'His name is John': a patronal festival homily

Preached as a sermon at the Minster Church of St John the Baptist, Croydon. Readings: Isaiah 401.1-11; Luke 1.57-66,80

 

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‘His name is John’! And the name John means ‘the Lord is gracious’.

 

Today is our patronal festival, that is to say the festival when we celebrate our patron saint.

 

And that patron saint is St John the Baptist.

 

A patron, according to the dictionary, can be a couple of things.

 

First a patron is ‘a customer, especially a regular one, of a shop, restaurant or theatre’. That doesn’t sound quite the sort of patron we’re talking about here. John the Baptist doesn’t drop by to take in a show at the Minster: he’s not that sort of patron.

 

Another definition is ‘a person who gives financial or other support to a person, organization, cause, or activity’. Well, John doesn’t give us any financial support, he’s not on the direct debit planned giving scheme and he doesn’t use GiftAid. So what are we talking about here?

 

A patron saint has a deeper function and gives other support.

 

As Bishop Rowan Williams says, ‘Patron saints are not there to be benign mascots; they are given so that nations and groups and individuals may have identifiable friends in the company of heaven who will give a particular direction and sharpness to the challenges of the gospel.’

 

What a beautiful thought, that here at this church, we have an ‘identifiable friend in the company of heaven’.

 

The Christian understanding of the Communion of Saints isn’t of a mush of people who have died, like drops making up a pool, but individuals whose identity is magnified as they praise God and pray for us on earth. So we can have an identifiable friend in heaven.

 

That patron saint, our identifiable friend in heaven, prays for us: there is nothing more encouraging than to know that your friend, living or departed, is praying for you at the throne of grace.

 

Our identifiable friend in heaven is an example to us in the living out of the gospel: there is nothing more inspiring than the example of a friend. A Christian friend’s life helps us in being a Christian.

 

And as Rowan Williams says, our patron saint, our identifiable friend in heaven, ‘gives a particular direction and sharpness to the challenges of the gospel.’

 

You can certainly say that of John the Baptist.

 

Before I came to Croydon, I have to confess that I hadn’t really thought a huge amount about him, other than that he was a bit weird, somewhat off putting and rather remote.

 

I was, of course, aware of his high profile during the season of Advent, when he is identified as the one who proclaims the coming Christ and fulfilling the text of our first reading: John’s is the voice crying out in the wilderness, ‘prepare the way of the Lord’.

 

But since I have been here I have pondered John much more. I ask his prayers for me, for you and our church. He has become my friend in the Communion of Saints!

 

And his example stirs and inspires me in my ministry here, and I hope all of us in our Christian faith.

 

Accounts of John begin with his childhood: let us rejoice in the presence of children and young people in our midst and ensure they are served and nurtured: that is a gift adult disciples can give to the young.

 

John the Baptist takes us to the heart of the matter, away from the fripperies and distractions: John leads us to a deep encounter with Jesus Christ.

 

John knows that his mission and ministry is to point people to Jesus Christ. And that he does.

 

He makes himself unpopular by speaking the truth, rebuking those who exploit the poor, and the tyrant King Herod, to the cost of his life.

 

What integrity. John the Baptist puts the grit back into integrity!

 

John is intensely humble and aware of who he is, ‘I am not worthy to untie the thong of Christ’s sandal’.

 

John’s blunt and direct: turn away from sin; turn to God.

 

In all of that John does not want to get in the way of his message: ‘Christ must increase; I must decrease’ (John 3.30). A bit like St Paul saying, ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2.20)

 

Ultimately John tells us to look beyond himself to the very heart of the matter, to the depth of the mystery of God revealed in the one he calls the ‘Lamb of God’: it’s my message, not me.

 

John says to us, as our gritty, personal friend, ‘Behold. Look. See. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’.

 

We sing John’s words at every Eucharist, ‘O Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world. Have mercy upon us. Grant us peace’. In doing so we adore Jesus Christ; and John’s task is realised.

 

For this is where we come to behold, and to meet, Jesus Christ in his word and sacrament.

 

In John the Baptist, we have a friend in heaven, whose powerful prayers we ask for in our daily lives as disciples of Christ and in the ministry and mission of Christ’s church.

 

V. Pray for us, O glorious St. John the Baptist,

R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Walking in step with the Crucified & Risen Lord

First preached as a sermon at Guildford Cathedral on Easter Day 2018 at Solemn Evensong & Procession.

Luke 24.13- 35 ‘The Walk to Emmaus’

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the delights and excitements of the English beach holiday – apart from guessing the weather – is going rock-pooling. And when you wear shoes a lot walking barefoot on rough ground brings you quickly to realise just how soft and pampered your feet are. I have childhood memories at the beginning of beach holidays treading through rock pools being scratched by barnacles, shivering in cold sea water, jabbed by rocks, burned by hot sand.

Tonight on the shiny floors of this cathedral there will be an Easter procession; not a journey of penitence but a journey of rejoicing. Holy Week and Easter is characterised by a surfeit of journeying – Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, the Way of the Cross; and just last night the confirmation candidates journeyed to the font to recall their baptism, echoing the journey of the people of Israel from their slavery in the darkness of Egypt, to freedom, light and liberty in the Promised Land. Led by incense and making our way to the Paschal Candle our procession deliberately evokes the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire that led the people of Israel from their slavery to freedom. All these journeys are an embodiment of a life metaphor.

So now a new day has dawned: Christ is risen! And still journeys. The journeys of the first Easter morning are of the myrrh bearing women, coming to anoint Jesus’ dead body, and of Mary Magdalene coming to weep at the tomb. From the empty tomb Mary begins the first Christian missionary journey as she goes to pass on the news of the resurrection to the Apostles, what we know now as the apostolic faith. Mary hands on that which reaches us today. Peter and John respond by racing to the tomb. Tonight’s Easter procession is a response in movement around the Cathedral: it is a rather more stately echo of the journeys of the women, of Mary Magdalene and of Peter and John - with no overtaking - to and from the tomb: we make their journey tonight.

Easter can seem like we have finally got it, we have arrived at our destination; journey’s end. And all too often the resurrection is told as simply the happy ending of a sad story. But the resurrection of Jesus is a junction not a terminus; it is a point of departure that takes us on and beyond our expectation. It recalibrates our vision and the possibilities of God; we are left asking ‘who is this Jesus? Where is this Jesus?’ and we see him and find him in the simplicity and depth of the breaking of bread; which is itself, day by day, a glimpse of resurrection and then we see him no more.

In his poem ‘Emmaus’ Archbishop Rowan Williams describes a stranger – Jesus - as completely out of step with our familiar world. Jesus walks to a different rhythm, padding in the gaps between our uncertain footsteps, across the terrain and contours over which we are called to walk, like the feet of the little boy who has removed his shoes to walk across the rock pools.

Before the Resurrection we were shod with the expectation that death is the final word, that we can live only for ourselves, that we are essentially alone. We take off those shoes to walk barefoot, walking the same terrain as before but, like with shoes off in the rock pools, with a more vibrant appreciation of God’s abundant life, our bonds with others, and that we live no longer for ourselves but for Christ. Tonight we begin resurrection walking again, tentatively and yet attentively, walking with him, step by step into his rhythm, he who is everything we are, and everything we are to become.

Those two dejected disciples walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus in the dimness of dusk and with uncertain footsteps. They walked into the dark night with the stranger who walks with them and breaks bread for them, as he has before, and now they walk on and into the light.  

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

What can be said? Reflections on Auschwitz

These reflections come following a visit to Auschwitz with the then Archbishop of Canterbury and a group of fellow Anglican clergy in January 2017. I later joined with my Jewish colleague and others from around Surrey at the University of Surrey to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day. I have been asked to speak at the event having so recently visited Auschwitz. What follows is my beginning to work through what it means to speak about something unspeakable. As the Archbishop said at the time, “I’ve come away with too much to write, and no words to write it.” 

But here are some initial thoughts of mine.

'There is a time to speak and a time to keep silent' Ecclesiastes 3.7b

There is a profound silence at Auschwitz.[1] That silence emanates from the deathly hush of the gas chamber after people have been killed - murdered - and before their mortal remains are turned to dust and ashes in the ovens. 

It is said that the birds do not sing at Auschwitz. In my first visit there earlier this month I don't recall birdsong, but that may just have been me being unable to hear sounds of beauty and unrestrained joy in a place that represents the polar opposite of all that is good. What I do remember, whilst walking around Birkenau, was hearing the barking of a dog quite clearly. That bark pierced the freezing air as an inarticulate cry that spoke more deeply than I knew at the time.

The people who were killed at Auschwitz had not always been silent or silenced: they spoke, laughed, cried, had dreams, aspirations and hopes. They prayed: praise, lament, supplication and thanksgiving. They spoke eloquently and passionately; they gossiped and slandered. Some had not even learned how to speak beyond the primeval cry for their mother's breast. In short, they were human beings, ordinary and living their lives. 

The humanity of those killed, in all its ordinariness and prosaic detail, is the first thing that the Nazis sought to deny. Their strategy was one of, first, identification (the Nuremberg laws and the wearing of the yellow star), second, isolation (the ghetto) and, third, eradication (Auschwitz). They predicated all this on the less than humanness of the Jewish people, and because of that they had no right to speak, be heard, or to breathe. Human rights only apply to human beings.

Witnesses to the killing testify that those people who were killed at Auschwitz both sang psalms to God and screamed out in terror: they were not silent lambs led to the slaughter.

'There is a time to speak and a time to keep silent'

Anything that one writes or says about Auschwitz has to be properly reticent. It can never be casual or cheap. Auschwitz demands that we pay attention to our silences and our speaking. It's not simply about the choice of words but whether or not we deploy words at all.

Why so? In the face the industrialised and systematised processing of death there is little that can be said that is not trite, hollow or over earnest. Anything we might seek to say about Auschwitz has to pass a high burden of authenticity.

In The Edge of Words Rowan Williams points out that choosing to keep silent can operate in more than one way.[2] Silence can be a way of honouring those people and situations about which we cannot properly speak. However the Nazi project was dependent on German society keeping silence about the violence and death at its heart: colleagues, neighbours and friends of Jewish people did not speak out. For every Oskar Schindler and Maximilian Kolbe there are countless stories of people betraying Jewish people and effectively condemning them to Auschwitz and all that that held.

Silence can also manipulate and betray. Not to speak out about Auschwitz, even 72 years since its 'liberation', is an abdication of responsibility. Failure to speak about, and speak out about, Auschwitz will mean a failure to speak out about pernicious anti-Semitism, crimes against humanity and genocide in our own times.

In the wake of Auschwitz we also need to guard against 'over speaking' that is, naming things evil that may be distasteful, so that when that which is truly evil is present it can be identified, isolated and defeated.

Auschwitz puts me, as someone who always wants to speak, or at least talk, in a difficult position. To speak means I might say too much or not enough, to remain silent, whilst honouring the dead, also can collude with the silence about their fate and what led and leads to it. All I can do is make that judgement in the hope that I speak well: if nothing more, Auschwitz makes me all the more aware of the power and 'edge' of words and silence. May Auschwitz, the place and the idea, never be forgotten or the memory of those who died there fall silent.

'There is a time to speak and a time to keep silent'

I want to conclude with the words of Elie Weisel an Auschwitz survivor, the author of Night, with words from his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986:

The world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men and woman are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center [sic] of the universe.[3]

© Andrew Bishop, 2016/2025

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[1] When I am referring to Auschwitz, I am referring to both a place and an idea: the concentration camp and death camp - Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz 2, at Birkenau - and also using 'Auschwitz' as representing the whole Nazi eradication programme of God's ancient people, the Jews, intentional, brutal and evil as it was, and the others - amongst them Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviets, catholic priests and religious - who were also murdered.

[2] Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), Especially on silence as a moral choice, 48-51.

[3] Elie Wiesel, trans. Marion Wiesel. Night. (London: Penguin Books. 2006), 118.

THE PRIEST AS GARDENER

‘Priests are to be servants and shepherds among the people to whom they are sent…They are to be messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord’.[1]

The language of the Ordinal gives familiar images of the priest, replete with Biblical allusions and imagery.[2] In his reappraisal of the work of Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s classic The Christian Priest Today (1972) in an anniversary lecture, Rowan Williams adds a new image, that of the priest as weaver, one who interprets and draws together the stories that form and shape the community that the priest serves. In this blog I want, humbly, to suggest and explore another image, that of priest as gardener. As it continues I have written on the basis that the word ‘gardener’ can be replaced by the word ‘priest’, and ‘garden’ be replaced by ‘human spirit’ or ‘church’, such are the parallels.

It reminds me of a story when I started my second curacy, before I was licensed and no one knew who I was. A woman came into our new garden as I was chopping some overgrown things down. She was clearly looking for someone and said to me, 'Are you the gardener? Can you tell me where the keys to the church hall are?' Nice to be mistaken for the gardener.

Of Gardens

Gardens feature in the Bible as locations that are, and represent, a place of proximity to God in God’s creative and redemptive purposes. In the Old Testament, the Garden of Eden is the place where Adam and Eve dwell, initially in harmony with God, before fracturing that relationship (Genesis 2.15 ff), and it is also a place where the man and woman hide from God (Genesis 3.8); the garden in the Song of Songs is a place where the loved purses the beloved (Song of Songs 6.2). In the gospels the Garden of Gethsemane is where Jesus bears the weight of the fallen creation to reverse ‘Adam’s fall’ in saying ‘yes’ to the Father (John 18.1); and in the Garden of Resurrection, which is in such close proximity to the place of crucifixion (John 19.41), Mary Magdalene’s tear-filled search for her Lord sees her find the beloved (John 20.15).

These gardens interconnect typologically: Adam and the New Adam; the lover’s pursuit in Song of Songs, Mary Magdalene’s in the garden of resurrection. In Eden and the Garden of Resurrection the true gardener is God.

Of Gardeners

The task of a gardener is to cultivate, tend and nurture a garden. The gardener does this to (co)create something beautiful and that grows, not to the gardener’s glory, but as something for everyone to behold and for God to delight in. The garden is an offering beyond itself and is subject to forces beyond the gardener’s control. So then, the garden, like the human spirit or church community is a microcosm of the world; or, is it the world, the Kingdom, in embryo? Like the trees of the field the plantings of the garden will ‘clap their hands’ (Isaiah 55.12), or in the words of the canticle Benedicite, omnia opera, ‘O all ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him forever’.[3]

The gardener intercedes for the garden. The prayers of Rogationtide are perhaps more agricultural than horticultural, but the same principle applies: the gardener asks God’s blessing on the garden.[4] The gardener knows, like St Paul, that whilst planting and watering it is God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3.6). The tending of the garden is a work of trust on the part of the gardener and one in which grace is bestowed.

There is nothing the gardener enjoys more than to perambulate around the garden. The poet George Herbert interpreted the ‘beating the bounds’, the traditional Rogation procession, ‘as a means of asking God’s blessing on the land, of preserving boundaries, of encouraging fellowship between reconciling neighbours with the reconciling of differences, and of charitable giving to the poor’.[5] The gardener knows that whilst boundaries are in the mind of the gardener: bees, birds, butterflies and dandelion seeds do not observe boundaries. In gardens boundaries are trnagressed. There is cross fertilisation, literally. The gardener has to live with and accept this graciously.

Biodiversity is crucial to support the ecosystem of the garden. Plants that may not be desired by the gardener nourish and support the life of other deeply valuable aspects of garden life. The caterpillars that are a nuisance become the pollenating butterflies. Even 'weeds' (insert names as applicable) have a place in a healthy garden. That which is deemed a weed by the gardener can be a thing of beauty; it can be redeemed and seen as a blessing to the garden.

The gardener has to be endlessly patient. There are many pressures to short-circuit patience. Planting of rapid growing shrubs or ground covering plants and those that provide instant splashes of colour are easy to do. But they will need to be replaced season by season. We do not plant many oak trees any more. In the eighteenth century Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown changed landscapes with a patient vision knowing that neither he nor his aristocratic employer would see instant benefits. The landscape would look its best when trees had matured and lakes had reeds around them. And that would be long after his day.

The gardener has to take particular care in transplanting. Seedlings are delicate and do not always take root in new soil. Indeed the gardener has to attend to the whole garden but know that some plants are more self-sufficient than others. The gardener’s task is inter-generational. The youngest plant can bloom and be beautiful as can the mature plant; each will need different treatment.

The gardener can only work with the garden that has been entrusted. So it would be impossible to create the gardens of Sissinghurst into the Australian outback. The gardener has to pay heed to the soil conditions of the garden as well as the local climate and conditions, what the French viticulturists would call the terroir. A gardener is on a hiding to nothing in attempting to replicate the planting of a garden from elsewhere and to not pay attention to the realities of the terroir of their own garden.

Like the vine grower, the gardener has to prune (John 15.1-2). Pruning helps healthy growth, can increase fruiting and cuts away disease. On first sight pruning looks brutal or harsh yet it is profoundly necessary. Furthermore pruning can benefit other plants as well as the pruned one. Pruning enables light to get to dark places to allow those plants growing in the shade of others to flourish, although some plants are shade loving and the gardener needs to honour that. The full sun will impoverish those plants.

From time to time the gardener has also to tie up and support those plants that cannot stand by their own strength. The trellis is needed to ‘bind up and heal’. Gardeners also need to feed and nourish the soil. Feeding is a task of the gardener. The need for patient digging in of nourishment and nutrients, watering in drought but knowing some plants draw from deep down and not just at the surface (cf Jer 17.7,8).

‘You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God…Pray earnestly for the gift of the Holy Spirit.[6]

This is a profoundly Trinitarian vision into which the gardener is bound. In the gardener’s task we see the Triune God: the Father, the source of all being and life, the Creator, who spreads the garden before us; we see the Son, in the redemptive capacity with the Father, to recreate the garden as the New Adam; the Holy Spirit in the Spirit’s boundless creativity, sustenance, beauty and diversity of gifts, the Spirit which enables even ‘the desert [to] blossom and burst into song’ (Isaiah 35.1).

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

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[1] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 37.

[2] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 37. This edition gives biblical references for these images.

[3] Book of Common Prayer, p. 9.

[4] Common Worship: Times and Seasons, p. 610.

[5] Common Worship: Times and Seasons, p. 597.

[6] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 39.