Archive of Sermons from Wakefield Cathedral |
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
Canon John Lees
|
|||||||||||||||
Good Friday 2006 (United Service)Readings: ‘He was now too sick to speak in anything louder than a whisper. His limbs shook. He was ashen-pale, and feeble. For months he had been both too afraid and too ill to emerge from those six rooms. He had become a “cake-gobbling human wreck”. Presenting a dreadful sight, he dragged himself about painfully and clumsily, throwing his torso forward and dragging his legs after him from his living room to his office. He had lost his sense of balance. If he was detained on that brief journey, twenty five yards in all, he had to sit down on a bench or cling to the person he was talking to. Most of the time he was completely torpid, talking only of his need for chocolate and cake.’ Almost certainly all of us would have compassion for that man in his crumbling form, shut off from the world. Compassion, that is, until we realise who it was about whom this was written. Arguably the cruellest, most depraved and perhaps also the most powerful man of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler. Hitler locked himself, for his last months, into the Führerbunker, deep beneath Berlin. One commentator writes: ‘The great imprisoner was himself imprisoned. The man who had taken Germany into the most reckless war in its history to gain ever more Living Space (Lebensraum) could hardly stagger round his own air-raid shelter.’ The most powerful man of the twentieth century, I said. Or was that Joseph Stalin, or perhaps even Mao Zhe Dong? It hardly matters, for their achievement of power seems to have dislocated the lives of these tyrants almost equally, so that they too could dislocate the lives of others even more severely. Power is an extraordinary word. Difficult to define, more difficult still to describe, for good as well as ill, it is one of the motors of our world. It is, too, a good word on which to fasten today, Good Friday. For what does the cross say about power? It seems to have its own power. That brief but penetrating drama we’ve just experienced talks of the cross ‘drawing people’, that is having some form of power. And then, almost every other prayer we pray begins Almighty God – and that too means all powerful. The most effective Anglican priest of the Great War, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, Woodbine Willie, was worried by all this talk of power. Writing popular poetry in the trenches, eventually he became incensed by traditional talk of God’s power. He wrote:
But this was but a prologue. As Kennedy gets into his stride, so the emotional tension rises until he snaps:
Here, then, is a God who, in the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross, takes the sum of human suffering into his heart. Here is a God who is powerful indeed, but it is a reversed form of power. In his very weakness, suffering is taken into him, such that humanity may be redeemed. People – indeed all humanity – are drawn to the cross. In his last book, the outstanding twentieth century theological writer, Bill Vanstone, tells the story of a paratrooper – just twenty three years old – diagnosed with a most virulent cancer. It was inoperable, and Ken was told of his condition. He was brought home just before Christmas. A team of army nurses helped his wife with the three hourly régime of heroin injections to ease his pain. Vanstone visited him daily. He noticed that after two and a half hours the heroin was wearing off and the agony returned. On the evening of Palm Sunday, Vanstone called. Having a palm cross in his pocket, he offered it to Ken, who could not speak. He raised his hands, however, and placed it in his pyjama pocket. Thereafter, when the agony returned, Ken would move his arm across his chest and take hold of the cross. Later in the week when Bill called, Ken’s wife gave him a cup of tea in the kitchen and said it had been a strange, almost alarming day. Ken had kept signalling, almost frantically, as if he needed his wife. She moved things in the room, but it made no difference. Then, after some time, she realised that when the nurses had changed Ken’s pyjamas they had not replaced the cross in the breast pocket. She did so, and he became calm again. He died at noon on the Easter Monday with his hand still on that pocket. How powerful indeed had been God’s love, Ken had been drawn by the Cross. I began with Hitler’s terrifying corrupted power – a power that finally imprisoned its perpetrator. I am ending with the absolute reverse. Studdert Kennedy’s broken Christ manifesting a very different power. God and power do go together, then, God can be Almighty, but only as we see in that most magnificent Collect for Good Friday from the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross, who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end.' Amen. |
|||||||||||||||
Easter Day 2006Readings:
Private Eye always seems to me quite a good indicator of what is going on in the news. Often it includes a column rather like that of The Times’ agony doctor, Thomas Stuttaford. Stuttaford’s column is rather like a newspaper answer to ‘Family Doctor.’ After the latest Health Service controversy, surrounding Patricia Hewitt, and about doctors being made redundant, Private Eye’s equivalent, Dr Utterfraud writes: ‘As a doctor, I’m often asked: “Doctor will you please clear your desk and get out as you’ve been fired?” Well the simple answer is “Yes”’. It continues, ‘What happens is that the doctor is suffering from Hewitt’s Disease or Hospitales terminensis. There is no known cure for this life-threatening condition.’ Now this struck home with me for another reason. Alongside endless articles by its agony doctor, in The Times on the three days before I read Private Eye, the main front-page headlines had run: ‘Bird flu hits Britain’. ‘Now Burgers with CJD’ and ‘More Youths Die on the Road.’ The Times is not alone in this health obsession. The day after the Scottish swan was suspected of carrying Avian Flu, there were pages about flu, about swans, about vaccines and so on. If it were not terrifying for people it might almost seem comic. However, none of this would fill our newspapers were it not touching a raw nerve. For perhaps our greatest obsession, almost neurosis, is with our own immortality. We know of course that we’re not immortal, but we act as if we think we might be. Build better hospitals; eat more health foods; go regularly to the gym and death may yet be beaten. This worry over our immortality, or is it really mortality, goes deeper as we become more affluent. One of the most recent controversies has focused on human sperm being frozen and women conceiving their husband’s children even years after the husband has died. That’s like a form of delayed mortality. This, then, is why Easter Day is so counter-cultural. Luke’s account of the resurrection hits all these nerves absolutely ‘on target’. Let me remind you of how it goes. The women who had surrounded Jesus go to the tomb. Even in that part of the story Luke is counter-cultural. In antiquity women had no clout within society. But often, as here, Luke places women centre stage, just as he does with so many of the other marginalised and outcast groups – Samaritans, tax-collectors and so on. What do the women do? They take spices to anoint Jesus’ body. They assume he is dead. But, as the scene unfolds, something clicks in their heads. They remember that he’s said he will be handed over, crucified, but then be raised. All this is captured in that unforgettable question which challenges them: ‘ Why do you seek the living among the dead?’ It is the punch line, perhaps, which most sharply summarises the counter-cultural feel of St Luke’s gospel. The women in Luke’s passion narrative lived in a world where death came sooner and more easily than we can ever imagine. Death, like the mediaeval plague pits, was all around them. The only hope, it seemed, was of immortality. Some element would survive. The Greeks called it the soul. Archaic as all this sounds we have hardly moved on. Back in the 1940s, Evelyn Waugh wrote a book caricaturing all this. Following Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, where people paid to be put in a deep freeze pending the resurrection, Waugh turned it into a black comedy. So at one funeral Waugh describes the scene: ‘Half the coffin lid was open. Sir Francis was visible from the waist up. Dennis thought of the wax work of Marat in his bath. There was a fresh gardenia in Sir Francis’ buttonhole and another between his fingers. The gold rim of the monocle framed a delicately tinted eyelid.’ If this sounds too bizarre for words, some of you, like me, may have queued in Red Square to see Lenin’s waxen-like remains. Or, indeed, any of you could still go to see the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, sitting looking rather greenish now, embalmed in a cupboard in the college he founded, University College, London. When it was founded, the college was even called the ‘godless institute of Gower Street’. Bentham had been a free-thinker and had had his body preserved for scientific research. Now remember, once again, St Luke’s narrative: ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?’ Why is the Christian gospel so counter-cultural then? Answer - because we celebrate resurrection not immortality. God raises Jesus. There is new life, not embalmed boredom. Such a gospel challenges our culture too. Our obsession with preserving life is what Evelyn Waugh caricatured. In Jesus, throughout his life, ministry, passion and death God proclaims a new thing. St Paul calls it a ‘new creation’. It challenges the accepted patterns of our world. How can we, instead of being obsessed with our own mortality, kindle in God’s spirit, a truly healthy world – a new world, a new creation? In each case it will depend on where we are and the issues of our time. Is it Wakefield’s nightlife? Is it building real community which straddles cultural and even religious boundaries? Is it as simple as caring for lonely or infirm neighbours? Whatever it might be, at root for us as Christians it must lie in re-kindling that element present within every human heart, the element that yearns for worship, yearns for God. (This is what the day of the resurrection; Sunday, is about) There is an irony that now the retailing laws have changed, the car parks are certainly full again on a Sunday. The temples flourish, but it is the temple of St Asda, if you like. Is that because of that unfilled yearning? Leave it unfilled and something dies inside us. Back to Luke: ‘Why seek the living among the dead?’ John’s version of the gospel reports Jesus offering life, and life in its full abundance. Our gospel echoes a tough irony, playing on the words living and dead. If we do beat bird flu, CJD, cancer, road traffic accidents, and the rest, will we be really alive? The resurrection is counter-cultural, if anything ever was. Its challenge begins with seeking out the living among the living and not among the dead. And that living is the new life which is God’s work. God raised Jesus and promises to raise us too. Are we ready for new life – that is indescribably more challenging than prolonging the old! Amen. |
|||||||||||||||
The Bishop of Wakefield Veterans' Service, Tuesday 27 June 2006Reading: On the evening of the fifth May 1982, I was at the Passionist House at Ilkley. I was on retreat with students from Lincoln Theological College and had thus spent the day in silence. After Night Prayer, I went out to my car to hear the ten o’clock news on the radio. As the last chime of Big Ben struck, Brian Perkins or whoever, announced gravely: ‘H.M.S. Sheffield was struck earlier today by an Exocet missile!’ As the news unfolded we heard more of casualties out of the terrible fire onboard. The bottom fell out of my stomach. Only seven months later I arrived in Portsmouth for a new job. Portsmouth, by then, was home to a number of veterans from the Falklands and from the Sheffield in particular. The impact of war can be oddly sanitised by the professionalism of our media. We know that international conflict is devastating but still we are distanced from it by the sheer sophistication of contemporary technology. So it is not until we encounter it for real that it comes home to us. Just before I left East Anglia to come to Yorkshire, three years ago, I went for lunch with the Lord Mayor of Norwich. A cheery man, he was more than unusually sober. His future son-in-law had been brought down by friendly fire in a helicopter over Iraq. Friendly fire is a most ironic term; it was hardly ‘friendly’ for my friend’s daughter who became a ‘veteran by proxy’ through that tragedy. For much of our lives we are unaware of rubbing shoulder to shoulder with veterans. It is only when the injuries have been hideous that the realities become obvious. And yet often the impact upon veterans will be shocking and terrible in ways that we can hardly imagine. So, Ivor Gurney, one of England’s most promising poets and musical composers was devastatingly affected by shell-shock in the Great War. In and out of asylums – they were still called by that name then – eventually Gurney died in the equivalent of a padded cell in his thirties. His music and poetry live on as does the war:
So, almost invariably, veterans, for whom today we have come to give thanks, are changed by war. Gurney cries out angrily to God. The two most outstanding priests of the Church of England who survived the Great War were also profoundly changed. Dick Sheppard came home broken and tired. As Vicar of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields in London and the first ‘radio vicar’, Sheppard spoke to millions. He was a founder member of the Peace Pledge Union. He had been transformed by the effects of war. Or there was Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, or Woodbine Willie, as he was better known. Studdert-Kennedy’s simple verse cried out for a new world; and it changed his picture of God:
When he died in the 1930s, still but middle-aged, the streets of Worcester were crowded as if for a state funeral. War had changed him and his ministry thus had a profound effect upon others. Part of the change that becoming a veteran has often heralded is captured perfectly in our New Testament reading, the Beatitudes. These twelve verses capture not only a pattern for the Christian life, but a pattern that can be shared more widely still, well beyond the Christian margins. For they imply a rich understanding of humanity:
And perhaps most sublime of all:
Christian people believe that these qualities were supremely lived out by He who spoke them, and, that in Jesus Christ we see God. Today people of different faiths and of none are also gathered here. But I would guess that all of us would celebrate the qualities described in the Beatitudes. Especially, I would hope, would we celebrate the ‘poor in spirit’ for that describes true humility. As we give thanks and celebrate veterans of any number of conflicts of the twentieth and now also the twenty first century let us pray that we may all be formed by the values enshrined in the Beatitudes. This part of Yorkshire is well blessed in its veterans. They give much in so many different ways and walks of life. They will have been changed irrevocably by their experience, often to be given a deeper humility and a hunger for lasting peace. We pray that the grace that has touched them, may through them touch us too. Blessed are the pure in heart |
|||||||||||||||
Sunday 16 July 2006Tonight’s sermon is, besides a sermon, the Jane Lecture for 2006. The Revd. Joseph Jane, Rector of Iron Acton in Gloucestershire, left monies in his will of 1781 to be used for ‘the best advantage for promoting true religion.’ Jane’s executors instituted a lecture in a deed of June 26th, 1801. Monies were to be used for ‘having prayers read and a Lecture or Sermon delivered on a Sunday evening by a senior Clerk in Holy Orders.’ In 1876 this was amended so that the lecturer should be someone in priest’s orders and ‘should perform the duties of preaching and ministration in the Parish Church of Wakefield.’ Rather worryingly the amended Deed also says that the lecturer ‘shall also from time to time perform such other clerical or spiritual duties for the benefit of the aforesaid Parish of Wakefield as the Trustees shall from time to time direct.’ It is not quite as worrying as the oath a canon takes on being installed here that one will undertake additional duties as the Bishop shall direct! So tonight’s sermon is given in accordance with the late Mr. Jane’s wishes, and I can only hope will promote ‘true religion.’ But how? My subject tonight is one suggested to me and is the Holy Spirit. Seeking to encourage people to understand God better is surely a key aspect of promoting ‘true religion.’ The truth of God is prior to any other truth we can imagine. How can we get to grips with the Holy Spirit? How can we categorise, understand, relate to "spirit" which seems such a vague word to use? It is my guess that problem for many of us here the Holy Spirit will be the least related to and understood Person of the Holy Trinity. Father - we can make some sense of this for "father" is a concrete human term and can resonate for us whether for good or ill. And Jesus uses the term to refer to God and we take our lead from him. Son - we can make sense of this. And the Son, Jesus, was a living, breathing human being with a body of teaching and an account of his actions in the four gospels. But Holy Spirit? Is not "spirit" an "it" rather than a "who"? We may relate to Father and Son, but "spirit"? How can one relate to the wind? Or to breath? For in the Old Testament the same word is used for spirit as for breath and wind and so, indeed, how can we do something with this? Yet over the past few thirty years or so within and without the traditional churches the charismatic movement has had a profound influence - "charismatic" from the Greek "charism" meaning "gift" emphasising the gifts and work and power of the Holy Spirit as they are understood in the New Testament. The charismatic movement following on from the older Pentecostal movement has urged Christians to rediscover the Holy Spirit, relating to the Holy Spirit personally as to the Father and the Son. So where might we start if we find that our sense of who - not what but who the Holy Spirit is - is unclear. Why not start with the fruit of another's experience? Our next hymn is "Come down O Love Divine", number 137, and you may wish to have this open in front of you. In this 15th century hymn the writer, Bianco of Siena, has, it seems to me, distilled his experience of the Holy Spirit. Little is known about Bianco's life. Said to have been born in Anciolina, he entered a religious order of unordained men who followed the rule of St Augustine, which had been founded by John Columbinus of Siena. Bianco's first image is of the Holy Spirit as "Love Divine." Please note how this hymn is a prayer directly to the Holy Spirit. Most formal Christian prayer is addressed to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. But as the Holy Spirit is God we can pray to him directly and this is what we do in this hymn, and as "Love Divine." And note this hymn does not speak of "us" but of "me." This is a personal rather than corporate prayer. The Holy Spirit, for Bianco, is divine love, God's love, personal to him. God is love and is Bianco's love. He begins with something which people will recognise - love. And they will know the power of love, for good or ill. But this is divine love, God's love and lying behind a simple expression such as "love divine" is all that we know of God in Jesus and the love that expressed itself in his offering of himself upon the cross. And what do we ask of this love - "Seek thou this soul of mine and visit it with thine own ardour glowing." Ardour - fervour, passion, eagerness. All the force that we know human love can have, but this is divine love, and so it is so much greater and it seeks out my soul - the very deepest part of my whole being. The Holy Spirit is indeed "Love Divine" - the love that Jesus knew at his baptism when the Holy Spirit rested on him in the form of a dove; the love the disciples knew which transformed them from people who hid and were afraid into people who showed themselves and were brave for the gospel they'd received because they had experienced a force of love greater than the hate they knew would be directed at them; the love that countless millions have known through the centuries including Bianco of Siena and which we ourselves can know now. A love which is eternal because it is divine and is so much more than the vagaries of human love, however powerful. But the hymn writer does not stop there. Next, he prays, "O Comforter, draw near." This is our second image of the Holy Spirit in the hymn. In the Gospel of John Jesus speaks of sending the "advocate" and both advocate and comforter are different translations of the same word also sometimes rendered as "helper." There is about the word a sense of one who strengthens and guides and so the Collect for Pentecost speaks of the Holy Spirit teaching and strengthening us. Love Divine does not just fire us up, but embeds and reassures and gives strength and direction to us. Again, very personally, we pray that the Comforter may appear in my heart and "kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing." The hymn writer experienced the Holy Spirit as the "paraclete" - strength and comfort, guide and teacher. So for us too. I am sure that we find ourselves in need of strength as we look at what is before us and comfort when we hit a low point. Guidance when we have no idea where to go and what to do. Teaching when our own thoughts and feelings are inadequate. All this is part of what the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, Love Divine, seeks to do. Then a third image for the Holy Spirit - "holy flame." And here we have an image straight from from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2 where the Holy Spirit rests upon the disciples like a tongue of fire. To be honest when I think of the image of the fire for the Holy Spirit I tend to think of the Spirit, like fire, giving light and warmth rather than being destructive, but in our hymn the writer has none of it. He wants the Holy Spirit to "freely burn" till "earthly passions" are consumed and become "dust and ashes" ready to be swept away. Only then does he go on to seek the light of that fire. A divine love which is fiercely passionate and seeks to guide and teach and comfort, but a love that is also seeking to change us. A tough love that wants nothing but itself to be what is in our hearts. As the last verse of the hymn puts it:
This is Love Divine in the soul of a human being far exceeding the ability of human speech to describe it. So who is the Holy Spirit? Love Divine. Comforter. Holy Fire. All these, and much more. And what does the Holy Spirit do? Loves, of course, for the Holy Spirit is God and God is love. And as an expression of this love comfort us - strengthen, guide and sustain us. And a fire burning out all that is not of God and leading us forward so that we may be what God would have us be and be the place where God dwells. Through Bianco of Siena's use of images for the Holy Spirit taken from the Bible, the fruit of his experience, we can use our imagination to allow us to get a sense of just who the Holy Spirit is. We can then pray to the Holy Spirit as to the Father and as to Jesus. We can ask things of the Holy Spirit who will work within us and make us his home. Our God is not just so much more than us, which he is. Our God is not just one with us, which he is. Our God is within us - the Holy Spirit, the breath to animate us, the wind blowing freely, the fire warming us. |
|||||||||||||||
Rt Rev Arthur Roche, Bishop of Leeds
|
|||||||||||||||
The Very Revd George Nairn Briggs, Dean of Wakefield
|
|||||||||||||||
The Very Revd David Ison, Dean of Bradford
|
|||||||||||||||
Canon John Lees
|
|||||||||||||||
Canon John Lees Sunday 28 January 2007 Readings: One of life’s minor irritations is that the really best TV programmes that ought to go on and on for ever stop being made. Endless Christmas repeats of Morecambe and Wise! More seriously, that realistic and profound depiction of priestly life, Father Ted, couldn’t survive the death of its main character. I’ve scoured the whole box of DVDs and Father Dougal did only ever do one funeral. My favourite of all was and is the Fast Show. One of their many running jokes was a spaceman in full rig bursting into some unlikely situation, the pub, or a shop or something, and shouting For God’s chosen people where they are was paramount. Hebrew scripture resounds with the awareness and the discovery and the appropriation of places. The Garden of Eden; the land flowing with milk and honey; Egypt the place of plenty which turned to enslave them; the waters of the Red Sea; the Holy City Jerusalem, and within that city the great Temple - the place of all places where God was to be sought and found and worshipped. These were the places God had promised his chosen, and where he had worked his miracles of power and love. In the sixth century BC everything went wrong. The experience of invasion, exile and the Jerusalem Temple destroyed, even though eventually they drifted back, and over 100 years later rebuilt the Temple, dealt a grievous blow to their identity under God. Where were they? What had happened to their land, to their holy place? Had God’s promises come to nothing? Into the darkness of exile and loss the OT prophets speak words of hope, of restoration and return and renewal. Haggai, tonight, rebuilding the temple, bringing hope; ‘the latter splendour of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord, and in this place I will give prosperity’. And as the prophets prayed and listened to God, another dimension of hope developed; the promise of a royal leader, a Messiah, the anointed of God, who would again lead his people out of slavery into freedom, would bring in the kingdom of God’s justice and peace. These hopes (and fears) of all the years are met in Jesus Christ, who at Candlemas comes to his Father’s Temple so that Simeon can declare the age of hope and prophecy closed – ‘Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace – for mine eyes have seen thy salvation’ – the Messiah is here, before his eyes. ‘Destroy this Temple, and I will build it in three days’ says Jesus, casting out the moneychangers from the Temple. The presence of God, so keenly felt by the Jews in the stone of the Temple and its holy of holies, takes on in Jesus its fullest dimension, its closest possible relation to the human condition. The peculiar essence of the Christian faith is to believe not in a set of principles, or convoluted philosophy, but to follow a person, a man in whom God’s presence and love are completely shown; to enter a relationship with another – which, whether it be God or a fellow human person, can be at once the scariest and also the most life-giving thing a human being can ever do. Yet there is no alternative. Again, Haggai - ‘Take courage all you people of the land’. Craig Raine’s new book on T S Eliot identifies that greatest of 20th century poets’ preoccupation that ‘life is often a failure to live fully – to have a proper, vivid, satisfying emotional life’ – so in ‘Burnt Norton’ Eliot writes Footfalls echo in the memory To engage with opportunity, to school ourselves to the redeeming power of risky life and love, to live without regrets; these are some of the roses in the garden (Eden or Gethsemane) where are set the defining events of death and life. Where am I? Where are we? In a sense, always in the garden; always offered the choice between death and life, between getting stuck in our own desires or risking engagement with others. The way we live our lives, the sort of person I am, our commitments to one another and to God, all reduce to these choices. But when, as so often, we get the choice wrong, God always gives us another chance; when our innermost motives and thoughts are revealed all too clearly for our own good and our own sanity, that is both understood – |
|||||||||||||||
Canon John Lees
|
|||||||||||||||
Bishop John Flack Friday 5 April 2007
On 9th March 1947 an RAF pilot was trying to fly – in dense fog - round the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. On board were 10 airmen, some wives and small children, including a baby of nine months. They were on their way home to England for a holiday. The pilot flew twice round the island and then, realizing he was making no progress, set off on a route directly above the island. A few seconds later the plan crashed headlong into Mount Epomeo, the volcano which dominates Ischia. Everyone on board was killed, there were no survivors. Later that morning, when the fog cleared and the Mediterranean sun came out, a 33 year old shepherd named Luigi turned a corner near the summit of Mount Epomeo and came upon the most horrific sight he had ever seen – human flesh, carnage, twisted metal, death and destruction everywhere. Looking up, the shepherd saw that the plane had crashed just six feet below the summit, six feet from safety. Where was God, sixty years ago on that foggy morning in the Bay of Naples ? Where was that God whom we say loved the world so much ? Could not that loving God have nudged that pilot to move his joystick just a fraction, so clearing the summit and saving the lives of 20 people ? What satisfaction did it give that loving God to preside over the death of a small baby ? On 9th March 2007, just a few weeks ago and sixty years after that terrible crash, I stood on the crash site at the summit of Mount Epomeo with the remaining relatives of the 20 dead, and most of the population of Ischia. The parish priest, Don Peppino, celebrated a Requiem Mass on a makeshift altar, his vestments blowing in the wind, and I preached. The choir from Ischia’s junior school, average age 8, sang the parts of the Mass. Representatives from Bramhall in Cheshire and Peterborough in East Anglia, the towns from which many of the victims came, stood with the Mayor of Ischia beside the Altar, holding each other tight against the strong wind. Elderly Ischian men embraced RAF squadron leaders, forgetting the fact that in World War II they had fought against each other. And perhaps the most moving moment of all was when the shepherd Luigi, now aged 93, his wizened Mediterranean face a living testimony to the power of olive oil and tomatoes, stepped forward and with tears flowing down that face, described to us all what he had found in this spot on that terrible morning exactly sixty years before. That morning, on the top of Mount Epomeo, on the island of Ischia, I experienced a mutual, overarching love among everyone, the like of which I have never known before. I was a long time coming down off that cloud ! I learned, from that experience on Ischia that morning, a most important truth about God. God’s love does not prevent tragedy, but redeems it. That tangible mutual love at the Requiem Mass a few weeks ago could not have happened without the tragedy sixty years before. Bramhall and Peterborough folks would have remained unaware of Ischian people. Italian and British airmen, opponents in the last war, would never have participated in that loving act of reconciliation. Luigi Solazzo would not have had that life-changing experience which gave him a day to remember always, and made him into the loving person he became. I’m not saying that God arranged the tragedy so that he could teach people about loving. I cannot believe in such a God. But what God does is to use suffering and death to show us the extent of his love, which – as I discovered that morning – is wider and vaster than we can ever imagine. And this gives us the clue to the meaning of the Cross. The death of Jesus Christ on the Cross is God’s supreme act of love. He used that human tragedy to show us how much he loves us. He used the suffering on the Cross to show us how great , how vast, is his mercy. He used the power of the Cross to give us an example to follow, that just as he loves us with a love beyond all telling, so we ought to love others. As a child I was taught, as many of us were, that Jesus was crucified to take away our sins. That remains true, but it isn’t how I would want to express it now. I would want to say now that on the cross God, through the suffering of Jesus, showed us just how vast is his love and mercy, a love and mercy which includes among other things the forgiveness of sins. This great truth, the vastness of God’s love, is wonderfully expressed in this Cathedral. On the Rood Screen here it says sic Deus dilexit mundum ut filium suum unigenitum daret It’s the Latin version of that text from John 3 verse 16 which reads “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son”. Why in Latin ? Because one word in the Latin text puts a new dimension on it all. “Sic Deus dilexit mundum”. Normally Latin uses the little verb “amare” when it speaks of “love”, but here the word is “dilexit”. I hope other Latinists here would agree with me that “dilexit” is our English word “delight”. “God so delighted in his world, that he sent his only Son”. In other words, God doesn’t love his world just out of a sense of duty, he actually delights in it – he enjoys it, is exhilarated with it. This is a far cry from the way most of us understand God. We tend to see him as “the God of the wagging finger” constantly disapproving of us and affronted by our behaviour. But that isn’t what scripture says about God. No less than the writer of the Fourth Gospel tells us that God delights in his world, that he loves us with a love beyond all telling, and his mercy sweeps up our failings and consigns them to oblivion. God’s face wears a smile, not a frown. And the Cross of Jesus, the centerpiece of our Good Friday liturgies, is the great manifestation, the ultimate showing forth, of God’s endless love. So Good Friday is a day of rejoicing, of thoughtful rejoicing perhaps, as we are reminded again that God delights in his world, delights in each one of us whoever we are and whatever we have done, and loves us all with a love whose heights and depths are beyond imagining. That is why we shall end this liturgy by singing Cardinal John Henry Newman’s words Praise to the Holiest in the height Tomorrow night and on Sunday morning we shall begin that celebration which teaches us that God’s love is eternal, that he lives for ever, and we with him, and that his love and mercy which we celebrate today are for always, and that he is with us now and always, to the end of time. Good Friday is at the heart of the story, and Easter is its conclusion. May each of us know the love and mercy of God in our own lives, and know also that it is ours till the end of time, and beyond. Sic Deus dilexit mundum ut filium suum unigenitum daret
|
|||||||||||||||
Rev June Lawson Cathedral Presence
Wakefield has a cathedral- an indisputable fact for a 120 years. A visible landmark on the skyline is the soaring spire- 247 feet, the tallest in Yorkshire. Our cathedral is an imposing presence amidst the commercial and civic life of Wakefield’s town centre. YP like to skateboard in its precincts; Goths congregate in its shadows; regular farmers markets remind us of the long tradition of markets in Wakefield- going back to at least the medieval times of 1204, but I don’t expect that any of us here remember the cattle markets vibrant enough to rival Smithsfield in London. In the present the Victorian market a confident reminder of that great time of industrial development- when villages grew into towns, towns became cities and All saints parish church became the new cathedral of Wakefield diocese within the new city of Wakefield. But maybe something of the stark physical presence of the cathedral became overshadowed when, in the 19th c, a flurry of buildings arising from prosperity and civic pride began to alter the architectural landscape of the industrial town/new city to be: Wakefield’s first hospital, new Corn Exhange was built at the top of Westgate in 1837, Kirkgate railway station/ Westgate station, the Mechanics Institute built in 1841, Clayton Hospital, the new Town Hall, the Opera House, the County Hall / And so today if we take time to walk round this cathedral, we can find clear evidence of how it has changed its physical presence through the centuries- from its life as a parish church to its newer cathedral status. Changes made to further better the ministry and mission of the church for its time. We may not find aesthetic pleasure in all the developments, but what we can’t criticise is the motivation, and the desire, to better fit the church for that mission and ministry. An attentiveness to how the church was present in its context. Architecture and furnishings endeavouring to contribute to a sense of holy space or holy place, its solidity and permanence a confident reminder of the eternal perspective to life amidst the prosperity and drudgery of civic and urban life. A report on cathedrals (in 1994) commented : ‘for some the majesty of the buildings themselves is an expression of what might otherwise remain inarticulate, a perception of the holy, an anticipation of eternity’. I was heartened by these words outlining the mission and ministry of Dunblane cathedral in Scotland:
Much more could and should be said be said about the mission and ministry of that particular cathedral, but one discerns a clear sense of the building itself contributing to its life and witness. It’s physical presence, exterior and interior, a tangible expression of its essential purpose:
Purpose and physical presence clearly linked. It would seem to me that to seek to re-order a cathedral without clear reflection on what it means for it to be present in a particular time and space- its essential purpose- would be remiss. And of course that is not happening here, there has been and continues to be careful attention paid to the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ questions of cathedral life, alongside proposed plans, feasibility studies, and grant applications. So as we do this, how might Wakefield Cathedral understand the nature of its presence in the heart of this city of Wakefield? I’ll quote the Dean, in the December edition of Awake: “I want our Cathedral to be a beacon for the gospel. I want to create a sanctuary for those with Christian faith, those of different faiths, and those without faith. A Christian community where they can come into contact with God and have their hurts healed. A place where strangers are welcomed, where the hungry are fed and where the estranged are reconciled. I have a passionate belief that Christianity is a force for good, and in a world where people are increasingly self-sufficient, isolationist and materialistic, it seems to me that the message of the Gospel can challenge and transform. I want our Cathedral to be at the heart of all that.” The physical presence of this Cathedral , is important only as it serves and reflects why it is truly here: what is the nature of its presence; what is its calling amidst the culture of its day. But where a key value is not ‘relevance’ for its own sake, but rather relatedness: holding together how this cathedral may be rooted in its past, networked into its present context and focused on the vision of the k of G coming in all its fullness, yet tangibly present now. Our New Testament reading takes us to the very heart of that calling. Paul’s words to the Athenians remind us that God’s presence cannot be confined to shrines, or temples, or anything made by human hands, ‘for he made the world and everything in it, he is Lord of heaven and earth’. ( Acts 17:24 cf Acts 7:47)) In other words, God is bigger than all of this. In Paul’s day, there was a tendency to create idols and worship them-as Paul writes ‘ we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals’. (Acts 17:29) Now of course we live in the 21st century and have grown out of idol worship. Or have we? For idol worship can manifest itself when we confuse how God is present with the physical presence of a building. We too can locate our worship of God in stone or wood or gold, we can also lose sight of the biblical understanding that God’s presence is made tangible when his will and purpose is being followed. In the OT where the centrality of the Temple and its worship is at the heartbeat of city life, Micah, the prophet, challenges a people, obsessed with the presence of the Temple in its midst and the ordering of its worship:: ‘what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.’ (Micah 6:8). Holy space and holy place is created and encountered where there has been that loving attentiveness to God’s will. Similarly, the Gospel reading, from John 14, reminds us that the presence of God, will be most obviously encountered when there is a loving attentiveness to his purposes. (John 14:23) God’s presence becomes tangible when his will and purpose are being followed. He makes his home in that sort of space. In a book of essays reflecting on cathedrals in society, and edited by Stephen our bishop, one writer sounds a warning about the refurbishment of cathedrals: ‘‘The ugly, concrete block worship-space.. can be a holy place, because it is occupied by and associated with a community of Christian people who are known, publicly known, for their acts of charity and peacemaking, and who have drawn their building into the struggle for a radical openness to the will of God...To root the holiness of Christian sacred space in anything else is to be involved in idolatry or in magic.’ (Rowland, C. Friends of Albion? p.33, In Flagships of the Spirit1998 ed by Platten, S & Lewis, C.) To discover God’s presence is always to discover his outward movement into his world. The daily Services in this cathedral tells the story of incarnation- God with us- and of redemption- ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son’, He can be found here, but he cannot be confined. If we, as Paul suggests to the Athenians, ‘live and move and have our being’ in him then we too are caught up in that dynamic outward movement as members of his worldwide church and as regular members of this cathedral. So Paul’s words as he exits the synagogue and enters the marketplace of Athens, as he acknowledges the cultural context by ‘going through the city and looking carefully’,(Acts 17:23) his words speak to us about being here for more than ourselves ‘if in him we live and move and have our being’- we are here for the bishop and the diocese, the city and its institutions, the county, the voluntary sector; for the spiritual seeker, the Christian pilgrim, for the tourist, for the weak and the marginalised. It is as we ask how God is present in this place that we discover how our cathedral may best be present in this city.
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|