A Homily on Charles Simeon

At a gathering of catholic clergy, what are we to say about Charles Simeon, the evangelical clergyman who ministered for half a century at Holy Trinity Cambridge, and who died on this day in 1836? I read his biography when I was an undergraduate at the other place. It was approved Christian Union literature, that slim blue paperback with three silhouette caricatures of Simeon as a preacher on the cover. The author was Handley Moule, the early twentieth century bishop of Durham. I was touched by it, more than I expected. I kept it all through my ministry, though I’m afraid I left it behind in the Deanery at Durham when I retired.

What was it about that book? I think it was the character of the man himself. It wasn’t that he sat loose to the doctrines that characterised evangelicalism: justification by faith alone, the sufficiency of atonement through the sacrifice of the cross, the centrality of the scriptures, the final coming of Jesus as saviour and judge. All of these he embraced and preached ex animo. But it was the experience of Christian faith that mattered most to him, how every believer needed to have a personal relationship with Jesus. It all flowed out the profound change of life he had undergone as a young man preparing to receive communion in Kings College Chapel. He was overwhelmed, he said, by a sense of God’s redeeming love. Like John Wesley a generation earlier, his heart was “strangely warmed”. It’s the classic evangelical story of conversion.

When you have ministered in a place as long as Simeon did, you become a legend in your own lifetime. No doubt the decades at Holy Trinity, where he had met considerable opposition to begin with, were looked back on later with a kind of apostolic glow. It no doubt coloured the way Bishop Moule wrote about him as a fellow evangelical who was, perhaps, an important role model for him.

I put the book down persuaded that Simeon was the best kind of Church of England evangelical. His personal qualities seemed to breathe the spirit of our epistle reading today from Colossians, what it was that St Paul gave thanks for in them: “your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven”. Simeon was renowned as a great preacher and evangelist whose sermons drew crowds from miles around. And yet, I guess, the most compelling sermon he gave was the life itself. As the preacher spoke, so the man lived. 

For all of us in public ministry, our evangelical example, the gospel we embrace and embody in our own habitus or way of life, is the sermon that is remembered when a thousand others have been forgotten. Conversio mori, the conversion of life, isn’t the prerogative of only one sector in the church. The Rule of St Benedict sets out what this vow means in the life of the community and of each individual. And Benedict would certainly have endorsed a famous saying of Simeon, when asked what he had learned most as a pastor. “The three lessons which a minister has to learn” he said, “are: 1 Humility. 2 Humility. 3 Humility. How long we are in learning the true nature of Christianity!”

“The true nature of Christianity.” To humble ourselves before God is the very heart of the converted life, whether it is before the scriptures, the holy sacrament, or the divine image in the neighbour we serve in his name. To humble ourselves before him, whether it is in worship or penitence, adoration or fear, preaching or presiding, listening or praying or loving or serving, in times of trouble or of joy. Our vocation as priests, as ministers, as evangelists is, I think, to be a public embodiment of the virtue of converted humility and humble convertedness. We know it when we see it in others. May it be seen in us too, this great work of God in our lives and ministries, and in the depth of our souls.

Given at a gathering of the Society of Catholic Priests at St Martin's, Byker, 13 November 2018

In Defence of Wilfrid

Tomorrow is the feast of St Wilfrid, the 1300^th anniversary of his death in 709.  Hexham would not be here if it weren’t for him.  Wilfrid built the first church here in the 7^th century on such a grand scale, says his biographer Eddius, that no other church north of the Alps could compare with it.  Your marvellous crypt, all that is left of Wilfrid’s church, is one of the holy places of the north for it links us directly to the saints of Northumbria’s golden age, like his other crypt at Ripon; and like Wearmouth, Jarrow and Escomb whose stones still stand as a record of the Saxon church.  And even where those layers of primitive faith have been overlaid with the centuries, as at Bamburgh and Whitby, Lastingham and Hartlepool, Coldingham, the island of the Inner Farne, and Lindisfarne itself the fountainhead of them all, the memory of the saints is still powerful.  These numinous places have a power to move us that is all their own.  Their testimony is undimmed with the passing of time, for you feel as perhaps nowhere else the fervour of holy men and women who prayed here.  Coming from Durham, I include in that list the shrines of Cuthbert and Bede in our cathedral, for though buried beneath the grandest of romanesque canopies, it is the simplicity of their faith that touches and inspires us today.

 

Nowhere else in England has such a concentration of ancient Christian sites, and nowhere has such a constellation of saints whose lives have so affected the course of English history.  Of these, Wilfrid was without doubt one of the most able and most influential.  He was one of Aidan’s boys like Chad and Cedd, a native Northumbrian who was sent to Holy Island to be educated at the monastery there.  From there his studies took him to Canterbury, Gaul and Rome, an experience that gave him an understanding of the wider continental church few others of his generation had, and which gives us the clue to his life.   Here of all places, I do not need to rehearse his colourful career as ecclesiastical statesman and politician par excellence, striding out across Europe like some new Joshua to conquer lands for God.  From the beginning, as abbot of Ripon and bishop of York, and as apologist for the Roman way at the Synod of Whitby, he courted controversy.  Combative and pugnacious, he fell out with practically every Saxon king and prelate in the land, first imprisoned and then exiled, and making not one but two long journeys to Rome to appeal to the pope.  Finally, and not without controversy, he returned to Northumbria where his church at Hexham became a centre of his see.

 

Of all the saints of his era, Wilfrid is usually presented as an unattractive image of worldly ambition and self-interest, corrupted by the power he craved.  He was said to be carried to his consecration on a throne supported by nine bishops, not exactly an icon of servant leadership.  While his teacher Aidan had preferred to walk rather than ride, Wilfrid never had a conscience about his fine horses and retinue of servants and warriors.  His reforms of Irish customs at Ripon led to the rough expulsion of Cuthbert who was guest master there, an event Durham finds it hard to forgive.  And so it goes on.  He looks like the antithesis of the gospel simplicity we associate with Lindisfarne which Jesus speaks of in tonight’s reading: ‘I thank you, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants.’  This is how we like our saints to be: childlike, humble, innocent.  Wilfrid, worldly-wise, power-hungry, clever, and not a little ruthless, puzzles us. 

 

So, at your Rector’s specific prompting, let me attempt the difficult but important task of defending Wilfrid.  I am not going to paint over his faults, though he is not the only saint to have them.  But it seems to me that we can make the case for his being one of the Saxon church’s most far-sighted, dedicated and courageous leaders.  Let me try. 

 

First let me say something about the collision of Irish and Roman customs at the Synod of Whitby in 664.  By then, the date of Easter was already celebrated on the same date both across continental Europe and also in much of Ireland as well.  The Columban communities of Iona and Lindisfarne were a tiny minority.  Wilfrid understood where the future lay: not because it was ‘Roman’ rather than Irish, but because he was committed to the unity of the church and believed that the bishop was the visible focus her teaching and her sacramental life.  His passion was for a church that was one, holy, catholic and apostolic, extending across the known world.  This explains much in him that otherwise seems like a puzzling denial of his own Northumbrian traditions.  If we love the church because we love God, then a larger vision of the church, and in particular, the pursuit of unity among Christians is given in the gospel.  The church exists as an institution with a catholic shape and structure in order that it may have continuity in time as well as place through the preservation of what is handed on across the generations.  Wilfrid understood how the tides of history as well as theology were flowing, which is why he threw his weight behind Europe and Rome.  It is a fantasy to think that the outcome could have been different, even if ‘Celtic Christians’ with more romance than historical sense continue to argue that it should.

 

Secondly, we should celebrate in Wilfrid one of the most energetic of evangelists and founders of monasteries of his day.  To establish religious communities, build churches, nurture their faithful, establish schools for the education of the young and proclaim the gospel all belonged together as ‘mission’.  This is precisely what Aidan had done at Lindisfarne.  In this Wilfrid was the loyal imitator of his teacher, planting Christianity as far afield as Sussex and the Isle of Wight as well as in Mercia and possibly in Frisia, another instance of the extraordinary confidence and flair of the Lindisfarne mission.  And the evidence is that Wifrid was conscientious in the pastoral care of his people as missioner, teacher and bishop.  We do him a disservice if we somehow imagine that he was interested only in the institution of the church and its power relations with the state, rather that in its community of disciples.  His great church here at Hexham testified, no doubt, to human power as much as to the glory of God.  Yet the crypt that remains, its layout designed to give the faithful access to the relics of the saints, seems to speak more of the power of holiness, the spiritual quest to re-connect with what truly belongs to the foundation of a life lived before God. 

 

Finally, we should honour Wilfrid as one of the two men who first introduced into England the Rule of St Benedict.  (We don’t know whether he or Benedict Biscop was the pioneer, but we can honour them both for it.)  This is more important than it sounds.  As a matter of history, it paved the way for the upsurge of Benedictine monasticism in the late Saxon period, itself the soil in which the great monasteries of the high middle-ages were planted.  The influence of the Benedictine life in English history is incalculable, not only in the great libraries that flourished in monasteries such as Durham, or the economic impact of the religious houses that controlled estates in every corner of the land, but in the spiritual legacy it bequeathed to the English church.   It can be argued that the liturgy and spirituality we love the Church of England for, particularly in the Book of Common Prayer, is a direct legacy of its Benedictine past with its instinct for order, balance and seriousness, pattern and rhythm, for the reticence that prefers to listen before speaking, for its profound care for human beings individually and in community.  We owe Wilfrid more than we know for his commitment to this wise and humane rule.  It took a well-travelled man to grasp why it mattered. 

 

Jesus says in our reading tonight: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’  Benedict’s rule makes humility its principal virtue.  He likens it to Jacob’s ladder, each of the twelve degrees of humility bringing us nearer to heaven; only the steps lead downwards rather than up, for the lower we go, the closer we are to God.  In Wilfrid’s quieter final years, the years of peace as Bede calls them, could it be that politics and power lost their appeal, and instead it was the call to be gentle and humble in heart like his Master that he heard again as in his boyhood he had heard it on Lindisfarne where sky and sand and sea spoke of simple things, and the Lord called as once he had called disciples by the lakeside and had said, ‘follow me’? 

 

Hexham Abbey, 11 October 2009

On the eve of the 1300^th anniversary of the death of St Wilfrid

Matthew 11.20-end

St Paul: a tribute

Today, the 25 January, we celebrate the conversion of St Paul.  Caravaggio painted the scene and caught its sound and fury.  Paul is spread eagled on the ground, as if toppled by a seismic cataclysm, staring upwards out of his blinded eyes.  Above him rears a vast horse, rider-less, the one he has just fallen from.  Somehow that enormous horse overshadowing the man symbolises the immensity of what has trampled on his world, like the stage play Equus for the 1^st century: it’s as if only heaven itself can tame Saul’s huge animal energies.  Caravaggio’s biographer Helen Langdon says of this painting, ‘with its jagged shapes and irrational light which licks out details for their dramatic impact, it creates a sense of crisis and dislocation [in which] Christ disrupts the mundane world’. Such a man, if he ever recovered from this epiphany, would not be a comfortable conversation-partner or bed-fellow.  ‘Great men are meteors that consume themselves to light the earth’ said Thomas Hardy.  Struck by a thunderbolt from Jesus, Saul of Tarsus had no choice but to become one himself. 

 

Perhaps I was over-exposed to Paul in adolescence.  The Christianity that retrieved me from my lazy teenage agnosticism was thoroughly Pauline – or thought it was.  Paul was regarded as the early church’s theological organiser who laid down the definitive systematic template over the New Testament.  If you wanted to know what Christianity taught about sin, grace, atonement, faith, money, sex or power, you went first to Paul.  There is a logic to this, though not the one I was taught.  It is that the earliest documents of the New Testament are not the four gospels but Paul’s letters.  There is a case for reading the New Testament in the order in which it was written, overhearing how the early church evolved over the first two generations.  But this was not how I learned Paul.  To us students the Bible was more like a jigsaw puzzle whose disparate texts in the Old Testament, gospels and Acts had to be sorted and fitted into their allotted places so that a coherent picture emerged.  The bits you began with, the ones with straight edges that framed the image and determined where the others would go were the Pauline pieces.  

 

If I came fresh to St Paul now, what would I make of him?  Here are three aspects of his career that would strike me as reasons to celebrate Paul’s conversion today. 

 

First, there is St Paul the evangelist.  He was one of the great travellers of the ancient world bringing the Christian gospel to the known world. You know the roll-call of places from Sunday School when you learned to trace Paul’s missionary journeys: Asia Minor, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, Malta, Rome.  He would have gone to Gaul and Spain if he could, and who knows, even to this cold, rainy far-flung corner of the Roman Empire.  It required energy and courage, for he endured all kinds of hardship and opposition.  But his real achievement lay in the sense of purpose with which he set about his travels.  He preached in the towns and cities where influence mattered, along the great trade routes that were the communication lines of his age.  He stayed long enough in each place both to make sure that people were able to absorb the message and also to ‘grow’ local indigenous Christian leaders who would settle his young churches securely.  We should learn from this.  A book written a century ago by Roland Allen, Missionary Methods – St Paul’s or Ours? would help purge us of some of the nonsense that goes by the name of evangelism.  Paul can help us establish sound principles of faith-sharing and the nurture of Christian communities even in an era so different from his. Our church plants and ‘fresh expressions’ need to pay attention to the sound mission principles St Paul worked to. They have never been bettered.

 

Then there is Paul the theologian.  One of greatest minds in antiquity, for him risk-taking was not only a matter of persecution or physical danger but also of the intellect.  Conversion was not just a matter of heart and soul and strength, but also of the mind. In the ancient world of mystery religion, pagan cults and moralism, Christianity came like those shafts of sunshine in the painting, as enlightenment, an invitation to intellectual freedom, to think in wholly new ways about God, the world and our human lives. I mean proclaiming the gospel in a way that could be heard by the cultured Greek and Roman world beyond Judea, promoting ‘intelligent’ and ‘intelligible’ Christianity, we could say.  This meant, courageously, doing away with the age-old divisions of the human race and stating unequivocally that Christ was for all humanity and all creation. The idea that the gospel embraced gentiles was deeply subversive and large parts of the New Testament show how fiercely it was contested.  Paul’s greatness lies in that he understood how Christianity is truly universal.  The grace of God through faith in Christ is offered without condition to all people, whatever their race, gender, status or culture.  This lies at the heart of his truly radical vision of the church – and Paul is the New Testament’s great theologian of the church.  Our unity in Christ underlies this Week of Prayer for Christian unity. 

 

And thirdly, there is Paul the writer.  The letters of Paul are among the most cherished pieces of writing from the first days of the Church: 1 Thessalonians is probably the earliest New Testament document of all.  The Letters to the Romans and Galatians, setting out the meaning of faith in Christ; the Letters to the Corinthians cajoling a wayward church into living together as a community, the Letter to the Philippians with Paul’s acknowledgment of what the Christian journey has meant to him personally – what would the New Testament be without them?  These are remarkable documents with their skilful blend of theology, spiritual insight, pastoral sensitivity, honesty, humour (yes! or at least heavy irony), passion and well-grounded common sense.  They give us an unrivalled picture of the life of the early church and, as I have said, suggest principles by which we may order our own lives and that of our churches.  How impoverished we would be without these beautiful letters. In them, we hear the early church celebrating the joys and wrestling with the struggles of living together in these small fragile human communities that the gospel had given birth to. They are like a mirror held up to us as we try to live authentic Christian lives today. What we see is our own selves, in the complexity and mess of our unredeemed state, but also in the beauty of lives that Jesus Christ has touched and re-fashioned through his grace. We hear Paul challenging us to look at how we understand what it means to be human, inviting us to judge ourselves against the virtues that are his touchstone of authentic Christianity as he lists them in one of his letters: faith, hope and love.  

 

What do we do with St Paul today?  We need to recognise that he lived in his own times and spoke to his own contemporaries in the places he wrote to. But that voice from a distant past speaks eloquently into the present, our present. We should learn from the way he set about the vocation to Christian life that without warning confronted him on the Damascus Road, knocked him off that horse, pinned him to the ground, shut his eyes to the pain and persecution he had instigated and opened them to the gospel life that would shape his life from that day onward and launch him his extraordinary career as an apostle.  If only we could be as courageous and hope-filled! 

 

And our vision of the church should not be less universal than his, embracing people of all races, cultures and backgrounds. Today marks the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I do not myself think that trying to achieve a structural convergence between the historic denominations is at the heart of this nowadays, though we should welcome it when it happens. I think we are far better at recognising the heritage each of our Christian traditions brings to the whole church as gifts to enrich it. What is harder is to create churches that are genuinely united communities of faith and hope and love. When St Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians, that passionate, powerful statement of the non-negotiable values that lie at the heart of his gospel, he says: that in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor gentile, slave nor free, but we are all one in Christ Jesus. My own community of Anglicans in this country has only just got round to opening up an equal space for women alongside men in the senior leadership of the Church of England, though it has been on this journey for the entire 40 years of my ministry. You were there decades before us; others are not even close to it. 

 

And that is only one of his criteria for a genuinely inclusive community of faith. We can add to his some of our own which are surely in the spirit of his letter: young and old, gay and straight, wealthy and disadvantaged, indigenous and incomer, conservative and liberal…. You see what a mountain we still have to climb. But it matters. It matters hugely. The human family is as bitterly divided in our day as it has ever been. We are in despair about the cruelties and hatreds inflicted by one group of human beings on another, and it is always the weak, the voiceless, those with no power or influence who are the victims. Radicalised Islamists behind massacres in Pakistan, Nigeria and Paris are in all our minds; yet they are only the latest symptoms of the cancers that eat away at the human soul. On Holocaust Memorial Day this week, we shall keep the memory of genocide alive and hold its victims in our prayers. In the light of man’s inhumanity to men, it is vital that we create communities of openness and trust, of friendship and care, communities that work away at the patient task of healing us of these fatal diseases.  This is the vision that lies behind the way St Paul speaks about the church. For him it’s a new creation, a new humanity in Christ, his cherished body, a place of reconciliation and wholeness and peace. Because of this, the church is something beautiful, good and even glorious. 

 

It will be costly to bear witness to the gospel as he did, having the courage to do away with discrimination and division; being communities of graciousness and generosity that show the love of God poured into our hearts.  But this is how we shall become churches of whom Paul would say, as he does in his letters, that he gives thanks constantly for us, rejoices in our faithfulness and bears us on his heart.  And in that, flawed yet always mighty, his heart will have spoken to ours. 

 

Waddington Street United Reformed Church, Durham

25 January 2015

For the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul

Acts 9.1-22

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