A Priest at the Altar: at the First Mass of Father Thomas Sharp.

We are here to make eucharist with Father Thomas. He is among us as a new priest, just a few hours old. Eucharist means thanksgiving. At this mass, we give thanks for all the priests God has given to his church in this ordination season. Especially for Thomas whom we surround with our prayers and our affection on this first day of his journey in the priesthood, the day that sets the course for the rest of his life.

Our readings are those of the festival of St Mary of the Angels. The Basilica of that name just below Assisi is holy place for all Franciscans. It was there at the little Portiuncula church that is now inside it that Francis heard Jesus’ words about his disciples leaving everything behind to follow him. This is what he did. Throwing off his staff and shoes, he set out on the road as a poor brother of the Lord who had nowhere to lay his head. Others joined him, who became known as the Order of Friars Minor.

I spent last week in retreat with the deacon candidates with the Franciscans at Alnmouth, a place I know well from my days as Vicar of Alnwick. I was struck once again by the intensity of the Franciscan vision of a life yielded up to the fierce and wonderful love of God, living close to the earth in the company of all his creatures, embracing poverty as a vocation. When such a vision is truly realised, it is life-changing.  

It must have been a real annunciation for Francis when God spoke to him in words of fire. Like Isaiah’s temple vision, like Mary with the angel, there is only one response that could do justice to the encounter. When you look into the face of God, what else can you say but “here am I, send me”; “behold the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word”? In such annunciations worlds meet: God’s and ours face each other. There is recognition. Edwin Muir’s poem puts it like this:

Each reflects the other’s face,
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there

And this is the pattern of things: a divine annunciation, a mutual recognition, and then a “yes” to a vocation to start walking through the door the angel is opening. This is how it has been for Thomas in his vocation that has brought him to the altar on this day. This is how it is for everyone called to a ministry in God’s church. This is how it is for us in baptism. God comes to us and calls us by name and claims us as his own. And we start our lifelong walk in Christ. You could say that all of Christianity comes down to this: annunciations of God’s mercy and kindness; God’s recognition of us and we of him; that open door, that “yes” to God, that walk into his future that is the new life of grace.

This is true of the eucharist as well. As the emblem of God’s love, the eucharist itself recognises us, beckons us to come, invites us to the banquet, draws us to this place of love, gathers us around God’s altar. And Thomas is our representative, our intercessor, our priest. When he offers the bread and the wine, when he lifts up his hands towards heaven to say the blessing, when he breaks the bread and gives it to us, it is in the name of the church that he does these things. In our name. And more than anything else, in God’s holy name, because we are his and one anothers’ companions, bread-sharers as Christ’s body. The eucharist recognises us. It recognises Thomas as our priest. In the eucharistic action, there is an annunciation that says, “come unto me, all who labour and are heavy-laden, and I will refresh you”. We come, we are glad, we eat and drink. And life is changed, transfigured. We see things in new ways. Like Francis, like Mary, like Isaiah. 

These are deep and wonderful truths of the Christian life that we celebrate today. The word immensity comes to mind. John Donne uses it in his great poem on the Annunciation story. “Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb” he says as he imagines himself in the presence of Blessed Mary and of the divine humanity that is beginning to grow within her. I think we can transfer that wondering gaze to the eucharist too: immensity cloistered in the humble earthy creatures of bread and wine:

Sweet sacrament divine, earth’s light and jubilee,
In thy far depths doth shine the Godhead’s majesty

“Here O my Lord I see thee face to face.” Today, Thomas has become a priest of these things. He has gone through the open door that annunciation has pointed him towards. As the president of the eucharist, he opens up doors of possibility for us too, annunciations without number of the immensity of God’s majesty and love that shine in the body and blood of the crucified and risen Lord. Here we touch the mystery of God. And find that it is the mystery of our own selves too who feed on angels’ bread, touched by God, his children for ever for whom eucharistia is at the heart of everything: thankfulness, celebration, joy without end.

At the First Mass of Fr Thomas Sharp, Church of the Holy Nativity, Newcastle
1 July 2018
Isaiah 6.1-5, Luke 1.46-55

Life Can Begin Again: a sermon on Easter Day

On Easter Monday 1917, in northern France, the British and Commonwealth forces launched the Easter Offensive against the German line. The Battle of Arras cost over 160,000 British. One of them was a soldier who was serving in the Artists’ Rifles. He was one of the great poets of his generation. Among his closest friends was Eleanor Farjeon who wrote the song ‘Morning has Broken’, a woman who was more than a little in love with him. As Holy Week began Edward, holed up in his trench, received an Easter gift. Eleanor’s poem tells the story. 

In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You like to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said. 'I will praise Easter Monday now -
It was such a lovely morning'. Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, 'This is the eve.
'Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon'.

That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve,
There are three letters that you will not get.

Deceptively simple, it charms us until we get to the last line and realise what it conceals. That painted Easter egg (or was it chocolate?), kept for a week with such anticipation was possibly the last thing he ever ate. A few hours later on that Easter Monday Edward Thomas would be dead, struck down by a rogue shell as he was lighting his pipe.

There are three letters that you will not get. Think of the millions of letters those who fell in battle would never get. This is the first Easter of this Great War centenary that began last summer. I doubt if you came here wanting to be reminded of war on Easter morning. It was such a lovely morning Edward had written. Perhaps on a beautiful spring day in Picardy where, even in the desert of the front line a daffodil or two might dare to raise its head, perhaps Edward could forget the war for an instant. Maybe it’s possible as we keep this beautiful and holy feast in the Cathedral to forget the conflicts of our own time for an hour.  

Or so we think. But we must not leave those worries outside the church door. ‘Lest we forget’ matters just as as much on Easter Day as it does on Remembrance Sunday. Let me say why. Like the poem, St John’s Gospel takes us back to a garden. Peter and John come running to Jesus’ tomb. They find the stone rolled away, the cave empty. But someone else has been there all along, ever since before dawn: Mary Magdalen, the woman who had loved Jesus so intensely. When the two men go back she stays there, ‘weeping outside the tomb’. On that first Easter morning there are tears, just as there are tears today for so many in our world. But then comes the wonderful moment of recognition. She thinks the stranger is the gardener, wants to know where he has taken the body. ‘And Jesus said to her…’ But how do you possibly put into a word all that is conveyed as he calls her by her name. At that instant she understands, and believes. After the terrible ordeal of God Friday when she had stood close to the cross watching Jesus die, she has a rush of conviction, a surge of hope. Rabbouni! she exclaims.

This Easter garden is full of symbolism. Go and visit ours in the Galilee Chapel of this Cathedral. In one way it’s the beauty of spring time, the yearly marvel of nature’s renewal. ‘The winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come.’ But it’s much more than that. This garden takes us back to creation when, said the ancient story, God planted a garden in Eden and placed Adam there to look after it. St John is saying to us: here is a new paradise, indeed, a new world, a new creation. And yes, Jesus is indeed the gardener, just as Adam was, for this Last Adam comes into his garden on the first day of the week to begin his great work of re-making the world as God wants it to be. Morning has broken, like the first day. The day after Jesus has finished what he came to do, and has kept the Sabbath and rested in the tomb, the week begins all over again with a sunrise of wonder that heralds a new dawn for the world. It brings a new hope to raise up broken spirits. And with it the promise that the risen Christ will one day make all things new.

At Easter in 1917, like first century Judaea and our own 21^st century, there are tears. They may be tears of personal grief and loss like Mary’s, like the bereaved who have lost cherished loved ones, with memories of Easters past that come flooding back this morning. This morning I am grieving a good colleague and friend I suddenly lost a week ago and trying to share the heartache his wife and children are going through. I am thinking of Jewish people keeping Passover this week like our ancestors, in fear of the future; thinking too of Christians under the iron fist of Islamic State who will celebrate Easter in terror; and Christian refugees far from home in Turkey and Jordan, and the families of the students in Kenya shot without mercy last week because they were Christians and not Muslims. Is it possible that human beings can be so cruel? If we have any feeling for humanity, our hearts break for the pain of the world. Just as God’s heart must break too as he weeps over us.

Yet Easter says to you, to me, to all of us, to the entire human family if only it would listen: do not lose heart. Do not be afraid. Reawaken the hope you once had. Or if you never had it, if hope has eluded you for a lifetime, go to the garden. Go to the empty tomb, go to the very place where it seems he is absent, and find that he is alive and present and among us. Find that as then, so now, he calls us by our name and invites us to step out of the shadows of the tomb into the marvellous light of resurrection.

Edward Thomas’s world was not very different from ours. Even on a beautiful spring day in Eastertime, death can stalk us as it did him. His widow’s memoir tells how he went to France deeply afraid, with an awful sense of foreboding. Yet his last letter to Eleanor recalling a hidden Easter egg still rises to the conviction that he will keep a day for praise. Like her poem, we sow seeds today, seeds of faith, of hope, and of overflowing love. What are they when the world is so dark and we protest ‘O God, why?’, when events baffle us and make us afraid, when our burdens and our planet’s feel just too heavy to bear? Faith and hope and love are everything. They give us back our disintegrated lives, put back together by the crucified and risen Lord. We glimpse how we can learn to trust once more, how life can begin again. The good news of Easter is that even at the grave, even when everything seems hopeless and we feel at our most helpless, we sing alleluia. Morning has broken! This is the day that the Lord has made. It’s a day for praise. He is risen.

Durham Cathedral, Easter Day 2015. John 20: 1-18

Supper at Emmaus: a farewell sermon

St Luke is one of the best storytellers in the Bible. Take the gospel we have just heard. What we love about it is the way it leads up to the moment of recognition. The two disciples trudge wearily back from Jerusalem ‘looking sad’ says Luke,for they thought they had lost the one who had become the very focus of their lives. That man had been crucified two days before. It had felt like the end, such hopes had they invested in him. Skilfully, Luke moves the story from bafflement to disclosure. The couple talk with the stranger who walks with them. They invite him in to share a meal, ‘and their eyes were opened and they recognised him’. All the pent-up tension in the story is resolved. There is catharsis, a dramatic cleansing. Something new has happened, and the world is a different place from before. That is the power of Easter.

A recognition scene is always a satisfying climax to a story. And perhaps it is not so big a leap of the imagination to make a connection with what we are doing here this evening. Principally, we are here to celebrate the Christian eucharist. Luke’s whole purpose in telling his story about Emmaus is clear: every time we gather at table in memory of Jesus, eyes are opened; there is a disclosure. So in this Easter season, wecome to the altar and perform this simple, this ancient, this profound fourfold action. We take bread, we bless it, break it and give it; and as we do, we know that the risen Christ is among us. We recognise him in the words we hear and in the bread we break, and in the faces of one another who share it. Every eucharist is a recognition scene.

For St Luke, recognition is not simply seeing Jesus in a new way, as risen and alive in our midst. It leads us to see one another in new ways too. Because Easter transforms the whole of life, it raises all our relationships into a new realm. Affection, loyalty, colleagueship, friendship, love all begin to glow in the light of Easter. We glimpse the God-given potential that lies within every human encounter and commitment. Indeed, we glimpse Jesus in the midst whenever heart reaches out to heart, whenever men, women and children understand that it is not good for us to be alone. Recognition transfigures things, as every lover knows. For St Luke Easter is the birthday of the church because it means the renewal of every aspect of life and gateway to new possibilities as they are gathered up and given fresh expression in the resurrection of Jesus.

And that brings me to the other reason we are here tonight. We are saying farewell and thank you to Jonathan Lawson who has been chaplain of this College for a decade. We may feel that like Jesus at Emmaus, no sooner have we ‘recognised’ him than he vanishes from our sight and disappears north of Tyne. But recognition comes into this too, for it is a word we use when we want to express appreciation and thankfulness to a colleague and friend. And I think I speak for all of you when I use that language. We recognise Jonathan for the decade of commitment he has given this College as its chaplain and in ways that have extended well beyond that role. He has loved this place and its community. Perhaps he would like us to say that he ‘recognised’ something here that he could give himself to, invest in, help build up so that it could flourish. And I believe we need to say that we have recognised these qualities in him, and thank him for his dedicated, caring immersion into the life of this college. He has, I suspect, touched more lives than perhaps he can ever know.

In the Emmaus story, there is one other dimension to Luke’s carefully crafted narrative. There is the parting of friends: Jesus disappears, and for the second time that day, the disciples are left alone. But this time, it is in a very different spirit from the empty forlornness of that afternoon. ‘That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem.’ That meant another seven mile journey, this time in the dark with all the threats it held. Yet the memory of what had happened to them when the stranger broke the bread in their home impelled them; it energised them to go back to tell the others that Jesus had risen from the dead. The memory held a legacy, and acting on it could not wait, not even the few hours until morning. This too was an act of recognition: to understand what was required of them by the events they had played a part in.

So, what we recognise at this farewell service is not simply a past decade with so much to celebrate. We also recognise the legacy of Jonathan’s service here, and how it contributes to shaping the future without him. That legacy, I believe, has been to consolidate chaplaincy in this College in a way that has been admired across the University. I even dare to say that some Durham colleges that have no chaplain have envied StHild and St Bede for its privileged position as a college that is so well provided for. This is thanks to generous funding by the Hild-Bede Trust, a legacy of the time when the two colleges of St Hild and St Bede were Church of England teacher training colleges.

Chaplaincy offers many benefits to a college. Maintaining services, supporting the music of the choir, and giving pastoral care to those who make the chapel their spiritual home is only a part of this - vital, but only a part nevertheless. A chaplain cares about the life of the whole college. He or she is freely available to all its members whether they are students or staff, whether they are observant Christians, belong to another faith or practise no faith at all. The presence of a chaplain adds the dimension of looking beyond the visible and tangible aspects of a college into its deeper values and ethics, its collective imagination, conscience, spirit. It adds what I call ‘religious intelligence’, that is, an understanding of the part religion plays in public life, something that is crucial in today’s diverse society of many faiths and many degrees of agnosticism especially in the articulate world of higher education. Chaplains who minister in open and inclusive ways are part of the glue that hold communities together; they help prevent dangerous misunderstandings that polarise institutions.  This is as true of a Durham college as it is of workplaces such as hospitals, schools, the armed services and prisons. Even in the secular environment of a modern higher education institution, religion is inevitably part of the public discourse as it is in the world at large. This is why chaplaincy is important and worth investing in.

It is now for this College to do its own work of recognition and take Jonathan’s legacy forward. Like the disciples at Emmaus, it is for us to remember what has happened here, and act on it. We do this conscious of the void that is left when we say farewell. But we also do it in the spirit of Easter: gratefully, courageously, confidently and gladly. So thank you, Jonathan, for all that you have brought to us, and all that you have done among us. God bless you in your future ministry; and God bless us here as we continue what you have so effectively sustained during your Durham years as our chaplain and our friend.

Emmaus and a Winter's Tale

It’s the 450^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Not long ago we went to see The Winter’s Tale. It’s a late drama, hard to classify. It starts out as a tragedy where, like Othello, the tragic flaw is jealousy. Leontes imagines that his friend Polixenes is having an affair with his wife Hermione. The drama shows a man eaten up by self-absorption and jealousy, his rapid disintegration bringing about the collapse of a whole family with the deaths of his wife and his young son. But then comedy breaks in. The famous stage direction exit, pursued by a bear introduces a note of parody as if nothing is quite what it seems. There is a clown and dancing; all is set for a happy ending, though we can’t guess how Shakespeare will get there. Well, he uses a device that puzzles critics because it seems to resort to trickery. Paulina brings a statue of lost Hermione back to life. It’s a tease: we don’t know if she was really dead or had just been hidden away and looked after by Paulina. But in a beautiful recognition scene she and Leontes are reunited and the play achieves catharsis.

Does the comedy, following hard on the heels of so much grimness, mock what went before as if to say, don’t take any of this too seriously: it’s just playful illusion? Perhaps it’s a parody on both tragedy and comedy: the scarcely believable speed at which things go wrong at the beginning, the sudden lurch into careless comedy complete with songs, ballet, slapstick and a miracle (if that’s what it is) to end with and undermine belief still further. Or is Shakespeare showing his mastery by merging tragedy and comedy in one art-work and making what is unbelievable at one level credible at another?

I see resonances in The Winter's Tale of the central Christian story of the passion and resurrection of Christ.  It seems to take us through a passion-like experience of suffering and pain into a realm of laughter, reconciliation and dancing that suggest resurrection and the kingdom of God. It’s one great transformation scene that leads us out of winter into summer, bringing colour into the greyscale it began with. Paulina has a great line near the end: ‘it is required you do awake your faith’. Which is why, when the statue comes to life (and who envies the actor who has to stand there so still for so long?), you smile at the ludicrousness of what is happening, and yet find yourself believing in it and being deeply moved by this recognition scene. Theatre is always an act of faith for playwright, actors and above all, audience. In The Winter's Tale, we are drawn rather wonderfully into the life of things that are both tragic and comic. It’s either parody or it’s gospel - or maybe both, because in an important way the gospel parodies the self-importance of so much of life and says: look beyond this and see something that is not transient but real and that lasts for ever.

Many of the Easter stories in the gospels are recognition scenes: the astonishing reversal of separation and loss in the joyful reunion of followers and friends with the risen Jesus.  Think of Mary Magdalen, supposing him to be the gardener, hearing him pronounce her name and recognising him as Rabbouni.  Think of the eleven behind locked doors and the Visitor who greeted them as only Jesus could, ‘peace be with you’.  Think of Thomas who would not believe, and his radiant confession of faith: ‘my Lord and my God’.  Think of Peter and the disciples after the miraculous catch of fish: ‘it is the Lord!’ All rather like statues brought back to life.

But for supreme artistry, go to St Luke’s story of Emmaus that we heard this morning.  The two disconsolate disciples trudging back home, joined by unknown stranger; their conversation on the road, the supper at which guest turns host, the familiar action of bread blessed and broken, the moment of recognition, the excited return to the city to tell the others – it is exquisitely told: there is not a false note anywhere.  Its intimacy and naturalness, its portrayal of the characters strikes us as entirely believable.  We are there: it is happening before our eyes.  Indeed, so vivid is it that we want to go beyond the sense of watching a drama happening to other people and say: truly this is happening to us. 

The journey is a favourite theme of St Luke. His Jesus is always on the move: indeed, the gospel is largely constructed around the theme of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem that ends in suffering and death.  But here is a journey from Jerusalem. It reminds me of that early story Luke tells about how Jesus’ family were going home after their visit to Jerusalem for the feast. His parents think the lad is among the crowd, but he isn’t. So back they go, and find him in the temple, recognise him ‘in my father’s house’, going about his Father’s business. Here is another journey, only this time, the Emmaus two think Jesus is not with them, yet they find he is.  Christ incognito, absent yet present, hidden yet disclosed, abased yet glorified, unknown yet well-known – these are St Luke’s themes.  And, says today’s story, when we take the risk of travel, walk by faith into an unknown future, the risen Christ comes to us as our fellow-traveller. There is recognition.  There is joy.  

There is another way in which we find we recognise. Luke’s gospel is a story full of eating and drinking.  Many of his key moments happen at the meal table where Jesus eats with tax-gatherers and sinners.  At the last supper he teaches his disciples about true service, and what the giving of his own body and blood will mean.  Does this recall how it was through a first supper that the human race was banished from paradise, when the man and the woman took the forbidden fruit and ‘the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’.  At that primordial meal, two people came to a recognition that led to death.  At the Emmaus meal, two people come to a recognition that leads to life.  ‘Their eyes were opened and they recognised him’ says Luke; as if to say: here, at Easter, with the first supper of the first day of the week, here is a new beginning.  Humanity’s long exile is over.  The way back to paradise is open at last. Eyes are opened; new life is breathed into our cold, rigid, statuesque existence. We recognise the risen Lord, we know who and what we are in the resurrection of Jesus.

In these days of Easter we celebrate with joyful hearts the memory of God’s wonderful works.  Luke says that the risen Christ walks with us, reveals to us the mystery of his being, crosses the threshold of our lives so that we recognise the one who wants to make his home with us.  What more do we need to know?  Like the disciples on that far-off day, we too are joined by the stranger who walks this earth and speaks to us of peace and hope.  ‘We greet him the days we meet him, and bless when we understand’, said Gerard Manley Hopkins, when the half-light of our existence is transformed into the full light of God’s new day, and our eyes are opened, and our hearts burn within us. Like Leontes, we know that it is required that we ‘awake our faith’, but that is precisely God’s Easter gift to us: that we recognise him, and know him, and love him, and find ourselves surprised by joy that our lives are given back to us, and winter’s tale has been transformed into spring.