Living expectantly - a sermon for All Saints'

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 & Luke 6:20-31

Before I was ordained I spent about a decade studying and working in universities. At the heart of this work was the PhD I undertook looking at the philosophy of an English seventeenth-century theologian called Ralph Cudworth.

Cudworth was born in 1617 and lived and worked his entire career in Cambridge University where he was Master of Christ’s College. His use of classical philosophy, and particularly Neoplatonic philosophy, has led him to be remembered as one of the leading members of a group known as the Cambridge Platonists.

My work on Cudworth looked at him as a philosopher on the cusp of modernity. Investigating his ideas of freewill and ethical responsibility which I argued – or at least I hope I argued – did something to inform the development of modern ideas of individual liberty and freedom. To do this work I spent very many long hours in the manuscripts room of the British Library straining my eyes to read Cudworth’s unpublished manuscripts on freewill. 

Not all of these manuscripts focused exclusively on these “modern” ideas. Some, to our modern eyes, seem strangely backward looking. In particular two impenetrable manuscripts entitled “A Commentary on the Seventy Weeks of Daniel”. 

These works go through line by line the prophecies of Daniel which we heard the beginning of in our Old Testament reading today. In these you get a very different image of Cudworth. Here we have not the forward-looking philosopher, but the Professor of Hebrew waiting expectantly as he combs the pages of this prophetic book to seek evidence of the second coming and end of all things.

These manuscripts paint a picture of Cudworth which, to our modern eyes, would seem to be at variance with the early enlightenment thinking on freedom and liberty that I was interested in. Here instead we have theologian caught in maelstrom of the Civil Wars which ripped this nation – and this Cathedral – apart. Here is a thinker focusing not on an imagined future of rights and democracy, but on a future of God’s providential action breaking in. The future promised to Daniel where:

the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.

It is, in many ways, not a surprise that this apocalyptic aspect of Cudworth’s thought, and for that matter this dynamic in the writings of other “enlightened” thinkers of the seventeenth century – most notably Sir Isaac Newton – has fallen from view.

But there is something in this view which is worth us holding onto as we come to this All Saints’ Sunday and this season and period of remembrance and remembering which the Church has come to call Kingdom Season.

A few years ago, in the midst I lock-down I attended an online seminar led by an experience retired Bishop focusing on the future of the Church. Seminars like this can, if I am honest, be quite dispiriting affairs, where the participants are shown graphs of doom suggesting the decline of the church and of faith in the west is inevitable and irreversible. This seminar, however, stood out not simple because the Bishop leading it was engaging and encouraging. But also because of a perspective which he opened up to us which is too often missing from view. 

When asked by one of the participants what the declining church of the west can learn from the growing church of the global south, he gave an answer which made me sit up and listen. What we can learn from those churches, he said, was “expectancy”. An expectancy that God is at work in the world, that God will change the world, and that if we are open to this, if we are expectant of this, we can see this transformation and be part of it.

Thinking back to my days trawling through dusty manuscripts it strikes me that this sense of expectancy is all too often lost in our modern way of thinking. We cannot understand what fired the work of Cudworth and Newton, stripped of a sense of expectancy. It might have been framed in the grand and apocalyptic language of the books of Daniel and Revelation which will punctuate our worship for these coming weeks, language which can seem foreign to us, but which is full of expectancy.

As we come to this All Saints’ Sunday, and into this Kingdom Season, the encouragement is for all of us is to find again that sense of expectancy of God’s grace transforming the world around us.

It is a generalisation, but one I am happy to make nonetheless, that what marks the lives of all the saints we remember today was that they lived with an expectancy in the transforming power of God’s grace. In whatever way and in whatever form it took in their lives, the internal motor of their extraordinary lives came from this sense of expectancy. 

This theme of expectancy opens for us the “Beatitudes” of our Gospel reading. In this well-loved reading Luke – as in the more well know collection of Beatitudes we find in Matthew’s Gospel – we hear those “Blessings” that Jesus promises to those who follow and seek the path God as set before them. 

However, unlike Matthew’s Beatitudes, in Luke’s Gospel we get also the “Woes”. These woes warn against a life which is too complacent, too set in its ways, too comfortable with the idea that one might have made it. Woe to those, Jesus says, who have no expectation that life and God’s promise can and will be greater than anything the world around us – with all its wealth and rational order – has to give us.

The Blessings, Jesus reminds us, comes to those who live with expectancy that God’s promise can and will be better.

Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

How many of us, if we were truly honest, live in a world where we think we have it all sorted, all done, and can’t or don’t want to expect anything to be different. This might be driven by comfort or apathy or cynicism. What ties these different perspectives is a lack of expectancy. 

How many of us can truly say that we live our lives full of that sense and spirit of expectancy in the transforming power of God’s grace in creation? I know that as I trawl through my email inbox or prepare for my next meeting or when I look with anxiety at the news and my bank balance, expectancy is not  immediately present.

But on this All Saints’ Sunday it is a sense of expectancy which God calls us to find. Whether in the lives thinkers we thought we knew, or in the experience and vibrancy of the global Church, or in the example of the saints, or in the words Jesus speaks to us today, God calls us to  look with the eyes of the saints, and with expectant hearts, and search and seek and expect the transforming power of God’s love breaking into our world and into our lives.

In praise of small things - a sermon for the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

We have heard a lot about growth, well at least the hope of growth recently.

The political and economic turmoil of the last week has been driven by our new Government’s single focus on what they believe to be policies that will stimulate growth within our economy. Whether these policies are the right or wrong answer to this is perhaps too soon to say. But what is clear is that economic growth is the single reason and rationale given for these new policies.

Similarly, we live within a Church which remains, in many ways, transfixed on the idea of growth. Years of declining numbers has meant that over the last decade there has been a radical refocusing of the resources of the Church on mission and growth. For instance, in the past money was redistributed across the Church of England from richer dioceses to support the poorer ones through a financial and demographic formula.  Whereas now half of these funds are awarded through a competitive tendering for mission and growth projects.

Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong with growth in these different forms. A growing economy, structured to benefit all backgrounds and contexts, can be one of the most important motors of social and economic wellbeing we can create. Similarly, it would be churlish to think that we would not want the church to grow both in faith and numbers. Who would not want more people to know more deeply of the love God reveals for all who follow him in Jesus Christ?

The problem with a focus on growth is not growth as such. Rather the problem comes with the moving seamlessly from a desire for growth to the false equivalency that as we seek growth bigger is always better.

A bigger economy, we are told, will be better. But what if that economy systemically excludes people in certain regions or certain socio-economic backgrounds? A bigger church is better, we are led to believe.  But what is the effect of this mantra on places and contexts where “bigger” is not simply possible?

That was certainly a feeling and pressure that I felt as a Vicar in small rural parishes in Northumberland.  Northumberland is the most sparsely populated county in England. There we worked and developed the life of the church where the reality of “small” was simply a given.

I remember taking a service in one Church in a very remote corner of the county and feeling disheartened that we were worshipping in single figures. And then I flicked back through the service register, which stretched back many decades, to see that congregations had always been in single figures. There in that place, in God’s plan, small was the reality.

Our Gospel reading begins with the Apostles, to use the modern jargon, asking Jesus for a strategy for growth:

Increase our faith!

they ask. However instead of offering the theological equivalent of economic shock-and-awe, or suggesting they develop a strategic vision for spiritual and numerical growth of his followers, or encouraging them to have big hopes and big dreams of a bigger future. Jesus instead asks them to do something completely different. Jesus asks them to focus on the small. And Jesus said: 

If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.

Jesus’ response to the Apostle’s desire for growth, for an increase in their faith is not to seek the false equivalency that bigger is better. Jesus, as he so often does, asks us instead to focus on the small things.

When I was Vicar of my small and faithful rural parishes I would have to remind myself that, in a wider church context where all the focus seemed to be on large urban churches, Jesus’ advise to the Church was in fact counterintuitively simple. That at its heart the church is called to be “two or three” and “salt and light”. That, returning to today’s Gospel, if we want things to increase, we should look to the small things and see the growth and transformation that only they can bring.

As we move into a new chapter in the life of this Cathedral we need to remember this wisdom. We are a small Cathedral and that physical reality is not going to change. For some this is a limitation of this place. When I arrived an acquaintance with considerable experience of Cathedral’s, suggested – only half in jest – that we should really think about rebuilding the nave! “What a difference that would make” he jested.

But this smallness is a gift. Where we can find an intimacy in our worship within the grandeur of this place. A unique combination which is hard to find in many of our bigger and brasher Cathedral siblings. Similarly, through the summer we were able, through our Rest under the Stars installation, to find a small, simple, and creative way for us to draw new people into the unique gifts of this small place.

The desire for growth that we hear of in our political and church life is one we can all recognise and understand. Whether it is for our society, our church, or for our own faith we can all understand the apostles’ prayer for things to increase and grow. 

So, as we make this prayer for ourselves we need to avoid the temptation that this can only come from seeking the things that we are told are bigger and better. Instead, we need to look to the virtues of the small in our life, and in our church, and in ourselves. We need to nurture those small things, like mustard seed, and know what unexpected growth that will bring, if we only have the patience and faith to see the deep gifts that God reveals to us in the small things God gives us.