When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.
I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.
Today we remember twelve men spilling out onto a Jerusalem street at nine in the morning, twelve men babbling aloud in twelve different tongues, twelve men praising God, telling of his mighty deeds, and causing such a disturbance that they were thought to be drunk. They were not born leaders, natural orators or seekers after fame– indeed in the weeks preceding this emergence onto the public stage they had been conspicuous by their absence, locked away, at prayer in an upstairs room.
Jesus had promised that his disciples would not be left lonely and helpless, but that they would receive a further gift, a baptism with something he called the Advocate, or Holy Spirit. We can perhaps enter the disciples’ world sufficiently to imagine their anxious waiting for this unknown and unknowable gift, and their nagging fear that before its arrival there might be more betrayals and further arrests: small wonder that they clung to one another and to the security of that upper room.
That changed on the day of Pentecost. Their anxiety was transformed into joy; their fear into confident hope; and they left behind them the introspection and self-absorption of their first-floor hideaway and went out with their heads held high to embrace the cut-and-thrust of engagement with the city’s streets.
In a lot of places this day that marks their transformation is celebrated as the birthday of the Church, the day when God acted with power to galvanize the men of Galilee, our ancestors and forebears in faith, and make of them a body capable, ultimately, of turning the world on its head. Before Pentecost they were anxious, fearful, and introspective: after it they were joyful, confident, and engaged.
Anxious, fearful, and introspective; or joyful, confident, and engaged: after two thousand years of history I wonder which adjectives best describe the Church, our Church, built on those Pentecost foundations and heir of that Pentecost tradition. I wonder which adjectives best describe our parish; and which best describe each baptized person, each latter-day disciple of Christ here this morning. Are we anxious, fearful, and introspective; or joyful, confident, and engaged?
Let me suggest that joyful churches; joyful disciples of Christ - hold before them continually what it is that God has done for them; their every prayer is a thanksgiving and their every moment is lived in hope and trust. They are as different and as irresistibly attractive as were the twelve that early morning. Yet Swinburne’s lines still resonate and bear witness to a locked-away, upper-room Church, to religious faith as something dutiful and joyless, without colour, passion or meaning. In his Hymn to Proserpine, he famously writes:
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
We too often make our faith the very opposite of joyful: we experience it as dull and life-denying, and in some quarters the modern critique of it as unthinking, intolerant and divisive would be justified.
Let me suggest that confident churches, confident disciples of Christ are happy to live with doubts and questions, sure of the God who has loved them and the whole of creation into being and will love them beyond the grave. There is no shortage of arrogant churches and arrogant Christians, but they are a quite different matter. Many will tell you in no uncertain terms what the true faith is: what are its rules; what Jesus actually meant; what God is really like. And there is no shortage of conditionally confident Christians, frightened souls who spend their lives trying desperately to please a God who they confuse with some half-remembered authority figure from home or school, believing that he will love them if they are good. But there aren’t many who exhibit a real confidence in God’s mercy and his justice, a confidence that might be described as serenity.
And let me suggest that engaged churches, engaged Christians throw themselves into the life and discourse of the communities in which they belong, never retreating from them, never seeing these walls as a refuge from their tainted and polluting air. In common parlance ‘they have a life’, and they certainly aren’t churchy. Their buildings are centres of community and their members are school governors, JPs, local councillors, charity shop volunteers. They don’t judge their contact with those outside the doors only by their strike-rate in getting them in through those doors; instead they seek to serve and, in serving, to transform.
The popular perception of our Church and of many of its members as we approach the middle of 2007 makes it look like the fledgling church of the days before Pentecost: locked away behind closed doors, perpetually anxious about its very existence; fearful that its faith will be diluted by the culture in which it is set; and preoccupied with notions of success that ought to be foreign to it.
I began with WB Yeats, who tells of the fiddler of Dooney, whose playing, in lines that I love, makes folk dance like a wave of the sea. He writes also of his worthy relatives, the priests, whose heads are stuck in their books. There are no prizes for guessing which of the three would have felt most at home in Jerusalem on the morning of Pentecost. The pious brother and cousin would have retreated to the upper room with their prayer books. But the fiddler would have clambered onto a soapbox, played his heart out and made that crowd dance as they had never danced before, glowing with the sheer joy and exaltation of the moment.
Will are we going to do - climb the stair and lock the door - or follow Peter and the others out into the streets, to join the everlasting dance?
Amen.
Tuesday 31 July 2007
Easter Day 2007
Yesterday our children were in a department store not far from here when lo, they beheld an apparition tall and furry. It had long floppy ears and a fluffy white tail, and was sporting a purple bow around its neck. It also had with it a basket full of Easter eggs, and, after some consideration, this meant that it was deemed worth approaching. Later, though, the chocolate digested, and reflecting on the encounter, our daughter announced that she didn’t think the Easter Bunny was real. ‘He’s just a bunny’ she said ‘dressed up as a person’.
At Easter, you see, recognition is everything.
It came early to Northern Ireland in 2007. Held in the dark of uncertainty and political division for so long (held in the dark, as it were, of the rock-hewn tomb), longing for daybreak and straining to catch a glimpse of the rising sun, the citizens of the six counties saw the stone rolled away on that remarkable day when Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley agreed to serve together in a devolved government.
The enormity of the moment cannot be overstated. It’s as though the kaleidoscope has been turned a fraction and a new pattern has come into focus. These are bitter rivals who have spent their public lives spitting visceral contempt for one another. They have made a virtue out of their refusal to compromise or negotiate. Yet we all saw the pictures of them sitting behind their desks, agreeing that henceforth their disagreements will be about drainage and education policy, and that they will be conducted with words across a debating chamber rather than with megaphones and Semtex across the province’s divided streets.
It was a new beginning. It was a moment when new possibilities were opened up to their people. It was an experience of new life. It was an experience made possible not by the magical convergence of the vast impersonal forces that we like to talk about. It was not made possible by the coming together of communities, or cultures. It was made possible by the willingness of two men to do something act new; to recognize one another as the legitimate representatives of their traditions and to recognize the legitimacy of those traditions. It was made possible by their willingness to speak with one another, their willingness to attempt to relate to one another and work together. It was made possible by their readiness to see one another as human.
Yet another powerful image from the weeks of Lent is the video recording of the British captives in Tehran. The Iranian government released them because it understands well the power of recognition, the power of faces and names. It is easy to gloss the capture of unnamed personnel, and more difficult to ignore the plight of a young Leading Seaman who has spoken cheerfully about the circumstances of her imprisonment. Knowing one another’s names, using them (as, behind closed doors, I suppose Paisley and Adams must) begins to draw us into relationship with one another, to open us up to one another. It nudges the kaleidoscope just a fraction, and brings a new pattern into focus.
What is the connection between these stories of the last weeks and the great feast we celebrate today? Well, we live in Da Vinci Code days, and Lent began with the sensational discovery of some bones in an ossuary supposedly bearing the names of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The excitement was short-lived as the very ordinary nature of the find became quickly obvious. However if the headlines prod us into thinking a little more carefully about what we understand when we speak of the resurrection, or even what we understand when we speak of God, then we need to thank those who created them. Perhaps the discovery of an empty tomb and the physical appearance of Jesus on Easter morning are unimportant nowadays; perhaps those events were actually an intense spiritual awakening for Mary and the other first witnesses; perhaps we could believe in the risen Jesus even if we were confronted with unmistakeable evidence of his mortal remains.
I’m not convinced. What has always set Christianity apart from other faiths, and made it ridiculous and even offensive to our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters is the extraordinary claim that in Jesus Christ God became man; that in the tortured figure of the crucified one we see simultaneously the immortal and invisible Creator of everything that is. Ours is a faith of paradox, a faith that understands God to be beyond our knowing and yet also longing to be known in Christ Jesus; a faith that believes God to be utterly different to the world he created out of nothing, and yet entirely present within it in the life of the carpenter from Nazareth. Matter matters to this God; it is how he chooses to make himself known to us. If the resurrection of his Son is a purely intellectual event, perceptible only to the inner eye of faith; if the stories of his resurrection appearances are mythological ways of explaining this deep truth to the simple, then our God is no God but instead a schizophrenic fly-by-night who lurches from one idiom of communication to another, without integrity or consistency. But surely that is not the God we worship. Our faith is not some rarefied formula for spiritual ecstasy. It is flesh and blood, tears and laughter, oil and water, bread and wine. In the dying of his Son God does not abandon the stuff of our living. He embraces and transforms it.
So the encounter in the garden in the early morning of the first Easter Day is above all a moment not of awareness or of awakening, but of recognition. The resurrection means nothing until the grieving woman is called by her first name: ‘Mary’. Only then can the new life take hold of her; only then can she take hold of the new life that she is being offered. Christ speaking her name changes everything as surely as does Ulster’s old adversaries speaking each other’s names. In that moment she knows that she is in the presence of a power greater than she can possibly understand. The one who has died is speaking to her. And in that moment she knows too that the nature of that power is love, for he is speaking her name. She is recognized and remembered from beyond the grave and into the new future that Easter is bringing about. The kaleidoscope has moved and a new pattern has been brought into view –a pattern into which we have been baptized and in which we will live for ever.
To God be the glory, now and in all eternity. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Easter Day, 8 April 2007
At Easter, you see, recognition is everything.
It came early to Northern Ireland in 2007. Held in the dark of uncertainty and political division for so long (held in the dark, as it were, of the rock-hewn tomb), longing for daybreak and straining to catch a glimpse of the rising sun, the citizens of the six counties saw the stone rolled away on that remarkable day when Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley agreed to serve together in a devolved government.
The enormity of the moment cannot be overstated. It’s as though the kaleidoscope has been turned a fraction and a new pattern has come into focus. These are bitter rivals who have spent their public lives spitting visceral contempt for one another. They have made a virtue out of their refusal to compromise or negotiate. Yet we all saw the pictures of them sitting behind their desks, agreeing that henceforth their disagreements will be about drainage and education policy, and that they will be conducted with words across a debating chamber rather than with megaphones and Semtex across the province’s divided streets.
It was a new beginning. It was a moment when new possibilities were opened up to their people. It was an experience of new life. It was an experience made possible not by the magical convergence of the vast impersonal forces that we like to talk about. It was not made possible by the coming together of communities, or cultures. It was made possible by the willingness of two men to do something act new; to recognize one another as the legitimate representatives of their traditions and to recognize the legitimacy of those traditions. It was made possible by their willingness to speak with one another, their willingness to attempt to relate to one another and work together. It was made possible by their readiness to see one another as human.
Yet another powerful image from the weeks of Lent is the video recording of the British captives in Tehran. The Iranian government released them because it understands well the power of recognition, the power of faces and names. It is easy to gloss the capture of unnamed personnel, and more difficult to ignore the plight of a young Leading Seaman who has spoken cheerfully about the circumstances of her imprisonment. Knowing one another’s names, using them (as, behind closed doors, I suppose Paisley and Adams must) begins to draw us into relationship with one another, to open us up to one another. It nudges the kaleidoscope just a fraction, and brings a new pattern into focus.
What is the connection between these stories of the last weeks and the great feast we celebrate today? Well, we live in Da Vinci Code days, and Lent began with the sensational discovery of some bones in an ossuary supposedly bearing the names of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The excitement was short-lived as the very ordinary nature of the find became quickly obvious. However if the headlines prod us into thinking a little more carefully about what we understand when we speak of the resurrection, or even what we understand when we speak of God, then we need to thank those who created them. Perhaps the discovery of an empty tomb and the physical appearance of Jesus on Easter morning are unimportant nowadays; perhaps those events were actually an intense spiritual awakening for Mary and the other first witnesses; perhaps we could believe in the risen Jesus even if we were confronted with unmistakeable evidence of his mortal remains.
I’m not convinced. What has always set Christianity apart from other faiths, and made it ridiculous and even offensive to our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters is the extraordinary claim that in Jesus Christ God became man; that in the tortured figure of the crucified one we see simultaneously the immortal and invisible Creator of everything that is. Ours is a faith of paradox, a faith that understands God to be beyond our knowing and yet also longing to be known in Christ Jesus; a faith that believes God to be utterly different to the world he created out of nothing, and yet entirely present within it in the life of the carpenter from Nazareth. Matter matters to this God; it is how he chooses to make himself known to us. If the resurrection of his Son is a purely intellectual event, perceptible only to the inner eye of faith; if the stories of his resurrection appearances are mythological ways of explaining this deep truth to the simple, then our God is no God but instead a schizophrenic fly-by-night who lurches from one idiom of communication to another, without integrity or consistency. But surely that is not the God we worship. Our faith is not some rarefied formula for spiritual ecstasy. It is flesh and blood, tears and laughter, oil and water, bread and wine. In the dying of his Son God does not abandon the stuff of our living. He embraces and transforms it.
So the encounter in the garden in the early morning of the first Easter Day is above all a moment not of awareness or of awakening, but of recognition. The resurrection means nothing until the grieving woman is called by her first name: ‘Mary’. Only then can the new life take hold of her; only then can she take hold of the new life that she is being offered. Christ speaking her name changes everything as surely as does Ulster’s old adversaries speaking each other’s names. In that moment she knows that she is in the presence of a power greater than she can possibly understand. The one who has died is speaking to her. And in that moment she knows too that the nature of that power is love, for he is speaking her name. She is recognized and remembered from beyond the grave and into the new future that Easter is bringing about. The kaleidoscope has moved and a new pattern has been brought into view –a pattern into which we have been baptized and in which we will live for ever.
To God be the glory, now and in all eternity. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Easter Day, 8 April 2007
Third Sunday of Epiphany 2007
Ian McEwan’s most recent novel tells the story of twenty-four hours that many of you will remember. It tells the story of Saturday 15 February 2003, when tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on this city to protest against the looming attack on Iraq. At least, it tells the story of Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon living not far from this parish. It tells of the different ways in which that day’s anger, elation and foreboding connected with what ought to have been the ordinary routine of his Saturday - a squash match, a call on his elderly mother, a family reunion supper. It tells one man’s story, mingled with the stories of many.
Thursday’s celebration and this morning’s Eucharist mark a convergence of the sort that fascinate McEwan, although I hope without some of the more dramatic consequences that he fashions for his characters. Today the story of your new priest meets the stories of as many of you as are here, and meets also the greater, more elusive story that is the story of this parish, this church and this congregation. It is a story which my predecessor, Prebendary Tillyer, enriched immeasurably in the years he served here with such distinction. In his valedictory homily he urged upon you that verse beloved of his predecessor, George Howard Wilkinson, “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward”. So the story continues to be told, and together we will write the next chapter, perhaps the next volume. But what will we write; and, as important, how will we write it?
McEwan’s hero, Henry Perowne, would be happy to be described as an atheist, but he would not be happy to let matters rest there. He is no arid fundamentalist of the sort demolished so effectively (and with such relish) by the Bishop on Thursday. A neurosurgeon, he is entranced by and overwhelmed at the mysterious complexity of the human brain, its unimaginable power and its hidden depths. Why look to the supernatural, he would say, when human beings should simply marvel at their capacity for thought? And on the Saturday that the novel follows, when the outworkings of organized religion’s murderous insanity are more than usually evident in London’s crowded streets Perowne is doubtless confirmed in his preference for the mystery of the operating theatre above the mystery of the temple.
Each of you knows a Henry Perowne, a person intelligent, civilized and responsible, yet who sees no need to be doing what we are doing this morning. What sort of story might we craft together that would attract him, or her; and how might we write it?
Let me start with the how, which I have already said is as important as the what. For how we create narrative has changed. My first Head of Chambers was a wise, kind man whose considerable virtues far outweighed his two failings: a mania for the nascent information technology of the early 90s; and a tendency to treat his colleagues like his children. Every day would bring showers of memoranda from the cumbersome lap-top and wire-managed desk of which he was inordinately proud, purporting to govern every area of Chambers life from the lavatories to the telephones. But we live in the era of YouTube and MySpace, when the communication of narrative, the telling of story, is no longer controlled by a select few. It is, after a fashion, democratic, something to which we can all contribute, and to which many expect to and do, particularly the young.
Offer Henry Perowne a church which resembles my Chambers of fifteen years ago and he will leave before the end of the first hymn. He will not be told what the answers are or where truth lies, and in a climate which is suspicious of experts, he will very definitely not trust a priest. He will expect to be heard and to be listened to; he will expect to question and be questioned; and he will expect to be among the like-minded. If ‘Father knows best’ was ever a good rule of thumb for the Church of God (and I doubt that it was) then it is not now, and it needs to be consigned to history’s dustbin. Father does not necessarily know best – he is like you, a disciple of Christ who is struggling to understand what that means in this place in 2007.
But our tradition offers us another image, one articulated by Paul in the first Epistle to the church in Corinth, an image with which we are so familiar that it has perhaps lost some of its power to shock: “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it”. Paul’s vision of the church - of this church - bears examination and re-examination. It is a vision of a community of gifts, different, but equal, with no rank or status. The Gospel and its proclamation is a shared endeavour. Each contributes; and should any cease to contribute then the whole ceases to function. That would surely appeal to Perowne’s appreciation of human physiology and sense of justice. The implications of the vision are far-reaching: they mean each of us, each of us, thinking afresh about what we bring to this place, what we take from it, and how we nourish our common life as disciples of Christ. The vision is dazzling, and I wonder if we dare be dazzled by it.
But if the writing of the story is to be something that is done by us all, and not by them or, worse still, by him, then what will be the plot; what story will we tell? What will make Henry Perowne keep turning page after page? Throughout my ministry I have been drawn to the Gospel account of Jesus’s return to Nazareth, of that moment when he stands up in the synagogue and, as Luke puts it: “the eyes of all...were fixed on him”. He reads from the scroll handed to him and no church looking for a mission statement need look any further:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”.
Good news for the poor; release for the captives; sight for the blind; freedom for the oppressed; the year of the Lord’s favour. We have no other mission than that. The story that we write will not be about us. It will not be about a few hundred souls who together indulge in a harmless Sunday past-time called church. It will be about the poor: those who lack the resource to lift their eyes or their hearts or their aspirations. It will be about the blind: those bedazzled by the glitter of wealth or punch-drunk with the intoxication of power. It will be about the oppressed and the imprisoned: those languishing in the world’s dungeons, built sometimes out of steel and concrete, but often out of the psychoses and addictions that disfigure God’s creation and hold his children captive. It will be about the year of the Lord’s favour: the great jubilee promised by God and vouchsafed to all humankind in the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I don’t believe that Henry Perowne could resist it, and seeing such a company embarked on such a task he would rush to join us.
I began with a British novelist. I will conclude, if I may, with an American poet, and with words to reflect upon as together, like the children of Israel, we go forward:
“So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute.
Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Practice resurrection.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
21 January 2007,
1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a;
Luke 4: 14-21
Thursday’s celebration and this morning’s Eucharist mark a convergence of the sort that fascinate McEwan, although I hope without some of the more dramatic consequences that he fashions for his characters. Today the story of your new priest meets the stories of as many of you as are here, and meets also the greater, more elusive story that is the story of this parish, this church and this congregation. It is a story which my predecessor, Prebendary Tillyer, enriched immeasurably in the years he served here with such distinction. In his valedictory homily he urged upon you that verse beloved of his predecessor, George Howard Wilkinson, “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward”. So the story continues to be told, and together we will write the next chapter, perhaps the next volume. But what will we write; and, as important, how will we write it?
McEwan’s hero, Henry Perowne, would be happy to be described as an atheist, but he would not be happy to let matters rest there. He is no arid fundamentalist of the sort demolished so effectively (and with such relish) by the Bishop on Thursday. A neurosurgeon, he is entranced by and overwhelmed at the mysterious complexity of the human brain, its unimaginable power and its hidden depths. Why look to the supernatural, he would say, when human beings should simply marvel at their capacity for thought? And on the Saturday that the novel follows, when the outworkings of organized religion’s murderous insanity are more than usually evident in London’s crowded streets Perowne is doubtless confirmed in his preference for the mystery of the operating theatre above the mystery of the temple.
Each of you knows a Henry Perowne, a person intelligent, civilized and responsible, yet who sees no need to be doing what we are doing this morning. What sort of story might we craft together that would attract him, or her; and how might we write it?
Let me start with the how, which I have already said is as important as the what. For how we create narrative has changed. My first Head of Chambers was a wise, kind man whose considerable virtues far outweighed his two failings: a mania for the nascent information technology of the early 90s; and a tendency to treat his colleagues like his children. Every day would bring showers of memoranda from the cumbersome lap-top and wire-managed desk of which he was inordinately proud, purporting to govern every area of Chambers life from the lavatories to the telephones. But we live in the era of YouTube and MySpace, when the communication of narrative, the telling of story, is no longer controlled by a select few. It is, after a fashion, democratic, something to which we can all contribute, and to which many expect to and do, particularly the young.
Offer Henry Perowne a church which resembles my Chambers of fifteen years ago and he will leave before the end of the first hymn. He will not be told what the answers are or where truth lies, and in a climate which is suspicious of experts, he will very definitely not trust a priest. He will expect to be heard and to be listened to; he will expect to question and be questioned; and he will expect to be among the like-minded. If ‘Father knows best’ was ever a good rule of thumb for the Church of God (and I doubt that it was) then it is not now, and it needs to be consigned to history’s dustbin. Father does not necessarily know best – he is like you, a disciple of Christ who is struggling to understand what that means in this place in 2007.
But our tradition offers us another image, one articulated by Paul in the first Epistle to the church in Corinth, an image with which we are so familiar that it has perhaps lost some of its power to shock: “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it”. Paul’s vision of the church - of this church - bears examination and re-examination. It is a vision of a community of gifts, different, but equal, with no rank or status. The Gospel and its proclamation is a shared endeavour. Each contributes; and should any cease to contribute then the whole ceases to function. That would surely appeal to Perowne’s appreciation of human physiology and sense of justice. The implications of the vision are far-reaching: they mean each of us, each of us, thinking afresh about what we bring to this place, what we take from it, and how we nourish our common life as disciples of Christ. The vision is dazzling, and I wonder if we dare be dazzled by it.
But if the writing of the story is to be something that is done by us all, and not by them or, worse still, by him, then what will be the plot; what story will we tell? What will make Henry Perowne keep turning page after page? Throughout my ministry I have been drawn to the Gospel account of Jesus’s return to Nazareth, of that moment when he stands up in the synagogue and, as Luke puts it: “the eyes of all...were fixed on him”. He reads from the scroll handed to him and no church looking for a mission statement need look any further:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”.
Good news for the poor; release for the captives; sight for the blind; freedom for the oppressed; the year of the Lord’s favour. We have no other mission than that. The story that we write will not be about us. It will not be about a few hundred souls who together indulge in a harmless Sunday past-time called church. It will be about the poor: those who lack the resource to lift their eyes or their hearts or their aspirations. It will be about the blind: those bedazzled by the glitter of wealth or punch-drunk with the intoxication of power. It will be about the oppressed and the imprisoned: those languishing in the world’s dungeons, built sometimes out of steel and concrete, but often out of the psychoses and addictions that disfigure God’s creation and hold his children captive. It will be about the year of the Lord’s favour: the great jubilee promised by God and vouchsafed to all humankind in the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I don’t believe that Henry Perowne could resist it, and seeing such a company embarked on such a task he would rush to join us.
I began with a British novelist. I will conclude, if I may, with an American poet, and with words to reflect upon as together, like the children of Israel, we go forward:
“So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute.
Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Practice resurrection.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
21 January 2007,
1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a;
Luke 4: 14-21
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