Sermon: Rodney Shires Thanksgiving

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Wednesday 18th August 2010
Service:: Thanksgiving
Readings:: Revelation: 21

‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth’.

The Hebrew prophets never imagined that one day things might take a turn for the better and that mankind would slowly progress towards a new age in a facile optimism. For them, events around were significant, not of man’s progress towards better things, but of God’s judgement on men’s sins. The world was not as God intended it to be, nor would it become so merely by human efforts; what was needed was a new act of creation.

There’s something bracing about this, this lesson from the last book of the New Testament chosen for his thanksgiving service by Rodney Shires. It is a lesson precise, unambiguous and clear, neither facile, nor optimistic – it is the lesson chosen by a surgeon, a surgeon who described himself, not wholly ironically, as the man the Dean thought of as a Daily Telegraph-reading, Protestant Conservative. Rodney was deeply interested in religion, practised it assiduously, was a loyal member of the Church of England and rejoiced in the Church of England’s ability to ask hard questions. He is not the only Tommy’s man I’ve known, and from Cambridge to St Thomas’s to the Cathedral he kept his integrity. He knew, as the Hebrew prophets knew about the world, that the human body, after a certain amount of medical intervention, would not take a turn for the better, because the world was not as God intended it to be. Hence, Rodney’s clear instructions about how his last illness was to be managed, instructions honoured to the letter by his loving family.

Let’s return to the 21^st chapter of the Revelation to John. The first heaven and the first earth had vanished. We might have thought it would be sufficient to do away with the earth, but the ancient picture of the universe was integrated by astrology; events on earth were governed by movements in heaven, doing away with one meant doing away with the other and a newly-created earth would require a new heaven to regulate its destiny. The earth was thought of as hemmed-in on all sides, in those days, by the sea, and was resting on waters imprisoned beneath it. This element in the old order was the place of the chaotic forces of evil, hence in the new order it had no function – there was no longer any sea. For a sea-faring nation, this is hard to understand, but in the Middle Eastern Semitic world that produced the Scripture, the sea was an unknown horror, and in the end, when all will be well, the horror and chaos of the sea will be done away.

Rodney was an inspiration and encouragement to this particular priest, not only because of his publically seen attendance on Sunday, but his for-several-years regular attendance at one of the weekday Eucharists. He would come, armed with his copy of Common Worship with little post-it indicators, guides to help him through the service. He knew all about helping other people, that was his vocation at the operating table, and he learned, what some find harder to assimilate, that he needed help himself. This Cathedral is here today, filled with his friends, who pray for him and give thanks for him – the two essential ingredients of Christian ‘farewell and fare forward voyager’. He knew all about farewells as he knew all about voyaging, and many of you know so well of his devoted care for his wife, a personal and private care alongside the years of public care and professional expertise.

There is in the Christian faith, the faith that Rodney both practised and questioned, a point-counterpoint between the world as it is, with its pain and chaos, the uncharted ocean that so frightened the writer of Revelation, and the world as it is to be, that new heaven and new earth, where weeping and lamentation shall never be heard again. The New Testament has two pictures at its heart of the story of Jesus. One in St Mark, the earliest of Gospels, where Christ dies crying out in foresakenness and darkness, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’, an experience Rodney felt at various points in his life and those who surrounded him at his end sometimes also knew as their experience. Then, in John’s Gospel, the death of the same Jesus, understood as love vindicated, the triumph of hope over despair, the earnest of the age to come breaking in, ‘I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself’, for that Gospel writer, John, knew Christ’s death as triumph; ‘it is accomplished’, not finished. Christ’s death on the Cross is, as Professor Peter Hinchcliffe at Balliol used to say, ‘the goal scored’.

Because Rodney was honest, enquiring, intelligent and kind, his faith moved between this point-counterpoint; the puzzled darkness of Mark and the triumphant breaking in of the new world in St John. Perhaps, if I may permitted a personal observation, this realism and fearlessness and honesty made Rodney a very special friend to the Dean, especially in his first years at the Deanery. It is a cliché to say it was a privilege to be with him at the end, but it was, and I am hugely in his debt for inviting me to be present at the ‘farewell, fare forward voyager’ moment.

Funerals do two things, as also do thanksgiving services. We begin with Mark and move to John. We begin, unashamed to say that we face into the darkness of death, that we grieve and mourn, but for the Christian we also stand with John on the threshold of the unimaginable, only just glimpsed reality of God’s eternal purpose – a new heaven and a new earth, where every tear is wiped away, where ‘there shall be an end to death and to mourning and crying and pain, and the old order has passed away’. Or as T S Eliot put it in The Dry Salvages:

‘So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle.

Not fare well,

But fare forward, voyagers’