In Memoriam: Stephen Williams

Like Joshua standing on the edge of the Jordan in our first reading, Stephen knew he must be strong and very courageous as he faced the time when he must cross over. Strong for Anthea and Martin and Jane and Matthew who accompanied him to that brink; strong for himself and for them when the time came to say farewell; strong for them and for all of us who loved him for whom the world is emptier now that he has left us.

Today are remembering him in the place that meant so much to him. This Cathedral was where Jenny and I first met the Williams family when I arrived as Precentor. 1987 was the golden year that Coventry City won the Cup Final. We watched the match in Martin and Jane’s drawing room and cheered on the city with which, up to a few days before, we had not had any connection. I remember that day as much for the warmth of their hospitality as for the match itself. We soon became firm friends - they with us, our children with theirs.

At that time Stephen and Matthew were both members of the choir. The Cathedral was central to the lives of the whole family. It still is. Martin and Jane were married here, and the boys were confirmed here. And although life took Stephen about as far away from his home city as it is possible to get, he was deeply rooted in Coventry. He loved coming back, and was proud in due course to bring Anthea here too.

We can only guess how many evensongs Stephen must have sung in this cathedral. It seems so right to honour him at this celebration of the divine office that is the daily breath of the church. The music has been chosen with Stephen in mind; the hymns were sung at his funeral. But the readings are those set for the day. In the New Testament, Jesus gathers his followers and gives them power, amongst other things, to “heal every disease and every sickness”. And this work of healing is to be a sign of God’s care for human beings. “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”

This was the vocation Stephen gave his life to. Medicine today is a world away from the first century, yet the God-given work of healing is the same: applying human knowledge and skill to reverence life by caring for it, enhancing its quality, enabling it to flourish, mending it when it is broken, helping people to make the journey towards becoming whole once more. That is a profound collaboration with God’s eternal work of healing his creation and all of us who are part of it. Those of you who were at Stephen’s funeral or watched the live link will have heard how good he was at it. Even in his illness, his commitment to his work went on, an oncologist with cancer treating others with the same condition. He was a true wounded healer. The tributes from professional colleagues to his skill and care were inspiring and moving.

But those tributes were not only about Stephen’s professional life. They said much about his personal qualities as a human being, as a man, husband, son, brother, colleague, friend. I don’t think that any of us should have been surprised at this surge of warmth and affection for him. Perhaps this strikes us with special sharpness because his life was so cruelly cut short. What would he have become? What gifts would he have given to us all? What difference would he have gone on to make in the world?

Someone said that “the unfinished symphonies of this life are the most beautiful”. What is beautiful, what touches us is when we glimpse wholeness in a man or woman or child. It speaks to us of what is God-given in life, what springs out of goodness and love, what is more than just aspiration or ideal because it has lasting value and is remembered. When Jesus says that the kingdom of God is near, maybe we see it most clearly in the faces of those who have the capacity, without realising it, to tell us truths and show us ways of living we hadn’t quite grasped before.

I talked about Stephen’s personal qualities. Among them, perhaps explaining them, was his Christian faith. He was open and unashamed about this. It nourished him throughout his life and it sustained him through his illness right up to the end. We can never know quite how another person believes, but we can and do know when it becomes a life-changing fact of their lives. It was moving to hear how Stephen found real strength from somewhere as he faced the ordeals of terminal cancer. That somewhere was his faith that did not fail him in the shadow of death. When he, with Anthea and the family received communion a few days before he died, it was his viaticum, their viaticum, food to give courage and strength for the hard crossing that lay ahead, especially for him but for all of them as well.

This is where Christian hope makes all the difference. We can’t know in this life what lies at the other end of that journey, when our travelling days are done. Death is a great mystery and we are right to be in awe of it. Those who live close to it, as Stephen did first in his professional life and then in the personal ordeal of terminal illness, are especially aware of the shadow of mortality, the power it has to overwhelm us when we are vulnerable and afraid.

But what we do know is that it is possible to travel in the hope that a greater dawn is breaking, a dawn in which we shall see the face of God, and finally know how his everlasting love gathers up all the human loves we have ever known in this life. When we recited the Creed earlier in this service, and said that we believe “in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”, I think it was something like this that we were affirming: that as the poet said, “nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest”. What else matters, if not to know God’s fierce and wonderful love that makes us truly alive and gives us a faith by which to live and die?

The meaning is in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Stephen must have gazed thousands of times on Graham Sutherland’s Tapestry of Christ in Glory. Who knows how it may have influenced him all his life, reminded him of what ultimately matters, challenged him to new adventures, comforted him in times of sorrow? Below is the wracked figure of the crucified Jesus, an image for all time of human suffering and pain. But in that agonised image lies redemption and hope, for he is the Wounded Healer of us all. We look up and there, above, is the risen Christ victorious over death, seated in splendour, his arms outstretched to welcome us home. This is our hope, this is our destiny. This is what gives us the courage to endure to the end.

Joshua was strong and very courageous. You’ll remember the final words, those most moving of words with which John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress ends. “When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said, “Death, where is thy sting?” And as he went down deeper, he said, “Grave, where is thy victory?” So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

We thank God for every memory of Stephen his beloved child. We thank God for the Easter hope that sustains us as we travel on in faith. And thank you Stephen for lighting up our lives in ways we shall always cherish and never forget.

Coventry Cathedral, 7 October 2018 
Joshua 3, Matthew 10.1-22