Sermon: Oxford University Lady Day Sermon

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 6th March 2011
Venue:: Oriel College
Service:: Evensong

Both arresting and urgent, thought-provoking and contemplative, sculpture in the current exhibition at the Royal Academy emerges from the darkening inter-war years and the bloody terror of 20^th century Europe divided. Behind the stillness there is a scent of blood in the air. In the third room of the exhibition of Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy there are only two statues: Jacob Epstein’s Adam, carved between 1938 and 1939, an enormous (in several senses) display of virility, that so attracted and repelled the diarist, James Lees-Milne, that he wrote a typically upper-middle-class, anti-Semitic entry in his diary about Epstein, but also he wrote how marvellous it would be to have his own bust sculpted by him. Apart from the monumental Adam, this third room in Modern British Sculpture is empty, except one very small snake, carved in 1924, between the First and Second World Wars, by Henry Moore has resonances with Mexican antiquities from the British Museum. The snake has a barely discernible smile and it is coiled to make its particular annunciation.

If you haven’t got to the ‘Modern British Sculpture’ exhibition yet, the preacher recommends it, at least, the first few rooms, and especially the second, which connects Moore and Hepworth with the antique, particularly collections from the British Museum. There are some unexpected annunciations. But above all the Royal Academy exhibition has space, and annunciations come in two forms: when there is space, and then, quite unexpectedly and disturbingly whenever life is impossibly demanding.

In Cambridge the other day I deliberately walked past Veneziano’s little pink and blue pillared, architectural perspective annunciation in the Fitzwilliam. ‘I won’t look at it’, I said, ‘I know it too well’. Knowing things too well is one of the difficulties of religion, at least of our religion in England, where the Christian year with its Hilary term, its Lent and Passiontide, its Easter and Pentecost, is like a great Tibetan prayer wheel, perhaps only brushed against in passing, but set whirring all the same, the same next year, followed by the next. We also know how the story ends, which makes for less attentiveness.

To be attentive is difficult, life is too crowded, not with incident of a fascinating and energising kind, but with deadly routine. For the Dean of a cathedral, there are committees about committees, sub committees of those committees, and then committees that review both the sub committees and the main committees, each tending to unravel or jam together, rather like the less satisfactory, or at least superficially less attractive rooms with which ‘Modern British Sculpture’ at the Royal Academy ends, with Damien Hirst’s Live and Dead Flies. One of the hopes of Christian faith and life is for space and time, space less peopled, time less interrupted; not only Eliot’s ‘evening with the photograph album’, but the looked for bliss of retirement, when committees shall cease. There will be no committees in heaven. ‘There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall love and we shall praise, in the end that is no end’.

In the Epstein room at the Royal Academy, Henry Moore’s serpent smiles, but a serpent who has such a bad press in Christian imagery is also the bearer of wisdom. Without the serpent we’d be stuck in the garden of innocence. We wouldn’t be at Oxford. But for annunciations to get through, as there is usually little space and much busyness, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’, effort must be made. Indeed, in Carlo Crivelli’s The Annuniciation, with St Emidius, painted in 1486 and now in the National Gallery, there is an architectural oculus for the Holy Spirit to get through, the heavenly light needing to strike through the architecture, thus its own particular little gilded window of opportunity to get to Mary. It makes me smile and I wonder why Crivelli thought he needed to take a brick out for the Holy Spirit to get through.

And unexpected annunciations? There’s a television soap called Waterloo Road about a demanding comprehensive school, like one I was a governor of where the pupils managed to burn the same building down twice in one year. The other night, coming, yes, from a committee and wondering whether I could begin to think about this particular sermon, and deciding I couldn’t so put on the television, I caught part of Waterloo Road. The father of one teenage boy at school, a teacher at the school, was in the middle of a furious argument with the father of his son’s boyfriend, the second father, furiously angry and violently homophobic, and the episode ended with the angry parent viciously assaulting the protective, supportive and understanding father. I’ve seldom seen such a sensitive, thoughtful and useful depiction of the plight of a gay teenager, and contrasted it with that other annunciation recently, where a gay activist was beaten to death in Uganda by a man with a hammer. No Anglican Bishop or priest would take part in the victim’s funeral, so the grieving friends were left to the tender mercy of vitriolic denunciation and hatred from the lay reader who had been persuaded to take the service. The art gallery may announce to the educated but Waterloo Road reaches places Crivelli cannot reach, where Henry Moore’s serpent smiles, and not with wisdom.

Annunciations come where there is space, but they also come unexpectedly. Years ago I thanked the poet Kathleen Raine for her poem on the Annunciation. ‘I haven’t written one’, she said testily, but she did write this from the poem I meant:

‘We do not see them come,

Their great wings furled, their boundless forms included

Smaller than poppy-seed or grain of corn

To enter the dimensions of our world,

In time to unfold what in eternity they are,

Each a great sun, but dwindled to a star

By the distances they have travelled.’

Perhaps the great wings furled of Annunciation are over familiar. March 25^th comes round imprinted on the prayer wheel, it came last year and will come next, and Oxford University has these sermons and the Church has this Feast. Our art galleries are full of pictures of a balanced, mysterious beauty, some speaking of the tomb and of the womb, as in Poussin’s Annunciation painted for his friend Cassiano dal Pozzo, who died in 1657; academic, measured, contemplative and beautiful, but also disturbing. The unexpected annunciation from a soap opera also speaks a word of truth, a judgement on the Church that knows the answers to the questions no one is asking.

If you don’t know Crivelli’s Annunciation, with St Emedius in the National Gallery, please go and enjoy it – where the brick’s taken out of the wall so that God can get through. And I can’t recommend highly enough that space around Epstein’s Adam where the serpent lurks, in the Royal Academy. The point of all this is that annunciations come two ways, when we’re prepared and attentive, but also when we’re taken off guard, and moved and frightened as the two boys are and as the angry father is in Waterloo Road. Perhaps every spiritual annunciation is, in Eliot’s image, calamitous, each sounds a knell or rings in a change. But, and this may be behind the intention of the portrait Luke paints in his Gospel, where there is Annunciation, there is a price to pay. Or, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews has it, ‘without the shedding of blood is no remission’.