A Sermon for the Desert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On a Snow-Capped Mountain: Transfiguration then and now

There is a physical geography in today’s gospel and there is a geography of the soul. St Matthew tells us that Jesus and three disciples went up a ‘high’ mountain. Which one? There is only one serious candidate for me, and that is Mount Hermon in the far north of what is now Israel. We know from the previous chapter that Jesus has been in the district of Caesarea Philippi where Peter confesses him to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Here the infant River Jordan flows out of a mysterious cave in the cliff where there was once a shrine to the god Pan. I have a precious relic from this numinous place, a piece of limestone from the river bed that I brought back from a pilgrimage there. The headwaters of Jordan rise behind the cliff on the south-west flank of the great Hermon range. At nearly 3000 metres high, it is covered with snow for most of the year, a towering backdrop to the borderlands of Lebanon, Syria and Israel. This gleaming white mountain is my candidate for the transfiguration despite the claims made for Mount Tabor, which is much further south and just a modest hillock compared to Hermon. ‘His clothes became dazzling white’ says Matthew, and even if this is not persuasive, the three summits of the massif seem to echo the threefold company of Jesus, Moses and Elijah.

Israelis in Galilee call Hermon ‘the eyes of the nation’, a poetic epithet for a sinister purpose, which is to be home to Israel’s strategic early warning system located on one of its summits. For this is troubled territory. When I was there we were driven through the Golan Heights, the ancient hills where, as every chorister knows from the Psalms, Og was king of Bashan. This is occupied Syrian territory, and I wondered what risks we ran by driving through it in tourist buses.  It was not reassuring to pass through a ruined Syrian village, shot to rubble by Israeli artillery in the Six Day War. On both sides of the road alarming signs with skull and crossbones warned of minefields. With the tragedy of Syria in all our minds today, the memory of stopping beneath the foothills of Hermon and looking into Syria is strong.  Near here the ancient Via Maris headed towards Damascus only about 50 km away, with the memory of St Paul’s transfiguring encounter on that road. We could see beautiful vineyards and cherry orchards in blossom; but we could also see watch towers, radio transmission posts, barbed wire and army barracks, for these are turbulent, troubled landscapes.

In these foothills of Hermon is the wonderful castle of Subeibe which we visited. It has both an Arab and a Crusader history.  The ruin is set on a spectacular spur from which there are marvellous views across to the mountain. The fortress was built in the 13^th century by a nephew of the Islamic warrior Saladin to pre-empt an attack on Damascus by Crusaders. I have to confess that it was a relief from the holy sites which can become a shade oppressive when you are seeing so many in a short time. There were no biblical associations in these underground cisterns, winding staircases and forbidding towers. Yet the very existence of this fortress underlined how this sunny landscape held a dark side, for it has been fought over since the dawn of time, and the bloodshed is not over yet.

My point is that this is the landscape where transfiguration happens. Christ reveals his glory not in the imagined oasis of ‘sabbath rest by Galilee, the calm of hills above’ but where lands have been and still are bitterly contested, where blood goes on being shed, where human beings exact cruelty and pain on one another. You could say they are lands of crucifixion. St Matthew frames his transfiguration story with predictions of how Jesus will be made to suffer. At Banyas under Mount Hermon, Caesarea Philippi, where he has been recognised and proclaimed, Jesus begins to ‘show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised’. Afterwards when they are back in Galilee, he says that ‘the Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised’. Even on the mountain’s flank, he speaks about how ‘they did to Elijah whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man is to suffer at their hands’.

In the first three gospels, Hermon is the turning point in Jesus’ career. When Jesus descends from these snowy heights of the north, it will be to return south again, back down into his homeland of Galilee, and beyond that, to Jerusalem itself. The holy city is where he will face his crisis, and he needs to prepare his followers for what ‘must’ come to pass – the texts underline that little word ‘must’ because it is not only his choice but his destiny. So already, on the mountain of glory, the passion is in view. Hermon is a long way from Judea, yet distance is collapsed in the geography of the spirit. It’s to say that we must not be misled as to the meaning of transfiguration. Yes, it is to be overwhelmed by the vision of divine splendour and the prospect that all of life, the whole of creation, and ourselves with it will one day be transformed from one degree of glory to another. The new heaven and the new earth are palpable on that summit, as they are whenever we find ourselves on some summit shared or alone, some peak experience as we say, when the air is suddenly thin and the colours glow and the ordinary falls away and we feel we know ‘the hills where our life rose and the sea where it goes’.

But the gospel writers would not want us to slip into that way of speaking too easily. They would urge us not to dislocate the story from its context. They would say: remember where Hermon is, remember that these dangerous lands have long known conflict and suffering. And remember how before his transfiguration and in its glowing aftermath, Jesus felt the icy shadow of pain and death fall across his heart. Remember that the cross is his true glory, his self-giving love for the human family for which he was content to be betrayed, and given into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death at Golgotha. This is why all the gospels speak of the cross as transfigured glory, the deep and dazzling darkness in which, as we gaze at it with awe and faith, we see the light of everlasting love.

We stand on the threshold of Lent, about to embark on the journey towards Easter. To be on Hermon is like the Hebrews on Mount Pisgah, looking out across to the promised land. For us today, that promised land is Easter. We have a journey to make to get there. It may be rough and steep, but it will be filled with its own beauty and reward: the desert is a place of wild beasts and angels, says St Mark where life is stripped thin and bare so that we can glimpse glory. I am saying that it is time to turn from the mountain to the plain and learn once again whatever God has to teach us in that desert’s tough but cleansing place. It is time to turn towards Jerusalem where faith will be tested in the time of trial, and where we shall walk the via dolorosa with Jesus and with suffering humanity and pray that he will take into himself the pain of the world. Time too to turn towards the resurrection we celebrate on this first day of the week, the risen glory that the transfiguration foreshadows. Time to pray the ancient prayer that God may show us his glory and beckon us to embrace it, time to reawaken our hope that one day all creation will find what it has longed for since time began, where there will be no more darkness or dazzling but one equal light.

Durham Cathedral, 2 March 2014
Matthew 17. 1-13

Candlemas

I am glad to be here on your patronal festival, especially as an envoy of the diocese of which your former bishop is now legally the incumbent. We are sorry to have stolen him from you. However, I hope you will still receive the warm greetings of Durham Cathedral, the only other Romanesque cathedral in the northern province.  

Down with the rosemary, and so /Down with the bays and mistletoe;

Down with the holly, ivy, all / Wherewith ye dressed the Christmas hall;

That so the superstitious find /Not one least branch there left behind;

For look, how many leaves there be /Neglected there, maids, trust to me,

So many goblins you shall see.

Robert Herrick was writing in the 17th century.  It sounds like a poem about Twelfth Night.  But it's called ‘Ceremony upon Candle­mas Eve’.  In those days they kept the Christ­mas decorations up for 40 days.  Then, on 2 February, they took them down and, in some rural parts of England at least, burnt them: bonfires to light up dark nights in honour of Christ the world’s true light. In the middle ages, Candlemas was an occasion for elaborate ceremonies of blessing tapers and carrying them in procession to light up churches and much partying.  In Durham Cathedral, a great row blew up in 1628, the puritans alleging that the high church party had lit 60 candles on the holy table, while they claimed it was only two.  Durham has always enjoyed a good argument about liturgy.  There are echoes of pre-Christian rituals here: Roman lighting candles to banish evil spirits, or Celts kindling fires at this time of year to mark the end of winter as the days grow perceptibly longer and snowdrops and crocuses signal that spring will soon be here. 

Candlemas is the last official day of Christmas.  Like the 40 days of resurrection from Easter to Ascension, these past 40 days of incarnation have kept before us the truth of the Word made flesh.  At Candlemas we recall how Jesus is brought by his parents as an infant of 40 days to be presented in the temple and blessed by God.  Simeon acclaims him as ‘a light to lighten the gentiles’: Light of the world, Light of all people, Light of life.  And we who stand by, looking on as Simeon cradles this little human light in his arms, we too are ready to sing our own Nunc Dimittis.  For we have seen all that is worth seeing: we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.  We can depart in peace.

Those loving parents, and old Simeon and Anna, and the little tiny child – all of humanity is there. Rembrandt depicted this scene many times in his paintings and etchings.  He returned to it again and again, fascinated by the inter­play of themes: intimacy and vastness, child­hood and old age, life's dawning and its eventide, prom­ise and ful­filment, darkness and light. It is the scale of these pictures that is so memor­able: the immense spaces of the temple, and at its centre, the tiny figures of the holy fam­ily, like a fragile colony of life precariously nurtured in a shadowy cave.  You wonder about those lowering shades that seem to press in upon that tiny point of light.  Will the light grow in that darkness and finally overcome it - or is the darkness about to close in upon the light, extinguish it, snuff out what has been carried at such cost in Mary's womb?

They are sublimely accurate, these paintings.  They portray things as they are, the dark-and-light realities God takes on as he comes among us and shares our human condition.  By now, we know that Christmas has not suddenly made the world all right again, though we longed and prayed for it, for peace on earth and goodwill to all people, ‘hoping it might be so’.  The shadows and the darkness are real enough.  The massacre of the inno­cents shows how fragile incarnation is.  According to St Matthew, the infant Jesus had to cling precariously on to life in a world as mis­chievous and as viol­ent and as mur­der­ous as we know it to be today.  The Candlemas story foreshadows the child's destiny.  ‘A sword will pierce your own soul too’ says Simeon to Mary.  It is another annun­ciation that sets her pon­dering in her heart all over again as she feels Golgotha looming over the holy family, foresees another, crueller, presenta­tion of Christ, when he will be handed over into the hands of wicked men to suffer death upon a cross. W. H. Auden has a poem ‘At the Manger Mary Sings’.  He has Mary say to her child, with terrible foreboding yet infinite love: How soon will you start on the sorrowful way?  Dream while you may.

So Candlemas has a poignancy as well as joy about it.  We have said goodbye to the festive cheerfulness that warmed up the bleak midwinter.  The crib will be put away for another year, its pieces disassembled into a forlorn plastic bag.  Tomorrow it will be ordinary time again, and soon Lent and ashes: ‘dust you are and to dust you shall return’.  Christians in the east call Candlemas ‘the meeting’, the strange meeting between old and new covenant, between Christmas and Lent, light and dark, nativ­ity and cross.  In the Candlemas ceremony in this liturgy we shall mark the end of Christmas by carrying candles in procession, and then – get ready for it - blowing them out.  It is a deliber­ate, almost sacri­legious thing to do: to snuff out the very light of the infant Jesus.  In Advent it was darkness to light; now in a way it is light to darkness: the human pattern so familiar in our world today as we watch nations and peoples being drawn inexorably into destructiveness and conflict; familiar to people with no home or livelihood or friends; familiar to anyone who has lost someone they loved; familiar to all of us in a thousand different ways.  It is as if a shadow falls across what light we have.  The cross is always present. 

This time of year is paradoxical.  It makes you wonder about the mystery of things, how ‘joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine’ as Blake says; how our light, glorious as it is, is as yet only partial; how spring tries to prize this world out of winter’s clasp, yet frost clings on to its soul.  God forbid that at this precarious time in our history, the threats we face should hold us fast for ever.  There is the ecstasy of the crib and the agony of the cross and these two belong together.  But it is still true that the days are growing longer, and the sap is rising.  The worst of winter may not yet be over, but February doesn’t last forever, thank God.  Spring will come, and Lent’s lengthening light.  Soon we shall climb towards Easter.  Today we light candles of longing in dark places and even when they are put out, we keep the memory of a precious flame alive for when the day breaks, and shadows flee away, and Christ is the glory of the nations, and hope is emptied in delight.

2 February 2014, on the Feast of the Presentation, Southwell Minster

Luke 2: 22-40

For Holocaust Memorial Day

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.  It’s a day to remember the millions who perished at the hand of the Nazis and in the other genocides and acts of ethnic cleansing of modern times.  We need it to strengthen our resolve to build a more peaceable world in which every member of the human family is equally valued and where prejudice has no place.  We need it to reinforce our prayer that what happened in Armenia, in Germany and in Europe, in Cambodia, Uganda, Rwanda and Bosnia and is still happening in Southern Sudan, the Central African Republic, in parts of the middle east will not happen again, anywhere, ever. 

In the Nazi holocaust, two thirds of all the Jews in Europe perished. Survivors carry the physical and emotional scars with them in memories that can never fully be healed.  It is part of my own psyche too, as a ‘second generation survivor’ as we are called.  Almost too late, my grandparents got my uncle and my mother out of Germany before the borders were closed.  But for that, they would have been transported to Treblinka, Dachau or Auschwitz with other members of the family.  This country took them in. Thank God for British kindness to the stranger, the refugee, the asylum-seeker.

The holocaust was and is a defining experience in the life of Jewish people today, and probably always will be. It has become part of the long story that defines that community and its capacity to survive extreme persecution. The Passover haggadah tells of how the Hebrews were resident in Egypt. Pharaoh made slaves of them, piled on the oppression until they managed to flee for safety across the Red Sea at the hand of Moses and Aaron. Escaping to a land of safety across the water was precisely my mother’s experience. The Festival of Purim recalls how Queen Esther, the Jewish consort of a pagan king, acts with supreme courage to save her people from extinction.  Yet another feast, Hannukah, commemorates a fierce persecution of the 2^nd century BC when a Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated the temple in Jerusalem and exacted a terrible price on Jews who would not bow to his will and abandon their covenant. This time it is Judas Maccabaeus, the ‘hammer’, who saved them. These are not the only holocausts written into the history of Judaism.

This background helps us to see why ‘holocaust’, Sho’ah, literally a whole burnt offering of flesh, stands as a symbol of genocide.  Our question must be: what do we say and do in the face of it? I don’t mean the Jewish holocaust only, but every genocide where the same story gets acted out in new places and new ways. The inventiveness and dark imagination of evil seems to know no limit. 

In the Hebrew Bible, the ‘Old’ Testament as we call it, many texts try to grapple with the question of why human beings suffer. The greatest of them is the Book of Job. It tells of a devout, religious man who finds himself progressively afflicted with terrible diseases, has his house and home destroyed, loses all his children. Mrs Job asks why how this could possibly have come about. ‘Curse God and die!’ But this is precisely what he will not do. He is baffled, like she is, but he chooses to stay with the unanswerable questions while all along knowing that he has done nothing to deserve this personal holocaust of his. And then, says the story, his friends come along to keep him company as he sits among the ashes. Although they will utter plenty of thoughtless nonsense later on, they are at least wise enough to stay silent to begin with, not just for a few minutes but for an entire week, ‘for they saw that his suffering was very great’. 

There is something we can learn in that picture of friends standing by silently. When we are in the presence of suffering, it’s not that the words fail us, or not only that. It’s how best we stand in solidarity with suffering human beings, honour them in their ordeals.  Silence is not passivity.  When we go to the site of a terrible atrocity, we know that we are not simply onlookers, sightseers of history. There is ‘work’ to be done here: mental, heart-work, spiritual work that should change us, transform our attitudes to suffering and injustice, empower us to act for the victim, the voiceless and the weak. 

A few years ago my wife and I went to the Bay of Naples to visit Pompeii, the Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. It was a human disaster on a vast scale. To see the moulds taken of men, women and children found in the rubble, showing them bracing themselves helplessly against a relentless, unpitying, power is deeply moving. But with millions of people visiting the site each year, you now have to run the gauntlet of a ‘shadow’ money-spinning city of fast food outlets, hawkers of tacky souvenirs, lurid entertainments of every kind that has grown up outside the gates. It does not prepare you to visit the site of a tragedy. Our guide took us round in an irritating jokey way that was far more interested in erotic paintings inside the prostitutes’ house than in human suffering and grief. We wanted somewhere to be silent, like Job’s friends, try to take in what a momentous place it was, this arena of suffering and grief. The least we could do was to remember silently.

As we commemorate the victims of holocaust today and tomorrow, I hope we can find some way of being reflective and thoughtful, perhaps, if we are people of faith, saying a simply prayer like kyrie eleison, ‘Lord have mercy’, or the Lord’s Prayer, ‘save us from the time of trial and deliver us from the evil one’. If our nation could be quiet, like it is on Armistice Day, if we could collectively stand alongside the victims of every place, it would help us to act with more compassion and justice in the future, to speak out for the voiceless, to take in those who flee from terror like my mother, do all we can to make this world a better place for our children and grandchildren.

The gospel reading spoke about how Jesus began his public ministry by calling people to repent, to turn away from what was dark and destructive and turn towards the light of grace and truth dawning on the world. He spoke of it as the kingdom of heaven drawing near. He called people to follow him, say yes to this world made new. Perhaps those who felt the heavy hand of imperial Rome crushing the life out of them found a new hope rising up before them. And we say: if only those who still harbour cruelty in their hearts could hear this, could feel the stirrings within of another, better, kinder way to live!  

At the end of St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus prays from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’  That is the agonised cry of so many who sufferer, not least those who like him are victims of other peoples’ cruelty. But St Luke tells the story differently. He has Jesus utter one of the most extraordinary prayers ever breathed.  While he hangs there, mocked and ridiculed by his persecutors, by the bystanders, even by the man dying on the cross next to his, he prays: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’.  Face to face with death, another voice, kind and merciful, invites us to turn back towards the light. There is light and hope for those who sat in darkness, a redemption so universal in its scope that includes even the perpetrators of evil who sit in the darkness of their own making. And we who stand in silent solidarity with victims bearing witness to all that is wrong need to be fortified by the announcement that the kingdom of heaven is near. Faith says that the long-awaited dawn the prophet foretold is breaking. The Saviour, Christus Victor, has overcome the world.  

St Chad’s College Durham, 26 January 2014
Isaiah 9.1-4; Matthew 4.12-22

A Long History of Care: Founders' Day at the Hospital of God, Greatham

It is a long history that we commemorate here at Greatham each Founders’ Day. When Robert de Stichill founded the Hospital of God in 1273, he no was no doubt influenced by the example of his Cathedral Priory in Durham where he had been a monk. He dedicated this chapel to St Mary and St Cuthbert, like the Cathedral: perhaps he wanted to invoke the tradition of Benedictine hospitality that lay at the heart of the Priory’s daily work and ministry. The care of the poor and needy was always a call of monks living under Benedict’s Rule. ‘Welcome everyone as if they were Christ himself’ it says.

This was why Greatham was not simply a ‘hospital’ in the medieval sense, a place of safety, sanctuary and care. It was a hospital of God. Its business was to imitate and live out God’s own hospitality to those who most needed his protection, the people the Hebrew Bible speaks of as his special treasure, the poor. Bishop Stichill was undertaking a project of love: that is what this place represents. ‘Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels unawares’ it says in our reading this morning.

In Durham, the visible survivals of the Priory’s hospitality are scant: the foundations of the guest hall underneath what are now desirable flats in a heritage setting; the remains of the infirmary beneath the Archdeacon’s house.  The monks’ dormitory itself survives, of course: its great length running along an entire range of the cloister and its grand 15^th century timber roof make it one of the great rooms of England. It tells you something not only about the size and wealth of the Priory but about the importance it attached to accommodating the community properly.

But you have to go to France to see a ‘hospital’ in the Greatham sense whose whole reason for being was to serve the sick and the poor. This is the Hospices de Beaune in Burgundy, one of the best architectural statements of medieval charity I know.  There, a room the size of Durham’s dormitory has beds in cells along its walls and, at the far end, an altar where once upon a time the great Last Judgment triptych of Roger Van der Weyden used to hang, a proper focus for the infirm and dying who lay facing it along the length of the dormitory.  It reminded guests that it was God himself who received and entertained them. It was his kindness and care that was expressed through the hands of the staff who looked after them. Like Greatham, that charity continues to serve the sick and needy today.

It seems to me that these couple of words, of God, make all the difference: the Hospital of God. No doubt it was true, when Robert de Stichill founded it, that all charitable endeavour was done for God and in his name: this is what Christendom meant. When we consider how many of our charitable institutions in Europe originated in the medieval vision of a holistic society, whether in education, health care or the service of the elderly and poor, we have to recognise that there was something rather wonderful in the church’s commitment to emulate the generosity of God in its service of humanity.

No doubt there was a lot wrong with those centuries and their preoccupation with temporal power and wealth. Robert de Stichall was one of those who insisted most strongly on wielding his Palatinate power as a prince-bishop, and that should give us pause. But perhaps he redeemed himself by founding this Hospital, endowing large resources to Greatham so that it could care for the needy and vulnerable within his Palatinate realm. We don’t know if he or other prince-bishops had an uneasy conscience about their riches. I am not above helping the wealthy to assuage their consciences by means of substantial charitable giving. And in this place and on this day, we should pray for him as we celebrate our Founder, that he may indeed be resting in peace in gratitude for what his charity continues to do today.

In this Epiphany season, we have been hearing once more the story of the Magi who came to find the infant Christ. Perhaps the gifts they brought him out of their own wealth and power give us an image of a resplendent prince-bishop doing something similar: bending low enough to see and worship the Infant, offering him what he had to give. Can we see in the gold, frankincense and myrrh not simply valuable gifts in their own right, but symbols of the offering of all of life to God in the person of his incarnate Son? The long journey of the Magi, their humility in paying homage to the Child, the generosity of their gifts – it is all in such stark contrast to the fearful, grasping Herod whose clenched fist batters the Hebrew children and drowns their innocence in a bloodbath.  

What use had Jesus of gold? Or frankincense, or myrrh? Not much, I think. In the lovely Epiphany operetta Amahl and the Night Visitors, the composer portrays the Magi as begging shelter for the night at a woman’s hovel where she and her crippled son eke out a parlous existence as best they can. Here, seeing how the gold seduces an impoverished mother, the wise men come to recognise that a Sovereign whose kingship is not from this world does not need these things. All he needs is the homage and love of loyal subjects. The poor cripple-boy wants to make his offering to this new-born Child too. All he has to give is his crutch. As he offers it, he finds that he is miraculously healed. And that somehow feels so much more authentic a gift than all the gold in the world.

And yet, like the bread and wine of the eucharist, any gift offered and blessed through the giving has transformative power. Even poor gold such as the magi offered; like Bishop Stichill’s wealth. This Hospital is the result, still here, still true to its founder’s vision all these centuries later. That is something to celebrate on Founders’ Day. And because his money and resources were offered to God as an act of charity, this this is not just any hospital. It is the Hospital of God. It derives its name and its meaning from why and how the gift was offered. What we do here we do in God’s name, because he is that kind of god: generous, open-handed, far-seeing, compassionate, kind.  It’s not that other institutions in the business of health care and alleviating social need don’t demonstrate real excellence and utter commitment. They do, and we thank God. But I want to say that the excellence and commitment of the Hospital of God has a particular quality, a character that derives from its name, its founder’s intentions and its long, long history of care. 

It is hard to put into words, but I believe we know it when we see it, because we can recognise the hand of God in it at a conscious level. ‘Recognised or not, the Deity is always present’ wrote Carl Jung above the entrance of his clinic at Zürich. God is present, if unrecognised, in so much wonderful care exercised by thousands of people day after day across the nation.  But it is especially wonderful when God is acknowledged as the source and inspiration of what we do when we offer hospitality and care for people in name of the Christ who is the same yesterday, today and for ever. For then, strangers become friends, and angels, and we know that we belong to that larger fellowship of those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light. To that place of glory and unending happiness may God bring us all.

Founders’ Day at Greatham Hospital, 23 January 2014
Hebrews 13.1-8, Matthew 2.1-15

My Child, My Beloved: a Baptism Sermon

I sometimes think that going into the new-year, facing the January blues, is a bit like travelling into a strange country. We had got used to 2013. We were at home in it: it felt familiar even if we didn’t always like what it brought. January means a doorway. I know it’s only turning a page on the calendar. Yet it does feel like crossing a threshold where we have to learn to navigate a landscape that will take time to read and understand.

Throughout life there are thresholds to negotiate. Some like new-year are common to us all; some – birthdays, marriage, a new job, retirement, bereavement - are personal to each of us. But each time we face one of these threshold experiences, when we cross over and glimpse something different on the other side, there is to begin with a kind of exile. It is new, and a bit strange.  It’s like being away from home where habits are different and no-one quite speaks your language. And when exile is forced upon you against your will and you have to make your own way on alien soil, it is deeply painful. Listen to the displaced of the Central African Republic or Syria, to refugees and asylum-seekers anywhere.

Our first reading envisages just such a situation. The Hebrew community had been in exile in Babylon, struggling, as they put it, to ‘sing the Lord's song in a strange land’. For half a century, they’d had no reason to think their exile was coming to an end, or that their desperate longings to see their homeland again would be fulfilled.  Prophets like Jeremiah had warned that exile would be long and hard, and the people should learn to accept that this was the will of God, settle down and establish themselves in Babylon and more even than that, pray for the welfare of this godforsaken place.  But then along comes another prophet whose name we do not know though his writings are found in the book of Isaiah. He is full of hope for the future. He foretells that the time is coming when the people will return home, and glory will fill the land. Indeed, not only Israel but ‘all flesh’ shall see it together. The land will resound to songs of celebration as all the nations inherit the blessing once promised to Abraham, and the world is rebuilt on the foundations of truth, justice, freedom and love.

And this prophet of homecoming has something specific to say about Israel’s vocation as the people of God. What are they to do and be when they return home? ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified’. Or as the Greek version has it, ‘you are my pais, my child’. It’s a lovely phrase, but not a new one to Hebrew ears. Two centuries earlier another prophet had declared on God’s behalf in a moving moment of divine self-discloure: ‘When Israel was a child I loved him, and out of Egypt I brought my son’. He went on to record the wayward behaviour of that child. ‘The more I called them, the more they went from me. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk. I took them up in arms but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness; I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.’  What parent or grandparent does not respond to the deep feeling in those words? So now, says Isaiah, the moment has come for the people of the covenant to realise in a new way this vocation to be God’s child, to be those through whom God opens his arms wide and embraces the world. ‘I will give you as a light to the nations’ he says, ‘so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’.

Our Christian hindsight looks back across the centuries to those words. It looks back and recognises that only one person has ever truly embodied that vocation. That truest of Israelites, we Christians say, is Jesus of Nazareth, the one who fulfils the ideal of the Lord’s Child, the infant who lay in the manger and whom shepherds and magi recognised as Immanuel; the one who called God Abba, Father, who learned to see himself as the child who must be about his Father’s business. So we are not surprised that at his baptism, when the sky is torn open and the dove descends, the voice echoes these ancient words of the prophet and cries: ‘This is my Son the beloved, with whom I am well pleased’.

Today, as we baptise Alexander and Lucie, we hear those words again. ‘This is my child, my beloved’.  We hear them spoken to Jesus. But we also hear them spoken to the children who come for baptism, and we hear them spoken to each of us. For what is baptism if not to receive the seal of God’s Spirit that affirms that we are indeed children of God? What is it if it is not the sign that God welcomes us home from exile, receives us back from our strange lands, offers us his generosity, stretches out his arms of love and reaches towards us to embrace us, invites us through Jesus to pray with the words ‘Our Father’?  There is no way of life more dignified, more humanising, more fulfilling than living out this call to be God’s beloved child. The voice says ‘this is my beloved child’ and Lucie and Alexander say ‘yes’ to it today, yes to God’s invitation to become more truly a human being, find their truest selves, embrace the path of light and love, and life in all its abundance.

All this belongs to Alexander and Lucie today. In baptism, each of us is made ‘a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven’ as the old Catechism puts it.  A beloved child of God, the voice from heaven tells us, our names written on his hands: that is what we are when we become members of Christ. Like him, we are in the world to be children, disciples, servants, bearers of light and glory.  Where horizons are dark, and exile threatening, where so many suffer and peace on earth seems distant, where we quickly lose heart and hope begins to fail, baptism is a sign of the God who keeps faith with us. Because of that voice that spoke from heaven, we can safely entrust this world and ourselves to God’s Child who comes to us. With joy we journey on into another year and give a heartfelt welcome to Alexander, Lucie and all who want to walk this Christian way with us.

For if we are God’s children, God’s beloved, we know there is a future worth living for. The world, time, eternity are ours, for we are all Christ's, and Christ is God's.

Durham Cathedral
12 January 2014, The Feast of the Baptism of Christ
Isaiah 42.1-9; Matthew 3.13-end