Amahl and the Night Visitors

I was about eight years old and in short trousers when our school music teacher, Miss Waites, who seemed to us then to be about one hundred, decided to try us out on opera. That autumn term, every Friday afternoon when grammar was over, we sat down to listen to it scene by scene on a scratchy LP. We memorised words, we learned tunes, we acted scenes, we drew pictures with wax crayons. It was quite an education. The opera was by Gian Carlo Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors. 

It's about a crippled shepherd boy who lives in a remote hovel with his mother.  One night, while he is playing his pipe under the desert sky, he sees a star like no star he's ever seen before. A little later, he hears the sound of travellers chanting as they cross the hillside.  Then there's a knock at the door.  It's the magi on their way to find the Child.  They do not know him, but will recognise him when they find him. They bring gifts for him: gold, frankincense, myrrh.  They need shelter for the night.  Hospitality is a sacred duty in the near east, so they are invited in.  A celebration is called for, so the village throws a great party.  Then, while everyone is asleep, Amahl's mother tries to steal the gold: just a little - surely the unknown Child won't need it all; think what she could do with it for Amahl.  She is caught by the watchful page, and is shamed. But the kings tell her to keep the gold, for the Child's kingdom is built not on riches but on love alone.  It's time for them to leave.  Amahl wants to send a gift of his own. What better than his crutch - the Child might be a cripple like him. He hands it over... and finds he can walk without it.  It's a sign from the Holy Child.  Amahl knows he must visit him too and take his gift in person.  So they set out following the star that will lead them to the infant King.

It's a charming opera.  Here are three insights from this folk-tale to ponder at Epiphany.

First:   the incarnation is about the wonderful possibility of change and renewal.  It is the new creation, whose words ‘let there be light' transform the people who walked in darkness.  The cripple becomes a new person, ready to make his own journey.  His possessive, fearful mother can let him go without regret so that he can thank the Child.  The kings learn that you don't have to be royal to be rich, for they see how God has honoured this poorest of households with a miracle.  Indeed, they have found the Child already, for he has been with them all along.  We have seen his glory, says St. John, full of grace and truth.  Each year, Christmas ought to change us, help us recapture our vision, reawaken hope.  So a good question for Epiphany is, how this latest Christmas in our life touched us, opened up in us a new awareness, some fresh vision of grace and truth, recalled the privilege of being those whom Jesus calls his friends?  

Secoondly:  Christmas is about childlikeness, becoming genuinely open-handed and humble enough to receive what another has to give.  Perhaps the magi saw in Amahl's house

that to welcome the Infant Christ, we must learn to receive before we can give.  For them this meant stooping low enough to seek shelter from the poor, as low as you have to bend down when you visit the shrine of the nativity in Bethlehem.  For the miracle happened not to the great and powerful, but to a crippled boy with nothing to offer but his crutches and a heart full of love.  Jesus said that unless we become like little children, we can never enter the kingdom of God.  If we take Christmas seriously, we see wealth and power in new ways.  To be rich before God is to have nothing in our hands; like the Christ Child to be little, weak and helpless is to know the infinite power of love. And this is all we have to come with: our worship, our longing, our love.  Yet it is enough for us to begin to be bearers of hope in our broken world.

Truth number three:  Christmas is about a journey we must all make for ourselves.  Whoever we are: prince or pauper, powerful or weak, young or old, the star is there for us to follow.  Once we have seen it, we can't not follow it - can't ignore it or tell it to go away.  Well, we can stay where we are, clinging on to old goods and old gods; but what does that profit if it means losing your own soul?  But to make the journey, fling away the crutches that symbolise the past, venture with God towards new horizons where Jesus is going to be - this is what Epiphany means.  It's a risk, for faith leads us we know not where and towards horizons we cannot even glimpse when we set out.  It calls for courage in a society perplexed by what religion is for, puzzled and even alienated by what Jesus Christ could possibly mean in a world such as this.  We are singing the Lord's song in a strange land.  But sing it we must, and gladly.  

Amahl is profound in its simplicity because it captures the profound simplicity of the gospel.  I can still recall watching the opera performed as an eight-year old, and being filled with a sense of expectancy and happiness.  Looking back, I now recognise what I needed to learn: about myself, about human life, about what it means to receive and give, about where true happiness lies.  I am grateful for those early glimpses.  Epiphany is not the end of Christmas but its enlargement that puts the incarnation into its greater context.  For the great light the shepherds and magi saw and the angels sang is for all people of all places and times, for all that lives and breathes, for all that is.  It's for us, this revealing of God's glory where the light shines in the darkness and the darkness is not able to overcome it.  During these forty days of the Christmas festival, we continue to pray that our joy at the birth of Jesus will last for ever, that its lambent glow will melt the snows of spirits long frozen over, warm cold hearts, re-awaken our love for this Infant and our resolve to place him at the heart of all that awaits us as we journey through another year.

Durham Cathedral, January 2010

In Memoriam: Stephen Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Saint John of Beverley: a celebration

St John of Beverley is a truly northern saint, one of that galaxy of great men and women of old who, though long dead, continue to speak to us and inspire us today. I come to you from Durham Cathedral, a place that did not exist in John’s time; and yet seems to me to be intimately connected with our celebration of him tonight. Durham only exists because of St Cuthbert, the 7^th century bishop of Lindisfarne whose community brought his body to our peninsula in the 10^th century and built a cathedral as his shrine. John belonged to the same Saxon Christian world. A native Northumbrian from Harpham, he came back to the north from Canterbury where he had been educated, and entered the double monastery at Whitby under its great abbess St Hild. In the year that Cuthbert died, 687, he became bishop of Hexham and then of York, both sees connected with St Wilfrid who had been educated on Lindisfarne under St Aidan.

But the direct link with Durham is through the Venerable Bede. His remains were brought to Durham in the 11^th century (said to have been stolen by the monks of Durham from their resting place at Jarrow). His shrine was nearly as important as Cuthbert’s in the middle ages. Bede’s huge significance not simply for the north but for the whole of England is that but for him, we would not know as much as we do about the Saxon church and the foundations it laid for the development of Christianity across this island. Aidan, Oswald, Cuthbert, Wilfrid, Hild, Benedict Biscop, Chad, Cedd – our knowledge of these great saints would be immeasurably the poorer without Bede’s writings. John of Beverley is another of them. Bede devotes five chapters of his History to John, and it’s clear that he was a man whom Bede not only admired but loved. One of the reasons for this may be that John himself ordained Bede as priest early in the 8^th century. For many clergy, the bishop who ordained us is someone who holds a particular place in our affections and prayers. Perhaps it was like this for the young Bede.

Our New Testament reading tonight speaks of some of the virtues Bede found in St John. I chose a reading from St Luke because we know that John wrote a commentary on the 3^rd gospel, though it has not survived. I wonder whether there were particular aspects of St Luke that he especially admired and that may have influenced the shape of his ministry. For St Luke, Jesus comes into the world as the Saviour not only of his own Jewish people but of all humanity: there is a universal dimension to this gospel of divine mercy without limit that many have found particularly appealing. Luke goes out of his way to speak of how Jesus gives back human dignity to and embraces slaves, outcastes, children, women, people who were not highly regarded in the patriarchal societies of antiquity. The first part of our reading recalled how crowds came to Jesus to be healed of their diseases: ‘all…were trying to touch him, for power came out from him’.

But the power of Jesus lies in his words as well as his works, says Luke. Indeed, the crowd, he says, had come out to listen to him as well as to find healing. Luke quotes the essence of his proclamation: ‘Happy are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God! Happy are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled! Happy are you who weep now, for you will laugh!’ And by contrast, how miserable are those who look for fulfilment elsewhere: in their wealth, their standing, their achievement, all the things that pass away and do not endure – for to invest your entire life in anything other than God’s kingdom of wholesomeness and promise is to miss what it means to be a human being. So ‘love your enemies’ he says, ‘do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you… Do to others as you would have them do to you.’ That rule is not golden simply because it makes for harmonious human relationships, though that is true. It is golden because it’s how God is in himself, the one who gives himself to humanity, to each of us, by coming among us in Jesus. And the secret of happiness is to live as Jesus did, in the light of the kingdom of God that he has come to announce and to embody in himself.

These are among the qualities Bede saw in John of Beverley. He introduces him as a ‘holy man named John’, the bishop who is not so absorbed in overseeing the affairs of the church that he cannot pay attention to a poor homeless young man who is also a deaf mute. He provides him with food and shelter, heals his infirmity and teaches him (literally) his ABC. Bede says he became like the lame man in the Acts of the Apostles (also a Lucan story) who, after his healing, walked and leaped and praised God. The boy says Bede ‘gained a clear complexion, ready speech and beautiful curly hair, whereas once he had been ugly, destitute and dumb’. The detail is so charming that we wonder whether Bede heard the story from him himself. Bede tells of other healings wrought by St John, and these are recounted at some length, as if to say: don’t pass over the stories told of this man of God too quickly. We should learn from them, ask ourselves how they point back to the example of Jesus Christ himself, what they might say to us and how they might inspire us as we try to live as committed Christians in our own times.

Here, I think, are particular questions for all of you here in this Minster community and in this East Riding town. Like Durham and St Cuthbert, this church would not be the marvellous building it is were it not for the shrine of St John, and the way he was revered throughout medieval times. Nor would the town would not be what it is. Some of England’s greatest kings fervently honoured his memory, among them Henry V who attributed his victory at Agincourt to the saint. With this memory of the enormous following St John had enjoyed here, you wonder what went on in the minds of those who destroyed his shrine during the Reformation era and confiscated its great wealth. In Durham, where Cuthbert’s shrine survived the king’s commissioners’ savage attempts to wreck it, there were dark mutterings about not tampering with places where the saints had performed works of deliverance and healing because they would not like it.

But of course, a shrine is more than a physical place within a grand building. Just as we in Durham gladly inherit the vocation of being Cuthbert’s community today, you here, by being a living temple of God’s presence, embody what belonged to the essence of St John’s shrine. That is to say, as people of faith who inhabit this great building and this lovely town, it is your vocation to do what John of Beverley did in his day. It is for you to follow your Lord and Teacher as he did, to imitate his words and works of mercy and salvation, as he did, to bring healing and reconciliation to the people among whom you live and work, as he did, to live in simplicity and loving community as he did, and to bear living witness to the coming of God’s kingdom of justice, truth and peace in the society of this town – as he did. In this place, all that makes us want to cherish and love St John of Beverley lives on, not simply in the stones of this church and its ancient shrine, or on words written on parchment by an ancient historian, but in you who are its living stones, a shrine of flesh and blood in whom the spirit of the risen Jesus bears joyful witness to the good news that he brings to the world that is both his and ours.

At the Patronal Festival of St John of Beverley, Beverley Minster, 11 May 2014 Isaiah 35; Luke 6.17-31

 

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)