Readers' Admission Service at Portsmouth Cathedral
SATURDAY 4 SEPTEMBER, 2004 AT 11.00 A.M.
Readings: 1 Cor. 4: 6-15
Lk. 6: 1-5
What is the sermon? This is a question that does not just concern me, as I standing here preaching to you; nor you, sitting down there, gazing up, or around, or across, or even down! It concerns in a particular way those three people who are about to be admitted as Readers in the Church of England; and note, it is primarily a licence to the whole diocese that they will be receiving – and not exclusively to the community which has nurtured them. They will in all likelihood have been preaching already, and getting themselves a bit used to it. Perhaps they’ve been helped on a bit by experience in other contexts than the Church, and encouraged, doubtless, by friends, colleagues and relatives. Perhaps they have even been teased out of the occasional mannerisms, whether it’s a physical one like standing with one’s hands behind one’s back, which is often a sign of disengagement, or tentativeness; or a verbal fad, like littering the sermon with rhetorical questions, beginning with the two words, ‘but surely’ – which always makes me instinctively question what is about to be said.
But underneath all these considerations, why do all the Christian Churches, whatever their traditions and cultures, set aside a specific part of nearly every act of worship, for one person to speak to the rest of the people of God? I have been in and out of many communities – from a French Cathedral on holiday as a boy, to a Pentecostal church as a student; and, a few weeks ago, during a weekend family reunion in Denmark, listening to the Bishop of Copenhagen, no less, preaching in Hamlet’s Castle Chapel. On each of these occasions, someone designated to do so got up and spoke to the rest of us.
There are many ways of describing a sermon – and not just in terms of its length – whether too long or too short. (The short ones are always much harder to prepare than the long ones – that is, if they’re any good.) But the most important is not about length, or style, or indeed how many trendy illustrations can be used, and quickly forgotten, or else, even worse, become the cuckoo in the nest, where nothing that follows is remembered because the story was either too spectacular, or had nothing to do with what the preacher went on to say. I see the sermon primarily in terms of the relationship between the preacher and the congregation – which is about both role and personality. The moment that a blue scarf is placed over someone’s shoulders, or a black one, or a stole, or even a mitre on one’s head, there is a new kind of relationship: not a ‘new creation’ (ll Cor. 5: 17). We continue to be the persons that we are, but we now represent the Church in a new and different way. O yes, our personalities will continue both to help and to hinder how that role is worked out in practice – down to the detail of how we say and do things. There may, too, be different kinds of sermons, evangelistic (calling people to Christ), exegetical (explaining the scriptures), devotional (helping people with their prayers), doctrinal (persuading people about the truth of something, rather than hurling one’s prejudices at them), - and the best often combine all these features – but the preacher’s role is first and foremost to unite, encourage and nurture the congregation; to draw them together, to put heart into their discipleship, and to deepen their understanding of the lives they already lead, in God. The sermon may help them to see new openings, new possibilities for how the Christian faith can be put into practice, both in prayer and in daily living. Medieval service-books often contained forms of mass ‘for the gift of tears’; in the light of recent events in Beslan with those poor hostage children, perhaps we need to hear sermons that occasionally make us cry.
There can be no escaping the role factor. In an age of television celebrities, it is all too tempting to snuggle up to the People of God as if Jesus were a cosy domestic cat. But the gospel and our whole way of being the Church, from how we celebrate baptism to how we break bread, and all stations leading there, and after, is about a God who is at one and the same time affection and demand, affirming and challenging, infinitely mysterious, yet closer to us than we are to ourselves. I went to a Church once (not in this diocese!) and sat near the back, as one often does. Everything could be heard (perhaps too well, thanks to an excellent sound-system, but without enough variation of pace, colour, tone); we could see the lesson reader, who stood behind a handsome, simple wooden lectern, one step above us all. But the president spent much of his time moving what seemed to be little more than a music stand closer and closer to the congregation, perhaps on the pretext of showing what a man of the people he was – but in the process betraying a lack of confidence in public role, and making him less and less visible to much of the congregation. Dignity is not always the same as pomposity.
I do not always expect to remember sermons – least of all my own. One little bit is enough to go away with, and an overall sense of what the basic argument was about. Nor should one be particularly overwhelmed by the great preachers of the past. They had clay feet too. St. Paul after all, on one occasion, went on and on and on, and sent a young man, called Eutychus, to sleep (Ac. 20:9). St. John Chrysostom, one of the renowned orators of the late fourth century (hence the nickname ‘Chrysostom’, which means ‘golden-mouthed’) is reputed to have been largely responsible for the invention of the pulpit for the purposes of visibility, because the ‘teacher’s chair’, which in time became the Bishop’s throne, no longer cut the mustard; but fire-eating preacher though he was, he could still lament that because he could only speak Greek, he was unable to be understood by the Syriac-speaking folk who lived in the villages outside Antioch, but who still came to his services. And the great Lancelot Andrewes, Court Preacher to King James 1, preached on one occasion at Holyrood Palace, at Whitsun 1617, and encountered Scots Presbyterians who found his style too distracting – with scripture texts being thrown in too many different directions at once. You can’t win ‘em all – so don’t expect to!
I know that I have been speaking to you about words; and as the son of an architect, brought up to appreciate the visual, and who loves music as well, I know that words are not everything. Indeed, we live in a world that mistrusts words; that is ready to suspect their sincerity; and that has a tendency to scrutinise their meanings perhaps too much. And to compensate for that strength (or is it really a weakness?), there has been a revival of interest in the audio-visual – which has, in effect, meant a new confidence in symbolism, even in those churches of the Reformation traditions that have been most sceptical about symbolism in the past. Nonetheless, the ‘Word became flesh’ (Jn. 1: 14); ‘meaning’ has to be communicated in words, though not exclusively so. Preaching, therefore, does matter – and it matters a great deal.
So preaching is relational. It is about the preacher’s relationship with the rest of the Church, as well as with the particular congregation. But it is also about the preacher’s relationship with Christ. How do our fine words match up to our way of life? Are they so demanding that we turn ourselves, frankly, into hypocrites? Or are they so cuddly that we leave our hearers exactly where they were, but with a nice ‘feel good’ factor? Do we want to sound ‘down to earth’ or ‘practical’, so that nothing we have said is in the remotest sense elevating? Or is there perhaps just a faint chance that what we say might illuminate their every day lives, and touch them with a glance of eternity, so that God is revealed in some new way? Today is St. Birinus’ day – an obscure seventh century saint who, although he’s referred to as the Apostle of Wessex, gets very little mention in these parts, except a chapel in my parish Church, St. Peter and St. Paul, Fareham, an icon in my chapel, and another in Winchester Cathedral; as well as the name of the village of Berinsfield, near Dorchester, where he established his main base. From what little that we know about him, the sheer effects of his work for the gospel – his preaching and living of the Christian faith – were founded on no more and no less than a dedicated, mobile Christian community. We in our very different times could do a lot worse than see our preaching in that wider, Christ-centred light, as part of a community where words, however broken and transitory, can still take flesh, and become part of the fragmented lives that are our everyday experience.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
