Category: Sermons

The Chaplains’ Event taking place all this week, Exploring Faith, is an event that used to be called ‘The Chaplains’ Mission’. In essence, this week’s talks are also a mission in that the audience will consist of Christians and non-Christians, those looking for faith and those who are sceptical. The main headline speakers of any mission have always formed the backbone of the initiative, but there are also often fringe events that one can enjoy. A few years ago one such fringe offering was an exhibition in the Wesley Memorial Church. There was a single work in the exhibition, which was an amazing art installation by Paul Hobbs called ‘Holy Ground’. It consisted of a large, circular Hessian mat littered with stones. In the centre there was a beautiful sculpture of silver metal, which twisted and spiralled out into arms like a tree or bush. Lights were shone onto it so that it shimmered and flickered giving a representation of the burning bush. All around the edge of the mat were pairs of shoes, thirty in all and next to them was an A4 card that told you something about the owner and what it means for them to believe in Christ. Paul Hobbs had travelled around the world gathering their stories. Each one is unique, but as he writes, ‘all have encountered the living God, arriving at a place of holy ground, where, like Moses, they must, metaphorically at least, remove their shoes on acknowledgement of God’s holiness.’
One pair of shoes was that of an itinerant evangelist in Africa. His sandals were literally worn out from the many miles he had trekked to preach the gospel and escape persecution. Another were the high-heeled pink stilettos of a former prostitute who, through her faith, turned her life around and now walks the back streets of New York to care for vulnerable girls. Finally, and perhaps the most emotive of all are Rosemarie’s plain and unassuming shoes. Her father had been Hitler’s bodyguard for the 1936 Olympic Games and Hitler became her Godfather. Before war broke out, her Dad, a Christian, risked his life to help persecuted Jews escape from Germany. However, in 1938 he was forced to swallow a cyanide pill for his actions. It was a deeply moving artwork and in itself created an incredible holy space in our city and in the lives of those who entered into and encountered it.
In this evening’s reading from the thirteenth Canto of Dante’s Purgatory, the shoes of the poets Virgil tread from the first cornice of Pride and into the second Cornice, where the sin of Envy is purged. And here, the travellers hear the story of Sapia of Siena and they see the envious inhabitants, huddled with their backs against a wall and their eyes, gruesomely sown up with wire so that they cannot see. Like all the sins to be cleansed in Purgatory, or roots of sin as I mentioned in my introductory sermon two week ago, Envy is a sin of desire, a distorted kind of love: either too much, too little or perverted in some way. Envy is all about looking, and desiring to have what you do not have. This is why the envious in the story have their eyes sown up, because their envious looking was the root of all their sinful deeds: their resentment of others wealth, power, possessions or lifestyle, so that their existence was given over to the acquisition of more status and money and things, to keep up with the Joneses, whilst the virtuous and healthy path of being grateful for what one has, and helping others who are less fortunate, is lost in one selfish act after another. Envy is never satisfied, because there is always someone who appears to have just that bit more and every acquisition just leads to a greater desire for the next item.
Therefore, in a world dominated by media advertising that constantly tells us we don’t yet have what we need to by truly stylish, or happy, we are conditioned, if we are not careful, into thinking that the grass is always greener on the other side, or to use another metaphor, the journey we are travelling is not as good as the other persons. I don’t want to be in my shoes, I’d rather be in you shoes. It is very much a 21st century sin. Envy can also be that resentful spirit that says, ‘It’s all right for you, you don’t have to out up with the problems that I have to put up with. If I had a better set of circumstances, then I would be happy.’ Again the envious heart has a kind of blindness, because it fails to look properly at the world, it fails to acknowledge others’ harships whilst exaggerating its own.
The letter of James tells us that ‘where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness’, but there is an antidote to envy, which we can all self administer on a daily basis. It is gratitude. Gratitude for the shoes that we have walked in on our pilgrimage so far, and gratitude for the places those shoes have taken us, and the people we have known along the way. Gratitude too, that our shoes will eventually take us to the ends of our life, where our journey will end with love, the love of God. This gratitude is itself a gift from above and James calls it ‘Wisdom’ that is pure and peaceable, gentle and willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits and it leads to generosity, impartiality and an end to hypocrisy. Envy brings division, but a grateful and generous heart brings peace to all.
I wonder, if we were to leave our shoes in that art exhibit of Paul Hobbs, and leave the A4 card with our story on it, whether it would be a story of a life gratefully and generously lived. May God give us the strength to walk such a path, for it has been generously given to us to walk it, and cannot be trod by anybody else but ourselves.

Rev. Dr. Jonathan Arnold
30th January 2011

I was having dinner in Worcester, sometime last term, and the conversation came round to the subject of the sermon series this term. As some of you may know, it has been a recent tradition here to have a themed series of sermons in the Hilary term and some of you may also remember that last year we looked at the Cardinal and Theological virtues: justice, fortitude, prudence, temperance, faith, hope and love. So perhaps it would be a good idea to look at the darker side of life: the vices, or seven deadly sins. But it was Jennifer Rushworth, post-graduate in Italian and French, who came up with the idea of using the stages of Dante’s Purgatory from his Divine Comedy that has brought the idea alive. Therefore, as you will have noticed, the first reading on each Sunday will not be from the Bible, but will be from Dante’s work, as we delve into the murky world of our sin and explore the concepts of hell, purgatory and heaven. This is the challenge for all of our preachers this term and, although Lent and Easter fall very late this year, I hope that they will provide a good introduction to the Lenten season.
So who was Dante? Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, died in Ravenna in 1321 and was a poet. In Italy he is known as Il Summo Poeta, the supreme poet and his masterpiece The Divine Comedy is one of the greatest works in the Italian language. The Commedia, nicknamed Divina by another Italian poet, Giovanni Boccaccio, was his allegory of life and God as revealed to a pilgrim, written in what Dante called Italian, which was an amalgamation of Latin and regional dialects from Tuscany. Like other medieval writers who broke away from wiring in Latin to write in the vernacular, like Chaucer in England, he established his national language, Italian, as being suitable for the highest forms of expression. Of course Dante has had a profound influence upon western literature ever since.
I won’t give a biography of Dante, but there is one important fact that will be important to remember: that, although he married a woman called Gemma di Manetto Donati, with whom he had, at least, four children; Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni and Antonia, years before his marriage, at the age of 9, it is said that Dante had fallen in love with a certain Beatrice Portinari (d.1290) the young woman in his autobiographical Vita nuova (c1293) (The New Life). The unattainable and distant Beatrice remained an essential part of Dante’s life and works and she is a feature of the Divine Comedy too, as we shall see.
The work, written when Dante was in exile between 1307 and 1321, describes the poets journey through the Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise), guided by the Roman poet Virgil and then by his beloved Beatrice. The Comedy of the title refers to the classical tradition where works which reflected belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word Commedia, the progression of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim’s moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.
Il Purgatorio, like the inferno, is, of course, concerned with souls who are suffering the penalty for sin. This may be a rather unfashionable concept these days: the idea of a place where our wrong deeds and habitual vices are purged away in preparation for a greater, sin-free eternity in paradise. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church itself has recently played down the concept, abolishing the idea of limbo only a couple of years ago, and making purgatory a non-essential part of the tenets of belief. But the Purgatory of Dante’s conception, as Dorothy L Sayers pointed out, is a place where freedom is secured for the pilgrim poet. If hell (inferno) is ‘the fleeing deeper into the iron-bound prison of the self … Purgatory is the resolute breaking down, at whatever cost, of the prison walls, so that soul may emerge at last into liberty and endure unscathed the unveiled light of reality.’ For Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, purgatory was ‘imagined as a region bordering on Hell and rather like it.’ But for Dante, Purgatory is a much more positive place and ‘is as remote from Hell as the surface of the Earth is from its centre.’ Purgatory is not a place of probation from which souls may go either to heaven or to hell; it is not a second chance for those who die unrepentant; and in Dante’s work, repentance at the moment of death is always accepted and souls ‘which have so persevered in virtue till the moment of death as to accomplish their whole purgation in this life, are not detained in purgatory, but pass immediately into the presence of God. These are the Saints.’
This is all rather different to a picture of purgatory that many of us will be familiar with from Shakespeare: the Ghost of Hamlet’s father walking the earth until his murder is avenged. Dante’s purgatory is a place of ‘systematic discipline’. In his journey, the poet joins Virgil in ascending a mountain (Mount Purgatory) with seven terraces, cornices or circles as markers along the way, devoted to purging of the Seven Capital Sins. To each of the cornices is allotted a Penance, a Meditation, a Prayer, a Guardian Angel and a Benediction and the ascent from one to another is accompanied, often, by a discourse on some scientific or philosophical subject. At the very top of the mountain the Earthly Paradise is reached, whereas the 7 circles are preceded, at the foot of the mountain, by the 2 terraces of ante-purgatory. Ante Purgatory is for those who died unprepared and are forced to wait for a fixed period of time before they can begin to ascend the cleansing mount purgatory.
Between Ante-purgatory and Purgatory is Peter’s Gate, through which every soul must pass in order to enter purgatory. This is approached through the three steps of Penitence: Confession, Contrition and Satisfaction. The Seven P’s, which we heard mentioned at the end of our reading, standing for the seven Capital Sins (peccata) are inscribed upon their foreheads, and are erased, one by one, as the soul ascends by the Pass of Pardon, as the exit from each circle, or terrace. It is at Peter’s Gate that our sermon series begins tonight. At that gate the poet begs the Angel to be admitted:
‘Devoutly falling at the holy feet
I prayed him let me in for mercy’s sake,
But first upon my breast three times I beat.
Then did he write with his sword’s point, and make
Upon my brow the mark of seven P.s;
‘Wash thou these wounds within here’, he spake.’
But is this relevant to us now? Haven’t we abolished the whole concept? And isn’t this all about being punished for our wicked deeds so that we can go on and get pie in the sky when we die? Well, No. This story is not about the act of sin at all. It is about cleansing the stain of sin in ourselves, not individual acts as such, but those habits of mind from which bad deeds come: the very roots of sinfulness. Again Dorothy L Sayers is helpful with the example of cruelty. Why is cruelty not a capital or deadly sin? Because cruelty, although a wicked act, has its roots in selfish feelings towards others: pride, from jealousy, resentment or fear (envy), from ill-temper or vindictiveness (anger) and so on.
It is our habits of mind that change who we are as people and direct what actions we take. Of course, this idea was not new to Dante, or to Aquinas or to the Church Fathers, such as Origen who developed the idea of purgatory. St. Paul in his letter to the Romans, exhorts them to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.’ (Chapter 12:2). Likewise in this evening’s reading from the second letter of Peter, he encourages his readers to make every effort to support their faith with goodness, knowledge, self-control, endurance, godliness, mutual affection and love. It is in the habits of these practices that goodness flows, not a single act, but a daily, hourly, renewing of one’s mind with regard to the roots of our selfishness, deliberately conquering imperfections and temptations with intentional acts of virtue and kindness. The place to start if you want to create a giving, loving and kind heart is with your mind. If you think about the practice of goodness, then you are on your way to achieving it. May we look to be transformed by the renewal of our minds and hearts this term. Amen.

Rev’d Dr Jonathan Arnold
16th January 2011

Prince Harry came to Wiltshire this week. He was present when a new Field of Remembrance for those killed in Afghanistan was dedicated at Lydiard Park. 349 young men and women so far are commemorated in that good earth with small wooden crosses. 349 crosses have their photographs on them, but members of the public can also buy crosses from the Royal British Legion. Even now only a few days on 35,000 people have already marked their respect and remembrance by leaving just such a cross.
Lydiard Park is in the parish of Wootton Bassett which itself is next door to RAF Lyneham. You’ll doubtless know that about once a week a C17 aircraft bringing back the bodies of those killed in Afghanistan flies over Wootton Basset. Then a repatriation ceremony takes place on the base sometimes in the presence of senior military personnel, members of the government or even members of the Royal Family. But this is chiefly a moment for those whose loved one lies in the coffin.
· This is inevitably a bureaucratic moment: the armed forces need to deal with their dead in as respectful but orderly a way as possible. The Coroner awaits a post mortem report on the death. The family needs to arrange a funeral.
· This is also an intensely personal and grief-stricken moment: for comrades, friends and families the sight of a flag-draped coffin means their worst fears enacted. As the psalmist once said they have been fed with the bread of tears.
· This is also a religious moment: the coffin is accompanied by an army chaplain because, whatever the faith or none of the family, we believe that the mortal remains of someone should be treated with ceremony and respect, and in the face of death we declare our Christian hope that those we love will yet live.
· But Wootton Basset has also turned this repatriation into a moment of shared significance for us all. As the cortege makes its journey from the chapel on the base to the John Radcliffe Hospital here in Oxford it has to travel through the life of the town, and so the town stops what it’s doing for a few moments. People gather at the war memorial, they line the main street, they chat about what is happening in their lives but then the traffic is stopped and the church bells begin to toll and there is a profound silence. They never knew the young people who now pass before them in the hearse but they honour their sacrifice, they give dignity to their return and they assure those grieving of their gratitude.
On this Remembrance Sunday we’ve no trouble remembering the misery and costs of war. All of us are aware that British soldiers are engaged in the most intense and prolonged theatre of operations since the Second World War. More than 140 times have the people of Wootton Basset turned out. And then there are those with life-changing injuries caused by improvised explosive devices. The sacrifice of young people is real at a time of war and we honour it today in our remembering.
The poet Wilfred Owen, who was awarded the Military Cross for bravery but then killed just a few days before the Armistice in 1918, once described the experience of the war dead as being like autumn leaves. They fall to earth, their life decomposes and is gone but then their sacrifice brings the hope of Spring. For Wilfred Owen’s generation this earthly life was only a small part of the equation of what matters to us. There was a sense of a grand scheme or divine purpose whereby we know who holds the keys of death and hell, whereby in the end God makes everything right. The sacrifice we make by forfeiting our security and comfort is intrinsically meaningful to us. Sacrifice may be deeply sorrowful but it makes sense to us.
Wootton Bassett happens to have a simply splendid parish priest and he would be the first to tell us that it doesn’t feel like that anymore, even in the conservative villages of north Wiltshire.
Firstly they’re less sure about the justifications for war. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing because certainly the Christian starting point has to be that war is always and absolutely evil. We’ve occasionally tried to glorify the experience, to dress it up as a ‘crusade’ or present it as a sanctified moral endeavour but violence will never be the chosen way of a God who, as our gospel reading says, longs for us to know wellbeing and peace. And in our other reading the aspirations of the prophet Isaiah were, as he described it, for the wolf to live peaceably with the lamb, the leopard to share a bed with a kid – there would be no aggressors in a world full of the knowledge of the Lord.
We recognise that war is sometimes a necessary evil, to preserve higher values. We live with the responsibility of having British soldiers in Afghanistan because we believe that without their presence our safety and freedom to live without terror would be compromised. It still ought to be a difficult debate for us as a nation not least because the Cold War and globalisation have brought with them a sharper moral question of whether aggression is a justified response to potential threat? What are our proper responses to militant ideologies and atrocities in distant places?
The Salisbury diocese, of which Wootton Bassett is a part, has a 40 year link with the Episcopal Church of the Sudan and so we count as friends people who live on the other side of that debate. A billion citizens of our world live with the suffering brought about by the mix of poverty and war. The conflict our soldiers are experiencing in Afghanistan is endemic to societies where the economy is weak and the State failing. And lest we forget, it affects us all; for instance 95% of the global production of hard drugs comes from conflict ridden countries.
Perhaps the issues are more complex, the causes of conflict more intractable and the solutions more elusive: for whatever reason the good people of Wootton Bassett are less sure about the justifications for war than they were when their war memorial was erected.
Yet what prevails for them is a desire to protect the dignity of sacrifice. Wars may cease, or seem a very distant reality to us, nevertheless the importance of sacrifice remains critical to our self-understanding as a human community. The ability to surrender what we badly want for the sake of something more meaningful gives your life and my life a dignity which it’s hard to achieve through self-interest alone. The moral and spiritual values of our nation matter to us, not only because they sometimes hold us back from war or properly send us into it, but because without such principles we devalue the sacrifices we all make when we choose the costly option of self-offering. As Jesus speaks of His own sacrifice, moving as He is towards his death, it isn’t the hope of a Spring to come and His resurrection which drives Him on and keeps Him brave: it’s partly knowing what sacrifice will achieve.
So on this Remembrance Day, in the midst of our ongoing debates about the justifications for war, let’s remind ourselves that how we view the sacrifices we ask of other people, of military personnel, has consequences for how we see the dignity and importance of sacrifice in our own lives.
There’re some things we want for ourselves and those we love which can only be achieved by risk and letting go of our security. Sacrifice is the price we pay to discover something more meaningful and to capture a greater prize. Think of the sacrifices the likes of you and me might be asked to make in the years ahead: as a husband or wife we may give up the chance of promotion because the cost is too great for our family: we may sacrifice our leisure and ease in order to do better by an elderly relative: we might resist betraying someone or put another’s welfare before our own.
Sacrifice may not be exalted any longer because it’s seen as nobly part of a grand plan or majestic purpose but the dignity of sacrifice remains at the heart of what achieves our human goals. Whether its integrity, or trustworthiness or faithfulness we’re unlikely to live up to who we want to be without immense sacrifice. So let’s treat it with dignity and get used to calculating the cost.
Another poet who uses the image of autumn, this time the burning of trees, is Mary Oliver. She talks of the resurgence of natural life through the sacrifices made at the end of a year. Let me finish with part of her poem ‘In Blackwater Woods’
“Every year
everything
I have learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”
In our moral scepticism about war, in our sorrow about letting go, in our loving what is mortal, let us also protect the dignity and importance of sacrifice. It’s what makes us more than we dare to hope we can be.

Very Rev’d June Osborne, Dean of Salisbury
14th November 2010

Ninety years ago today, at 11.00am on the 11th day of the eleventh month, after two minutes of silence, King George V dedicated the Cenotaph, newly designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Then the body of the “Unknown Warrior”, one of millions of young men whose remains could never be identified after the dreadful carnage of the “Great War”, was taken in state to lie in Westminster Abbey.

It seems a happy coincidence (except, of course, that there is no such thing as coincidence under the providence of God) that today is also the feast of St Martin of Tours. He was named for Mars, the god of war, and was a 4th century soldier, of whom the legend is told that he encountered a naked beggar, and impulsively cut his military cloak in half and gave it to the man to cover himself. That night, he had a dream in which he saw Christ clad in the half-cloak; and that was apparently the moment of his conversion, the discovery that Christians have always made, that in serving the poor they serve Christ. Martin turned his back on a military career; and when threatened with imprisonment on a charge of cowardice for refusing to fight, offered to go out into the front line carrying no weapons at all; and as it turned out, the invading army turned on their heels and retreated.

Another happy “coincidence” is that the legend is neatly recorded in a relief sculpture by Eric Gill in the only building in Oxford that was designed by Lutyens. As a result of this vision, Martin became a monk and eventually a bishop, and eventually died a most impressive death, not in war, but calmly giving his soul to God on his way back from resolving a squabble between clerics in a particular parish. It is no exaggeration to say that the effects of his ministry are still powerfully detectable in his part of France, 17 centuries later.

The skills and dispositions that make a good soldier are, I suspect, the same as those that make a good saint. The readings for today give us a hint as to how it goes. In the first reading, Paul, now an old man and in prison (and undeniably looking for sympathy as part of his strategy), is endeavouring to persuade his friend Philemon to treat a fellow-Christian, who happens to be a slave, not as a slave, a thing, a possession, but as a fellow human being, a fellow-saint. It is a charming letter, read only today, alas, in the entire year of the Catholic lectionary; and it is certainly the place to start your study of St Paul. In the letter, Philemon is congratulated for “giving rest and refreshment for the bowels of the saints”. It is a most delicate, and presumably irresistible (or it would not have survived – Philemon would have torn it up and thrown it into the trash-can), piece of persuasion. What Philemon is invited to do is to see things, and people, differently, and not visit upon Onesimus (the slave in question), the violence that he is entitled to receive and Philemon to administer. And we have, all of us, to recognise inside us those tendencies to violence, those moments when hitting someone or killing them or chopping bits off them, seems, deceptively, to be the only answer.

Violence is also in the air in the gospel that you have just heard: Jesus is being badgered by Pharisees to say “When is the Kingdom of God coming?”; and his answer is that “It doesn’t come by watching”. Instead of trying to read the cosmic weather-forecast and give the definite timetable that they are looking for, he suggests to them, and to us, that “The Kingdom of God is within you”, that is to say, inside you; or “among you”, that is to say somewhere in that group of religiously-minded Pharisees, or, come to that, religiously-minded members of Worcester College, Oxford. And sometimes, Jesus reminds us, it will be obscure: “you will long to see a day of the Son of Man and won’t see it. People will tell you, ‘Look! There!’ or ‘Look! Here!’; but he will come like a flash of lightning, from one end of the sky to the other”. Then the reading ended on an ominous tone, “First the Son of Man has to suffer much violence, and be rejected by this generation”. We shiver, but should take comfort in Jesus’ certainty that God is in charge.

And what of you, who will shortly march forth from this college and university to run the world? The lesson is clear: your generation must eschew the seductions of violence; like Philemon, you must learn to see other people as human beings and not as things. Like Jesus, and like St Martin of Tours, I regret to say, you must be prepared to endure violence visited upon you. But like both Martin and Jesus, you must know that God is in charge of our world, with all its shadows and frailties and ambiguities. And, one day, for sure, you will find yourself clothing the homeless and naked beggar and discovering that it was, after all, Christ whom you were serving; one day, it will become true that in the prophet’s words, “They shall not learn war any more”.

Fr. Nicholas King
11th November 2010

Saints bother me and I’m not quite sure why.

It is not difficult to describe what a Saint is. A Saint is one

· By whom God’s Word speaks to the World
· By whom God’s Light shines on the World
· By whom God’s Life lives in the World.

Furthermore, we have little difficulty defining who the Saints are, given that they feature on a year by year/ week by week/ day by day basis in our liturgical calendar. In addition to those named there are also those who are known to each one of us as guides and mentors to us in our own journeys of faith and discipleship. They, too, are numbered amongst the Saints. By no means least, the New Testament does not shirk from naming all people of faith as Saints even if, in effect, we are simply re-cycled sinners!

All that is well and good, so why do Saints still bother me?

I think it is because we have turned them into spiritual celebrities – Christians with the X-Factor when X equals super-holy and otherworldly.

The rot set in quite early.

In the first and second centuries of the Christian era it was the way they died which determined who would be a Saint – martyrdom was the gateway to sainthood. But soon not only how you died but how you lived began to define a Saint, and especially one living a life of self-imposed hardship – a kind of living death if you like.

Then throw into the mix the belief that Saints could intercede for us in order that we may be found fit for heaven rather than hell. Now they were venerated less for what they did in their lives and more for what they could do in ours.

The Protestant Reformers generally rejected the cult of the Saints and taught people to stick to Scripture as the gateway to salvation rather than seeking to piggy-back into heaven on the backs of those who have gone before us. Typically, Anglicans chose a middle way by electing to remember year on year a hand-picked selection of pre-Reformation Saints whilst at the same time deciding not to add to their number. We Anglicans operate a sort of mixed economy when it comes to celebrating Sainthood so that we affirm the New Testament view that all Christians are Saints, whilst also affirming that some Christians are more saintly than others!

This is all a bit of a muddle, but it’s not that which bothers me – being in a bit of a muddle is what makes being an Anglican so much fun.

No, I think I am bothered because we have gradually drifted away from Saints as defined by their deaths, and recruited them to the ranks of life-coaches i.e. people who can show us how to live, when what we really need are lessons in how to die.

When sainthood was about martyrdom then it was about teaching us something about the Christian way of death. Over time it has come to be more about Saints teaching us the Christian way of life and important though that is, this shift in emphasis has colluded with modern day fear of death and refusal to talk about it. The eve of All Saints – Hallowe’en – has become a mere rehearsal for the Pantomime season, and Saints have been reduced to somewhat saccharine and anaemic mannequins in a spiritual lifestyle fashion parade.

That is why it is good to remind ourselves that All Saints Day is followed by All Souls Day – the day when we commemorate the faithful departed. This enables our death-denying and death-defying culture to recapture that full-on approach to death which the original cult of Saints managed to capture and which we have sadly lost.

So Saints bother me, or rather, the way the cult of Saints has developed bothers me. But a verse from one of the Psalms comes to my rescue:

“Precious in the sight of the Lord
is the death of His faithful servant” (Psalm 116 verse 8)

We would do well to re-capture that sense of death as precious – something to be venerated, or even sometimes celebrated as it was in the case of the early Saints, rather than death being shunted into a siding so as to be both out of sight and out of mind.

Dying is a lifetime’s work if you do it properly, and thank God for the Saints who are those faithful servants whose deaths are precious not only in the sight of the Lord, but in the sight of those of us who are not only dying to live well, but living to die well.

May God give us grace to follow His Saints in faith and hope and love, and to follow them through the adventure of death and so join them in the eternal song of heaven:

“Hallelujah! The Lord our God, sovereign over all, has entered on His reign! Let us rejoice and shout for joy.” (Revelation chapter 19 verse 6).

May God Bless you as you seek to live your lives so that, as with the Saints of old, you will not be afraid to die.

Rt Rev Dr John Saxbee, Bishop of Lincoln
31st October 2010

How might we assess and respond to the Government’s long awaited Spending Review? Not perhaps a question that you would expect Jesus to be addressing in first century Palestine. And indeed he’s not – at least not directly. But today’s Gospel reading has a striking relevance.
Since George Osborne’s statement in the House of Commons on Wednesday a political row has been raging over the idea of ‘fairness’. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has weighed in saying the cuts are regressive. Nick Clegg responded by backing the Chancellor and saying the cuts are progressive, meaning the richest will bear their fair share of pain.
We might join in with the Teacher in Ecclesiastes who in apparent despondency brands it all “Meaningless…” But in our Gospel reading we discover what might be a more positive response.
Jesus too is embroiled in a political debate. The Pharisees we are told by the writer, have just heard that Jesus has dealt a significant political blow to their coalition partners, the Sadducees. He has also just had a couple of skirmishes with the disciples of the Pharisees and the Herodians over taxation.
There is a big discussion going on. On the one side is the uneasy coalition: the Sadducees, the Herodians and other parties who are in bed with the Romans. They, for obvious reasons, think it is OK to pay taxes to Caesar. On the other are groups such as the Zealots, who believe that paying taxes to Caesar is collaboration and tantamount to treachery.
So whose side is Jesus on? Does Jesus support the coalition or does he side with the opposition? Jesus is set a political trap, the Gospel writer tells us. And whatever answer he gives it seems, he will be damned. He’s either going to be seen as a collaborator or a dangerous subversive.
Jesus, however, confounds them with his response, and refocuses the political agenda. Cutting to the heart of the matter he holds up a coin and asks whose head is on it. It is of course Caesar’s. “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” he says.
In contemporary terms, it’s a bit like asking if you support the Government. Jeremy Paxman wants a straight answer – “yes, or no”. But the issues are complex, and Jesus instead refocuses the discussion. What is the basis of your question? Who is ultimately important here – is it God or Caesar? What are the values involved? What are God’s priorities? These are the kinds of questions that Jesus’ response throws up.
Theologians have debated what exactly Jesus meant on the question of taxation. But whatever was meant, it seems to have confounded the questioners. So the Pharisees have determined to lay another political trap.
And this time, it’s a bit like Osborne’s spending review. They are trying to get Jesus to set out his priorities. If he’s so clever, then what does he think is most important? Is it child benefit and working families tax credit? (Honouring one’s father and mother?) Is it the Ministry of Justice and frontline policing? (Thou shalt not steel?) Should the age of Sabbath rest be raised to 66?
Jesus once again refuses to accept the premises of their questions. He goes instead to the heart of the matter. First and foremost this should be about love – love of God and love of neighbour.
The idea of love seems ill-suited to realpolitik both then and now. But moving swiftly forward to 21st Century Britain we might conclude that contemporary debate is more or less on the right lines. The discussion about cuts after all seems to be revolving around ideas of ‘fairness’. This debate is all about love of neighbour and how we treat each other. We’re all in this together after all. The only disagreement is whether the spending review has achieved the fairness that we all hoped it would.
But all is perhaps not as it seems.
As the writer of Ecclesiastes suggests hopefully:
“God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.”
Indeed, this is what Jesus has also been doing in his responses to the questions that have been posed. He has been drawing out and revealing what really lies beneath the debates into which his opponents have sought to draw him.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies too could even perhaps be interpreted as doing God’s work, as it seeks to expose the potential impact of the Government’s cuts. It has attempted to reveal those hidden things which we might not have otherwise spotted. And there is an important tradition of speaking truth to power into which it falls.
But a closer examination of the ideas of ‘fairness’ which are being used by all sides, suggests that everyone may be somewhat at odds with a Christian conception of fairness.
When Herodians ask the question about taxation and the Pharisees ask about the law, Jesus’ response brings into sharp relief how their priorities and perspective are intimately related to how they understand God and how they treat those around them – their neighbours.
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'[a] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself
Jesus brought the politics of 2000 years ago into question. If we allow him, he might bring the spending review under close scrutiny too.
In the Christian tradition, ‘fairness’, is that which is found in the character of God. The extent of our love and devotion to God is evident in how that fairness is demonstrated in the treatment of our neighbours.
Christianity holds too that all are made in God’s image. And consequently, fairness demands that there is a special and particular regard for the vulnerable, the weak, the poor and the excluded.
We are all in this together. Yes. But God’s approach suggests not simply that the rich should carry an equal, or even greater burden. When considered in God’s light the bar is raised still higher. The question becomes whether the poorest and most vulnerable should be shouldering any of the burden at all. True fairness, incorporating the Christian idea of bias to the poor, might be better seen as the poorest being protected completely and entirely. Indeed, God’s fairness might demand that the poorest emerge even better off, than before the spending review began.
So what might Jesus’ response be to a question about Government cuts? Jesus might not be drawn into the budget setting on a department by department basis. But perhaps, as was his habit, he might use an example or tell us a story.
He might tell us about a man. A man who is on the minimum wage. It’s just gone up by 13p an hour and that gives him £237 for a 40 hour week to live on and support his family. That doesn’t go far these days so he is grateful for the housing benefit and the controlled rent. Mind you, the area he lives in isn’t that great. But it’s the only one he can afford to live in. You can’t really be choosy when you don’t have cash to spare. So far there have been plenty of police on the beat to keep the anti-social stuff under control. But with the cuts in the policing budget and the freeze on recruitment, he is starting to become frightened.
He’s particularly anxious about what might happen to his children. He wants them to grow up without getting into trouble or getting hurt. He’d like to move away to an area where they’ll be safer and the schools are a bit better. The trouble is, he can’t imagine where he might go. Social housing seems to be getting scarcer, and buying is unaffordable. Even now if something were to happen to put his rent up it would be hard to imagine how he would cope. He’s already anxious about the cost of keeping the place warm this winter.
His eldest though is doing really well at school; she’d like to stay on, do ‘A’ levels, go to university. But it’s going to stretch his means. The £30 ‘staying on’ grant has been done away with so he’s not sure how he will find the money to buy her books, what with the fares for the travel into work going up, the increase in VAT and his own pay freeze.
And come to that, his job isn’t too secure either. He’s heard that benefits are being cut too. He loves kids, and would have loved to have had more, but that would have been irresponsible. He wonders what the cuts will do for his existing children’s futures? He’s concerned too what the university fees are going to be like by the time his daughter is 18? Perhaps he’d better not encourage that aspiration.
He’s grateful though that the Child Tax Credit is going up £30 a year. It will help now that the £30 a week he got to help with childcare has gone. But it might mean that his wife has to give up her job because it only just covers the shortfall as it is. And it’s just possible that she might be able to help by doing a bit of cleaning work without declaring it.
And as for his elderly mother’s care, he does wonder what is going to happen to her now that the local authority is having its budget cut so severely. What will it be like if there isn’t anyone to get her up in the mornings and wash her?
Such a story would certainly help to refocus abstract debates about fairness, and highlight the need to relieve, not increase, the loads of the already burdened.

Jonathan Bartley, Co-Director of the Christian Think Tank Ekklesia
24th October 2010

Words from St. John’s Gospel: ‘You did not choose me: I chose you. I appointed you to go on and bear fruit, fruit that shall last; so that the Father may give you all that you ask in my name. This is my commandment to you: love one another.’
As I have already said, welcome back to Worcester and welcome to those who are here for the first time. As I enter my third year here as Chaplain, it seems that time, in Oxford, passes quickly and seems to become condensed somehow. I realised the other day, that this is the year when I will see third year undergraduates leave, the ones that started at this college with me in 2008. This is also, sadly, the beginning of the Provost’s last year as Head of House, and so it is a significant and poignant year. But we are not to be downcast, for I also suspect it will be a great year in many ways and it is auspicious perhaps, that today is the 10th day or the 10th month of 2010. So the numerologists, and those of a superstitious nature, tell us that it is the luckiest day of the year and likely to be the last properly sunny day. It must be true, because I heard it on the news! We shall see.
But I want to begin this first sermon of the academic year by testing your knowledge, bearing in mind that everyone here is well educated. The simple question is this. Can you tell me where this literary quotation comes from? The first one to give the answer will win a prize afterwards. If you don’t get it the first time, I shall give you a clue the second time. Here it is, and I quote: ‘It is our choices … that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities’. Anyone? Here it is for a second time with a clue inserted: ‘It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than out abilities.’ Of course it is from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling published in 1998, p. 245. Words spoken by Professor Dumbledore.
If you did not manage to guess correctly, do not worry, for not everyone is an expert in popular culture. Next Friday I will take part in a village quiz, and my team is entirely composed of Church of England Clergy: a Canon Professor and Principal of a theological college, another College Chaplain, a Professor at Oxford who is also a clergyman, a vicar and myself. We must know something, you might think. But I tested one of them the other day. I said ‘Can you tell me, for instance, who was the last person or group to win the X Factor?’. He replied: ‘What’s the X Factor?’ Oh, dear!
But I digress. Let us examine the wisdom of another Professor, Professor Dumbledore. ‘It is our choices that show what we truly are’. If this is true, it begs a question of each one of us tonight. What decisions have we made in our lives that have brought us, by twists and turns, to where we are right now? I don’t mean simply deciding to come to Chapel this evening, although may I commend you on an excellent choice is so doing, but the hundreds of other choices that have formed us: our parents’ choice of where we were brought up and where we went to school; the choice of friends we make; the subjects we chose to take and those we decided to reject; our A level choices; our decision to go into higher education and so on and so on … And why choose Worcester College? The wonderful grounds and buildings, the friendly reputation, the teaching, the sport or the music? Or is it more that Worcester chose you: chose you to study here, or chose you for a certain sporting team, or chose you to sing in the choir as a student or as a boy chorister. And what does Worcester expect in return? What fruit are we expecting you to bear? Academic success, sporting excellence, a glittering career? Great expectations indeed. I was saying the other day that it is difficult to find the right words to describe the work/life balance needed in a place like this. One finds oneself oscillating between saying ‘Don’t worry, enjoy life and all that Oxford has to offer’ and ‘But do work hard’ ‘but don’t worry …’ etc.
But there is a different kind of choice that puts all of this into perspective. And it is not hard for me to find the words, because, as is so often the case, Christ has the words, and the gospel turns the wisdom of the world upside down. Jesus says: ‘You did not choose me: I chose you.’ I find these words very comforting, because they demonstrate to me that in the dilemmas and struggles of everyday life, I am not alone, that I am loved by God regardless of how I am feeling and that his Spirit is at work in us. It is the primary work of God’s love for us that gives us strength to do good. I particularly love this version of the greatest commandment in John 15, because it does not say ‘Love one another as you love yourself’, which is sometimes a very difficult concept, but ‘Love one another as I have loved you’. The love of Christ, self-giving and sacrificial, is not only our model, but also our impetus and our strength. We are able to love because he loved us first and, although taking the road of selfless love can often be hard, we will always be given sufficient grace for the task.
Moreover, the consequences of this love in action is the bearing of fruit: the kind of fruit that we hear about in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians that the fruit of the Spirit is patience, self control, joy, love, peace, faithfulness, gentleness, goodness and kindness. And the consequence of this work of God is joy ‘I have spoken to you so that my joy may be in you and your joy complete.’ The consequence of our response to the love of God is life in all its fullness.
In 2006 I heard a series of radio interviews entitled: Humphries in Search of God, which have now been published as a book, in which John Humphries, the grumpy one from the Today programme, talked, as a non-believer, about faith to key religious leaders. The Response of Rowan Williams to one of Humphries’s question aptly summarizes the notion that God chose us: his love is there for us. Williams said:
‘The gift of God is there for you … God stands at the door and knocks and if you don’t fully open the door you are not fully in the company of God’. The fundamental question, Rowan said, was, can you respond to the notion that ‘you are the object of an unconditional eternal love which values you in such a way that your contribution, as you, to the world is uniquely precious to the one who made it.’
I hope that you all have a great year, and whatever you have to contribute to this college, or your school or your workplace may bring fulfilment and joy. I hope that you may find the courage to love one another as Christ loved you. And I hope that whatever choices you make, be they wise ones or mistakes, that you may meditate on the life-giving truth that, before all the complex decisions of life began and before all difficult choices were presented, God Chose You. How you respond is up to you.

Rev Dr Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain
10th October 2010

In 1989, when I came up to Oxford as an undergraduate at St. Peter’s I was told on my matriculation day, by a certain Francis Warner, an English Don there, that it was the second best day of my life. ‘Second best’? We wondered? When it came to graduation day a few years later, we were, of course told, ‘Welcome to the best day of your lives.’

Indeed, these ceremonies contained a kind of greatness in them: a sense of grandeur, pride of the achievement and of a journey completed. And, rightly, Francis was alluding to the college family that I had joined, and of which I would always be a member, just as those who leave this term, will always have a family here at Worcester.

But I have to admit that, like many of you here I am sure, the days that are supposed to be the best are often not so. I have many happier memories of Oxford than matriculation or graduation, fine though they were, and many happy memories from my time before and after being a student here.

In fact, the happiest and most significant times in life steal upon us from nowhere and we find ourselves in a state of joy or peace or happiness, only realising the fact just as the moment slips away.

One such moment is beautifully captured in Evelyn Warre’s Brideshead revisited, when he tells the story of Charles and Sebastian’s impromptu drive into the countryside with wine and strawberries as their only provision. When Sebastian suddenly turns the car into a dirt track, a moment, seemingly insignificant, becomes very special: Charles recalls the moment when he is older:

‘We ate the strawberries and drank the wine. As Sebastian promised, they were delicious together. The fumes of the sweet golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.

‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold.’ Sebastian said, ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place that I have been happy. So that when I am old and ugly and miserable I could come and dig it up, and remember.’

We may have experienced such moments whilst here in Oxford or elsewhere. I’m sure all of us can relate to that fleeting feeling of being lifted slightly out of the ordinary, only to find that the moment is gone. But, although our lives may be linear, and that an ending in one place only serves to bring about a new beginning in another, it is perhaps worth remembering that our experiences also combine within us so that our present selves, in the here and now, are a culmination of the all that we have been, what we are, and all the potential of the future. This is captured in T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Burnt Norton’ from the first of his Four Quartets.

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”

In these long poems Eliot explores the nature of time and how all existence, past, present and future is only explicable in the eternal. Therefore, the true way of living is to recognise the present – the reality of the time we are in. The past is a living memory within us, the future is our potential. But, now is the only time that matters, for it is the only time we have.

To engage with God is to engage with timelessness, that our present experience now encapsulates everything that has gone before and everything that is to come, because God, timeless creator of time and our creator, is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

This last week of term will mark a parting of the ways, like that of Abram’s words to Lot: ‘If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go to the left.’
But I implore you also to remember the words of Jesus tonight: ‘Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? Instead, don’t you put it on its stand?’ For what we have learned here at Worcester College, whether that be through good times or bad, is not just for our own edification, it is for the good of those who are less fortunate than ourselves: the poor, the sick, the outcasts in society, for those who have not received an education. This does not mean that everyone will enter into a so-called caring profession, but it is incumbent upon every one of us to take what has been given to us and use it for the good of our neighbour and to the glory of God.

With the privilege of belonging to the family of Worcester College, comes the responsibility to help others, to let our light, whatever that may be, to shine out in the world. Therefore, I urge you, to remember to bring all that you have to each present moment, of how you and others exist within it and how you can help those in need, knowing that, just as the eternal Christ came before us, and lived among us, he goes ahead of us in all that we do.

All we need to do now is to bring our whole selves as we are to God with the intention of meeting the eternal God in this very moment, in this very Chapel where many of you have worshipped for the past few years.

As T.S. Eliot puts it in the last of his Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

I pray that, as you journey onward, we ask forgiveness where we have failed you; we give thanks for all you have given us; we assure you of our love and prayers. As you experience the pain of change, and the insecurity of moving on, we pray that you may also experience the blessing of inner growth. And, as you meet the poor, the pained, and the stranger on the way, we pray that you may see in each one the face of Christ. As you walk through the good times and the bad, we pray that you may never lose sight of the shelter of God’s loving arms and that the peace of Christ may reign in your heart.

Amen.

Rev Dr Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain
13th June 2010

Today’s feast is, you may feel, a very Catholic one, associated with some very kitsch art, and some undesirable sentimentality, and not at all appropriate for the setting of a university given over to the things of the mind. But in fact I’d like to suggest that it is a feast that speaks to you precisely in your search for truth (and I hope it is that, and not those elusive alphas, that you are seeking in your weekly essays). The devotion to the Sacred Heart, often linked with a devotion to the Five Wounds of Christ, goes back as an individual devotion to 11th Century, received great impetus from the visions of Margaret Mary Alacocque in the 17th century, and has been universal in the Catholic Church since 1856. And it is, let us be clear about it, a feast about love, not sentimentality; but in the course of its history it has provided a corrective, and should for us today provide a corrective, to the austerities of purely intellectual pursuits, which can turn into a rather dangerous and unlovely power game.

What the feast does is to celebrate God’s passionate pursuit of the human race, God’s com-passion for suffering humanity, the power of love in an age that drearily exalts the intellect. That passion of God is beautifully expressed in the first reading that you have just heard. The context is that of Ezekiel’s terrible condemnation of the “shepherds of Israel” (by whom he means the political and religious leaders – and you might ask yourselves whether he would not say the same today), who have fed themselves rather than their sheep. In response, Ezekiel hears God say, “I will search from my sheep, I will bring them out, I will gather them, I will feed them, I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the crippled and I will strengthen the weak… I will feed them in justice.” These are words to make us quail; for this is a God who will do what society’s leaders should be doing, and who will then demand an account of us for how we have exercised their leadership. And it is no good nodding wisely and saying, “Yeah – right on, Ezekiel. You just tell those bishops and cabinet ministers where they get off”. For it is every one of you here tonight to whom those words are addressed, for it is you, because of your expensive education, who are challenged to look after the strayed and the weak and the crippled and the lost. The challenge will not be “Did you get a First or a Blue?” but “Did you look after my special ones?” And who are the special ones? They are those who fall through the net of our society, the homeless whom we rush past on the streets, the drug addicts whom you saw making their transaction today in Bonn Square, the person in your college whom no one will talk to.

And we mutter guiltily to ourselves, “That’s really not my problem – it’s all their fault, anyway.” But that simply won’t do, as that beautiful second reading makes clear, for Christ died for us when we were precisely in that condition of weakness: we are God’s “special ones”. It comes from that bit of the Letter to the Romans when Paul has worked through a good deal of the difficult argumentation, and is now trying to give us, and that divided church in Rome, our grounds for hope. And our grounds for hope are precisely what God has done in Christ. The measure of it is Christ’s death: and there is nothing easy about death, especially, as Paul remarks elsewhere, that appalling death on the cross, and especially when it is done on behalf of no-hopers, people who are a waste of space. For it is they who are God’s special ones, who have been, in the terms of the metaphor which surfaced three times towards the end of that reading, “reconciled”. Our sanest response to the situation in which we live is, quite simply, gratitude. And once we see that, then at last we grasp who the no-hopers are, those whom we so readily avoid. They are ourselves, and any human who ever felt pushed out of the centre where it all happens. They are there before us, these special ones of God – for they are ourselves.

That is what is going on in the gospel reading that you have just heard. The setting is that astonishing 15th chapter of Luke’s Gospel, with its three stories of parties being thrown in heaven to celebrate the recovery of what had been lost. You know them all (and if you don’t, then I suggest that you read them tonight before going back to the demands of your essay): the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost (or Prodigal) Son and his Unfortunate Elder Brother. And we should notice the setting: good religious people have been complaining about Jesus’ terrible friends: tax-collectors and sinners (Shock Horror). We might think of our own equivalents: who are the people, in your view, for whom God cannot possibly have any time? They might be immigrants, or the homeless, or pederasts or murderers, or the Cambridge Rugby team. Whoever they are for you, Jesus is here telling the story of a God who goes looking for precisely those who are on the margins of society, including, as in this evening’s gospel, the one idiot sheep that gets lost, as opposed to the ninety-nine who are comfortably, not to say complacently, ensconced in the JCR or the Library – or the Chapel. And what happens when God finds that one? He throws a wild party! This is not a God whom we can easily control, this God of love for the unlovely.

So what we celebrate today is the compassion, I have to say the absurd compassion, of a God who loves the poor and the oppressed and the marginalised. But there is more to our celebration; and this is where you come into it. For your task is to be the hands and eyes of God in our world. Your Oxford education has, believe or believe it not, put you in a place of power. But the training you have received here has given you an unparalleled ability to see through weak and specious arguments, to unmask the deceits of the Evil One, to bring to the light the dangerous allurements of power and privilege and pleasure that are so readily available, here and in the glittering careers that lie ahead of you.

and the other thing that your education has given you, or should have done, if your tutor is doing her job, is the possibility of imagining our world in a different way. If you can do that, and resist the very Oxford temptation of regarding all change as change for the worse, then something rather remarkable will happen. You will find, possibly only in retrospect, not really noticing it at the time, that you are or can turn out to have been, the presence of the compassion of God in a broken world, reaching out for the lost and the weak and the hungry, not out of useless guilt, but because they matter to God, and because when God’s special ones are brought home where they belong, then the world is a better place because it has become the world that God wants it to be. And that is what we are celebrating on this great solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Fr. Nicholas King
10th June 2010

We have had a wonderful year of chapel music. So, as we approach the end of this academic year, it seems appropriate to say something about the relationship between music, faith and worship. In part this is a way of thanking the choir – and the chaplain – for all they have given those of us who come to sit, listen and pray. In part it is to help us all reflect more on how music evokes a faith in quite a different way from any exhortation dependent upon the abundance of words.

So I start tonight with a visual aid: this is our alabaster candlestick which serves as a lectern, quoted by one art critic as representing an upside-down melted candle. I wonder how many of you have ever looked closely at it. This was a gift from the scholars of the college in 1865: you can see it in the writing on the base: ‘D.D. Scholares Coll. Vigor.n. A.D. MDCCCLXV’. The silver-bound lecterns on each side were also a gift – in this case, from one Charles Henry Olive Daniel, a great supporter of Burges and a Fellow of the College who was later to become Provost. The candlestick was finally placed in its present position when the work on the mosaic pavement had been completed: you can see the way it neatly separates the twelve saints of the English church from the four earlier saints of the Western church. Once situated where we have it now, it has become all but immoveable; it was taken aside when the refurbishment of the chapel took place in 2002, but other than then I have never seen it other than approximately halfway between the two pillars at the West End and the two pillars at the East end. For some, it interrupts the aesthetic sweep from the narthex up to the chancel; and for others, it is a real practical nuisance when it comes to liturgical processions and dramatic and musical performances. But it does imitate rather well the two axes of the chapel: the vertical axis is represented not only by the pillars, but also by the downward sequence of the seven scrolls and seven windows, with the fourteen frescos on each side and the seven friezes underneath; whereas the horizontal axis is represented by the words of the two canticles, one running right around the cornice and the other around the back of the benches. The candlestick has been placed more or less at the very centre of this axis right under the dome. It echoes our cross-shaped faith, pointing us to the crucifixion window at the East end.

But I wonder how many of you have really looked at this in detail. William Burges, the chapel’s architect, left us his sketch of it, in silhouette form, and it is now in the College Library. Burges had eclectic tastes, and one of them was for Renaissance Art and Architecture. He had entered competitions for designs for a church in Florence, for example, and the designs for the candlestick were undoubtedly influenced by that Quattrocento style of fourteenth century Florence – a style which in turn imitated Greek and Roman classical forms. If any of you have ever been to the Duomo in Florence, you might have seen in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo a work by Luca della Robia, dating from 1428-31, entitled ‘Cantoria’: it was built as one of two marble ‘organ pulpits’ over the two sacristy doors in the Duomo (the other was designed later by Donatello). ‘Cantoria’ comprises ten reliefs of children playing, singing and dancing Psalm 150, set on three different levels. When we were in Florence, I found these different cameos, taken as a piece, incredibly moving, for they suggested the unconstrained, jubilant nature of children’s praise, which to my mind is a most apt way of depicting Psalm 150, with all its calls to praise God with trumpet, lute and harp, with tambourine, dance, strings and pipe, with clashing symbols and with one’s voice. The choir’s earlier rendition of Psalm 150, to that familiar setting by Stanford, with the trebles more than playing their part, did full justice to this psalm.

If you look closely at our candlestick you will see that around the upper base we have a group of eleven youths – I’ve no idea where the twelfth singer has disappeared! – who are perhaps a little older than the children in Luca della Robia’s work, and older too than our choirboy trebles, but not much – and they are singing diligently from six different books. Perhaps it does not have quite the vibrancy and joyful spontaneity of of the 15c. Florentine work, but it has undoubtedly been influenced by Luca della Robia. The sculptor responsible for transforming Burges’s sketches into reality was Thomas Nicholls. Nicholls – who had worked with Burges on previous projects – was responsible for the three different sculptural projects in the chapel – firstly, the animals, in walnut wood, on top of the bench ends; secondly, the four statues of the Gospel writers, inlaid with gilt, in each of the four niches in the corners of the chapel; and, third, this candlestick, carved from alabaster. The statues of the four Gospels produced the most controversy, because some of the Fellows thought they were too close to what they saw as the idolatrous practices in the Roman and High Anglican Churches growing around Oxford in the 1860s, encouraging devotion to images.

The carvings and candlestick were not controversial, and you can see the way each project has been integrated into the heart of the chapel. For example, look at the cornice of the chapel: you will see, in twelve sections, that morning canticle called the Benedicite, which calls on all creation to give praise to God – the light and darkness, the green things of earth, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, the fish of the sea, the mountains and hills. In the carvings of the animals all around you Nicholls has focused particularly on the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air which, implicitly, are giving their own praise to God their Creator. Now look, if you can, at the backs of the pews against the chapel wall: there you will find, rather more hidden, the other morning canticle, the Te Deum,. which is split up so that one word runs into another. This is a call to the angels and saints in heaven above to join with the choir and saints on earth below in praise of God: ‘We praise Thee O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord; to thee all angels… continually do cry, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts’ . Just as Nichols carved out the animals to illustrate more of the Benedicite, so too he carved out this alabaster candlestick-lectern, in Florentine Quattrocento style, to echo the Te Deum. So it is not of Psalm 150; and although marble has worn somewhat thin to give any indication on their song books, our library sources tell us that this anthem is, as appropriate for our chapel, the Te Deum.

Worcester Chapel is by far the most visual and sensory chapel in Oxford. Every available space has been taken up with highly symbolic drawings, covering the walls by way of frescos, windows, murals, and using every available inch of the ceiling and the floor. But Burges and Nichols – and Henry Holiday, who was responsible for the windows – did not intend this to be a chapel where the praise of God is only encountered visually. As well as the two canticles, and as well as our singers on this candle, there are several other instances where Burges points us to how we can encounter God not only by what we see but by what we hear. Look first at the frieze on the north side, immediately to my right – there you see the heavenly host of angels making music to God – Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and the Choir of Eight. (It was pointed out to me recently by Matthew Salisbury that one of these angels is holding a book with exactly the same psalm chant on it as the chant running across the organ bench.) This frieze conveys to us the music of the heavenly host, of which not only the Te Deum but also the Benedicite speaks: if you look up you will see the writing above this frieze which reads “Oh ye angels of the Lord, bless the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever”. This fits with the sculpting of four angels at the base of the candlestick joining the choir of eleven in the ‘Te Deum’. So heavenly praise intermingles with earthly praise and raises it back to heaven. Earthly praise is of course important: look now at the gold-plated frieze further down the chapel, and you should see David, the founder of Hebrew psalmody, playing on his harp, along with Solomon his son, the founder of the Temple, carrying a model of it in a typical Medieval pose. Then at the other side of the chapel look at the frieze just along from the Provost’s stall, which is of the martyrs of the Christian Church, where you can see St. Cecelia of Rome, the founder of Christian music, with her pipes, here with St. Catherine of Alexandria (and her wheel). And then, on the floor, you see in the mosaics St. Wilfrid, holding his psalms scroll.

So despite its intense visual impact, we also have a chapel which is about hearing as well as seeing the praise of God. Furthermore, we are reminded that we in what has been called a ‘Temple masking a Church’, where, like the Temple of Solomon, heavenly mysteries are made incarnate on earth and earthly realities are transformed by a vista of heaven.

I deliberately chose tonight’s readings with this idea of earthly praise and heavenly praise in mind. Our Old Testament lesson told us about the celebrations after the completion of the Temple of Solomon. Here we read that the celebrations focussed not on sacrifice but on processional songs. We read how the Levitical Singers took their cymbals, harps, lyres and trumpets ‘and other musical instruments’ and sang praises to the Lord, using a song found in many psalms, especially 118 and 136: “For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!”. After they had sung, the mystery of the glory of God filled the Temple. So music preceded sacrifice, and it was the praise to God in music and song which apparently drew the presence of God into the midst of the sanctuary. This is a typical example of how the gift of music attunes human hearts to the hear and see the glory of God.

Our New Testament lesson spoke of earthly praise and heavenly praise in a reverse way. The setting for this reading was of a heavenly Temple, and the assembled company included the twenty-four elders, each holding a harp, singing a new song of praise to the Lamb of God: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation”. The praise of these heavenly saints was augmented by the praises of many angels, singing “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” At this point the praise in heaven moved down to earth, with the whole company in heaven and earth singing “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”. This is what John in Revelation both sees and hears: here the gift of music from angelic voices attunes those on earth to hear and see the glory of God.

I started by saying that I wanted to speak about the music of the chapel, and I have tried to show how music is to be found in the chapel already, even before the choir adds their own voices to it. I also said I wanted to reflect on how music gives rise to faith, often surpassing what words can do. I realise now this latter aim is really a contradiction in terms: how can I use mere words to describe music and faith when I am saying music and faith transcend them? This is the point at which I think music and theology, my own subject, are really about the same things. The score of music, like the text of Scripture, is a prism to help us encounter the divine, but it only comes to life when we move beyond the notations of the musical score (or beyond the words of a scriptural text) into some sort of performance. The score on its own, and the text alone, need to be brought to life. Music has the capacity to offer to us ‘a little incarnation’ as we perceive through a performance the presence of God within us and beyond us. T.S. Eliot once said that poetry was ‘a raid on the inarticulate’.

I think this also applies to music as well. So- ‘thanks be to God’ for those who have sung so wonderfully throughout this year, not least for their ‘raid on the inarticulate’ which has lifted our hearts to God and also brought God down to us.

Dr. Susan Gillingham, Reader in Theology, Tutor and Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford
6th June 2010