Month: July 2022

Rt Rev’d Christopher Herbert Sermon on Beauty

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This sermon, on beauty, was preached by Christopher Herbert on 25 May 2014 as part of St Paul’s Cathedral’s sermon series ‘What I Want to Say Now: Retired Bishops Speak Out’. Listening to it via YouTube more than eight years after it was preached, I was struck by its commitment to the appreciation of beauty as a means of apprehending as best human beings can something of the true mystery of God. Herbert criticises trenchantly the Church of England’s neglect of the patrimony of buildings, prayers, poetry, and hymnody it has been bequeathed. If anything, this has become more entrenched since 2014.

More optimistically, on the other hand, I think there are possibilities of the image-oriented Instagram generation rediscovering the joys in ‘reading’ a Church and its contents in a way that probably hasn’t been true since the Reformation, which Herbert inevitably misses and few in the Church have yet noticed.

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A couple of months ago, a book was published by Edinburgh University Press. It’s entitled A Companion to the Bible and the Arts, and in it is an essay by Nicholas Bielby, and that essay has not left me alone. It’s actually about the subtleties and difficulties of biblical translation, and in it almost as a throwaway line he writes this:

If beauty is an attribute of God and His Word, then we should hope for intimations of it in the translation of His Word. This beauty is in the story the Bible tells us and we would hope to find it in the way it is told.

His essay is a delight, and thought it focuses on biblical translation, it ranges more widely into the whole field of aesthetics, and I want to quote him again:

An aesthetic experience has this sense of rediscovery of something unknown, but entirely familiar, because it feels right, and true, and beautiful.

You won’t be surprised to know that he doesn’t overload the word ‘feeling’. Because something feels right, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.

Well, I’ve read and reread that essay with great enjoyment, partly because it is so carefully written, but also because it raises an issue to which I believe we need to give serious attention, and that is the whole question of beauty.

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Disappointed in Jesus?: Sermon Preached at Trinity Parish Church, Jersey, Sunday 17th July 2022 (The Fifth Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings – Colossians 1: 15–28; Luke 10: 38–42

‘Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

Earlier this week, a member of the Trinity congregation told me they thought this was the hardest story in the Gospels to deal with. Many of us have a visceral emotional reaction to it, which we try to suppress because we want to be good Christians who value our Bibles. Yet we find ourselves disappointed in the Jesus who seems to bark at an overworked Martha when she asks for help. If that’s your instinctive reaction to the story, please don’t suppress it, but hold on to it as we unpack it.

An ’away match’ in Jersey in July; what a hardship posting?!?!? (Trinity Parish Church, 10 July 2022, © Gerry Lynch_

This reading, from Luke’s Gospel, is one of three Bible stories that mention Martha. The other two are in John’s Gospel: they are the raising of Lazarus, and then John’s version of the story of the woman pouring perfume over Jesus’ feet.

While this story refers just to “a woman named Martha” in isolation, John’s Gospel makes it clear that Jesus was very close to both Mary and Martha. In the story of the raising of Lazarus it says very directly that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus”.

The story in John’s Gospel of Jesus visiting the house in Bethany for a meal is so similar to the one we heard this morning that we might well wonder if they are different accounts of the same event. In that one, Martha serves dinner while Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with some very expensive perfume.

Any conversation between Jesus and Martha needs to be understood in the context that they are the closest of friends. He wasn’t snapping at a stranger.

So, I wonder was Jesus gently teasing his dear friend Martha here? Would Martha have been happy if Jesus had told her not to worry about all her jobs and being the perfect host and told her just to take it easy for a few hours? Because basically He did tell her that – “you are worried and distracted by many things, there is need of only one thing.”

We get the sense that perhaps Martha was the sort of very practical person who can’t relax until every bit of work is done – but then keeps finding another little job to do. Whereas Mary is perhaps more given to the appreciation of beauty and the good things in life, even when times are tough.

It is tempting to get our sense of our own worth from what we do, rather than from accepting what we are. Of course, we all have a regular round of tasks we need to get done to earn our living and keep ourselves and our homes in order. But that is not what makes us valuable; you, I, and every human being in the world is of value simply because we are children of God, made in the image and likeness of God. Sometimes, therefore, we need to give ourselves space to just be – to be ourselves and to be with God, to accept ourselves as the people God made us, imperfect but loveable and dearly loved by God.

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A Vision for the Appointed Time: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 3rd July 2022 (Feast of St Thomas)

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Readings – Habbakuk 2: 1–4; John 20: 24–29

“…there is a vision for the appointed time.”

It hasn’t been much of a summer, has it? Even by Wimbledon fortnight standards, we have had a depressingly heavy dose of rain. We are promised rather better for the next fortnight, and the wet start to the summer means we shall appreciate it all the more if we are indeed blessed with a fine spell in the next few weeks, when the days are still at their longest.

A carpet of flowers in the Namaqualand desert around a water-pumping mill.
The desert blooms briefly in South Africa’s Namaqualand region as winter ends. © Gerry Lynch 27 August 2011

On the other side of the world it isn’t high summer, but the depths of winter. In August, when winter starts to give way to springtime, something remarkable happens in the deserts that straddle the border between South Africa and Namibia. Normally almost completely barren, for a few weeks the desert blooms with carpets of flowers, sometimes stretching for miles in brilliant purples, oranges, and bright yellows, all giving off the most wonderful perfume. It is as if heaven has suddenly broken into the mundane world.

The same thing happens in a few other spots around the world as winter ends, where a desert approaches a western ocean coast and the rainfall patterns are favourable – in parts of Chile and California and Western Australia. The barren desert blooms with billions of wild flowers, and it comes and goes in a few weeks, and then the barrenness returns.

There is a vision for the appointed time… wait for it.

This is one of the more pessimistic times any of us have lived through. The desert has plenty of charms and compensations compared with the barren dryness of our culture and our political discourse.

It is not, despite all that, a time that quite matches the mood of hysterical doom-mongering that dominates our media reporting and especially our online discussions. I remember the 1980s, which were at least as politically divided as the current era, and also a time which in this country and generally in Western Europe was marked by much more politically-motivated violence than today, both in terms of terrorism and of street fighting. Most of it is now forgotten. The threat of war with Russia was quite a bit more intense then, with TV shows like Threads depicting the likely consequences of a nuclear war for ordinary people in grizzly detail. We also had a thousand miles of fortifications through the middle of Europe with easterners routinely shot dead by their own governments for trying to cross them. I am not going to join the panic-mongers just yet about our own situation, even if the United States seems to be in the grip of collective insanity.

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