Holy Week in Chester 1: “I am the Door”

Reading: John 10.1-10.

This Holy Week, I want to explore with you the famous I AM sayings in St John’s Gospel. They are among the most characteristic utterances of the Gospel, associated as they are with the words and signs that, St John says, proclaim Jesus as the incarnate Word, the Son whom God sent among us to bring about the salvation of the world. So he feeds the hungry crowd and speaks of himself as the Bread of Life; he heals the man born blind and announces that he is the Light of the World; he raises Lazarus from the grave and tells the onlookers that he is the Resurrection and the Life. 

The words I AM are a golden thread that runs through this Fourth Gospel. To us they sound simple enough. But the way they are highlighted by St John tells us that to his ear, tuned to every nuance of the Hebrew Bible, they carry deep significance. They originate in the deepest layers of the Old Testament. In a defining narrative in Exodus, God reveals to Moses his sacred and mysterious name YHWH. It’s derived from the verb to be. So when Jesus speaks the emphatic ego eimi, I AM, he is consciously recalling that holy name, and associating himself with it as if to say, here is the Eternal Word of God who has come among you to reveal the Father’s glory, the fulness of his light, life and love. The legacy in St John is these sayings that are among the most significant and best-loved ways we have for speaking about Jesus. How could we now think about him other than as the Good Shepherd, as the Way, the Truth and the Life, as the Bread of Life or as the True Vine? 

What has this got to do with Holy Week? you ask. My answer is that the whole of St John, from the prologue we read at Christmas to the concluding stories of the appearances of the risen Jesus is pointing to the events of this great week. For John, this week’s paschal celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus is the essence of his good news. Nearly half of the gospel concerns the final week of Jesus’ life – and what came next. And even in the earlier chapters of St John, what is sometimes called the Book of Signs, it’s clear that the author is constantly anticipating – foreshadowing – the cross and resurrection. 

In the I AM sayings, the evangelist offers us a series of unforgettable images that speak about God, his coming among us in Jesus and what these might mean not only for us who follow him, but for the whole cosmos, our world, his world, the whole human family. They urge us to look beneath the surface of familiar texts into the larger ocean of meaning that imagery, symbol and metaphor open up to us. As poetry comes into things, at the end of each address I shall read a poem by Malcolm Guite, an Anglican priest and poet, who has composed sonnets on all of the I AM sayings. Poetry can awaken our imaginations in ways that cold prose can’t always achieve. And that is what I hope these addresses may help to do – awaken our spiritual imaginations as we walk the way of the cross and resurrection, and celebrate again love’s work during these days of awe.

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In this first address, this gateway to Holy Week, it seems apt to take Jesus’ saying in the tenth chapter of St John, “I am the door”, or as the modern version has it, “the gate”. In this section of the gospel, Jesus introduces a new idea, that of the sheepfold. The gate is introduced first, closely followed by the shepherd. Unlike the thief and the bandit, the shepherd does not climb over the wall or enter secretively by some other hidden means, but comes and goes through the open gate, followed by the sheep who know his voice. “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” So not only is this saying closely linked to the Good Shepherd whom we shall come to on Good Friday, but also to another saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life”, or as it’s better translated, “the true and living way” that leads to salvation. 

We need to picture an ancient near-eastern sheepfold to catch the force of this image. It would look familiar to a shepherd on the high fells of Northumberland where I come from: a space enclosed by a round drystone wall high enough to keep out not only human predators but wild animals in search of prey. On the sheltered side there would be a gap in the wall for the sheep to go in and out. It would be narrow enough for a man to lie across it, thus closing the circle and protecting the sheep. This is likely to be what Jesus means when he speaks about himself as the gate – both the opening itself and the deeply symbolic action of lying down to safeguard the flock, or as he will go on to say, laying down his life for the sheep.

The thing about a door is that it marks a threshold, defines the spaces that are either “outside” or “in”. It looks both ways, like the Roman month of January, the door of the year that was pictured as a double face that looked backwards to the old year and forwards to the new. A threshold is a limen, from which we get the world liminal. It implies a crossing over into a different space. Very often we are one person on this side of a threshold, and someone else on the other. For instance, our front door marks the transition from the public and visible world to the personal and intimate environment of our own homes. The door of this cathedral symbolises the transition from what we call “secular” space to the sacred. The rites of passage at birth, marriage and death are our familiar examples of liminality, but it’s everywhere.

So what is the threshold Jesus alludes to when he speaks of himself as the door or the gate? It’s the passage to safety, to a space we can call home where we can be unafraid and flourish and find life in all its fulness. A space to be safe in, to grow into and inhabit is not far from what the Hebrew scriptures mean by salvation. At this paschal season, we tell the story of how the Hebrews left their Egyptian slavery behind and undertook their journey across the wilderness towards the land that had been promised them. They were not to know that it would be forty years before they crossed the Jordan and entered Canaan. More than a generation in that liminal state of being between places and between times, one life behind them and another life before them. You could picture the Jordan as a threshold, a gateway, a door to a new and at first utterly strange way of life as a settled people. I don’t think it’s over-speculative to wonder whether this isn’t part of the background to Jesus’ saying “I am the gate of the sheep”, when we remind ourselves how the people of Israel were likened to a flock whose shepherd was none other than the Lord himself. The promise of a land, a home to call their own, was to the wandering tribes their sheepfold, their safety, their salvation. 

In Northumberland, shepherds talk about sheep being “hefted” to the hill where they were born. It’s the place they belong to, that gives them their identity, that part of the landscape from which they will never willingly stray. So the sheepfold, and the gate through which the sheep go “in and out to find pasture” is, I think, a far richer image than we might think. For safety, in the way I’ve been speaking about it, is much more than merely the absence of need or hunger or pain. It means knowing the place we call home, knowing where we belong and where our hearts are hefted. rediscovering the lost domain we spend our lives longing for, that Eden from which we were banished, that paradise garden where our humanity is given back to us again. It’s the destiny for which God made us. “I came that they might have life, and have it in all abundance.”

And if you asked St John where he saw this door opened wide and the invitation given to cross over that threshold to abundant life, I think he would not hesitate to say, at Golgotha, at the cross where the world’s salvation is achieved and God’s work accomplished. And beyond it, at the place where the stone was rolled away, and a door opened on to an empty tomb, and a new day dawned, and the kingdom of heaven was opened to all believers. For as we travel through the events of Holy Week, as we go with Jesus to the cross, Easter is the goal that lies ahead, for which we have prepared all though Lent with eager longing. “Behold, I have set before you an open door which no-one is able to shut” says the risen Lord in the Book of Revelation. And now, in Holy Week, we are nearly there, close to the portal that’s the culmination of our great journey. The doorway through which God beckons us stands open. Through it we see our promised land where we know we are hefted and will always belong, that place which is to all pilgrims happiness and home. 

Here is a sonnet by Malcolm Guite on Jesus as the Door. 

Not one that’s gently hinged or deftly hung,
Not like the ones you planed at Joseph’s place,
Not like the well-oiled openings that swung
So easily for Pilate’s practised pace,
Not like the ones that closed in Mary’s face
From house to house in brimming Bethlehem,
Not like the one that no man may assail,
The dreadful curtain, The forbidding veil
That waits your breaking in Jerusalem.

Not one you made but one you have become:
Load-bearing, balancing, a weighted beam
To bridge the gap, to bring us within reach
Of your high pasture. Calling us by name,
You lay your body down across the breach,
Yourself the door that opens into home.

(c) Malcolm Guite. With permission.

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

Stirring us up to Sing: Sermon at the Consecration of Nicholas Chamberlain as Bishop of Grantham

Honour comes into things today. We are here to celebrate the consecration of a new bishop. We are glad for him, for the diocese of Lincoln and for the whole church. And it is not wrong to say that we honour him as we give thanks for Nick, this man of God, this friend, this priest whom we surround today with our love, our affection and our prayers.

Why do I use that word ‘honour’? Because it’s found in the gospel reading for this holy day, the feast of St Hild. (Two things to say here in parentheses. First, you’ll forgive me for preferring to speak of her by her Saxon name Hild rather than the Latin Hilda despite Nick’s honourable role as incumbent of St Hilda’s Church Jesmond. The second is that she died not on the 19th but the 17th of November 680. But as Lincoln people know, that day is also the anniversary of Hugh of Lincoln who died in 1200. To my mind Hugh, who was not only five hundred years Hild’s junior but also a gentleman, would not have hesitated to concede the 17th to the senior lady and taken the 19th himself. But the Church calendar has a wisdom of its own.)

But back to this word honour. In the gospel, Jesus has a lesson about good behaviour at a party. Be careful. Don’t grab the place of honour for yourself. Wait to be invited. It’s a pertinent reading at an episcopal service, for diocesan bishops as we know have seats. Cathedrals are named after these seats of honour, these cathedra; pretty grand some of them are too, if Durham’s is anything to go by. But, Jesus says, be properly reluctant about occupying a place of primacy and taking honour. Once, bishops-designate had to be dragged to their consecrations, so fearful were they to take up this awesome office. Nolo episcopari! they would cry, ‘I don’t want to be a bishop.’ Quite right. That should be an essential quality in the person spec of every episcopal appointment.

It’s so characteristic of Jesus’ teaching. Doxa, honour, is only to be had by those who begin by sitting in the lowest place and are invited to take a privileged seat. Why? Because his rule is a kingdom of nobodies where the greatest are least and the last first. Jesus himself is the example of this way of being: he who was rich became poor so that we might become rich, who took the form of a slave and was obedient unto death. All of Christianity is about this. But public ministry in particular, and episcopal ministry most of all. To be ‘grand’ is to subvert the very thing a priest or bishop embodies as-Christ. To be a ‘dignitary’, as we call it, is to embody true Christian ‘worth’, dignitas; and this means above all else, evangelical poverty of spirit, the virtue of humility we heard about in Ephesians, the grace to be as nobody and become one of God’s poor.

Hild was born into the royal house of Northumbria. But her vocation did not lie in being a princess but an abbess pledged to religious poverty. She had the oversight of a double monastery of women and men like her given as God’s poor in imitation of the humble Son of Man and in response to his call to follow. Like others inspired by gentle Aidan, she is depicted by Bede as a woman who embodied the spirit of the gospel herself by noticing and honouring those of little account. One of those to whom she said, in effect, ‘friend, come up higher’ was Caedmon. He was a nobody in that community. While the brothers and sisters were at prayer in quire or dining in hall, he would be outside in the stables caring for the animals and sleeping among them. Once in a dream, someone came to him and asked him to sing about the origin of created things. ‘How can I sing?’ he replied helplessly, 'how shall I sing that Majesty?' Yet in his dream, he composed a poem and sang the praise of the Creator. Next day he remembered the song. Hild heard about it and summoned him. Testing and recognising his gift, she called him to take vows and enter the monastery as its poet and singer in residence, one of the earliest poets to write in English. 

I love that story because of what it says to me about Christian vocation and ministry. For one thing, it underlines the Bible’s insistence that God’s humble poor are his special treasure. This is always a privilege of public ministry as deacon, priest or bishop, to notice and care about those in the stable no less than those in quire. But to go on, this ‘noticing’ is about paying attention to what God is doing in the lives of others, even when they are the most unlikely of others. We should learn from this story not to think we can ever predict or know where God is going to be at work. All ministry is to do the work of God, indeed, but part of this is the difficult and exacting task of discernment: understanding that God is at work in the world before we ever get to see it or know about it. Only then are we in a position to bring about reconciliation and healing, one of the gifts Hild was especially remembered for in the Saxon church. This is where we look to bishops to lead. I don’t simply mean that the recognition and calling out of gifts and ministries belongs to episcope as your act of loving oversight of the church. I mean something altogether larger than this: teaching the church to pay attention to creation, to all of life in its flourishing and in its brokenness, to listen and discern so that we do not miss the often hidden stirrings of the Spirit of God. Hild, we can safely say, always acted in an episcopal way as Abbess, and the story of how Caedmon was brought to her and her eyes and ears were opened gives us a clue about the leadership style of this remarkable woman.

And then there is the nature of the gift itself. To compose poetry and to sing songs in praise of God: this was the charism Hild discerned in Caedmon and brought out to flourish. Isn’t it the vocation of a bishop to help the whole church find our voice as poets and singers? When it comes to worshipping God and speaking about him, poetry and song are far closer to the truth of things than prose can ever be. In Bruce Chatwin’s book Songlines, he traces the footsteps of native peoples who sing as they walk and bring worlds into being, echoing the primordial song by which the universe was made. ‘The trade route is the Songline because songs, not things, are the principal medium of exchange.’ Oscar Wilde says that Christ was a poet who makes poets out of all of us. I have a hunch that if bishops and all of us who are Christian leaders could worry about the prose a little less, and trade in song a little more, our church might breathe a great sigh of relief. For with the lightness of spirit and quickness of step that poetry and song bring, who knows how our worship could begin to dance, and our mission glow with gratitude, and our service of God and humanity, and our pursuit of all that is just and right be transformed from Pelagian duty into gospel joy?

This story of Hild and Caedmon fits so well with our gospel reading. Here is the man who knew his place but was called to a new role because his gift was discovered and recognised. I doubt if Hild ever forgot the day she first heard Caedmon sing. To him, like so many in the Saxon church of Northumbria, ‘she was known as mother because of her outstanding devotion and grace’ says Bede. To be a father or a mother in God, like every act of parenting, is to recognise the giftedness of those who are as children to us, and raise them to the place of honour where their God-given potential is realised, and where the base metal of prosody is transmuted into the shining gold of song.

'We need each other's voice to sing the songs our hearts would raise.' Nick, you are among us as God’s bishop to stir us up to sing even in dark and evil times, especially in dark and evil times*. So find your own voice, and help us to find ours so that we may be a church of joy and hope as together we learn how to 'sing that Majesty which angels do admire.'

*A reference to the bombings in Beirut and Paris by Daesh a few days before, and heightened security in the UK.

Southwark Cathedral, St Hild’s Day 2015.
At the consecration of The Right Reverend Dr Nicholas Chamberlain as Bishop of Grantham. (Ephesians 4.1-6, Luke 14.7-14)