Holy Week in Hymns 2: "My song is love unknown"

During Holy Week we are looking at some of the hymns we sing during Passiontide. Tonight’s is one of the best known, and also one of the best. “My Song is Love Unknown” is by the seventeenth century clergyman-poet Samuel Crossman. Just after the Civil War, he published a little book of nine hymns called The Young Man’s Meditation, or some few sacred poems. He was the Dean that never was. He was a Canon of Bristol Cathedral and was appointed Dean there but died that same year early in 1683 before he had taken up his office. He had been a Puritan and like two thousand other ministers, was thrown out of the Church of England under the Act of Uniformity in 1662. But he found his way back into the newly re-established church shortly afterwards.

Perhaps that bitter experience of being ejected, homeless and without friends coloured the way he thought about Jesus in his Passion. For this hymn, more than most others, tries to get inside the human experience of passion – not only our experience of Jesus but his experience of us as the One who “was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. To look at the Passion that way is to give us wholly new insights into what it must have meant to take this fore-ordained road to Golgotha and face death at the Place of the Skull.

Let us open up the hymn half way through where we find the emotional and spiritual heart of the entire hymn. “Why, what hath my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite? He made the lame to run, He gave the blind their sight.” Sweet injuries! the poet cries out in a bitter irony. Was it for these things that the Lord is strung up on a cross to be jeered at and spat upon by the crowd that only days before had shouted Hosanna? Why has he been treated with such contempt?

That question comes out of the Old Testament. In the prophecy of Micah (6.1ff), God summons his people to a court of law so that they and he can defend themselves against the charge of breaking faith with each other. The Lord begins his defence in this way: “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” And he carries on by reminding them of all the ways in which he has delivered Israel: “for I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery”. This dialogue is the origin of the Reproaches that are sung on Good Friday, the long, agonised plea from the crucified Jesus to the people who have put him there. “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you?” Why, what hath my Lord done? wonders the poet plangently.

In the Reproaches, and even more in the hymn, this plea becomes not a forensic law court challenge and defence so much as a highly personal lament on the part of a friend who is deeply wronged. Of course, it is the Lord who is suffering this terrible ordeal, none other than the One who came from his blest throne, the Prince of Life for whom heaven was his home. But that exalted title of “Lord” becomes intensely intimate in this hymn. He is not the Lord but my Lord – no fewer than three times, and then a fourth, my dear Lord. It reminds me of Mary Magdalen in the garden on Easter morning. At first she tells the apostles, “they have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him”. But when she encounters the two angels in white, it’s become: “they have taken away my Lord” (John 20.2, 13). That personal pronoun that carries such an intensity of emotion is the key in this poem too. Never was love, dear King, Never was grief like thine.

We have to read these references to Christ’s lordship in the light of the other great word in this hymn, friend. Indeed, we need to read the entire hymn from within the experience of a deep and intimate and wonderful friendship. We can see this coming from the play on words of love right at the outset. Love unknown is the poet’s theme, unknown not because he has to guess at it but because it passes understanding. To quote another hymn beloved here in Wakefield for its author was your Bishop, “It is a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be, That God’s own Son should come to earth And die to save a child like me”. To be sure, it is my Saviour’s love to me, Love to the loveless shown That they might lovely be. It is my Lord who takes frail flesh and dies, who came salvation to bestow.

But as Crossman begins to puzzle over why humanity would not embrace such a guest, why men made strange, and none the Longed-for Christ would know it dawns on him how different are the longings and hungers within him. The opposite of making strange is to welcome, embrace, befriend. So out it bursts, his realisation that he is talking not only about the Word incarnate but someone who is as close to him as his own soul: But O! my friend, my friend indeed, who at my need his life did spend. And having rehearsed the cruel story of the passion, the bitterness of pain, the agony of suffering, the loneliness of dying, how even in death there was no friendly tomb for him to rest in, the poet comes back to what it means, this human-and-divine friendship that means more to him than everything he counts precious.

This is my friend. Where does Crossman draw this language from? It has to be the Gospel of St John. In Holy Week, we remember how Jesus taught his disciples in the Upper Room and washed their feet before going out to die. The focus of these moving farewell discourses is love, divine and human: the love with which God has loved them in Jesus, the love with which they are to imitate it and live it out by loving one another. This, says Jesus, is the new commandment. And to clothe this commandment with the warmth and vitality of flesh and blood, he goes on to offer an image of love that is freely given and received. Not the love of parents for children, or of spouse for spouse, or even the devotion of loyal servants to those they serve. “No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, but I have called you friends” (John 15.12-15). We know that verse from a thousand war memorials. It is the highest tribute we could pay to the sacrifices of so many that we associate it to Jesus laying down his life, and speak of it in the language of friendship.

We don’t know much about Samuel Crossman. But I think we can speculate from his hymn that he knew what deep friendship means. Maybe his troubled years of exile as a deposed minister had shown him who his true friends really were. Perhaps there were only a very few who were prepared to stand by him in his public humiliation. Misfortune has a way of isolating people when there is a whiff of disgrace in the air. Who wants to be known as an associate of this crucified criminal? Who wants to risk contracting the taint that radiates from the man whom not only mortals but God himself abandons? “Then all the disciples forsook him and fled” says the passion narrative of Jesus. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” So it’s all the more striking that this passion hymn is charged with such emotion, such a deeply-felt empathy for the cast-out victim. Here is “passion” in both senses: a story of suffering and pain, but also a story of one human being’s solidarity with and love for another.

“Were you there when they crucified the Lord?” asks the old spiritual. Where do our minds and imaginations place us in relation to the man on the cross this Holy Week? Our hymn answers: be close to him, stand alongside him, suffer with him, enter into his pain. That’s what sympathy and empathy mean: suffering with, suffering alongside, suffering in. Holy Week calls us to journey with the Son of Man, make his via crucis ours, this way of the cross that he has travelled and that all of us who are marked with the cross in our baptism are called to travel too. 

But we need to ask, in what spirit do we make this pilgrimage each year? To speak about entering into the experience of the Crucified sounds onerous, too tragic for our twenty-first century that can only contemplate darkness in small doses. People tell me quite candidly that they switch off the television news when it turns shines a light on terrorism in our cities, or bloodshed in middle-eastern war-zones, or famine victims in Africa. It’s true, as T. S. Eliot said, that humankind “cannot bear very much reality”. So a Holy Week spiritual discipline might entail not flinching, holding our gaze a little longer, thinking about and praying for the crucifixions that happen daily in our world, and then discerning what part we might play in bringing light to dark places where in life there is no house, no home.

And there’s another thing about this way of the cross. The spirit that this great hymn breathes tells us as much as the words themselves do. Yes, they draw us into a story that is truly dreadful. How can a man's crucifixion not be a terrible thing? But that is not everything it is. For I find in the poem a prospect that is indeed terrible, but also sweet. It’s a sweetness that gives me back my life and hope precisely because of what the ordeals undergone by this Saviour, my Lord, this dear King who is my Friend indeed.

So it is not a matter of somehow feeling sorry for Jesus. No, pity is a more robust attitude than that, more theological, more spiritual, more humane. If you asked the poet what word summed up his hymn, I think he would reply, gratitude. Thankfulness for the love of his Friend. Thankfulness for the greater love that lays down his life. Thankfulness for reconciliation and redemption, renewal, forgiveness and the taste of glory. You could call it eucharistia, the great thankfulness that gives its name to what we do to remember him tonight in bread and wine. 

This is my Friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend. And shall, please God, to the end of time.

Wakefield Cathedral
Tuesday in Holy Week 2017


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My song is love unknown,
my Saviour's love to me,
love to the loveless shown
that they might lovely be.
O who am I
that for my sake
my Lord should take
frail flesh and die?

He came from his blest throne
salvation to bestow,
but men made strange, and none
the longed-for Christ would know.
But O my friend,
my friend indeed,
who at my need,
his life did spend.

Sometimes they strew his way,
and his strong praises sing,
resounding all the day
hosannas to their King.
Then "Crucify!"
is all their breath,
and for his death
they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
he gave the blind their sight.
Sweet injuries!
Yet they at these
themselves displease,
and 'gainst him rise.

They rise, and needs will have
my dear Lord made away;
a murderer they save,
the Prince of Life they slay.
Yet steadfast he
to suffering goes,
that he his foes
from thence might free.

Here might I stay and sing,
no story so divine:
never was love, dear King,
never was grief like thine.
This is my friend,
in whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.

Samuel Crossman 1624-83

Holy Week in Hymns 1: "Ride on, ride on in majesty"

This year in Holy Week at Wakefield Cathedral, we are going to explore some of the hymns of Passiontide. You may wonder why I’ve taken this as my theme. Well, I’ve drawn inspiration from a famous saying of St Augustine, “when we sing, we pray twice”. He’s usually taken as meaning that the music of our prayer adds a second “layer” or dimension to the words we mouth. Through music we breathe God’s praises in a way that reaches different parts of ourselves, touches our emotions, our longings, our fears, our hopes, our loves. More than that, the words of hymns are themselves not prose but poetry, allowing them, like music, to penetrate beyond the limits of our normal ways of speaking. 

There’s another aspect to this. How we sing or worship or pray has a great deal to do with the kind of faith we have and how we believe it. The words of our liturgy, our prayers and our hymns form us as Christian disciples. Lex orandi, lex credendi says the old tag: it’s how we pray that lays bare the content of our faith. And perhaps our singing of hymns, our “praying twice”, plays a far more important part in shaping our faith than all the sermons, creeds and catechisms in the world.

So I want this Holy Week to allow the words and music of the church’s great legacy of hymnody to accompany us as we enter into the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus so that we can discover a little more of what this season can mean for our lives. I hope we shall all be “praying twice” in this Great Week of our salvation as we entrust ourselves to these great hymn writers as our spiritual guides. 

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So we begin where Holy Week itself begins, on Palm Sunday and its great processional hymn “Ride on, ride on in majesty”. You can tell that its author was sure-footed, not only as a theologian but a poet. Henry Hart Milman was Professor of Poetry at Oxford and was ordained 200 years ago this year. In 1849 he became Dean of St Paul’s, another poetry-writing-dean to succeed an even greater poet who had held that office 200 years earlier, John Donne. 

The hymn captures the essence of Palm Sunday brilliantly. It's a perplexing paradox of Holy Week that a crowd can cry “Hosanna!” today and “Crucify!" just five days later.  Tomorrow’s hymn, “My song is love unknown” does it too, but in a more personal, intimate way. Today, the key word is majesty, repeated in the first line of every stanza like a drum-beat that is both noble and ominous. Ride on, ride on in majesty! The exclamation mark tells you something important, that this refrain honours a king who has not only come to his city to receive the acclamation of his subjects, but also prefigures the tragedy and triumph that is unfolding throughout this Holy Week. 

 In the first verse, majesty means sovereignty, kingship, hosannas, royal palms and a carpet of robes like the procession of a Roman triumph when a great battle has been won. But this isn’t Easter a week in advance, for “the last and fiercest strife is nigh” says verse 4. And all this ceremony is to recognise what the destiny of this Man on the mule will turn out to be: in lowly pomp ride on to die. To die! It comes twice, pulling into itself a succession of poignant words that rhyme with die: cry (in acclamation, but also in anticipated pain), sky (for the drama of Holy Week is not just some squalid little local incident but is universal, cosmic in its scope), nigh (because the end, the tragedy and triumph of approaching sacrifice, is upon us), and then die again in the final verse, where the word ties together a meek head bowed to mortal pain with God’s taking power and reigning. Those emphatic lines proclaim that in all this, Jesus his Son truly is both King and Lord.

Let’s stay with that final couplet for a moment, because it sums up what this hymn is trying to tell us. Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,/Then take, O God, thy power, and reign. What kind of king is he, this messiah who rides in triumph into his city to shouts of hosanna? What fervent hopes and longings claimed the hearts of those who were so glad they had lived to see that day? 

The point about Palm Sunday is that today is the Sunday of the Cross. That is to say, the hosanna procession is not itself the central theme. It’s what it leads up to that is the focus of today's liturgy. And this is the Passion of the Lord. So once we have processed into church, laid up our palms and taken our places, our attention turns towards the cross. We listen to the solemn recital of the Passion narrative and in bread and wine, participate in Jesus' life laid down for the salvation of the world in his broken body and shed blood. From now on until Good Friday, it is the "wondrous cross" that occupies our minds, imaginations and prayers, from what we begin in the procession today to what is completed at Golgotha on the holiest day of the year.

But what is “finished”, says St John, is not a defeat but a victory. Yes, the Son of God must bow his meek head in mortal pain. He must know the suffering, the dereliction, the despair, the God-abandoned darkness that is appointed for him, for as the gospels have relentlessly told us, “the Son of Man must suffer”. And yet, St John sees in these dreadful events nothing less than the victory of God-in-Christ. He ascends his throne of the cross, and is proclaimed there as nothing less than king. And so the hymn dares to command him to take, O God, thy power, and reign. 

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What is the power with which he reigns? Not the power of mortals who slash and burn their way to victory. Not even the moral power of the human victim who has done no wrong and gone innocently to his death. 

No. It is nothing less than the power of love that holds him there on the cross, his arms stretched out to welcome home and embrace every child of the human race, every soul that longs to be reconciled, every man and woman who knows that only here, where this life is laid down, does human existence hold any purpose or meaning. “Love so amazing, so divine” we shall sing later in the week. On the cross, in the strange disfigured form of love that is crucified, we meet him and greet him, and however bewildered we find ourselves, worship and adore him. And pledge our allegiance and loyalty to this broken but majestic Man of Sorrows whom we acclaim as Lord and King.

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Ride on! ride on in majesty!
Hark! all the tribes hosanna cry;
O Savior meek, pursue thy road
with palms and scattered garments strowed.

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die;
O Christ, thy triumphs now begin
o'er captive death and conquered sin.

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
The angel-squadrons of the sky
look down with sad and wondering eyes
to see the approaching sacrifice.

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
Thy last and fiercest strife is nigh;
the Father on his sapphire throne
expects his own anointed Son.

Ride on! ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die;
bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
then take, O God, thy power, and reign.

Henry Hart Milman, 1791-1868

The Raising of Lazarus, the Raising of a City

“To the glory of God this Cathedral burnt.” “This illness does not lead to death, rather it is for God’s glory.” Two striking sayings about ordeals and suffering. The first text is inscribed in the nave floor of this Cathedral. The second comes early on in St John’s story of Jesus and Lazarus that we’ve just heard. What connects them is the word glory.

I doubt it would have occurred to anyone who watched this Cathedral burn on the night of the 14th November 1940 to speak of that fiery holocaust as glory. It was no doubt an unforgettable spectacle to behold. But it was a calamitous act of violence and destructiveness. Many died; many more were grievously injured. Where is glory when precious human lives are laid on the greedy altars of war? Where is glory on a day when the grim reaper gathers up so bitter a harvest in this city that is home to men, women and children like us?

But you could have said the same about the suffering of Lazarus, Jesus’ friend. “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” The meaning is clear: this is a mortal sickness. The end is coming quickly. Soon this good man, this beloved friend will be dead, and Jesus is needed there. And when the worst has happened, there is still the desperate hope for a miracle: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask him.” Where is glory in any of this?

There are degrees of glory. Perhaps we use it a trifle too easily when we say that something is glorious. But in the Old and New Testaments, the meaning is quite specific. Literally in Hebrew, glory is “weight”, and therefore something significant, portentous, having lasting meaning. So glory belongs fundamentally to God himself, and to created things to the extent that they embody or reflect the divine. When we are confronted by glory, we do what Moses did at the burning bush and bow before the Holy One. We are silenced like the disciples on the mountain when they saw the glory of the transfigured Lord. Where glory is manifested, we are on holy ground. We acknowledge that God is among us. We learn our place in the world. And we worship.

When Jesus speaks of Lazarus’ illness being “for God’s glory”, his meaning is specific. It is not that there is any glory in anyone’s suffering and death, but rather “so that the Son of God may be glorified through it”. At the climax of the story, when the stone is rolled away from Lazarus’ tomb, Jesus turns to Martha and says, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” In the first sign that Jesus performs at Cana in Galilee, St John says that Jesus “revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him”. As then, so now, in this last sign before the passion. Glory and belief coalesce around the mighty works of God that reveal him as having come into our very midst.

I said that the death and raising of Lazarus are the last sign before the passion. Immediately after this episode, Caiaphas speaks about how one man must die for the people. And in the next chapter it is Passover time, and in this same home at Bethany whose intimacy Jesus loved so much, Mary anoints him for his coming death. And as he trembles on the very threshold of Holy Week, he speaks again of glory. “Now my soul s troubled. And what shall I say – Father, save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name!”

And this is where the story of Lazarus is pointing: to the glory of God in the suffering, death and resurrection of his Son. Like Lazarus, Jesus must be subject to this ordeal that lies ahead. “The Son of Man must suffer” say the synoptic gospels. But whereas for Matthew and Mark, the cross is a dark place of dereliction and abandonment, for St John it is glory. In the Christmas gospel he acclaims that “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten Son full of grace and truth. And if you asked him where, more than anywhere, he beheld glory, he would say, at Golgotha. On the cross. Because it is there that we see the glory of loved poured out, with which “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”, where Jesus is “lifted up” and draws all humanity to himself.

So there is the paradox of this day we call Passion Sunday. Glory means, not the splendour we thought it meant as we nodded casually in its direction. As we probe more deeply, we find it means the infinite “weight” of “God’s presence and his very self”, as the hymn puts it, at the heart of humanity. It is the suffering, death and raising to life of Lazarus that reveal it, and all the more because it enacts the suffering, death and raising to life of Jesus himself. But we only see it that way as we look back across the whole story. This is St John’s point in writing his gospel, so that we can enter into what glory means in the big story of God’s solidarity with the human race, his raising all of us to life through what the Son of Man must suffer and endure.

And this Cathedral is itself a living emblem of glory through suffering and resurrection. To the glory of God this Cathedral burnt and was rebuilt. I understand those words better, thanks to Lazarus. Like him, this place has a story to tell about how resurrection can take us by surprise and transfigure us even in the darkest of times. For the story of Coventry is not only about a building, powerful though the imagery and the witness are. The tapestry of Christ in Glory presides over every offering of praise and prayer, and every act of celebration and lament. It lodges in every memory we attach to this place, and in the longings and heartaches, the sorrows and joys of all who come here and stand in their simplicity before God. What burnt and was rebuilt was not just a cathedral church but a household of faith, a community among whom the lived experience of dying to ourselves and being raised in Christ is at the heart of our Christian identity. You and I, all the people of God in every place: all of us are a temple of God’s glory. The resurrections in our lives are the best evidence there is for glory. We are all Lazarus if we have been buried with Christ in baptism and raised to newness of life.

We have a little time left as we travel towards Holy Week and Easter. What will our hope and prayer be? The story of Lazarus is placed where it is in the Fourth Gospel for a reason. We read it on this Sunday for a reason. It is to provide a gateway at which to pause and ask what we really want to happen during these awesome days that will soon be upon us. In the book of Exodus, God promises to pass before Moses. Partly out of fear, but more out of love, Moses cries out: “Lord, show me your glory”. The passion, cross and resurrection are the answer to that prayer. Lazarus has given us a parable. Now it is for us to walk with Jesus in the way of the cross and find once more in that place of pain the glory of redeeming love, and beyond the empty tomb, the glory of his resurrection life.

Coventry Cathedral, Passion Sunday, 2 April 2017. John 11.1-45

New Reformations? Wisdom and the Church

Introduction

This is the final address in this year’s Lenten series at Warwick, New Reformations? Tonight our theme is “wisdom”. But please don’t assume that because this sermon brings the series to an end, somehow wisdom is going to supply a summing up, a full-stop. Far from reaching watertight conclusions, it’s more in the nature of biblical wisdom to identify and ask the right questions, and model good ways of asking them. This is all I can try to do tonight.

But how important that task is! It goes to the heart of our Church of England’s identity that owes so much to the Reformation. I am not simply thinking of the questions about authority, church polity and sacramental theology that dared to be asked five hundred years ago. We must ask the questions of today as a church that is constantly in search of reformation in every generation. The legacy of our history is not simply to have been reformed but to be constantly in a process of being reformed, or as they said in the sixteenth century, reformata atque semper reformanda.

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Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible

Let me begin by asking what it means to be wise according to the scriptures. I then want to raise some of the challenges facing our church today where I believe wisdom is very much needed. In our reading from the book of Proverbs, the characteristics of the wise man or woman are set out. To be wise is to respond to the invitation of a gracious lady whom the text calls Lady Wisdom. She walks the street, calls out from the heights, stands at the crossroads, takes up her position at the town gate. She is in every public place, where men and women go in and out, where choices are made about which way to go, where leaders gather to transact business, where the young congregate to learn and shape their lives. “To you O people I call. Learn prudence, acquire intelligence; hear, for I shall speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right.” She goes on to describe the treasures she has to offer to those who listen: “wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you desire cannot compare with her. Riches and honour are with me, enduring wealth and prosperity.”

If we look into these first nine chapters of Proverbs, we glimpse what wisdom means. It has many levels. We learn how to manage our household well (what we call oikonomia from which we get the word economy). We learn about shrewdness, common sense, speaking well, having good judgment, being prudent with our resources. We learn the virtues of hard work, careful speech, living purposefully, finding fulfilment in being diligent, becoming aware of other people and the environment we live in. We learn how to know ourselves better, understand the ambiguities and contradictions of our flawed human nature. We learn where to find happiness and how to avoid misery. We learn about our own creatureliness, how we live in a morally ordered universe where creation can teach us and where destinies are set. And we learn that wisdom is fundamentally a religious quality whose source and end are God himself: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and to know the Holy One is insight”.

In all this, there is one overriding message, that the goal of the wise man or woman is to become a human being who is aware emotionally, spiritually, physically, practically and theologically. We could call this the quality of being present to God, to one another, to the world and to ourselves. When the church father Irenaeus said that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, I think this is what he meant. To be wise, to be aware, to be “intelligent” in all these dimensions of living, to practise “mindfulness” as we say nowadays – all these are synonyms for the God-given wisdom that, says Proverbs, makes us fully alive, fully human. As the New Testament says, Jesus himself is the embodiment, the very incarnation, the perfect realisation of divine wisdom.

There is a special emphasis on leadership in the wisdom literature. Some scholars conjecture that books like Proverbs were compiled precisely to contribute to the education of future leaders, especially young men in the royal court – witness repeated phrases like “listen my child” throughout the book. In our own day, leadership training in the church and in secular institutions of many kinds has enthusiastically taken up the phrase “reflective practitioner” to characterise what it means to lead well. The thinking is that people, communities and institutions need more than anything to become self-aware, conscious of who and what they are, and how they need to be in wholesome relationships both personally and collectively. And you only create healthy communities by leading them in healthy ways.

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Wisdom in the Church: Three Case Studies

This is where I come to the second part of my address. For if the church is to become intelligent, reflective, generous, engaged, self-aware, compassionate, prudent, virtuous and wise, if indeed it is going to reflect the character of the God who is all these things, then it must be led by people who are formed in these ways too. I am not saying that no institution is better than its leaders. But the values by which leaders live are profoundly influential in shaping the communities they are responsible for. In the church, the ordinal spells this out carefully, reminding clergy that to be responsible under God for the household of faith is an awesome vocation indeed. These were some of the themes I explored ten years ago in my book Wisdom and Ministry. I can’t recall a time when the leadership of our church was under so much public scrutiny. We feel for the House of Bishops who need the wisdom of Solomon in responding to the challenges they are faced with.

But scrutiny is good for us. It reminds us of our accountability. I am going to come to two of these matters shortly. But let me first say something about my own situation as a recently retired priest, and how it has made me think about the Church of England’s role in the modern world. I retired eighteen months ago after nearly thirty years in full-time cathedral ministry, first as Canon Precentor here at Coventry followed by twenty years as Dean first of Sheffield and then Durham. I loved cathedral ministry and owe a great deal to Coventry for having taught me something of the craft of it. It was at Coventry that I learned how far-reaching in society and public life the mission of a cathedral can be, and how cathedrals, through their architecture and art, their music, their liturgy and preaching, yes and the life of their communities are powerful magnets that increasingly draw worshippers, pilgrims, visitors and those who are curious about faith from far and wide.

(1) The Church and Decline
We landed in retirement in a rural Northumberland village. The parish church is across the road and is served by an able young priest. He is at the same stage in his ministry as I was when I served my first incumbency in the same diocese. But that was over thirty years ago. Now, as we re-enter parish life and contribute what we can, we realise how the churches have declined in the decades we were away. The church everywhere, apart from the suburbs and market towns, is facing real threats to its long-term survival. I’m not only thinking about dwindling congregations, the buildings they have to maintain and the lack of resources with which to do it. I’m also wondering where the next generation of lay leaders is going to come from when multi-parish benefices become ever larger and clergy time is increasingly stretched. When our silver-haired generation dies out, where are tomorrow’s churchwardens, treasurers, PCC members, worship leaders and musicians going to come from? How long will the present model of parish ministry be sustainable?

Those who have analysed historical trends over the last half century tell us that organised religion is in decline in secularised western Europe. It is a fact on the ground. It is not due to the church’s faulty strategy or lack of vision or evangelistic effort or social engagement. But the institution finds it extraordinarily hard to admit to decline publicly. Bishops and dioceses devise slogans that relentlessly accentuate the positive. The word growth is usually in there somewhere, linked to Renewal and Reform. You won’t find ads at the back of the Church Times that begin: “we are a declining church, but we are learning to grow smaller gracefully. We aim to be wise in this generation, and we do not lose heart”.

How does wisdom speak into this situation? I think she would say a number of things. First of all, speak the truth and don’t massage the facts. And if the truth is frightening (which I think it is), don’t panic. Do everything you can to understand it and help others understand it, bringing to these difficult questions the critical, analytical tools with which reason has endowed you. Expect to find a great deal of complexity in what you discover that will not be susceptible to the usual solutions, for example programmes of evangelism, certainty in theology, throwing money at dwindling congregations. Wisdom says: ask yourselves where you detect the work of God in the events and processes of our time. The scriptures are, I think, less concerned with organised religion and congregational life than we may think, more outward-focused in bearing Christ to the world in word and work, more concerned with truth, justice and the weightier matters of the law. Above all, keep hope alive among those who continue to bear witness to God’s presence in times of suffering and joy. And in everything, don’t be afraid. Be of good cheer. In his death and resurrection, Christ the Lord has overcome the world.

(2) The Church and Brexit
Next, let me turn to a matter that has been much on all our minds in the past year, and indeed, in the past week. Last Saturday the European Union celebrated its sixtieth birthday. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister triggered the Article 50 process by which this country will leave the European Union.

I may as well own up to my feelings of profound sadness here. My mother was a German-Jewish war refugee and I was brought up to think of continental Europe as my home, with Britain as an essential part of it. My mother died just after the referendum, scarcely able to take in the realisation that the country that had given her a home, protected her from harm and befriended her in 1937 could now walk away from its cultural, historical and spiritual roots. But we are where we are, and in or out of the EU, we need to continue to be good Europeans, good allies, neighbours and friends across the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the English Channel.

However, my question tonight is about wisdom and how the Church of England contributed to the debate about our nation’s future. I was disappointed. We knew after the 2015 election that a referendum would soon be called and that we would be required to make the biggest political decision of our lifetimes. Some of us begged the Church of England to debate it at its February meeting last year, just as the referendum campaign began. But there was silence, no collective voice from the national church that could help bring Christian wisdom to the momentous decision we were being asked to make. You would think that the future of the nation was a matter of indifference to the Church of England. Even if the church was never going to take a view (though the other national church in Britain did, the Church of Scotland), not to have anything to say, not to help shine a Christian light on these extraordinarily difficult matters strikes me as a real failure of leadership. It’s true that an emergency debate was allowed at the July Synod. But by then it was too late. On Brexit Day last week, England’s national church had nothing officially to say about the future of the nation, no reflection to offer, no prayers to say. I felt ashamed of our silence just when we needed Christian voices to speak into a vital and contentious debate.

What is the learning here? What we find in the wisdom literature is that it is not afraid of complexity. Books like Job and Ecclesiastes do not pretend there are easy answers to the fundamental questions of human existence such as the problems of suffering and of meaning. So the national church could have warned us against the perils of binary choices, those fatal either-ors that trap us into thinking that everything must be black or white. The Church could have said: beware of thinking that all right (or all wrong) are on the side of either Remain or Leave. Even though we have to vote this way or that, listen to the case made by the other side; weigh up the evidence, assess the arguments, come to an informed conclusion. The word for this is discernment. The Church is supposed to be good at it. If only it had placed its long spiritual experience of wise discernment at the service of the nation when we needed it so much.

(3) The Church and Same-Sex Relationships
Finally I want to say something about the matter that is said to “threaten to tear the Church apart”, human sexuality and in particular, same-sex relationships. As we all know, the recent February General Synod decided not to “take note” of the House of Bishops’ report. If I had still been a member of the Synod, I would have voted with the House of Clergy not to “take note”: the report simply didn’t do justice to the complexity of human sexuality in the light not only of Christian teaching but also how to interpret that teaching knowing what we now know from science and social science about our sexualities. It seemed to bear no relation to the careful “listening process” that had been set up in every diocese to enable us to hear one another’s experience and speak frankly about sexuality. And given that a majority of lay people in the Church now support the view that committed same-sex love is as God-given as heterosexual love and that the state was right to legislate for gay marriage, the report was not just questionable as theology but bad politics too.

I watched the whole of the Synod debate. It seemed to me to be mostly well-informed, emotionally intelligent and respectful. As in the debate about women in the episcopate, the Synod can show a remarkable capacity to engage in contentious matters without sacrificing courtesy: given the wisdom literature’s strong emphasis on listening and using words with care, we can be proud of the example our representatives have set. But now the Bishops must find a way of bringing back to the Church a way forward in its understanding of sexuality that will command consent. And this calls for wisdom of the highest order because as we know, there is a real threat to the unity of the Anglican Communion should the Church of England depart (as it would be seen) from the traditional moral disciplines of the Church.

I need to tread carefully here. But as with the debate about the European Union, I may as well come clean. My belief is that whatever the complexities in the decisions we are called upon to make, we must always try to “do the right thing” without fear of the consequences, however hard they may be to face. In other words, we cannot let consequentialism dictate the way we make ethical choices; we must not allow the ends to justify or control the means.

This calls for real moral courage. I am in no doubt about what a decision to endorse same-sex marriage and to solemnise or bless it in church would mean for many Anglicans in Africa, Asia and South America. I’m also in no doubt about how hard this would be for many in our own churches to accept. At the same time, it cannot be right for our Church to retain any vestige of discrimination in the way we think, speak and act, whether it is inequalities endured by those of colour, women or gay people. So when I speak about acting courageously, I mean with the integrity that is informed by wisdom, and with consciences that have been educated by long immersion in the faith of the scriptures nurtured by the sacraments supported by the prayers of the faithful. Wisdom’s presumption is that in our decision-making, we do not look for easy ways out, nor do we crumple under pressure, nor do we take the pragmatic, politically expedient option. We behave with principle and seek to follow the way of justice and truth. I am not saying this is ever easy. But I am saying that anything less is not to act out of Christian wisdom. It comes back to wise and holy discernment. 

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Cruciform Wisdom
I believe these three examples show how inescapable the task is of seeking wisdom for and in our church. While we live in times of bewildering complexity, I hesitate to say that previous generations would have found the task of interpreting scriptural wisdom any easier. A church that is semper reformanda can never say to itself that this work is finished. Wisdom ought to make us curious and sharpen our questions. We should expect new light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word as we make read the ancient text out of our contemporary experience of faith.

But let me end by reminding us of the way wisdom is configured in the New Testament. St Paul tells us that “wisdom” by itself is not enough. What matters is to cultivate a cross-shaped wisdom that eschews human cleverness and instead looks to the crucified Jesus as both the power of God and the wisdom of God. Paul says that what we must do is to “have the mind of Christ”. So it’s never a bad idea to ask the question, when faced with hard choices, “what would Jesus do?” It is always easier to ask than to answer, of course. But to begin to frame the question in that way is to affirm how important it is always to ask our questions and do our discernment Christianly. For if Christ is no less than the incarnate wisdom of God himself, and God’s power and wisdom are found not, in the end, in human knowledge or achievement but in Christ crucified, where else can we possibly go? Especially as we prepare to celebrate his passion and resurrection in the Holy Week of our salvation that will soon be upon us?

St Mary’s Warwick, 2 April 2017
Proverbs 8.1-21   

Storm, Stress and Salvation: the gospel of Paul in a turbulent world

I doubt if St Paul envisaged archdeacons in his ecclesiology though I guess that to do the job well you need pretty much the entire panoply of spiritual gifts he lists in his letters. I worked closely with archdeacons on two bishop’s staffs for twenty years, as well as benefitting from archdeacons on the Cathedral chapters I served as Dean. I hope you will hear it not as flattery but as real appreciation when I say that I hugely admire what you do. Everything I have heard during this absorbing conference underlines that. You are profoundly committed, visionary, people, but prudent and practical too, and unlike some bishops and deans, good at the detail, a combination of gifts that make you the gyroscopes that keep our dioceses upright. On behalf of the national church, I want to thank you. 

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. I always think of Caravaggio’s great painting of that story, with the poor man, blinded by the great light that has assaulted him, spread-eagled on the ground while his huge horse rears up above. Chiaroscuro, we call Caravaggio’s technique, exploiting the dramatic interplay of light and shadow in art. Your conference theme Open to God in a Turbulent World captures the light-and-shadow aspects of the human journey and the path we walk as the people of God. A Damascus Road it is not for most of the time in our public ministry. Yet when I read the story of Paul and how he was prised apart on that road, I recall the late great Leonard Cohen’s immortal lines about the chiaroscuro of every life-changing encounter: 

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

At last Paul’s long-repressed inner turbulence is exposed for all to see. Torn between passionate love & violent hatred, something in him must have longed to still the tectonic plates colliding within him. Is this what Caravaggio is getting at? I see his painting telling us something not only about Paul himself but the storm and stress that surrounded him. Caravaggio’s day was the same. So is ours. In today’s epistle Paul sets out a catalogue of his trials and ordeals, the turbulence he has endured for the sake of the gospel. I doubt any historical era is immune from turbulence, whatever nostalgia colours the way we speak about the past. But I don’t think anyone will deny that our own times are seeing more than their fair share of it, and this is mirrored in the church too.

It’s been a privilege to overhear you entering into this theme during these past days. Our speakers, all of them first rate and some of them profoundly moving have between them created a remarkably coherent exploration of how we need to be "open to God in a turbulent world". One thing that has struck me is the difficult tension between trying to control turbulence and doing the risky thing of stepping into its flow to see where it takes us. What if turbulence, for all its discomforts, were not always an enemy to be feared, but, sometimes at least, opened up new channels of flow that might reshape our history in better ways? "Rivers do not flow in straight lines." 

We wouldn't be human if we weren't shaken by these "fightings and fears within, without". We are living in times when people of faith have to hope against hope in order to keep hope alive. I see that as a central task of the church today when good people find their spirits crushed by events spinning out of their control, and succumb to resignation, despondency and even despair. It's been refreshing to come to a conference that has genuinely tried to address how we should contemplate a world in which the lights seem to be going out in so many places. I'd thought I would hear much more than I have about Renewal and Reform, the tension between strategic development funding and resourcing parish ministry, mission action plans needing to be diligently worked up and applied to save the church from terminal collapse. What a relief! Instead, what we have been doing is the more difficult but even more important task of pondering how best we can respond to the turbulences of our time, whether in church, society or global politics.

Let me speak into our specific role as senior leaders in the church. After thirty years in three cathedrals, I'm now learning how to be a superannuated villager in the Northumberland countryside close to Hadrian's Wall. It's eye-opening to see what challenges the rural benefice is facing. It's partly about resources, but more, I think, about the ageing and declining pool of lay people who are confident and willing enough to participate in the leadership of the local church. My wife and I sit in the congregation each Sunday and contribute as lay Christians. I go across to church on weekday mornings to say matins with the Vicar, a young and able priest who is the same age as I was in my first incumbency (but who is making rather fewer mistakes than I did at that point in my ministry). I admire and fear for younger clergy because it would be so easy for their vitality to be sapped by the sheer scale of the turbulence they are facing. It's not that there is any sign of this now. But ten years down the line: who knows? So I'm glad about the investment being made across the church in mentoring, consultancy, spiritual guidance and other forms of close, intentional support, and I'm also glad to play a small part in the networks in our diocese that are there to help clergy so that they do not lose heart.

In a fascinating Bible reading, we heard insights from Esther about how to be responsive to God in a world of chance and change. In turbulent times, we are easily driven by the sneak of danger to seek security in some imagined status quo that is familiar to us. Or if we feel the need to do something, we go on the offensive and throw what we can at the crisis. But both those ways feel more reactive than responsive. And reaction is driven not by an open unafraid engagement but by panic, anxiety and fear. To apply this to the church we serve, reaction seems to characterise the rhetoric we hear from some church leaders who are unwilling to ask the question, where is God in the turbulence itself, where do we glimpse his presence and hear his voice even in our institutional decline? And what might this point to in the reshaping of our life together? But if this conference has taught me anything, it is always to go back to the question, what is God doing in the storm and stress? The Elijah story tells us that we need to be as present to the earthquake, wind and fire as the still small voice. 

In the desert tradition that owes so much to Elijah, discernment or diakrisis is one of the spiritual gifts most to be coveted by spiritual leaders. At its heart lie the twin tasks of listening and interpreting. We've heard a lot about them in this conference: how we discern God's activity so that we can join in, whether it's among the poorest of our world whom Christian Aid serves so wonderfully, or in the theatres of conflict like Afghanistan where the pity of war draws out our empathy both with those who suffer and those who serve; or nearer to home where we want to bear good witness to the gospel in our cities and countryside, suburbs and estates. On the first evening we learned how the novelist has to sit still, look hard and listen intently if he or she is going to be a truth-seeker - but by extension that means each of us because story is at the heart of who we are and how we tell of the mighty acts of God. So to reflect yesterday afternoon on how we sustain the life of the spirit in was an essential aspect of responding well: "praying, sleeping, dreaming, looking, smiling". It isn't too much to claim that all of wisdom comes down to these avenues of discernment, for in the spiritual tradition, these are the gifts of God that lead us on the path of insight and illumination. In the gospel reading, Jesus thanks God for revealing the mysteries of the kingdom not to the imagined wise and intelligent but to infants, a theme developed at length by St Paul in his Corinthian letters. 

We started out on the first afternoon reflecting on mission. Whenever that word comes up I think of the title of a great book written more than a century ago, Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods – St Paul’s or Ours? The Feast of St Paul is a day to pull that book off the shelf. When I was a curate in the 1970s, my much-loved training incumbent Bob Jeffery, once a member of this conference who died this past Christmas, insisted that I read it. “We’ve got it all wrong” he would mutter crossly. “We don’t listen to the voices of the indigenous, the local and the least privileged and powerful. We don’t hear what the context is telling us let alone bother with the hard work of interpreting it to the biblical text and the text to it. We don't learn how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land, and we don’t trust the Holy Spirit to nurture and grow disciples. If we did, how different the Church of England would look.” Diakrisis. 

Whom am I to tell you this? You work with the reality day after day. But here’s what’s distinctive about archdeacons. You do these things in minute particulars. Bishops (and even deans) can climb clear of what are disparagingly called “operations” and get away with painting big pictures in very broad brush strokes. It can all get a bit excitable. But not archdeacons. When I chaired the DAC, I saw how invaluable archdeacons were at reminding the committee that its decisions were not just about conservation and development, but were in the service of mission. "There is nothing too ample for you to overflow, nothing too small that your workmanship is not revealed" we heard R S Thomas say yesterday. 

When I was about to become a dean, I looked for books to read on leadership. This was before the days of strategic leadership programmes and mini MBAs.  My wife suggested the Hornblower books. I read through the entire series and found them highly illuminating. Here’s one example. “In the ships of the line in which he had served there had only been minutes of battle for every week at sea, and he had gradually become fixed in the idea that seamanship was the one requisite for a naval officer.  To be master of the countless details of managing a wooden sailing ship; not only to be able to handle her under sail, but to be conversant with all the petty but important trifles regarding cordage and cables, pumps and salt pork, dry rot and the Articles of War; that was what was necessary. But he knew now of other qualities equally necessary: a bold yet thoughtful initiative, moral as well as physical courage, tactful handling of both superiors and subordinates, ingenuity and quickness of thought.” (C.S. Forester, Lieutenant Hornblower)

Something like that could do as a role-description for an archdeacon. That passage to me encapsulated all the arts of leadership from understanding the detail (because you are at heart a practitioner) to the high moral qualities that make a man or a woman stand out: imagination, intelligence, fortitude, responsiveness, emotional awareness, self-understanding, good judgment and the determination to collaborate. And all this, placed within a theological and spiritual frame, lays the best possible foundation for being leaders in mission not out of anxious reaction to storm and stress but because it is right in itself. These are the marks of intelligent, far-sighted leadership because they emerge out of careful discernment. This is what we must cultivate if we are to have the spirit of St Paul.

I am currently reading a remarkable book A Different Path: an emotional autobiography by Neville Symington, a psychoanalyst and ex-Catholic priest. He speaks about the two pillars of a healthy life. "Friendship and wisdom are the most precious fruits of civilisation" he says. So I’d like to commend to you as a model for an archdeacon the "wise friend". More than any other role in the church, yours invites you to be both the source of insight and discernment, not dispensed from a distant centre but in that all-important place that is very close to the parish clergy and the people they serve. In a turbulent world, they, we, need your wisdom and your close friendship in equal measure. 

In our conference, in one way or another, every address, every workshop, every act of worship and a lot of the table talk has been about recovering this vision of life and our involvement in it. To be open to God in a turbulent world tests our spiritual resilience in ways that unsettle and disturb us. Like the disciples in the boat on storm-tossed Gennesaret, we cry, “help, Lord”. And we are heard. "Thou art my rock, thou art my rest" says George Herbert in words quoted to us on Monday. 

Turbulence can obscure our sight by unbalancing us or hurling dust into our eyes or towing us into maelstroms from which we can't pull ourselves out. Symington tells how he "went into the Church so that, identified with a savage God, I would not see these dark forces of unreason within me." The analyst and the spiritual guide both know that we must get to know and befriend the demons lurking in the shadow, whether in the institution or in our own selves. If we don't, they will never be stilled and we shall never see clearly. But like Elijah’s earthquake, wind and fire, like the ordeals that St Paul writes about, turbulence that is faced with courage and equanimity can purify our vision of God and how he is present to us when we are most disorientated and afraid. It takes great faith to read things that way, yet how can we read them any other way as we hear St Paul's magnificent words on this his feast day: "as dying, and see, we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything"?

So as we make Eucharist and say our farewells, it's with the resolve to be newly open to God in a turbulent world, to be cheerful and courageous, filled with hope and poised to be wise friends to all for the sake of the gospel. This Eucharist invites us to participate in Love's great work in the world, God's project of reconciliation and redemption and the making new of all things. Maybe, one day, we shall look back and know why we were here as part of it, doing what we did for God through change and chance and providence. And, just maybe, we shall understand how all of it was "for just such a time as this".

At the National Archdeacons' Conference, Swanwick, on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 2017

2 Corinthians 6.1-10; Luke 10.17-24

King Solomon's Mines...of Wisdom

I was looking forward to being back in my old college to preach tonight. I am very sorry indeed that an infection prevents me from travelling at the moment. I’m grateful to the chaplain for reading it to you instead.

The High Court ruling about Parliament’s role in Brexit, Guy Fawkes’ Night yesterday, and Tuesday's American election make for an interesting constellation of events. In their different ways they all make us think about political authority: what it means and how it should behave towards the citizens it governs. For people of faith they pose the even larger question about where God belongs in the structures of human society. In the language of our New Testament reading, what does it mean to “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”?

The story in our Old Testament reading doesn’t answer these questions. But it does shine a light on the nature of leadership. The young king, unsure of himself at the outset of his reign, goes into the sanctuary, the place he senses he will grow wise in.  God appears to him, and asks what gift he should give him.  It’s an annunciation moment: when the angel comes, what will he say?  Like Mary, he rises to the test.  He asks for the only gift worth having: wisdom.  How else can he govern this great people?  There is a divine sigh of relief.  God is pleased with his prayer, and gives him not only what he has asked but also what he has not asked: riches, honour, glory.  And the story goes on to show how Solomon’s wisdom was such that Israel ‘stood in awe of the king, because they saw that the wisdom of God was in him.’

But things are more ambiguous than we might think.  Is Solomon cynically praying for what he knows God wants him to ask for, calculating that in a world where outward show counts for so much, God will give him riches and victory and power anyway?  It would be churlish to be too suspicious. The natural reading of the story echoes our instincts when we begin any new task we know we are ill-equipped for. Helplessness has a way of concentrating the mind. I prayed just such a prayer on the day I was ordained in this very chapel forty years ago this year. At least Solomon is wise enough to know that he must ask to be wise.  It’s only when we know what we don’t know, the ‘known unknowns’ in Rumsfeld-speak, that we begin to be wise.   

No, what is intriguing is how the author introduces his reign at the outset.  He could so easily have begun with Solomon’s noble prayer. Instead, he embarks on the new king’s career with some not very subtly disguised hints that all is not happy and glorious.  First, there is his marriage alliance with Pharaoh’s daughter. Egypt is the place Israel had left behind in the exodus.  To marry into Egypt would be a betrayal of history. It anticipates what the text says later on about how Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh, who ‘turned away his heart after other gods’.

Then there is the reference to his building ‘his own house, and the house of the Lord and the wall about Jerusalem’.  We might say that this is precisely what kings do. But think about this: whereas it took just seven years to build the temple, no less than 13 years were spent on his own palace with no expense spared.  In Solomon, a king had arrived ‘like all the nations’, just what they had so misguidedly asked for in the days of Samuel.  And notice the order in which these grands projets are listed: his own house first, then the house of the Lord, then the city walls: king first, shrine second, the people and their safety last of all.  There is already a hint of the forced labour with which Solomon realised these achievements and the heavy taxes he levied to pay for them, something for which the northern tribes of Israel never forgave him, and which after his death led to the kingdom’s fatal schism. Was God still king in Israel? – that was the big question.

So Solomon is introduced to us, not altogether as the legendary wise and good king, but as a man already compromised in his public life and personal relationships.  In this, he is his father’s son, for the story of the golden days of David is also one in which the conflicts of his private life threaten to subvert his public role and destroy both the kingdom and its king with it.  The storyteller is unsparing in his scrutiny of how Solomon’s reign ended badly. His huge wealth, his taxation policies, his exploiting of slave labour, his comprehensive harem of women from across the world and his toleration of their gods all betrayed the promise of his early years.  No doubt the story is reading the ending back into the beginning: the overture is warning us that we must prepare to be disappointed in this man. 

So Solomon’s prayer is the petition of an already compromised ruler. It suggests that the king is not so much the innocent child as the young man who knows about the ambiguities that could lure him from the path of wisdom. He can glimpse his demons, the conflicted desires that could get the better of him, the seductions of money, sex and power that corrupt even the best of leaders.  And he can also see that good leadership calls for real integrity of mind, heart and motive. Is this why he prays for wisdom?  If it is, we should admire Solomon for his emotional honesty.  What else can purify his ambitions, wash them of the corrosive instincts for self-aggrandisement and the pursuit of pleasure that a king in the ancient world would have to be superhuman to resist? 

Our society likes leaders who can be either heroes or villains.  It’s good at erecting pedestals but enjoys it when they are fallen from. We find it hard to accept that our leaders are flawed, that their failings could be forgivable, and that even their brokenness could be the raw material of greatness or at least dignity.  This is precisely the drama being acted out before our eyes in America: whose personal story makes them more fit to be Commander in Chief? The scriptures don’t regard Solomon as unambiguously good; perhaps he is more of a tragic figure brought down by the flaws in his character, and in this he is of a piece with so many in public life we could name. 

But I like to think that Solomon never forgot how his best instincts led him to ask for the wisdom to know not only how a king should govern his people but how he should govern himself.  The oversight of ourselves is a task we all have to face, leaders or not.  We know how we fall short of what the psalm calls ‘truth in the inward parts’.  But our exemplar is not any human king, not even Solomon in all his glory.  It is the one who is God’s wisdom incarnate, who comes to forgive our failures, and mend our broken lives and make us fit to serve him.  In him, our Redeemer, a greater than Solomon is here.

Balliol College Oxford, 6 November 2016 (1 Kings 3.1-15, Matthew 22.15-22)