Sermon: Mattins - 29 May 2011

 

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

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 29th May 2011
Service:
Mattins
Readings:
1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18

‘Then, we which are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord’.  Is this Pauline hyperbole, poetry, preaching style or primitive physics? - difficult for us to get back into what kind of literature we’re dealing with in the first letter to the Thessalonians.  We do know it’s the earliest expression of belief in the Resurrection because we know this document was written about AD 50 before any of the Gospels or indeed anything else by Paul.  We’re near the heartbeat of primitive Christianity here, but we’re not sure, for all St Paul’s confidence, whether he’s talking as we would about spiritual things in earthly terms, or whether this is his different understanding of the way the universe works.

Here’s Archbishop Michael Ramsey on the resurrection: ‘Believing that the soul survives death, though the life of the soul without the body is a conception which is difficult to imagine, is incomplete because the self is far more than the soul and the self without bodily expression can hardly be the complete self’.  Ramsey believed that belief in the after-life, if it’s only to be the life of the soul, is dull (his word), for without embodiment in some sense as God’s gift, we’re not in the presence of the radical Christian belief in the resurrection of the body that Paul insists upon in the first letter to Thessalonica.

Last Thursday saw a wonderful conjunction of saints in the calendar; our own Augustine of Canterbury, our first Archbishop, who died in 605, and on the very same day, John Calvin, the father of the French-speaking Reformation, who died in 1564, and also on the same 26 May, Philip Neri, founder of the Oratorians, who died in Rome in 1595.  Calvin, one of the most important figures of the 16th century, who broke with the Roman Church in 1533, having had a religious experience which he believed commissioned him to purify and restore the Church of Christ, accepted a position in Geneva, which involved organising the Reformation in that city, and with a few absences spent most of the rest of his life there, becoming the undisputed master of the morals and ecclesial lives of the citizenry.

And Philip Neri, a man who was born in Florence in 1515, going to Rome when he was 18, studying hard, leading an austere life, for a time a virtual hermit in the catacombs, founding a fraternity to assist pilgrims and the sick, an enormously attractive personality, and eventually founding the congregation of the Oratory, and so revered and popular in Rome, he was treated like a living saint.  Calvin the champion of the Reformation against Rome, Philip Neri one of the champions of the Counter-Reformation against the Reform, reinvigorating the teachings of Rome.  On the same day all those hundreds of years before, our own Augustine, perhaps the most attractive of the three, because sent by Pope Gregory the Great to re-evangelise England, he turned back in Gaul, having lost his nerve he wanted desperately to return to Italy.  A man, as Nicholas Thistlethwaite said on Thursday, who was the prototypical Anglican.

All three of Thursday’s saints believed that Christ was risen and that in some mysterious way we could be risen also, and all three believed, as Michael Ramsey believed, that Christian Resurrection requires embodiment, and is a foretaste here of that which is to come.  So, Christians of different ages, just like us, have different experiences of what it is to be a Christian, and in the 16th and 17th centuries felt their differences as sharply dividing and excluding.  Perhaps Calvin and Neri missed something.  Augustine of Canterbury, our first Archbishop embodied the comforting fact that God has space for uncertainty and irresolution - Augustine, the prototypical Anglican. 

This Easter season as we approach the Feast of the Ascension next Thursday and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the feast which is the feast of title of this Cathedral, has room for many questions, a broad enough Church for diverse prayer as we try to discover what Resurrection meant to Paul as he wrote to the Church in Thessalonica in AD 50, and as we prayerfully explore this mystery today.  But Augustine, Calvin and Philip Neri would have agreed with Michael Ramsey that belief in the Resurrection for Christians is not simply the idea of the immortality of the soul, because as Ramsey says, ‘That is dull, it implies a prolongation of man’s infinite existence for everlasting years.  In contrast both of the incompleteness and the dullness of the immortality of the soul, Christianity teaches of a future state, wherein the soul is not unclothed, but clothed upon, a bodily expression, wherein the finite human life is raised so as to share, without losing its finiteness, in the infinite life of Christ himself’. 

‘”My ways are not your ways”, saith the Lord’, as the Hebrew bible had it, and Resurrection life means a newness, which we can only intuit, but nevertheless, in our prototypically Anglican way, really experience, because we’re touched by Resurrection now, even in the busiest and most demanding times.