The unresting castles thresh
Sermon on the Fourth Sunday of Lent at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Llandudno in the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno
The Ministry Area’s order of service with the lections, including a poem in addition to the Old Testament Reading and the Holy Gospel, can be found here.
Nothing here is theoretical or abstract; everything here involves everything of us.
My grandfather, who was brought up in the tiny slate mining village of Cwm Penmachno (down the Conwy valley, past Betws, and keep on going, into the mountains, until there’s no further to go) spent the last years of the Second World War serving on submarines. He was a young man who’d never been to London; I doubt he’d been to Chester; Llandudno would have seemed exotic. And now, he was in a metal tube, travelling the world. I remember him telling me about sailing up the Hudson in New York, and, after chapel one Sunday, about sailing through the Gulf of Corinth.
Nineteen hundred years earlier, the Apostle Paul had sailed those seas, too. He’d set sail for Corinth because he made his living as a tent-maker, and the Corinthians organised the Ismathian Games, one of the big Hellenic festivals. In Corinth he could ply his trade, he could make money. And, in his spare time, so to speak, he could also ply his ministry — Corinth was one of those busy, connected, fluid places where it was good to start new churches; and that it is what Paul did. And, when work and ministry took him away from Corinth, he kept in touch with the church he’d established there, through letters. And just as the Christians in Corinth would gather to hear Paul’s words read to them, we’ve gathered today, and heard some of the same words.
Read those words again this week. And think of Paul, writing to old friends, to people he’d cared about, to people he’d ministered to, to people he’d baptized, to people with whom he’d broken bread and shared wine. It’s obvious from what he writes that things are not well with him — he isn’t specific, but we can speculate that he was unwell (there seems to have been some sort of recurring physical pain that plagued him); we can speculate that he was being persecuted for his preaching (the shadow of religious and state authorities always over him); we also know that his relationships with some of those he had nurtured in Corinth had become fractured (that normal stuff of church communities, or any family, arguing, feuding, trying, awkwardly, to make things right). And so he writes about suffering and affliction as things that he knows about, intimately. I am afflicted, I suffer, he writes. And I know that you do, too. Yet, just as I know suffering and affliction, he writes, I also know consolation and salvation. Just as I know broken-ness and loneliness, I also know hope; I know what the dawn looks like. And I know that you do, too. Suffering and affliction — they don’t go away, they are part of what it is to live in the flesh and the spirit, he says; but so are consolation and salvation. In all of this, we share.
And he goes further, of course. Because he knows that which John the Evangelist says: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” “to be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” That’s not the description of some sort of bargain, or cosmic scapegoating. It’s a description of God’s involvedness in all of this. Just as I know suffering and affliction, yours and mine, Christ says, so I also know consolation and salvation. Just as I live suffering and affliction, God says, so I also am consolation and salvation.
I was struck this week by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s moving words to the family, partner and friends of Sarah Everard, kidnapped and murdered, we think, in south London this past week. “May they know,” the Archbishop said, “the suffering God alongside them in this unimaginable pain.” Suffering and affliction — they don’t go away, they are part of what it is to live in the flesh and the spirit. But just as I live suffering and affliction, God says, so I also am consolation and salvation.
Nothing here is theoretical or abstract; everything here involves everything of us.
Lent used to be a time of preparation of Baptism — when adults to be baptised, newcomers to the faith, would get to know the details, the depth of the Christian faith. A kind of 40-day long confirmation class. The Catechism in the old Prayer Book is a sort of hangover from those days — a curriculum for Christianity. And it includes three foundational texts that everybody used to know by heart — the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments. When we can venture up there again, we can see those three texts, and those three texts alone, written on the panels affixed to the wall behind the altar-table in St Tudno’s on the Great Orme: the Lord’s Prayer and Creed on the north side, the Ten Commandments to the south, installed as part of the 1855 restoration.
And one of the reasons those three texts were considered so important, so formational, is because they stand for foundational things, for what it is to be Christian: The Lord’s Prayer stands for devotion, for worship, for adoration, for beseeching, for closeness to God. The Apostles’ Creed stands for the engagement of the intellect with God, for seeking understanding, for our duty and yeaning to know something of God’s unknowable ways, for pursuing in us the mind of Christ.
And the Ten Commandments stand, not as specific injunctions against coveting your neighbour’s wife, but for the foundational truth that Christianity is nothing unless it drives our behaviour, our relating, our daily living. Christianity is nothing unless our lives are lived, marked by love and, by sacrifice and care.
Nothing here is theoretical or abstract; everything here involves everything of us.
Philip Larkin, the author of the poem we heard earlier, had something of a love-hate relationship with his widowed mother, Eva. In some ways he thought of her as a burden; he could be nasty about her to his friends, and he wrote some deeply unsentimental poems about family life. In other ways, he was devoted to her, taking her without fail on her annual holiday to the seaside. The Christmas of 1977, after her death that autumn, was his first, at the age of 55, he had ever spent without her.
His poem this morning is unflinching and honest and hopeful. Look at the trees, he says. Look at their new life, every year. They’re not immortal, he says; they age; the bark marks it. But the green leaf unfolding speaks (in truth, louder) of consolation and salvation, of the vitality of love and pity and sacrifice and care, of a mother’s love, and a father’s love, and a difference made. For nothing here is theoretical or abstract; everything here involves everything of us.
