With a Twist of French: a sermon at a music festival

Today this Hexham Abbey festival “with a French twist” reaches its climax. I’d better own up at once to being an ardent Francophile. My love of France and its people, their rich legacy of art, literature and intellectual life, their heritage and landscapes has if anything been strengthened through the torturous Brexit we are inflicting upon ourselves.

At the end of this service we shall hear the Final of Louis Vierne’s first Organ Symphony. After that we are going to enjoy César Franck’s Violin Sonata, one of the greatest ever written. Franck was a Belgian by birth, but he lived and worked in Paris and thought of himself as entirely French. His final church post was as Titulaire and Maitre de Chapelle at Saint Clotilde with its Cavaillé-Coll organ that was the love of Franck’s life and the inspiration for much of his music. Vierne was his pupil and later Organist Titulaire at Notre Dame. I tell you all this because of something Vierne said about his teacher. He wrote in his memoirs that Franck had “a constant concern for the dignity of his art, the nobility of his mission, and the fervent sincerity of his sermon in sound….Joyous or melancholy, solemn or mystic, powerful or ethereal: Franck was all these.”

That phrase sermon in sound is striking. A sermon, literally, means a word or a speech, a conversation, a discourse. What we intuit about music is that it’s just that, a form of speech that communicates in ways that ordinary words can’t do. I want to be careful here. The crafted words of literature and liturgy, of drama and poetry do have that capacity, and the way they touch us can feel like our experience of music. For great art somehow knows us and reaches into our deepest selves taking us far beyond the power of ordinary speech. It awakens our imaginations, stretches our horizons, kindles our spirits. And if we have ears to hear, music it speaks to us of life in all its tragedy and glory. It speaks to us about ourselves. It speaks to us of God. “Joyous or melancholy, solemn or mystic, powerful or ethereal” said Vierne. Beyond the earthquake, wind and fire, or through them, or in them, we hear the still small voice of God’s Spirit.

What we listen to and how is something the scriptures take seriously. In the ancient world and still today, the body's orifices are regarded as needing scrupulous attention because they are the channels by which we are connected to the outside world. In particular, what we see and hear has the potential to uplift us or corrupt, and everything in between, because it allows the world beyond the boundaries of our bodies to penetrate. Seeing well, and even more gearing well, are highly significant. When Israel made a covenant with God, it was couched in the language of listening. “Tell us everything that the Lord tells you,” they say to Moses “and we will listen and do it.” In Proverbs there is a repeated call to find wisdom by paying attention: “My children, listen to me and be attentive to the words of my mouth”. When Jesus says “I am the good shepherd” the test of his authority and his integrity comes down to listening: “the sheep hear his voice…they follow him because they know his voice”.

When St Wilfrid founded this great abbey in 674, it was as a Benedictine community. (Yes, it was rebuilt as an Augustinian priory in the twelfth century, but let’s not forget its Benedictine origins.) The Rule of St Benedict is one of the classics of Christian writing. One of its great themes is obedience: to the scriptures, to the Rule, to the abbot, to the voice of the community, and most of all, to God. The word obedience is derived from the Latin obaudire whose root audire means to listen. The very first word of the Rule underlines that idea of serious listening. “Hearken to the voice of the Master and incline the ear of your heart.” Listen! Pay attention! Train your ears to respond. And when you hear, try to discern the prompting of the Spirit and let your open ears be a symbol of open hearts and open minds – open to God, and open to the wisdom of the inner voice of truth and conscience.

The capacity to listen well is basic to the good life. We know what it is like to be talking to someone who is looking away from us, only half paying attention, not caring enough to lend us their ears. Often it’s the distraction of some other voice, some more important person glimpsed over the shoulder, some better song than ours that's more worth listening to. And if our attention spans in modern life have never been generous, the worldwide web and social media have tended to shortened them still further. Four minutes, some say, is the limit. I’ve already been preaching longer. Who has the patience any more to sit through a Bach passion or a Beethoven symphony let alone a Wagner music-drama?

And that’s our challenge in these times. To let ourselves become overstimulated, incapable of investing time and effort in what is worthwhile is a besetting sin of our age; a craving for what belongs to the instantaneous, the immediate here and now, while we lose the judgment to decide what we should and shouldn’t pay attention to. Here is where music can teach us. There is no quick gratification in great art. You have to invest in it, take the time it takes, surrender to it. Music you give yourself to rather than merely play in the background is an opportunity not only to learn how to listen well, but to grow in the attentiveness that takes the larger and longer view and allows us to see our "instants" in a larger setting. It's how we become open to what the eighteenth century French spiritual writer De Caussade called, in a wonderful phrase, “the sacrament of the present moment”. It’s a gift, but we have to listen out for it, be attentive and open. Then, listening can be a life-changing event. For whenever life is touched and transformed, we can be sure that God is among us.

Back to Vierne and Franck and the phrase a sermon in sound. Cathedrals and abbeys like this one are sometimes spoken about as “sermons in stone”. You look around you as you sit a great building listening to great music. And aren’t you drawn, if you have any feeling, to think to yourself, there is something here that is bigger than me, older and wiser than me, something that touches me, speaks to me, compels me to pay attention? Maybe the music we have been enjoying in this festival has spoken to us, moved us in some way, opened once more the doors of our perception? If so, I call that an experience of God’s presence and his very self. And I think of Jesus walking the shores of Galilee, calling to anyone who would listen, inviting them to hear his words and find their lives changed. Can music call us to new ways of being alive in God’s world, new depths of wisdom and insight, new treasures of human experience to enrich our lives and share with others?

Music preaches the best of sermons if we will sit and listen. Of such is the kingdom of God.

Hexham Abbey Festival, 24 September 2017

At a Service of Thanksgiving for Bob and Ruth Jeffery

I can hear Bob’s advice to me as his curate ordained just a few weeks. “At funerals and memorials, don’t preach about the person who’s died. Preach about God.” He was right of course. And yet…. Isn’t a person’s life – yours, mine, Ruth’s, Bob’s - the primary place where we read the traces of love’s work, where we discern God to have been present in the joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries of being a woman, a man, where we learn how to speak about God out of our own lived experience?

I think Bob would say so. It was how he had been formed as a Christian and how he had learned the art and the craft of Christian ministry. You could call it “being real” though Bob would have hated the cliché like he hated all the easy speeches and hackneyed phrases that fall unexamined off too many tongues. Being authentic as a priest, a Christian and as a human being was Bob’s life task right up to the moment he died. His faith and the language with which he spoke about it were characteristically his own. They owed a great deal to the people who had inspired him and he never tired of acknowledging the debt. But the experience was his, and the words were his. He wouldn’t perhaps have owned the word artistry to describe this. Yet I believe that under God we are called to be artists, or co-artists, of our own lives and to do this means living in a state not only of awareness but of being true to who we are in God.

Being present, paying attention, living reflectively, truth-seeking were basic to Bob’s way of understanding the world and God’s involvement in it. He didn’t have much time for theological speculation and none at all for simpliste slogans and what they usually gave birth to, well-meaning but ill-considered strategies and programmes that would sort out the church’s problems. One of his great spiritual guides, the eighteenth century French Jesuit writer Jean-Pierre de Caussade, taught him to be humble before the providence of God and not claim to know too much about the divine plan for the world. Bob conscientiously refused to speak of things he did not know about, things none of us can know about. What mattered was the offering of life to God. To him, reticence was a virtue that went with the modesty proper to a created being. And the complexity of life, and the unknowability of so much of it, was part of its glory that God embraced in the incarnation. He insisted that it had to be understood “from below”, inside the experience of being living and sentient with mind and conscience and the capacity to be aware and articulate the wonder of our own being. He believed with Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and that in this respect, religious faith, the God-given “examination” of life should make us more human, not less.

As David Thomas says in his tribute in today’s service sheet, metaphor and poetry were everything in this quest to interpret the human condition from the perspective of the divine. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” said Emily Dickinson. Faced with the task of finding words to express the inexpressible, there is no alternative. I once preached a sermon at Headington, mercifully long-forgotten, that Bob felt did not quite capture the spirit of the text. “The trouble is” he said in the nicest possible way “there’s too much prose in your preaching, not enough poetry and not enough paradox”. It was one of those moments that made me stop and change course, not just as a preacher but as a theologian too. It’s among many insights for which I have to thank a tolerant, cherished and wise mentor.

But if he valued reticence when it came to speaking about God, his practice of faith was confident, joyful and large-hearted. He liked Bishop Ian Ramsey’s saying about being “tentative in theology but sure in religion”. He proclaimed a God who in Jesus, as the Fourth Gospel puts it, “loves us to the end”. In the words of our reading from St Paul, God’s is a love from which nothing can ever separate us, not height nor depth, not evil or disaster, not anything in all creation. I guess there were times when that faith had to be fought for, most of all here at Worcester that terrible morning when he found that his beloved Ruth had died suddenly. Bob had always believed that if religion has nothing to say about suffering and loss, then it has nothing to say. Such circumstances are the severest test not only of the human being but of whether the faith he or she professes can carry such a burden. Bob found that it could, because the bridge to which he entrusted himself to carry him across the abyss was scaffolded with love. That is what it means to be “sure in religion”.

To Bob, the capacity to hold belief and doubt together, to explore, probe, debate, ask questions was all part of having a mature faith. He reckoned that religion that infantilised grown-ups into tribal submission and uncritical obedience was not worthy of the name. James Fowler’s Stages of Faith had taught him, as had Bonhoeffer before him, that faith must “come of age” and it is the responsibility of a Christian leader to help people discover religious adulthood for themselves. It takes courage to do that. On the last page of his book Anima Christi he wrote: “Our pilgrimage is itself an act of faith and an act of worship. We are moving towards the greater mystery of God which envelops us all. Pilgrims live only by the mercy and grace of God. This means that we can let go of security and certainties because we realise that God is in control. We need nothing but to offer everything to God with willingness.” His children say that even in his last illness, there was a curiosity about what he called the “end game”, how to die as authentically as he had tried to live. His favourite Psalm 139 was sung at his funeral: “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me”. He wanted to be as alert and present to the truth of this in dying as much as in living, and to discover how God would be “about his path and about his bed” in his last Nunc Dimittis.

We are here today to honour Bob and Ruth’s memory cherished not only in Worcester but also in Sunderland, Barnes, Oxford and Tong, not to mention the British Council of Churches and the General Synod. As Dean here, he worked tirelessly to save the tower and conserve this great building. He and Ruth made their Deanery a place not only of hospitality and welcome, but of jollity, stimulus, good conversation about books and theology, church politics and the state of the world.  But he would have wanted these tangible memories to be a metaphor of a lifelong investment as priest and pastor whose generous vision of life touched the fabric of so many people. If I learned one thing from Bob in the forty years I knew him, it was how to try to understand and live just such a Christianity that is capable of reaching out to the lives of others and of making a real difference in the world.

So what is Bob and Ruth’s lasting memorial? I think we can see it in the faces of all of us who are here today, and many more who are not,  whom they loved and cared for because they prized the most precious gifts life can bestow: integrity, generosity, community, a sense of place, kindness, laughter and the knowledge of God. What unites us today is that our lives were touched by Bob and Ruth in the name of the One who in Christ has himself touched us, searched us out and known us. In his death and resurrection we are given back our lives once more, strengthened by the promise that our hope was not in vain. For love was his meaning, and always will be in both this world and the next.

Worcester Cathedral, 21 June 2017
At the memorial service for The Very Reverend Robert Martin Colquhoun Jeffery
Romans 8.31-39

The House of the Interpreter

Wisdom means many things in the Hebrew Bible.  It can mean practical skill, competence, good management.  It can mean insight and discernment.  It can mean knowledge of the natural world.  It can mean learning the lessons of history and transmitting them to your children.  It can mean being able to play music and write poetry.  It can mean having a moral sense, an educated conscience. It can mean detachment from our drives, an inward stability of character.  But however they speak about it, wisdom is a religious quality.  The wise sum it up as the fear of the Lord, committing your way to him.  The wise know their place in the scheme of things, and in relation to God the creator who is not only the source of wisdom but is Wisdom itself.

Being aware means learning how to discern and ‘read’ the world and what God is doing in it. There are biblical stories that seem designed to explore how God works in the lives and histories of people and nations, and how some have the gift to see into the meaning of events, understand the patterns within them.  The Joseph story in Genesis is like this.  It is one of the most perfect narratives not just in scripture but in all of literature.  Our passage comes in the middle of the story where Joseph is playing games with his estranged brothers: he knows who they are, but they have not yet recognised him.  One of the story’s themes is to portray Joseph as a wise man.  He shows shrewdness and skill as a manager in Potiphar’s house; when Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him he behaves with integrity; he knows what is required when famine befalls; and not least, he has compassion for his brothers with whom he wants to be reconciled. 

But more than anything, Joseph has the gift of interpretation.  He can understand his own dreams, and others soon start telling him theirs: the butler, the baker, Pharaoh himself.  Somehow, Joseph has the gift of detecting in them what God is doing or is about to do, and counsel the right response. Dreams provide clues to the mysterious workings of providence; what is needed is to know how to read their meanings within the larger purposes of God. Every psychoanalyst knows the importance of decoding the complex but intelligent symbolism of dreams and how reflecting on them adds to wisdom. In a larger way, reading the signs of the times is like reading dreams. ‘Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good’ he says at the end of the story. 

I want to commend to you the interpreter as an image of what the church is for. One of its tasks is to help people understand and respond to what God is doing in the world and in people’s lives: pointing to meanings, uncovering significance, not simply human significance but divine significance.  Wordsworth, in a beautiful phrase in his ‘Lines Written above Tintern Abbey’ speaks about ‘seeing into the life of things’.  You may say that it’s a brave person who speaks like that in our age.  Yet in the ancient world no-one seriously doubted that providence, dreams, omens, sacred texts all carried meaning; the only question was, what.  Today when we are suspicious of ‘grand narratives’ we still want to ask the fundamental question of how we recognise pattern, structure and connection in the world, and how we dare to speak about it.

As Christian interpreters, we establish meaning in different ways.  We do it when we bring the power of the gospel to bear upon human lives and transform them.  We do it in the celebration of the liturgy where we play at living in the kingdom of God as if it were already fully present. We do it in our relationships with individuals, when, in joy or in sadness we attempt to read the stories of their lives in the light of the value God puts upon each of them. And we do it in our citizenship of the world by putting the questions of God’s kingdom to situations where justice and mercy are unacknowledged or forgotten and victims have no voice of their own.  In looking for ‘divine significance’, we are taking seriously our role as God’s interpreters.

I’m saying that the interpreter is, if you like, God’s spy in recognising and naming the good, the beautiful and the true, and also falsehood, deception and illusion for what they are.  In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian comes with his heavy burden into the house of the Interpreter.  As he steps inside, he is shown a painting.  It shows a man ‘with his eyes lift up to heaven, the best of Books in his hand, and the Law of Truth writ on his lips; … his work is to know and unfold dark things to sinners, even as also thou seest him stand as if he pleaded with men.’  He says the Interpreter is the guide Christian must follow on his journey.  It’s of course a portrait of Christ, depicted both as travelling companion and as destination, the interpreter par excellence of our pilgrimage.  In knowing and unfolding dark things and standing as if he pleaded with men, Bunyan is saying that Christ himself is the model; for the living Word is God’s final act of interpretation by which his movement towards us is revealed as grace and truth.  Calvin says in the Institutes that the scriptures are like spectacles which bring the world into focus and help us to begin to see things with God’s way of looking.  When Christian leaves the house of the Interpreter, he comes to the wall of salvation and finds the cross> There the burden he carries falls off his shoulders, and he is free. Good interpretation brings liberation because the truth always makes us free.

To be an interpreter is part of the church’s apostleship. It is always a risk. We know how broken and fallible the church is.  But there are God-given ways by which we are kept close to the mind and heart of God, learn to read his ways in what the French spiritual writer Jean-Pierre de Caussade called ‘the sacrament of the present moment’.  They are the old fashioned disciplines that nurture the inner life: prayer, reading the scriptures, meditating, the kind of silence that teaches us to pay attention, spiritual friendship that helps us know ourselves; and not least, enriching our lives through literature, poetry, film, music and the arts which are so often the unlooked-for sources of wisdom in our time. These are among God’s instruments to help us become aware, have insight, be wise and become good evangelists.

The task of the interpreter is not some huge ordeal. It will come to us as naturally as breathing if we simply speak honestly out of our faith, and are ready when asked, as St Peter says, to give a reason for the hope that is within us. When the world is as it is, why should we have hope and not give in to despair? This is where the interpreter is crucial. The story says that Joseph ‘reassured’ his brothers, ‘speaking kindly to them’.  ‘The Lord meant it for good.’  To help others glimpse how, in the changes and chances of the world, ‘love is his meaning’ is the missionary vocation of the church and of each of us individually.  It is to be a dealer in hope and help turn back the tides of human angst. It is not to point to ourselves but to God in Christ, to make room for the Holy Spirit to do God’s work in the lives of others and ourselves. As the hymn we are about to sing puts it so wisely, ‘God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.’ 

Durham Cathedral, 28 July 2013.

Genesis 42.1-25; 1 Corinthians 10.1-24