A blazing fire: A Trinty Sunday semron

Preached at Evensong on Trinity Sunday 2016 at Guildford Cathedral

Psalm 73; Exodus 3.1-15; John 3.1-17

‘The angel of the LORD appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of a bush’ (Exodus 3.2)

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A couple of weeks ago the pictures coming from Fort McMurray in Canada were terrifying in the extreme. Much like wild fires we have seen in Australia, the fire advanced at extraordinary speed, destructive and all consuming. The pictures of the aftermath of the fire are devastating: homes and livelihoods destroyed and a barren and ashen landscape of twisted metal and charcoal trees, barely hinting at what was there before.

Fire is dangerous. The phrase ‘you’re playing with fire’ serves as a warning of highly unpleasant consequences. The fiery pit is a very vision of hell itself, both smouldering and flames flaring up and licking: ‘unquenchable flames’ as it is described in one place (Mark 9.43b).

Fire is used as an analogy of God: destructive, all-consuming, purging, as in Deuteronomy, ‘For the LORD your God is a devouring fire’ (Deuteronomy 4.24).  This purging, refining and cleansing is not always destructive: in some places wild or controlled fires regenerate flora and fauna. The discovery of processes of refining metals in fire was one of the great advances in human ingenuity. The prophet Malachi speaks of God his people ‘like gold and silver’ in a refiner’s fire (Malachi 3.3)

So what of Trinity Sunday in all of this? Is there a clunky analogy to be made between fire and the Holy Trinity? Could one link the so-called fire triangle and the Trinity: fire needs heat, fuel and oxygen; Father, Son and Lighter Spirit? It would break down into contrivance and heresy. So no!

So what might the fire in this evening’s first lesson point, and draw, us to?

What becomes clear is that as Moses gazed at that fire, he gazed at an intense mystery. There have been explanations ranging from Moses being under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, to a particular plant that, ‘excretes such a vast amount of volatiles that lighting a match near the flowers and seedpods causes the plant to be enveloped by flame. This flame quickly extinguishes without injury to the plant’. But no one suggests that Moses was lighting up a match or anything else that could have caused a plant to burst into flame.

We have surely to treat this as a theophany, a manifestation of the divine presence.

The burning bush grabbed Moses’ attention, ‘I must turn aside’ he said, ‘and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up’ (Exodus 3.3). Of course his head was turned by what he saw. With his head turned, and his attention held, he heard the God’s Word more clearly. The book of Deuteronomy puts it like this, ‘Then the LORD spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of the words but saw no form; there was only a voice. He declared his covenant, which he charged you to observe.’ (Deuteronomy 4.12).

Words without form, without a body to speak them, are as strange as fire that burns without consuming. The fire that Moses saw was entirely like fire and entirely unlike fire. And yet this fire didn’t destroy, didn’t consume and didn’t purge. It was a fire that called: it called Moses, it literally turned his head.

The fire that does not consume is something that can disappear without trace. It is wholly elusive, and yet absolutely real. This is where Abrahamic theology is distinguishable from, say, Indian religions, in their view of the sacred flame. As Elijah discovered, the LORD is not in the wind the, earthquake or the fire, but in a sound sheer silence (1 Kings 19.11-12).

The burning bush tells us about the ineffability of God: God beyond any description that words can give. In biblical terms this is against idolatry, which is thinking that words or images can define, trap or constrain God. So, for example, Deuteronomy reflects on the way in which the fire of the burning bush cautions us against idolatry, ‘Since you saw no form when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure – the form of male and female’ (Deuteronomy 4.15, 16).

Of course later when Moses came down from the mountain to bring the law later in Exodus, that is precisely what the Israelites had done, they had, with Aaron’s the priest’s connivance, created a golden calf which they worshipped. Concocting our own transitory ideas of God is constructing golden claves if we don’t pay attention to what we can’t say of God.

The doctrine of the Trinity guards us against saying too much of God, and not enough. It tells us that we can, and must, speak of God, yet with care. It is like a trellis, up which grows our understanding of the intense, burning, mystery of God, not subject to the whims and changes of our preferences.

As Christians we do claim to see God in an image, but one not made with human hands, and that is in the face of Jesus Christ, who, the letter to the Colossians tells us, is, ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1.15). And indeed Moses’ encounter with God is not wholly without words. Moses is told he stands on holy ground and that the God who speaks is the God of his ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exodus 3.5, 6). And then God reveals God’s name, ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (Exodus 3.14).

Jesus shows us the ways of the Eternal God in the parables of the Kingdom, in his incarnation, death and resurrection, in healing and forgiving: the Trinity is implicit and revealed in Christ Jesus who is totally at one with the Father in the power of the Spirit.

So we now know God’s name and we see his face in Jesus Christ and the flame of the Holy Spirit catches our attention to remove our sandals before the mystery of God. Indeed the fire of the Holy Spirit invites us into share the very life of God, in the saving Name of Jesus Christ who shows us the Father and leads us, human and frail as we are, into the divine life. St Paul calls it in the Greek being en Christo, in Christ.

This is the Christian vision of salvation - not simply hearing and obeying law (that’s Judaism); not simply submission to God, abject or otherwise (that’s Islam) - but incorporation, being drawn into the sanctifying life of God, from which flows our thinking and speaking and acting in God’s name.

May we be like flames dancing out of the inner life of the very heart of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to be a source of blessing, peace and burning love for the whole creation.

© Andrew Bishop 2016

Welcome and Worthiness: the hospitality of God

First preached as a sermon at Guildford Cathedral 29th May 2016

The gospel of the healing of the centurion’s slave (Luke 71b-10) is fascinating on many levels: intercession to Jesus on behalf of another; the nature of authority; quality of faith. And there is an insight into the relationship between Jesus, the Jewish elders and the Roman authorities. Far from the notion that each of the three parties had nothing to do with each other, other than be antagonistic, here they work together. The Roman centurion asked the Jewish elders to ask Jesus to come and heal his slave.

Another aspect, though, is worth deeper pondering. That is the question of worthiness and welcome, a better word would be hospitality.

On worthiness, the Jews say to Jesus about the centurion, ‘he is worthy of having you do this for him’, yet the centurion says to Jesus, ‘I am not worthy’.

On hospitality, Jesus starts to go to the centurion’s house, but the centurion says he cannot receive him because of his, the host’s, unworthiness.

There is something of the etiquette and religious sensibilities of two thousand years ago here, but it still speaks today. People who consider themselves unworthy, for example, to enter a church, or consider themselves unworthy to engage in society, who consider themselves unworthy of love, joy or hope, or feel themselves unworthy of time or interest from people they respect. And today there are people who feel unworthy about receiving guests: ‘what will they think of my house?’; ‘if only we lived somewhere more splendid/bigger/glamourous…’ delete as applicable…then we could entertain.

Hospitality and worthiness works out today in other situations too. Who is more or less worthy, the host or the guest? How do we treat a guest? What does it mean to be a guest? The letter to the Hebrews reminds us, ‘do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it’ (Hebrews 13.2).

It is in a gracious welcome and hospitality that we can show a guest just how worthy they are. But welcome is not just about saying ‘hello’ to someone. A good motto is this: ‘Welcome is what happens after we have said hello’.

In other words it’s not just enough to acknowledge a visitor or guest at the door; that’s the first step, but a superficial one. True welcome, true hospitality is about taking the guest as they are and enabling them to feel at home, seeking after their needs: counting the guest a blessing. Christian hospitality always supposes the guest to be Christ himself.

An example of this in St Benedict’s Rule for monks when he says, ‘Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for He is going to say, "I came as a guest, and you received Me" (Matt. 25:35)’. Later Benedict writes, ‘In the reception of the poor and of pilgrims the greatest care and solicitude should be shown, because it is especially in them that Christ is received’ (The Rule, Chapter 53). Christ is most present in those who appear most unworthy of a good welcome.

This worthiness and hospitality is three dimensional: it’s about ourselves, our homes, our country: personal, domestic, national. Who do we welcome? Who do we show that they are worthy to be with us? Who welcomes us? How are we made to be worthy?

This all has a direct bearing on our actions: it’s ethical.  How do we as a nation give worthiness and hospitality to those coming into this country as migrants, refugees or asylum seekers? If we say ‘yes’ to them coming in, through the Border Agency, what is our real welcome like? Are we ready to give a welcome beyond the ‘hello’, a welcome that may be hard work and not without cost - but that says that hospitality and worthiness is profoundly important - be that in the provision of health care, housing, social care, education, jobs?

This is where our faith directly strikes at how we live our lives day by day. In the places where we spend time - in our homes, in school, in the workplace, or wherever it may be - how we receive the stranger, the new person or the difficult person is actually a measure of how we are a Christian.

It applies to church life too, here in this now cathedral now, today. I’ll aks it first of myself and invite you to do the same: who do I say ‘hello’ to but never really come to know, or seek to know, in other words never really welcome?

Welcome isn’t just about receiving someone on to your territory. The territory is shared and both guest and host have to change. If someone joins us at table, we all have to budge up.

Welcome is costly, because it demands from us that we give up something of ourselves and our preferences to go the extra mile; going beyond the superficial ‘hello’. Welcome isn’t just about receiving, it’s about seeking too; seeking out who someone really is, worthy to be loved, welcomed, as if we were welcoming Christ himself.

The centurion felt unworthy to welcome Jesus, but was shown worthiness: Jesus sought to meet him and paid attention to his deepest need in healing the man’s slave, thereby showing worthiness and dignity to the slave too. We learn that no one is beyond the worthiness of God, and all are shown hospitality should they wish to receive it.

The priority of the church today needs to be declaring and living out the worthiness of all people, such that they are ready to receive the hospitality of God.

And those of us here in this building today need to know that too. We need to know that when we dare to say ‘I am not worthy’ we are teetering on the threshold of refusing God’s hospitality. That’s why, like the centurion we say, ‘but only say the word and I shall be healed’. Or from the Prayer of Humble Access, ‘we do not presume to come to this your table, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies’. You make us worthy.

Both those lines come from preparation to receive Holy Communion, which is, for us, the ultimate act of the hospitality of God. In receiving Holy Communion we receive Christ, and each of us is declared and shown to be worthy: worthy for Christ to come under the roof of our lives in word and sacrament.  Curiously, perhaps, the proper name for the bread of Holy Communion is ‘the host’. So, today, who the guest; who the host?

© Andrew Bishop 2016

The Ascension of Jesus Christ: looking up, down, left and right

An Ascension Day sermon preached at Guildford Cathedral, 5th May 2016

Readings: Acts 1.1-11; Luke 24.44-53

‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ (Acts 1.6)

+ In nomine Patris…

You need to wear your shades if you go into the Lady Chapel of Guildford Cathedral on a sunny day at this time of year. The steps take you up into the chapel and, for a moment, your sight line is directly up at the windows perched high up above.

The sun is quite dazzling. And one’s gaze cannot be held. And so one must look down again, back to the mundane, but also a place where manifestations of God’s glory are also to be found: the altar, the table of the Lord; the Blessed Sacrament, the presence of the Ascended Lord in bread and wine; and the people of God gathered for worship.

Ascension Day gives us a scene of people gazing up into the sky looking to the glory, exaltation and ascension of Jesus Christ. They know and are told that they cannot stand gazing up there for ever. They will have to look down again and out and about.

And, like them, we will look out for something that is coming: ‘Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people, and kindle in them the fire of your love’. And in these days before Pentecost, nine days, hence the term ‘novena’, we are asked to pray especially in Jesus’ words, ‘thy Kingdom come’, the Kingdom that the Spirit shapes and leads us into. ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’

This is what we look out for: the coming Kingdom of the Father, made known to us by Jesus Christ, into which the gift of the Holy Spirit will lead us.

You can sketch this movement of the head if you look up, then down, then left, then right. In doing so you are tracing the shape of the cross, and you are shaping yourself in the directions in which Christian disciples’ are called to look.

We look up, a motion expressive of our seeking out the Lord who has ascended from this earth, who reigns supreme over all things. From gazing up at the stars, to spotting Colonel Tim Peake’s space station, from rockets jetting up into space or a helium filled balloon, there is a deep human yearning is to gaze upwards and outwards. We want, we need to gaze so far beyond ourselves because in doing so we sense that we can reach out and touch the face of God.

But the Ascension of Jesus Christ tells us we cannot keep our heads tilted upwards forever. Only a spiritual cramp of the neck comes from that. The Ascension of Jesus Christ tells us we must look back down too. As the disciples were asked, rhetorically, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up into heaven?’ (Acts 1.11).

As we look back down we are not looking down on the world in a superior or supercilious way but, for a moment, we consider a heaven’s eye view of our world, a world that we are called to inhabit and love, as God does: as the creation account reminds us, ‘And God saw that it was good’ (Genesis 1.18b)

The prayer of Jesus to the Father, ‘Thy Kingdom come’ captures this vertical gaze, up and down, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’.

But our gaze is not just vertical it is horizontal too. As the Spirit swept over the waters in the beginning, so our gaze goes left and right: we look, with the eyes of Jesus Christ, at a world full of joy and lament; violence and healing; blessing and curse. We are called to walk as if on patrol, looking for the signs of the Kingdom, ‘thy Kingdom come’, looking left, looking right. As St Paul puts it, and I use the Authorised Version unashamedly, ‘See then that ye walk circumspectly, redeeming the time, not as fools but as wise, because the days are evil’ (Ephesians 5.15, 16). ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’

Circumspection literally means looking all around. Up and down, left and right. And time is redeemed and changed as we look for the coming of the Kingdom, a kingdom already amongst us, yet to come, and of which we are citizens. As we pray with Jesus, ‘thy Kingdom come’ we pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit, make us citizens of the Kingdom, reveal to us the ways of the Kingdom, strengthen us to live the Kingdom’. We look around for a kingdom not of this world, but in this world. This means being fully engaged in society and politics, like voting, even when there seems little point.

Churches and Christians that only ever look up will miss what God is about on the earth. Churches and Christians that only ever look down will be bogged down in the things of earth and never notice the power from on high (Luke 24.49). Churches and Christians that only ever look side to side miss the vertical dimension of faith that is more than just about a kingdom being restored to Israel, more than social and political action. The Kingdom of God is richer than that.

This looking around in all directions connected with the coming Kingdom is reflected in a prayer we often use at the preparation of the altar at the Eucharist, drawing on a second century prayer:

As the grain once scattered in the fields

and the grapes once dispersed on the hillside

are now reunited on this table in bread and wine,

so, Lord, may your whole Church

soon be gathered together

from the corners of the earth

into your kingdom.

We are ready to be gathered in, but also to be sent out. As we go out having been fed at this table, may we be at the same time both lookouts for, and signs of, the Kingdom, looking up to heaven, looking down at the earth with a heaven’s eye view, left and right, in see a world where the exalted Christ is all in all (cf Ephesians 1.22,23): in other words, ‘Thy Kingdom come’. We wait in eager longing. ‘Come, Holy Spirit’.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Ascension: chronos and kairos kiss each other

One of the great insights of the early twentieth century was the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their deep explorations into human personality and the world of what they named as the ‘psyche’. Their voluminous work is not something many of us have waded into, me least of all, so, like many people, I know their work in that sort of ‘pop psychology’ way.

One of the insights derived particularly from Jung was about human personality and the different types of person: this is used in the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator: so we may tend to be either more introvert or extrovert, sensing or intuitive, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. For some people this is a deeply helpful tool of understanding for others, and for other people it is absolute rubbish!

 

Freud gives another polarity: retentive or expulsive personalities. Being Freud it relates to nappies and basic human actions, and there I will leave that aspect. Essentially a retentive personality is someone who is insistent upon the smallest detail of something, one who feels a need to be in control of all aspects of his or her surroundings, controlling, ordered. So what sort of personality wrote this phrase?

‘I decided after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you…’ (Luke 1.1)

It sounds a rather ordered personality, precise and careful. The author is, I’m sure you guessed, St Luke. Luke gives us a most orderly account and plenty of detail. It is Luke who gives us the celebration of the Ascension tonight, forty days after the Resurrection of Jesus; he’s that precise and, just to keep it all tidy, the Day of Pentecost falls a nice round fifty days after Easter. Luke inspires the putting of the Annunciation a neat nine months before the birth of Jesus at Christmas.

Our liturgical practice mirrors Luke’s neat and tidy scheme. Indeed priestly literature in the Bible demonstrates this tendency: the orderly seven days of creation forming the seven day week; the rubrics and liturgies of the Pentateuch. Priests, and Luke, enjoy chronos the ordering of time, from which we take the word chronological, measured time.

We have something of a contrast in the Biblical tradition of the prophets: they  tend to let it all hang out, talking in big brush strokes, setting hares running and not thinking through the consequences.

St John’s gospel curiously echoes aspects of that. Very untidily – but I would say that wouldn’t I, I’m a priest – there is no moment when Jesus’ risen body disappears from our sight, although he does tell Mary Magdalene, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”’. (John 20.17). But if that’s the Ascension he comes back, whereas for Luke the Ascension is the tidying up of the earthly body of Jesus.

If we took the liturgical year from John it would look all very different. We might call it expulsive, but a better word would be kairos another Greek word that is about time, but more about time as a fulfilled moment. Time, as we will all have experienced, is something of quality of experience as much as measurement. How long has this sermon gone on? Dangerous question! If it’s boring you silly you might say 20 minutes at least, but if you’re interested and engaged you might say 2 minutes. Time flies by: well, chronos doesn’t; kairos does.

So what do all these threads say about the Ascension of Jesus? It is a fundamental and often overlooked festival, not just because it always falls on a Thursday, and not a Sunday, but because it is a major collision point where the retentive and expulsive tendencies of scripture and human preference run into one another, and where time and space is unbounded, and a new cosmology is shaped. The Ascension and its difficulties take us literally into places where our language and speaking cannot go, caught between the poles of Him being here or not.

In Luke’s account of the Ascension the disciples are busily asking Jesus the tidying up question, ‘’Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ But that’s the last we hear of them: Jesus’ answer, and what they see, renders them silent, gawping up into the skies. From that moment Luke’s passion for things chronological fades and whilst the Day of Pentecost falls on the fiftieth day what it unleashes is a swirling maelstrom of confused language, visions, dreams and wonders, people are taken to places, figuratively and literally, where they never expected to go. The Risen and Ascended Jesus appears to Saul and dazzles him.

Jesus ascended into the heavens and inaugurates the age in which his Body, the Church, becomes the vessel which, at the very least, will bear his life and grace to the world, spilling out expulsively from Judea to the ends of the earth.

The Ascension of Jesus undoes our efforts at retention and the compulsion to tidy up and hold onto God; it also tells us that just as the climbing plant cannot climb without a trellis to support it: the risen life is to be lived in the real and actual world and it is not a pie in the sky. It is into the space that a new creative space is created and engaged with in the Eucharist, where we meet the Christ who commissions us. The Eucharist is the trellis that means earth meets heaven and heaven touches earth.

In the psalms we read,

Mercy and truth are met together: righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Truth shall flourish out of the earth: and righteousness hath looked down from heaven. (Psalm 85: 10-11)

In the Ascension retention and expulsion are met together: chronos and kairos have kissed each other. And in the inadequate language given to us, God’s truth shall flourish out of the earth, and righteousness hath looked down from heaven.

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.

Seeking Wisdom: St Benedict and Universities, Ancient and Modern

‘The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day’ (Proverbs 4.18 AV)

‘But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? (Job 28.12 AV) Those are the questions that underlie the great Hebrew tradition of wisdom writing. The answer from the book of Proverbs is, in a nutshell, that, ‘The fear of the Lord is beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and understanding’ (Proverbs 1.7 AV). Proverbs is a book that restates that question and answer, and explores wisdom and her benefits and contexts. The question for the Christian is how far that wisdom tradition informs us today as those living in the hope of the gospel.

I want to use the Rule of St Benedict as a way into that and as a lens through which to see the pursuit of wisdom and the love of God, not least in the context of learning in Universities.

The Rule is laced with Biblical references, predominantly from the book of Psalms, with the next largest number of citations from the book of Proverbs. There is a clear relationship between the opening of Benedict’s Rule and Proverbs: from Proverbs: ‘Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding’; and from the Rule: ‘Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart’ (RB, Prologue, 1).

It’s not overstating it to say that St Benedict’s Rule is the conjunction and application of both the Hebrew wisdom tradition and the vision of Christian society. The pedagogy of both may seem remote from our times, laced with patriarchy, but The Rule is, at its heart, a practical and very pragmatic set of guidelines and instructions for living in Christian community, and some of the disciplines that go with that, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour. It is a powerful statement of finding wisdom in the heart and love of God.

Universities and collegiate foundations flow from and echo the monastic ideal: a resident, learning community that pursues wisdom (in the library or scriptorium); that eats together (in the refectory or hall); that ponders in company (in the cloister or quad); and that prays together (in the chapel or oratory). The survival and promulgation of learning and Christian teaching through the so-called Dark Ages has been attributed in large part to The Rule and those living it. They were faithful to the disciplines that go with the pursuit of wisdom, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour.

What Benedict advocates is a patient, unhurried pursuit of wisdom. For those pursuing wisdom, patient habit forming is at a premium. ‘Habit’ for a monk has a double meaning, the robe he wears and the formation in which he engages. So it is that Benedict states his aim of creating ‘a school for the Lord’s service’ (RB Prologue, 45) and this is about habit forming in the virtues and in wisdom. In emphasising, like Proverbs, the acts of hearing and attending as we pursue wisdom, Benedict’s Rule takes the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew scriptures and weaves it together with the New Testament and his deep conviction that the Christian should, ‘prefer nothing to Christ’ (RB 72.11).

In a hurrying world the ancient question uttered by Job still has a place: ‘where is wisdom to be found?’ Many things conspire against us: short terms for undergraduates, REF applications for academics, modern living and all hours’ social media. Whether we are monks or not, the disciplines that go with the pursuit of God’s wisdom, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour still matter but are still hard to pursue.

How we do that is in the forming of the habits of patience and attending to God are also shaped in those times and places where the hurry to a conclusion is not essential, and recognises that not everything concludes tidily anyway. Perhaps that’s why the Rule gives attention to the washing up in the monastery kitchen as much as to the cleaning of the vessels of the altar. Nevertheless, wisdom is rooted in God; a place like this is a witness to the divine patience where you are invited to stand on the threshold of God’s time: ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’.

But we cannot do this alone. The pursuit of wisdom is relational and inter-generational, as Proverbs and Benedict know. Hence the reference to father and son, that extends out into understanding that the wise community is not simply a teaching community, but a learning one too, drawing on and interpreting that which is handed on to us.

This patient, relational wisdom comes out in Benedict’s use of verses from the First Letter of John. How should the monastery deal with the admission of those seeking to join them? Benedict answers quoting 1 John, saying, ‘Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (1 John 4.1). This isn’t the desperate, grasping anxiety to recruit and boost numbers, characteristic of our contemporary church. This is a sense that ‘trying the spirits’, what we might call discernment, which is not to be hurried or rushed, but to be right both for the community and the individual: an act of wisdom.

So, then, there are connections between Proverbs and attending to wisdom and our second reading which is a meditation on love and listening to God. The Rule of St Benedict starts the process of incorporating wisdom and practical daily living in Christian community: as he says, it is a Rule ‘for beginners’ (RB 73.8). Such is the nature of wisdom that there is a practical and prosaic dimension to it. The wise ordering of the community is one aspect, but also wisdom as the basis for our ethical thinking and acting. The Christian Gospel roots that in love; not as a soppy sentiment but in the redeeming, sacrificial love of God revealed in the cross, which is, as St Paul puts it, scandal to Jews and the polar opposite of wisdom to the Greeks (cf 1 Corinthians 1.18-25).

So where is wisdom to be found for you and me? The culmination of Benedict’s pursuit of wisdom in relation to life in Christ comes as he connects it to the way of humility, the way of the cross, and how that shapes practical wisdom and the living of the virtues. So, he says, ‘after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear (1 John 4.18)’ And he goes on to say that this can be exercised, ‘no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue’ (RB 7.67, 69). Benedict is alluding to the verses from 1 John which capture John’s theology, ‘he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God…Herein is our love made perfect…There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear…We love him because he first loved us’ (1 John 4. 16-20 AV).

That’s the task for us as Christian disciples, within and outside Universities, to continue to pursue wisdom in all that we pray and think, speak and learn and do, so that it may be said of us, ‘The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day’ (Proverbs 4.18). 

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Imposters yet true - Seeking my true self in Lent

A sermon preached at Guildford Cathedral on Ash Wednesday. Readings 2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10 and John 8.1-11.

‘We are treated as imposters, and yet are true’ (2 Corinthians 6.8)

+ In nomine Patris…

I have recently been reading a fascinating book about narcissism.[1] In it the psychologist authors describe the features of narcissism in individuals, including Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and narcissism in society.

The term ‘narcissism’ derives from the Greek mythical figure Narcissus who set out, a bit like us all, looking for someone to love. The beautiful nymph Echo fell in love with him and repeated his every word, but he rejected her and she faded away. Narcissus kept on looking for love and companionship, and one day, as he gazed into a pool, he saw the face that he would fall in love with: his own! He was so engrossed in his own beauty that he was stuck by the pool, lost the will to live and died.

In contemporary terms a narcissist is someone who thinks that they are superior to everyone else -  ability, status, good looks, intelligence and creativity - even if they’re actually not. Narcissism is corrosive for individuals.

It’s also bad for society. The book I’ve been reading says is that through narcissism we become phony:

We have phony rich people (with interest-only mortgages and piles of debt), phony beauty (with plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures), phony athletes (with performance-enhancing drugs), phony celebrities (via reality TV and YouTube), phony genius students (with grade inflation), a phony national economy ($11 trillion of government debt)… and phony friends (with the social networking explosion).[2]

Clearly not everyone is a narcissist and whilst there are damaging features of society it’s not thoroughly rotten. But to sketch out the extreme helps us to situate our own self-regard, or lack of, in the context of Ash Wednesday and this beautiful season of Lent.

Lent takes us back to a pool, but not one where we gaze longingly upon our own image but upon the face of Jesus Christ. In the baptismal pool Jesus calls to us lovingly: he is the one who loves us before we even seek the love that only he can give. His love draws us into the love of the eternal Trinity. Lent is a time when his call to us and claim upon our love is renewed and heard afresh, lest he becomes to us like Echo was to Narcissus.

That call to Christ’s love on Ash Wednesday, and in Lent, is back to that first love - in its joy-filled disciplines - where we attend to body, mind and spirit: for our body, in disciplines around self-denial and fasting; for our minds, being stretched through reading and pondering; for our spirits, through re-engaging in our life of prayer.

Lent, which begins today, is the time of the Church year that invites us away from our phony selves and takes us back to who we truly are. We construct much of our own identities and want others, and ourselves, to believe it. The greatest danger is when we ourselves believe the myths about ourselves.

It’s not just about being narcissists and believing ourselves to be all-important, invincible and at the centre. All too often we believe the negative narrative of ourselves, summed up in phrases like, ‘I’m not really very good at this’ or we feel ourselves to be a fraud, on the brink of being exposed as useless, inadequate or unlovable. As Bernard of Clairvaux warned, in the 12^th century, ‘Sorrow for sin is indeed necessary, but it should not involve endless self-preoccupation. You dwell also on the glad remembrance of the loving kindness of God’.

Ash Wednesday holds before us the phoniness of our lives – the over-exalted and over-negative bits -and places upon us, literally, and ‘in your face’ the reality of where we come from and who we are. It encourages us to dwell on the ‘glad remembrance of the loving kindness of God’

As the cross is marked in ash on your head you hear these words, ‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’. In the face of all we construct about ourselves and our identity - unrealistically good or unrealistically bad - we are reminded of our mortality, that we will die. We are not immortal, but turning away from sin and being faithful to Christ is the starting point and destination of finding ourselves, our loves and passions: Christ loved us first; we can find our assurance and identity in that love, a love that sees beyond self-preoccupation, either in the form of over-inflated egos or self-deprecation, and sees us as we are and as we can be.

This is the Christ who judges without retribution and with mercy. ‘Miserere me, Domine’ - Have mercy on me, O Lord - is not, for us, a desperate plea but, because of Christ, a confident declaration. This is in complete contrast to the crowd that gathered in judgement to stone the woman caught in adultery. They could not bear the threat that she represented to their sensibilities and supposed perfection: something that they could not claim, as became apparent.  They were acting narcissistically and saw no need for mercy. Rather than live with her less-than-perfection they would rather lynch her than forgive her.

In the face of their rampant and violent perfectionism Jesus wrote in the dust of the ground. We are dust, we are less than perfect; but therein lies God’s mercy and capacity, in Christ, to raise us up from the dust, breathe new life into our nostrils and form and re-form us in his image and likeness. Christ writes his love and life into our hearts: destination, Easter.

Is that possible? Can he do it? Surely, we say, I am a phony Christian, I am a phony person, my life a sham, I am an imposter waiting to be found out, just daring to call myself a Christian.

As sons and daughters of God we might well feel like imposters, and yet, Paul reminds us, we are true. As he says elsewhere this is possible because, ‘it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2.20)

If nothing else this Lent, be assured that you are no imposter but as you seek to be faithful, to grow in holiness and to follow Christ you will be more truly yourself and more deeply human than the judgements, distortions and phoniness of the world can conceive.

That cross of ash marks you out as more yourself and not less; that you are someone who gazes into the face of Jesus Christ and knows that you are precious, valued and forgiven beyond measure simply because you are.

God loves you.

© Andrew Bishop 2016

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[1] Jean M. Twenge & W. Keith Campbell The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, (New York: Simon & Schuster).

[2] Twenge & Campbell, 4 .