Category: Sermons

I don’t know about other preachers in this series of sermons, but this one is in some peril in the light of the fulsome invitation he received. The letter made much of the largesse which he would be offered after Evensong: hospitality so alluring, indeed, that he felt he had almost been lured into sin even by accepting the Chaplain’s courteous invitation.

In truth, however, few if any of us could approach the subject of tonight’s address without being aware of the unmistakable sound of stones clattering on the roof of a very large and vulnerable greenhouse.

But there it is: something must be said on the subject of gluttony, and it is my task – as one sinner among others – to make something of it. But that is perhaps the very point. Of all the so-called seven deadly sins, gluttony is the one that makes me most uncomfortable; for whilst a hungry person’s desire for food cannot be sinful, my own desire, and that of very many of my contemporaries, for much more than I need, is harmful for reasons both practical and spiritual.

Why? Because excess has undesirable consequences; dulled faculties (if I may dare to use that word in this setting); impaired concentration and, at the extremes, a disabling inability to control the appetite.

I remember a certain bishop, speaking indiscreetly at the dinner-table about one of his more eccentric priests. “Can’t control himself,” he said, “Always comfort-eating, that’s his trouble. I know all about that from a psychiatrist chum. By the way, Tom, could I trouble you for another slice of that excellent syrup-roll?”

Well, there is of course a more serious dimension to all this. Gluttony – and not only of food – can provide relief, in the same way as seemingly more harmful drugs, and can enable us to forget for a time those aspects of our life which we find difficult, from the merely boring to the disturbing and terrifying.

Gluttony, viewed in this light, is not a matter of digestion so much as a manifestation of a real and very alluring spiritual problem – the desire – the need, perhaps – to escape from reality. It hinders the awakening of the imagination, and the ability to see, in the sense of that word often employed by Jesus.

The heart of the Good News which he proclaimed is to be found in the 5th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel – usually and misleadingly known as The Sermon ion the Mount. The deceptively straightforward beatitudes – that list of those people whom God counts as especially blessed – are indeed little more than a list when taken at face value

The pure in heart and the poor
The peacemakers and the persecuted
The meek and the merciful.

To discover the riches of the text and for that matter the revolutionary nature of the teaching, it is necessary to have an awareness of the unpalatable truth of our own emptiness, and our need, as Gerard Hughes puts it, to ‘throw ourselves on the mercy of God’. The Sermon on the Mount is an oblique but unmistakable challenge to an attitude of mind which is concerned with self-sufficiency, and which seeks its security in anything but God and the pursuit of his Kingdom.

That is the besetting weakness – dare I say sin? – of the most righteous of religious people who, as the American priest Barbara Brown Taylor has written,

‘I’m not referring to sinners: their hearts have already been broken. I mean the righteous. They are like vaults. They are so full of their precious values, and so defended against those who do not share them, that even the dynamite of the Gospel has little effect on them. “Woe to you Pharisees,” wails Jesus, “for you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God.”’

…which is only another way of saying that tax-gatherers and prostitutes will be the first to find their way into the Kingdom…

This does not make for cheerful hearing, but it may prompt us reflect on another saying of Jesus which is less about physical food than spiritual priorities (John (6:27)):

‘Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life.’

Those words seem to echo the First Book of Samuel (12:16-22) which we heard this evening:

‘Do not go after vain things that cannot profit and save…but serve the Lord with all your heart, and he will not cast away his people.’

But can that be so? In what sense can the service of God, the pursuit of his Kingdom, lead to deepened faith and heightened spiritual awareness?

Maya Angelou makes a helpful suggestion:

History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage need not be lived again.

To face up to the deep things of faith and daily living with the courage that Maya Angelou counsels, is a rich and potentially liberating process. For sure, it is likely to be uncomfortable, as we contemplate our own history, our besetting sins and weaknesses, but we may well discover that these are in reality ‘the highway of our virtue’.

Like the psalmist before us, we shall find some hard questions – the whys and wheres and hows of faith, but we shall stand a much better chance, like the man in that strange little parable of Jesus, of discovering a faith which is built on rock and not on shifting sand, and with it the food that endures to eternal life.

I have no means of knowing what the hard questions are for you, but I do know, at least in my better moments, that to face such questions thoughtfully and theologically is productive of an attitude of mind and heart which finds its sense of meaning and purpose in God.

The film actress Mae West, who was known for gluttony of a rather exotic kind, once remarked, ‘I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it’.

Well, we might agree with her, but the food which endures to eternal life, which is to be found in the life, the teachings, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is well worth the seeking, not just because it endures to eternal life, but because the pursuit itself provides a means towards knowing the one who is true.

There is no need to seek gluttonous relief, whether of food or other fleshly appetites, in order to forget those parts of life which we find difficult to acknowledge or to live with. All that stands in the way of our facing up to the hard questions of faith and daily living has been overcome by the God who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, ‘and he feeleth for our sadness, and he shareth in our gladness’.

That ought to be comfort and sufficiency enough for the time being, for did he not come that we might have life, and have it more abundantly?

The Very Rev’d Nicholas Frayling, Dean of Chichester Cathedral
4th February 2006

The Sin of Pride and the Annunciation Window

In last week’s sermon, our chaplain illustrated how sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins were very much a fourteenth century phenomenon, epitomized by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now I would never dare to argue with Emma as an authority on the piety in the Middle Ages, but my own reading has made me see that the numbering of deadly sins can be traced back to biblical times. The seven oracles against the sins of seven foreign nations is a frequent feature in the prophets; and in the Gospels, Mary Magdalene has seven demons which need casting out; and the Apostle Paul offers a list of fourteen ‘sins of the flesh’ in Galatians 5. The counting of sins, even using the number seven (sometimes, intriguingly, seven plus one) was not unique to the Middle Ages, although it was clearly popularized then. It was an early tradition. Even by the fifth century, John Cassian, from southern Gaul, argues that Adam and Eve were guilty of all the seven deadly sins when they took from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. A century or so later, Gregory the Great, writing from Rome, develops Cassian’s ideas and lists the seven sins of Adam and Eve in order, starting with the spiritual and ending with the carnal. The Sin of Pride heads Gregory’s list as the cardinal spiritual sin, out of which come Envy and Anger; and then, the carnal sins – Sloth, Covetousness, Gluttony, and Lust. By the fourteenth century Chaucer, in The Parson’s Tale, similarly speaks of the ‘barren tree of sin’ which has its roots in Pride, and ‘of this roote spryngen certain branches’. And as we heard from our chaplain last week, Dante, in The Divine Comedy holds the same view: of the deadly seven sins which are purged on their way to purgatory, Pride comes first.

But Medieval preaching and teaching did not just focus on vices and evils. The Books of Hours and the Morality Plays had a good deal to say about Christian virtues as well. Several lists of seven virtues ‘offset’ the seven sins – the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, the seven penitential psalms, the seven gifts of the spirit, the seven words from the cross, the seven wounds of Christ. The cardinal spiritual virtue underlying these lists is Humility, for as Pride takes us far from God, Humility leads the sinner to repentance. In a sense, Pride and Humility are two sides of the same coin: we overcome the Sin of Pride by the Grace of Humility.

It may surprise you that this chapel, designed in part to echo the theology of the Middle Ages, offers several insights into this theme. Clearly the nineteenth-century architect, William Burgess, enjoyed the number seven: look around at the seven stained glass windows, each in their different ways designed to show Christ as the Light of the World; look at the seven scrolls above each window, showing how the narrative in the window was foretold in the Old Testament; look at the seven friezes below the windows, which develop a theme in the window and also echo parts of the Te Deum on the dado underneath; and in the antechapel there are seven symbols of Judaism, representing what Burgess saw as the ‘old order’. Burgess even developed the ‘seven + one’ theme in his illustration of the eight virtues, four from natural religion (justice, perseverance, purity and moderation), and four from revealed religion – adding, most appropriately for this sermon, the virtue of ‘humility’ to the usual trio of faith, hope and charity.

Some of you will know that in recent sermons I’ve chosen to focus each time on one of the stained glass windows. I have to date preached on five of them. It might not take you long to discern which window I am intending to use tonight, as an illustration of the Grace of Humility overcoming the Sin of Pride: you have a copy of it in your pew, as the window cannot be seen at this time of day. It is on the north side of the chapel, nearest the door – the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel to Mary.

By the Middle Ages, Mary, as one representing so well the Grace of Humility, was often contrasted with Eve, associated, as noted in the works of John Cassian and Pope Gregory, with the Sin of Pride. Interestingly, Burgess always placed these two figures in close proximity. Steeped as he was in Medieval typology, one cannot help think that this was intentional. Mary is a key figure in the East Window, where beneath the cross she mourns the death of her son. By contrast, in the ceiling above her, you can see Eve in the Garden of Eden, about to take the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Mary is also portrayed in the windows on either side of the entrance to the chapel – one is our Annunciation window, and in the other, now darkened, is of the visit of the Magi. Her self-sacrificial love is evident at the beginning of her son’s life as well as at the end of it. Look up at the ceiling between these two windows: we again see Eve, ironically surrounded by the four natural virtues, being expelled from the Garden. Eve’s Sin of Pride is that she thought she loved herself more than she loved God; she had hoped the fruit would give her a power equal to his. Eve’s choice, freely given to her by God, takes the couple out of the paradise garden and so to mortality and death; Mary’s choice, without understanding how or why, leads her to the foot of the cross, although from there, to immortality and life beyond.

Let us reflect for a moment on this Annunciation window. Burgess’s artist, Henry Holiday, has produced a design with a typically stylized account of the scene. Mary is sitting (usually she is either reading or sewing, in receptive mode: here she is reading, probably from a text in Isaiah), with the Angel behind her. The scroll above the window identifies her as the ‘virgin’ spoken by the prophet Isaiah who will conceive and bear a son, thus highlighting that this moment is not accidental, but is part of the divine plan. We see the white lily near Mary, a symbol of purity – and death. We see the vines behind the angel, symbols of fecundity – and life. There is no dove, but the rose-hued colour of the angel’s wings signifies the cleansing power of the spirit. What is particularly unusual about this scene is that seems to set outside, rather than in the house in Nazareth: did Burgess intend to suggest that the promise of new life is made in another and different Garden than the one Adam and Eve had to leave?

The problem with stylized representations, typical of Medieval and Renaissance art, is that the human aspects of this dreadful choice, and its awesome consequences, are rarely brought out. As we see in this window, and indeed in all the four windows where she appears in this chapel, Mary remains an enigmatic, mysterious figure, passive, resigned, perhaps too devoid of personality to attract us to the Humility she represents. For human details we need to turn instead to the narrative itself. We heard in our earlier reading, from Luke, that Mary was ‘espoused’ to Joseph: her likely age would thus be between sixteen and eighteen. She is thus both vulnerable and innocent: our window has at least depicted something of this as she looks up at the angel. We also know that Joseph (who perhaps also deserves a sermon on the Grace of Humility) was known as a te,ktwn in Greek – one skilled in wood and stone, a carpenter and builder – perhaps what we would call a ‘skilled laborer’. And from the sacrifice of just two pigeons that Mary and Joseph made in the Temple as a thanksgiving for a safe birth, it is clear that Joseph’s craft did not bring in much wealth. So her age, her social class, her poverty made her an extraordinary choice for the ‘Mother of God’.

Immediately after the Annunciation, Luke accords to Mary a song we hear sung every Sunday Evensong – the Magnificat. It illustrates so clearly God favours those of low estate, scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts. ‘…He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. ’ This suggests that Mary’s material poverty encouraged a spiritual dependency which enabled her to trust in God alone. The Grace of Humility was at work in her before her calling, rather than being a result of it, and it was this was equipped her for a lifetime of self-sacrificial love.

But doesn’t this picture of Mary, materially and spiritually poor, equally distance her from us thus making the Grace of Humility an impossible goal to imitate? Our chapel window offers a part-answer to this. Look at the frieze under it, above the dado. There you see various figures of authority in Church and State – a Bishop, a Priest, two monks, two nuns, a King, a Queen, a Noblewoman, a Lawyer, an Academic; some of them, such as the King, were drawn in the likeness of well-known figures in and around Oxford (King Olaf, it is argued, was remarkably similar to a Tutorial Fellow called Daniel who later became Provost). It seems that here Burgess invites us to enter the story of the Annunciation and the Magnificat: each of these figures, with their various gifts and vocations, different from each other and certainly from Mary, are shown as making their own choice of seeking that poverty of spirit which Mary exemplified. And so we, the onlookers, each with our own various gifts and vocations – Provost, Chaplain, Preacher, Fellows, Lecturers, Teachers, Politicians, Parents, Graduates, Scholars, Undergraduates, Sacristans, Choir Boys – we, the onlookers, whoever we are, whatever are calling, are offered that similar choice: to put aside self-esteem and self-absorption and to pursue instead poverty of spirit whereby all that we are and all that we have is offered back to God.

We will often get it wrong. We might even be so pleased to have achieved a small part of the Grace of Humility we end up falling back into the Sin of Pride. But we need not give up. As you walk out of chapel tonight, under the frieze of Adam and Eve expelled from the garden, aware of Mary facing her challenge within that other garden, do look up at the last text Burgess has given us, above the West Door: ‘Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts’: – ‘Be it unto me according to your word.’
Amen.

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow and Tutor in Theology
22nd January 2006

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

“Sirs, I find that there is seven spiritual illnesses, the which may be likened to seven ears of corn stricken with a mildew. By these seven spiritual illnesses I understand the seven deadly sins, pride, lechery, covertousness, wrath, envy, sloth, and gluttony. Pride destroys in man humility and meekness, lechery destroys chastity and purity, covertousness destroys alms giving and pity, wrath destroys love and charity, envy destroys joy and gladness, gluttony destroys temperance and sobriety, sloth destroys the service of God and all other goodness.”

From preaching manuals of the time it would seem that during the fourteenth century sermons on the seven deadly sins, such as I have just read, would not have been a one off series but a weekly event. Along with the many references to the sins in art, sculpture and devotional writings it is not surprising that we are left with the impression that the medieval church was obsessed by the sins and their punishment. This is epitomized, of course, in Dante’s great Divine Comedy where midway through his life Dante awakes to find himself lost in a dark wood. With Virgil as his guide he begins a journey of self-discovery, which will lead him through the levels of hell where he sees sin in all its vile, degraded and dangerous state. In his turning away from the horror and futility of sin he begins the road of ascent towards God. It is on this path through purgatory that each of the seven deadly sins are purged through penance. So the heads that were held high with pride are now bowed in a necessary humility beneath the weight of sinfulness externalised as cold and heavy stone. The envious, who looked with grudging hatred upon other men’s gifts and good fortune, have their eyelids sealed from the sun. The wrathful must endure smoke and suffocation just as the sin of wrath blinded their judgement and suffocated their natural feelings. The slothful, who cared for nothing in life, are whipped into constant activity. The covertous are fettered face downward so that they can see nothing but the earth they so loved and hoarded. The gluttonous who indulged on a high standard of living are purged by starvation within the sight of plenty, and the lustful are purged not by an all consuming but all cleansing fire. Only when Dante is branded on the forehead with the seventh and last P for penance does he enter the earthly paradise before his ascent to the heavenly realms. In his writing Dante is not simply producing a poetic masterpiece for entertainment, instead he seeks to take the reader on the same journey of self-discovery. For both Dante and the Church at the time, this path began with the reality of sin and its effects, a decision to turn away from it and the work of purging the seven deadly sins through grace by the practice of virtue.

By this point I am sure that you are rather relieved that we no longer live in the dark ages of the medieval period and that a sermon series on the seven deadly sins is a one off. But you may also be wondering what the weeks ahead are going to be like. Hilary term is bad enough without enforced self-mortification and a good grilling from the pulpit. Well, to be honest, I can’t say. I don’t know what our distinguished lineup of preachers will have to say but I do know that they were each horrified when I gave them their sin.

It seems that from an age when preachers could quite happily go on for hours about the seven deadly sins or just sin in general be it gossiping or picking one’s nose, we have ended up in an age when for many the prospect of preaching on the nature of sin is anathema. Similarly for the average medieval person the seven deadly sins were all around, personified in plays and art whilst to us I wonder if we could even name them all without getting stuck at around five or six. Now I would hate to imply that the medieval person was more holy and devout than us today but it does seem that whereas sin was a living reality and a cause for concern, for us it is often seen as someone else’s problem.

One of the interesting side effects of being a priest is that you are never “off duty” as the saying goes. So its often with intrepedation that in casual meetings with strangers you let on that you are one of those odd people who are professionally “holy” because invariably the conversation will end up as a quasi – confessional. This happened to Jonathan one day when the plumber called at our flat in the Rectory in Shepperton. Entering a holy house seemed to be enough for him to pour out to Jonathan a catalogue of things he had done, like taking a camcorder someone had left behind, flirting behind his wife’s back, boozing till four in the morning and so on, all ending with the general observation that he was a really good bloke who never did anything wrong. We may not talk about sin but sin is still definitely all around, and it will continue to have a grip on our lives and linger like the foul, degrading and distorting stench it is until like Dante we name it and reject it. Not as something in other people but as something in ourselves.

A man arrived early at the station to catch his train. So he went and bought himself a newspaper, a coffee and a packet of biscuits. He sat down at a table where a woman was already sitting, and started to drink his coffee. All of a sudden the woman opposite reached out and opened the packet of biscuits and without saying a word started to eat one. Now as you can imagine the man was rather annoyed by this and not knowing what to say picked up a biscuit in an obvious way and started to crunch it nosily. The woman took another biscuit so he took another one too. This continued until the packet was finished and the woman got up and left. Furious by this time and thinking a hundred different accusations at the barefaced cheek and wrong of this woman, he stood up and picked up his paper to catch the train only to find his own packet on biscuits lying underneath.

Sin is something which afflicts all of us but it is often all too easy to see it only as someone else’s problem and be quick to judge another of sin and forget our own. For this is the very nature of sin itself. In her Revelation of Divine Love Julian of Norwich describes a vision she had of the full extent of sin on a person. She sees a servant, noble and loved by his lord, who falls into a ditch. There he is afflicted by seven great wounds, which rend his flesh and consume him with pain so much so that he is unable to lift his head to see the loving and pitying eyes of his lord. The servant is Adam, everyman, who in this earthly life is wounded and disfigured by sin and the lord is God. For Julian the most damaging aspect of sin is that it stops us seeing God’s love and leads us to believe that God is full of anger and blame for our sin, that God looks on us as we would look on each other. Instead God looks on us in our sin not with judgement and anger but with pity and love, for “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved”. Julian’s revelation shows us how God sees us in our sin and in turn how we are to look on the nature of sin in ourselves.

Dante’s description of the seven deadly sins comes from this perspective of God’s love and he sees them as a perversion, weakness or misdirection of our own natural inclination to love God in turn. For example pride, envy and wrath pervert our natural inclination to love ourselves, to love goodness and to love justice. Whilst sloth is the failure to love any good object in its proper measure and especially to love God, and avarice, gluttony and lust are all excessive loves of firstly money and power, secondly pleasure and thirdly of people.

The most important consequence of this perspective of sin is that it takes away the power sin has over us. The emphasis is no longer on sin but on the love of God, no longer on punishment but on forgiveness. For Julian the cross is a revelation of the extent of that love where Christ, though he is the fairest flower of heaven, becomes disfigured like us and takes on the pains of sin, so much so that not even sin is now able to separate us from the love of God but, through penance, it can become the path back to him. So Julian is able to boldly say that through recognizing our sin for the scourge it is, by rejecting it and receiving Christ’s saving ointment of grace and love which heals our wounds, God can even bring good out of our sin and in heaven we will stand before him and the scars that we bear as a result of sins forgiven will be our badges of glory and tokens of love.

So may I suggest that this term as we linger on each of the seven deadly sins we do not become disheartened or shameful, but hold in our hearts the truth of how God sees us in pity and love, so spurring us on to reject all that prevents us from receiving and knowing his healing love in our lives. Amen.

The Chaplain
15th January 2006