Category: Sermons

This sermon is part of a series of nine, all on the chapel décor, which have taken some four years to complete. My first was about the matins hymn, the ‘Benedicite’, which is set in the cornice above the windows. Seven others have been on the chapel windows. This final sermon focuses on the ‘Te Deum’, another morning canticle, which is sent in the dado below the friezes under the windows. It is well hidden: more of that shortly! But you have heard it sung so magnificently by our choir as the anthem just before this sermon. If you want to see its content, it can be found on page ten of our Prayer Books: you might turn to it to make sense of what follows.

But first, you might well ask, why two morning hymns at Evening Prayer? The answer is that, when the chapel was refurbished in the 1860s, attendance was compulsory every morning, so the architect, William Burgess, used the texts which would be most familiar to that nineteenth-century congregation.

Let us consider, as a preface to this sermon, the ‘Benedicite’. You should all be able to see some of it from where you sit. It’s mainly a call to all the natural order to praise God: ‘O all ye Green things upon the Earth, Bless Ye the Lord…. O all ye Fowls of the Air… O all ye Beasts and Cattle… O all Ye Seas and Floods, Bless Ye the Lord…’ and each of these is illustrated on the walls below, on each side of the stained glass window. The ‘Te Deum’, by contrast, is mainly a call to all humanity to praise God: ‘We praise thee O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord…’. Burgess, as architect, and Holiday and Wooldridge, as craftsmen who worked on the friezes and windows, viewed the entire chapel as an illustration of how nature and humankind unite together in praise of God. If you look around you should see how dominant this theme is.

The Te Deum dates somewhere between the second and fourth centuries AD and was used at a time when the Christian Church was expanding yet persecuted, and its overall theme is that the praise of God can counter the fear of men. Originally in Latin, it is often associated with Hilary of Poitiers or Ambrose of Milan, although it is not typical of their metrical hymnody; you’ll see even from your English edition that it’s really rhythmic prose. Only the first five verses, from the oldest part of the hymn, are on the dado, and these focus our praise on God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. [Praises to Christ as the Suffering Son of God form the second part, and the third and latest addition, from various psalms [27:9; 144:2; 122:3; 32;22; 30:2] form a different response, on the theme of mercy and forgiveness. The whole canticle has been set to music on countless occasions – in Gregorian chant, by Mozart, Bruckner, Berlioz, Dvorak, Haydn, and Britten. Sir William Walton set it for the Queen’s Coronation in 1952; and the Charpentier setting even made it into the Eurovision Song Contest! So although ancient, its theme of ‘the church praising God in every circumstance’ is what has kept it alive.]

Burgess made the ‘Benedicite’ clear to see and relatively easy to read, but the ‘Te Deum’ he deliberately hid from our sight and made almost impossible to read -unless one knows it already. [Starting at the north side, it somewhat hesitantly reads ‘We praise Thee, O God: we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship Thee and the Father everlasting. To Thee all Angels, to Thee the heavens and all the Powers therein, To Thee the Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabbaoth.’] Burgess placed this Matins hymn behind the backs of the congregation; he also broke up almost every single word and combined it with half of another, making the effect seem like utter nonsense. Starting in front of the organ, the first word is ‘Wep’; the second is ‘raise’; almost every other ‘word’ is presented as something resembling Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jaberwockey’. Certainly the reader has to know the ‘Te Deum’ in order to make sense of it. The consequence was that Burgess could apply more of his characteristic ‘chapel humour’: the word ‘raise’ (taken from ‘praise’) is set behind the Vice-Provost’s stall, whilst at the other side, a rare but complete word, ‘God’, is set behind the Provost’s stall.

However, Burgess frequently used humour to bring out something serious. For example, the verse above the door as you go out reads ‘Let us enter his gates with thanksgiving’, reminding us that the church is an entrance to the world outside. Similarly Burgess intended the Te Deum to have a serious message, although it is clear that he asks us to search for it. He provided words for only the first five verses, but he also adapted the verses which followed them in artistic representation, in a manner which requires us to search for their hidden, more serious meaning

That representation is on the six friezes below the six windows: here Burgess has depicted in detail that vast and diverse ‘company of praise’ of which the ‘Te Deum’ speaks. First, the angels: ‘to thee all Angels cry aloud’: they are on the north side, near the altar – we have Uriel, Raphael (with his fish!), Gabriel (with a lily) and Michael (with his sword) and their ‘choir of eight’, singing ‘Holy Holy, Holy Lord God of Sabbaoth’. [The actual words are found in panels starting behind the altar and continue down to where the chaplain is sitting]. Second, the apostles: ‘the glorious company of the Apostles praise Thee’: these are on the middle frieze on the south side of the chapel- here you can see all twelve apostles illustrated together, with Peter with his key to the church, and Andrew with his cross. Third, the prophets: ‘the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise Thee’: not only are there seven Old Testament prophets, each holding a scroll, above each of the seven windows – but also we find an eclectic group of twelve prophets matching the twelve apostles. They can be found on the frieze opposite the apostles, next to the angels: you might be able to see Enoch, then Noah, then Miriam singing and dancing, and David and Solomon – holding his Temple- and Huldah, Isaiah, Daniel, Malachi, John the Baptist and Anna. Fourth, we have the martyrs of the church – ‘the noble army of martyrs praise Thee:’ – and these are found next to the prophets, behind the choir stalls, forming another diverse group, including two angels with the Holy Innocents, Stephen, Polycarp, Aquinas of Canterbury, Catherine (with her wheel), Perpetua, Cecilia (with her pipes), Jan Huss, Jerome of Prague, and Latimer and Hooper (both Bishops of Worcester). Fifth, the ‘holy church throughout all the world’ Burgess divided into two groups, one of well-known saints and the other of layfolk representing all walks of life. The saints are behind the choir stalls on the north side: Augustine, Ambrose, Monica, Helena, Charlemagne (or King Olaf of Norway, in either case sporting the ginger beard of Daniel, a college fellow and soon to become Provost), Benedict, Catherine of Sienna, Elizabeth of Hungary, Wycliffe –with his Bible- and Luther and Pascal. The ordinary layfolk – including again a number of women- are on the south side, by the altar, where we see a bishop, a king, a doctor, a knight, a nun, a sister of mercy, a poet, a lawyer (with his red tape!), an artist, a carpenter, a farmer, a mother, and a fisherman. To bring his message home, Burgess took some artistic license by painting in the faces of people known in Oxford in his day.

So the ‘Te Deum’, in both words and pictures, moves from the praises of the heavenly host, to the praises of the apostles, prophets, martyrs and saints, to the praises of anyone and everyone – and this therefore includes those of us here in chapel tonight, for we are called upon too to join them in their paeon of praise. We have therefore both an appeal both to our intellect and imagination as we are invited to become part of that great community of faith, throughout the entire world and throughout the entire history of the church, a company giving praise to God in every place at every time and in every circumstance.

Most of those portrayed around us were part of a suffering church, but they knew that persecution and hardship are overwhelmed by praise. This was also the theme of our readings from Daniel and Revelation; each reading depicted how release from suffering comes when God’s saints move from lamenting their own condition to being lost in the praises of God. In Daniel, this was what the faithful Jewish community in Jerusalem had to learn, persecuted because they refused to bow the knee to the Greek Emperor and worship Greek idols. In Revelation, this was the faithful Christian community throughout Asia Minor had to learn, because they refused to bow the knee to the might of Rome and worship their gods. [We might ask, what is the corresponding challenge, in Oxford, today? ]
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As our chaplain explained, this sermon is really part of another sermon series on the Beatitudes which has been running throughout this term. You might ask how these readings and these reflections on the ‘Te Deum’ have anything to do with the Beatitudes, not least our final one, ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of God’. To this I would reply: a commentary on this Beatitude is to be found in Daniel and Revelation, but it is also to be found all around you. It is found in the Apostles, Prophets, Martyrs, Saints and indeed the whole church of God surround us, suffering communities and suffering individuals, persecuted for righteousness’ sake, yet ‘blessed’ in their suffering because they have learnt to transform their pain into an experience of God – Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

As for the Beatitudes, several preachers this term have commented on their ‘upside down’ appeal. Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Reading, observed how they ‘offer a topsy-turvy view of life’, which was not surprising in that they were spoken by Jesus, who turned the values of the world upside down and inside out. Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, also reflected on the way that the Beatitudes reversed the world’s values, and he said they were really about reality ‘the right way up’. Certainly this final Beatitude, which affirms blessings for those who suffer innocently, belongs to this same ‘topsy-turvy view of life’.

‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake’. Innocent suffering is something we all have to face at one time and another. Sometimes it is physical; at others, mental or emotional; often it is a profound spiritual pain, when we feel deprived of yet yearn for the presence of God. Innocent suffering is a real test as to how we live out our faith within a finite and often evil world. By far the most important comfort in our suffering is to realize that we are not alone. Suffering is the hallmark of the Christian faith, as you’ll see in the chapel window behind me, and it reminds us that the servants cannot expect less than their Master. So when it comes to pain and persecution, and indignation that this is undeserved, and our own ability to pray is very limited, and resources are scarce, let us seek another reality, an alternative vision, one which begins with the praises of the heavenly host, moves on to the praises of the prophets, apostles, martyrs and saints of the church, and ends with ourselves. It is as if we let these others pray and sing for us: we need to feel their presence, to hear their pain caught up in praise, and this is what this chapel allows us to do. This is how we can discover the secret of that ‘blessedness’ in suffering, the secret which all the Beatitudes seek to convey- an experience of God who enters into our pain yet also transcends it. So it begins with a prayer of lament at our human condition; but it ends with a hymn of praise to the God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
4th March 2007

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

There’s a wonderful rabbinic story that says when God had created all the blessings for humanity he looked around for a pot or vessel in which to put them. When he couldn’t find one, he created shalom, peace.

The most peaceful time I can remember as a child was sitting by the River Windrush, listening to the water rolling over the rocks, and to birds singing and soaring in the clear blue sky. It was lovely, a vision of Eden.

The most peaceful time I can remember recently however was waking up early in Al Amara in Iraq after half a night sleep, uninterrupted for once by any mortar or rocket attack, walking out onto the compound and watching the amazing stars in the Arabian sky. They really did look like a myriad of diamonds spilled onto a black velvet cloth. And looking at the moon, even though we were far apart, I knew that my wife would have looked at that same moon that night, and somehow we were together.

For me that peace is the more poignant of the two memories, not just because of the contrast between the previous days activities in a violent riot, but also because I knew how transient and rare it was. It was, and remains a precious memory.

Most of my strange parish were either blissfully asleep, and mostly snoring or quietly and vigilantly on duty. And because of those few on guard, I was, for that brief instant, safe in that strange land. Their watchfulness allowed me my quiet contemplation, and gave me that truly wonderful moment of peace.

For me those soldiers on duty were children of God, in their vigilance and their activity they were creating peace, if only for those few minutes. But what next.

Well, the recent history of Iraq is heartbreaking, for all that Saddam Hussein was a ruthless and cruel man, and that Iraqis, and indeed that part of the world, would be much better off with a more righteous leader, the West has acted in arrogance. During his tyrannical reign we sold him armaments and technology, with no thought of the consequences. Then when he stepped out of line on the orders of our elected politicians, his regime was destroyed, and subsequently we have failed to bring lasting order, or to win the peace.

It’s such a shame, the early days following Operation Telic were full of hope, the Iraqi people treated our media, politicians and soldiers as liberators and peacemakers, and they were!; the Ba’ath party’s regime was evil, but it’s all gone terribly wrong. Disparate groupings, and would-be leaders have created war and tyranny on their neighbours, and our soldiers, and those of all the other countries involved, continue to try, seemingly ineffectively, to restore hope.

In many areas of that troubled land fear has replaced joy, anarchy rules the streets, and senseless violence, torture and horror have returned. Despite the news on the ground it’s actually not all bleak, but it is very very far from perfect.

What are we to do? Well according to Micah the LORD requires us. ‘To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’. This seems to preclude the possibility of walking away and bringing all our soldiers and NGO’s safely home, even though it would save British lives and a fortune. No instead our soldiers, perhaps some 1500 fewer in Iraq, are commanded to continue to stay to act with justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God.

You might be aware that the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates lies north of Basrah, and just off the road north east to Al Amara, and that it was there that Garden of Eden was reputedly to have been formed. When I visited however the Cherubim with a flaming sword seemed to be away on a lunchbreak, and all that I could see was a broken concrete car park and a dead tree. It’s a desolate place; and far from the image Eden.

But the two etyiological creation accounts in Genesis still offer the reader visions of the perfection that God desires for us, whilst the subsequent narrative of the fall at the very least offers a theological explanation to the question ‘why isn’t the world perfect?’

The reality that our world is still far from perfect is why today we so earnestly need peacemakers. People who work to provide a vision of a better world, a world evolving into a planet of justice and equity rather than one falling back into feudal inter fighting and injustice.

Just to make this clear, British soldiers, on the whole prefer to be called just that, soldiers, they like being popular with indigenous peoples, but they’d much rather be in the pub, with their mum, or playing with their gamestations, their average age is only 23. And to be honest calling them a peacekeeper seems to invoke a negative reaction, and appears to have overtones of failure.

Which is a same because unlike some people in the world, soldiers know that they aren’t all good, and they certainly know that they aren’t perfect.

Soldiers know that when the great and good have finished and have failed, it will be their job to offer their lives, and to stand in the way of someone else’s danger, until some form of justice and peace can be negotiated.

But they also know that they aren’t lost to God. In moments of tedium I have often found soldiers either reading a copy of the New Testament, or wanting to discuss God with me. They don’t really do ‘Jesus’, and on the whole they really don’t do Church, but they like God, and they love the idea of redemption and peace.

But when they read the passage we just heard as our second reading, they know that God incarnate reached out in peace to an outcast, to the tax collector, and offered Levi such a powerful vision that he followed Jesus and then expended a fortune in entertaining him and his followers.
Despite the prevailing religious environment, Levi, the collector of tax for the hated Romans, was loved by God.
And if God can love a Tax collector, a leper, “even that bloke Judas, Padre, can God love me?”

As a completely unarmed Army Padre, I seem to represent a glimpse of normality, safety, and decency to soldiers, who day and night do their duty on operations in Afghanistan or Iraq. What they sometimes experience and have to do could not be in any way described as peaceful, yet they are only there because of decisions made by legally elected democratic Governments, and in many ways soldiers are far more pragmatic than politicians about the chances of easy success. It would be wonderful if our politicians were more successful in their negotiations, then soldiers could spend more time in their ‘pot’, in barracks, or better still down the pub.

Unlike many people in the Western world, British soldiers really know the price of freedom and peace, they know that the world isn’t pretty, and they also know that when push comes to shove, whether they want to or not, it will be their duty to try to restore order in some unpleasant environment. And they do it, and have done it time and time again. There is no one else.

And over the last four or five years they’ve done it almost continually, many for a measly remuneration of just 12.5 thousand pounds a year. And governed by strict laws of armed combat they have, on the whole (with very few exceptions) acted justly, humbly and despite incredible provocation, so often incredibly kindly, and have quietly gone about their duty time and time again.

And that’s why, for me, the Rabbinic story works so well; the imagery of God first looking for a pot to store up his blessings for humanity. Then God realizing that pots are used to store things for when they are needed, and that our blessings cannot be saved up for a rainy day but are in constant demand. God’s blessing to the peacemakers, shalom, cannot be passive but essentially is active.

Since Eden, the world and societies within it have evolved, and it seems to me that the Pauline concept, of our redemption also being in the process, of us being redeemed now and not yet, compliments this idea of an active peace, and the continuing need for peacemakers.

Today, in many ways, the world is a lot more peaceful than it has been, but it’s still far from perfect. And because of this, continuing painful evolution, when our politicians demand some poor mother’s child will have to deploy, and stand in the way of evil, or danger, and be ready to be counted.

The harsh truth remains that, despite the joy of Easter Morn, the bitter reality is that this is still a fallen world, a world in process, and until it, and we, are all finally redeemed we will continue to need peacemakers. Because of the glorious resurrection, there is always hope; but when peacemakers initially fail, to sleep safely in all our beds, to study, or even to look at the stars; I know that we’ll still need God’s blessing, and, for the time being, unfortunately we’ll still need those soldiers. May God bless them.

Amen.

Rev’d Dowell Conning, Army Chaplain
25th February 2007

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

‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God’.

Of all the Beatitudes I think this is the most attractive but possibly the least attainable of them all. Sadly all of us will mourn the death of someone we hold dear, most of us will at some point be filled with righteous anger and compassion for the situation and of those around us, and some of us from time to time will reflect that meekness and humility which is so highly prized, but how many of us will ever be pure?

We don’t need St Augustine, or any other theologian for that matter, to tell us what the true state of the human heart is like. We know for ourselves that it is a battleground of conflicting thoughts and emotions, desires and duties, goodness and evil. I remember having to go and see Bishop of London in a final interview before I was put forward for ordination. I don’t know if you have seen or know him, but he is the most formidable and intimidating of men. I have blanked out most of that terrifying ordeal, but I do remember his weighty words of caution: ‘Be careful, for the heart is very deceitful.’ Perhaps not the most encouraging things to say but it was memorable and made me stop and think about my motivations and desires and not to put my whole trust in them. For the heart, the core of our being, our deepest, truest selves made in the image and likeness of God, is warped and disfigured by sin.

I was going to go on and preach a sermon about how we can purify ourselves, redirect and reorder our destructive passions through a life of virtue in accordance with the other Beatitudes, and our reward for this enormous effort would be to see God. But while I was writing this I was suddenly struck by the fact that even in my own experience seeing God is not governed by the state of our hearts, it is not a reward for the spiritual elite who have toiled up the mountains of virtue and made their hearts pure, but is a gift offered to us all.

There are greater people to attest to this, not least Paul and Moses, but emboldened by the Bishop of Reading’s eloquent testimony the other week at St Aldates I want to tell you my story. For when I was nineteen, at university in Exeter, I did see God, not in any literal or visionary sense, but in the sense that a door was opened in my heart and I knew who the ground of my being, the end of all my desire was and I fell in love with Love himself. I had done nothing to deserve this. I was no ascetic and living the life of a hedonistic student in the fullest sense (there was no way you cold have called me pure). And yet I saw God, and that sight did not leave me for a long time, but was a physical feeling and a spiritual desire. Ironically, this did not make me feel pure in any sense, but on the contrary, much more aware of my impurity. A door had been opened and a light had been switched on, but whilst wonderful, its glare showed up so many blemishes and disfigurements, which the darkness had previously hidden. Since then I would say that the hardest part of my life is to look at that disfigured heart, illuminated by God’s light, and try to live with the reality that God loves that person, and not the one I would like him to see.

It would be so much easier to stand before God, to see God knowing that we were pure, holy, that all our dreadful thoughts and ideas did not exist, that we had trodden them down by the habit of virtue and we stood before God as our reward and our right. But the truth is far more harrowing. We stand before God naked, for he sees past all our attempts to hide what we really are, to trick him into thinking we are good and virtuous people. He sees all this and more. For whilst God Looks on our disfigured faces it is with the light of love that he sees, and this light pierces through our outer image and into the heart, which he created in his own image, which he knows and loves, and which, like him, is pure.

Those great mystics, like St John of the Cross, describe such an encounter as being set on fire. The fire of God’s love is ignited in the soul and slowly radiates out, purging the soul of all its sin until it becomes all flame. For no one who encounters God, be it through music, liturgy, scripture, academic study, nature or the words of others, is ever left unchanged by the experience. The flame of Christ’s presence in our lives, in our hearts, warms and illuminates us in a very real and tangible way. For the mystics of the Eastern Church, like Evagrius and Gregory of Nyssa, this is revealed in the life of virtue, which is not only the response to the love of God within our hearts, but is also the means of redirecting our passions to fulfill our truest and purest desires. The Beatitude is thereby turned on its head ~ blessed are they that see God for they shall be pure.

Unfortunately, from my own experience, I know too well that we cannot live on the mountain top, that the vision, the sight of God fades and the flame within us, is not so easily felt. But the mystics encourage us by their words, both hard and reassuring, that it is now, when the first flush of love is over, when we dwell in the dark night of the soul, that God begins his real work of stripping and burning and changing to reveal our true selves. It is now that our faith, our hope and our love of God are our anchor; that whilst we may at times see and feel nothing of his presence, we know that he dwells in our hearts. It is now that, against all the odds, despite the sin within ourselves and in the world, we live with the expectation of seeing him, glimpsing him wherever he shows himself. It is now that we can say: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.’
Amen

The Chaplain
18th February 2007

‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy’ Matthew 5:7

Mercy, it’s said, is when we deserve something bad but don’t get it. It’s pre-eminently a gift of power or status, a gift of the stronger to the weaker, of the powerful to the dependent. So kings can dispense mercy, but on the whole peasants can’t.

The Bible is full of examples of this kind of mercy. The king who had mercy on a servant who owed him an enormous sum, and cancelled it – only for the man to go out and have a fellow-servant thrown into prison for not paying him a much smaller debt. Or, on a different level, Joseph having mercy on his brothers, who had earlier sold him into slavery, when eventually, as second ruler of Egypt, he had them in his power.

The poor in spirit, the bereaved, the persecuted, even the peace-makers, may not be in a position to show mercy. This beatitude is an invitation to those who can.

Mercy is a fundamental characteristic of God. In fact, the Hebrew word which most closely parallels it, chesed, is probably the most frequently quoted abstract noun in the book of Psalms (we had it in our psalm tonight) – and always it refers to God. The King James Version translated it as ‘loving-kindness’, and no one has really bettered that. ‘Steadfast love’ and ‘mercy’ are also used to translate it, but the sum total of those properties is to be found supremely only in Yahweh, the living God. God is a God of mercy, who uses his power not arbitrarily or punitively, but in acts of mercy – of which, for Christians, the supreme expression is in the self-sacrificial life of Jesus.

Micah summed up memorably the heart of God’s moral requirements in these words: ‘O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God’. These beatitudes are like a fugue woven around those themes!

I said that mercy is the prerogative of power, but in one sense we all exercise power. A society without mercy in its everyday existence would be barren, ugly and vicious. Sadly, a loss of a sense of mercy marks much of modern life. Judges who exercise it are vilified. Offenders are demonised. Lock them up for life, hang them, chuck them out, shut your eyes to the world of injustice and suffering. Where there is no chesed there is no blessing, because from mercy flows blessing and from that blessing flows true happiness.

Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, said that mercy blesses twice over – it blesses the one who receives it, and the one who shows it. That is precisely how Jesus expresses its effect here. Those who show mercy, receive it, and are blessed.

Kyrie elison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. We have prayed those words tonight. No one is more ready to hear the cry for mercy than Jesus. Indeed, in Luke’s Gospel his last two actions, while dying on the cross, were of mercy. He forgave the Roman soldiers who, a couple of hours earlier, had nailed him there. ‘Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing’. Then he forgave the thief hanging on the cross alongside him. ‘Jesus, remember me,’ he said, ‘when you come into your kingdom’. ‘Truly’, Jesus replied. ‘today (not at some future date of kingly power) today you will be with me in paradise’.

To practice mercy is to reveal the likeness of God, to follow the example of Christ, to bring blessing to ourselves – and to a world crying out for mercy.

Canon David Winter, Former Head of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC
11th February 2007

‘In some languages,’ said the linguistics lecturer, ‘a double negative means a negative; in some languages a double negative means a positive. But in all languages, a double positive means a positive. There are no languages in which a double positive means a negative.’
And a voice from the back row called out, ‘Yeah, yeah.’

We have become the ‘Yeah, yeah’ culture. ‘Don’t try to take us in; we’ve heard it all before; it’s all promises, promises, spin and no substance.’ And there are many things in our world where that reaction, sadly, seems all too appropriate.
And I suspect the only reason why Jesus’ Beatitudes don’t come in for the same treatment is that we hear them as a kind of religious wallpaper: someone may have thought about it one stage but now we take it for granted. A pleasing background noise, murmuring its sotto voce blessings while the business of the room goes on unaffected. But in Jesus’ day, and to anyone who reads them seriously today, the Beatitudes surely cry out for the ‘yeah, yeah’ treatment. ‘Blessed are the poor? Blessed are the meek? The persecuted, the pure in heart, the merciful, the peacemakers?’ Yeah, yeah, give me a break: it sounds like the revenge of the no-hopers: we haven’t made it in the present world, so we’ll detach ourselves, escape into a private piety, and hope for a better future by and by in the sky.
And if you think that’s what Jesus meant – and, sadly, there have been many Christians, not to mention non-Christians, who have seen it like that – then the decline of faith seems inevitable. Swinburne’s picture of the pale Galilean, or Nietzsche’s critique of wimpish Christianity, seem to have their finger on the button. And today’s world of politics, business, the arts, the media – wherever you look, they’ve all gone along for the ride. ‘Jesus? Yeah, yeah.’

But this is, of course, a way of avoiding the sharp and dangerous challenge that Jesus’ words present. He is saying what millions then and now desperately want to hear, and could hear if only his followers would get off their whatevers and do what he said. He is saying, ‘Let me tell you: this world could be different. Actually, it’s going to be different. It’s going to be turned upside down – or rather, it’s going to be turned the right way up. And that process is starting right now! Why don’t you get on board and help make it happen?’ That was, and is, the challenge of Jesus’ preaching, and if this were a lecture rather than a sermon it would be fun to explore it in much more detail.

But tonight we reach one of the best known and loved of the Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ If you know Brahms’s German Requiem you may be able to imagine the wonderful opening chorus which sets those words: Selig die Trauernden, denn sie werden getröstet werden. A lovely word, getröstet; Trost, with echoes of our ‘trust’, a word which says ‘here is something you can rely on, lean on, find fresh strength from’. And ‘strength’ is of course what our word ‘comfort’ is all about. Comforting someone doesn’t mean explaining that things aren’t as bad as they seem. They often are, or even worse. Comfort is what happens when someone comes alongside and gives you strength. How that happens is one of the mysteries of human life and love.

All that is implied in this Beatitude, but it goes much further. When God turns the world the right way up, declares Jesus, then those who presently have nothing but grief in their hearts will find comfort, not simply because someone has come alongside them but because the world will be put to rights at last. And when that happens, death itself, the great bringer of mourning, will be overthrown. This ancient Jewish hope, which is not the same as the cyclic myths of reincarnation that we find scattered across the ancient near east, but is a hope for an eventual future in which, as John Donne insisted, ‘death shall be no more’ – this hope insisted that one day the creator God would make a new world, new heavens and new earth, and would raise people to a new and immortal bodily life to live in it, to look after it, to fill it with justice and joy. And Jesus’ promise of God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven means just that: that this tired, battered old world will be renewed from top to bottom, not thrown away, leaving us as mere disembodied spirits in a non-spatio-temporal heaven, but given a new, incorruptible bodily existence in comparison with which our present life is like a passing cloud. That is the promise of God’s kingdom; and that is the promise which undergirds, and comes to sharp expression in, the full set of Beatitudes.

So what do we say about mourning, about death and what lies beyond, about God’s promises to renew all things and us along with them?

First, get clear on the shape of Christian hope. For many modern Western Christians, the idea of a still future resurrection of the dead has retreated, and in its place has come simply the language of heaven: you die, you go to heaven, and that’s it. But the hope of the earliest Christians, and of many in non-Western traditions to this day, is for an eventual bodily resurrection. That’s what Paul is talking about in the spectacular passage we heard as our second lesson. When God will be all in all, in the new world over which Jesus will rule as king, then all those who belong to Jesus will be raised to share in it and indeed to rule over it. That’s the promise. And therefore, rather to our surprise, the early Christian writers aren’t very interested (as we are very interested) in where or indeed what people are immediately after their death, in between their death and the final resurrection. St Paul says simply, ‘My desire is to depart and be with Christ, which is far better’. Jesus himself speaks of going ahead to prepare lodgings for us – not our eventual home, because our eventual home will be God’s new creation, not some heavenly mansion.

Once we get this straight, we are given back a proper acceptance of grief, of mourning. Jesus doesn’t say we shouldn’t mourn; he says, ‘Blessed are the mourners’. If the person who has died has simply ‘gone to heaven’, then for many Christians mourning seems inappropriate. When my father-in-law died, my mother-in-law, as a devout Christian, believed that since he was now in heaven we shouldn’t be sad and cry, but should celebrate. So she did. Eighteen months later, her only and beloved daughter emigrated to Canada, and she wept bitterly for a fortnight. That parting, itself sad but not that sad, brought to the surface at last all her previously buried and undealt-with grief.

In a key passage, St Paul doesn’t say that Christians shouldn’t grieve; he says we shouldn’t grieve in the manner of people who have no hope. There is such a thing as hope-less grieving; and there is, thank God, such a thing as hope-ful, or we might say hope-filled, grieving. That is part of the Christian paradox, and indeed hope-filled grieving could stand as a metaphor for what the wise Christian thinks when looking out at this entire world the way it is, filled with bitterness and violence, with injustice, oppression and every kind of human misery. The Lamentations of Jeremiah, from which our first reading came, could stand as a heading for an appropriate Christian viewpoint on the world: grief, with powerful hope at the middle of it.

During my first year as Chaplain here, our much-loved Head Porter, Ray Smith, died quite suddenly and quite young. His daughter was my scout on Staircase 3. I was preparing to take the funeral, and she told me she wouldn’t come to it. Why on earth not, I said, of course you must come. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I know I’ll just cry and cry.’ ‘That’s precisely why you must come,’ I said. That’s what a funeral is for, and don’t let anyone tell you different. Grief is the shadow side of love; not to grieve implies that you haven’t loved, and, if you have, then not to grieve is to live a lie. But truth will out sooner or later, and sooner is better. She came; and she grieved; and she was comforted.
And so the comfort which Jesus promises as part of the blessing of the Kingdom, the comfort which will be fully ours in the new world which God will make, comes forward from that world to meet us in the present. Thank God, there is both a future hope and an anticipation of that future hope in the present. And this means that we are called to be people of comfort, as well as people of grief, in the present: people through whom comfort comes to others. The Beatitudes are not only promises; they are agendas. We learn their meaning for ourselves so that we may make them real for others. But that is a whole other sermon. For now: Blessed are those who mourn; for they shall be comforted. And the response is not ‘yeah, yeah.’ It is: ‘Amen; Amen.’

Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham
21st January 2007

Humility – or being Poor in spirit
has always been an admirable quality.
However, there has always been a double bind associated with it.
That is,
if we feel we are humble;
we probably are not.

Or as an American religious was reported to say once:
“I’m the humblest monk in Texas!”

Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ novel is obsequious,
#But that is a phoney sort of being poor in spirit,
Because his apparent humility masked an inner malignant pride and deceit.

Perhaps to be poor in spirit
Is actually to be accurate about oneself
Which can be both positive and negative.

*There is a story of Winston Churchill towards the end of his life being in
bed at Chartwell. A small child comes through the doors of his bedroom and
says:
“Please Sir, my Mother said you were the most famous man in the world. Are
you?”

To which the reply was:
“Too right I am; now buzz off.”

That is an example of humility,
Because at the time, he was. It would have been inaccurate for him to deny
it out of a false sense of modesty.

Sometimes being poor in spirit is essential for one’s work.
I suppose the opposite of being poor in spirit,
Is someone who is full of themselves.
Some people in their work have to get themselves out of the way almost to
the point of being a non-entity:

There is a beautiful description of Smiley, the spy in Smiley’s People,
which said: “Smiley was a good spy. For instance, if he were sitting alone
in a pub and someone opened the door and looked around and left, they would
have sworn that the pub was empty.”

A good counsellor or listener often has the quality of forgetting
themselves and losing themselves in what someone else is saying in order to
identify what the meaning of what is being said is for the person saying it.

Someone who is poor in spirit in a spiritual sense, would be much like
Mother Theresa, who would essentially look at the world through a
God’s-eye-view, rather than her own.

It might be described as being like a stained-glass window in which God’s
love shines through our own particular window in the unique colours of our
own personality.

Like the stars, the heavenly light shines most clearly when it is not
diminished by the light pollution of our own ego trip.

In the New Testament lesson read this evening, the Centurion, who is a
high-ranking officer in the Roman Army occupying Israel, sent some Jewish
elders to see Jesus, to save his servant’s life.
He did not come himself, nor did he send one of his own men.

Then when they approached his house, he sent word to say:
“Do not trouble yourself, for I do not deserve to have you come under my
roof. That is why I did not even consider myself worthy to come to you, But
say the word, and my servant will be healed.”

Jesus calls his poverty of spirit, faith, for that is what it is.

He is putting absolute trust in God’s power acting through Jesus.

The degree to which he is able to trust Jesus, rather than his own
authority, is a poverty of spirit, which results in the healing of his
servant. Jesus’ says ” I have not found such great faith even in Israel.”

Perhaps it is like the laws of physics, that 2 things cannot occupy the same
space at the same time. Either we or our pride can be there
or others’ needs and God’s power can be present, though it probably is not
as absolute as that when we look at it on a paradoxical level.

On a paradoxical level, it can be the ultimate selfishness to be unselfish,
because we certainly receive far more. This is backed by research that
someone’s ability to be fulfilled is largely dependent on whether they can
live a considerate style of life.

Many ask the question “How can I allow myself to get close to another
person, without my pride or bossiness getting in the way?”

In short, how can I become intimate with another person or with God?

Perhaps the basic response is how can we become poor in spirit.

How is this done?

Think of a continuum:
On one side, there is power – on the other side there is intimacy.
We are somewhere in between.

Power is where I can get what I want, when I want it.

Intimacy is where I give up power, and allow myself to be vulnerable to
another person. When I am vulnerable, they have power over me.
They can hurt me, reject me, shun me, or say they do not love me.”

As a rule, the more power we have, the less intimacy.

To a powerful person, intimacy is shunned because the vulnerability feels
like.

* I learned a valuable lesson about this from a strange cat I
once owned. It displayed strange behaviour, which I had to consult a vet
about. I would pet the cat who was lying on my lap. The cat would purr and
go to sleep. All of a sudden, , the cat would waken, jump up, bite and
claw me severely, often drawing blood, hiss and run off as if I had become
an enemy.

What the vet said, is that the cat, in going to sleep, would forget it was
being rubbed by a friend. It would suddenly wake up, and register the
closeness as danger. It would then attack as if its life depended on
defending itself from an enemy who had got too close, as it would in the
wild. He suggested only giving the cat a few rubs, and not letting it fall
asleep on my lap.

I thought, how similar to people who develop an intimacy, then suddenly
reject the partner, who is too close, because they register intimacy as
being powerless; the partner as being a foe.

Likewise when 2 wolves are fighting, when one wants the fight to stop it
lies on its back and bares its neck in a gesture of intimacy. The other
wolf could easily rip its opponent’s throat out.
It doesn’t, in the face of such an act of intimacy, hostility stops.

Perhaps this is similar to Jesus’ approach to violence by suggesting turning
the other cheek. This plays judo to power, through a display of intimacy.

In order to achieve intimacy with another person or with God, we have to
give up power, to become poor in spirit.

Power can take many forms. It can be by achieving dominance over another;
it can be to become addicted to drugs.
How is addiction power?

To take drugs is to feel better instantly. It places my feelings entirely
within my control. I can feel better now, without waiting for it to be in
the gift of others or a change in my own attitude toward what is happening.

This instant power comes at a heavy price. The heavy price is that we lose
our capacity to handle stress.

The interesting side effect is that if someone achieves a position of power,
or becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol,
the side effect is that it freezes one’s emotional age from the age the
power or addiction starts.

For instance, if someone starts drinking at 16 and stops at 45, then they
are a 16 year old in a 45 year old body.

When they stop drinking, they go through all the stages of development and
growth between adolescence and 45.

You can tell the emotional age often by the tone of voice, sometimes getting
it down to a year or two.

One such client said “It’s not fair, nobody loves me.”
“How old are you?” I asked
” I’m 35″ said the client
I replied, “Listening to the emotional age of the voice, it sounded like age
15 or younger.

Anyway, as they grew up emotionally, the voice changed to late adolescence,
then adulthood and took on a deeper and more understanding tone. The client
was listening to their own voice as well. We stopped when the emotional and
physical age were the same.

The poor in spirit, sometimes speak with the wisdom of an elderly person,
even when they are young in years.
I once was given a tape of a child aged 6 who had suffered and was in a
hospice. I said that it sounded as if the child were 6 going on 100. I could
even imagine myself sitting at his feet and learning something, despite the
age difference.

It makes it interesting to listen to politicians on the news, to hear their
emotional age.

Here power does the same as drugs in bringing about arrested development:
Statements from world leaders like “We’re going to whup their ass”
” Or nobody is going to tell US that we can’t develop nuclear weapons”
betrays being stuck at a particular emotional age.

Isn’t it reassuring that many weapons of mass destruction in the world are
in the capable hands of a few emotional adolescents?

There is a spiritual paradox here. The more we have under our control in
possessions and power, the less intimacy, and the capacity to enjoy what we
have.

In Zen, this truth is illustrated by a circular elliptical figure, which is
a complete circle, called MU.

MU means two things simultaneously: it means both everything and nothing
It reflects a divine truth that the more of everything we have; the less we
have.
(Gadgets and worldly possessions cannot love us back)

The paradox it represents is one who is without possessions, owns the world.
And the one who owns everything, enjoys nothing of what he or she has
because of the worry of defending their possessions,
and therefore really enjoys nothing.
If we own nothing; we possess the world because no possessions own us.

*This truth was illustrated in a Zen tale.
A Zen master asked one of his disciples to reflect on the koan : “Do cats
have souls?”
The disciple went away for several days and reflected.

Finally he came back to the Master, sat down and answered in one word: “Mew
(Mu).”

To be poor in spirit is to have no power
and to feel no burden of wealth.
It means to be able to be open to what life has to offer
— the intimacy of another
–the intimacy of the beauty of nature and the universe
but most important, the intimacy of God.

Both the hand and the heart
which wishes to receive, must first let go and be empty of lesser things
in order to receive the greater.

To be poor in spirit is indeed to be able to receive all that the kingdom of
heaven has to offer.

In a moment of silence:

Reflect-
At what time of your life were you the most full of joy, contentment and
love?

(silence)

Now reflect
on what particular loss or what poverty of goods or of spirit
made that joy possible? ///

Canon Beaumont Stevenson
Chaplain, the Psychiatric Hospitals of Oxford
Pastoral Care Adviser, Diocese of Oxford

You might have been wondering where the stained glass window on the front of your service sheet is from. It’s actually one of our chapel windows – the one on the right of the door as you come in. I’ve been giving a series of sermons on all seven windows, and this, the last one, fits well with the theme of our service tonight. You can see a full detail of it on the last page of your service sheet.

William Burgess, the architect behind the refurbishment of this chapel in the 1860s (you can see the date of its completion on the ceiling) was a Victorian who believed passionately in the power of the visual to communicate spiritual truths. So he covered the walls, ceilings and floors and furniture with people and themes from the Bible, church history, classical tradition and the natural world, whilst his glazier, Henry Holiday, applied his skills to the windows, on the theme of ‘Christ the Light of the World’. To say this chapel is rich in symbolism is an understatement. The illustrations often also served as a commentary on theological and social issues of the mid nineteenth century: the friezes around the windows reflect the debates about Darwinism and creation, for example, and the ceilings and the narthex reflect the nineteenth controversies about the relationship between Jews and Christians, and on the floor, behind the altar and in the windows we find suggestions of the disputes about the role of the church in society. In the 1860s, both undergraduates and fellows would have had to attend chapel daily for morning prayer, so there was plenty of opportunity for meditation on these things. Some hundred and fifty years later, we have lost so much of this interaction; and that is why I am trying to revive some of it in this series of sermons.

Our window tells its story just as the great cathedral windows would have done; predictably, its depiction of the visit of the magi, seems to reflect particular nineteenth-century British concerns about the nature of monarchies and the extent of their powers. The window is certainly a stylized depiction of the Gospel story. We no longer look into a stable, with the ox and ass, but rather look outwards from the entrance of a house; you can see the porticos, the silhouettes of the trees against the darkened sky, and the star casting its piercing shaft of light – almost like a sword – onto the Virgin and Child. Most importantly the visitors are no longer magi from the East, in traditional Oriental garb, but they are rulers of the kingdoms from the Western Christendom. Admittedly, the third figure in the background has a turban, but even he might typify the kingdom of the Turks – itself a relevant topic given the Crimean wars of the 1850s. But the other two – the one in red presenting myrrh, the one in gold and silver offering his golden crown – are distinctly Anglo-Saxon in physique and dress. The blue and black canopy, in the top left of the window, is embossed with royal symbols, and it protects the Virgin Mary, who in turn protects her baby son and holds a serene and regal pose. The infant Jesus, supported by Mary resting on a purple pillow, looks upwards and outwards: although only a few weeks old, he possesses a wisdom and composure way beyond his years. And we are included in this scene; together we can observe the contrast between the rulers who hold earthly but temporal power and the simple authority of the Christ-Child, whose kingdom we already know is in this world but not of it.
The details of this scene are taken from Matthew’s Gospel; they follow the reading the Provost gave a few minutes ago. Matthew records no stable, no ox and ass, no angels, no visit of the shepherds; all those details are in Luke’s Gospel. The setting is some time after Jesus’ birth, still in Bethlehem, but in a house. Matthew actually describes the visitors as ‘magi’- astrologers, following signs and portents through a star – not kings. But the kingship theme is undoubtedly a key part of Matthew’s story: the magi enquire in nearby Jerusalem as to the whereabouts of the ‘one born king of the Jews’, and the jealousy of king Herod, the references to Bethlehem, the birthplace of king David and the city where the promised ‘King of the Jews’ would be born, is deliberate.

So the scene in our window, with a certain artistic license, interprets Matthew’s account. It depicts the ‘kings of this world’ – in its nineteenth century setting probably from the kingdoms of Europe- paying homage to a baby whom they partially understand has a kingdom which surpasses theirs. It is a bizarre sight: those who hold power give it back to one who, in all the vulnerability of birthing and infancy, is utterly powerless. But this is what Burgess intended: if you look up above the window you will see a scroll held by the prophet Zechariah. Each window has its own caption through an unfurled scroll; the one over our window is taken from Zechariah 14:9: ‘And the Lord will become king over all the earth’.

The theme of ‘Christ the King’ has been a golden thread running throughout our service tonight, and given that we are starting the season of Advent, it is deliberate. We encountered it in our very first hymn, ‘Once in royal David’s city’, where we sang of Jesus’ first coming as a baby and his second coming as King over all the earth. We encountered the theme again as we prayed the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy kingdom come… for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory…’. We heard it in the reading from Isaiah 9 which spoke about one who was to be born from the house of David and who would bring in the rule of God. And in the hymn ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ we sang of how ‘the hopes and fears of all the years’ have been met in this Bethlehem birth.

So we could in fact end this sermon here. By looking at this window we could simply note that those who possess power and authority – and in our day we might choose instead those in government at home and abroad, and those leading our churches and, most relevantly in Oxford, those determining our education – we could simply note that those who possess power and authority serve their cause best when they recognize the temporal and temporary nature of their calling. This is an important message, and would that those who are in positions of power and authority could apply it more in their lives. But – because of our participation in the theme of Christ the King, we have to raise a further question: as we look through this window, together, what does all this mean for us?

The scene can mean a good deal to us. But we can only begin to take something from it when we appreciate that here we have just one example of what might be called the ‘upside-down’ nature of the Christian Gospel: it’s a theme which is developed not only in this window, but in the others as well, where in each case ‘Christ the Light of the World’ confounds human expectations of what a redeeming figure should be like. This reversal is there in the very first window, on the left of the door, which is of Mary receiving the message from angel Gabriel that she will give birth to Christ; we heard this story in an earlier reading, and it speaks of God confounding the mighty and powerful and rich and choosing the meek and powerless and poor through whom to bring about his work of salvation. The most vivid illustration is in the crucifixion window, behind me: here we have a moving image of Christ, the ‘King of the Jews’, who refutes worldly power and who affects salvation by being as vulnerable in his death as he was in his birth. The title over his cross is in fact, again, ‘King of the Jews’: it links together his birth and his death and shows us how the one who was born to be a different sort of king –for us- also dies as a different sort of king – for us. T.S. Eliot, in his poem The Visit of the Magi, also dwells on this theme. In the words of one of the magi, having returned to his land from that visit to Bethlehem, we hear:
Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We have evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

So the story of the Light of Christ, in its various stained glass hues, is of God’s attempt to penetrate the darkened human mind and the indifferent human heart through an element of ‘reversal’ and ‘surprise’. And our response? That even though we don’t fully understand, we try to believe. In the Christian Gospel we see again and again that Christ’s life and death is about the power of love, not about the love of power. Our response therefore has to be as simple yet as profound as that of the kings. In the words of the carol by Christina Rosetti which we heard the choir sing so movingly earlier:
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man,
I would do my part.
Yet what I can I give Him
Give my heart.

Perhaps as you sing our last hymn, ‘O Come all ye Faithful’- one which you might have sung so many times that you are in danger of ignoring its meaning – perhaps you can take time to ponder these things, reflect on this window, and make your own homage to the one whose purpose in coming into this world was to demonstrate, again and again, the power of love over and above the love of power.

Amen.

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
26th November 2006

There would be a certain delicious cruelty in preaching only tonight on the last verse from our reading from Ecclesiastes: ‘youth and the dawn of life are vanity.’ There is enough to be gloomy about in fourth week of Michaelmas Term, and on the day that we have to admit it is nearly winter because the clocks have gone back, without dwelling upon intimations of mortality.

The words of the Preacher – the writer of Ecclesiastes – whose studied indifference to the vicissitudes of life, and refusal to be beguiled by novelty, fame or riches which might be summed up with the one word, whatever, do however give me a way in to this address. For the Preacher recognises mystery at the heart of existence. ‘As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child,’ he writes, ‘so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.’ Creation and Creator, life and the author of life, are both mystery. And here – as in any theological use of the word, from the Old Testament or the New – mystery does not mean an inexplicable puzzle to be solved, a riddle to which we will one day know the answer: it means an unknowable certainty. A man may love his wife, and may know that he does with all his heart – yet try and explain that to somebody else, and the chances are that after a few moments, their eyes will glaze over with boredom. The love between two people may be utterly real; and yet it cannot be put easily into words, or represented as a scientific formula or algebraic equation. But it is no less true for that.

Some people cannot cope with the concept of mystery. Racing up the bestseller’s list at present, I’m sorry to say, is Dr Dawkins latest book, The God Delusion. Here, we find what can only be described as materialist fundamentalism: if a thing cannot be seen, touched, measured, proven according to physically observable criteria, then it cannot be true. Terry Eagleton – a Professor of Literature and literary theory, and by no means a blindly loyal son of the Church – describes Dawkins’ book in a notable article published just a week or so ago, as not only the work of an enraged atheist, but of a brisk, bloodless rationalist, a product of a certain kind of English middle class liberalism which generally finds its home in North Oxford. (As a resident of North Oxford myself, I’d like to assure Terry Eagleton that it ain’t necessarily so.) In opposing the God who is the superdaddy in the sky, the big boss above who acts arbitrarily and even capriciously in allowing suffering to exist in the world and not putting all to rights with the wave of a magic wand, Dawkins is forgetting the very first thing which the Church holds about God in her doctrine of Creation. God is not an item of the universe; God is the reason why there is a universe, why there is anything at all rather than simply non-existence. It is the freedom which God gives to creation – what has been called, God’s willingness to let creation create itself – that allows for the possibility of science (creation can be investigated, explored, understood more deeply and more thoroughly), and, indeed, scientists – even Dr Dawkins himself. Because God is not part of, but outside, creation, he is mystery: and we can never fully express the mystery of God.

Yet neither can we leave things at that. It is the Christian claim that God who is mystery has made himself known; initially, and in part, to his first chosen people, through a series of covenantal relationships; but then perfectly in Jesus Christ, who reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature; who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; and who has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of God’s will. Not only – so Christians believe – do we see in Jesus Christ the fullness of the revelation of God; but we also find in him the fullness of the mystery of man. Think back to the words from Ecclesiastes, who wrote of the mystery of the conception of a new life. However much, however massively, our medical and biological knowledge has increased – and it has, in ways which in themselves, we surely glimpse more, not less, of the wonder of God’s creation – however much more scientifically advanced we are so that we can create the circumstances which make new life possible in a variety of ways which would have been unimaginable to the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures (or indeed the Christian Scriptures as well), yet there is still a mystery about human existence which Christianity understands like this. At the moment of our conception, God gives to each one of us, newly, separately, and uniquely, that part of us which most nearly reflects the divine likeness, and which is immortal: which we call, our soul. Created as both spirit and matter, it is God’s purpose for us, that we should live to know and to love God, who creates us in love, and to reflect back to him, perfectly, the image of his glory. And – so Christians claim – it is only in Jesus, only in the Incarnate Word who is both God and man, that human existence does indeed find perfection and fulfilment. It is for that reason that the Scriptures and the Tradition speak of Jesus as our great high priest: the one who alone is able to present humanity before the throne of grace, an acceptable sacrifice of thanksgiving, love and praise.

How can we share in the priesthood of Christ? How can we so unite our lives with his, that they too might be conformed to the divine purpose in creating mankind? In our second reading tonight, there is a rather extraordinary verse, in which Paul, writing to Timothy, urges him to share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. That verse may well strike us as odd, for two reasons. First, because the church has lost confidence in the notion of Christians as the battle-squadrons of Our Lord. Sabine Baring-Gould’s Christian Soldiers rarely march onwards as to war (though they still do in Pusey House Chapel). Secondly, the verse may disturb us because of its association of our discipleship with the suffering of Christ – an altogether too uncomfortable a notion for much Christianity, especially in the prosperous West today, although one which represents a theme which runs through the New Testament from Our Lord’s injunction to James and John that if they are to share his glory, they must drink from the cup of his suffering. I shall not pursue that theme further this evening.

However, I do want to end by saying something about one way in which we can – indeed, as Christians, must – seek to unite our lives ever more closely with that of Christ, and one for which the image of a soldier is not unhelpful. I mean, prayer. Christian spiritual tradition has long understood prayer to involve a struggle – a battle; and as the great masters (and mistresses) of prayer down the ages have shown us in their writings, that battle grows more intense, the nearer one draws to God: sanctity, so Christian history would suggest, seldom brings serenity, in this world at any rate. The battle of prayer can be with ourselves. We can become distracted, our attention taken easily away from God, and directed towards – and this can be uncomfortably revealing – what we are really attached to, what really matters to us: and when this happens, it can be a wake-up call to look again at what is actually motivating, controlling and absorbing us. We can become despondent when prayer does not appear to be answered in the way that we think it ought to be. We can become prone to – here’s a technical term for you – accidie; spiritual torpor, sloth and laziness, which quickly becomes our habit of body and mind, when all we want to do is stay in bed, or drink another pint, or watch daytime TV (does it sound familiar?). Or the battle can be with our environment – with the many material things, the goods, the images, with which our world bombards us, which can bury our true selves, our best selves, and so erect a barrier between us and God. Or the battle can be with Satan, the Accuser (and whether he is real as you or I are real seems to me to be quite beside the point) – the one who so confronts us with our own faults and failings, our own sins, that we feel so low and wretched that prayer becomes impossible.

On each of these fronts, there will be a battle in our attempt to pray, in our struggle, as St Teresa put it, to ‘take time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.’ Yet we must never lose heart; for we are not alone. We are just now coming into the wonderful season of All Saints-tide, when we celebrate that great cloud of witnesses who have been – each one of them – where we are, and now encourage us by their prayers, offered in the nearer presence of God, to follow along the trail which they have blazed, God’s purpose in the creation of mankind made perfect in them as it can be in each of us. We never pray alone: but always in the communion and fellowship of all who have run the race – who have fought the fight – before us: and who now rejoice in the presence of the unveiled mystery of God, the source and origin of all things, all things ending and perfection.

Rev’d Jonathan Baker, Principal of Pusey House
29th October 2006

Over the last few years a number of comic book superheroes have made the leap from the glossy page to the silver screen. Out of all of these movies the one I have enjoyed the most has been Spiderman, not that I was ever a great addict for the comic, but because the 2 movies have grappled with the important question of, is it worth being and doing good in a world where you just get knocked down for it and receive no reward or recognition? It dares to ask the question of what is the point of doing good?

If you have seen especially the second Spiderman movie I am sure you will remember if not empathize with the slightly nerdish Peter Parker who, in both his personal and superhero lives always tries to do the right and decent thing but somehow his life is worse for this rather than better. Regardless of the fact that he has plucked a child from a burning building and saved countless other lives, he is still repromanded by his tutor with that most terrible condemnation of his work as disappointing. He loses his job because of his unreliability and must give up the girl he loves because of his concern that he may put her in danger. Even his life as a superhero comes in for criticism as the national press relish in portraying him as the masked menace in order to increase sales. It seems that doing the right thing, even bending down to pick up your books which someone has knocked from your hands leads to you being smacked in the face by other people’s bags, it seems that being good just doesn’t pay.

In his very astute way, Diarmird McCullough, on In Our Time last week, which was on Luthur, commented that this is the small problem the Protestant Church is left with if it follows the doctrine that salvation is by faith alone. For, if we are justified by faith and faith alone then what is the point of doing good or more worrying, what is the point in not doing bad. If our actions have no bearing on our salvation then what is the incentive to do the right thing or not to do the bad?

This is certainly not the situation we find in our first reading this evening, taken from that most troubling of books, Joshua. Here we see that doing the right thing really does pay and pays very well as Caleb comes to Joshua and asks for the land which Moses promised him as a reward for “wholeheartedly following the Lord”. However difficult we amy find it to hear a story of territorial ancestry at this time of war and suffering in the Middle East over dispossession, it is clear that for the writer of this section of the book, the Lord not only rewarded those who followed him but rewarded them in a very tangible and visible way, namely victory and the riches of land.

I often feel rather sorry for the Pharisees and the bad press they have had down the ages, probably because I suspect that if I had been around at the time of Jesus I would have been one of them. In our reading from Matthew it seems to me that, from their point of view, the Pharisees were trying very hard to do the right thing. The law was their path to salvation and to keep it wholeheartedly was to be good in the sight of the Lord, and the reward for this was to be in that right relationship with him, like Caleb. For them, goodness is about keeping a set of laws or rules but these are not just any old human laws, they are God’s laws and so have a divine as well as a moral precept to them. Given this, it is therefore not very surprising that, the Pharisees, the real specialists in the law, are annoyed by Jesus and his disciples. For them Jesus is not just doing something naughty, like standing on the main quod grass when he shouldn’t, he is breaking God’s divine law, he is, metaphorically, sticking two fingers up at God, is doing wrong, he is being bad and therefore should be punished.

I think there is something deep within us that yearns for Christianity to be a simple set of rules which we can follow, knowing that we are good and will be rewarded when we keep them and bad when we don’t. But we must fight this urge within us for this is not the freedom, the salvation which Christ brings. In a sense what Christ offers is much more difficult. He does not give us a rulebook which is held over us to show when we are good or bad. There are no laws which we can tick off. We cannot win God’s favour by our deeds of goodness but neither can we lose God’s love by our sins. the free gift of salvation through Christ cuts through all our commercial bargaining with God. We often speak of ourselves as children of God, and rightly so for that is what we are, but here it seems to me we are confronted by the most adult of relationships, one not based on getting rewards for being a good little girl or a bad little boy but one based on responsibility.

The only thing that keeps Peter Parker going through all the sacrifices and troubles which doing the right thing brings are the words his uncle says to him in a dream, “with great power comes great responsibility”. From this he choose that to do good outweighs everything else even his own happiness. And Jesus says to us “from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded” Luke 12:48. I do not think we can wriggle out of this and say that his words only apply to leaders ot clergy, they apply to all of us, who call ourselves Christian. For I do not believe that God wants us simply to be followers of Christ but to be his hands, his feet, his presence in this world, and we can only do this if we realise the great gift of salvation that has been given to us, that there is nothing we can do which will make God love us more and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.

Christ, in our reading this evening, does not change the rules, he does not give us a new set to abide by but he cuts through them s one who does not obey God as a child but as one who is in a loving, responsible relationship with him. It is this relationship that he makes possible for us.

To realise that this is our relationship with God is simply overwhelming because it not only strips us of our bargaining tools but also makes us realise our absolute inability to fulfil our responsibility of doing good. Of living up to the love and trust God gives to us. Our response can therefore be only one of repentance, we can no longer be like the Pharisees, for our bargaining tools have been taken from our hands. We can instead only cry out in wonder and repentance in response to God’s love for us. The more we open ourselves to God in all humility, the more he can use us, his broken tools, as vehicles of his goodness, his grace and his love in the world. His work through us is not for our glory or our reward, for us who know that ours is the liberating yet uncomfortable place of standing before God, for us are the words of Isaiah: “Here is my servant, whom I have chose, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.”

The Chaplain
22nd October 2006

This passage from Matthew’s Gospel opens with some stark reproaches to those who had received so much from God. It reminds us of what Jesus said in another place: “When someone is given a great deal, a great deal will be demanded of that person; when someone is entrusted with a great deal, of that person even more will be expected.” Lk.12:48

Matthew is, very likely, concerned with the lack of enthusiasm for the message by many in his congregation and wants them to beware of lukewarmness and lack of commitment. The Gospel message needs to be taken seriously and much more wholeheartedly especially by those who should know better. Capernaum, after all, was where Jesus had made his headquarters!
Jesus reveals how receiving the message actually works. Revelation comes from the Father, to the Son and then to those who are open to it, and these are not necessarily the most highly educated. Sometimes it might seem that faith is all very complicated when we consider the many controversies, debates, and the numerous books for and against it. It can often be difficult to see the wood for the trees. And yet, fundamentally, it is quite simple. The Lord himself tells us so when he says to the Father: “you have revealed these things to the humble or the simple – i.e. to those able to see and accept the messagewith their hearts.” They are those who have experienced the bruises and burdens of life, ‘those who turn naturally and with a childlike confidence to God’s word. Those who know from experience that Jesus’ ‘yoke’ is not burdensome because they are given the grace to carry it lovingly.

Among the loveliest and most consoling phrases in the whole New Testament must be these words of Jesus which we heard in this Gospel today:
“Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

In the Gospels we see Jesus being true to his promises. So many had heavy burdens lifted from them : the woman at the well in Samaria, the poor widow who lost her only son, Zaccheus, Bartimeus, the lepers, the blind, the lame and the deaf. All those who felt themselves to be on the fringes of society, those crushed in body and spirit. He who said
“I am the Resurrection, and, ‘I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly’ is true to his word, and not only then, 2,000 years ago, but also in our own time.
But we need faith and love, a faith which is not in our heads alone –which would keep God outside of us, a distant aloof figure. But we seek a faith also of the heart which sees God as close and loving, as the Father who looks out for the Prodigal, who forgives, restores and nourishes. A God who says
“Come back to me with all your heart; don’t let fear keep us apart.” (Hos.13) This is a God who has shown himself to us in human flesh, who, ‘in his greatness has let himself become small’ as Pope Benedict puts it. God has taken on a human face in Jesus who said
“He who sees me sees the Father; I and the Father are one.” (Jn.14:9) And then God, in Christ says those amazing words ‘learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart’. How could we fear such a God?
This is an awesome love.

Humility and gentleness are not the most popular attributes in today’s culture. Yet, we know that nothing is so strong as gentleness and nothing so gentle as real strength. It takes a strong self-confident person to be gentle. Gentleness is one of the most necessary, most humanising qualities of life. I for one am grateful for the gentle hands and heart of my mother. And just think of the gentleness required in the hands of a surgeon.
Deep within each heart is a longing for gentleness because we can’t open up and grow without it. Henri Nouwen says this “A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly and touches with reverence.”
A gentle person knows that healing and growth result from maturing not forcing. On the other hand the lust for power is rooted in weakness not in strength. Those who need to dominate others feel little self worth.

It is Jesus above all who shows the astounding strength of gentleness. “He opened not his mouth” before the cowards who sought to crush and humiliate him. Yet he it was who had the power to lay down his life and the power to take it up again.
To the gentle and humble Jesus promises peace of soul. Pride and arrogance do not bring peace but rather confusion and unrest get projected onto others through the anger and frustration of such people. Humble people disarm others and bring out the best in them: think of people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or Nelson Mandela.

The words of St Seraphim still ring true today ‘Acquire inner peace and a multitude of people will find salvation near you.’
“My yoke is easy and my burden is light” Jesus could say this because he carried it with so much love. Only love can lighten the load. G.K. Chesterton, that great wit said ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.’
If we are deprived of food for a day we can barely last out – at least that’s true for me! But a mother who gives up food for a day so that her children may eat, hardly notices it.
Ofcourse some of the baggage we tend to carry, we could and should let go of.
There is a Zen story about an old man going on a spiritual journey with a heavy bag on his back. On his deathbed he passes on the bag to his disciple. When the disciple opens the bag he finds that it is completely empty. Yet he wonders why it weighed so much.
The old man says,
‘It is the weight of everything in my life that I did not need to carry.’
Our religion is not meant to be a burden. The only command Jesus gives us is that of loving one another and bearing one another’s burdens.
While faith makes all things possible, it is love that makes all things easy. Let us remember always those words of St. John:
“My little ones, I am writing this to keep you from sin. But if anyone should sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one” (1 Jn2:1).
So –
“No matter what our hearts may charge us with – God is greater than our hearts and all is known to him – who is life eternal.” (ibid.,3:20)

Sr. Nora Coughlan, Assistant Chaplain at the Roman Catholic Chaplaincy
15th October 2006