Diamon Jubilee Year

This past week we have marked the 60^th anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth our Queen.  Like King David in the Old Testament, she was the unlikely child who became a monarch.  Until the abdication of her uncle, Elizabeth was not destined for monarchy and did not seek it.  Yet for 60 years she has served the nation with a dedication and sense of duty that is unquestioned.  We honour that achievement.  But the occasion also gives us pause for thought.  The last time the nation celebrated a diamond jubilee was in 1897.  There could not be a greater contrast between Queen Victoria’s jubilee and what I imagine will be more understated commemorations in June.  Then, the empire celebrated a glorious past and a future on which the sun would never set.  Who could foresee the cataclysms just over the horizon of the 20^th century, and their corroding effect on all our historic institutions including the monarchy?  Even at the silver jubilee 35 years ago, the future of the monarchy was not seriously a matter for public debate.  Yet today, while most people support the monarchy, the mood is no longer deferential.  We see ourselves as citizens, not subjects.  Perhaps the street parties and bunting of 1977 were the last fling of a more secure world we have now archived, as if it belonged to sepia and newsreels.

The jubilee is an opportunity to revisit important questions: what do we expect of leadership? what do we want from monarchy?  And how is the reign of God expressed in our national life?  Ian Bradley, a Scottish theologian, argues in a book called God Save the Queen that monarchy provides a storehouse of symbols and rituals to feed the nation’s imagination and maintain its sense of the transcendent.  He believes that our rich ceremonial tradition with its feel for the numinous and the spiritual gathers up and ritualises the ‘soul’ of our national identity.  Christian constitutional monarchy makes visible, he says, God’s rule and claim upon us, even in a modern democratic state.  A ‘Defender of the Faith’, or even ‘Defender of Faith’ requires us to take seriously in a collective way the imaginative and religious dimension of life, and do justice to it in our public life. I never use the word if I can help it, but perhaps iconic does sum it up.  The monarch gathers up and symbolises what we are as a nation; like an icon, what you see is much more than appears on the surface. 

And perhaps it says something important about leadership and how, according to Christian insight, it should be exercised. At her coronation, the Queen was presented with the Orb of State and told: ‘Receive this Orb set under the Cross, and remember that the whole world is subject to the power and empire of Christ our Redeemer.’  All institutions, however well they serve us, are provisional and made up of mortal beings.  They are accountable to the rule of Christ the King; they are set under the cross for he is a king whose throne is Golgotha.  One day they will be no more, for the kingdoms of the world will become the kingdom of God and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever. So the monarchy is not only a symbol of a temporal society but can point beyond itself to the city whose builder and maker is God.  

In the Old Testament reading, we heard about the part wisdom played in the creation of the world. Part of the 8^th chapter of Proverbs is set as the Old Testament lesson at morning or evening prayer on Accession Day.  ‘When he established the heavens I was there, when he drew a circle upon the face of the deep, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master-worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.’  It may not have been clear to you that the speaker is a woman, Lady Wisdom.  Not only is she God’s agent in fashioning the creation; she is also the inspiration and companion of all who want to live wisely and well, who intend through life to contribute to the fashioning of the world as a good and properly-ordered place.  In Proverbs she is contrasted with another woman, Dame Folly: she is the source of all that is mischievous and chaotic and destructive.  There are some entertaining passages in Proverbs where these two ladies clamour for the attention of a young man as he strolls down the street.  He has a choice to make: either he embraces Lady Wisdom and learns to flourish, or he falls for Dame Folly, is led into the whore’s parlour and ends up in ruin. 

We could make the obvious connection between wisdom personified as a woman and the fact that both our longest-serving monarchs have been women.  We could also reflect that our church will be the wiser and better when women become bishops.  But in our gospel reading, where St John tells in language reminiscent of Proverbs, of how creation came into being through the Logos, the immortal word or reason or wisdom of God, the gender is masculine.  The important theme in both our readings is that all good, just, wholesome and right activity in the world springs from divine wisdom.  This includes the roles we take up in public life, a point made much of in Proverbs which was probably written to instruct the young at court in the skills and arts of leadership.  In the coronation service, the sovereign is presented with a Bible and told ‘Here is wisdom, this is the royal law, these are the lively Oracles of God’.  Lady Wisdom again: ‘by me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just’. 

How does the tradition understand this?  In the gospels, it is abundantly clear.  Jesus’ kingship is not demonstrated in palaces and panoply, but in love and self-abasement.  His purple robe is died with blood and his throne is the cross. He calls us his subjects, and invites our allegiance and our love.  It doesn’t look much of a kingdom, this clutch of nobodies - the peasants, fishermen, prostitutes and tax-gatherers Jesus gathers round him.  He does not promise that if we go with him, his way will be glorious, or lead to wealth or success.  On the contrary, he foretells afflictions, ridicule and trial.  Yet he invites us to be faithful unto death and to seek rewards beyond this life.  He is concerned not with outward appearances but the heart, and looks there for loyalty, truth and love.  He calls all who lead to disdain privilege and the pursuit of honour.  He summons the powerful of this world to lay aside the seductions of glory and wealth and wash the feet of the poor.

In the Old Testament, ‘jubilee’ is the celebration of cancelled debt and freedom for slaves. It promises a world that is more just, more equal and more free.  Institutions have awesome power to destroy, but at their best they can help shape the future for good, something never more needed than in today’s precarious world.  No doubt the monarchy will have changed much before the next time we celebrate a diamond jubilee.  It will need to travel more lightly, stand back from our obsession with celebrity and image, shed the culture of deference.  But as we give thanks today for the service of our Queen over 60 years, we can, I think, loyally pray that the monarchy and indeed all entrusted with public office will embody more deeply the royal way of wisdom, humility and self-emptying.  This is how Christ’s strange work is achieved in the world.  Jesus comes among us not to be served but to serve.  He lays down his life for us, not only teaching the greater love but living it.  And whether we are simple or wise, strong or weak, rich or poor, leader or led, he speaks to us these words and summons us to make them real in our time: ‘Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, for I am among you as one who serves’. 

Durham, 12 February 2012

Proverbs 8.1, 22-31; John 1.1-14

John Cosin: the beauty of holiness and social conscience

‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’: we sang it earlier in one of the classic Epiphany hymns, or as the verse in the psalms puts it, sing praise ‘in holy array’.  I link it with that enigmatic saying of Jesus in this morning’s gospel: ‘you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’.  It is an allusion to the story in the book of Genesis where Jacob dreams of the ladder to heaven and sees angels ascending and descending, ‘in holy array’ we might say.  When he awakes, he exclaims: ‘how awesome is this place!  Surely this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven’.  So he names it Beth-El, ‘house of God’.  In St John, Jesus is saying that he is that ladder, that way to God, the one in whom heaven comes down to earth and earth is raised to heaven: not in a dream, this time, but in God’s presence and his very self, and essence all divine.  He is the way, because he has come as the truth and as the life.  In epiphany, we behold his glory and celebrate it, full of grace and truth. 

How do we do this?  We encounter him in many ways that we do not always recognise

at the time.  For he takes us by surprise, as he did Jacob, as he did Nathanael. It is often not at the time but afterwards that we ponder that unexpected epiphany, that strange meeting, and say to ourselves, ‘Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it!’.  Here on earth, we see through a glass darkly, and do not yet know him face to face.  So human instinct has always been to build temples that will memorialise some sacred encounter or holy man or woman, symbolise our yearning for what is beyond us, guard the possibility of glimpsing the holy and transcendent in our midst. And in the long history of constructing earthly temples, there has always been the belief that something of heavenly glory can be contained within a humanly-created shrine, there can be a ladder to heaven with angelic presences and a holy array. 

Here in Durham we have one man who embodied this vision par excellence and gave it substance.  I am referring to John Cosin, canon residentiary and then bishop of Durham, the anniversary of whose death in 1672 falls today, 15^th January.  All over north-east England, but especially around Durham, you can see how he brought splendour and richness into parish churches such as Brancepeth (as it used to be before the fire), Sedgefield and Haughton-le-Skerne, his own chapel at Auckland Castle, and especially into this Cathedral.  The civil war and commonwealth had left this building a forlorn, empty shell after the Scottish prisoners Cromwell held here were said to have stripped out everything combustible to keep themselves warm during the terrible winter of 1650-51. On St Andrew’s Day we dedicated a plaque by the St Margaret Altar to commemorate the many who died here.  The Restoration of 1660 was nowhere welcomed more warmly than here in Durham, when Cosin returned as bishop and determined to put right the wrongs this bleak chapter of history had inflicted on the Cathedral.  His achievements are all around you: the mighty font cover, the organ screen at the west end, the stalls in the quire that echo the great 14^th century Neville screen behind the high altar.  The message was: 17^th century Anglicanism stood in direct continuity with the medieval church in pursuing the beauty of holiness.  This sumptuous woodwork, for which only the best craftsmen would do, tells us that Cosin’s vision of the church was as a place of beauty and glory where all that human creativity and craftsmanship could achieve would be pressed into the service of God.  He believed that the church building should bring you to your knees.  In his Private Devotions he prays that we, ‘evermore endeavouring to set forth the beauty of thy church militant here on earth may at last be transported to the glory of thy church triumphant in the heavens’.

After being canon of Durham, Cosin went to Peterhouse Cambridge as Master of the College.  Its chapel had been built by his predecessor, but it fell to Cosin to furnish it.  In the chancel, there was an inscription in Latin, Jacob’s saying: ‘this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven’.  It expressed Cosin’s belief that the worship on earth and in heaven were one activity.  Above the altar was the dove of the Holy Spirit with carved cherubim all around.   The altar was covered with bright silk and in front of it incense burned as the offering of prayer to the Most High.  This was a chapel that made you pray.  Rich choral music filled the incense-laden air, for Cosin believed that music should serve ‘for the dignity and glory of God's high and holy service, and be also a means to inflame men's affections, to stir up their attentions, and to edify their understandings’. Alas, like Cosin himself, like this Cathedral, his noble chapel suffered at the hands of puritan iconoclasts.  Much of the glory departed, though enough was put back at the Restoration (thanks to the generosity of Bishop Cosin as he became) to recall what it had been like. 

In Durham of all places we should celebrate the importance of Cosin’s legacy to the Christian life of our nation: he deserves to be better known and honoured than he is.  His investment in the liturgy and spirituality of the Church of England was profound.  His version of the Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus is familiar and loved the world as an essential introduction to the ordination prayer in the Anglican rite.  In Cosin’s Library on Palace Green, they have a most precious book, his own copy of the Book of Common Prayer known as the Durham Book.  It has his painstaking handwritten comments, elaborations and suggestions for revision, some of which would find their way into the 1662 Prayer Book we have inherited today.  But it is not only as an architect of that book that we remember him, nor simply his classically constructed (and very long) sermons, nor his contribution to architecture, liturgy and the arts.  He used his wealth to found almshouses for the poor (including Cosin’s Almshouses on Palace Green), build schools, endowing libraries, provide for the needy in many places. and even give money to liberate a party of Christian captives in north Africa.  This illustrates Cosin’s belief that the beauty of worship and the service of humanity must always walk hand in hand.  Liturgy must always have a social conscience: we do not leave the pain of the world outside at the church door but bring it with us into the presence of God because it is his and our special care.  Cosin would have said that to invest in sacred space, and in the worship offered there is to sensitise us who pray to the imperatives of our world: to care for those who need our help, to look for reconciliation and wholeness in society; to reflect our love of God by loving our neighbour as ourselves. 

In the new Jerusalem, there is no need of shrines and temples, says the Apocalypse.  But in this life, meanwhile, we still need sacred spaces whose beauty will enchant us to re-imagine the world as God designed it and as he purposes in Christ to re-make it: a world premised on justice and mercy, goodness, truth and love.  In our worship this is the world we re-create for a while: we play-act the life of the world to come, live for a while as a people for whom there are ‘no ends nor beginnings but one equal eternity’.  ‘Come to church and be in heaven’ would not be a bad marketing tag for any parish or cathedral.  And we carry heaven out with us as we cross the threshold and return to our ordinary days; we take it into the world and become the sources of renewal, like little ladders between earth and heaven where angels congregate in holy array, and epiphanies happen, and the doors of paradise are flung open, and humanity is welcomed home. 

Durham, 15 January 2012 (John 1.43-end)

Joan of Arc 1412-2012

‘One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.’  Those words were spoken by a young woman whose destiny it was to be put to death at the age of just 19.  Her birth was remembered in her village as having taken place on Epiphany night, 6 January. Later on, when she had become famous, that Epiphany birthday was spoken about as a sign that had brought ‘inconceivable joy’, as if the magi had come visiting once more with a new gift to bear.  We are as near as we can get to the 600^th anniversary of her birth in 1412 at Domremy in north-eastern France, and of her baptism there by the name of Jehanne.  We know her better as Joan, Saint Joan of Arc.  
 

For years, I knew only the textbook version of her life, adorned by a sixth form reading of George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan.  The story was of La Pucelle, the cross-dressing Maid of Orléans and heroine-soldier who had voices, delivered a city, crowned a king, was captured, sold to the English, tried for heresy and burned.  I knew that soon after her death she was vindicated and beatified.  When I started going to France I discovered the extraordinary hold she has there.  We English, so ambivalent about the French, cannot quite comprehend this.  She is honoured in thousands of churches and public squares.  The civic version has her in armour, often on horseback, her head high in triumph.  In churches she is the obedient, prayerful maiden: like Blessed Mary in fact.  She was canonised only in 1920, just after the Great War, petitioned by a battle-weary people in gratitude for having once again been brought through conflict.  Intellectuals began to study her, poets and painters depicted her, politicians harnessed her to their causes.  She was spoken of as the soul of France, the embodiment of the nation’s ideals, her second patron saint.  For some this was a quest for a more enlightened patriotism, for some, a nostalgic return to a lost age.  Some harnessed her to radical political causes; others made her a symbol of political conservatism. The elusiveness of Joan is part of her mystery: there are so many readings of her that it is hard to know who the real woman was.  

Today we celebrate the baptism of Christ.  St Joan, born at Epiphany, is a child of this season, baptised at this time.  And if Jesus’ baptism is the first symbol of his obedience to his Father’s will, for Joan obedience was also the central theme of her life.  In the cruel era of the Hundred Years’ War, her obedience took a shape that was hardly straightforward.  Yet the transcripts of her trial and her posthumous re-trial two decades later show a woman who understood her whole life to be an act of obedience to God and to her baptismal vocation.  This was the source of her bravery in relieving the siege of Orléans and (what took even more courage) in confronting the Dauphin in person and urging him to go with her to Reims to be crowned.  Her love for her country and her belief that her destiny was bound up with that of France did not come from self-importance (she was always at heart the humble country girl), nor from a lack of self-doubt, but from an intense conviction that would not go away.  She spoke of these voices as a call to self-offering and service.  That, she said, is how the spirits should be tested – by their fruits.  It cost her not less than everything as she already intuited as a young girl. 

This insight was hard-won; it did not come except through a long and arduous journey of discernment.  Many princes in state and church asked her, roughly at times, how she could know what God wanted of her, how she could be so sure she was not deluded.  But before others asked her those questions, she had asked them of herself and of God a hundred times.  It was as if the conflicted soul of France was reflected in her complex inner life.  If she had not been so attentive to the voices that spoke to her, life would have been infinitely easier and no doubt longer.  So it is in the biblical stories we listen to in the Christmas cycle.  What if Mary had not responded to the archangel’s annunciation, if Joseph had not heeded the dream warning him to take the holy family into Egypt out of danger, if Jesus had not been obedient to the voice that spoke at the river Jordan and addressed him as God’s son….  so much in God’s purposes hangs by tiny, fragile threads of recognition and assent.  And like Jesus at his baptism, the vision and the voice would thrust her out into the world of power and conflict where she would be exposed to merciless public scrutiny which would end only with the sacrifice of her life.  Charles Péguy, the great 20^th century catholic thinker and poet who was so inspired by Joan, once said that everything begins with mysticism and ends in politics; that is, the path of sanctity leads from inward conviction to outward transforming action in the world, as it did for Joan, as it did for Jesus.  

Our choir has visited Versailles several times and sung at the Church of Sainte Jeanne d’Arc.  In the apse there is a huge painting of St Joan, upright in her armour, her sword pointing downwards at rest.  But she is not standing in her own strength.  She is propped up by the three saints whose voices she had heard since childhood: St Catherine, St Margaret of Antioch and St Michael the Archangel.  Joan took time to identify her saints, could not say why these and not others came to her in a blaze of light as regular, if not always welcome, companions.  But in the two woman martyrs, perhaps she saw how her life was being shaped for service, renunciation and a willing death; and in the archangel, how she was called to bring help and protection to the weak and powerless; and all this in the name of God.  Behind and around her are angels with trumpets and thuribles, perhaps celebrating Joan’s canonisation and reception into heaven.  Or, as I prefer, showing her in her earthly ordeals, so weakened that she can no longer stand upright, but helped to stand and persevere by her heavenly fellow-travellers. 

Shaw’s play is not perfect either as history or as drama; but he does capture Joan’s spirit.  Here she is, facing her accusers.  ‘Do not think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone.  France is alone; and God is alone; and what is my loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God?  I see now that the loneliness of God is his strength: what would he be if he listened to your jealous little counsels?  Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too: it is better to be alone with God: his friendship will not fail me, nor his counsel, nor his love.  In his strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die.  I will go out now to the common people, and let the love in their eyes comfort me… if I go through the fire I shall go through it to their hearts for ever and ever.  And so, God be with me!’  This Joan feels closer to the spiritual truth than either the heroic or the sentimentalised versions. 

And we should learn from her what we learn from all God’s saints, that in life’s complexities and stresses, we need to recall who and what we are: the baptised who follow the Lamb wherever he goes, even when it is into life’s cruel or dark or dangerous places.  The cup that he drinks and the baptism he is baptised with are for us too, says the gospel.  The play ends with a poignant plea on Joan’s part for the world she has left behind in death: ‘O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?’  How we pray and think, by what vision and truth we speak and live before others in the world, with what single-mindedness and purity of motive we set our hearts and minds on God and his kingdom, all this is our lived response to that question. It comes down to baptism, Christ’s, and ours: his obedience to save us and our obedience in following him; his yes and ours, his grace and truth, our only hope in life and death. 

Durham, 8 January 2011(Epiphany 1)