Alison Hudson's Homily (9 June 2011)

A homily from Alison Hudson (MCR) at our Choral Eucharist celebrating St Columba of Iona....

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In the Gospel reading this evening, Jesus helps Peter to catch a lot of fish, and then promises to make him a fisher of men. This is a story we often hear in Western culture.  A brief and informal survey of my friends this morning revealed that almost all of them were familiar with it, including the non-Christians.  However, because this story is so comfortably familiar, it might be easy to overlook how very uncomfortable and challenging the message of this reading can be.

Well, at least for me—your average, over-confident, self-assured Oxford student— the passages we have just heard make for uneasy reading.  For at root, these passages are about obedience, about admitting somebody else knows best.  It doesn’t matter that Peter is a skilled fisherman who has plied his trade for years: God, in the form of Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth, can beat Peter at his own game by telling him to fish in a place it never occurred to him to fish.  The learning of Jewish leaders in the second reading doesn’t matter in the end, either: rather, according to the passage from Acts, their partial knowledge and understanding actually hinders them, to the extent that they will choose damnation for themselves.

For these readings suggest that not only does God know best, he knows so much better than rest of us that it would never occur to us to do what He proves to be possible.    It had not occurred to Peter to keep fishing, or to fish in that place: yet he finds a great many fish.  Similarly, Paul and Barnabas share God’s love with the Gentiles, even though they were not the most obvious heirs of Abraham (at least to human eyes).  And the Gentiles rejoice and are saved. Obedience to God—particularly the call to share God’s love with all you meet— can lead to some totally unexpected outcomes.

As someone who resents all advice, even from all-too-present supervisors and parents, the idea that God knows best—and that we humans often aren’t even close to solving our own problems—is a difficult pill to swallow.  Indeed, the idea of trusting God so completely and loving even the most unlikely people seems so difficult that it is tempting to claim that God is asking the impossible.  However, as we heard at Oriel heard last week, Jesus is a human and ascended as a human, and is perfectly aware of what humans can and cannot do.  He never asks the impossible.  And indeed, there are some remarkable historical examples which suggest that obedience to God is possible. 

These examples are the Irish peregrini, or pilgrims.  One ‘pilgrim’ was St. Columba, or Colum Cille, whom we celebrate today.  As far as we can tell, Columba was born around 521 into an aristocratic family in the north of Ireland.  However, he gave up his status, privilege and wealth in an attempt to serve God and follow his commandments, particularly God’s call to preach his Gospel and share his love with all peoples.  Indeed, he even gave up his home and his family, traveling with a band of followers to the island of Iona, off what is now the coast of Scotland.  Despite attempts to rationalize Columba’s move—linking it to his family’s defeat in battle or to the aspirations of the kingdom of Dal Riata, which was near Iona—it cannot be denied that the inhospitable Iona was not the sort of place you’d expect to find an Irish princeling.  Columba’s move seems to have been acting out of obedience to God’s will (or what he perceived God’s will to be), in order to preach the Gospel and the message of God’s love to new regions. 

Nor was Columba unique in his dedication to and focus on God.  He was part of a larger movement of peregrini, who exiled themselves, leaving their homeland and their familiar comforts to serve God.  Some trusted God’s judgment to such an extent that they would cast themselves adrift in a boat without any oar, so that God would have to decide where they would land.

I’m not suggesting that any of us should cast ourselves adrift.  Nevertheless, the readings we have just heard call us to obey God, and the peregrini’s example shows obedience is possible. So what is the will of God, which we are supposed to obey? 

I think the two passages suggest that one way to be obedient to God is to share his love in unexpected places with unlikely people.  Just as Peter followed Jesus’ instructions to fish somewhere it hadn’t occurred to him to fish, so too did a later fisher of men, Paul, look to a group of people—the Gentiles—who were not the most obvious candidates to inherit the promises which God made to Abraham.  Similarly, even later fishers of men—the missionaries at Columba’s monasteries of Iona—also shared God’s love with unlikely peoples.  In particular, missionaries from Iona went to the Anglo-Saxon Northumbria even after a plague caused many to apostasize from Christianity.  This may have seemed singularly unpromising turf, and, according to Bede, their early attempts to set up a monastery were singularly unsuccessful. Nevertheless, their work in this unlikely place was not in vain: many Northumbrians became Christian and Northumbria eventually even produced a church father: the aforementioned venerable Bede. 

We Oxford students, too, should try to love everyone.  Like Columba, we are the royalty of our own little realms.  Like the intellectual leaders in the passage from Acts, we often think we know better than God; or at least, we think we can rely on our own, partial knowledge and skills to solve all the problems in our lives.  However, this very learning often blinds us to the fact that all humans are equal: all are loveable, all are God’s images, from bedraggled Big Issue sellers to annoyingly clever tutorial partners.  We should not rule anything or anyone out as too unlikely, too unworthy of our attention: for throughout history, fishers of men, from Paul to Columba, have been proving that it’s just those people whom we humans would consider the most unlikely who are actually the most promising in God’s plan.    

The Nation's Church: more than a postcard?

The Revd Sarah Eynstone, Chaplain and Minor Canon at St Paul's Cathedral in London, continued our Choral Evensong series on Faith and Public Life this past Sunday with an excellent sermon entitled 'The Nation's Church: more than a postcard?'

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Yesterday, just before the evening Eucharist, one of the Canons called me into the vestry and urged me, in excited tones, to look out of the window. Cycling past the Cathedral was a steady stream of some one thousand naked cyclists, all involved in a campaign to draw attention to the vulnerability cyclists face as road users. The canon and I then had a conversation along the lines of ‘would you ever do that?’. Both of us felt you needed to draw the line somewhere and we would draw the line a long way before we reached naked cycling. In short we felt that nudity belonged to the private sphere not the public one. I wonder how many of those naked cyclists, had they looked up to the vestry window to see two priests looking down at them, would have felt the same about us? That what were about to do, pray to and worship our God, is an activity that is more appropriate to the private, than the public sphere?

There is a lot of talk today of Britain being an increasingly secular society where the public discourse is one free of religious involvement or input. The reality of course is not so straightforward -as the intense media interest in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s commentary on the government during this last week illustrates.

Rowan Williams, preaching on faith and public life has said “I believe we are living in a society which is uncomfortably haunted by the memory of religion and doesn’t quite know what to do with it…”

The piles of flowers and toys which mourners leave on the site of a fatal road accident seem to suggest we are a society with a vague sense of the religious but an unclear idea of what to do about it. The mourner who is struggling with issues of loss and bereavement may have both genuine theological questions and a burning desire to mark publicly that someone they loved deeply is no longer alive, because of an accident which seems both cruel and banal.

Religion provides a space and a language to ask serious questions and says that these are legitimate, indeed crucial, questions to ask.  This is why a cathedral in the heart of the city is still the place where people of different faiths and of no faith gathered in the days following the 7/7 bombings.

Given both our unease and interest in questions of faith, buildings and places of worship like St Paul’s Cathedral might be seen to occupy an ambiguous place in this context; St Paul’s was built at a time when the Church of England was a dominant force in society and the best resources, the most able people, were used in the creation of this place of worship.

The size and grandeur of the building of St Paul’s means it automatically has a place on the public stage- it is a visible icon on the London skyline and can be seen nightly on television on the South East News. St Paul’s is also the location for services which commemorate or celebrate big events in the national psyche. Next year the Queen shall celebrate, God willing, the diamond jubilee of her Coronation by having a service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Westminster Abbey was of course the location for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – an event watched by billions of people throughout the world.

Winston Churchill dubbed St Paul’s the ‘Nation’s Church’ and his own state funeral took place there. In this way we could be seen to do public religion very well but because we currently live in a time when faith has come to mean so many different things to different people, we cannot reside in a false belief that we are seen as a sign of God’s presence in the world. Not for the first time, but now perhaps more than ever, we might also be seen as an English heritage site or the place where members of the Establishment go to dress up and find a sense of belonging and identity.

Today we rely on the income generated by tourism to continue as a place of worship. This means that the 20,000 people who come through our doors each week during the summer season will have a very different set of motivations for entering the building. Some will have travelled thousands of miles and St Paul’s will be one more venue on their list of places to go to in London to prove they’ve been there and done the English thing- they may be interested in the history of the city, the beauty of the architecture or St Paul’s as the church where Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married; the existence of St Paul’s as a place of daily worship might not even have occurred to them. They will go the cathedral shop and buy postcards and other St Paul’s memorabilia. This of course creates tension and unease for those of us who regard St Paul’s primarily as a place of worship, as a sign of God’s presence in the world- our desire is that people who enter the building as tourists might leave as pilgrims- that in some way they will be touched by the beauty or by symbols of the Christian faith and find something which connects with their own questions and stories and which points them to the God who creates and loves and redeems us.

The prophet Jeremiah was of course living in a culture where the place of faith in public life was a given. The temple was the place where God had chosen to reside and this gave the people who entered it immunity to misfortune or suffering- or so they had come to believe. Jeremiah, himself a priest in the temple, speaks out against the complacency to which this belief had given rise. The people are caught up in patterns of idolatry, worshipping themselves rather than God and Jeremiah warns them of the destruction that awaits them.

The gospel writer Luke has a very different instinct toward the temple- it is the honoured place for public worship. Luke’s gospel begins with Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, going about his duties in the temple; very early on we are introduced to Anna and Simeon who have been in the temple for years, waiting for the coming Messiah. In the reading we heard in today’s New Testament lesson, at the very end of Luke’s gospel, on Jesus’ instructions the disciples return to Jerusalem, to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit before they can live out his commissioning. They go to the temple- to the place of public worship, to await and pray for God’s power. We are not told they each go to their own homes- they gather together in a public space- it is in community  that they expect to encounter God.

Today the church celebrates Pentecost, to which this evening’s New Testament lesson points. The Holy Spirit comes to the disciples who have gathered in Jerusalem and empowers them to be witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and to be the agents of the forgiveness of sins offered to all nations. The Holy Spirit doesn’t come to the disciples privately but in the public square exploding onto the world stage in order to equip them and us to become the people God calls us to be.

A phrase I hear often, from people who perhaps feel uneasy in the presence of a priest is ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’. We have come to believe that spiritual and religious are distinct and different modes of being. We also, I think, tend to associate the spiritual with the private- I can be spiritual all on my own, when I have a sense of the presence of the divine or transcendental. Religion on the other hand is often regarded as something which muscles into the public world telling us what we should do or believe. For the disciples and for much of the church’s history, this would have been a meaningless distinction. The spiritual is located in other people and in the ways we practice our beliefs and sense of belonging to a community.

As Jeremiah argues so strongly, public religion does not guarantee us God’s blessing; rather, public religion is an invitation for believers and seekers to come together to encounter God in whatever way God chooses to reveal himself to us.

The Christian faith is permeated with a vision of different people, different cultures, coming together and finding their unity in God. God himself is both three Persons and one God- the very nature of God overcomes the distinction between public and private by being both one and three.

So let us pray that this community at Oriel College and the community at St Paul’s Cathedral might be true to the breadth and depth of this our great vocation; to find God revealed in the public sphere and our private lives. Amen

Losing faith in public life

At Choral Evensong on the Sunday after Ascension Day, Dr Matthew Grimley, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Merton College, continued our series Faith and Public Life with a sermon entitled 'Losing faith in public life'.  In it, he examined the career and witness of the controversial Canon John Collins (1905-82), who, among much else, served as Chaplain at Oriel both before and after the Second World War (1937-48).

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I’ll start with a line from our Old Testament reading:

‘The God of Israel has spoken, the Rock of Israel has said to me: One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’

The very idea of ‘one who ruleth over his people justly,’ as described by David in the first lesson, seems a very distant one for us. When we open our Guardian or Times, we don’t expect to see David Cameron or Ed Milliband hailed as being ‘like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.’ If we did, we’d just laugh. We’ve become very cynical about politicians of late. This cynicism is not new, but it has become more acute in recent years because of episodes like the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and the MPs expenses scandal. And its not just restricted to political leaders – we might also cite controversies within the leadership of the Christian churches, like the child abuse scandals or arguments about gay bishops. Though very different, all these episodes have left many of us feeling (in different ways) betrayed by our leaders. We seemed doomed permanently to be disappointed by them.

Three particular critiques of those in public life have developed in recent years:

• They’re only in it for what they can get – for vainglory, or for cash
• They all end up selling out – they become corrupted, either financially or in sacrificing their values and beliefs

The third criticism is particularly beloved of academics:

• If only it were so simple – in other words, public figures over-simplify, or present issues as black and white when in reality they are more complicated. As scholars, we’re trained to look for nuance, and we’re thus particularly suspicious of glib slogans or promises.

In this sermon I want to explore some of these charges by looking at the life of a political leader whom you’ve probably never heard of. He wasn’t a professional politician, but fifty years ago he was one of the most famous political campaigners in Britain. He also has an Oriel connection, which is why I’m talking about him today. His name was John Collins, and he was a Church of England clergyman who became Chaplain of Oriel in 1938, just before the Second World War. His education and early career had been quite traditional, but in the 1930s he joined the Labour Party out of concern for the unemployed. His radicalism grew when he became an RAF chaplain in the Second World War, and on returning to Oxford at the end of the war, and becoming Oriel’s domestic bursar, he was horrified to discover how poorly paid the staff were, and persuaded the other fellows to put up their wages.

But Collins had his eye on more global injustices, too. In December 1946, he held a public meeting in Oxford Town Hall to set up a movement called Christian Action.  Christian Action sought to get Christians to carry their faith into political action. It pioneered a number of campaigns in the 1940s for victims of famine in Germany at the end of the war, for the homeless and refugees, and against the death penalty. But it was in the mid-1950s that Collins found his two great causes – apartheid and nuclear disarmament.

In 1956, Collins visited South Africa, and became preoccupied with the evils of apartheid. He set up a new body called the International Defence and Aid Fund to raise money for the legal fees of those dissidents (including Nelson Mandela) who were arrested by the South African government. The following year, 1957, Collins was one of the founders, and the first chairman, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which argued that Britain should unilaterally give up its nuclear deterrent. It was CND that really made Collins an international celebrity.

It’s easy to forget now what a huge threat nuclear war was felt to be in the late 1950s. The invention of the H-bomb had led many people to fear that Armageddon was imminent, and this fear was to some extent borne out by the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war. This fear meant that Collins’ CND soon gained massive popular support, especially among young people. Collins had a good instinct for eye-catching gestures, leading the series of famous Easter marches between the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire and Trafalgar Square in London. CND became the prototype for a whole series of later protest movements in the 1960s and beyond, on issues like race relations and the environment.

So Collins achieved a lot, but he was also a very controversial figure in national life. His prominence as a political activist meant that Collins was the subject of all three of the criticisms of politicians that I’ve outlined. All three criticisms contained a grain of truth in Collins’ case. Take the first – that he had sold out. Collins was that recognisable English type, the establishment rebel, who spent most of his career in very comfy berths – first Oriel, then for 36 years, a canonry of St Paul’s Cathedral. His establishment mindset caused problems in CND, which hadn’t been going very long when a split opened up between those, like Collins, who wanted its protests to remain within the law, and those who favoured direct action, or civil disobedience. As a moderate, Collins found himself conflict with more radical CND luminaries like another Anglican priest, Michael Scott, and Bertrand Russell, who saw it as their duty to break the law and get arrested, and who felt that he had sold out. Eventually, the split made it impossible for Collins to carry on as Chairman of CND, and he was forced to step down in 1964. Some of his CND colleagues also complained that Collins behaved too much like a politician, not enough like the clergyman that he really was.

The second criticism, ‘they’re only in it for themselves’, was also levelled against Collins. Here too, there was some justice in the accusation. Collins was a bit vain; if you read his or his wife’s memoirs you get a sense of a naive egotism. Like many public figures (especially senior Anglican clergy), he was also sometimes tempted to make outrageous comments in order to get into the papers. He was also ambitious, and never quite got over not being appointed Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, the job he really coveted. The Labour politician Denis Healey said he reminded him of that other Mr Collins, the oleaginous and ambitious cleric in Pride and Prejudice.

And Collins was also vulnerable to the third criticism, ‘if only life were so simple.’ Many people, fellow Anglicans included, thought that he was deluded in supposing that if a waning power like Britain gave up its nuclear weapons, it would have any impact on the superpowers. Collins was accused of over-simplifying a complex international situation, and of proposing a kind of vacuous gesture politics. Worse, his naive willingness to attend Peace conferences and fraternal delegations to the USSR opened him to the accusation that he was a ‘useful idiot,’ a Russian pawn in the cold war game.

So Collins turns out to have been a rather complicated, fallible, political figure.  But did these faults matter? He was certainly irritating, not least to successive Archbishops of Canterbury, but he was probably a necessary irritant – the grit in the oyster, a thorn in the side to guard against Anglican complacency.. I’m not sure I’d have liked him very much, but that’s probably true of many saints too. Sometimes we need irritating people to challenge our values and priorities.

We also need to set in the balance the achievements of Collins, or any other political leader, against their failings. What ever else we think of Collins, he certainly displayed courage in challenging apartheid and the arms race, two of the great ills of the late 20^th century, and he forced other politicians to take those issues seriously too. We need to remember the achievements of public figures, as well as their flaws (and that’s particularly important if you’re a historian, like me). The dying figure of King David in our first reading reminds us of this. David’s last words on his deathbed extol the role of a righteous king, and that is how he himself is mourned, but David was, of course, one of the most extraordinarily flawed politicians in history. In his early career, he had seduced the wife of his colleague Uriah, got her pregnant, and then ensured that Uriah was bumped off. On this epic scale, Collins’ mild egomania, or the petty venality of modern MPs, all seem pretty small beer. But David is also - in spite of everything - a righteous king. He reminds us that leaders are flawed human beings, just like the rest of us. Sometimes we perhaps expect too much from them, demanding super-human virtues that they have no hope of living up to.

But as well as expecting too much from our leaders, we can also end up expecting too little of them, too, because we don’t want to be disappointed. In 1971, Pete Townshend of The Who summed up the disillusionment of many young people with the failure of sixties protest movements like CND when he sang ‘we won’t get fooled again.’ Townshend’s point was that the leaders of the protest movement had turned out to be no better the old politicians they promised to replace. ‘Meet the new boss/same as the old boss,’ he sang.  But, like someone vowing ‘I’ll never fall in love again’ after a bad break-up, there’s a risk that if we vow never to trust our leaders again, we deny ourselves the hope that they can actually achieve something good. Our lowered expectations can have a lowering effect on public life itself.

There’s also a danger that if we become totally disenchanted with public life, we end up withdrawing into a sort of comfortable quietism. A dose of scepticism of politicians and their promises is always healthy, but we need to be careful that it doesn’t become a cop-out for our own responsibilities as citizens and as Christians. The whole idea of public life has become so tainted that there’s a risk that we’ve thrown out the more laudable virtues that used to be associated with it, like duty and service. We need to recover those virtues, and to think seriously about how we are sometimes called to serve God and each other, by speaking out publicly against injustice or oppression.  We can’t – thank goodness - all be John Collinses. But perhaps we can all learn something from his flawed example.