Sermon: Mattins - 6 Feb 2011

 

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

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 6th February 2011
Service:
Mattins
Readings:
Acts 3: 1-10

‘And Peter, fastening his eyes upon him with John, said, “Look on us”’. (The fourth verse of the third chapter of the Acts of the Apostles)  ‘The man, seeing Peter and John about to go in the temple, asked for alms’.  ‘And Peter said … “Look on us”’

This time last week the Sub Dean, who’s all-powerful here, allowed me to miss Mattins, before going up to Cambridge to preach at Peterhouse, leaving early enough to spend an hour in the Fitzwilliam Museum, where I looked at some paintings, particularly little canvases by Constable and Samuel Palmer.   But looking, thought how lovely will retirement be, when I shall have more time to look, not distracted by the diary and anxiety of the timetable and a College sermon to preach.

The story in the third chapter of the Acts of the Apostles has this striking image, ‘Peter fixed his eyes on him, as John did also, and said, “Look at us”’.  Were you taught as a child the correct attitude to life, God first, others second, self last?  Were you taught as I was, the sign of the Cross , crossing out the ‘I’ that puts self first, the ‘I’ of sin or preoccupation or anxiety that prevents looking turning into seeing.  For the lame man - ‘lame from his mother’s womb, who lay daily at the gate of the temple which is called beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple’ -  for that man to be healed, he needed to look the Apostles in the eye – ‘Look at us’.  Look away from your own self-concern, self-absorption, habitual mode of thought, learned expectation of what the day will bring, ‘Look at us’, then  everything was changed.

So, we know that much of our lives are filled with self-concern, with anxiety – anxiety about health, about getting older, about what’s happening in Egypt, about what’s going to happen to our friends – and in all this living in the anxious future, we miss the present, or lingering in the past, we are held captive by nostalgia, about how things were 50 years in the Cathedral, rather than how things are now if we only will look.  All religious practice deals with the difficulty of attentiveness in prayer.  ‘Be still and know that I am God’ – simple words from the Psalmist, slowly repeated, but halfway through the first repetition the mind wanders backwards or forwards, missing the present, not seeing what is to be seen.  Hence, the discipline of learning how to pray, of how to be still, so that we may know.  That’s not so different from the discipline of looking attentively in order to see.

Notice, also, in the story what Peter does.  ‘And he took him by the right hand and lifted him up’, or as another  translation puts the text, ‘then he grasped him by the right hand and pulled him up, and at once his feet and ankles grew strong’.  When we look, we are pulled up.  When the penny drops, when we see a truth for the first time, it is apocalyptic, literally unveiling – we see what we never expected or have been too frightened to contemplate, and ‘too frightened to contemplate’ are suggested words for meditation.

Finally, last Wednesday was Candlemas.  A few of us at Holy Communion in the Lady Chapel held little candles at the Gospel, and at the end of the service we walked together silently down the north ambulatory and reassembled in the Crossing around the stag, the brass stag just here, let into the floor, at the highest point of the hill, the heart of the Cathedral.  It was good to do that on Candlemas in our Golden Jubilee year, and we noted at the end that a candle carried into a dark room can chase away shadows, teaching children to pray and helping them and us to see.

‘And Peter, fastening his eyes upon him with John, said, “Look on us”’