Sermon: Eucharist - 25 July 2010

 

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford Photograph of Victor Stock

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 25th July 2010
Service:
Eucharist
Readings:
Matthew 20:20-28

‘The mother of Zebedee’s sons then came before him with her sons.  She bowed low and begged a favour.  “What is it you wish?” asked Jesus.  “I want you”, she said, “to give orders that in your Kingdom my two sons here may sit next to you, one at your right and the other at your left”.’

The desire for assurance, for place and honour, is deep in the human heart, we want to be sure that we’re going to be alright.  How much mothers want that for their children – as much as the anxious in the General Synod, who think if a woman is consecrated to the Episcopate, those who follow her and are ordained at her hands, will somehow have left the Apostolic Succession and a guarantee of ‘sacramental assurance’, as some in Synod called it, may be lost.  It’s instructive, on this Feast of St James the Apostle, to listen to the story from the twentieth chapter of Matthew, where the writer has Jesus say, ‘You do not understand what you are asking.  Can you drink the cup that I am to drink?’  And then there’s that marvellous confidence, ‘We can’, they reply.

We’re here in the heart of the summer, the great Feasts of Easter and Pentecost are behind us, and what is so unimaginatively called ‘Ordinary Time’ in the liturgical calendar stretches before us through the parched lands of the summer choir holidays, only enlivened by miscellaneous Saints Days: St Margaret of Antioch last week, whose dragon found her so indigestible that on consuming the Virgin Martyr, exploded.  Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa and his sister, Macrina, the deaconess, those 4th century teachers of the faith, Cappadocian Fathers and Mothers in the Eastern Way in a part of Christendom, long submerged under the tide of Islam.  Mary Magdalene, the Apostle of the Resurrection, Bridget, 14th century abbess in Sweden, and this week the faint, almost unidentifiable figures of Anne and Joachim, parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Brooke Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, the great theologian and teacher of the New Testament, who died in only 1901.  On through William Wilberforce on Friday and Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus; one the scourge of the slave trade, one the scourge of the Protestant Reformation and hero of the Reaction.  All these figures in their day looked for certainty as we do and at some stage cried out in faith, ‘We can’, but to all of them the Christ of St Matthew’s Gospel said, as he says to us, ‘You do not understand what you are asking’.

I’ve been reading Richard Everett’s play, Entertaining Angels, which some of you have seen on the stage.  I’ve been pondering it in the study.  Grace, the clergy wife, has spent a lifetime on her best behaviour.  Now, following the death of her husband, Bardolph, she’s enjoying new-found freedom to do and say exactly as she pleases.  In a conversation between her and her dead husband she finds herself holding his hands as he says, ‘You can’t go anywhere unless you were somewhere to begin with.  You don’t think it’s all a muddle, do you?’  And Grace replies, ‘No, but I don’t think it’s a straight line either.  God isn’t the answer to anything, he’s the question, and faith doesn’t sort out the mess, it simply allows you to join in’.  That’s what the lives of the saints in the calendar, from St James to Ignatius of Loyola, invite us to do; to join in and ask the questions.  If only the Church in its corporate manifestation would be prepared for this more humble Apostolic life, we would be spared the ill-founded certainties of Synodical protestation and assertion.

On a personal note, the last few weeks have had their difficulties.  On Chapter we’ve been considering different views, sincerely and deeply held, about something you, who only see us on Sunday morning, may think peripheral to our lives – the proper running of our office.  Who does what, for whom and when, because the people who work here work enormously hard, and as the Cathedral is used so much by so many, there is a vast amount, sometimes an intolerable amount of organisation that must be achieved if there are not to be spectacular road smashes.  One group feel the Office should be reorganised in this way, another group think in another.  All are good people, trying to do the right thing, and all need listening to.  In the process of listening I’ve been reflecting, for listening is always time-consuming and demanding, I’ve been reflecting on that Collect some of us say three times a day when the Angelus rings – our day begins with it in the Cathedral, five minutes before Mattins, every morning at twenty-five minutes past seven: ‘We beseech Thee, O Lord, to pour Thy grace into our hearts’.  (Well, yes – without grace we can’t begin the day.  Richard Everett hasn’t named his heroine in Entertaining Angels Grace without reason)  ‘We beseech Thee, O Lord, to pour Thy grace into our hearts, that as we have known the Incarnation of Thy Son, Jesus Christ, by the message of an angel, so by his Cross and Passion may be brought to the glory of his Resurrection’.

For all of us endeavouring to lead the Christian life this is an invitation to be open to grace, to wait for the angels and expect annunciations.  Then, more deeply, to go by the way of the Cross to the Resurrection, which doesn’t mean a devotional exercise in Passiontide – it’s much more than that.  It means a daily seeing that the frustrations and difficulties, pains, disappointments and exhaustions of life as the very stuff out of which God makes Resurrection, because it’s only through what comes to us in reality that God can transform and renew and raise from death.  As Richard Everett’s play says: ‘Faith doesn’t sort out the mess, it simply allows you to join in’.

So, the mother of Zebedee’s sons asked for something she didn’t understand, and the sons said, of course, when asked, ‘Can you drink the cup that I am to drink?’ - ‘We can’.  But mercifully at that stage in their story they had little idea what that would mean.  One day, by God’s grace, they knew.   ‘You shall indeed share my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant, but is for those to whom it has already been assigned by my Father’.  Perhaps if we gave more attention to the Cross and the Resurrection, we wouldn’t mind so much about the Bishops descending from the right people, and we shouldn’t need so much reassurance because we’d be doing what God really wants us to do.  ‘Faith doesn’t sort out the mess, it simply allows you to join in’.  To live by faith is fantastically expensive.  Perhaps that’s why so few people are prepared to sign the Standing Order.