, I am (not even I was, which would seem more grammatically correct, because Jesus is quoting the Hebrew, “Yahweh”, in Exodus 3, which has no tense). But now we get to the nub of the issue:
There is precedent in Old Testament traditions for a similar enigmatic “I am” statement. As we have heard, Exodus 3 recounts Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush on Mount Horeb. When Moses asked whom he should tell the people sent him to deliver them from Egypt, God revealed himself as “I am” or “I will be” (Ex 3:14).

It is not so much a statement about ontology, proving the existence of God, but more a statement about the character of God, which becomes more clear, as we hear in the later books of the bible, through His involvement with humans history. He is not only a creator God, but active and creative within history. The name God takes for himself in the burning bush is almost a challenge: I am in every moment of time and space, and thus, Moses, I will be in every part of your future and your people, so look out! It is the same challenge that He sets us “I am”: here, active, living, involved.

So, this is the background to the verse in St. John that we heard tonight: “I am he”. John is applying the Greek version of the Hebrew “I am” Thus, Jesus identifies himself with the same God who manifested himself in his saving relationship with the Jewish people. John’s whole gospel, from its beginning to its end, attempts to show that Christ is God’s Son, who existed before creation, lived, ministered, died and rose again, according to his Divine character and purpose, which is at one with his eternal Father, who is active in all the pain and joy of human history. Each saying and sign points to this Christological truth, and as John points out at the end, the purpose of encouraging the reader to believe it is so that they might have life “in his name”: the very name itself represents his saving, sacrificial, loving purpose.

The metaphors that Christ uses to describe himself in the seven sayings we will be examining this term are very special and beautiful. They are well-known phrases that perhaps we take for granted, but I hope you will enjoy this term, as I will, looking a little deeper into the power of Christ’s language and his message. For the words are, after all, the words of life. Amen.

The Chaplain
18th January 2009

‘War will continue to the end’ (Daniel 9:26)

The national movement of remembrance started after what was called ‘the war to end wars’ in a combination of grief and loss, pride and hope. This mixture is kept alive in the Albert Hall (last night) and at the Cenotaph and in hundreds of cities, towns and villages (this morning), on web sites and even in an extra historical pamphlet distributed in yesterday’s edition of a national newspaper.

There is hardly a family in the land that cannot refer to at least one member in the past 100 years who was affected by violent conflict at home or abroad. In the 1st World War alone some 2700 of this University died (18% of combatants, of whom many were from Worcester College).

And now we have not mainly inter- but intra-national conflict. This was brought home vividly to me in my first visit to Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (in 2003) to minister to a community where the local bishop had had to flee because of tribal violence between the Hema and the Lendu. The tiny Cessna plane landed cautiously on a grass runway and my journey was made secure by a band of heavily armed child soldiers.

Added to this is the murderous intent of global ideological assassins. In the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Tuesday the wreath laying ceremony at the Diplomatic Service Memorial will name 18 members from Sir Christopher Ewart-Biggs in Dublin in 1976 to Mr Ali Ghazi Abdulhussein in Basra in 2006 who have died in terrorist attacks.

If these are not our memories, and we missed the school trip to the Western Front or the Concentration Camps, [Auschwitz] there are still numerous feature films that remind us of the violence and the emotions that are expressed in war, terrorism and tyranny. The opening minutes of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ are a graphic illustration of 6th June 1944, (but you might also turn to Bobby Sands’ Northern Ireland in ‘Hunger’ or Idi Amin’s Uganda in ‘Last King of Scotland’)
where the still-present themes of patriotism, bewilderment, bereavement and relieved thankfulness are woven through the stories.

But what are we to think and do with the unpalatable evidence that ‘war will continue to the end’?

We do right to remember the dead (here in Oxford we have just erected a new memorial plaque to centuries-old martyrs! we might visit the courageous patients with their mangled bodies in Birmingham’s Selly Oak military wards) but how do we keep a clear vision and practice of peace;
how do we secure and nurture our values for a flourishing society;
how do we strengthen ourselves when violence impinges again and again?

The writer of the Book of Daniel (over 2000 years ago) hoped, as we do, for a resolution to all this and offered a pattern of putting things right.

‘to finish the transgression
to put an end to sin
to atone for iniquity
to bring in everlasting righteousness
to seal both vision and prophet
to anoint a most holy place
(9:24)

Now this pattern of development does not encourage a naïve modernism, fuelling the myths of progress, but a profound realism about human weakness and fallibility.

‘To finish the transgression’ reminds us that we need power and authority to make and keep peace.
As a Highlander (an ethnic group from which came many who made military aggression both a pastime and a career)
I keep on the wall at home three 18th C broadswords of the kind used at Culloden and on a shelf the archetypical dented silver cigarette case that saved my grandfather at the 2ndBattle of Ypres. These serve to remind me of both the reality and the personal cost of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.
I also read (John Gray ‘Black Mass’ or Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern’)

Remember to PRAY for armed forces and for the diplomats, UN troops and national leaders in Great Lakes Africa.

‘To bring in everlasting righteousness’ reminds us that we require a clear understanding of the public values to which we subscribe, asking, for example, for gifts of unselfishness and co-operation in order to create a fruitful society.
Here we might benefit from reading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks ‘The Home we Build Together’ and a vision of a Covenant and a new language to articulate our human desires and aspirations.

Remember to PRAY for political and community leaders and particularly for President-elect Barack Obama that he is protected from the assassin’s bullet.

‘To seal the vision’ reminds us that humans need to have a firm personal faith to keep going when unreasoning tragedy strikes.

The image of Christ carrying his cross (John 19:17) takes us to the heart of God entering into this weakness and bearing suffering caused by deliberate violence. Through his death on a cross Christians believe that sins are forgiven [there is atonement]; in his resurrection, that life can begin again [the vision is sealed]; by the power of Holy Spirit that is possible to live [the righteous life].

Remember to PRAY for the ‘hope within you’
and to do so together.

Jesus in the midst of terrible suffering and imminent death, looking down from the execution cross, commissioned his friend John to care for his mother Mary. We can imagine them breaking bread and sharing the cup of wine, [this is my body broken for you, this is my blood shed for you] together at home with the words of Jesus in their minds
‘do this in remembrance of me’

‘War will continue to the end’ so as we know ourselves in the remembrance of all these things and as we bear responsibilities for the peace of our 21st C global village let us benefit from the
beautiful grounds here at Worcester and pause at four points, recommended on the web site, the Orchard, Lake, Lawn and finally the Chapel.
Here in this holy place the prayer recommended from the prophet Isaiah (43:1-3) encourages us to remember God’s promise even in war and terror

“Do not fear, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine”.

The Rt. Rev’d David Urquhart, Bishop of Birmingham
9th November 2008

It is November. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is a dead month. Dead leaves are being stripped off the trees; the darkness seems all-pervasive; and November contains, of course, Weeks 5 and 6 of Michaelmas Term, when it is obligatory for all undergraduates to experience those 5th (or, according to taste, 6th) week blues, something akin to The Wall that Marathon runners hit at about 18 miles. This is the moment when students realise that there is absolutely no hope of getting to the end of term, or of coping with the absurd demands of their tutor. For these, and other reasons, we feel ourselves in this month surrounded by death, bereft of hope and meaning. So we celebrate All Souls Day, to pray for the dead, on November 2nd; and it is a healthy tradition within the Catholic church, to pray all month long for those who have died. Next weekend we shall have Remembrance Sunday, to remember and honour those who have died in war. And, in Halloween, we have an ancient ritual for keeping the darkness at bay. Which is why on Friday evening, if you remember, you were rushing about Oxford in those strange costumes and those odd masks. And today, celebrating the feast of All Saints, the Church wisely gives us a glimpse of that that hope and meaning that seems so far off in dark November.

For the saints whom we recall today are not those plaster statues of doubtful artistic merit that you sometimes find in Catholic churches, wearing those unattractively pious expressions. Saints are flesh and blood human beings, with flaws and frailties of their own, who, on their journey to God have their own share of battles to fight, and have marched, or limped, or crawled, to the end, and, in the process, have given us a glimpse of God, and the consequent recognition that there is hope and meaning in life.

Consider the readings that you have just heard. The first was probably written for that extraordinarily difficult time in Israel’s history, when the exiles came back from Babylon to Jerusalem; Jerusalem had functioned for them, all during that half-century of being away, like the thought of an oasis in the desert (or of home after a term at boarding school or university). And they get there, and find that no one wants to know. They are not welcome, nor are people queuing up to restore to them the property that had once been theirs. The city’s infrastructure was a shambles; sin and corruption were rife. There was no Temple any more, and no enthusiasm to rebuild one. (I was in South Africa in July and August this year, and found something of these reactions among those who had most looked forward to the aftermath of the first democratic elections in that country, in April 1994). Where, they must have asked, is all this hope and meaning? To those baffled returnees, the prophet offers a wonderful vision of the world that God is creating: Jerusalem is to be a ‘joy’; instead of a shambles, it will become a place where there is no premature death; and instead of a desert, the prophet depicts a remarkable picture of unexpected fertility, a place where the ‘wolf and the lamb will lie down together’, and, beyond all belief, but still capable of inspiring and moving us, the affirmation that ‘none shall hurt or destroy on my holy mountain, says the Lord’. We notice, of course, that at this stage in Israel’s development there is no hope at all of Resurrection; but there is, after all, meaning and hope, in the view of this unnamed prophet. It is a glimpse of God at work in our world; and that glimpse is what saints, the saints whom we recall today, give to us.

The second reading comes from the Letter to the Hebrews, which has sometimes been attributed to Paul; but we shall do well to listen to Origen, the great Greek biblical scholar, who said, ‘Who wrote the Letter to the Hebrews, only God knows’. Certainly, the author had an extraordinary theological mind, one of the best in the New Testament; and we listen with awe as he reflects on the difficulties of being Church in the world today, and on the awkward question of who Jesus is, a question that he resolves by saying, in effect, that ‘Jesus is the Real Thing’. This is an appropriate enough reading for All Saints, because it offers a list of our forebears, who gave us the glimpse of God that saints can present. And it may help you to consider that there were some pretty ropey characters among the names he mentions: have a look, if you have nothing better to do this evening, at the doings of Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah in your favourite translation of the Book of Judges. And reflect also on some of David’s less appealing characteristics, for his was another of the names listed there. Nevertheless, these somewhat hairy individuals did extraordinary things under God, and so can you (although I have to urge that, at any rate just for the moment, you don’t try closing the mouths of lions or being sawn in two). And, says the author, ‘they were stoned’. I suppose that in this company I do not have to make it clear that this term is used literally, not in the vernacular sense which you saw exemplified last night.

Notice, however, that even though these characters have given us a glimpse of the vision of hope and meaning that God has on offer for us, they have not quite made it. What you and I need, to complete the picture, is the one whom the author describes as ‘Jesus, pioneer and perfecter of our faith’. Jesus, you remember, is for this author ‘The Real Thing’, the one who experienced the hopelessness and meaninglessness of the Cross, and is still God’s ultimate affirmation that there is hope and meaning, even in November. So even on this dark and damp evening you should be glimpsing the vision of a promise that hovers just around the corner.

How, then, can this work in your life? Let me speak of three events that took place this week that gave rise to a vision of meaning and hopefulness.

On Monday, we buried a member of our community. He was 92 and had heart problems, so his death, which happened quietly in his armchair, was not a surprise; but it was something of a shock. He was an old man, very deaf, but startlingly observant, who saw everything, and gazed upon it with a patrician benevolence and a deft touch of humour. I was enormously impressed with the range of people whom he drew to his funeral, the more so in that much of his working life had been spent in Africa, so that a good many of his friends could not be with us on the day. In particular, I was touched by the grief of two young men, brothers in their 20s, who had flown in from Boston and from Kathmandu in order to be there. Because, you see, he had given them a glimpse of hope and meaning. And that is how God uses us human beings.

Then on Wednesday, we started to hear of two murders, of Jesuits, who belonged to the tiny Jesuit community in Moscow. It did not attract much attention in this country, but it was on the various Jesuit networks, and, in particular, we at Campion Hall got to hear a good deal about it because one of our current students is a member of that Moscow community. So it came home very much to us, as our brother spoke of what had happened: the two had been quite brutally murdered, 20 hours apart, in the apartment that was their community residence, by a killer who apparently waited in the apartment, having killed the first, for the second one to appear. Where, you ask, is the meaning and hope in all that? Simply, I think, in the fact that that the community will continue its work, and will not think of ceasing to do so. There is a glimpse of God, even in those circumstances.

Finally, yesterday, I was in Newcastle, at a meeting, a part of which took the form of a religious service for sick people and those who care for them. Before the service started, I overheard a wife talking about how difficult and demanding her wheelchair-bound husband was being. Then, at the Lord’s Prayer, I happened to see her, standing by his wheelchair, unobtrusively, but with enormous tenderness, place her hands on his. That was a glimpse of God, of hope and meaning.

And what of you? There are people in your life who speak to you of God. And they may be unexpected people, for all of us, including your tutor and the homeless man whom you hurried past yesterday because he looked a bit unkempt, all of us are saints made in God’s image and likeness; and all of us offer a glimpse of the hope and meaning that are found only in God and in Jesus.

And do you see what that means? It means that you too are saints, made in God’s image, and that you too can give people a glimpse of that God. So today is your feast, and you must be prepared to leave this Evensong ready to radiate your God-likeness, and so to proclaim to a dark November world that there is meaning and hope in life. It is a great invitation that the Lord lays before you this evening.

Rev’d Nicholas King, Lecturer in New Testament at Worcester College
2nd November 2008

I wonder if any of you were surprised by our Old Testament reading from Ecclesiastes. It could not be more different from the readings from Proverbs in the first two Sundays of term: in those readings, it was clear that the author believes God is close at hand and that he intervenes in the world; proverbial teaching on morality is positive, clear-cut and black-and-white: there are material rewards for good behaviour and punishments for bad, and trust in God gets special rewards. Our the two readings from Proverbs 3 and 4 which we heard in weeks one and two of term offered the following advice: ‘Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh, and refreshment to your bones’. ‘Happy is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gets understanding’. ‘Get wisdom, get insight! Do not forsake her, and she will keep you’. ‘Hear my son, and accept my words, that the years of your life may be many.’ ‘Keep hold of instruction, do not let go: guard her, for she is your life’.
The teaching of Ecclesiastes could not be more different. God is utterly transcendent and he does not intervene in the world; and what practical teaching there is offers more questions than answers. Good behaviour is rarely rewarded: faith in God has few advantages, and certainly does not result in his presence becoming close to us. Indeed, all that is left is to ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. Our reading today revealed just how pessimistic this world-view is: ‘Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when you will say ‘I have no pleasure in them’. ‘Remember… before the silver cord is snapped, the golden bowl is broken..’ ‘Remember…. before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit to the God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity’.
The rabbis used to say that Proverbs was written by Solomon as a young king, with all the enthusiasm, ambition and positive thinking of youth, and Ecclesiastes has the imprint of Solomon in his old age, with failing health, fear of death, and an uneasy faith. Although these books are very different, the reasons the rabbis gave for their differences are not very convincing. The two books have very distinct literary styles and the Hebrew in each of them is quite different It is hard to presume the same author influenced both books. Furthermore, it is hard to accept that those who are young never face profound doubts about faith in God, and, conversely, that those who are old do not possess a positive faith which is based upon a lifelong experience of God. But, nevertheless, I see why the rabbis distinguished between the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in this way: it is quite clear that anyone reading Proverbs comes away with the impression of a clear-cut affirmative faith, and anyone reading Ecclesiastes feels that sense of despair which is the result of posing unfathomable questions about God.

So what are these two books doing, side by side, in our English Bibles?

Before we look for an answer, we need to be reminded that these ‘opposing voices’ are not only represented in Proverbs and Job but are evident throughout the Bible as a whole. Within the Old Testament, the confident teaching of the prophets and the uncompromising teaching on the Law correspond closely to the more upbeat and unquestioning world-view in Proverbs; whereas the prayers of despair in the Book of Psalms and the questions about God’s justice in the Book of Job fit more with the more sceptical and pessimistic world-view of Ecclesiastes. The New Testament, too, has many examples of these two approaches to faith. Think of the extraordinary confidence in matters of faith and practice expressed within the letters of Paul – indeed, such as we heard in that second letter to Timothy tonight – and compare this with the accounts individuals searching, questioning and reaching out to Jesus in, for example, the Gospel of John: in the very first chapter we read of John the Baptist asking ‘Who are you?’; this continues through to the questions of Nicodemus who comes to Jesus by night (‘How can a man be born again?’) and, at the very end of the Gospel, we read of ‘doubting Thomas’ who will only believe in the resurrection if he place his hand in the marks of the nails in Jesus’s side.
If the Bible embraces both responses of faith, then surely there should be room for both in Jewish and Christian communities today. And yet it self-evident that this is far from the case. Those who are more open to doubt tend to find those whose faith is confident and strong too shrill and simplistic and superficial; and those whose faith is confident and strong find those who are more open to doubt and questioning too introverted and ineffectual. The challenge facing the church today – and one which impinges upon our chapel community here at Worcester as well as on the church at large – is how to become a ‘broad’ and ‘inclusive’ church which recognises and respects different expressions of faith.

How can we really achieve this? How can we as Christians learn to love and respect those whose faith in God is very different from our own?

A brief phrase, used somewhat differently in both Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes, might give some guidance here. It has occurred in all three Old Testament readings thus far this term. In Proverbs it is termed ‘the fear of the Lord’; for example, ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ It is used again and again throughout the entire book -some fifteen times. What does it mean?
Primarily, ‘the fear of the Lord’ is about having a God-centred, not human-centred view of life: it is a faith about being focused on God, and not on ourselves. Trying to see ourselves and the world theologically, as God sees us, does not come naturally, but it can certainly re-shape our world-view, and it is probably harder for those who think they already have the answers than for those who know they have very few. Discovering that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ requires quiet reflective prayer; it requires listening to God before we purportedly speak about him. Small wonder that the book of Proverbs, with its tendency to assume it has all the answers, reminds us of this phrase so often.
Secondly, ‘the fear of the Lord’ is about recognising that nobody, however intelligent, however confident in faith, however skilled in debate, has all the answers: there will always be a mystery to life because it is always full of paradoxes and contradictions, and because life is a mystery the key to it is with God, not with us. ‘God only knows’ is a slick turn of phrase, but it’s one we all need to heed.
The book of Job, whose teaching falls midway between the utter confidence of Proverbs and the despair and scepticism of Ecclesiastes, is very much about learning that ‘God only knows’. Job 28 is one of my favourite chapters in the entire Old Testament. It is a reflective hymn on how wisdom and understanding has been hidden from us: ‘Whence comes wisdom? Where is place of understanding?’… Only God understands the way to it, and he knows its place’. The hymn ends with that familiar phrase: ‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding’. The whole book is about the hero, Job, discovering the real meaning of what it means to ‘fear the Lord’ and so acquire ‘divine wisdom’ – which means knowing he, Job, does not have all the answers. So, whether taken from Proverbs or from Job, ‘the fear of the Lord’ is a warning for those who think they have all the answers: they need to discover a quiet humility in the presence of God.
So much for those who think they have all the answers: what of those whose faith seems to be one ongoing question about the meaning of life before God? Ecclesiastes has I another similar turn of phrase, although, perhaps predictably, it is used in a less assertive way. It is not the more intimate expression of Proverbs, ‘the fear of the Lord’, but a more nostalgic longing: ‘fear God’ (The more distant term for God is used in the Hebrew in this case.) Whereas the ‘fear of the Lord’ in Proverbs was to challenge the certitudes of faith, in Ecclesiastes ‘fear God’ is a way of bringing reassurance in doubt and uncertainty. ‘When dreams increase, and empty words grow many: fear God’ (5:7). ‘I know it will be well with those who fear God’ (8:12). ‘The end of the matter: all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments’ (12.3, from our reading tonight). ‘Fearing God’ in Ecclesiastes, although taken from such a different perspective, results in the same conclusion as ‘ the fear of the Lord’ in Proverbs. It is about seeking out God’s perspective on life; and it is about recognising that it is only by living in awe of God the Creator that the mysteries of life on earth can in any way be resolved.
One of the most important challenges for us all, when at the beginning of this academic year we seek to establish a new chapel community, with a new chaplain, new members of choir, new parents, new fellows, new members of college and new students, is to learn how to live with those whose expressions of faith are very different from our own. Whether we are thinking of members of the CU, the chapel choir, the Catholic chaplaincy, or just middle-of-the-road church goers, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes when taken together should remind us that neither an upbeat nor downbeat response to faith should exclude the other. They can and should both be held together. Our challenge as a chapel community is to learn when it is appropriate to ‘comfort the disturbed’ and when it is better to ‘disturb the comfortable’.
I end with a prayer which has meant a good deal to the Provost and me at various moments when faith and doubt have each been challenged. It is known as the ‘serenity prayer’ – initially ascribed to Reinhold Niebuhr in the mid 1930s, written for Alcoholics Anonymous, but it is now known to have its roots back into the fourteenth century. It sums up so well the issues I’ve been trying to put before you tonight:
‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.’
Amen.

Ecclesiastes 12:1-7
The Four Calls
The Spirit came in childhood and pleaded, “Let me in,”
But oh! the door was bolted by thoughtlessness and sin;
“I am too young,” the child replied, “I will not yield today;
There’s time enough tomorrow.” The Spirit went away.
Again He came and pleaded in youth’s bright happy hour;
He came but heard no answer, for lured by Satan’s power
The youth lay dreaming then and saying, “Not today,
Not till I’ve tried earth’s pleasures.” The Spirit went away.
Again He called in mercy in manhood’s vigorous prime,
But still He found no welcome, the merchant had no time;
No time for true repentance, no time to think or pray,
And so, repulsed and saddened, the Spirit went away.
Once more He called and waited, the man was old and ill,
And scarcely heard the whisper, his heart was cold and still;
“Go leave me; when I need thee, I’ll call for thee,” he cried;
Then sinking on his pillow, without a hope, he died!

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Reader in Theology, Worcester College
26th October 2008

“Bilbo used often to say that there was only one road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous thing, Frodo, going out of your door’, he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’”.

So says Frodo Baggins as he and Sam begin their adventure in Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring and, whether you have realised it yet or not, we have all just embarked upon a new exciting adventure. Some of you may even be wondering where you have been swept off to. For, at the end of Freshers’ week, this Evensong marks a time of new beginnings: for those joining the college for the first time, for those returning as students, staff or fellows, and for choristers and parents entering upon another year with the choir and school. Indeed, it is a time of fresh horizons for me too as I begin the role as Chaplain with you. It is the beginning of a journey that we will take together, and we do not know exactly what is going to happen to us or precisely how we will be effected by our experiences along the way. We hope to grow, to learn and to gain, as the Proverbs writer advises, wisdom, a quality more precious than jewels.

But our gathering here today also signifies that we are not on this journey alone for, although we may have left family behind to be here, to be part of the Worcester College community, is to be part of a family – a network of friendship, fellowship, guidance and support, to which, I hope, you will always feel connected, wherever your path may take you in years to come.

Last Saturday, at the Gaudy meal for old members, I was lucky enough to sit next to one of the oldest living members of that family. Colonel Edward Lewis came up to Worcester in 1933, exactly seventy-five years ago. The story of his adventurous life in the army took him to 14 different countries and 36 different homes, and to listen to him was as gripping as reading a John Buchan novel. What struck me most about his conversation was how very grateful he was for is life and everything that had happened in it. Several times he said. “I’ve been so lucky, you see.” Well, whether you make your own luck or not, if Solomon was right in connecting wisdom with longevity, then I surmised that Col. Lewis must have some wisdom to impart after all these years, and he did not disappoint me.

“If he could preach one sermon”, he said, “it would be this: Abolish Human Rights”. “How dramatic”, I exclaimed. “Why?” Because, Col. Lewis explained, the world has become obsessed with individuals and their own rights at the expense of their responsibilities. Responsibility involves changing the focus from one’s own needs to those of others, being grateful for what one has and mindful of those who are less fortunate. Well, I promised colonel Lewis that I would probably use his idea, and so I have.

In fact, the more I have reflected upon the notion of responsibility this week, the more it seems essential to a healthy community. In this place, people are responsible for each other, I have responsibilities towards you, you have responsibilities towards each other and we all have responsibilities towards the wider society. Responsibility encompasses a number of virtues: humility, generosity, diligence, thankfulness and patience amongst others. These are all virtues that require certain amounts of self-sacrifice and discipline. The advice of Proverbs touches upon other qualities that will assist in the active mindfulness of others: remember God’s commands, be loyal and faithful, trust in the Lord, do not be wise in your own eyes, seek wisdom.

Responsibility and family, or community, life go hand in hand. For if we were to be left to our own devices as individuals unaided and uncared for, and not helping others, on our great adventure we could only fail. However, transcending all our actions is the gospel of Christ as we have heard read in St. John’s first epistle, which tells us that we are members of God’s family. “See what the love of the Father has given us that we should be called children of God: and that is what we are.” The fact is, that we have no right to be the children of God – it is not one of our human rights – it is a free and unconditional gift that allows the love and grace of God to work in our imperfect lives. As one of the desert fathers, John Climacus, put it:

“God is the life of all beings. He is the salvation of all: of the pious or the impious; of those freed from the passions or those caught in them; of monks or those living in the world; of the educated or the illiterate; of the healthy or the sick; of the young or the very old. He is like the outpouring of the light, the glimpse of the sun or the changes in the weather, which are the same for everyone without exception.”

Implicit in this family membership is a future of hope for “we are God’s children now: what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him.” To be like Christ is to live in love. That is the kind of love, self-sacrificial and life-giving, that we can only know because he first loved us.

Responsibility, virtue, wisdom and long life have no worth at all unless there is love. “For this is the message you have heard from the beginning,” St. John Says “that we should love one another.” Indeed, love is the mark of life in all its fullness. “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another.”

This Michaelmas term, let us chiefly remember this: we do not have to strive to be children of God, we just are. There is no entrance exam and no condition. We can love each other because he first loved us. With a light heart, therefore, let us respond to each other, and those outside these college walls, with the responsibility of love, and may God’s freewill offering of grace be with us as we journey on together.

Amen.

Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain
12th October 2008

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there lived a rich man and his three daughters. One day, the rich man asked his daughters, “How much do you love me, my dears?”
“Why, Father,” said the first, “I love you as much as life itself.”
“Oh, Father,” said the second daughter, “I love you more than all the world.”
The rich man was very pleased. Then he turned to his youngest daughter and asked, “And how much do you love me, my little one?”
“I love you as much as salt, Father,” she replied, quietly.
This made the rich man very angry. “You don’t love me at all,” he exclaimed. “You will no longer live in my house or be my daughter!” he said and threw her out of the house.

The poor girl wandered across the land until she came to a large house where she was taken in by the cook and worked as a scullery maid. No one knew who she was for she had woven a cloak and hood of rushes to hide her beautiful clothes and cam to be known as Cap O’ Rushes.

To cut a long story short, the master’s son came to fall in love with Cap O’ Rushes and asked her to marry him. Soon the wedding was arranged and people from all over the land were invited to the feast including Cap O’ Rushes’ own father. Before the feast, Cap O’ Rushes went into the kitchen and told the cook tp put no salt in any of the dishes she prepared.

All the guests arrived and duly sat down to enjoy the sumptuous fare placed before them but as they started to eat they could not swallow a bite for the saltless food tasted so terrible. Suddenly, Cap O’ Rushes’ father burst out crying, “What is the matter?” asked the others. “I once had a daughter who said she loved me as much as salt,” he wept. “I didn’t understand what she meant, and threw her out of the house. Now, eating this food without salt, I realise she loved me very much.”

Then Cap O’ Rushes stood up and put her arms around her father. “Here I am Father,” she said. “Your very own daughter!” Her father was overjoyed to see her safe and sound.

I am sure that most of you will be familiar with the more complex and political version of that fairy tale as rendered by Shakespeare in his King Lear. But the original tale is a more simple, homely fable about the value of something as ordinary and everyday as salt. Salt, like love within a family, can all too often be taken for granted yet it is essential for the flavour and even the enjoyment of food. If it is taken away the food not just become less palatable but inedible.

It is not for nothing that Jesus describes those who believe in and follow him as being the salt of the earth. Whilst Jesus does not go on to explore the precise meaning or implication of this image, it is Paul, in his advice to the church in Ephesus, that the notion of being the salt of the earth is given practical expression and significance.

Paul has often been criticised in passages such as these for what appears to be reinforcing the status quo and thereby not only legitimising social injustice but also subverting the radical message of the gospel of Christ even before it has started. To a certain extent our second reading this evening seems to bear this criticism out as Paul addresses those members of the community who are in unequal relationships of power and tells them to uphold the societal norms. Children and servants are to obey their superiors and parents and masters are to act responsibly over those whom they have power and control. Paul is encouraging them to be like everyone else, to be an ordinary member of the society to which they belong and to adhere to its forms and conventions and yet within these very norms of everyday life he calls them to be essentially different, to be like divine salt.

Children are to obey their parents but because it is right, as laid out in the Ten Commandments. Fathers are not to upset their children and bring them to anger but to have the Lord as the model of fatherly care and authority. Servants are to obey and serve their masters but in so doing they serve Christ and masters must act knowing that they too are under authority, that of their Lord in heaven. In Paul’s eyes the life of a Christian is a normal life but what makes it different is this divine dimension which radically informs and alters how one sees oneself in society and as a result, how one acts and is. Like salt, it is this divine essence or orientation to God, that brings the flavour which savours the whole of life, making it in turn good, and true, and godly.

And yet, as Jesus says, it is all too easy for salt to lose its saltiness, it is all too easy to be distracted by the things of everyday life to forget our divine essence and the person from whom our strength and life comes. I remember once when I had been asked to lead the intercessions at a conference for London clergy telling a fellow curate how anxious I was about what all these eminent clergy were going to think of my prayers and of me. His salutary reply was that all I really needed to worry about was whether my prayers would offend God. All too often we can be caught up in ourselves and slowly lose our saltiness as we lose sight of our Maker and Redeemer.

Paul is ever ware, probably form his own experience, of our capacity to get it wrong and lose our way. As a result he tells his brothers and sisters in Christ to encase themselves in the protection of God. Putting on the armour of God, with its shield of faith, breastplate of righteousness, helmet of salvation and sword of the spirit, is not so much an act of aggression but one of intent, to be so enclosed within the nature of God that we can withstand the evil that afflicts us. For the choice to follow God or not is an ever present reality.

Peter Thompson Jones expressed this very powerfully in a programme he made recently called Extreme Pilgrim. In the last one in the series he followed the early desert fathers and went into the desert alone for three weeks. At one moment during that retreat he looks into his handheld camera and expresses all those old experiences of battles with demons when he says that every moment is a choice, to do good or to do evil. Our amour is to help us at every minute of the day to choose God, to choose life in all its flavoured fullness.

It has never been easy to be a follower of Christ. We may not, in this country, have to live with the fear of persecution but our own time and place brings its own concerns and trials. One of these is the sense that today slat is seen as something which is bad for you and must be eradicated from our lives. Of course too much salt can indeed be a bad thing. Fundamentalism, be it Muslim or Christian, wherever religion is used to separate people one from another and God, can only lead to a kind of sickness or even spiritual death. But if God were removed from our lives altogether, then as our fairy tale warns, life would become not just unpalatable but unbearable.

But it seems to me of more pressing concern not that there is a minority who wishes us to live in an unflavoured world but that the Christian gospel of love and virtue is so much part of our ordinary lives, that just like salt we are in danger of forgetting that it is there. I was reading an article the other day by Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney, who was commenting on just how Christian Dr. Who is. Regardless of its strongly atheist writer and overt anti-religious comments, it is still a programme which shows the overcoming of evil by good by an incarnate and resurrected lord on behalf of humanity. So deeply had salt flavoured our thinking that all too often we do not notice it. But if, as in the fairy tale, we forget or underestimate it too much then we run the risk, like the rich landlord of casting our that very person who savours our lives by his love and goodness.

We who are the salt of the earth, who enable the flavour of God to savour the world, we are the reminder of who it is who loves us and makes life flavoursome. Though we are few, it only takes a pinch of salt to make God’s presence real, do not lose heart, wrap yourself in the being and nature of God, walk in his ways with confidence and trust and continue to be the salt of the earth and in particular of this college. Amen.

The Chaplain
25th May 2008

‘Trinity Term’ – two words which we have all used many times over the last few weeks. But the term ‘Trinity’ – now that is a conundrum. And yet on this particular Sunday, we normally expect to hear a ‘Trinity Sermon’.

There have been countless attempts to explain the belief in ‘One in Three and Three in One’. One I remember from student days was the ‘water analogy’: water is liquid; water is vapour; and water is ice, forming three parts of the same substance. But the problem with this illustration is that liquid, vapour and ice do not simultaneously subsist as ‘water’ – they are three separate aspects of water – yet ‘God as Trinity’ implies there are three persons co-existing at one and the same time.

Another illustration I remember is of one actor playing three parts in one play. Unlike the water analogy, this preserves the notion that God is as One Being, like the one actor – but this time it fails because God as Trinity is also three persons, not one person playing different roles. Similarly, the human analogy, that we are body, spirit and mind, yet one ‘being’, also fails, because it is again about one person in three different roles; an additional difficulty is that at death the body and the mind are separated from the spirit- whereas the Trinity is inseparable and co-eternal.

Perhaps a better analogy is a triangle. The three corners of the triangle are linked to each other by the three sides (1+1+1 = 3) yet make up the one figure (1x1x1 = 1). Yet even for my simple mathematical brain this seems to be too neat; as a theologian, anyway, I have problems, because it does not take into account that God the Son is unlike the Father and Spirit, because He comprises two natures, the human and divine: so the ‘oneness’ of the Son is not the same as the ‘oneness’ of the Father and the Spirit, which, using this geometrical analogy rather crudely, makes one corner of the triangle different from the other two.

Although attempts to describe God the Trinity consistently fail, this doctrine became the benchmark of orthodoxy. From as early as the second century those who stressed too much the unity of God were called ‘Modalists’- because they did not place enough emphasis on Jesus Christ, and because they did not stress enough the decisive break of Christianity from Judaism. Those who stressed too much the distinctive parts of God were termed ‘Tritheists’, because they failed to give due weight to a monotheistic faith, one which is in continuity with Judaism in the common affirmation that there is only one God.

One of the compulsory papers which theology undergraduates take here is called ‘Patristics’. They have to look at early Christian debates about heresy and orthodoxy, and attempt to understand how and why the early Church Fathers formulated Christian doctrines in a particular way. All undergraduates agree that the debates about the Trinity are notoriously difficult to comprehend: the eastern churches emphasized the Father gave life equally to the Son and to the Spirit, but the western churches stressed that the Father and Son together gave life to the Spirit. The western church’s Nicene Creed reads ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son’. The phrase ‘and the Son’ does not occur in the eastern church’s version of this Creed. This different understanding of the interrelationship of the three persons of the Trinity divided a fledgling church, and contributed to the eventual schism between the churches of the east and the west.

I have a satirical cartoon on my door in College which is headed ‘Judge orders God to Break up into Smaller Deities’. It is a send-up about a US District Judge who ruled that God was in violation of the anti-monopoly laws because he wilfully thwarted competition from other deities and so created an ‘illegal monotheopoly’. If God were to allow for a coalition of lesser deities, the Spoof Judge advised, the benefit to worshippers would be vast: with a wider selection of specialized gods and goddesses, there would clearly be a quicker ‘prayer-response’. This ‘tongue-in-cheek’ report is making a serious point: why promote the worship of one God, when the worship of many gods might be a better ‘theological insurance policy’? But surely this misses the point? The doctrine of the Trinity – that God is One in Three, and Three in One – is a safeguard both against polytheism and against monotheopoly.

So, despite its problems, the doctrine of the Trinity actually does make sense. And it should not be surprising that the idea of God being Many and God being One actually existed long before Christianity: it was a vital part of Jewish faith as well, for given that polytheistic cultures also a threat to the writers of the Old Testament, they had to provide a middle way of understanding God as the ‘One in the Many’ and the ‘Many in the One’. Our reading from Genesis chapter 1 throws some light on this. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ The very first three verses of the entire Old Testament already introduce the idea of the different parts of the Godhead bringing creation into being: God the Creator is eternally present ‘in the beginning’; God the Spirit, brooding like a bird over the waters, is the sustainer of the world as it comes into being; and God as spoken Word brings form from the void and light from the darkness.

The same idea of the plurality and diversity within the one Godhead is again expressed later in Genesis 1: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over… all the earth.’ Why should God speak in the plural form? I believe it shows us how the writer understood enough about the diversity in the Godhead to use plural verbs and plural possessive adjectives. Admittedly, some see this as an expression of polytheism – that God, like the Most High God in surrounding pagan cultures, is addressing a pantheon of deities in his heavenly council. I personally think that the writer of Genesis 1 is too subtle for this. Throughout this chapter he has used a plural name for God – Elohim – but given it, up this point, a singular verb. God makes the sun; there is not another deity, who is the sun. Similarly he makes the moon, and the stars. No other astrological deities exist alongside him. ‘Elohim’ is a rich diversity of many parts; it is a way of stating that God is both One and God is Many.

The Unity and Diversity of God is actually a dominant theme throughout the Old Testament. Within the Temple God is known as ‘Glory’ (in Hebrew, Käböd and Shekinah ); in his relationship with his people, He is known as ‘Redeemer’ (gö´ál) and as ‘everlasting mercy’ (Heºsed ) and as ‘the Lord’ (Adonay); He is also known as wisdom (Hokmâ), and as ‘the voice’ ( häqôl ). And he is simply ‘the name’ ( häšëm ). In surrounding cultures some of these names were referents for separate male and female deities. But in Hebrew, the maleness and femaleness of the many parts of God (‘spirit’ and ‘glory’ and ‘wisdom’ for example are female nouns) are contained in the one Deity. So in Genesis 1: ‘…Let us make humans in our own image’ is a way of expressing how the diversity and unity in the Godhead in a mirror image of the diversity and unity in the humanity he has created.

So this idea of God as One in Many and Many in One surely paved the way for those first Jewish Christians to think about God as Trinity – now as about God as One in Three and Three in One. These first Christians, Jews by birth, already knew that God is Creator and Father of us all; that God could be present in the world through His Word, now ‘made flesh, and dwelling among us’; and that God is Spirit, the rûªH of God -which, because the word also means breath or wind, also describes how the effects of God’s presence are seen in the world.

As an undergraduate I once had to do an essay on whether God could really known as Trinity within the New Testament. The tutor who marked that essay was one George Carey, later Archbishop of Canterbury. I still have that essay, with his comments on it. I would never have dared to disagree with him then, but actually I would now: I think that those early Jewish Christians had a sufficient understanding of God as One and God as Many to deduce that God could be known as Creator, as Redeeming Word, and as lifegiving Spirit. So although the doctrine of the Trinity is incomprehensible, it is, nevertheless, explicable.
‘Incomprehensible but explicable’. We started by seeing how the term Trnity is a conundrum. And we have ended by seeing how the development such a doctrine makes sense. But even so, the Trinity is still, in essence, beyond our understanding. It is one of those mysteries about which T.S. Eliot says: ‘words strain, /Crack and sometimes break under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide and perish/ Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place’.

So to say more about the essence of the Trinity is superfluous. We have to learn to understand this Triune God in a different way. This can only be by faith and human experience, once our intellect and critical analysis have taken us as far as they can. For, ultimately, the mystery of God as Trinity can only be made known to us through contemplative prayer and reflective worship as we meditate on what all three persons of the one God might mean to each of us: ‘Holy Holy Holy, God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity’. So, falling silent before God as transcendent Creator, before God as incarnate Word, and before God as sustaining Spirit, is perhaps as helpful a way to start as any.

And now to God our Creator, God our Redeemer, God our Sustainer, Three Persons in one God, be ascribed, as is most justly due, all honour, might, majesty, power and dominion, now, henceforth and for evermore. Amen.

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
18th May 2008

+ ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.’

Considering the remarkably cold spring that has followed this year’s early Easter, I imagine that Easter must have fallen rather later in the year when Philip Larkin wrote his poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. For heat is one of the recurrent themes of Larkin’s account of that train journey; not the gentle warmth of the last week, but a full-blown heat-wave. The heat of the train itself – ‘all windows down, all cushions hot’ and of the Lincolnshire landscape through which they travelled: ‘the tall heat that slept for miles inland.’ Whitsun, White Sunday, is the late Old English name for this, the seventh Sunday after Easter, the fiftieth day after Easter Day, which is what the Greco-Latin name Pentecost means. One of the major feasts of the Christian year, celebrating the occasion described in our second reading from Acts, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, today represents both an end and a beginning. Pentecost marks the end of the Easter season, the period when the risen Christ remained among his disciples; it is a moment of leaving behind what is past (most vividly reflected in Christ’s physical departure from the world and his ascension into heaven). But this feast also launches something new: it marks the formal initiation of the Church’s mission to the world. ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father and he will give you another advocate to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth. (John 14.15-17). This gift of the Spirit is the fulfilment of that promise Jesus made to his disciples: ‘I will not leave you comfortless’.

In his narrative in the book of Acts, Luke located the gift of the Spirit as coming on the day of the Jewish festival, the Feast of Weeks, when the first fruits of the corn-harvest were presented and Moses’ giving of the Law commemorated, a festival which fell fifty days after Passover. ‘When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place and suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind … Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.’ We might recall here John the Baptist’s prophesy as recorded in Luke (3:16) that Jesus would baptize with ‘the Holy Spirit and with fire’. Because of its direct association with new life, in the Early Church the feast of Pentecost was the other time of the year as well as Easter Eve at which catechumens (new converts to the faith) might be baptized. The English name, Whitsun, probably derives from the white clothes the newly baptized used to wear for the eight days after their baptism. In the Middle Ages, Pentecost was thought a suitably solemn date for royal coronations; the royal anointing of the king in that ceremony acting as an outward sign of the reception of the Holy Spirit. The newly-crowned king would thus be rendered both Christ-like and a vessel of God. Pentecost, or Whitsun weekend is also a popular occasion for weddings, as Larkin came to realise on his train journey south; for though,

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at:
Gradually, his train filled up with newly-wed couples:
A dozen marriages got under way
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side …
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

Larkin’s poem is about the transition that marriage makes, entirely appropriately for this season characterised by change, when the gift of the Holy Spirit effects its transformation upon each of us.

The gift of tongues given to the disciples, which Luke here interpreted as the ability to speak in different languages, but which Paul tended to explain as the uttering of incomprehensible babble, baffled the crowd who witnessed it. Some of the sceptical present wondered if the disciples were drunk, just as –were this event to occur in a contemporary context – we might wonder if the Apostles’ ecstasy were chemically rather than spiritually induced. But Peter’s speech which we just heard explains that it is not that the disciples are out of their minds, rather than the prophesy of Joel is being fulfilled. And then he repeats much of the text of our first reading from the book of Joel, ‘‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.’

Quite when the Old Testament prophet Joel was writing is unclear; what is obvious from his own text is that he wrote in response to a devastating invasion of locusts which swarmed over all the crops of the fields but also over all the people in their houses. He interpreted this plague as a sign of judgement of the Lord and urged the need for the Israelites to repent, and throw themselves on the mercy of God. From the passage we heard read, that petition seems to have been successful, for God has sent the autumn rains, and as the newly-planted crop sprouts, the hope is offered of full granaries once more, repaying what have clearly been years of famine. Yet, then at the end the prophet moves into eschatological mode; he starts talking explicitly of the last things: ‘Then afterward, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.’ The young will prophesy and see visions, old men will dream dreams and God will show portents on heaven and earth, turning the sun to darkness and the moon to blood, all prefiguring the coming of the terrible day of the Lord. There will be those who escape – specifically those who call on the name of the Lord – but the portents for Joel are, none-the-less predominantly forecasts of destruction and death. Yet on Peter’s lips, as we heard in the passage from Acts, these become a declaration of new life. Note how Joel’s ‘then afterward’, became on Peter’s lips ‘In the last days’. For Peter the wonders that Joel prophesied were fulfilled in the life and deeds of Jesus’ ministry on earth; what is being prefigured now is the second coming with its latent promise of the redemption of humankind.
‘Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams’. This vividly evocative passage reminds us of the limitless possibilities available to the young. Whether you are sitting here trying not to agonise about the imminence of finals, or whether the prospect even of applying to university still seems a long way off, you all have this essential thing in common: the possibilities of what you might do, what you could achieve, how you might harness your own gifts and talents lies before you. You may not exactly have visions about your future – perhaps you think visions are things visited only on people in the past, people like the fourteenth-century spiritual writer Julian of Norwich, whose feast we celebrated on Thursday last week – but you can all identify with Vision. Boris Johnson successfully persuaded voters that he had a fresh ‘Vision for London’ to re-invigorate the capital. Poor old Gordon Brown suffers at the moment not least because it is David Cameron, not he whom the media believe to have the ‘vision thing’. Perhaps this is in part about age; visions are for the young, those with their futures still stretching before them. Your minds are – or should be – filled with visions, aspirational images of the various potential futures open to you, in public and private arenas. Everything is possible as you stand on the threshold of adult life. For those of you who are about to take finals this is, just like Pentecost, both an ending and a new beginning. You are leaving behind that which is past and launching forward into something that may now be starting to be revealed, or perhaps its precise form still remains entirely unclear. Even though the ultimate fulfilment of your visions is yet to be realised, the promise and hope you can, and should have in the future are clear. Whatever you do, even if in the first instance you return to studying, that too will represent a new beginning and open new vistas of opportunity. Adapting the words of tonight’s anthem: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon you, because he hath anointed you to … preach the acceptable year of the Lord’.

But for the old, such visions are past. ‘Your young men shall have visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’ The old have their memories, they can dream about their own youthful visions and reflect on their past glories, but their futures are narrower, less fluid, more closed as the reality of the imminence of mortality can less and less be ignored. My father, now in his late eighties, says that some days he can scarcely bear to open The Times for fear that it will tell him that yet another one of his contemporaries, and perhaps worse another of his younger friends, has died. Yet old men’s dreams, too, are touched by Pentecostal fire; remember Eliot’s vivid depiction:
a glare that is blindness in early afternoon
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but Pentecostal fire.

That Pentecostal fire touches each of us. And touched, we too are changed. Wherever we stand, on the threshold of adult independence, in middle years, or at the end of life, every year Whitsun takes us back to this pregnant moment in the life of the people of God and the relationship between God and his people: us.

For the gift of the Spirit fulfils Christ’s promise to all of us, his children; it confirms what he told us in his life and in the time he was among his disciples after his resurrection, that his purpose is our redemption, our salvation. The coming of the Spirit shatters expectations; while Christ’s Ascension seemed to bring an end, yet now we have another beginning, a promise of new life: ‘then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’. Pentecost, Whitsun is about that changes which arise from the outpouring of God’s grace and power. The spirit touches all our lives, young and old alike, effecting a transformation from which we cannot emerge unchanged. In ending, I return to my beginning, and to Larkin’s, Whitsun weddings. In his poem the railway journey acts as a metaphor for the journey of life, a journey each of us makes and to which, whatever our life stage, we can all relate. Larkin’s message is about transformation, too:

…………and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give.
AMEN

Professor Sarah Foot, Regius Professor in Ecclesiatical History
11th May 2008

At Harvard there are resonances with Oxford, not least a fast-flowing river and oarsmen rowing. Connecting the boathouses with Harvard and crossing the Charles River is a bridge with, on either side, gate piers, as in some 18th century Oxfordshire Palladian parkland, and on those gate piers are inscribed words from tonight’s second lesson: “On either side of the river stood a Tree of Life, which yields twelve crops of fruit, one for each month of the year; the leaves of the trees serve for the healing of the nations”.

I’m not quite sure why that moved me so much when I first crossed that bridge to the Memorial Church at Harvard. Perhaps it was something to do with the countless names emblazoned on the wall of the chapel of those who’d come to Europe and then beyond Europe to the Pacific to die in the Great Wars of the 20th century, those young oarsmen transposed into names on that war memorial. So it is with this Revelation to John and its poetry. We’re not quite sure where it carries us, but we believe the Revelation, this apocalyptic from the hand of John the Seer, was intended to be read aloud, for its kaleidoscopic visions have an effect upon us more like music that logical argument. Like a symphony this book needs to be heard as a whole, the overall structure carrying demand for discernment and message of redemption. Everything illuminates a crisis of which the seven churches of Asia Minor in the Roman Empire were unaware.

Written on Patmos, off the west coast of modern-day Turkey, the Seer speaks to his time, the time of the formation, persecution, and perhaps worse than persecution, a time of compromise, of settling in to civil society of the early Church. Nero’s persecution, AD 60-70, perhaps, but more likely Irenaeus was right, that leading Greek theologian of the 2nd century, in dating the Revelation toward the end of Domitian’s reign, AD 81-96, with its time of peace with some local persecution; the moves and pressures more subtle than persecution, to make Christians conform to local culture, as in chapter 2, to eat food sacrificed to idols and practise fornication, a common metaphor for religious infidelity.

This book is both an unveiling, for that’s what apocalyptic is, and also prophecy in the form of a letter, illuminating a crisis in a series of three disasters: war, death and famine, with the pictures of God as Creator and Redeemer, and of the renewal of heaven and earth, and that rainbow around the throne, signifying that God has not forgotten his promise to Noah in the 9th chapter of Genesis. All this memory from Ezekiel and memory from Daniel, re-worked by the Seer, the Seer’s imaginative ability, the Lion of Judah transposed into a Sacrificial Lamb, a profound change, a change which makes this seemingly violent and vindictive book profoundly Christian, a fitting climax to the biblical story.

“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb” – a temple which has become a lamb. The metaphors and images shimmer and recede, advance and brighten, darken and are transposed, like some Baroque opera. The scene changes, with gods descending and hell opening up beneath, to puzzle, inspire and appal by turns. What is it that’s at work here, that makes an American carve words from this apocalyptic on gate piers, either side of a bridge over the Charles River at Harvard, with its resonances of Oxford, its memories transposed, a gateway to a memorial of appalling cost and sacrifice on the walls of the Harvard Memorial Church?

More than forty years’ ago, when the preacher was himself at university, there was a question in the New Testament paper for theologians: ‘Should the Revelation to John form part of the New Testament?’ The suppositions around it were that to read it literally left one with a sub-Christian vindictive cruelty, a miasma rather than a vision, more fog than sunrise. For this priest, remembering next year forty years of ministry, listening to the human experience of others has brought the preacher to see that John the Seer speaks truths which only his music can embody with any justice. But, the warning of this book is that those who are literal-minded will die through lack of imagination. Perhaps here, with what leads one to another, the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, both in Oxford and in Harvard; perhaps what is borne towards us, sometimes overwhelming and sometimes almost engulfing, in our human experience. As we get older, more battered and buffeted by the pains of others and of ourselves, we come to value more deeply the strange kaleidoscopic, shifting lights, T S Eliot’s ‘fancy lights’ of the Revelation to the Seer, John.

The late Kathleen Raine, poet and visionary, founded an academy called Temenos, for the transmitting of the perennial philosophy. In Surrey, near the Cathedral where I work at Guildford, a founder member of Temenos lived in a little studio in a field called Pasturewood. Dr Thetis Blacker made for Winchester Cathedral a great set of banners, which at the Christian festivals unfurl in the nave, illuminating themes of Creation and Recreation, dazzling the beholder with apocalyptic vision. The literal-minded either writes the book of Revelation off as incomprehensible, 1st century muddle or, and this has recurred throughout Christian history, a key to the political and religious events of the time of the reader. Rome equals Babylon, or the Reformation period’s Roman Catholicism, or the Ottoman Empire, and there are plenty of such religious people about today in the 21st century who give this extraordinary book a bad name. But as Surrey’s Pasturewood was transformed into a foothill of the Himalayas, so Thetis Blacker rediscovered and displayed the great archetypes of Revelation.

Perhaps we too are invited here to be carried along by this river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, for it does indeed flow from the throne of God and of the Lamb. Perhaps the suffering of Tibet and the injustice of Zimbabwe, and the chaos of Iraq and the horrors of Afghanistan require a broad and deep canvas behind them, against which some of the great themes of religious life can, if not understood, at least be approached: God, Creator and Redeemer, the renewal of heaven and earth, the rainbow round the throne, the not-forgotten promise to Noah, the Lion of Judah transposed into a Sacrificial Lamb.

Those young university oarsmen at Harvard were transported, not only across the Charles River but across the world, and their names now adorn, and adorn is the right word, the war memorials of the University Church – ‘But their name liveth for evermore’. For the titanic struggle between good and evil to which the Revelation to John bears witness is not over and the struggle happens not only in the battle field, but in the study, in the costly engagement of one human person with another where there is sickness, suffering and desperate need. The water of the river of life is offered to us at a cost, for we, the thirsty, receive this water from the one who himself cried out on the Cross, “I thirst”, and who in himself renounced the power of the Lion of Judah for the weakness of the nailed Saviour, and by his death showed us, who dare to approach these mysteries, what it costs God to be God.

“‘Come’, say the Spirit and the Bride. ‘Come’, let each hearer reply. Come forward you who are thirsty, accept the water of life, the free gift to all who desire it’ ….. Amen, Come, Lord Jesus!”

Very Rev’d Victor Stock, Dean of Guildford Cathedral
27th April 2008