Category: Sermons

I haven’t seen it, but Ridley Scott’s epic film Exodus: Gods and Kings received poor reviews last year and was even banned in Egypt due to historical inaccuracies. The censors objected to claims that the Pyramids were built by Jews and opposed suggestions that an earthquake caused the parting of the Red Sea, even though Scott had an explanation for his depiction.

You can’t just do a giant parting, with walls of water trembling while people ride between them,” said Scott, who remembers scoffing at biblical epics from his boyhood like 1956’s The Ten Commandments. “I didn’t believe it then, when I was just a kid sitting in the third row. I remember that feeling, and thought that I’d better come up with a more scientific or natural explanation.”

Scott’s solution came from a deep dive into the history of Egypt circa 3000 B.C. After reading that a massive underwater earthquake off the coast of Italy caused a tsunami, he thought about how water recedes as a prelude to such disasters. “I thought that logically, [the parting] should be a drainage. And that when [the water] returns, it comes back with a vengeance.”

However it has been depicted in film, the story of the Israelites in the book of Exodus is a remarkable tale, from Moses’s relationship with Pharaoh, the the ten plagues (7:8-13:16) the first Passover (ch. 12), to the guiding of the people to Sinai (13:17-18:27), receiving the Ten Commandments (19:1-24:18) and to the building and dedication of the tabernacle of the Lord (35:4-40:38). Exodus is a book of redemption in which God delivers His people out of bondage and brings them into a special relationship with Himself.

The part of the redemption story that we heard this evening finds the Israelites stuck in the wilderness, tired and very hungry and complaining ‘If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.’

But it is only in the previous chapter that there has been the great victory of their flight from the Egyptians through the parted red sea. That was a completely different story. Then there was rejoicing and singing: Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: ‘I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;    horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. ² The Lord is my strength and my might,^*    and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him,    my father’s God, and I will exalt him. ³ The Lord is a warrior;    the Lord is his name.

Likewise, the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. ²¹And Miriam sang to them: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.’

If you know your Handel Oratorios, then you will know his joyous, even aggressively victorious, setting of these words in his great choral work: Israel in Egypt.

 

Indeed, the connection between the salvation history of the Jewish people in the Old Testament, has long been associated with music. Isaiah 26:19, for instance, connects the notion of resurrection with song: ‘Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy.’ In addition, there are many verses of the psalms which refer to singing at times of salvation, rescue, or victory (33:3, 40:3, 96:1, 114:9, 149:1) and these are themes also witnessed in New Testament scenes of salvation, such as Revelation (15:2-3):

 

And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mixed with fire, and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands. And they sang the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb:

“Great and amazing are your deeds,

Lord God the almighty!

Just and true are your ways,

King of the nations!”^[1]

 

Michael O’Connor opines that, from the Biblical evidence, ‘Singing is what redeemed people do and in doing so they anticipate a consummation of their song in a future glory.’^[2] New songs represent redeemed people who live in a new covenant as narrated in the New Testament, as Augustine preached:

 

So anyone who knows how to love the new life knows how to sing the new song. So for the sake of the new song we need to be reminded what the new life is. All these things, you see, belong to the one kingdom – the new person, the new song, the new testament or new covenant. So the new person will both sing the new song and belong to the new covenant.^[3]

 

It is the same theology, or soteriology, that we heard expressed in this evening’s anthem:

 

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Which according to His abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

 

It is remarkable then how soon, after this redemption from slavery, the Israelites come to be despondent. Even when Moses turns undrinkable water into sweet water at Marah, and God gives them twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees to camp under, they seem fearful and alone. In the desert of Sin, between Elim and Sinai, they cry: “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

 

We too have, of late, been singing redemption songs, songs of freedom, salvation, resurrection. For this is the season of Easter, when we have time to reflect upon the good news of our freedom, bought by the blood of Jesus Christ. And yet, how difficult this is to see in a world where thousands of refugees flee north Africa only to be drowned in the Mediterranean, people are mindlessly slaughtered by terrorists, and Christians are burned alive or machined gunned down just because they are Christian. If God’s kingdom has come, on earth as it is in heaven, then surely something has gone wrong. What does the gospel have to say to us about such times and about God’s love for us?

 

Yesterday was the feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, author of the shortest, and most dramatic of the gospel narratives. The original ending of his gospel depicts the women at the tomb discovering that Jesus is not there but has risen. Mark uses these words: ‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’

 

The reality of resurrection, which heralded a new era of revolution, was, apparently, as shocking, terrifying and amazing in first century Palestine as it is today, and human reaction to it is equally flawed. And yet, the events of Christ’s life and death have transformed the lives of millions throughout the generations. Mark would never know the impact of his gospel upon Augustine, Aquinas, St. Francis, Mother Theresa, or countless unknown saints of the faith who have been transformed by God and thus enact the redemptive work of God in the world.

 

The story of the flawed people of God in Exodus continued with the story of the flawed early Church to which John wrote in the book of Revelation, and it continues with us today. The greatest story ever told has not yet finished. How it ends will depend on how we play our part in it.

 

 

 

[1] Revelation 15: 2-3, New Standard Revised Version, cited in O’Connor, ‘The Singing of Jesus’, p. 440.

[2] O’Connor, ‘The Singing of Jesus’, p. 440.

[3] Augustine, Sermons, The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21^st Century, Part III, vol. 2, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1990), Sermon 34, p. 166, quoted in O’Connor, ‘The Singing of Jesus’, p. 440.

WORCESTER COLLEGE OXFORD

3^rd May 2015

 

It was, I think, during last November that the poet, biographer, teacher and university academic Jon Stallworthy died. Well-known of course in Oxford, he did not quite live to see his eightieth birthday.

 

A few weeks ago, I found myself browsing through a book that I had received as a gift from some friends in 1980, thirty five years ago, and had hardly looked into since. Plucked from the bookshelves after all that time, it brought back memories, and it reminded me of the speed of the passing of the years. It was an anthology of some twentieth century poetry. In it, I came across a piece by Jon Stallworthy. I had not known or noticed it before. It somehow struck a chord with me.

 

The poem is called Sindhi Woman. It is about a poor Indian woman whom the poet spots in a Karachi market; a bazaar. In spite of her barefooted poverty, her grace and charm captivate the poet. The poem is only two short verses long. The first goes as follows.

 

Barefoot through the bazaar,

and with the same undulant grace

as the cloth blown back from her face,

she glides with a stone jar

high on her head

and not a ripple in her tread.

 

The woman moves with dignity, seemingly without effort, in spite of the load she carries. And the poet continues in the second verse:

 

Watching her cross erect

stones, garbage, excrement and crumbs

of glass in the Karachi slums,

I, with my stoop, reflect

They stand most straight

Who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

The ‘stones, garbage, excrement and crumbs of glass’ speak of the impoverished context out of which this elegant person emerges, carrying her load, and over which she somehow seems to triumph. And the poet notes:

 

I, with my stoop, reflect

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

The poem is simple, but I think it speaks profoundly.

 

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

I have no reason to believe that Jon Stallworthy was an especially religious person, in any conventional way. But the message he conveys through his poem certainly chimes in with a kind of wisdom that you can find in our great religious traditions; wisdom that both warns and reassures us that genuine human stature is not achieved, not arrived at, without some kind of struggle. This is most surely true of the Christian tradition.

 

Our New Testament reading tonight, from the Revelation to John, opened with a message addressed to the Church in Sardis. Apparently, Sardis was a flourishing economic centre near the end of the first century and was known for its influential Jewish community. It seems that the Christian community was well adjusted to its surroundings. There is no suggestion that the Christians in Sardis faced serious opposition or social conflict. In short, the Christians appear to have been having life easy. But the author of the Revelation claims that the Christians of Sardis “are dead” and not “alive”. And so it often happens that, when Christians become too comfortably adjusted to the world in which they live, too ‘acceptable’ to others, they lose what you might call their ‘cutting edge’. They become flabby, and really have little to offer.

 

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

The disconcerting fact is that what have been called the ‘eternal truths’ and ‘enduring values’ disclosed in and through the life of Jesus Christ are, in many ways, offensive; not only to everybody else but to us also. They constitute a burden and a weight that we almost naturally resist. The translation of the ideals of self-sacrifice, and self-forgetfulness in the interest of the good of others, into the vocabulary of everyday life is hard. Yet it is our vocation to engage in that exercise in order to contribute to the raising of our world to the level of what we understand in Christ to be its true humanity.

 

Nonetheless, perhaps like the Christians in Sardis at the end of the first century, we in our own time have developed a tendency to be too well-adjusted to the culture in which we find ourselves. In a rather uncritical way, we attempt to gain credibility by aping the world around us, by adopting its mores, and by blessing and baptising its assumptions. Perhaps this is seen most in what has become in the Church an obsession with ‘growth’, and the insistence on measuring so-called ‘success’ by reference to the expansion of the organisation!

 

This can happen at the expense of our providing any kind of challenge. Indeed, we offer an escape from real challenge, sometimes by trivialising and domesticating religion; trying to attract more followers by turning it into a kind of recreational entertainment to lift the spirit of those who will return to daily life refreshed and contented. Some will smile at us but we are generally looked upon as harmless creatures. We might be seen to be a bit eccentric but we ruffle few feathers. In a tolerant society, we shall be tolerated. But, to what end?

 

I am not advocating a retreat into sectarianism. I do not believe that the Church should be ‘counter-cultural’ but I do believe that Christians should be ‘culture-critical’; wary of those movements that seem to inhibit development into what we perceive to be God’s will as disclosed to us in Jesus Christ. In a way, I am asking for no more than that we should take our religion ‘seriously’, try to allow the very things in it that we resist to shape our own lives, and attempt to become conduits through which its flavour might seep into the world of which we cannot help but be a part; agents of some kind of leavening.

 

I am, I suppose, asking that we should bear the weight of a certain responsibility; a responsibility laid upon us by virtue of our professed discipleship. That responsibility must be to demonstrate something of the strange difference that Christ makes to life; what other reason could there be for us to take the name of ‘Christian’?

 

It is by bearing the weight of that responsibility that we, as individuals and as the Church, will grow in the only way that really matters; grow in faithfulness to our vocation; grow, you might say, in integrity.

 

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

 

Should you, at this stage, think that I am commending to you a life of earnest misery, let me remind you of some words of Jesus that put things into context. Somewhere in the Gospels, it is recorded that he invites us to take his ‘yoke’ upon us but always to remember that, in some odd way, his yoke is easy and his burden is light. A wonderful grace is given to those who emerge out of their spiritual comfort zone to bear witness to Christ. But that’s another story, and another sermon.

 

 

David Conner

Shelter the homeless. Leviticus 25: 35-38; Luke 10: 25-37. The Chaplain, 8^th March 2015

‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head.’

Where is home for you? Is it where you live now? Is it the place where you were born or grew up? Is it the place in which you no longer live, but is still home in your heart? Is it a place that you have left temporarily to come and live in Oxford, perhaps even to live in Worcester College?

There are few things quite as important as a sense of home. Somewhere we feel at rest, where we can be ourselves. For some, that place may be somewhere that is yet to be found or has been, for whatever reason, lost. Like the Son of Man, many on our streets have nowhere to lay their head. Here are just three short and true stories:

Seven years ago, just a few days after we had moved into Garsington Rectory and still had boxes unopened on the floor, the doorbell rang and there, on the doorstep, was a young couple and a baby. Their car had, apparently, run out of petrol and they had nowhere to stay. We invited them in and did what we could. It was a striking and startling way to begin parish life and we wondered if every night would be like this. The couple told us their story as we gave them food and drink, but unsure of what to do in the longer term, I rang my old training vicar, Ian Cohen (who preached here last week), who I felt sure would know all the numbers and contacts to help find this couple more permanent shelter. He did. And this is where things, as they often do with the homeless, became more complicated. The social services told us that this couple were wanted by the police and before we knew it there were two police constables on the doorstep and the couple had fled, their car miraculously now replenished with petrol. We never saw them again or heard of what happened.

Story two: a month ago, when the nights were still freezing cold, as Emma walked to lock the church, she found a middle-aged woman curled up in a sleeping bag in the porch. Julie was travelling west she told us over some food. We knew not why, except that she had fled from Zimbabwe and did not want her past to be known. As I drove her into Oxford the next day in order to find shelter in one of the many hostels, she became anxious that they would ask her questions. I suspect that she did not stay in an Oxford hostel but carried on walking. Her secrets were not to be shared.

Story three: Last week, as I came in for morning prayer, Romana, who is the scout who cleans this chapel, told me that she had been speaking to a homeless man in Gloucester Green. Patrick had a tale of family breakdown, low self-esteem and a sense of hopelessness, he told Romana as he sipped his vodka and coke at eight o’clock in the morning. When I went over to find him, he had gone: moved on by shopkeepers or police, I do not know. We may see him again. He may become like one of the regulars of the square, or Speedwell Street or the big issue sellers on the Broad or the High.

The fact is that the problems are complicated and when we multiply these stories by the number of homeless people we may get a sense of hopelessness ourselves. Or, like the Bishops of the Church of England, start writing open letters on the need for more social justice, entitled ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The number of homeless in the UK has risen 14% in the last year, the fifth annual rise. Behind each case may be a narrative of family problems, addiction, debt or other factors. And beyond our shores there are thousands more being displaced from their homes and trying to find new ones. Even Christ mused that the poor will always be with us.

And yet. And yet. If we give up on mercy, we not only give up on our faith in humanity to do good and not only do we de-humanise others, we fail something divine within us as well.

In his new book entitled ‘In God’s Hands’, which was commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury for Lent this year, Desmond Tutu states that the Bible is ‘more revolutionary, more subversive of injustice and oppression than any political manifesto or ideology. How so? The Bible asserts … that each one of us, without exception, is created in the image of God (the Imago Dei). Whether you are rich or poor, white or black, educated or illiterate, male or female – each one of us, exhilaratingly, wonderfully, is created in the image of God.’ This, says Tutu, makes each one of us a ‘God-carrier’.

He goes on: ‘If we really believe this assertion, then we would be appalled at any ill-treatment of another human being, because it is not simply unjust but also, shockingly, blasphemous. It is really like spitting in the face of God.’

This is why the book of Leviticus demands that if someone is homeless, displaced and in need, they should be supported by the Israelites, remembering that God brought them out of the land of Egypt and home to the land of Canaan. And when the lawyer, in St. Luke’s Gospel asks, ‘who is my neighbour’, Jesus replied with the story of the good Samaritan. The priest and the levite passing by, it is the Samaritan, traditionally an enemy of the Jews, who bandaged the victim’s wounds, soothed them with wine and oil, gave him an animal to carry him to an inn, and gave him money until he was well. Who was this man’s neighbour, Christ asks: the one who showed him mercy.

The story embodies what it means to obey the two basic commands of the faith: to love God and to love our neighbour. If we take the essence of the Christian faith seriously, that we are created in God’s image and that God became human, a homeless human at that, we would know that we are not called upon to face the agonies and injustices of this world alone, but with the presence of the living God and by his strength and grace. As God-carriers we are bidden to work for the cause of mercy and the kingdom of God on earth now, knowing that Christ’s redeeming work was for everyone and for all time.

It has been a fascinating term of sermons on the works of mercy and I have been struck by the stories and theology of each of our speakers. Each one of the works of mercy seems to relate to another and in turn they all relate to a sense of home. Whether it is feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty, or clothing the naked, visiting the sick or the imprisoned, each one of these relates to our fundamental need for shelter and a sense of belonging: home, be it permanent or temporary, is where we often eat, drink, clothe ourselves, recover from illness. Prison is a deliberate displacement from home for the purposes of punishment and the prisoner longs to return home. Even burying the dead is strongly related to home, in fact in the most profound way of all. ‘In my father’s house are many mansions’, says the Lord, ‘If it were not so I would not have told you. I go there to prepare a place for you.’ Our true dwelling place will be when we fulfil that destiny to live in God’s presence and in his loving embrace.

So where is home for you? Well wherever it is, or will be, in this life, it is inevitably temporary. As God-carriers we may not be able to solve all hunger, or thirst, or sickness, or nakedness, or imprisonment or homelessness, or even death. But we are able, surely, to show mercy in the way we live our lives, spend our money, govern our time, and to show mercy to those in need, in this college, in your school, in the workplace, in the city and, through our giving, in the wider country and to those in need in other parts of the world. And let us not attempt these works of mercy because we wish to earn some heavenly reward, but for their own sake, as human beings made in the image of God, recognizing the divine spark in each other that deserves our respect and honour, our care and our love. Let us act in response to the merciful God who is the author of all life. As Isaac Watts penned:

Were the whole realm of nature mine

It were an offering far too small.

Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Amen.

Of the seven works or acts of Mercy for reflection,

this evening mine is that of visiting those imprisoned.

From our second reading this evening:

Remember those who are in prison,

                   as though you were in prison with them;

                   those who are being tortured,

                   as though you yourselves were being tortured.

 

The Flemish Artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger depicted this in his painting “The Acts of Mercy” – of which a number of variations were painted.

For those unacquainted with this painting

he paints a sort of “Where’s Wally?” picture.

Lots of little characters busy about their activities of goodwill.

There in the top left hand corner is a man with his legs shackled in stocks, being comforted by well-to-do visitors.

 

 

The jailer sits wearily alongside,

whilst behind, faces peer out through a lattice-work of bars.

We might look at it and we can be intrigued like a bystander.

But Christians do not believe they are called to be bystanders,

but to live connected to the lives and circumstances of others,

all those with whom we share our lives, indeed everyone.

So we are invited beyond just proclaiming interdependence

as our view of living, to acting upon it.

We live interdependently and so, as regards acts of mercy

we are summoned to demonstrate personal goodwill.

Now, getting access to visit a prisoner, going through security there,

is not unlike airport security, but you have to leave things behind,

like keys and phones.

Life goes out of one’s own control as one enters, generally,

what is a strange place, but it is a territory from which one will surely return.

It is a place in which an outsider,

uncomfortably longs for the comfortable outside, and to be a bystander.

So the feeling of walking out, after a visit to a prison,

is one which becomes a real moment of relief.

This relief can be deeper recognized when later on it is shared

when the one who was visited in prison, is released back into the community, back home, and visits me at my home.

His relief takes the form of him smiling with embarrassment

when I am discretely shown the “early release” ankle tag.

 

Brueghel’s depiction of visiting those in prison leaves us as bystanders,

and there is much in all acts of mercy –

all acts of charity – which can be too limited.

 

 

The late Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit,

imagined a story of the time God gave a party to all the virtues.

Great and small, humble and heroic,

they gathered together in a splendidly decorated hall in heaven.

They soon began to enjoy themselves

because they were well acquainted with each other.

Indeed some were even closely related.

But then God spotted two virtues who seemed not to know each other and were ill at ease in each other’s company.

So God formally introduced them to each other.

“Gratitude,” God said, “this is Charity.”

But God had hardly turned round when they were again parted.  And so the story got round that even God cannot bring Gratitude to be where Charity is.

There is no guarantee that any works of mercy,

and especially that of visiting those imprisoned, will bring gratitude.

And this is above all, because the approach is often of a bystander

who comes to observe the prisoner.

Etty Hillesum, a young jewish woman, lived in Nazi occupied Holland.

She was inspired by writers such as Rilke and his mysticism.

On 30 July 1942 she moved into the transit camp for Jews and others at Westerbork.

She wrote in her diary two days before she moved into the camp:

“At this moment I know, more certainly than ever,

 that I have a task in this life, a small project specially for me. 

And I shall have to live through everything.”

How reminiscent of the refrain of the psalmists, quoted by the writer to the Hebrews:

“The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”

 

 

Etty was able to move in and out of this transit camp, at times,

and with permission, even go home.

She worked hard to bring relief and comfort to those imprisoned

who were in transit – ultimately to their destination in the death camps.

She had the opportunity to stay free, to hide,

to not go back to her imprisonment.

But to choose that would mean that she was a bystander.

She made the profound moral choice – to truly live interdependently,

offering charity, and remarkably receiving much gratitude,

because she refused to just observe.

 

 

She continued to write in her exercise book diary:

“Sometimes, when I least expect it, someone suddenly kneels down in some corner of my being, when I’m out walking or just talking to people.  And that someone, the one who kneels down, is myself.”

Etty’s identification with those in prison, grew deeper

as she became less detached,

which had been her stance before she entered the prison.

She wrote of her conversation with, her prayer before, God:

“How great are the needs of your creatures on this earth, O God. 

I thank you for letting so many people come to me with their inner needs.  They sit there, talking quietly and quite unsuspectingly,

and suddenly their need erupts in all its nakedness. 

Then, there they are, bundles of human misery,

desperate and unable to face life….And that’s when my task begins. 

It is not enough simply to proclaim you, God, to commend you to the hearts of others.  One must also clear the path toward you in them.”

 

 

Etty Hillesum left the camp on 7 September 1943, on the daily transport to Auschwitz.

She died there on 30 November 1943.

 

Acts of mercy, and especially that act of visiting those in prison,

can not be carried out by bystanders.

They are carried out by those who know their own need,

their own selves kneeling down inside themselves, perhaps in despair,

and total human misery.

And yet who then find the path to God cleared within them.

 

Now not everyone is called to practice this act of charity, this work of mercy,

of visiting those in prison, behind physical bars.

Perhaps more may find themselves,

drawn to be present with those who experience something imprisoning in their own living.

But all, for health’s sake, can find themselves drawn to visit themselves in their own imprisonments.

We can recognize this particularly when we dangerously opt to be bystanders of our own living, and find something lacking.

For it is then that we need to sit within ourselves and clear God’s path within.

And strangely, it can often be when we are visiting another’s imprisonment with them in conversation, or just presence, that we are freed up as Etty was.

 

Like her we can rediscover our interdependence through acts of mercy,

not expecting gratitude,

but finding the gift for others of simple personal goodwill.

Worcester College Oxford Clothe the Naked

Ezekiel 16: 8-14; James 2: 14-18

The exposed and humiliated figure of a man hanging from a Cross is a common Christian symbol. There are of course others, but this one stands centre stage. Whether Jesus was crucified naked upon The Cross we just don’t know, but there is sufficient evidence from antiquity to suggest that most victims were. However, we do know that Jesus was stretched out on The Cross stripped of his dignity, and exposed to the taunting and jeering crowds who gathered to watch Him die. It was a shocking and cruel experience from which some may well have eventually averted their gaze in order to spare themselves the mental and emotional distress that witnessing such a scene might cause them. Crucifixion was a slow, agonising and suffocating death. It would seem that his blessed Mother did not look away, but gazed, heartbroken upon the broken form of her Son, supported in her sadness by the Beloved disciple, Mary Magdalene and those other loyal women. As a consequence of what He knew to be the right thing both to say and to do throughout His ministry Jesus was beaten, humiliated, stripped, spat upon and killed.

In his Four Quartets T S Elliot writes that, “mankind cannot bear very much reality.” How very true these words are. I find it very interesting that there are some people who can quite easily sit down and watch very frightening films of fantasy, but find it impossible to watch a film like Schindler’s List. Many of you will be familiar with it. Amongst its many harrowing scenes there’s one of particular insanity in which men and women are rounded up in a Nazi concentration camp, stripped of their clothing and forced to run around in circles stark naked, as Wagner’s booms out over loudspeakers. Over the years organisations such as Prisoners of Conscience have exposed numerous images of men and women naked and manacled, undergoing torture, that shock us to the core in the same way.

Of course nakedness is not a physical state alone, and the naked of our own time that ought to trouble our consciences come in many different guises. We see them in the accused, the victim, the mentally ill; the perpetrator of violence who is naked of compassion and driven by naked aggression; men and women who behead and burn alive. There are those who are nakedly proud and arrogant, devoid of the garments of decency and compassion; naked of any concern save of that for themselves. We see the naked in the person who has no voice be it religious or political and who for conscience sake are stripped of their freedom; the Cross or the Burkha. Then there are the odd; you know, those who simply don’t fit in, and who appear strange maybe. There are others too, whose clothes of confidence, dignity, self worth and self belief, society has metaphorically stripped bare from them; leaving them purposeless and devoid of meaning in their lives. And then I guess there are us as well. We too can feel exposed from time to time can we not when our work is being scrutinised, when we make mistakes or when we feel that we are being judged; when perhaps we feel very alone.

The apparently simple question, “I wonder what Jesus would do” is not for the faint hearted to ask as our reading from the epistle of St James this evening makes very clear. The profession of Christianity is not an invitation to esoteric naval gazing, but a clarion call to action that effects change and makes a difference. Belief is a dead thing if it fails to outwork in the service and benefit of mankind. It’s not sufficient to bang on about the love of God if we don’t match our words with our deeds. And it really is so simple. We extend a hand of friendship, we offer a listening ear, we provide a kindly thought, we may put our hand in our pocket and support financially where we can; we may champion the need for our society to be more forgiving, more tolerant, less punitive, less punishment driven. We may be bothered to give our time (and how easy is it to convince ourselves that we don’t have time) to someone who needs a word of comfort or the reassurance that they are not on their own. We may go through our wardrobe and quite literally give away our coat or our gloves or an old hoodie to a person living on the streets.

Lent is the time to realise how difficult the evidently simple is. Christianity, unlike films of fantasy, is no fairy tale. Those who buy into it are called, metaphorically and actually, to clothe the naked. We are commanded to speak and to act in accordance with our consciences in the light of the gospel imperative; and if we do that we will in all probability find ourselves somewhat unpopular from time to time; and thought even odd!!

The bare figure of Jesus on The Cross is a bold statement of sacrifice and love. It is a reminder to all of us, whatever our belief may be, of our common obligation of service to our fellow men and women and to see in the eyes of the naked and the suffering the very face of Jesus Himself. As He Himself has taught us, “Forasmuch as you did it for the least of these my brethren you did it also for me”.

 

 

Worcester College, Oxford 15 February 2015

Corporal works of mercy – Visit the Sick. James 5:15-20  Mark 6:7-13

Ely Cathedral, where it’s my joy to work and where I have the privilege of being the Head of the Foundation, has, you will not be surprised to know, a long history, It would not be appropriate to relate it all now, suffice to say that for a significant part of its history it was a monastery – first of all a double monastery for men and women founded by St Etheldreda in the year 673. Etheldreda’s monastery flourished for 200 years before being destroyed by the Danes, It was then refounded as a Benedictine monastery in 970 – at the heart of the new monastery was the shrine of St. Etheldreda. She had died in the year 680 from a tumour of the neck, reputedly as a divine punishment for having worn necklaces in her younger days – in reality it was the result of the plague that killed several nuns at the time. 17 years after her death her body was found to be incorrupt = the tumour on her neck healed – and the linen clothes in which she was buried as fresh as the day she had been buried. Her body was place in a stone sarcophagus and reburied. When later placed in the monastic cathedral it became focus for vast numbers of medieval pilgrims until the shrine was destroyed in 1541 at the dissolution of the monasteries. We now have a simple slate slab marking the place where her great shrine was.

Though the shrine was destroyed, the vision of St Etheldreda and of St Benedict lives on as we continue in words of our mission statement “to joyfully respond to the love of God in worship outreach, welcome and care.” Although not bound by the Rule of St Benedict, we remember the rock from which we were hewn as each day, at Morning Prayer, we read a short extract from his Rule: so much of it has an enduring relevance ….this is what Benedict says about ‘The Sick’

“Before and above all, care must be taken of the sick, that they may be served in very truth as Christ is served, because he has said ‘I was sick and you visited me’ and ’as long as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren you did it to me (Mtt25:40) But let the sick themselves consider that they are served for the honour of God and let them not grieve their brothers who serve them by making unnecessary demands. These must, however, be patiently borne with, because from such as these a more beautiful reward is gained. Let the Abbot’s concern be that they suffer no neglect.”

“Before and above all care must be taken of the sick”. The corporal acts of mercy  that are the subject of your sermons this term, of which visiting the sick is one, are all in their different ways, responses to the fact that the God who we worship, the God who made us, is merciful. If we’re not careful we can get caught up in that old debate about justification by faith or by works – Martin Luther has a great deal to answer for in mistranslating letter to the Romans and talking about justification by faith ‘alone’ (the word ‘alone’ does not appear in the original text) – but that’s another sermon. Faith and works are two sides of a coin – one cannot be a reality without the other – and neither of them earn us anything in respect of God – rather they are both a response to the complete mercy of God shown to us in Jesus Christ. Put very prosaically – if we have been shown mercy then we cannot really help ourselves in being merciful also; “Be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful”.

The reality also is that, most of the time, this stuff isn’t easy – not least because, as Benedict hinted at, the sick can be really difficult and demanding – very often understandably so, but that doesn’t stop caring for them being jolly hard work. There are those one visits who never seem to complain, who bear their suffering with great grace and are a particular joy to be with– and there are those who seem positively to relish ill health, who when one visits perhaps are using you as a someone on whom to overload a vast amount of anger and frustration – probably a good thing, better dumped on the visitor than on the person who may be alongside them many more hours of the day – but nevertheless, they can be very stressful to visit.

Mercy received must become mercy given if it is to have any value. And given because that is where the kingdom of God breaks in – our two readings this evening referred to the anointing and healing of the sick as something that disciples of Jesus were particularly sent out to do – and his Church still does so today. When I visit the sick I always carry holy oil with me, it sits on the mantelpiece in my study alongside my stole and sick communion set, I regularly anoint and pray with them using the words prescribed that say “I anoint you in the name of God who gives you life. Receive Christ’s forgiveness, his healing and his love. May the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ grant you the riches of his grace, his wholeness and his peace.” The kingdom breaks in because, as St Benedict reflected from St Matthew’s gospel “I was sick and you visited me”. Mother Teresa frequently emphasised the sublime dignity we have in serving Jesus in others – and a profound dignity it is indeed. She once said “we should not serve the poor like they were Jesus, we should serve the poor because they are Jesus”.

That’s why Benedict says ‘before and above all care must be taken of the sick….the sick must not be neglected’ – because in them we’re serving Jesus.

This priority given by Benedict to the poor also caused me to reflect on behaviours beyond the personal and individual to the corporate, because the way we behave corporately, as a community, as a society as a nation matters too. On a large scale as well as on a small one, those who are and are not considered a priority says a massive amount about our underlying priorities and values.

There is a certain amount of public debate around at the moment about ‘values’ – British values – Christian values – are they one and the same thing?  what does it mean, if anything, to say that we are a Christian country? Are there values shared by all irrespective of faith or religious practice? I guess values like respect, honesty and integrity are going to be common to all – whereas self-sacrificing love is possibly particularly Christian – very particularly so. The difficulty with the debate is that Christianity at its heart isn’t a values system ..As the Archbishop of Canterbury has recently pointed out, Christianity’s not first of all about being nice to people – at its heart it’s a relationship with God, through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit – we’re hopefully nice to people in response again to the mercy of God.

So that personal relationship has knock-ons….and particularly in the realm of the sick, not just individually but corporately.

In what is going to be an extremely long run in into the next General Election the National Health Service will be a political football that gets kicked around with a great deal of energy and no small amount of hot air will be expended upon it.

How we treat the sick, the priority we do or don’t give them says a great deal about us as a society – and where we find ourselves in the debate says a great deal too about where we see God and where we see Jesus. This time five years ago I was staying for three weeks at the National Cathedral in Washington DC at the time that President Obama was struggling to get his health reforms through….it was real challenge for me, and remains one, to see how anyone who calls themselves a Christian could object to those reforms. If access to basic health care and provision is first of all about the size of your bank balance then things are skewed – at least they are from a perspective that wants to call itself Christian.

As individuals Christians are encouraged and lauded for the care they take of those in need – Christian communities were at the forefront of the hospice movement to take but on obvious example – but the wider questions about corporate responsibility must not be shied away from.

A famous Brazilian RC Archbishop Helder Camara once said  “when I care for the poor they call me a saint – when I ask, why are they poor, they call me a communist”.

So I finish with those words of St Benedict that we heard earlier – and suggest that they are a corporate instruction as well as an individual one:

“Before and above all, care must be taken of the sick, that they may be served in very truth as Christ is served, because he has said ‘I was sick and you visited me’ and ’as long as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren you did it to me (Mtt25:40)”

To the one and only merciful God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be all honour and Glory. Amen.

Worcester Chapel, 1 Feb 2015

‘Feed the Hungry’ (Second of the Seven Acts of Mercy)

 

The so-called ‘seven acts of mercy’ are often associated with Lenten works of charity, but as Lent does not begin until the middle of February, this sermon series clearly has a much broader remit. In fact, ‘works of mercy’ are not only known in the Christian faith, but they also play a vital part in other world faiths, not least Judaism and Islam, for each agrees that ‘mercy’ and ‘compassion’ lie at the very heart of true religion. It is important we recognise this, as this is one way of answering the popular criticism that religion causes nothing but bloodshed and fear. As the chaplain said in his sermon in First Week:

‘We are increasingly living today with a false portrayal of God as a violent might which must be imposed on others by force… But murder in the name of God is an aberration, a catastrophic consequence of a distorted notion of the divine. ‘When religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong’, as Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, recently stated as he and his community fled their Church in Iraq because of terrorism.’

 

All too often religion can go horribly wrong. One reminder was only last week, when on ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ we heard again the terrible accounts of survivors of Auschwitz. Another reminder was at the beginning of the week, in the news reports of the mass murderer Anders Breivik, who has been trying to orchestrate an uprising from his Norwegian prison cell: all in the crazed belief that Europe needs to be ‘re-Christianised’ and rescued from what he calls ‘Islamification’ – a belief which led him to slaughter and maim over one hundred people on the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011. Other reminders of religion going ‘horribly wrong’ are the all too frequent attacks on both mosques and synagogues in Palestine and Israel, as well as on churches in Iraq, many of them disputes over ‘holy sites’. Add to this the ongoing horrific attacks by Boko Haram militants on Christians in northeast Nigeria, and it is all too obvious that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are each caught up with the effects of barbaric acts committed in the name of ‘religion’. It is easy to forget that ‘true religion’ is about mercy, and its terrible aberrations have little to do with what its founders once taught.

‘Mercy’ is a word used many times in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: each shares the common belief in a ‘Merciful God’, whose mercy is to be the inspiration for every believer. Take Judaism, for example: the phrase ‘the Lord is a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’ is an early creed found several times in the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible.   And in Christianity, the New Testament testifies repeatedly to a God who is ‘rich in mercy’: the parable of a father’s mercy towards his ‘prodigal son’ is just one illustration of the mercy which God offers to all who turn to him. And in Islam, too, ‘Most Merciful’ (al-Rahman) is one of the names of Allah, whilst ‘Compassionate’ (al -Rahmin) is repeatedly used in the Qur’an. Both derive from the Arabic root rahmat – ‘to have compassion’ or ‘to show mercy’. A very similar verb exists in Hebrew: raham means ‘to have mercy’. (Interestingly, in both Arabic and Hebrew the noun, ‘raham’ means ‘womb’, thus comparing ‘mercy’ with a mother’s love towards her child.) So all three faiths espouse that because God is merciful to us, we are to show mercy to others. In Judaism, the last six of the Ten Commandments can be seen as ‘acts of mercy’ to family and friends; in Christianity , ‘acts of mercy’ lie at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount (‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy’); and in Islam, ‘acts of mercy’ in the form of almsgiving (zakat) are the fourth of the Five Pillars of the Faith.

In Matthew 25, which is a key text in this sermon series, Jesus makes it clear that by showing mercy to others it is as if we do it to him. ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me’.   A similar teaching is found in the Qur’an: the righteous are those who feed the poor , the orphan and the captive, saying ‘We feed you for the sake of God alone’. By being compassionate and merciful we are imitating the character of our God.

The particular act of mercy I have been asked to focus on is ‘feed the hungry’. I shall look at this in two ways, one practical, the other more theological. I shall ask, firstly, how do we give to the hungry?   And, secondly, why do we give to them?

Statistics tell us that almost one in seven of the world’s population is hungry, and 90% of the hungry are predominantly in Asia, the Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa, and that 50% of the world’s wealth is held by 6% of the world’s population. So the people of the West have a huge debt to pay. Yet it is clear that few of us can literally ‘feed the hungry’: we have to use aid agencies as a medium. And we have to be discriminating: there is much truth in that Chinese proverb,   ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ There is of course spontaneous crisis aid, in times of terrible famine, but there is also educational aid, which builds for a better future. ‘Works of mercy’ have often to be about us using our minds as well as our hearts.

It is nevertheless all too easy to harden both our hearts and our minds against the hungry of the third world, for we never see them.   So it should be very different when we hear the statistics about the number of people who go hungry in our own country, as the book by the Archbishop of York (On Rock or Sand?), published last week, argues; Archbishop Sentamu challenges both the Government and the Church to recognize how immediate and urgent the cycle of deprivation and hunger is in our own land. Yet even here, it can again be a case ‘out of sight, out of mind’:   we can forget what we do not often directly encounter. So perhaps our greatest challenge is when we come across those who are hungry in our own neighbourhood, some of them on the streets of Oxford. Here again we face the choice of immediate crisis aid or longer term aid (through, for example, The Hub or the Gatehouse), and again we have to ‘feed the hungry’ with minds as well as our hearts.   But that we should respond generously, in some way,   to those who are hungry is a Christian, Jewish and Islamic imperative: how we do it and to whom we do it is very much an individual act of conscience.

So what about the second issue – why do we give? Here our two readings throw some light on this. Deuteronomy 8 is an extract from a ‘sermon’ of Moses; first the ancient Israelites are reminded about God’s provision when they were miraculously fed with manna in the wilderness, and then they are warned that when they enter Canaan, a land of plenty, they are not to forget that the same God is their provider, and they are not to assume that the land and its produce are theirs by right. ‘And you shall eat and be full… Take heed lest you forget the Lord your God… Beware lest you say in your heart ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth’ (Deut.8:10-11). Hence having an abundance of food and wealth is quite acceptable: God is a generous giver, and the real issue is about how we view it and use it.

There is a passage in the Gospel of Luke which in part expands the teaching in Deuteronomy. It begins with Jesus teaching the disciples the Lord’s Prayer; you may recall the very first request is ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (Luke 11:3). In Luke this incident is followed immediately by a parable of a man who seeks out his friend, late at night, to ask him for ‘three loaves of bread’ as he has unexpected visitors. The friend initially refuses to get out of bed to help: he is too well fed to bother with the needs of others. ‘Give us today our daily bread’ is not just a prayer for ourselves, but a prayer for others, too.

Our second reading today was the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. It has echoes of the sermon in Deuteronomy about God feeding his people with manna in the wilderness. This is the only one of Jesus’ miracles to be recorded in all four Gospels – indeed in Matthew and Mark it is reported twice – so we night deduce that something must have happened which had an effect on the different Gospel writers. Some have argued the small offering of five loaves and two small fish encouraged others in the crowd to share what they were holding back; others read it more literally. However one explains it, it is a reminder of how God can freely and abundantly provide for us in times of need. But it is also a reminder that we must give out of our plenty to serve those in need, and whoever does so, whatever their faith of creed, is reflecting to others the character of God the Merciful.

However, God’s resources are infinite, and ours certainly are not. But the implication is  that we are required, nevertheless, to give as generously as we can. I think of two stories – both again in Luke’s Gospel, which of all the Gospels is the one which champions the cause of the poor and needy. One is of Jesus observing a poor widow putting two copper coins into the Temple treasury. Jesus commends her as follows: ‘She out of her poverty has put in all the living that she had’.   She may not have given much, but she gave beyond her means (Luke 21:1-4). The other story occurs just before it, and concerns a rich young ruler, anxious to know how to inherit eternal life, who is challenged by Jesus not just to keep the commandments but to sell all that he has and distribute to the poor. ‘And then’, says Jesus, ‘You will have treasure in heaven. Come, follow me.’ But when the ruler hears these things, he becomes sad, for he was very rich (Luke 18:18-23). Whether rich or poor, what counts is being prepared to give abundantly out of whatever we have – for the simple reason that the God of mercy- the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – has given to us and so we owe Him, through others, His due.

I am acutely aware that, within half an hour of the end of this service, many of us will be dining in Hall or eating at home and the plight of the hungry may well be far from our minds. So is this a contradiction of what has been said tonight? Is this, in effect, ‘cheating’ the hungry and the poor? I think not.   Here I draw from the Rule of Benedict, which is an ancient monastic rule which influenced the founding of our very first Chapel, built almost exactly on this site in 1484. Gloucester College, lasting from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, was very much a Benedictine foundation. The Benedictine Rule has often been seen as ‘living with contradictions’, and one of those, apposite for today, is the paradox of living with plenty and living in want. Saint Benedict – who is depicted twice in this chapel, once amongst the saints of the church, and once behind this lectern in an act of giving Gloucester College over to God – has a good deal to say about plenty and want. The Rule of Benedict speaks about feasting, and fasting; about kind and generous hospitality, and self-control; about times of celebration, and acts of compassion. Chapters 39 and 40 of the Rule, on ‘The Proper Amount of Food’ and ‘The Proper Amount of Drink’ make surprising reading.

As we heard in our reading last week, Jesus’ first appearance in his public ministry was at a wedding in Cana, and according to John’s Gospel his first public miracle was changing water into wine. So Jesus affirmed celebration and generous hospitality. Yet just before this, by contrast, we read in other Gospels that Jesus was in the desert, where, hungry and parched, he survived the temptation to turn stones into loaves of bread. So deprivation and plenty were both part of the rhythm of his ministry. So to live ‘in abundance’ is not to be despised: we could not respond practically to the command to ‘feed the hungry’ if we did not have the means to do so. This is what is meant by those words attributed to Moses in Deuteronomy: ‘And you shall eat and be full… but take heed lest you forget the Lord your God…’   So let us rejoice in what we have been given, but let us also discover in practice the words of Jesus, ‘Truly, I say to you, feed the hungry: and as you did it to one of the least my brethren, you did it unto me’. (Matt. 25:40).

Mercy and compassion lie at the heart of true religion, and the more we, as individuals, practice this – Jews, Christians and Muslims alike – the more we will expose as a lie those who use religion to try to take the world by force. ‘Acts of mercy’: these can prevent religion going ‘horribly wrong’.                     Amen.

Sermon: Introduction to the Seven Works of Corporal Mercy

18^th January 2015

Isaiah 58: 6-10; Matthew 25: 31-46

 

Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

 

Words from Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poem As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame: the acceptance of God’s grace, brings grace into our everyday behaviour and actions, allowing a person to be “in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is”— that is, in Christ. It is then that Christ plays in ten thousand places, in our limbs, our eyes and God can be perceived in the faces of others.

 

Hopkins’s ideas reflect those of Isaiah in our first reading. Actions of justice and kindness, rather than malice and spite, are the true way in which all are called to reflect the divine image.

 

If you remove the yoke from among you,    the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry    and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness    and your gloom be like the noonday.

 

This term we are going to explore these ideas further by looking at the seven corporal works of mercy, those practical and down-to-earth acts can reflect God’s grace in the world. The list of the seven works was formed Thomas Aquinas, in the 13^th century, as they are to be found in his summary of all theology, the Summa Theologicae, but the importance of performing these duties was urged from the earliest days of the Church, in fact, from Christ’s declaration of the two highest commandments:

 

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it; You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

 

Fulfilling the works of mercy fits hand in hand with loving God and our neighbour, for, as St. John of the Cross wrote: “At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love.”

 

Of the virtue of mercy, Aquinas wrote:

 

“. . .The sum total of the Christian religion consists in mercy, as regards external works: but the inward love of charity, whereby we are united to God preponderates over both love and mercy for our neighbour. . . Charity likens us to God by uniting us to Him in the bond of love: wherefore it surpasses mercy, which likens us to God as regards similarity of works.” (Secunda Secundæ Partis, Question 30)

 

Thus, the virtue of practising mercy becomes part of the greater command and virtue of love, which is the essence of the divine. Many of the corporal works of mercy are mentioned by Christ in our second reading this evening, from Matthew 25:31-46:

 

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. . . Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:35-36, 40)

 

Now I mention that these works are corporal, pertaining to the body and physical needs, thus the seven works of corporal mercy are to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to visit the imprisoned, to visit the sick and to bury the dead. This last work is not mentioned in Matthew 25 but several times in the book of Tobit.

 

The seven works of corporal mercy are complimented by the seven spiritual works of mercy, whose purpose is to relieve spiritual suffering. These are, traditionally, to instruct the ignorant, to counsel the doubtful, to admonish sinners, to comfort the afflicted, to bear wrongs patiently, to forgive offences willingly, to pray for the living and the dead. But it is the works of corporal mercy that Christ emphasizes in Matthew 25 and which concern us this term, for they are the concrete actions that bring us closer to the divine nature, to God’s grace and the true purpose of our lives.

 

Of course this passage from Matthew 25 has caused theological debate throughout history, insisting as it does, that according to our merciful deeds, or lack of them, we shall be judged and sentenced to everlasting heaven or hell. In Catholic theology, this seeming endorsement of justification by works stands against the traditional view that God’s grace is offered to us freely in the sacraments. In Protestant theology, Jesus’s words in Matthew 25 seem to contrast with the Lutheran imperative that we are justified to God by faith alone. Such debates will remain as we struggles to understand that nature of creation and our place within in it, but what can unify theological or religious differences, especially as we begin the week of prayer for Christian Unity, is the fundamental sense that all of us are made by a merciful God, in his image and our purpose to is worship and love that creator, and to exercise love towards each other as we are best able to do. This involves following treating others, especially those with whom we strongly disagree or dislike, as holy, uniquely loved children f God. We are commanded to treat the stranger as Christ by offering what we can to help or comfort, thus showing that God’s grace is at work in this world.

 

The tragedy, with which we are increasingly living with today, is a perversion of religion and a false portrayal of God as a violent might which must be imposed on others by force.

We hear much about the greatness of God, and in our time, as in many other times throughout history, atrocities are being committed in the name of God of an almighty and powerful God who will judge the world. But murder in the name of God is an aberration and an absurdity and a catastrophic consequence of a distorted notion of the divine. ‘When religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong’, as Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, recently stated as he and his community fled their Church in Iraq because of terrorism. That is why our speaker this term, for the Woodroffe Society dinner in fifth week, is Imam Monwar Hussain, Muslim Chaplain at Eton College and head of the Oxford Foudation, which promotes education of young, challenges extremism, and promotes inter-faith relations. He will be speaking about challenging extremism from an educator’s perspective. In a recent open letter to ‘Islamic State’, Monawar and his colleagues from around the world, concluded with these words:

 

God has described Himself as the ‘Most Merciful of the merciful’. He created man from His mercy … Reconsider all your actions; desist from them; repent from them; cease harming others and return to the religion of mercy.’

 

What he, and his moderate friends are calling for, is a humble turning back to the God of mercy and compassion and to the true image divine, and to be touched by the ‘Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love’ of God in each other. I end with words by William Blake:

‘For Mercy has a human heart Pity, a human face: And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.’

 

University Sermon on the Sin of Pride”

preached by Provost Jonathan Bate in Worcester College Chapel,

23 November 2014

 

The preacher of the University sermon on the Sin of Pride is given a selection

of texts upon which to expatiate. I have chosen, you will be relieved to hear,

the shortest of them, the second half of the first verse of your second reading:

“Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.”

In Book VII of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the affable archangel

Raphael delivers a lecture – a sermon – to Adam, on the subject of the revolt

of Satan in heaven and God’s creation of the world. Adam asks some

questions about astronomy and metaphysics – the business, much debated

by philosophers, theologians and natural scientists, of what moved the prime

mover, how the creator was created. Raphael encourages him not to push too

far. He has been commissioned from above to answer Adam’s desire for

knowledge but to keep it within bounds. To go beyond bound would be to

trespass into the dangerous territory of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.

‘Beyond abstain / To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope / Things not

revealed’. Human knowledge must have limits. There are certain areas where

the language of reason and inquiry is inadequate, inappropriate. As a later

philosopher from Milton’s university – the other one, not ours – put it, whereof

one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Thus Wittgenstein, in the

seventh proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)

” Enough is left besides to search and know, reiterates Milton’s

archangel:”

 

“But knowledge is as food, and needs no less

Her temperance over appetite, to know

In measure what the mind may well contain,

Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns

wisdom to folly, and nourishment to wind.”

 

Milton is allowing himself a pun here, a bit of a joke: if you eat to much you

may become flatulent; if you are too indulgent in your appetite for learning,

you may end with an analogous intellectual afflatus, a lot of academic hot air.

Moderation in all things, he is saying: with surfeit comes sickness.

This sequence in Paradise Lost subtly alludes to our verse in St Paul’s

letters to the Corinthians: the idea of knowledge puffing up. It perhaps helps

to explain the oddity of this chapter of the epistle, which begins with the

question of knowledge and then proceeds to some rather detailed musings

about diet.

It was a passage that drew the attention not only of John Milton but

also, a generation before, of Sir Francis Bacon (like me, another Cambridge

man, I am afraid). What interested Bacon was Paul’s repeated imagery of the

worshipping of idols. What is the proper balance, he asked, between the

Advancement of Knowledge and the Sin of Pride? You will recall his great

meditation on the four idols, in his 1620 Novum Organum Scientiarum (‘new

method of science’), that foundation text of modern academic method

(inductive reasoning as opposed to presumption from a priori principles).

 

The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human

understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset

men’s minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance

is obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet

and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger fortify

themselves as far as may be against their assaults.

There are four classes of Idols which beset men’s minds. To these

for distinction’s sake I have assigned names, calling the first class Idols

of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market

Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theatre.

The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt

the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away

of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use; for the doctrine of

Idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation

of sophisms is to common logic.

 

Idols of the Theatre: the limitations imposed by particular systems of thought,

traditions, customs of belief.

Idols of the Marketplace: the limitations imposed by the insufficiencies

of human language. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Idols of the Cave: the limitations resulting from the quirks of every

individual mind.

Idols of the Tribe: the limitations of all human knowledge, bound as we

are by our senses (“by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the

human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and

deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh

things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important”) and

equally bound as we are by the pattern-making of our brains (“The human

understanding is of its own nature prone to abstractions and gives a

substance and reality to things which are fleeting”).

It is pride to suppose that in our quest for knowledge we can transcend

the limitations imposed by these idols.

 

So Bacon and Milton can tell the modern university much about the need to

accept limit in the quest for research novelty, can warn us of how Knowledge

Puffeth Up. As for the contrasting clause in the rhetorical chiasmus, we do not

need seventeenth-century scientists, poets or divines to tell us that charity

edifieth. This university and this college, all our colleges, are charities. We

came into being through charitable enterprise, through philanthropy on which

we still depend. Here at Worcester, once the home of Benedictine monks who

had taken vows of poverty, and always a place of poor scholars, lacking the

resources of our grander neighbours, we continue to rely upon – not the

kindness of strangers – but the charity of friends, in particular of our

philanthropic Old Members who in the Tercentenary Year of our re-foundation

are building a new endowment to see us through the storms of the next three

centuries, in which the world of knowledge will change beyond all our

imaginings.

 

But the particular verse says that Charity edifieth. Edify, as in edifice, a

building. The Greek text reads ἡ γνῶσις φυσιοῖ, ἡ δὲ ἀγάπη οἰκοδομεῖ.

Oikodomei: “(the act of) building, building up; metaphorically edifying,

edification; the act of one who promotes another’s growth in wisdom, piety,

happiness, holiness.” The metaphor comes, of course, from oikos, that

resonant word meaning a home, a dwelling-place, a household, a community,

the word from which we get economy and ecology – the nomos and logos, the

laws and the words, of the oikos. To teach and to learn with charity and

humility is to build a college and a university into a home, a dwelling-place, a

household, a community.

 

I am constantly impressed, meeting our students today, at how many of

them wish to put the knowledge they have gained here in Oxford to use that

is truly charitable: in public service, in the third sector, in development and

the developing world, in the quest to make our world a better dwelling-place,

whether through the alleviation of poverty and inequality or the addressing of

climate change and ecological crisis. They are a special generation, of whom

we should be proud in a good way.

And that’s a thing to remember. There is a thin dividing-line between

the celebration of excellence, the quest for the best (the Greek ideal of

Ἀρίστων), and the arrogance of pride. As someone who has witnessed

wonderful students passing through other universities in which I have taught –

Liverpool, Warwick, the University of California Los Angeles – I am sometimes

troubled by the thought that Oxford can be guilty of the sin of pride, or worse,

of a complacent assumption that our history and our reputation are enough,

that we can still be among the best without embracing some of the

innovations of our peers. Is it a sin of corporate pride to disdain the MOOC –

the massive open online course, available for free to the entire world – that is

now part of the charitable mission, the outreach, of Harvard, Stanford and

MIT? Are we puffing ourselves in a belief that Oxford will always be the best

place to gain knowledge?

What should our attitude be to our teaching and learning? We should

not, our text tell us, be like Milton’s Satan, “Blown up with high conceits

engendering pride.” We should instead approach knowledge with the kind of

humility that Eve shows towards Adam. Times have changed and we no

longer wish for submission on the part of females, far far from it, but an

approach to knowledge that doth not puff up might very well have a tone such

as this: “And by her yielded, by him best received, / Yielded with coy

submission, modest pride, / And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”

 

 

Have you heard of ‘manspread’? It is a new term coined, not to express the middle-aged spread in men’s physique, but of the phenomenon that occurs when a man takes up a seat, perhaps on the London underground, or in a cinema or theatre, or whatever, and manages to spread himself beyond the confines of his seat, with arms, legs or even bags, thus taking up space meant for those sitting next to him. Apparently, manspread has become such a problem on the New York subway trains that they have had to legislate against it and those caught doing it are now going to be fined.

 

The whole bizarre notion reminds me of a mosaic that I used to look at every day in St. Paul’s Cathedral. High above the East end altar there is a depiction of Christ in glory, sitting on an enormous throne and posing as if recently crowned with what I can only describe as a posture of manspread. He is king, he is glorious and he is judge. Today we celebrate Christ the King as the highlight of the relatively new liturgical season of Kingdom, which stretches from All Saints Sunday, when we remember the kingdom of the faithful, to Advent Sunday next week, when we begin to prepare for the coming of the child king at Christmas. The collect that was prayed at Matins this morning echoed the kingship theme as we prayed for our own monarch:

 

‘O Lord, our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen ELIZABETH …’

 

The idea that Christ the Messiah brought about a new kingdom, which is to be made complete at the eschaton, the end times, is repeated throughout the gospels. In fact, the very first verse of St. Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Christ comes from a line of kings. Matthew wrote ‘An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham’. Thus, Christ is immediately introduced to us as a figure of authority and kingship, just as he is in the final verses of the gospel that we heard read out this evening.

 

Indeed, Jesus’ ancestor, David, was a great king. He was, as we heard tonight, the anointed, exalted, favourite and strong one of Israel. A king. A judge. A great authority. But David’s final words makes it clear that his authority for all his great reign has come from the greater power of God: ‘The Spirit of the Lord speaks through me, his word is on my tongue. The God of Israel has spoken, the Rock of Israel has said to me: One who rules justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’

 

David acknowledges that his success in ruling justly and with great favour and authority is because he acted in obedience and not out of his own human pride. Now we do not need another sermon on the sin of pride, as the Provost has already preached eloquently on the subject in this chapel already today, in this morning’s University Sermon, but perhaps we might end this day reflecting upon the attendant virtue to the sin of pride, which is the grace of humility.

 

When Henry Holiday, the pre-Raphaelite artist, designed the windows for this Chapel, he themed each window on a scene from the life of Christ, from annunciation to ascension. Unlike St. Paul’s Cathedral however, Holiday chose not to have the East end of the Chapel depicted Christ the King in glory, but rather the crucifixion. I, for one, am grateful for Holiday’s theological insight in so ordering his design, for the theology of this Chapel is all the stronger for it. For Christ’s kingship is one of the servant king, the suffering king, the humble and obedient son of God who saves humanity by sacrifice and pure love. As St. Paul wrote to the Philippians, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.’

This is why the crucifixion window is different from the other windows. They are more a celebration of life, whilst here, we have the struggle with death. Holiday has depicted the darkened sun, the crescent moon, the skull, and the dereliction of Christ.   Look up at this scroll above this window, and you will see Daniel 9: 26 which reads ‘The Messiah shall be cut off and have nothing’.

 

That suffering and self-giving love of Christ is one of the main themes in this Chapel. If you walk through the nave here you can see the unusual bench-ends on the pews. They’re all symbols from the story of the last week in Jesus’s life, when he was tried, tortured and killed.  There is the seamless robe, the crown of thorns, the nails, the thirty pieces of silver, and the ladder to take Jesus down from the cross.

 

So when, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, the risen Jesus takes his disciples up onto a mountain top, with some of them still doubting as to his reality, and he tells them that ‘All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations’, we still have, as the disciples had, the very fresh memory of Christ crucified, of the suffering, compassionate, loving face of Christ. Any authority the disciples are given, is only licensed to them because it is in the gift of the servant king. If they are called to be leaders, then they are servant leaders.

 

A good friend of mine and Emma’s, Robert Atwell was made Bishop of Exeter in July and we went down for the induction ceremony. The cathedral was, of course, packed with people, and the beginning of the service opened with the dramatic scene of the Bishop elect, banging on the outside of the cathedral doors to be let in. When the doors are opened the dean asked who is knocking, to which Robert replies that he has come to be the next Bishop of Exeter. Quite rightly the Dean asked what qualifications Mr. Atwell had for the post, ‘None’, he replied, ‘I am only a sinner seeking the forgiveness of Christ and humbly wishing to share the love of Christ with others’.

 

I found this to be a powerful point of departure for leadership of a Diocese, or indeed any leadership. Christ’s own humility, even though he is God, is our example as well as out salvation. It for these reasons that we celebrate Christ as King – that by his life of service, of love and compassion, and self-giving death, he has given life to all. That is why we sing with George Herbert: ‘Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and king’