At the Ordination of Priests in Lincoln Cathedral

They say you should be careful what you wish for.  When the Lord appeared to Solomon and asked what he should give him as a new king, Solomon replied, wisdom.  It was a clever answer, indeed a wise one, because he was able to hear the question for what it was, not ‘what do you want most?’ but ‘what do you need most?’  You no doubt want what most people crave: wealth, success, a long life.  And if you were a king in the ancient world, those things counted, for they were signs that the gods had bestowed their favour.  But Solomon knew that they were not enough.  What he needed if he was to be a good king was altogether more precious and more rare, a quality of character marked by insight, understanding, discernment, reverence for life, love of God.  All this the Bible calls wisdom.   

If you adopted a suspicious reading of this text, you might think that Solomon was simply saying what God wanted to hear, and that if he played the game and gave the right answer he might get the other things he wanted as well, as indeed he did.  Someone as complex as Solomon would certainly be capable of acting out of motives unknown even to himself.  In his later life he fell in love with the lifestyle of an ancient near eastern potentate. The seductions of riches, power, ostentation, slavery and sex show how capable he was of being corrupted. Don’t think any of us is immune. ‘Let those who think they stand take care lest they fall’.  And yet…. How appealing is this story of the young winsome king at the dawn of his reign, so eager to please God, so willing to do the right thing, so humble in accepting that he knew nothing and had everything to learn.  It was the best moment of his life.  Despite his fame and fortune in later years, he was never richer than he was that night when he had a dream, and God called to him, and he knew what he must ask for. 

We are privileged today to be with these ten good people as they are ordained priest. They start out like Solomon did, both excited and daunted by what lies ahead. This story says so much that is important about office-holding, standing for God in public, making sure that our motives are pure and our vision bright and that at the heart of it all is a sense that we are accountable to God whose work this ultimately is.  It’s more than forty years since I was ordained priest. I shall never forget the holiness of that summer, the expectancy and privilege I felt as I offered my life surrounded by those who loved me and were praying for me.  The memories have sustained me all these years, reminded me what I must live up to, encouraged me to persevere when times have been hard. Like Solomon, I knew I was not ready for this awesome task, never would be unless God gave what only God can give: wisdom, understanding, strength and the capacity to love.  

In the past few days I’ve been immensely glad to spend time in retreat with the ordinands. We've been reflecting on the beautiful hymn to the Holy Spirit we shall shortly sing together as the ordination prayer begins, Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire. It was written by a seventeenth century Bishop of Durham, John Cosin and has been sung at ordinations ever since his time. We’ve explores some of the themes in these verses: vocation and illumination, protection and resilience in public ministry, and how we do love’s work in our witness to the gospel, leading the church’s praise, caring for those in pain, and reaching out to the world. All this they do in God’s name. So it's right that the hymn ends with the prayer Teach us to know. The focus is God himself, because to know God and love him is what we were made for. It’s the basis of all life, all faith, all ministry. So our prayer that these new priests may have Solomon’s wise and understanding mind comes down to this: that they may know and love and glorify and find joy in God whom we worship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  

Like Solomon, our ordinands have dreams, and why shouldn’t they on this great day in their lives? What will they ask for in their dreams? Will it be success, being popular and admired, well spoken of, having a life free of conflict and hostility? They wouldn’t be human if they did not recognise that ministry would be a lot easier and trouble-free if only it were like that.  

But the story of Solomon speaks of desires that are more grown-up than the wish list we put to fairy godmothers.  “Give me a wise and understanding mind.” Which means being aware of what God wants for the world and for human beings, all that will make for our reconciliation and flourishing, our healing and our happiness. One way of seeing ordained ministry is that it lives out this quest to be wise, to be a seeker after truth, in a public way. Solomon’s wisdom was not given to him for his private use.  It was so that his whole people could become wise too, and God’s wisdom be known to the ends of the earth.  Teach us to know will be the prayer we sing for our new priests as they kneel at this most solemn moment of their lives.  

But we ask it for ourselves too, and on behalf of many others in our world. So pray that our priests may always want to know God so that they can prompt us in turn to feel after God and find him. Pray that they may touch human need so that we stand together in Christ’s name close to those who are poor or helpless or in pain. Pray that they may bear witness to God’s goodness in a way that brings good news to people far and wide. Pray that they may lead us in word and sacrament to praise God "for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life, but above all for his inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ". 

And pray that they may imitate Christ himself. Because in the New Testament, it is Christ is the wisdom of God, embodied in our midst, the one who came to bring to the world his light and life. So our dream is simply to be as he was and do as he did, anointed by the Spirit who came upon him: glorifying his Father, speaking words of grace, praying for his people, healing the sick, serving the poor, announcing the kingdom of heaven, laying down his life for his friends.

 

Yes, it is so easy to say and so hard to do.  Yet he comes to us, as God came to Solomon, and asks us what we most need if we are to be obedient to his call.  And he longs to hear us say, as we long to hear ourselves say in our best moments, ‘Lord, I am only a child. I do not know how to go out or to come in. Give your servant therefore a wise and understanding mind’.  And with it, the gifts to lead and serve, and a heart to love.

 Lincoln Cathedral, at the ordination of priests, 1 July 2017
1 Kings 3.3-15

At the Ordination of Deacons in Lincoln Cathedral

It is the greatest privilege to be preaching today. I want to thank the Bishop for his invitation and the warmth of his welcome.

There’s a nice play on words in our reading from the Old Testament. The Lord asks Jeremiah, “What do you see?” Poor lad (for he is only a boy)! Is it a trick question? He peers up at the sky, then across to the hills, then down at the ground, then up again at the object he’s standing right underneath to shelter from the sun. “I see a branch of an almond tree” he says, feeling a trifle foolish, for what kind of answer is that? “You have seen well” comes the response, “for I am watching over my word to perform it”. In Hebrew, shaqed is the almond and shoqed is watching over. So whenever the young man sees an almond tree it will trigger the association of God being vigilant for his word, watching over it. The boy sees what is there, and sees well. Like God who watches. Whether you are divine or human, seeing, looking, watching, the optics of God come into things.

You have seen well. Lincoln has an honoured place in the history of seeing. The great thirteenth century Bishop Robert Grosseteste is now regarded as one of the medieval pioneers of modern scientific method. His preoccupation was the science and art of seeing. He believed that light was the essence of creation, the “first form” of the universe. Everything else derived from it. This made the cosmos intelligible. It could be scanned, contemplated and understood. And because Grosseteste was a theologian, he saw the faculty of sight as a spiritual virtue, a God-given tool with which to read the world around him, read human life itself and at the heart of it all, discern the living God.

Seeing well - scanning, contemplating, understanding - lies at the heart of good ministry. Today we pray for and accompany these seven good ordinands as they offer themselves as ordained ministers of the church. Maybe they've been asking themselves, maybe you're wondering, What does it mean to be “clergy”?  Many things, of course; impossibly many, some may say, for the expectations on the clergy have never been higher. But one of the qualities we might look for in the ordained is that they are learning to see well.

In our retreat during the last few days, we have been studying the hymn we shall sing at the start of the ordination prayer, Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire. We've reflected on some of the big themes in these verses: vocation, protection, resilience, worship, and how we learn to live out of thankfulness. We've explored what it means to know God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity whose love moves the sun and the stars and who breathes life into all creation. And we've spoken about faith as illumination that enables us to see in new ways. When the Spirit comes, says the hymn, there is comfort, life and fire of love. And with God’s fire there is light to see by: enable with perpetual light / the dullness of our blinded sight.

I suggested to the ordinands that they should cultivate this gift of seeing well. Like Jeremiah, it’s a case of paying attention, noticing, looking around you. That’s how you learn to recognise what God is doing in the world and in the lives of others. That’s how you see the joy or the pain, the happiness or need in your parishioners and neighbours. In one of his poems, Thomas Hardy imagines the epitaph on his own gravestone. He wants to be remembered as “a man who used to notice such things”. He’s speaking of the natural world and how easy it is to pass by its wonders without so much as a thought. It points to the all-important emotional and spiritual way of looking which you could call awareness, discernment or insight. These are gifts we should covet in life and in ministry. They would help us become more contemplative and see what is there. One of the words used of Hebrew prophets is the “one who sees”. That is what we are called to be in ministry.

To learn to see well is a lifelong task, especially for those entrusted with public roles in church or society. For Jeremiah under his almond tree it all comes down to this. In that moment, his life is changed forever. God summons him and with the voice comes the opening of his eyes so that he can see. And he is overcome with consternation. How can he speak in God’s name? He is only a boy! To find his voice he must learn to see well. He needs to see the world as it really is, see it as God sees. He needs to see into the issues that face the people of his time, understand their questions, have insight into their anxieties and longings. The eye of faith must teach him what God is doing in the world and in human lives, how he moves in the tides of history where “behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face”. He needs to discern God’s promise that a future is coming where pain and terror are past and the world is reconciled and healed, where there is a new covenant of peace that makes the human family one again. If he can only see well, he can bring the hope that God’s reign is coming.

So much enclosed in an almond branch! Was I talking just now about a Hebrew prophet or about ministers in the world of today? Is there a difference when it comes to seeing and understanding and becoming part of love’s work? I don’t know what the equivalent of the almond branch is for each of you on your ordination day. But I do believe that the question “what do you see?” goes on being asked of us not just today but for as long as we are serving God in ministry.

And it's not only God who asks us “what do we see”, but many of those to whom we go. How can it be that in these secular, often cynical times, people still welcome the presence of clergy in local communities, still value the thought that we say our prayers and care for our parishioners, still look to us to help make sense of life in the light of our faith? There are a surprising number who are genuinely curious about what we see and why it makes a difference. If you have been watching the TV series Broken you'll know what I mean. It’s making the connections so that the penny that dropped for us can drop for others. It’s to allow us to say, in the daily tasks of ministry, “I am here in the name of Christ the Servant. This is how I see things. Maybe you can see them like that too?” Which is why we need to pray constantly to the Holy Spirit in the words of our hymn: enable with perpetual light / the dullness of our blinded sight.

The poet David Scott has a beautiful line in one of his poems. Eyes take in the light for hearts to see by. So look around you with your heart as well as your head. See well. Serve well. Love well. And may the God of peace be with you as you go out from here in his name as deacons in his church, and ministers in the world he loves to the end.

Lincoln Cathedral, 2 July 2017
Jeremiah 1.1-12

Veni Creator: the seven gifts of the Spirit

At the end of this service, we shall sing one of the best known of all Whitsunday hymns, our own Bishop Cosin’s Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire. It has the distinction of being the only hymn, in the modern sense, to be included in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer where it invokes the Spirit at the start of the ordination prayer for priests and bishops.

            Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire
            And lighten with celestial fire;
            Thou the anointing Spirit art,
            Who dost thy sevenfold gifts impart.

Cosin drew on a 9^th century Latin hymn of Pentecost when he wrote it in 1625. But the event he composed it for was not an ordination but a coronation, that of King Charles I. And in this his instinct was faithful to the biblical origins of this opening stanza. Its reference to the ‘sevenfold gifts’ takes us back to the lesson from Isaiah that we heard earlier. There, the prophet is looking forward to a new and glorious reign of the coming king who will emerge from the root of Jesse, the line of David. What kind of ruler will he be? Isaiah tells us. ‘The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord’. That makes six gifts. What about the seventh? That was added by the Greek translators of the Septuagint who included the spirit of piety or reverence.

In catholic moral theology, these seven gifts came to be seen as among the God-given lists that offer compass-bearings for the faithful as they navigate the spiritual life: seven deadly sins to avoid, seven virtues to embrace and live by, the four cardinal and three theological virtues, and the seven petitions that make up the Lord’s Prayer. So on this Whit Sunday, let’s reflect briefly on these beautiful qualities as gifts of the anointing Spirit to the Messiah, to the church and to us. And although they have moved some way from their original setting in the prophecies of Isaiah, John Cosin, an accomplished moral theologian who had read St Thomas Aquinas, would have understood this way of speaking about them.

Wisdom, sapientia, embraces all the other gifts; it means having the insight and capacity to place the spiritual above the material and transient and to see into the life of things. Understanding, intellectus, suggests the disciplined training of a Christian mind to think as God thinks, pursue truth as it is taught us by the Spirit of Truth, see through falsehood and illusion. Counsel, consilium, is right judgment or discernment to know right from wrong and make and follow the choice to live by what is good and true. Courage, fortitudo, is the overcoming of fear and evil and embracing risk to follow the way of Jesus Christ and publicly stand up for it. It is the virtue that emanates from a mind that is single-focused, set only on doing the will of the Father as Jesus obeyed him in his life and death. Knowledge, scientia, is one outcome of the second gift of understanding as the believer begins to grasp the meaning of God, not as the accumulation of information or doctrinal grasp, but as an aspect of Christian formation whereby we make the good choices of loving God and our neighbour.

Piety, pietas, is not simply ‘spirituality’, but rather the respecting and honouring the sources of our life and health: our parents, teachers and the church who together have shaped us, the public institutions to which we owe gratitude and loyalty, above all God himself whom we reverence as the author and giver of all good things. Finally, the fear of the Lord, timor Domini, stands for the gift of wonderment and adoration as we become ever more aware of the glory and majesty of God. The fear of the Lord teaches us that God is the perfection of all we long for: perfect knowledge, goodness, power, and love. Thomas Aquinas says this is not being afraid of punishment but rather a child’s fear of displeasing the parent they love. The Hebrew Bible says that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, so it brings us full circle to that first and all-embracing gift of wisdom.

All this, says Isaiah, is true of the promised anointed king, the messianic ruler who will judge the poor with righteousness and decide with equity for the meek of the earth, in whose days the lion will lie down with the lamb, and children will play safely over an adder’s den, when nothing will hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. We cherish these promises and live by the hope they set before us, and are right to think of the reign of Jesus our risen and glorious Lord whose kingship we have celebrated in the days of Ascension and whose just and gentle rule we long for when we pray ‘thy kingdom come!’ And come it will, be it soon, be it late. We wait for it, we long for it, and because of it, we are always ready to give an answer for the hope that is within us.

Whitsunday invites us, not indeed to lose that long view but also to set our sights on the tasks and obligations of Christian living in the present. This, says Jesus to his disciples in the upper room, must be our daily concern when he is gone. It is for this that the Spirit of Truth comes, to lead us into truth, to give us a right judgment in all things, to impart the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit the hymn teaches us about. For in Christ, these are not the prerogatives of anointed messiah alone, but are for all who are anointed in baptism and sealed by the Spirit, for all of us whom Christian faith has made into the royal companions of the King of Glory. In St John, Paraclete is a word that glitters with expectation and is bright with promise: the Comforter, the Strengthener, the Encourager, the Advocate who both teaches and puts into our hearts the blazing fire and rushing wind and living water of God’s eternal love. Thy blessed unction from above is comfort, life, and fire of love. What would life be without the Spirit among us, between us and within us? What use would we be without the Spirit’s sevenfold gifts to make us fully human and perfect in us the image of Jesus? How can the church be a transforming influence in the world unless the Spirit’s gifts animate and inspire every breath we breathe?

Which is why I want to urge on the church the need to meditate on these sevenfold gifts. I see a church today that is at risk of panicking as it watches itself diminish in numbers and influence, as it wonders whether even Christian faith itself could be at risk of eclipse and a lingering, painful, sclerotic death. It’s understandable that our church is tempted to become busy and excitable, embark on great outreach projects with relentless energy, invest vast sums of money to try to turn this stately galleon Christianity round before it is too late. It is understandable. Like climate change, we can either pretend it isn’t happening, or engage seriously in mitigating its inevitable effects.

But the texts of Pentecost tell us that all the best-intentioned endeavour in the world will count for nothing without the Spirit of God and the seven gifts of an anointed people: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and the fear of the Lord. They give us a ‘values statement’ for the imitation of Christ. But they call for a deep and spiritual intelligence – ‘mindfulness’ - if we are to become life-changing agents of mission. These are gifts to make us into reflective practitioners, as they say, to foster wisdom before they are impulses to activity. The question at Pentecost must be: how do we cultivate the vocation of the church to practise mission with this kind of contemplative wise biblical insight? How do we make sure that in what we do and the way we do it, we are truly emulating our anointed King, and listening to what the Spirit is saying to the churches?

Durham Cathedral, Whitsunday 2015. Isaiah 11.1-9, John 16.1-15

FIRE AT WHITSUN

Note: this sermon draws extensively on T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’. However, copyright permission is needed to cite the 22 lines of poetry that are integral to this sermon (I am seeking it from the publishers, Faber & Faber, who I hope, given that this is a liturgical sermon, will agree to my including them without charge). You will therefore need a copy of the poem by you to make the best sense of this address. The omissions are indicated by ellipses (…).

If you come this way…

May is a white time in T. S. Eliot’s poem from the Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’.  His welcome to the whiteness of spring time draws on the memory of snow and the longing for release from winter’s captivity. This leads him to reflect on the four elements, earth, air, water and fire. It is the last, fire, the primal and ultimate element that is the theme of this great poem.

It was prompted by the searing experience of the Luftwaffe raids on London whose hellish wild fires costing so much in human life and property he saw as a symbol of sin and destructiveness. But as he scans the Christian memory for other fiery associations, he begins to enlarge his understanding. There is the fire of purgation that leads to repentance and a new vision of life that purifies humanity of base corruption and its propensity to embrace evil. And there is the fire of healing and redemption, the Pentecostal fire that renews and makes it possible for life to begin again. But the human race must choose between the fire of the Holy Spirit or Dante’s inferno which the bombing of London symbolises. It is the choice between being redeemed or being destroyed. God, says the poem, invites humanity to be redeemed, consumed by the fire of love and escape the living hell through purgation by the ordeal of fire. As Eliot says in the famous fourth stanza:

The dove descending…

The story of Whitsun in the Acts of the Apostles is rich in themes. One of them is how it marks the passage of time. In one way it is the end of an epoch: the last day of the Passover season when the firstfruits of God’s harvest were gathered up and offered (in the Jewish calendar, the Feast of Weeks celebrated the first cutting of wheat). Hence the apocalyptic imagery in Peter’s Pentecost speech about the sun being darkened and the moon turned to blood, familiar language about the last days which in Joel’s prophecy are linked to the outpouring of the Spirit upon all flesh. But in another way, today marks the beginning of a new epoch. In Luke’s story, so carefully constructed around the times and seasons of the year, it is placed not at the end of his gospel, part 1, but at the beginning of his part 2, the Book of Acts. He believes that Pentecost marks the birthday of the church, the inauguration of its mission to bring salvation to the world. So the tongues of fire that hovered over the apostles symbolise the launch of the acts of the Holy Spirit, the era in which Luke lived and we his readers still live.

But with fire, you can’t separate ends from beginnings. The very destructiveness of fire is also a purgation that leads to a new start. Many of the world’s primitive creation myths begin with fire: Prometheus who stole fire from the gods is but one. Eliot’s poem speaks about beginnings and endings, and how they merge in our experience of them:

 

What we call the beginning…

And this I think is at the heart of what Pentecost should mean for us as we celebrate it today. Eliot called his poem ‘Little Gidding’. This was the place where in the 17^th century a small Anglican community was founded by Nicholas Ferrar. His wish was to live with his family in simplicity, inspired by the spirituality of the Book of Common Prayer. The liturgy would be offered in the high church tradition espoused by King Charles I and the so-called Caroline divines, like our own John Cosin, Canon of Durham at this time, author of the Pentecost hymn we shall sing shortly: ‘Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’.  The turbulent times of the English civil war seemed to Eliot to echo the London blitz and to underline how humanity’s flawed understanding of life and turning away from God leads to the relentless cycle of warfare. So this small community living a common life of Christian prayer and service symbolised how the human race needed to repair itself, to purify its vision of life if it was to survive.  This meant understanding an ambivalent, conflicted, shameful past and embracing a renewed, God-given present and future. All this will be in the name of the ‘broken King’ whose coming is our healing and whose just and gentle rule, lived out through the Holy Spirit, is our salvation and our joy.

I see the church as just such a community. Our church in the west is not grand and powerful anymore, not visibly triumphant or successful if the recent statistics on membership are anything to go by. It is small, and fragile, and declining, and vulnerable.  Yet it is not the less beautiful for that, and no less beloved. Faithful unto death, its beauty is of the Spirit whose fiery presence purges it of what is corrupt, heals its sicknesses, repairs its breaches and mends its brokenness. She animates it to become inflamed, impassioned with all the energies of God at work in our world. Its mission is what it always was in the Acts of the Apostles and throughout Christian history: to bear witness to a God whose love declares that ‘all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well’ (Eliot twice quotes Mother Julian of Norwich’s great saying in his poem.)  For then, enlightened with Cosin’s celestial fire, and in that ‘condition of complete simplicity….’, the fiery tongues will be in-folded

                                    Into the crowned knot …

Durham Cathedral, Whit Sunday 2013

Acts 2

Whitsun: reconciliation and love

On Friday, the two bishops and I were in Coventry Cathedral where we were once all canons residentiary.  We went for the celebration of the Cathedral’s Golden Jubilee. When I went there as Precentor in May 1987, my first big service was the Silver Jubilee.  So it was good to be back to mark the first 50 years of this great 20^th century church building.  

When the Cathedral was built in 1962, thousands queued to get in and see it.  I was among them: my parents thought we should make the journey.  For me as a boy, driving up the newly opened M1 was the real excitement of the day.  Yet I vividly remember going into the Cathedral, taking in its light-filled space, gazing at Graham Sutherland’s tapestry of Christ in Glory and at John Piper’s kaleidoscopic baptistery window, and seeing my reflection staring up at me in the jet-black polished marble floor. I recall that I sat in the centre of the nave on my own while the crowds swirled round the periphery. I felt as though I had the Cathedral to myself.  Ever since, I’ve reckoned that large naves are the best places to sit, ponder and pray in.

Coventry is one cathedral in two buildings.  The shell of the old cathedral bombed in 1940 is as eloquent as any ruins in England.  It speaks poignantly of ‘war and the pity of war’, Wilfred Owen’s words quoted by Benjamin Britten in the War Requiem, commissioned for the Cathedral and first performed there 50 years ago this week.  But the ruins don’t only speak of sacrifice and death.  They speak powerfully of life.  At open-air eucharists in the early morning on Easter Day and Whit Sunday, it was as if the skeleton of that beautiful 15^th century church reached for the sky, a striking metaphor of resurrection as if we were in some great empty tomb.  It reminded me of Ezekiel’s dry bones: arid, dead, lifeless things which the Spirit brings back to life again. 

The focus of Coventry’s ministry ever since the war has been reconciliation.  Beginning with the rebuilding of friendship with Germany, this work has spread to many places of conflict across the world.  On Friday the Archbishop of Canterbury preached about it. He began with John Cosin’s hymn ‘Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’ which children from a local school had danced to while it was sung.  Enable with perpetual light the dullness of our blinded sight.  Reconciliation, he said, always involves seeing the other person or community in a new way. The Cathedral building helps us do this. You walk up the nave towards the image of Christ on the tapestry. Then you turn round and see the array of colour in the aisle windows that were concealed from you as you walked towards the high altar. At the west end you are aware of the Hutton glass screen with its angels and saints.  Beyond that you see the ruins, symbol of the wreckage and pain of humanity. This, he said, is how Christ on the tapestry sees the world: not as a lost and hopeless place but transfigured by God’s mercy symbolised in the coloured windows and the angels and saints on the screen. He drew attention to the diminutive figure of the human being held between Christ’s feet. From that safe place, held by Christ’s love, that figure is also looking out on the ruins, seeing it as Jesus sees it. This is you and me. If we see the world like this, reconciliation happens.

One of the meanings of Pentecost is that it promises the transformation of the whole of life, even in its darkest, most broken passages. The face of Christ has a gaze that seems to know you in a profound way, draw you upwards, put to you God’s questions, speak compellingly about grace and truth. Above him a shaft of light streams down on his head as if he were being baptised by a glow that pours over him from a window in the sky.  And right at the top is the origin of that light: a dove.  She is descending on that sunbeam towards Christ and towards us: the Holy Spirit of Christ the risen Head who animates the body of his church, the community of the baptised, the faithful of every age and the faithful of today. Us. 

The tapestry gives us an image of our reading from St John. There, the resurrection and the giving of the Spirit happen on the same Easter Day.  For John, the Spirit is the clue to Jesus’s public ministry.  At his baptism, John the Baptist quotes Jesus: ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.’  In the temple he invites all who thirst to ‘come to me and drink… Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’ and John adds that he says this of the Spirit which believers would receive.  And at the end of gospel, the risen Christ announces peace to his disciples and confers on them the gift of the new creation: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’.  But we must not miss what comes next.  ‘If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’  He is saying that the Spirit comes into the world to do work, God’s work.  We heard last week in St Luke how Jesus begins his ministry by announcing that ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me…’  For what?  ‘To bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.’  It is his calling and ours: the Spirit anoints the church so that we can continue God’s work of re-making the world, bringing justice, reconciliation and hope to all humanity. This is part of what John means by his language of forgiving and retaining sins: making real in human lives the grace and truth of Jesus and putting to the world the inescapable demand and invitation that the truth presents us with.  ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’

Let me go back to Coventry. I have a memory I cherish. In 1990 the city marked the 50^th anniversary of the Luftwaffe air-raids codenamed ‘Moonlight Sonata’ when incendiaries rained down on the city and burned its heart out, destroying the cathedral with it. One day an elderly man came into the ruins, and walked slowly up the length of the nave to the stone altar in the apse, tentative as though he was not sure if he should be there.  He stood for a long time gazing at the charred cross and at the inscription on the wall behind it, ‘Father, forgive’.  And then he began to sob: not in a self-dramatizing way, but with the honesty of a child who has been confronted with some personal truth that is too overwhelming for words. The Provost embraced him and they held on to each other for some considerable time.  That man had been a Luftwaffe pilot on that terrible bombing raid of 14 November.  In 50 years he had never been able to bring himself to visit the city.  But now he wanted to come before he died, and face the truth of what he and his comrades had done so many years before, the truth of ‘war and the pity of war’.  It felt like a moment of life-changing forgiveness and reconciliation. 

On Whit Sunday, white with the brilliance of God’s light and love, we should ask ourselves if we are genuinely Pentecostal Christians.  Not that we speak with tongues, or prophesy, or understand mysteries, or give away all that we own or even have faith to move mountains. St Paul tells us that there is one first-fruit of the Spirit’s harvest that we must covet above all others. Caritas is that fruit. Love is the only thing that matters: love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love that never ends.  It is love makes us Pentecostal as we are illuminated by the Spirit, brought back to life by the Spirit, as we join in God’s mission to bring reconciliation to his world. The dove descending on that sunbeam on the tapestry reminds me why I am here: to learn how to see in a new way, and then to act on what I see. And then I know that in the power of God’s risen Son and his life-giving Spirit, anything is possible. 

Durham, Whit Sunday 2012
(Ezekiel 36.22-28; John 20.19-23)

My book on Graham Sutherland's tapestry: A Picture of Faith: a meditation on the imagery of Christ in Glory (Kevin Mayhew, 1995)

The Book of Common Prayer

This year we are celebrating 350 years of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.  It is good to be a guest of the Prayer Book Society at this service today, and especially here in Warwickshire in this diocese where we spent eight good years at Coventry Cathedral where we hope to be next week for the Golden Jubilee service. 
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To lovers of literature, Warwickshire means not only Shakespeare but George Eliot, one of the great wordsmiths of the 19^th century. In her novel Adam Bede there is a beautiful tribute to the Prayer Book that shaped and influenced her so profoundly in her youth as a parishioner at Holy Trinity Church, Coventry.

Ad­am's tho­ughts of Hetty did not de­afen him to the service; they rat­her ble­nded with all the other deep fee­lings for which the ch­urch service was a ch­annel to him this after­noon, as a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility. And to Adam the church service was the best channel he could have found for his mingled regret, yearn­ing and resignation; its interchange of beseeching cries for help, with outbursts of faith and praise - its recur­rent responses and the familiar rhythm of its collects, seemed to speak for him as no other form of worship could have done.

As we know, the contrast the author is drawing is between the excesses of nonconformist ‘enthusiasm’ as it was called at that time, and the more sober liturgy of the established church. For myself, the contrast was not between one style of worship and another, but between any worship and no worship at all. I first attended a church service as a teenager. It was 1962, so I have my own anniversary this year. It was evensong, Book of Common Prayer. I had hardly stepped foot inside a church before. My parents had little time for religion. But they did love music. To help me develop musically, I was drafted into one of the best church choirs in London that sang to cathedral standard. No-one took much notice of probationers in those days. I was left to make what sense of it I could. All of it was utterly new to me. The canticles that evening were sung to Walmisley in D minor. I have had a soft spot for that setting ever since. I remember feeling awed and moved by what I was experiencing, this tapestry of words and music that seemed to envelope me. It was strange, and yet familiar, as if I had known it all along, but had not known that I knew, like an old friend I had met for the first time. It was somehow familiar and reassuring at the same time as it was unknown and new. I realised that in an important way I had come home.

I come to you from a cathedral that has a particular interest in the Prayer Book. In our library we have a first edition of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, and a copy of the Sealed Book of 1662. But our closest connection is through the great Bishop Cosin of Durham who was influential in shaping the 1662 book. The University library has the wonderful Durham Book, his personal copy of the 1559 Elizabethan revision of Cranmer’s two prayer books, painstakingly, and lovingly, annotated with comments and emendations in preparation for the next revision. Some of the best 1662 collects are written by him. And like all English cathedrals, ours is a place where you know that Cranmer's work retains an honoured place in the daily round of prayer.

There is a paradox here. What for Cranmer was a bold experiment in creative vernacular liturgy has become for us the traditional rite. So to honour the Prayer Book is to recognise that that in the 16^th century, this was a radical break with tradition. By the 17^thcentury this had changed, not least because high church Anglicans like Bishop Cosin recognised Cranmer’s debt to patristic and medieval rites, and how his intense focus on the passion and death of Christ was completely in the spirit of late medieval devotion. Meanwhile, the new liturgies of today have enriched all our churches with fresh insights by taking us more directly back to forms of worship that belonged to the early Christian centuries. We can be glad that we are in the happy position to do as Jesus says, and in our worship bring out of our treasures things old and new.

The Prayer Book is part of our cultural inheritance. It belongs to the legacy of Christian England, like the arcades and monuments of our churches and cathedrals, like the King James version of the Bible whose 400^th anniversary we celebrated last year, like the poetry of George Herbert and John Donne, like Gibbons and Purcell, like Anglican chant and Hymns Ancient and Modern. Its measured 'rhythms and cadences' as we call them, its unforgettable words and images, its gravity and quiet joy, its undulating landcsapes of contrition and praise, its sense of balance and proportion, these all create a whole that is infinitely greater than the parts. It is something of a miracle, unique to the English speaking world. We are right to cherish it.

But the Prayer Book is more than a treasured part of our heritage. Beauty can remain merely an aesthetic experience, or it can lead us into a more inward place where we find God. For example, the office of evensong speaks at many different levels. It begins by marking the ending of the day: we go to sleep with the memory of having prayed ‘defend us from all perils and dangers of this night’. But that phrase seems to suggest deeper darknesses that need lightening in whatever ordeals we may be going through: sickness, bereavement, sorrow, fearfulness, shame. And then we are led further to reflect on the ultimate sleep that awaits us all, death itself. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ Each Nunc Dimittis we sing or recite is one less until eternity. That thought haunts you, but it gives you courage you as well, for it helps you face your own mortality.

I am saying that the Prayer Book is a rich manual of ‘soul-making’ as John Keats called it. It trains us to become what we will all one day be in heaven: contemplatives. Like the Rule of St Benedict, it offers a school where disciples can be trained for eternal life. By inculcating the virtue of stability, it exercises an enduring pastoral, formative influence on all who take it to their hearts. For we are what we pray, as the old Latin tag has it: lex orandi lex credendi, what you pray is what you believe. The words we say, the texts we sing in worship shape us, whether we like it or not. And in the case of the Prayer Book, the fact that these words are so imbued not only with biblical texts but also with the Bible’s imagery and symbolism is part of what makes it somehow familiar. These words matter. Their repetition when we truly mean them from the heart has a healing, redemptive effect on us. How many times have we prayed the confession at communion, and found that the burden of our sins is indeed intolerable because we have been made to say those tough words and think about their meaning? Or discovered the release that comes when we hear the comfortable words read and are then summoned to lift up our hearts? To be caught up in spiritual dynamics of the Prayer Book is, I think, to experience a kind of catharsis of the soul, a purifying that leads to a more serious sense of purpose in being Christians, and therefore, better human beings.

Finally, this purifying of spiritual motive and intent is a consequence of being required by the Prayer Book to pay attention and listen. Many texts are to be spoken by the priest alone, addressing the congregation or God on our behalf. Take the Prayer of Humble Access. Why does the rubric require the priest to say it on behalf of the worshippers rather than by the congregation itself? Perhaps because here, at this solemn moment in the rite, the text wants us not to be busy with our heads in our books worrying about written words. Instead it invites us to approach the sacrament in a more contemplative way, allowing this great prayer to draw our thoughts and meditations towards the gift of God in the body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ. It is wrong to say that we do not ‘join in’ just because we­ are silent: on the contrary, we ‘join in’ in a more demanding way: by listening and praying while others perform the liturgy on our behalf. Its carefully calibrated pace slows us down, makes us go deep, something that we need in a world that is often fast and shallow. We learn that liturgy must never be manic and busy. It must make us sit at the feet of Jesus.

To Adam Bede, the Prayer Book service ‘spoke for him as no other form of service could have done’. In the Letter to the Hebrews the author reminds his readers to ‘remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you’. Today we celebrate the 1662 Prayer Book and the leaders who had a part in creating it during the 16^th and 17^thcenturies. Their labour of love continues to speak the word of God to us today and to testify to Christ who is the same yesterday, today and for ever.

To him, crucified and risen, be all praise and honour today and all our days, and to eternity.      

Hampton Lucy, 12 May 2012

(Hebrews 13)