Storm, Stress and Salvation: the gospel of Paul in a turbulent world

I doubt if St Paul envisaged archdeacons in his ecclesiology though I guess that to do the job well you need pretty much the entire panoply of spiritual gifts he lists in his letters. I worked closely with archdeacons on two bishop’s staffs for twenty years, as well as benefitting from archdeacons on the Cathedral chapters I served as Dean. I hope you will hear it not as flattery but as real appreciation when I say that I hugely admire what you do. Everything I have heard during this absorbing conference underlines that. You are profoundly committed, visionary, people, but prudent and practical too, and unlike some bishops and deans, good at the detail, a combination of gifts that make you the gyroscopes that keep our dioceses upright. On behalf of the national church, I want to thank you. 

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. I always think of Caravaggio’s great painting of that story, with the poor man, blinded by the great light that has assaulted him, spread-eagled on the ground while his huge horse rears up above. Chiaroscuro, we call Caravaggio’s technique, exploiting the dramatic interplay of light and shadow in art. Your conference theme Open to God in a Turbulent World captures the light-and-shadow aspects of the human journey and the path we walk as the people of God. A Damascus Road it is not for most of the time in our public ministry. Yet when I read the story of Paul and how he was prised apart on that road, I recall the late great Leonard Cohen’s immortal lines about the chiaroscuro of every life-changing encounter: 

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

At last Paul’s long-repressed inner turbulence is exposed for all to see. Torn between passionate love & violent hatred, something in him must have longed to still the tectonic plates colliding within him. Is this what Caravaggio is getting at? I see his painting telling us something not only about Paul himself but the storm and stress that surrounded him. Caravaggio’s day was the same. So is ours. In today’s epistle Paul sets out a catalogue of his trials and ordeals, the turbulence he has endured for the sake of the gospel. I doubt any historical era is immune from turbulence, whatever nostalgia colours the way we speak about the past. But I don’t think anyone will deny that our own times are seeing more than their fair share of it, and this is mirrored in the church too.

It’s been a privilege to overhear you entering into this theme during these past days. Our speakers, all of them first rate and some of them profoundly moving have between them created a remarkably coherent exploration of how we need to be "open to God in a turbulent world". One thing that has struck me is the difficult tension between trying to control turbulence and doing the risky thing of stepping into its flow to see where it takes us. What if turbulence, for all its discomforts, were not always an enemy to be feared, but, sometimes at least, opened up new channels of flow that might reshape our history in better ways? "Rivers do not flow in straight lines." 

We wouldn't be human if we weren't shaken by these "fightings and fears within, without". We are living in times when people of faith have to hope against hope in order to keep hope alive. I see that as a central task of the church today when good people find their spirits crushed by events spinning out of their control, and succumb to resignation, despondency and even despair. It's been refreshing to come to a conference that has genuinely tried to address how we should contemplate a world in which the lights seem to be going out in so many places. I'd thought I would hear much more than I have about Renewal and Reform, the tension between strategic development funding and resourcing parish ministry, mission action plans needing to be diligently worked up and applied to save the church from terminal collapse. What a relief! Instead, what we have been doing is the more difficult but even more important task of pondering how best we can respond to the turbulences of our time, whether in church, society or global politics.

Let me speak into our specific role as senior leaders in the church. After thirty years in three cathedrals, I'm now learning how to be a superannuated villager in the Northumberland countryside close to Hadrian's Wall. It's eye-opening to see what challenges the rural benefice is facing. It's partly about resources, but more, I think, about the ageing and declining pool of lay people who are confident and willing enough to participate in the leadership of the local church. My wife and I sit in the congregation each Sunday and contribute as lay Christians. I go across to church on weekday mornings to say matins with the Vicar, a young and able priest who is the same age as I was in my first incumbency (but who is making rather fewer mistakes than I did at that point in my ministry). I admire and fear for younger clergy because it would be so easy for their vitality to be sapped by the sheer scale of the turbulence they are facing. It's not that there is any sign of this now. But ten years down the line: who knows? So I'm glad about the investment being made across the church in mentoring, consultancy, spiritual guidance and other forms of close, intentional support, and I'm also glad to play a small part in the networks in our diocese that are there to help clergy so that they do not lose heart.

In a fascinating Bible reading, we heard insights from Esther about how to be responsive to God in a world of chance and change. In turbulent times, we are easily driven by the sneak of danger to seek security in some imagined status quo that is familiar to us. Or if we feel the need to do something, we go on the offensive and throw what we can at the crisis. But both those ways feel more reactive than responsive. And reaction is driven not by an open unafraid engagement but by panic, anxiety and fear. To apply this to the church we serve, reaction seems to characterise the rhetoric we hear from some church leaders who are unwilling to ask the question, where is God in the turbulence itself, where do we glimpse his presence and hear his voice even in our institutional decline? And what might this point to in the reshaping of our life together? But if this conference has taught me anything, it is always to go back to the question, what is God doing in the storm and stress? The Elijah story tells us that we need to be as present to the earthquake, wind and fire as the still small voice. 

In the desert tradition that owes so much to Elijah, discernment or diakrisis is one of the spiritual gifts most to be coveted by spiritual leaders. At its heart lie the twin tasks of listening and interpreting. We've heard a lot about them in this conference: how we discern God's activity so that we can join in, whether it's among the poorest of our world whom Christian Aid serves so wonderfully, or in the theatres of conflict like Afghanistan where the pity of war draws out our empathy both with those who suffer and those who serve; or nearer to home where we want to bear good witness to the gospel in our cities and countryside, suburbs and estates. On the first evening we learned how the novelist has to sit still, look hard and listen intently if he or she is going to be a truth-seeker - but by extension that means each of us because story is at the heart of who we are and how we tell of the mighty acts of God. So to reflect yesterday afternoon on how we sustain the life of the spirit in was an essential aspect of responding well: "praying, sleeping, dreaming, looking, smiling". It isn't too much to claim that all of wisdom comes down to these avenues of discernment, for in the spiritual tradition, these are the gifts of God that lead us on the path of insight and illumination. In the gospel reading, Jesus thanks God for revealing the mysteries of the kingdom not to the imagined wise and intelligent but to infants, a theme developed at length by St Paul in his Corinthian letters. 

We started out on the first afternoon reflecting on mission. Whenever that word comes up I think of the title of a great book written more than a century ago, Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods – St Paul’s or Ours? The Feast of St Paul is a day to pull that book off the shelf. When I was a curate in the 1970s, my much-loved training incumbent Bob Jeffery, once a member of this conference who died this past Christmas, insisted that I read it. “We’ve got it all wrong” he would mutter crossly. “We don’t listen to the voices of the indigenous, the local and the least privileged and powerful. We don’t hear what the context is telling us let alone bother with the hard work of interpreting it to the biblical text and the text to it. We don't learn how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land, and we don’t trust the Holy Spirit to nurture and grow disciples. If we did, how different the Church of England would look.” Diakrisis. 

Whom am I to tell you this? You work with the reality day after day. But here’s what’s distinctive about archdeacons. You do these things in minute particulars. Bishops (and even deans) can climb clear of what are disparagingly called “operations” and get away with painting big pictures in very broad brush strokes. It can all get a bit excitable. But not archdeacons. When I chaired the DAC, I saw how invaluable archdeacons were at reminding the committee that its decisions were not just about conservation and development, but were in the service of mission. "There is nothing too ample for you to overflow, nothing too small that your workmanship is not revealed" we heard R S Thomas say yesterday. 

When I was about to become a dean, I looked for books to read on leadership. This was before the days of strategic leadership programmes and mini MBAs.  My wife suggested the Hornblower books. I read through the entire series and found them highly illuminating. Here’s one example. “In the ships of the line in which he had served there had only been minutes of battle for every week at sea, and he had gradually become fixed in the idea that seamanship was the one requisite for a naval officer.  To be master of the countless details of managing a wooden sailing ship; not only to be able to handle her under sail, but to be conversant with all the petty but important trifles regarding cordage and cables, pumps and salt pork, dry rot and the Articles of War; that was what was necessary. But he knew now of other qualities equally necessary: a bold yet thoughtful initiative, moral as well as physical courage, tactful handling of both superiors and subordinates, ingenuity and quickness of thought.” (C.S. Forester, Lieutenant Hornblower)

Something like that could do as a role-description for an archdeacon. That passage to me encapsulated all the arts of leadership from understanding the detail (because you are at heart a practitioner) to the high moral qualities that make a man or a woman stand out: imagination, intelligence, fortitude, responsiveness, emotional awareness, self-understanding, good judgment and the determination to collaborate. And all this, placed within a theological and spiritual frame, lays the best possible foundation for being leaders in mission not out of anxious reaction to storm and stress but because it is right in itself. These are the marks of intelligent, far-sighted leadership because they emerge out of careful discernment. This is what we must cultivate if we are to have the spirit of St Paul.

I am currently reading a remarkable book A Different Path: an emotional autobiography by Neville Symington, a psychoanalyst and ex-Catholic priest. He speaks about the two pillars of a healthy life. "Friendship and wisdom are the most precious fruits of civilisation" he says. So I’d like to commend to you as a model for an archdeacon the "wise friend". More than any other role in the church, yours invites you to be both the source of insight and discernment, not dispensed from a distant centre but in that all-important place that is very close to the parish clergy and the people they serve. In a turbulent world, they, we, need your wisdom and your close friendship in equal measure. 

In our conference, in one way or another, every address, every workshop, every act of worship and a lot of the table talk has been about recovering this vision of life and our involvement in it. To be open to God in a turbulent world tests our spiritual resilience in ways that unsettle and disturb us. Like the disciples in the boat on storm-tossed Gennesaret, we cry, “help, Lord”. And we are heard. "Thou art my rock, thou art my rest" says George Herbert in words quoted to us on Monday. 

Turbulence can obscure our sight by unbalancing us or hurling dust into our eyes or towing us into maelstroms from which we can't pull ourselves out. Symington tells how he "went into the Church so that, identified with a savage God, I would not see these dark forces of unreason within me." The analyst and the spiritual guide both know that we must get to know and befriend the demons lurking in the shadow, whether in the institution or in our own selves. If we don't, they will never be stilled and we shall never see clearly. But like Elijah’s earthquake, wind and fire, like the ordeals that St Paul writes about, turbulence that is faced with courage and equanimity can purify our vision of God and how he is present to us when we are most disorientated and afraid. It takes great faith to read things that way, yet how can we read them any other way as we hear St Paul's magnificent words on this his feast day: "as dying, and see, we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything"?

So as we make Eucharist and say our farewells, it's with the resolve to be newly open to God in a turbulent world, to be cheerful and courageous, filled with hope and poised to be wise friends to all for the sake of the gospel. This Eucharist invites us to participate in Love's great work in the world, God's project of reconciliation and redemption and the making new of all things. Maybe, one day, we shall look back and know why we were here as part of it, doing what we did for God through change and chance and providence. And, just maybe, we shall understand how all of it was "for just such a time as this".

At the National Archdeacons' Conference, Swanwick, on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 2017

2 Corinthians 6.1-10; Luke 10.17-24

The Whole Armour of God

Once upon a time in my teenage years, I was a Crusader. I mean that I attended a Bible class on Sunday afternoons under the auspices of a national organisation called the Crusaders Union. It was founded in 1900 for outreach to young people. Its badge, which I must still have somewhere, consisted of the traditional crusader emblem of a red cross on a shield, with sword, breastplate and helmet. Underneath was the motto in Greek: ‘looking to Jesus’, a quotation from the Letter to the Hebrews. We had fun, made good friends, and learned a lot about the Bible. It all went into the personal mixing-bowl we call ‘formation’, where it lodged with chorister memories, Bach, Thomas Hardy’s novels, an awakening conscience, and my first experiences of girls. It would be years before I knew enough about the medieval crusaders to question the name, but I’m glad to say that they are now called Urban Saints.

You’ll recognise the motifs on the badge from today’s 2^nd lesson. ‘Take up the whole armour of God’ says Ephesians: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit. The author’s appeal to his readers is vivid and urgent. ‘Be strong in the Lord…so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.’ Combative stuff. But it fits exactly into the world-view of the first and second generations of Christians. They believed themselves to be warriors of light and truth in an alien, hostile universe. And just as Christ in his descent into hell had harrowed it, ransoming his own and rescuing them from the demonic clutch of death and Satan, so now the church was called bravely to battle against evil by witnessing to the gospel’s redeeming power and by turning human lives round from the oppressions of terror and wickedness to the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Move the clock forward by six centuries, and we come to St Cuthbert whom we celebrated last week. There is a so-called ‘Celtic’ perception of our northern saint, and there is the truth. The fantasy is that he was a kind of proto-romantic who took himself off to the Inner Farne for peace, quiet, and plenty of time to contemplate ducks. The more austere truth is that he went to the Farne to fight, Bede says, to ‘seek out a remote battlefield farther away from his fellows’.  For him, to be a hermit was to wrestle with evil, the demons within and those without. This warfare was not, or not principally, a private affair. It was an act of the church whereby the ever-threatening forces of chaos and disorder were kept at bay by those called, so to speak, to front-line service. The consolations of the Farne were, to quote the title of a book about desert spirituality, ‘the solace of fierce landscapes’. There is nothing perfumed or rose-hued about Cuthbert’s struggle for the good, the life-giving and the just. Like all who are valiant for truth, like the prophets and apostles, like the desert fathers and Irish monks, like Jesus himself, it cost him everything. He lived for it, and in the end he died for it.

Scroll on to the 12^th century and to this building we are sitting in. Durham Cathedral, ‘half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot’ say Sir Walter Scott's lines on Prebends’ Bridge. Linked to the castle, it is part of a carefully conceived fortification of this peninsula against the threat of invasion. What is more, it makes a tremendous statement about the power of the neo-Norsemen, the descendants of the fiery peoples who had ravaged Cuthbert’s Holy Island, destroyed his monastery and sent its community fleeing inland for safety. The Normans, now the overlords of England, knew how to build in a way that would intimidate the Saxon natives and remind them who now held sway. But this Cathedral is far more than that. It is built as a spiritual fortress as well, for this was what a Romanesque church was. Its huge towers, massive walls pierced only by narrow windows far apart, its cyclopic piers spoke with one voice which said: this place is a bastion against the principalities and powers, those demonic spirits that make constant raids on human souls to suck them into the turbid maelstrom of the devil. Here was a sanctuary, a defended and sacred place of safety from the terrors outside against which hell would not prevail. This is a different understanding of a cathedral from the Gothic vision of later centuries, as we can see in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, where a cathedral was becoming a casket of light whose walls melted away as the radiance of heaven poured through myriad windows reflecting the glory of heaven itself.

I doubt that most of us live each moment with this vivid sense of how evil crouches at the door, as Genesis puts it, though we glimpse it from time to time, the hells human beings create for themselves, not always in places that are far away. Some of us may have looked into the abyss and wondered how we were not engulfed. So we don’t dismiss the power of evil to grip fragile lives and to crush them out of existence: this was how it was experienced for so many of our forebears, and still is for some. And we can read in the pages of the New Testament how the gospel opened the door to an utterly new world, a marvellously life-changing liberation from demonic enslavement. This explains why the spiritual combat between truth and falsehood is so clearly etched in early Christian writings, and how the daily choices between light and dark became elevated into cosmic battles between good and evil where it took angelic powers to deal comprehensively with the devil and all his works.

And now? For all that it is a good and lovely world, it is also a profoundly broken place where tragedy walks hand in hand with beauty. Very many wake up each morning to this reality: they look on evil’s mighty works and despair. And much of it, I say most of it, is our own doing as the human race, and this implicates all of us. ‘A leaf does not turn yellow but with the consent of the whole tree.’ I am not asking about whether you invoke the existence of a hostile spiritual power to explain it. We can read this language metaphorically; yet the fallen-ness of our state is an unarguable fact of our existence, those ‘great refusals’ that we are in thrall to both collectively and personally. We know only too well about our struggle to live out our baptismal promise to reject the devil and all rebellion against God, to renounce the deceit and corruption of evil, to submit to Christ as Lord, to embrace him as our way, our truth and our life. What a theatre of the soul baptism inaugurates, to fight valiantly as Christ’s faithful soldiers and servants: heroic but so hard!

So Lent takes us into the desert where Cuthbert went to follow Jesus in his ordeals. Jesus knew, and Cuthbert knew, that resisting evil’s claims on us involves real battles. They knew about the re-arming Ephesians speaks about to make us strong and very courageous. To do this we must take evil seriously, be rid of the fantasy that things always improve, that human beings can on their own become better people. It is not blind optimism we need but facing the truth and being properly despondent about the human condition, for only then will we ever find real hope in God. And hope there is in abundance during Lent, for we are promised that these fierce landscapes will bring solace, and life will begin to blossom and flower in the springtime of our redemption. Soon it will be Easter when we renew our baptism vows and celebrate the Deliverer whom death and hell could not hold. Until then, in these days of Lent, we travel on with the whole armour of God to defend us, and in this desert we learn to be God’s people once again.

Durham Cathedral, 23 March 2014 (Lent 3)
Joshua 1.1-9, Ephesians 6.10-20

A Sermon for the Desert

Last week the theme was transfiguration and glory; this week it is wilderness and pain.  At the outset of his ministry, like Moses and Elijah, Jesus goes into the wild places to live for a time on the margins of the world.  Like Israel’s forty years in the wilderness, Jesus must face forty days of ordeals before he can enter his promised land.  Temptation means testing.  It is peirasmos, the time of trial we pray to be delivered from.  And the test for Jesus is the same as it is in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve when the Lord God comes walking this earth and puts this question to them, to him, to us: where are you?  Where are you, where do we stand before the great decisions of life, where is our life leading us?  Whose are you?  To whom do we owe allegiance?  Are we slaves to the illusions and fantasies of power or pleasure or wealth or ambition or whatever other hungers drive us?  Or are we free, through the love of God, to exercise the choice to have no other gods but him, free not to be corrupted with idols, free to take up our true humanity, be the men and women God made us to be?

For Israel, for Adam and Eve, the test results in defeat: their stories are of capitulation and failure. And St Matthew’s reason for telling his wilderness story near the outset of the gospel is precisely to demonstrate how Jesus the archetypal Man, the new Israel, is victorious where they once failed.  Three times the adversary Satan tries to deflect Jesus from the path of obedience; three times he is thwarted, comprehensively.  And this, says Matthew, sets the pattern for his entire ministry: from baptism to resurrection, he demonstrates that he is God’s beloved Son by submitting to his Father’s will and overcoming the evil one. 

For Matthew, the wilderness story is by no means just a moment, an episode, of testing after which the ordeal is over. He is careful to point out how all through his ministry Jesus is tempted to turn aside from the path set before him.  The temptations set a pattern, for although the devil departs from Jesus for a while, he will soon be back; for Jesus to announce that the kingdom of heaven is near is to assault the very citadel of evil itself.  So when Peter tells him he must on no account suffer rejection and death, Jesus vehemently takes up the words with which he had seen off the devil in today’s gospel: ‘Get behind me, Satan’.  In Gethsemane, on the way to the cross, his threefold cry, ‘Father, let this cup pass from me’ echoes the threefold ordeal of the desert: in his passion, this garden has become a wilderness, bread is turned to stone.  And when the bystanders mock him, ‘If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross’, they unconsciously echo Satan’s taunts to Jesus as they are locked together in combat on the temple pinnacle: ‘if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down’. 

Each time, says Matthew, there is victory.  For the three temptations Jesus resists in this morning’s gospel lead later in the story to some new act of enlargement, of generosity, on God’s part.  He will not turn stones into bread, yet he provides loaves to eat for a huge crowd on the mountainside, and more than that, makes bread his own body at the last supper.  He will not throw himself off the temple pinnacle, yet in the resurrection he is able to ‘destroy the temple of God and to build it in three days’, for one greater than the temple is here.  He will not worship Satan to inherit the kingdoms of the world held out to him on the mountain, yet at the very end of the gospel, on another mountain top, he enters into the promised dominion, and more besides: ‘all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me’.

We need to draw strength and inspiration from this story as we embark on the journey of Lent. These 40 days take us to the paschal mystery of death and resurrection, the very heart of the Christian year, the very heart of Christian faith.  In the early church, as we know, Lent was the time when catechumens were prepared for baptism by prayer and fasting before the awesome initiation rites of Easter.  Lent was when sinners who had been separated from the fellowship of the church performed acts of penance, kept quarantine before being reconciled and restored to communion at Easter.  The history of this holy season tells us what it is really for.  It is not an act of discipline for its own sake, denying ourselves because rigour is somehow ‘good for us’. It not really something we do at all.  Rather, it is a gift: for as we are drawn into the dying and rising of Jesus, we re-learn what grace is, forgiveness, reconciliation, renewal.  We realise like the prodigal son that there can be a homecoming, and life can begin again. 

St Paul says that ‘if through baptism we share in a death like his, we shall also share in a resurrection like his’. And this is how I read the temptation story: not simply as a story of the triumph of Jesus, but as a parable about ourselves and our own struggles, how death to self and resurrection to a new life are possibilities held out to all of us here and now.  For St Matthew, Jesus is not only the triumphant saviour-king who comes in the name of the Lord, victorious in the desert as he is victorious over death.  He is also the perfect disciple, the human being who lives out in his painful ordeal what it means to be made in God’s image. The ashes of last Wednesday point us directly to the new fire of Easter and the flames of Pentecost. In the ashen sign of the cross imprinted on our foreheads in memory of our baptism and in anticipation of our death, we know that we are already more than conquerors through him who loved us.

The simplicity of Lent for me puts a question mark against the easy comforts of conventional religion, suggests the need to look for what is altogether more passionate, more fervent, more real, something felt in the deepest places of the human soul that makes a life-changing difference to us and to our world. Lent is a time to rekindle spiritual longing, re-awaken hope, turn back our disordered appetites and addictions into hunger for God.  The temptation story shows us what we can become if we embrace the call to conversion of life, give ourselves once more to this great project of Christian discipleship. Kierkegaard asked the question, what is the truth for which we would both live and die?  He answered it with the title of one of his books: ‘Purity of heart is to will one thing’. By purity he meant singleness of heart and mind, shedding whatever distracts us from that focus, a purposeful, intentional following of Jesus wherever he leads us. Lent invites us into this tough but rewarding journey, the path that points forward to resurrection, the golden thread that leads us to Easter.  And if we search, or perhaps simply find it in ourselves to want to search, to take the first tentative step of acknowledging our longing and our hunger, then we shall find that Christ is already rising - Eastering - within us.

All Saints, St Andrews, 9 March 2014 (Lent 1)

Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Matthew 4.1-11

In the Wilderness

Our Old Testament reading took us into the wilderness in words which Samuel Sebastian Wesley set to music in tonight’s anthem.  The desert is a rich theme in the scriptures.  One aspect of this is that it is a place of truth. If you have been in the desert for even an hour, you realise what a profoundly discomfiting place it is. But to biblical writers it can become not an enemy but a friend.  The desert fathers heard the voice of prophets like Hosea and Jeremiah, who said that all Israel’s problems stemmed from their having abandoned the faith of the desert.  So they turned their back on the cities and went into the desert to seek God.  Our beloved St Cuthbert whom we celebrate this week followed this same way of life when he went as a hermit to the Inner Farne. He went to face the hunger, the thirst, the silence, the loneliness, the exposure, the cravings the wilderness throws at you, live with the wild beasts, face the demons in the depths of the soul, and find God. 

We need a place of truth to teach us who we are and who God is. Jesus too goes into the wild places where, like Israel in the desert, he undergoes ordeals, not so much temptation as testing, the time of trial that portends the last things.  The test for Jesus is the same as it is in the story of Israel’s wilderness wanderings. To whom do I owe allegiance?  Will I choose to have no other gods but the Lord?  The desert teaches us the difference between illusion and truth. It purifies our vision, helps us regain clarity about what our lives are really for.  So we keep Lent to strip the spirit bare like trees in winter so that we pay proper attention to what matters ultimately.  It invites us to a table spread with prayer and fasting and silence and simplicity and acts of charity: our teachers and soul mates for forty days to help us make space for God.

When we do this, we find something remarkable happens. The wilderness becomes a place of blossoming and joy.  When we give ourselves to him, God comes to us, relieves our fears, makes us strong, gives us back our lives. Waters break out, streams in the desert in the imagery of Isaiah. There is a highway, a holy way which turns out to be nothing less than the way home, the way out of exile, the way back to God. And as we journey through Lent, this wilderness way offers the promise of redemption, reconciliation, healing. We glimpse how life can begin again: for our broken world, for our damaged communities, for everyone who has lost hope, for ourselves. We sense that things could blossom and flower for us, even when life is at its most deserted, desperate and dry

The Sunday sheet charmingly announces that at this service I am offering ‘medication’ on Isaiah chapter 35. Well, the Prayer Book Collect for St Luke speaks about the wholesome medicine of the gospel and this is what we celebrate in Passiontide.  That medicine is the cross of Jesus: by his wounds we are healed.  The eyes of the blind are opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame leap like deer and the tongues of the speechless sing for joy.  These healing images in Isaiah are metaphors of what will become true for all humanity when the wilderness becomes a paradise.  The cross is no longer a symbol of shame but of victory.  The final hymn invites us to ‘sing my tongue the glorious battle’. In this hostile, destructive wilderness there blossoms a tree that, in the hymn’s imagery frees the world from death. Its fruits are for the healing of the nations.  Christ is the victim who has won the day.  We make our boast in the cross.  Sorrow and sighing flee away.

Durham Cathedral, Passion Sunday 2013 (Isaiah 35)