Sermon: Third Sunday after Trinity

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 10th July 2011
Service:: Evensong
Readings:: Luke 19: 41 - 20: 8

‘When he came in sight of the city, he wept over it and said, “If only you’d known on this great day the way that leads to peace”, but no, it is hidden from your sight’. This verse from the nineteenth chapter of St Luke’s Gospel speaks of the perennial human search, put as it is by Luke into the mouth of Christ as Christ challenges Jerusalem, the challenge that led to his Passion and death.

Good religion always sits aslant to the world, questioning and challenging the world of power, authority and success. In the calendar on Monday we commemorate a man of enormous influence in Western Christianity, a man who is indeed called ‘The Father of Western Monasticism’, Benedict of Nursia, born around the year 480, educated at Rome, where the conflicts and values of the late Roman Empire certainly did not make for peace. Benedict withdrew from that world in the year 500 to a cave at Subiaco, where he lived as a hermit, but others came to join him, and eventually he established twelve monasteries of twelve monks each, the abbots appointed by himself. Even withdrawing from Rome into the first eremitical life, the life of the desert hermit, and then the cenobitic life, the life of the community, didn’t remove him from conflict, and personal jealousy forced him to leave Subiaco in 525, when he moved to Monte Cassino, remaining there to his death.

He didn’t found an order for clerics, and as far as we know, was not ordained himself. The Anglican Abbot of Mucknell Priory in Worcestershire, in its new home and until recently at Burford in Oxfordshire, has a properly apostolic Abbot, an Anglican layman. So, Benedict was not even powerful in the Roman Church – he was a lonely lay voice, but was not permitted to remain lonely, for the magnetism of a personality now hidden from us, except as revealed in his Rule, drew others to him. From the eremitical life, the life of the hermit, he moved on to the life of the community, the cenobitic life, and from there a great stream of spirituality, of living and of human flourishing, has flowed, sometimes a torrent, sometimes a trickle, right on down through the ages. We know so much more about those much later Medieval figures, St Francis of Assisi and St Dominic, but the life of Benedict of Nursia is almost hidden from us, and yet it is a life embodied in new forms, not only in religious communities trying to express the monastic vocation in fresh ways today, but in the whole ethos, temper, aesthetic and spirituality of the Church of England.

In the 19^th century there was a flight from the comfortable establishment of Anglicanism, when Great Britain was at the height of its imperial pretensions, a world that had a certain resonance with the late Roman Empire from which Benedict withdrew. The 19^th century saw a revival of Benedictine communities and communities influenced by the Rule of Benedict in the Church of England, and by the 20^th century the Church of England had established religious communities for men and women following the Benedictine Rule. Near us, at Alton in Hampshire, until recently at Nashdom in Buckinghamshire (both for men), and women’s Benedictine communities at West Malling, where the magnificent 20^th Abbey Church grows out of a series of fine Medieval buildings, and in Edgware, where Benedictine Sisters also look after severely handicapped people – this monastic life, in community, the cenobitic life, is almost as hidden from the ordinary members of the Church of England as the eremitical life. For most Anglicans would be very surprised to know that there are a few hermits today, indeed, we have one here, praying and living in Park Barn.

Here’s Luke, Chapter 19 again: ‘When he came in sight of the city, he wept over it and said, “If only you’d known on this great day the way that leads to peace”’. Also in the 6^th century St Benedict wept over Rome and withdrew from it to discover what peace really means, and in the devising of his Rule found a three-fold cord that has held monasticism together ever since; a life of prayer, manual labour and study; life for the soul, the body and the mind. And the Benedictine monk or nun adds to poverty, chastity and obedience, a fourth vow, stability, for it has been the custom for a Benedictine monastic, man or woman, to be bound to the house in which they first made their profession.

The Church of England, as it emerged from the crucible of the Reformation and as its book of Common Prayer developed, and those books, like Common Worship today that are developments of that Prayer Book, all this is imbued with the aesthetic, the temper of daily prayer and of study. So, on Monday we have much to be thankful for as we gather to honour St Benedict. He is not only the Father of Western Monasticism but also the Patron of Europe, for there’s much in European civilisation which owes its genesis to Benedict, his Rule and the hidden stream that’s flowed on from the 6^th century into our own 21^st.

Part of the Benedictine way of life is to spend some time each day on what’s called lectio divina, a prayerful pondering over a passage of Holy Scripture, such as tonight’s second lesson, ‘When he came in sight of the city, he wept over it and said, “If only you’d known on this great day the way that leads to peace”’. From the Arab Spring to the tribal conflicts of Africa, and from the daily horrors of the news bulletin to our own internal struggles, with the war that rages within the human heart, our great question is Christ’s great question, ‘If only you’d known … the way that leads to peace, but no, it is hidden from your sight’. The life of prayer and study is the way to open ourselves to what peace might really be and what peace might really cost. How wonderful that Choral Evensong, offered daily in this Cathedral, is in direct and apostolic descent from the Benedictine way that binds all together and makes us whole.

Finally, not to leave out the body, I was very struck last Sunday at Holy Trinity when one of the people bearing witness to the value of the Cathedral in their lives, said how valuable she found it to climb the hill to the Cathedral, not coming and going by car, but climbing from the town to the hill in order to worship. The place of the body revealed, a physical exertion to prepare for spiritual contemplation, a literally uncomfortable, but certainly valuable lesson, and truly Benedictine.