The Woman at the Well – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 5 January 2020 – Choral Evensong
Isaiah 49:1-13       John 4:7-26

I wonder whether you’ve ever been to the Holy Land or even ever had the desire to do so. Despite hearing numerous people telling me over the years how life-changing such a visit can be, I’d never had any inclination to go until about 10 years ago. A former colleague of mine was living in East Jerusalem, where her husband had a posting with the Foreign Office. She’d always said we should take the opportunity to go and stay with them. Then, one day, we had a message to say that if we wanted to do so, we’d better get on with it, because they were about to be moved to China within the next few months.

So just after Easter some 10 years ago, we went. It was a magical trip for all sorts of reasons. One of the unforeseen benefits for us, though, was that because John had the use of a diplomatic car, he was able to get us to places which were otherwise tricky to gain access to. One of those places was Nablus, on the West Bank, where a well – said to be Jacob’s Well – is to be found. You’ll recall from the second lesson from John’s Gospel that Jesus sat down by this well in the heat of the midday sun one day and entered into conversation with a Samaritan woman, which, for her, was indeed life-changing.

As is the case with so much else in the Middle East, different religious groups have vested interests in Jacob’s Well: Jews, Samaritans, Christians and Muslims. In 1860, the site was obtained by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and in 1893 a church was built over the well, with a monastery as part of the complex. That building was destroyed by the Jericho earthquake in 1927. Since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, the well’s been the focus of considerable acrimony between Jews and Christians. In 1979, the then custodian of the site, Archimandrite Philoumenos, was found hacked to death inside the crypt housing the well. In 2009, the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem declared Philomenous to be a saint, since when a new church building has been erected over the well.

As with many of the sites in the Holy Land, you have to take all sorts of claims to be the really authentic place where this or that happened with a large pinch of salt. Whether or not the well in Nablus really is Jacob’s Well, there was, nevertheless, something about it. Hewn out of rock, it was extraordinarily deep, as the gospel narrative states. On the edge of the well was a stone on a string, which you can throw down to see just how long it takes for the stone to hit the water. A long time! And the water tastes unbelievably sweet and good!

The church which was erected over the well by Greek Orthodox Christians in 1893 was dedicated in honour of St Photini the Samaritan – the Samaritan woman herself. The choice of the name – Photini – is incredibly interesting. It means ‘the Enlightened One,’ or ‘the Luminous One,’ Photini being derived from the Greek word, ‘phos,’ meaning ‘light.’ Legend has it that the Samaritan woman was baptised by the Apostles and given the name Photine. Now whether we go along with the notion that the Samaritan woman was an actual historical figure or one constructed as a spiritual archetype by the evangelist is neither here nor there. The important thing is that the figure of Photini offers us a way in to this amazing, utterly engaging, spiritually true-to-life story, and speaks to us of our human condition, of our true nature in relation to Christ, and of the transformation required if we are also to become enlightened or luminous.

Enlightenment isn’t a word much used in Christian circles; it’s rather more associated with Buddhist traditions. In his letter to the Ephesians, though, Paul speaks of the ‘eyes of your heart’ being ‘enlightened.’ Light’s associated with Christ himself, who as the Prologue to John’s Gospel puts it, is the ‘true light, which enlightens everyone.’ So in a Christian context, enlightenment has to do with the discovery of our true nature as the light and life of Christ within us and at the heart of everything. As the prologue also states, this light is mysteriously obscured within us, yet, as everything which obscures the light is cleared away, so the light of Christ, which is already present – just as the sun’s always still present behind the clouds – begins to shine in us, and we discover our luminosity.

It’s here, perhaps, that the Buddhist traditions can – forgive the pun – shed a little light on the matter, for the practice of meditation, which invites a forensic examination and analysis of the workings of the mind and the heart, enables us both to discover the luminous ground of our awareness, and also that which obscures it. And this is exactly what Jesus does with the Samaritan woman.

Anyone who knows anything about Buddhism will almost certainly have an idea that the problem for human beings lies in the nature of desire, but a more sophisticated acquaintance with Buddhism will be aware that it’s not quite so simple. Nirvana, the so-called ‘goal’ of Buddhism, is often assumed to be that state in which desire has been extinguished. It’s actually rather more subtle than that. The problem isn’t so much to do with desire per se as with misdirected or disordered desire. It would be impossible to live without any kind of desire at all. If that were the case, we’d never get out of bed in the morning. No, the real issue concerns the nature of our desire.

In the encounter with the woman at the well, Jesus gently, sensitively and compassionately enables her to discover how the dissatisfaction she feels with her life arises out of her misdirected desires. And the metaphor for her desire is her need for water. In other words, this is all about spiritual thirst.

At the most basic level, she’s fed up with the sheer drudgery and mundaneness of life. She has to trek to the well in the heat of the day to draw water, a fundamental necessity of life, and yet she desires something more. The paradox is that this desire for something more obscures for her the sheer wonder and delight of water itself. Her sense of drudgery obscures her basic appreciation and savouring of the miracle of water. The discovery of that something more would enable her to delight in this practical and manual daily task in a way which eludes her at the time of her initial conversation with Jesus.

Jesus then draws her attention to a more fundamental disorder of desire in her life. For some reason she’s had five husbands and the man she’s with at the time isn’t even her husband. We don’t know what lies behind this and we should be careful not to project back on to her all our contemporary notions of romantic love. The point is that she appears to have looked for the fulfilment of her desire in a succession of human relationships. Such things are necessary and often life-giving, of course, but we find that often they can’t bear the burden of our unrealistic hopes, expectations and desires, and they become a source of pain, hurt and suffering. Jesus shows us that in all this she’s really desiring something more.

That something more is difficult – impossible even – to put into words, not least because it’s the very reality in which we’re grounded and through which we experience life. Suffice to say, the woman discovers this in the person conversing with her, as if he were a mirror in whom she sees herself. She sees in him the luminous ground of her own awareness and realises that this is what she’s been looking for in all the twists and turns of her life. And, paradoxically, even her misdirected and disordered desires, which have left her feeling dissatisfied with her life, have actually had their part to play in the discovery of what she was really looking for all along.

So the Samaritan woman, St Photine, the Enlightened or Luminous One, is really you and me. Her story is an invitation to all of us to discover that what we really want is already present within us. As we read in the letter to the Colossians, this is the ‘mystery hidden throughout the ages and now revealed to his saints – Christ in you, the hope of glory.’ The living water, for which we thirst, is already flowing abundantly in the unfathomably deep well of our being.

Christmas 2019- The Revd Canon Maggie McLean

Over Christmas I really enjoyed watching the film ‘The Two Popes’.

I liked it not only for its drama about different ways for the church to be, and to do, but for its depth of humanity.

The characters came alive as leaders and also fallible people.  People with something to learn from each other.

One part of the film reminded me of a visit I made to Argentina 15 years or so ago.  The country of the present Pope.

During our stay in Buenos Aires we went to see ‘the Pink House’, the Argentine equivalent of the White House.

It was here, in a plaza in front of the presidential building, that mothers protested during the so-called ‘dirty war’.

Between 1973 and 1983 tens of thousands of people ‘disappeared’.

In response mothers and grandmothers of the victims of government oppression gathered in front of the Pink House and protested.

They were unafraid; the most important things in their lives had already been taken.  They felt they had nothing else to lose.

It is hard for most of us to imagine this horror.  This panic and desperation to know what had happened to loved ones.  To seek answers and to be denied.

All that many of these women did was be present and weep.

The power of their protest lay, in part, in the fact that they were not influential people; they were not wealthy, they had no clout.  They came, they demanded answers, and they expressed their grief:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,

 wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

 she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

Today our Gospel reading is no less horrific.  It tells of state organised violence – the murder of God knows how many children.  All boys under the age of two.

It’s hard for us to imagine the impact of this crime, two thousand years ago.

The still greater tragedy is the repetition of such crimes, down the years, until today.

Children abducted and murdered; damaged beyond belief by living in a war zone; forced to survive on insufficient food and drink.

When will we learn?

When will we act?

Like the women in the Plaza de Mayo, the powerless have much to teach us.  Perhaps they are not the kind of people we look to in order to learn.  They are not always the educated or the qualified.  They are certainly not wealthy or powerful.

Yet such passionate protesters articulate the injustices of life in ways which should disturb our comfort, and bring comfort to the broken.

Today we are between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.  Perhaps some of us are thinking about resolutions to make.

For me, reflecting on this Gospel, I don’t feel the need to make a new resolution – but I do feel a call to strengthen my resolve.

To listen and to act.  To be open to the experiences of those responding to injustice and violence – to not only hear, but to do.

Howard Thurman, an African-American theologian and civil rights leader, put these feelings into context when he reflected on the Christmas story and it is with these words I wish to end: He writes….

When the song of the angels is stilled,

            when the star in the sky is gone,

when the kings and princes are home,

when the shepherds are back with their flocks,

            the work of Christmas begins:

                        to find the lost,

                        to heal the broken,

                        to feed the hungry,

                        to release the prisoner,

                        to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among the people,

                        to make music in the heart.

Amen.

Heart of Love – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 29^th December 2019 – Matins
Isaiah 35:1-6          Galatians 3:23-end

The anthem we’ve just heard is probably one of the most well-known and best-loved of all pieces of music associated with Christmas. I like to think we at York Minster have a rather special connection with it through our visiting choir today. Harold Darke, the composer, who, at the age of just 16, set to music the words of Christina Rossetti’s poem, In the bleak midwinter, was the great uncle of Richard Darke, who didn’t need to trade on his great uncle’s name, but was in his own right a much-loved, respected and gifted musician in Yorkshire. In particular, he was the Director of Music at St John’s Knaresborough for 22 years. The choir of St John’s comes to sing the services this weekend each year and we’re extremely grateful to them for doing so. By virtue of the relationship between great uncle and great nephew, the anthem provides us with the opportunity to remember Richard with much gratitude and affection, as he died in October just over a year ago.

I remember as a boy – singing in a parish church choir and later at school – getting all tongue-tied and confused over the last line: ‘Yet what I can I give him – give my heart.’ I always assumed it was a not very well phrased question, as if there were one too many ‘Is’. It was only much later that I realised the sense of it had to do with not having anything to give except the heart: ‘Yet what I can I give him – give my heart.’

‘Heart’ is an interesting word. It is, of course, a muscular organ that pumps blood around the body, but it’s long been associated with emotion and feeling, too. We speak of a broken heart when someone’s disappointed in love. In fact, one of the best known Christmas songs captures just this. Wham’s 1984 hit single, Last Christmas I gave you my heart, is all about the break-up of a relationship:

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart,

but the very next day you gave it away.
This year, to save me from tears,
I’ll give it to someone special.

Last Christmas, so the song tells, the singer had wrapped up his heart and sent it with the message, ‘I love you’. The heartache results from the fact that the love’s still there, unrequited, and won’t go away.

The heart’s also a very significant word in Jewish and Christian spirituality. Jesus summarises the Law by saying, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength; and your neighbour as yourself.’ The Biblical significance of heart’s more than its just being a bodily organ, although that’s important, and more than its being the seat of emotion, although that’s not insignificant. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, as the contemporary author and scholar, Martin Laird, reminds us, the word heart ‘intends the unifying, grounding centre of the human person.’ In other words, ‘heart’ really denotes that unitive awareness which is completely inseparable from God. ‘Heart’ is where we and God are one.

The problem, of course, is that we all know ourselves and experience life as fractured and fragmented, divided and dislocated. The Christian story can be read as one in which our ‘original’ state is recovered, when we wake up to the unity and harmony which is the real nature of things. This is why St Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, says that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, because in Christ all are one. Up to the point of his conversion experience on the Damascus Road, Paul saw everything in dualistic, binary terms, as in or out, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable. All of that was transcended by an overwhelming experience of divine love, in which he knew himself and everything and everyone else to be at one. Paul spoke of his waking up to this unitive awareness by declaring earlier in the letter, ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’

Christ is the reality, the unifying ground, in which everything has its being, and what we celebrate at Christmas is the revelation of this truth in a divinely human person, a being who is single in the sense of being whole and undivided. We might say that in him God lays bare his heart. And God invites us to do the same, to discover that beyond all division is the love of God, in which the broken heart of humanity finds its wholeness.

The Word became flesh and lived among us – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

First Eucharist of Christmas 24^th December 2013 11.30pm

Hebrews 1:1-4 John 1:1-14

‘And the word became flesh and lived among us.’

If you’ve ever watched the BAFTA or Oscar ceremonies on television, you may recall that towards the end there’s a very poignant moment, when pictures are shown of people who’ve died during the previous 12 months, having made significant contributions in film or television during their careers. If there were a large screen here in the Minster showing pictures of those who’ve been important in your life, but who’ve died since last Christmas, I wonder who’d be there. A close family member, perhaps, a friend, a work colleague, someone who’s inspired, encouraged or influenced you.

I’d personally want to see one particular picture, which wouldn’t so much make me sad as make my heart expand with love and gratitude. It wouldn’t even be a picture of someone I really knew. I met him only once, but that was enough to leave an indelible impression on me. Nor was his death untimely or tragic in any way: he died in May at the age of 90, surrounded by those who loved him, having led an amazingly full, creative and fruitful life. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if only a handful of those here now have ever even heard of him. And yet, whether we realise it or not, we all owe so much to him for his vision, his humanity, his faith, his love and, above all, for the way he changed attitudes everywhere towards those living with learning disabilities. He was the French-Canadian philosopher and theologian, Jean Vanier, best-known as the founder of L’Arche, a network of communities not so much for those with learning disabilities, but rather in which those with learning disabilities are included.

Vanier initially trained as a naval officer, and then embarked on an academic career, but while staying with a priest-friend in France, his life was changed. He came across a mental hospital, which at that time was referred to disparagingly as a ‘place for idiots.’ Some 80 men were housed in cramped conditions and were effectively written-off as human beings. It was there that Jean Vanier met Raphael, who’d contracted Meningitis, and Philippe, who was badly affected by Encephalitis. And so it was that in 1964, Vanier was prompted to invite these two men to form a small community with him and to live together in a tiny house he’d bought. From this first small community of three there are now 147 such communities in 35 countries.

I met Jean Vanier some years ago now at a day conference in Westminster Cathedral. He was insistent that the afternoon session begin with all 400 attendees washing one another’s feet, just as Jesus had washed his disciples’ feet the night before he died, on what we now call Maundy Thursday. It was a profoundly moving experience of love, humility and gentleness. It was in fact on Maundy Thursday in 2016 that I spoke in this pulpit about something that happened after we’d washed one another’s feet at that conference, so I apologise if there’s anyone who’s heard this story before. I want to use it in a rather different way tonight, though.

When the foot-washing was over, Jean Vanier encouraged feedback and discussion. All of a sudden, there was a disturbance at the back, caused by a loud wailing sound. Clearly someone with a learning disability was trying to speak with some urgency, for what followed was obviously a question, which sounded something like this: ‘Ow oo you ive wi umwun yoo ate?’ Minds were racing as we desperately tried to work out what had been said. All I could come up with was, ‘How do you live with someone you ate?’ ‘Surely this man’s not confessing to cannibalism,’ I thought.

At this point, all the attention was focussed on Jean Vanier. With utter gentleness and love he said, ‘Fred, you’re asking how we live with someone we hate. You tell me. How do you think we do that?’

Unlike Vanier, most of us might have responded to Fred rather patronisingly at best, or shuffled uncomfortably in our seats, at worst, embarrassed by our own inadequacy. Vanier, though, saw Fred as being no different from himself, treated him as an equal, as one from whom we could all learn, not despite his disability but because of it. All distinctions between superiority and inferiority, able and disabled, clever and stupid, disappeared in that moment and what was left for all to see was simply a beautiful and reciprocal relationship of love between equals in their shared humanity.

Why do I speak about Jean Vanier and tell this story as we celebrate the birth of Christ? For one very simple but mind-blowing reason: that the Word became flesh and lived among us. We see the Incarnation made real among us, because the effect of Jesus’ coming among us is to draw us into relationship and to create community, real community, not the superficial and narrow kind of community made up of only the likeminded, but the kind of community in which there’s a place for all because the barriers and boundaries of fear and prejudice come tumbling down, where relationship itself affirms and nurtures our deepest humanity, because we discover what it is to love and to be loved.

That’s exactly what happened in that exchange between Jean Vanier and Fred. Vanier responded to Fred’s question with such love and tenderness that Fred’s dignity was affirmed and, as a result, each was drawn more deeply into love. Indeed, Fred taught us so much in that moment, not least that the weak, the vulnerable and the often-ignored-if-not-despised have so much to give us, because they show us how to be vulnerable, and it’s only in vulnerability that we can really know love. That’s what Christmas invites us to see: that God’s mysteriously embodied in the vulnerability and fragility of a human baby, which, by virtue of simply being, is a crying out from love for love. What we all experienced in that encounter between Jean Vanier and Fred was the Word becoming flesh before our very eyes, the reality of Christ being made visible and his presence made known, because he was living among us as love. No wonder that in that moment we beheld his glory made manifest in relationship and community, full of grace and truth.

What we celebrate tonight isn’t simply something that occurred 2000 years ago, nor something that’s of significance just once a year, but something that’s true at every moment: that the Word becomes flesh in every person, in every place and in every time, if we would but let it. Christ is the reality in which all things exist, without whom not one thing comes into being, the light which is the life of all people. So the reality of the Incarnation’s to be discovered wherever we are right now, whatever’s going on in our lives, and above all, whenever we’re drawn out of our self-centredness into relationship, community and intimacy. The truth of the Incarnation isn’t primarily something we work out in our heads; rather it’s discovered precisely in and through the day-to-day embodied experience of our lives.

So, if you’re wondering what it all really means and whether it’s of any consequence, start exactly where you are right now in your life, with the people you come across, the people you’re here with now, those you’ll be with tomorrow and beyond. The key lies in our daring to be vulnerable to others and letting them be vulnerable to us; in being open to the possibility of a movement of love between us, however small.

Sometimes, of course, it’s really difficult, because we don’t necessarily like everyone or we’re afraid of being hurt or taken advantage of. But this is exactly what happened to Jesus. The vulnerability he experienced from his birth stayed with him until the end of his life, indeed took him to his death on a cross, because it was love that motivated him in every aspect of his being. His birth and death reveal that God meets us and loves us most of all precisely at the point where we feel most vulnerable. That vulnerability is the narrow gate through which God can enter, be made flesh, be made visible, live among us and draw us into the fullness of God’s own life. It can open up a whole new world of possibility and promise, just as it did for Jean Vanier, Raphael, Philippe, Fred, and for all who risk being vulnerable to love. It’s then that we experience and know for ourselves the reality of the Word made flesh, Christ living among us, here and now and always.

Keep Awake – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 1 December 2019 – Matins

Micah 4:1-7      1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Rugby Football may not be your cup of tea. If so, then the attention given to this year’s world cup competition might have been just a little too much for you to bear. This was undoubtedly the case for Canon Peter Moger, Precentor here at the Minster until recently, although if truth be told, Peter wasn’t so much irritated by the competition as completely oblivious of it!

The final, with England playing South Africa, took place on 2^nd November, the day after Peter’s licensing on the Feast of All Saints as the Episcopal priest in Stornaway. Peter was very keen to give a tour around the island of Lewis to the small number of us who’d gone there to support him, largely to show us the second church in his charge. This is a 13^th century church dedicated in honour of that well-known saint, Moluag. Canon Michael Smith – currently on sabbatical – and his wife, Ann, together with Dr Richard Shephard, my wife and me, stayed in an air B&B together. Michael had let it be known in no uncertain terms that we were intending to watch the rugby. So at 9.00 o’clock, the five of us sat down in front of the television. Dr Shephard managed to last barely a few minutes of pretending to be vaguely interested, before the sheer agony of boredeom forced him to leave the room and go and do something else! The four of us who remained, though, were gripped. And for those of us of a certain age, this final brought back memories of the final in 2003, when England beat Australia to become world champions.

The hero of that match was, of course, the fly-half, Johnny Wilkinson. At 79 minutes into the 80-minute game, England were ahead, and then Australia equalised, taking the score to 14-14. During the twenty minutes of extra time, both teams managed to add another three points to their scores, until 20 seconds before the end, Johnny Wilkinson scored a drop goal to give England a three point lead – and victory.

Wilkinson seemed to have golden boots on his feet, and he was well known for the ritual and posture he adopted before kicking the ball through the posts to convert a try or score a penalty. He seemed almost to crouch or squat and hold his hands in a rather curious position – almost prayer-like – in front of his chest. His eyes oscillated several times between the ball on the grass and the posts through which he needed to kick the ball, as he sought to fix in his mind the required trajectory of the ball. His concentration was enormous, and time and time again he managed to achieve his goal – literally – of getting the ball between the posts.

Keeping your eye on the ball is a phrase that’s widely used, whether or not the connection’s made with sport. It means, of course, keeping your focus, not being distracted, because if you take your eye off the ball, you’re likely to miss. We use the phrase metaphorically in all sorts of circumstances in our everyday lives.

If St Paul had been writing to the Thessalonians today, I wonder whether he might not have used this metaphor, for that’s really what he’s saying in the passage we heard as the second lesson today. Keep awake, be vigilant, keep your eye on the ball, otherwise you’ll miss the crucial moment on which all could be won or lost. For Paul that moment was the so-called second coming of Christ at the end of time.

The notion of the second coming draws on the language of what’s called apocalyptic found elsewhere in the Bible, notably in books like Daniel in the Old Testament or the Revelation to John, with which the Bible ends. Apocalyptic makes use of all sorts of weird, wonderful and disturbing images, with the intention of warning and alerting people to the serious danger they’re in without being aware of it. Apocalyptic seeks to wake us up and get us to pay attention. Although some people take the words literally, it might be more helpful to read them in a rather more symbolic way, not least because the thought world of St Paul seems so alien to us, which is why, if he’d been trying to say now what he was trying to say then, he might have used the metaphor of keeping your eye on the ball.

The business of paying attention resonates with many today and can connect us with every aspect of our experience. It’s why the so-called mindfulness movement has caught on, because it offers a practice of being attentive as a way of dealing with all the stuff which seems to blow us off course in our lives. But we know how important paying attention is in all sorts of everyday circumstances. A musician knows all too well that mistakes are likely to be made when your attention wanders. Or think of a brain surgeon in the middle of a delicate and difficult operation. A moment’s distraction could be fatal. And what about the temptation to answer a mobile phone when driving. Tragedy could occur in a split second. All this is a way of saying that everything in life is actually a spiritual matter.

A good many years ago now, when I was a vicar in Bedford, I invited Michael Mayne, then Dean of Westminster, to come and lead a quiet day as part of a two-week mission. He kindly gave me the manuscript of his addresses, which I still have, and he began the first address with these words:

I want to put before you a profoundly simple – that is to say, a simple but profound – truth. And it is this: that at root, the Christian life is about giving attention in order to become what we truly are. Prayer, spirituality, is about giving proper attention to God. Love is about giving attention to people. By which I mean attentiveness to what is before our eyes in the sacrament of the present moment.

I should define a religious person – one who is spiritually aware – as one who is prepared to give attention to the world, to its people and to its creator, in the process of learning to love them.

For St Paul, the crucial moment on which all could be won or lost seems to be the moment when Christ will come again in the future, at the end of time, but if we think about it carefully, that can’t possibly be the whole story. He’s actually saying, pay attention now, in this moment, because if you don’t, it might be precisely now that he comes and then you’ll miss him. Christ comes to us at every moment and in every situation. The so-called second coming points, perhaps, to that single moment when the whole creation will be so utterly at one in its attentiveness, that the very life and presence of God will be realised in everyone and everything in all its intense fullness.

So keep awake, be vigilant, keep your eye on the ball, for the God who comes in the future is simply the God who comes at every moment, which is only ever now – in the eternal present.

Patience is not one of my virtues – The Revd Canon Maggie McLean

10am  Sung Eucharist – Sunday 1 December 2019

Patience – waiting – is not one of my virtues.

Good things, things I’m looking forward to, can never arrive too soon and right now, it’s probably the way a lot of children feel about Christmas.

Waiting comes in many forms.  We can wait for something with apprehension – perhaps the result of medical tests or the outcome of an interview.

Alternatively, we can wait with sheer excitement for a special occasion; an anniversary, a party.

Sometimes we have a mixture of these feelings.

I thought about this a couple of years ago whilst  waiting in line at Universal Studios in Orlando for the Harry Potter ride which took you down into the vaults of Gringots bank.

I wanted to go on it, but as we moved along there were signs that made me have mixed feelings about the prospect. So for example one said:

“This is a high-speed roller coaster ride that

includes sudden and dramatic acceleration,

climbing, tilting, and dropping. You will be turned completely upside-down several times.”

(Perhaps a sign which we ought to have for new Canons!)

I was in the queue, committed to going, but my anticipation began to be mingled with real anxiety.

In our society a lot of effort goes into supporting the experience of waiting.

Digital signs at stations, on the motorway and at bus stops, all try to manage the anxiety waiting can produce.

We are impatient creatures and business and government understand the need to manage our waiting, our anticipation and our frustration.

We only need to take a few steps out of the Minster to experience a world disinclined to wait.  In our restaurants and shops we can have Christmas today – its sparkle, its food and its celebration.

Yet for the Church, Advent is about more than the flightpath to Christmas.

It’s a season full of signs about what the birth of Jesus means.  Not for one day, but for all days.  Not simply about jollity, but about the second coming; about our mortality, judgement, being with God – and the idea of not being with God.

And rather like my Harry Potter experience, the signs aren’t cosy or devoid of risk.

Our Gospel reading seems entirely compatible with the idea of sudden “acceleration, climbing, tilting, and dropping”.  People will be together; one will be taken and one will be remain.

We are not left with a vision of comfort, but of dramatic transformation.  The image for God here is the thief in the night – the unwanted visitor who disrupts the home.

Advent tells us that God’s coming will be an unsettling and disturbing experience.  With God comes change, change we may not have looked for.

Both the Israelites and the early Christians were preparing themselves for the ending of history and the start of God’s reign.

It might be tempting to see this as something which is eternally about tomorrow.  But as our prayer for today tells us, the urgency to prepare is ‘now’; ‘now in the time of this mortal life’.

Advent isn’t about tomorrow but today.  About whether we are ready to greet God; to open our hearts and lives to the presence that is our one true hope – but, also, a presence that never simply leaves us as we are.

In the couple of weeks that I’ve been here I’ve been reminded how this space offers to many the chance to meet with God.

Like a Russian doll it holds story, within story within story.  It is shaped and marked by those whose experience of God, even centuries ago, continues to bear witness in stone and glass; word and song.  It tells of the end time and it speaks of today.

Last week Chris and I went out for a drink in one of the pubs on Goodramgate.  We got chatting with some people on the next table who were visiting from Derby for the weekend.

One of the group spoke about their friend who, following a bereavement, happened to be in York and visited the Minster.

As a result his life was changed.  Something happened here. And as his friend put it:

“He went in alone, but he walked out with God”

Advent is about being as prepared as we can be for that experience.  It’s about being open enough to recognise God when the Holy Spirit enters our lives.

I hope that in this season of Advent we all take time to ask God how we can be ready for that encounter.  How we can be ready, and how we help others to be open to that experience.

This isn’t the season of passive waiting.  It is the season of searching and striving – of active anticipation.  The picture Jesus paints is of God breaking into the world.  The thief who steals our illusions and helps us see ourselves, and those around us, as people already loved beyond measure.

This magnificent building does not contain God.  It points to God, even as Advent points to the love which is at the heart of our faith.

Our task, our calling, is to be ready and alert for every moment when this love breaks into the world.

Like the night watch scanning the horizon for the first glimmer of day, we are asked to wait eagerly for each and every sign of God’s presence in the world; and proclaim to those around us that the night has ended.

Dignified by Divine Love rather than Social Status or Merit – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 6 October 2019 – Matins

Isaiah 59:9-20   Luke 14:1-14

Let’s start by having a little harmless fun at Donald Trump’s expense. Almost five months ago, the President of the USA and his wife made a State Visit to the United Kingdom. Although there were any number of protests about this, they were given the works, and on the evening of Monday 3^rd June, having had a meeting with the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, in Downing Street earlier that day, the Trumps were the guests of honour at a State Banquet hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. There was, of course, an order of procession and a seating plan. The President was briefed beforehand about where to sit and was told it would be perfectly obvious where his seat was. As the procession made its way to the table, Donald Trump placed himself in prime position with the Queen at his side. The Queen looked at him and said, ‘Move down one, Mr President; that’s my seat!’ Mr Trump replied, ‘Oh, sorry Ma’am. I saw number one written on the place card and assumed it meant me!’

Well, if you’re not entirely sure which bits of that account are historically accurate, welcome to the world of fake news! I’ll leave you to work out which bits were made up. The simple point is, though, that such a social faux pas on the part of the President, while not being entirely improbable, would have caused offence, I suspect, throughout this country, and embarrassment back in the USA. Generally speaking, the host of a dinner or a banquet is expected to sit at the head of the table, and the place of honour would be to their right. For the guest to usurp the position of the host would be seen as presumptuous and discourteous in the extreme. After all, we’re all expected to know our place.

Much social convention and etiquette operates on the basis of things being in their right places. Even in Church circles there are orders of precedence in processions and so on. Whenever the Archbishop’s here, for example, he doesn’t need to ask, ‘Where do I stand?’ or ‘Where do I go?’ He knows he’s always at the back of the procession, taking the place deemed to be that of the greatest honour and dignity. Even a procession into a service like this observes correct etiquette: the choir first and then the clergy, taking their places according to what’s referred to as the dignity of their position and then in the order of seniority determined by the date of their installation. You can imagine at the big services, such as the consecrations of bishops, anyone who wanted to subvert such things would cause havoc. That’s why we have people like Precentors and Succentors to make sure we do what we’re told!

Now Jesus, I suspect, would play by the rules up to a point – he wouldn’t want to stand on ceremony for himself – but for everyone else he’d be totally subversive. Whatever your status, he’d say, take the place of lowest honour. If you do otherwise, you’ll find that those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted. Greco-Roman society – the context for what lies behind these incidents we heard in the second lesson from the Gospel of Luke – was highly stratified, in which it was very important that everyone knew just what and where their place was. Social status was really important. It’s only even in relatively recent memory that such stratification has been eroded in our own society, and politicians of all colours are inclined to speak of a classless society, in which everyone’s valued on the basis not of position but merit. Jesus calls into question any concern for social status. In fact, he confronts us all ultimately with the question: where and in what do real value and esteem lie?

To press this point, he advises those having a lunch or a dinner party not even to invite their friends – those with whom they’d ordinarily associate on the basis of status – but the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. Outrageous! They don’t have any status but neither do they have any merit. They’re outcasts, not part of polite, ordered society. Invite them, Jesus says, and if you baulk at the idea, ask yourself where real worth lies. For Jesus, true value isn’t determined by social status, not even by merit. The value of every human being lies in the fact that they come from God, they’re grounded in God, and they’re created in the image and likeness of God. Their value to God lies in the simple fact that they are. In the end, it doesn’t matter what our social status or our achievements are. Our dignity lies in the fact that we’re loved and valued by God for who we are. The challenge is to relate to everyone, and to build a society – what’s called the Kingdom of God – in which this is universally, unequivocally and unreservedly the case.

The God of Love, not Violence – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 20^th October 2019 – Choral Evensong

Nehemiah 8:9-end   John 16:1-11

18^th August, 1572. Paris. A royal wedding’s about to take place. The political atmosphere in the city, though, is febrile. Margaret, sister of the young French King, Charles IX, a Catholic, is to be married to Henry of Navarre, a Protestant. The country’s deeply divided and on the verge of civil war. The Huguenots have been in the ascendant for a while, and many have infiltrated the royal court, most prominent among whom is Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who has the King’s ear. Many see the Huguenots as a threat to national unity and on 18^th August 1572 a large number of Protestant aristocrats have gathered for the wedding, which the King hopes will broker peace.

Four days later, on 22^nd August, an attempt is made on the Admiral’s life, sanctioned, many think, by the Cardinal of Lorraine. The King visits Coligny on his sick bed but angry Huguenots storm in on the Queen Mother having dinner, demanding justice. Coligny’s brother’s camped outside Paris with a 4000-strong army of Protestants. On the evening of 23^rd August, the King and his mother discuss what’s to be done and between them the decision’s made that the Protestant leaders must be eliminated.

What follows on 24^th August, the Feast of St Bartholomew, has been described as the bloodiest of all massacres during the Reformation era. Estimates of the numbers killed vary, but the likelihood is that somewhere in the region of 3000 Protestants were killed in Paris and some 7000 in the provinces. Many Catholics believed that by disposing of Huguenots in this brutal way, they were fulfilling their duty not only to the King, but also to God. The most dangerous threat to the cohesion of French society, so they argued, was the cancerous and pernicious heresy of Calvinism, and heresy had to be stamped out. In perpetrating bloody violence they were, they claimed, carrying out the will of God. On hearing of the massacre, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the celebration of a Te Deum of Thanksgiving in Rome, and many French Protestants concluded that Catholicism was a ‘bloody and treacherous religion.’

I mention all this not because I want to demonise Catholics – far from it. The most significant influences in my own life, both personally, spiritually and intellectually, have been Catholic. No. I refer to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre because it illustrates what is perhaps the most serious mistake, the deepest travesty and betrayal that lies at the heart of the Christian faith and just about every other religion, namely, that violence is associated with God and, more than this, the belief not only that God sanctions violence, but also that God is a violent God.

Absurd, ridiculous, outrageous, you might retort. The God revealed in Christ is a God of love and compassion. Absolutely right. Time and time again, though, that insistence that God is love and compassion has been denied and ignored. It runs right through the Bible itself. How many times have you heard readings from the Bible, in which God’s portrayed as commanding the slaughter of this people or that, and you’ve winced and not known quite what to do with it other than to ignore it? There are deeply uncomfortable passages in the Bible, which we have every reason to question. And the association of God with violence is presented to us in this evening’s second lesson:

‘I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me.’

Jesus unequivocally rejects violence here. Killing others in the name of God is a sure sign that those who do such a thing don’t actually know the God of Jesus. What lies behind this passage is almost certainly the bitter disputes between the early Jewish Christians and other Jews, who believed that those following Jesus were themselves heretics from a Jewish point of view. Sometime during the latter part of the first century, Jewish Christians were expelled from the synagogues, and the bitter atmosphere in which this was carried out left a lasting legacy of hurt among the early Christians.

It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, that Jesus completely turned his back on violence and laid it upon his followers to do the same, and yet in all of the gospels we find a rhetoric of invective directed towards opponents of the followers of Jesus. Verbal violence characterises some of the debates in the early Church. More than this, though, the early Church sometimes enlisted a violent Jesus in support of its own cause. Take the Book of Revelation, for example, the subject of much of the Great East Window. In this last book of the Bible, a picture’s presented of the fulfilment of God’s purposes as a marriage between God and humanity celebrated in a wonderful wedding feast. In order to get there, though, there’s a terrible conflict in which Jesus himself is enlisted to unleash violent forces of destruction. In chapter five, Jesus is depicted as the sacrificial lamb who has been killed, but then in the next he’s the one who opens the seals, from which come horses whose riders are permitted to slaughter, to kill and to wreak havoc on earth. Note that it’s Jesus who’s portrayed as initiating this.

Surely something’s gone wrong here, for if Jesus had believed that God was a violent God his manifesto for action would have been aimed at overthrowing the Roman occupiers of his country, presumably by military force. This he rejected out of hand. Instead, he revealed the nature and character of God as one of love, which absorbs and takes violence into itself. ‘Those who live by the sword will die by the sword,’ he declared shortly before his arrest, and to demonstrate what it looks like to reject violence as a way of living, he willingly accepted the gruesome brutality of crucifixion. On the cross there’s no rhetoric of invective, no call on his followers to rise up and overthrow the Romans, not even an expression of anger and hurt on the part of Jesus, but infinite love and compassion, which understands and somehow embraces and contains the violent tendencies, motives and distortions of the human heart that have put him there.

It is, of course, extraordinarily difficult to live this; some would say impossible. The instinctive response to being hurt is to hit back with a desire to wound. That’s partly what explains the bitterness we find in the gospels among those who were expelled from the synagogues. We’re all aware, too, that the instinctive response to threat and aggression is fight or flight. That’s partly what explains the decision to attack, which led to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. So, too, in the Book of Revelation, there’s an understandable longing to be vindicated and for evil to be overcome. We all want to be proved right, but we can never be proved right through violence. And in a world in which fallen human beings have mixed motives, violence may need to be contained and peace defended, but violence can never bring about the transformation we all need. Most of all, though, a violent God can’t achieve this with and for us, for violence only begets violence. The only thing that works in the end is what we actually see in Jesus: a non-violent God of love and compassion. It’s this God alone who has the power to transform and to fulfil the gospel of love embodied and enacted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Being Well, Keeping Safe – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 13 October 2019 – Sung Eucharist

2 Timothy 2:8-15          Luke 17:11-19

Harry Williams, who died in January 2006, was a Cambridge theologian-turned-monk. All set for what many predicted to be a so-called glittering career in the Church, he came to very considerable prominence in wider society when, as Dean of Chapel at Trinity College, he suffered a psychological breakdown, born of years of trying to suppress his homosexuality. For eighteen months he gave up on church altogether and it was only with the help of a psychoanalyst that he was able to come to an acceptance of who he was with integrity and without shame or self-condemnation.

What struck those who heard him preach once again in the College chapel after his absence was the sheer honesty, vitality and relevance of his preaching, and as a result there was standing-room only whenever he was in the pulpit. Such was his reputation that invitations came to preach from far and wide.

On one occasion he was asked to preach at Eton College. Realising that getting the boys on his side wasn’t going to be easy, he began by admitting that he’d been racking his brains as to what could be the most boring way to begin his sermon. He then revealed to the assembled company, now hanging on his every word, that he’d cracked it. ‘Today,’ be announced, ‘is Advent Sunday.’

Well, in the spirit of Harry Williams, I can happily say, ‘Today is Safeguarding Sunday!’ I know, of course, that if you’d gleaned that in advance, wild horses wouldn’t have kept you away! I can see you on the edge of your seats already! Joking aside, though, the mere mention of the word safeguarding is likely to evoke a mixed reaction. Some of you will be working in organisations where safeguarding is simply taken for granted: those who work in education or social services, for example. For such people, complying with the contemporary requirements and expectations with regard to safeguarding is simply non-negotiable.

Others, no doubt, will have jaundiced views about safeguarding, thinking that much of it is simply bureaucracy gone mad, and perhaps there’s an element of truth in that, not least because we can see certain things that are lost in the process, things like being able to give a cuddle to a toddler who’s fallen over at nursery and hurt herself and wants mummy, but mummy’s not there so the next best thing’s a teacher. The trouble is, of course, that we all know of people who’ve abused positions of trust and preyed on vulnerable people, like toddlers in need of some comfort. So safeguarding is about protecting the vulnerable from harm. And if truth be told, we’re all vulnerable in some way or other. It’s part of the fragility of the human condition.

And then it could be said that safeguarding’s all relative anyway. Take the present plight of the Kurds in northern Syria. I wouldn’t mind betting that if you were to ask any of them what their top priority is at the moment, what their deepest longing is, it would simply be to be kept safe. How at risk and vulnerable they are to all sorts of things: bombs and bullets; injury and death; psychological harm and emotional trauma; homelessness and disease; insecurity and fear. And what about the 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey? They’re currently being used as pawns in a political power game and they can’t possibly feel safe. There’s a deep desire in all of us to feel safe and there’s a fundamental moral obligation pertaining to all of us to be concerned to guard everyone’s safety. We might not call that safeguarding but in effect that’s what it is. So we might well be tempted to think that our preoccupation with safeguarding’s a sign of a society that’s gone mad, but I have my doubts that those who’re currently vulnerable and at risk in Syria and Turkey would see it that way.

Now we might think there’s a heck of a difference between our lives here and the lives of those in Syria and Turkey, which is why it’s probably best to think of safeguarding in our situation not so much in terms of legislation or bureaucracy but of culture. The aim of safeguarding is to create a culture across the whole of society in which everyone can flourish and be free from abuse or harm, especially those who’re particularly vulnerable: the young, the elderly, the mentally ill, the easily influenced, and so on. What constitutes good safeguarding practice is simply a way of fleshing out the aspiration to guard people’s safety and enable them to thrive. Attendance at safeguarding courses is mandatory for clergy, amongst many others, and Jonathan and I attended a day course together in February. Here’s a list of the areas that safeguarding’s concerned to address in children and adults: physical abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, sexual abuse and exploitation, financial or material abuse, discriminatory abuse, organisational abuse, spiritual abuse, domestic abuse, online abuse and modern slavery. That’s quite some list. I can imagine St Paul writing a hefty letter to present-day churches, if he felt that such concerns were being ignored, and arguing that failing to address them would result in the diminishment of our fundamental dignity as created in the image and likeness of God. Indeed, he might go further and say that such a failure would be tantamount to dishonouring Christ.

Today’s gospel reading might seem a long way from safeguarding concerns, but I wonder. To use the current terminology of our own day, it’s actually about wellbeing, and I want to suggest that safeguarding is intimately bound up with wellbeing. Wellbeing is what we experience when we can be fully who we are as human beings without fear or anxiety. The aim of safeguarding is simply to promote that state of wellbeing and limit and contain anything that threatens it.

So the story of the healing of the ten lepers is about being made well: the lepers recover their wellbeing because their leprosy is cured. It’s not just a story of physical healing, though. As lepers, they would all have been excluded from everyday society – just as in our own time those living with AIDS and HIV were and sometimes still are. In addition to this, though, one of them was also discriminated against on the grounds of his nationality and religion – he was a foreigner, a Samaritan. Of the ten lepers healed, he was the only one to come back and say thank you. The others all seem to have taken it for granted. The Samaritan, though, realised just how significant his healing was. It brought with it not just physical healing but restoration to society, and an end to the suffering born of prejudice, discrimination and, no doubt, abusive attitudes and behaviours. Such things would have taken their toll on his general health, as they would on us and anyone else, which is why in our own time wellbeing and safeguarding are such priorities. No wonder he was thankful. And perhaps the other nine healed lepers present a warning to us not to be complacent about wellbeing and safeguarding.

Harry Williams, with whom I began, came to see that one of the most significant ways in which we discover God is through our authentic and restored humanity. It’s as we become more fully ourselves, more free to be who we truly are, that we grow into the fullness of Christ. There are many within the Church itself who testify to how in all sorts of ways that growth has been hindered, not least because they’ve been damaged by the Church and its representatives. Safeguarding Sunday is a reminder that the responsibility to promote a culture of wellbeing belongs to us all. What’s at stake is the capacity of everyone to grow to maturity, measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ. That’s what we have to protect, guard and keep safe.

Farewell Sermon for Canon Peter and Heather Moger – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 22 September 2019 – Choral Evensong

Ezra 1   John 7:14-36

How many times, I wonder, has Peter stood in this pulpit and preached about the anthem? Actually, given notice of that question, Peter would be able to answer it accurately, of course; he files and categorises all his sermons! He’s nothing if not organised! Over the years, many of us will have had cause to be grateful for sermons Peter has preached involving music.

This hasn’t always been because of the unpromising material presented by the Biblical readings, although all of us who preach will sometimes have looked at the readings and said: ok, what else can I preach about! Dare I say it, there’s an element of that this evening! You should know that today’s readings haven’t been chosen especially for the occasion: they’re simply the readings set in the lectionary for today, and it’s entirely appropriate that Peter stuck with the lectionary. After all, as some of us know only too well, he’s a stickler for following the lectionary – even when he chooses to ignore the readings and preach about something else!

I am actually going to preach about the anthem myself, but perhaps I might say in passing that there’s actually quite a lot in the readings this evening that resonates with Peter’s ministry, gifts and imminent departure for pastures new. Both have to do with the Jerusalem temple in some way, the temple which was the focus of the worship of Israel until it was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD. Peter has devoted the whole of his ministry to the ordering of worship and in this regard he’s absolutely second to none. Indeed, I’d say he’s the go-to Precentor in the Church of England.

Then there’s the list – the inventory – of vessels offered by the people to assist in the rebuilding of the temple. Peter loves the fabric of this place: not only the vessels and vestments but also the glass and stone. He was a member of the advisory committee which oversaw the restoration of the Great East Window, now visible and legible in all its glory, and he knows all too well that the very building of the Minster speaks of God and, in a variety of ways, tells the story of God.

And the obvious resonance with the second lesson lies in the fact that there Jesus himself is speaking about his own departure: ‘I will be with you a little while longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. You will search for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.’ Jesus is referring to his own death here, a slightly different situation from Peter’s, although Peter would no doubt want to remind us of Paul’s words to the Romans that we’re all baptised into the death and resurrection of Christ. In other words, we’re constantly dying and living, indeed, we’re learning what it is to die in order truly to live.

Now Peter doesn’t regard Stornaway as a kind of death imposed on him; rather he perceives it to be a genuine vocation, but this doesn’t deny the fact that it involves a sense of loss. However exciting the future looks, the move requires of Peter and Heather alike a letting go of all sorts of things and people, which will be difficult and painful for them, as well as for us, too. At the heart of the Christian gospel, though, is the affirmation that life, real life, arises out of death. It’s actually when we cling to life as we know it that life in all its fullness is somehow impeded and we begin to die. So real life involves letting go, sometimes of the things we hold most dear. In letting go of a life with which Peter and Heather are familiar, comfortable and entirely at home, they’re giving us a wonderful picture of what living out the gospel looks like, something that each of us has to discover in our own particular way according to our experience and circumstances. So having not preached on the anthem thus far, let me now begin to turn a little in that direction!

Music’s intrinsic to Peter’s very life and being, as it is to Heather’s. Indeed, it was music that brought them together at Oxford. Just as music has been central to Peter’s ministry, so, too, has music been at the heart of Heather’s professional life. In fact, Music at Heart is the name of Heather’s highly successful and much valued teaching business, exposure to which at a very young age has nurtured the musical lives of some of our choristers.

Peter’s emphasised over and over again that we learn God’s story through its association with music. Think of things like Handel’s Messiah: choruses and arias like For unto us a Child is Born, He was despised, I know that my Redeemer liveth, and many more. The words get into our blood through the music. But it’s not just that music’s a kind of functional add-on to the words. The language of the music is itself a theological discourse. In other words, we can read the theology in the very music.

Explaining this and showing how it works would require far more time than I have available in this sermon, so let me put this in very general terms before coming on specifically to the anthem.

Much Western music is what we call tonal; in other words it’s in a key. If you find the note middle C on a piano and play all the white notes up or down from there, you’d be in the key of C Major. The last hymn we shall sing this evening, Angel voices ever-singing, is written in the key of C Major. What this means is that it begins and ends in that key, even though it also finds if way to G Major at one point, and then passes through D minor, before finally coming back home to C at the end. Being written in a key gives a sense of location, of being grounded, even of identity. It’s possible to wander away from a home key, sometimes quite a lot, but that key gives us a sense of our bearings, so that when we finally come back to it, we feel as if we’ve come home again.

Over the centuries the boundaries of tonality have been pushed further and further. In the early 20^th century, some music was identified as being atonal – without a key – and some music written in our own day could still be described as such. Often a composer will provide something else to give us a sense of home, though: a musical motif or idea, or a particular colour or texture, or something like that, so it’s hard to avoid a sense of home altogether.

Tonal music’s predicated on the notion that just being at home all the time – in pianistic terms, just playing the white notes in C Major and never touching the black notes – can be a little tedious. What makes a musical journey much more interesting is exploring other avenues and seeing where they lead. By the beginning of the 20^th century this exploration, as I’ve already suggested, pushed tonal music way beyond its recognised boundaries.

Underlying all this, though, is a sense of harmony, and the relationship between consonance and dissonance. Unrelieved consonance can be rather boring and unrelieved dissonance can be rather grating on the ears. Tonal music’s always integrated the two in varying degrees, but the point is that harmony isn’t just about everything sounding nice all the time. It’s about weaving consonance and dissonance – the sounds that in isolation seem to clash – into a bigger, broader whole, so that overall the dissonance in some way contributes to the ultimate harmony as much as the consonance, indeed it’s often the dissonance that makes it all rather more interesting.

Howells’ anthem, Like as the Hart, inhabits exactly this kind of sound world. Just as the words themselves speak of a kind of longing for home – for God – so the music conveys a sense of restless instability. Although the home key is E minor, this key’s also subverted with all sorts of rather jazzy blue notes and chords, so that when we finally get to the end, although we finish on an E Major chord, we’re still left with this rather bitter-sweet sense of things not quite having been fully resolved.

And isn’t this what life’s like for all of us? However rooted we may feel, however much we may have a sense of where life’s going, all sorts of things crop up in life which may make us see things in a different way, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. The Christian story, though, is one that encourages us to trust that all the twists and turns of life, the discords and dissonances included, indeed everything that happens, serves ultimately to bring us home. The greatest dissonance of all is the cross and yet even this, especially this, contributes to the ultimate harmony of creation, by revealing the boundless love of God at its heart, which is what the resurrection affirms. So Howells’ Like as the Hart is to be heard and understood not only as a stand-alone piece of music, which of course it can, but also in a much broader context, that of our being created for God, of our wandering away from God, of our yearning for God, and of our coming home to God. In this regard, words and music are perfectly at one.

If music can amplify words, then it’s also the case that words can draw on the language of music to say what they want to say, and nowhere better, perhaps, than in George Herbert’s wonderful poem, Easter, which speaks in the first verse of the joy of resurrection, in the second precisely of the dissonance of the cross, and in the third of the resolution of everything, with the aid of the Spirit, in the life of the Trinity. So let me finish with this.

Rise, heart, thy lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him may’st rise:
That, as his death calcinèd thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and, much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art,
The cross taught all wood to resound his name
Who bore the same.
His stretchèd sinews taught all strings what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort, both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long;
Or, since all music is but three parts vied
And multiplied

Oh let thy blessèd Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

So, Peter and Heather, we give great thanks to God for you both, and pray that you may always know that you are held in the loving embrace of God the Holy Trinity, and that in the end you, we and the whole creation might know the harmony of God, in which everything and everyone is at home – even in Stornaway!

Time and Eternity – The Reverend Canon Peter Moger (Precentor)

York Minster, Sung Eucharist, Sunday 22 September 2019, 10.00

In the name of the living God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

A Bishop was visiting a parish in his Diocese, and had to stay overnight.  The Vicar’s son was very excited that the Bishop was going to stay, and begged his father to be allowed to take the bishop his early morning cup of tea.  The Vicar was a little anxious, but drilled his son as to exactly what he should do and say.  ‘You should knock on the door, clearly, three times,’ he said, ‘and call out “It’s the boy, my Lord, it’s time to get up”.’  So the boy rehearsed until he was word perfect.  The day dawned, and the boy climbed the stairs from the kitchen, carrying the Bishop’s cup of tea.  He knocked boldly on the door, three times, but his memory failed him, and in desperation he blurted out: ‘It’s the Lord, my boy, your time is up!’

Time is something we can’t escape.  Our lives are measured (if not governed) by it, and we are always, and increasingly, aware of the pressure of time.  Today marks – for Heather and for me – the end of 9 happy years at York Minster, and in a few weeks’ time we set out on an exciting journey – leaving the Church of England for the Scottish Episcopal Church, and mainland England for the Western Isles of Scotland.  In our visits to the Hebrides in recent months, we’ve become acutely aware of a significant local concept: ‘island time’ – an unhurriedness – born of the fact that the extreme weather can mean that the ferry or the flight simply doesn’t run, and that what was planned for today will have to wait until tomorrow.  For a precentor, that’s really tough!  Because precentors like time to be measured and precise: we start services on time and liturgy is planned down to the last detail.

Before the Gospel we sang a hymn which I couldn’t resist choosing for today: Sing, choirs of heaven, a setting of the ancient Easter Exsultet to Richard Shephard’s magisterial tune, Scampston. This is very much a ‘York’ tune: it featured in the 2000 and 2016 Mystery Plays, and in recent years the hymn has been sung here on Easter Day.  The words and music together take us beyond ourselves into the heavenly realms, as we ‘join our cheerful songs with angels round the throne’, glorifying God for Jesus’ resurrection.  The hymn is a window which opens onto eternity.

In a sense, cathedrals are about eternity.  Anyone who’s tried to get a quick decision from Chapter or from the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England, will know all about that!  But seriously, cathedrals move slowly – on an almost geological timescale – because they are (and should be) places which celebrate the eternal: the mystery of God who was, and is, and is to come.  They are places where it’s worth taking time to get things right: our music, our mission, our stone and glass, our safeguarding.

So what can we say about time in relation to our Christian faith?  At the heart of our faith are the two gospel truths: that God, in Jesus, one the one hand shares our life, and on the other changes it.  In taking human flesh, the eternal Word – the second person of the Trinity – is born as a human being and enters the realm of time, with all the limitations that brings.  In doing this, God enters time, inhabits and sanctifies it – marks it out as holy.  We live in the year of Our Lord 2019.

Christian worship reflects this hallowing of time.  We set apart particular days to worship God – each Sunday is special because it recalls the resurrection: a key moment in the sanctification of time.  A little later, we shall hear these words in the Eucharistic Prayer:

From sunrise to sunset this day is holy,

for Christ has risen from the tomb

and scattered the darkness of death

with light that will not fade.

This day the risen Lord walks with your gathered people,

unfolds for us your word,

and makes himself known in the breaking of the bread.

The seasons carve up the Christian Year into chunks, each with its own theme: Advent for waiting, Christmas for the incarnation, Lent for penitence and so on.

Within the days and seasons, we set apart special times of day for worship, and within those services we divide time still further – for reading the scriptures, for praying, for receiving the sacrament.  Music plays a vital part in this, because music itself delineates time – through note values, bar lines, and the sections of a composition.  Music—within worship and elsewhere—helps reinforce God’s hallowing of time.

God, in Jesus, shares our life – and sanctifies the time of our earthly existence.  We give this concrete expression in worship, but more than that—if we’re serious about this—we will see all time as God’s time, as time made holy.  We’re used to the idea that all material things come from God, and so anything we consider to be our own is technically a gift from God.  It’s no different with time.  Time is gifted to us, and to be used wisely.

This comes home forcefully in this morning’s NT Reading. Paul writes to Timothy of the need to pray for our earthly rulers – those who wield authority in the here and now.  (And God knows that is especially urgent than at the present.)  In other words, our faith must be part of the substance of daily life – and not a parallel universe into which we escape.

One of my great Anglican heroes, Thomas Ken, the non-juror Bishop of Bath and Wells and hymnwriter puts it well:

Redeem thy mis-spent time that’s past,
live this day as if ’twere thy last:
improve thy talent with due care;
for the great day thyself prepare.

But let’s hold it there a minute.  I said earlier that the two gospel truths are that God shares our life and changes it.  God hallows time, but also transforms it.  The point of Jesus sharing our humanity, is that we may share his divinity.

The death and resurrection of Jesus, and the gift of the Holy Spirit have eternal consequences.  They mean that, ultimately, our existence is not limited by time, but is eternal.  Our hope of new life in Christ begins now but continues beyond the grave into eternity, where we become citizens of heaven.

Eternity gives our lives a proper sense of perspective.  It’s good to be reminded that this world isn’t all that there is, and that the best is still yet to be.  Cathedrals are a real help here, because they take us out of ourselves, and force us to look beyond and contemplate the eternal.  The builders of this Gothic Minster understood this profoundly: they set out to create in stone and glass a building which pointed beyond itself to the eternal God.  Before every Sunday Eucharist we remind ourselves of this as we sing in the South Quire Aisle:

This is none other than the house of God.

This is the gate of heaven.

The Jonathan Dove mass setting we have this morning does something similar.  Remember the closing bars of the Gloria earlier, and listen later for the Sanctus.  This is music which engages us with eternity, which opens the heart to the glory of God who is above and beyond and the one to whom we belong.  But Dove’s music is at the same time measured – and so the window it opens onto eternity is a window here on earth – sung and heard by real people in real time.  As such it offers us the chance to contemplate eternity from where we are, from within the present moment in time.

The Bible has two words for time: there is chronos, the measured passing of time, and kairos, critical time.  The birth of Jesus was once such kairos moment, as was his death and his resurrection.  Each was a breaking in of the eternal and the divine into the passage of measured time.

For us, although we live within chronos, time in the kairos sense is still important.  God is always a God of the present moment – always liable to break into our lives when we least expect it.  The point at which I decided to respond to the advert for a priest on the Isle of Lewis was one such kairos moment; a God-moment which has been an agent of change – for us as a family and, by extension, for the Minster.

As a community, it’s vital that we expect and recognise those kairos moments, asking the all-important question, ‘What would God have us do now?’  The Minster—with a relatively new Dean, two new Chapter members about to arrive, and a new Archbishop just around the corner—is well-placed to seize the time, aligning its next strategic plan with a shared understanding of God’s mission here.  But to do it properly will take time and effort – and might seem like an eternity!

To conclude, I’ve asked the choir to sing another fine York

piece: Philip Moore’s setting of a prayer by Christina Rossetti – O Lord God of time and eternity.  As it is sung, please make the prayer your own.

O Lord God of time and eternity,

who makes us creatures of time,

that when time is over, we may attain your blessed eternity:

with time, your gift, give us also wisdom to redeem the time,

so our day of grace is not lost, for our Lord Jesus’ sake.

That Nothing May be Lost. – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 15 September 2019 – Sung Eucharist

1 Timothy 1:12-17   Luke 15:1-20

The Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, the Lost Son. These three parables constitute the entirety of chapter 15 of Luke’s gospel. We heard the first two in today’s gospel reading. If you’re wondering whether you’ve ever heard of the Lost Son, then you’ll almost certainly know it well but under a different title: The Prodigal Son, although it’s not really the son who’s prodigal – which is to say spendthrift or extravagant – but the father, and it’s not just one son who’s lost but two. By contrast the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin seem a little less complicated. What all three undoubtedly have in common, though, is a concern for the recovery of the lost, of what’s gone astray or missing or has somehow become separated.

Luke’s gospel has a particular concern for the restoration of the lost. What’s interesting is who Luke puts in the category of the lost: not just those conventionally deemed to be sinners but also the poor, women, strangers, foreigners, social outcasts. If we’re inclined to assume that the lost have only themselves to blame, Luke’s concerns would suggest otherwise. The lost in these instances have become separated at the hands of others as a result of greed, the abuse of power, fear, prejudice and discrimination. And Luke’s absolutely clear that the overcoming of separation and exclusion lies at the heart of who God is and what God’s all about.

It’s not only Luke who’s concerned about the lost, though. Indeed, the whole gospel message is about the restoration to wholeness of all things and all people. After the feeding of the large crowd in John’s gospel – a number that’s calculated in the other gospels as 5000 men, to say nothing of women and children – Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ ‘So that nothing may be lost.’ That phrase could be used as a summary of the whole gospel story. The whole purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is precisely so that nothing and no one may be lost, so that everything and everyone might be brought into the embrace of God’s utterly spendthrift, extravagant, abundant, generous love, which knows no bounds. It knows no bounds because it rejects nothing, not even those who wish to exclude and do away with Jesus altogether. Instead, Jesus meets such attitudes and actions with love, compassion and forgiveness and, in so doing, holds everything and everyone in his embrace.

If the whole gospel story could be summarised in the words, ‘so that nothing may be lost,’ then the reading we heard today from the First Letter to Timothy puts it in a slightly different way, ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’ ‘Salvation’ is the word most commonly used in theological circles to describe the underlying purpose of the gospel, but we find that this concept embraces all sorts of other related notions, things like restoration, healing, wholeness and holiness. Salvation or wholeness is what we’re made for, far more than separation or exclusion, but this involves – not surprisingly, perhaps – every aspect of our lives and experience. It has to do, of course, with relationships, relationships not only with God and other people but also relationships with bits of ourselves, from which, for whatever reason, we’ve become disassociated. This happens to all of us unavoidably and the journey towards wholeness, towards the recovery of anything or anyone that’s lost can be a difficult, challenging and often painful one. I’d like to tell you about Marian Partington, because her story not only illustrates what I’m trying to say, but also the capacity to move and inspire.

Her book, If You Sit Very Still, begins on 27^th December 1973 with the abduction, either by force or deceit, of her sister Lucy. It wasn’t until 4^th March 1994, 21 years later, that the heart-wrenching truth about what had happened to Lucy began to come to light. Frederick West revealed to the police that there were several bodies buried in the basement of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, where he lived with his wife, Rosemary. Among these bodies was Lucy’s. It transpired that she was one of at least 12 young women who were raped, tortured and murdered by the Wests between 1971 and 1987. Marian’s book details with extraordinary candour the impact of these events on her and her family. For 21 years Lucy was lost. The not knowing was almost impossible to bear. Not only were they distraught about Lucy’s disappearance, not knowing what had become of her, hoping year after year that she’d suddenly turn up, but their own lives had been put on hold. They’d lost the capacity to function, as it were, normally.

The discovery of Lucy’s body, though, wasn’t the end of the matter. Marian then set about the task of trying to piece together the very uncertain fragments of the story, trying to make some kind of sense of them, moulding them into something vaguely coherent and understandable. This was motivated in part by a desire that Lucy herself should not be lost. At the time of her disappearance she’d been a student of English literature at Exeter University, a poet who’d recently become a Roman Catholic. Marian was concerned above all else that her sister’s life hadn’t been for nothing, that even her terrible ordeal might somehow contribute to something unimaginably creative and redemptive. Piecing together these fragments, though, involved trying to make sense of her own life, of what she, her siblings and indeed her parents had lost not only as a result of Lucy’s disappearance, but also of their parents’ separation when they were younger, and of what she herself had lost in all sorts of ways throughout her life.

Unlike her sister, Marian was a Quaker and at some stage she committed herself to the practice of meditation in a disciplined way. This led her to undertake three intensive retreats. On the second, she found herself consumed by what she describes as a ‘murderous rage’ welling up within her, directed not surprisingly at Fred and Rosemary West. Paradoxically, you might think, this was the turning point in her journey, for she realised that in some respects she was no different from Rosemary West. What was it that had led Rosemary West to become embroiled in the awful goings-on in 25 Cromwell Street?

Marian discovered that Rosemary herself had been brutalised as a teenager, having been continuously raped and abused. What had been taken away from her, such that the only way she could deal with it was to deprive Lucy ultimately of her life? In working all this through she discovered an extraordinary bond with Rosemary, and she was clear that this connection was rooted in unresolved pain. ‘Hatred, anger, rage and vengeance all come from that place of unresolved pain,’ she writes. ‘I think the actions of the Wests come from that place. So I have compassion for them because I know that once you are brutalised you lose the sense of who you are, the sense of beauty, the sense that God is within you.’

This realisation of shared pain led Marian to write to Rosemary, now in prison, telling her that she forgave her and requesting a visit. Sadly, Rosemary clearly wasn’t yet in a place to face her own pain and asked the prison authorities to send her letter back with the request that Marian cease from all further contact. Marian, though, now works with sexual offenders in prisons, and acts as a storyteller and ambassador for the Forgiveness Project, founded by Marina Cantacuzino, who gave an Ebor Lecture here a couple of years ago.

There’s so much more that could be said about this story but there isn’t time. So allow me to let the story stand on its own feet for you to ponder, except to say that as far as I’m concerned it’s a story shot through with the gospel. I see in it the Spirit of God patiently at work recovering and restoring so much that had been lost. For Marian, that recovery came at a considerable cost to herself, but the reward was a wonderfully creative and compassionate commitment in her own life to do everything in her power to reach out to those who, like her, are lost in some way but don’t necessarily know it. To my mind, her story acts as an embodiment in a particular life of what the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Lost Son are all about: the Christ-like action of God ceaselessly at work restoring anything and anyone that’s lost, bringing everything and everyone into wholeness. At a time when things seem to be falling apart on a national, international and global scale, to say nothing of what may be happening in our own personal lives, this story can encourage us to trust that in the end nothing’s ever irretrievably lost.