A Sermon preached at the Licensing of Fr John Hunwicke at St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford
6 November 2007
I AM VERY GRATEFUL to Bishop John, not only for the opportunity to take part in this evening’s licensing but also for his invitation to me to preach. With that comes the job of selecting the lessons to be read. Romans 12:5-16 – our second reading and the first reading at Mass today - is eminently and obviously suitable. But what about 1 Maccabees 2:49-50,65-70? This too, slightly less obviously, is drawn from the day’s lectionaries – as Fr Hunwicke, an expert on lectionaries, will be only too well aware. It is part of the first reading at the Office of Readings and well suits my own practice, which is to try, at licensings, to home-in on the Old Testament, on which we tend to preach comparatively less often.
The Second Book of Maccabees, famously providing scriptural warranty for prayer for the dead and the intercession of the saints, might have been the more obvious choice for a St Thomas the Martyr occasion. After all, this was perhaps the first of the Oxford Movement churches to adopt ritualist practices: we think of Charles Seager’s controversial use of the black stole for Holy Communion in about 1837 and Thomas Chamberlain’s homely adaptation of an MA hood to make a chasuble (and, indeed, Chamberlain’s uncle’s claim to have been a Puseyite before Dr Pusey was born). It was Fr Chamberlain – not that he would have been called that at first - who, in a fifty year incumbency, re-ordered the Church, introduced its distinctive furniture and fittings, worked with Marian Hughes for the restoration of religious life in the Church of England and presided over the revival of Gregorian chant.
The Parish of St Thomas the Martyr and Thomas Chamberlain are famous not only for pioneering the revival of vestments and being the second or third church to burn incense but also for that other attractive feature of the Oxford Movement revival, preaching the Gospel to the poor. The parish of St Thomas, we learn from Chamberlain’s comments on the 1851 census, included ‘the poorest and worst part of the city’ and the church was certainly drawing the crowds at that time. Chamberlain’s great hobby, we learn, was education and St Anne’s, Rewley, where the sisters taught girls of ‘the upper classes’ is now Rewley House in Wellington Square, centre of the University’s Extra-Mural Department.
All this – and much more – Fr Hunwicke will have chance to read, if he has not read it already, in former Churchwarden Whitehead’s short history and guide to the parish. We could ponder it further if we dwelt on the recent past, ichabod, the glory that was. There are obvious dangers in that: neither the shape of the parish, nor much of what is in the parish, is as it was. The challenge in every generation is to find a fresh expression of the Gospel, a new way of inviting men and women to become disciples of Jesus Christ and co-workers for his Kingdom, an apt challenge on this day on which we also remember Archbishop William Temple.
But right now we look beyond the history of St Thomas to what the reading from First Book of Maccabees has to say to us. We are back in the second century BC and we are learning how Judaism, the religion of the People of God, is preserved amidst the onslaught of Seleucid kings. Our reading is from the revolt under Mattathias. Antiochus Epiphanes in chapter one has entered Jerusalem to raid it, occupy it and hellenise it. He finds party of Jews in Jerusalem willing to come to terms with Greek culture and he introduces pagan worship systematically, tearing up the scrolls of the Torah, desecrating the temple by going in as a Gentile, defiling the sanctuary, carting off its treasures, and building an appalling abomination – probably an Olympian Zeus – on the altar of burnt offering.
Those who stand out against the invaders – for instance by continuing with circumcision and refusing unclean food –
meet a violent death. Mattathias, an outsider, leads the resistance party – stout fighting men – and tonight’s reading, telling of his natural death as a righteous man, full of years, and his entrusting of his life’s work to his three sons, Judas Maccabeus, Jonathan and Simon, all of whom, despite various temporary settlements, go on to die violent deaths in what is a holy war for the survival of Judaism.
We are once more, I believe, in the midst of such a holy war. I am not speaking of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, the state of national alert and the fear of explosion from within, just as for hundreds of years we feared invasion from without. The holy war, I would say, is a war against secularism and the force of secularisation. Let me give you a tiny example of this. The other day I was at the barber’s, having my hair cut. When I was a parish priest I used to go to Gay Gordon the hairdresser to find out what was really happening in the parish. (The one advantage I have over Bishop John in gleaning gossip is that nature has decreed that I go to the barbers more often than he). Well, it was Molly on Magdalen Road whom I was talking to last week. ‘Can you explain’, she asked, ‘why we have fireworks? Who was Guy Fawkes?’ I was a little startled that she didn’t know. What was even more startling was that she told me that no one whose hair she had cut that week seems to have known, either. It was a reminder to me not only of how little history we know – the schools seem to hop from Fred Flintstone to Hitler and the Third Reich and leave it at that – but how much of the real story which underlies our life and values – the story of Jesus Christ – is now almost unknown.
Quite a bit of this has been a matter of policy. Recent stories in the press have included a suggestion, in government circles, that Christmas be removed from all official reckoning. That was thought to be a tough objective. Another story has been the suggestion that ‘Faith Schools’ – by which they very largely mean ‘Church Schools’ - should not be allowed to select on religious grounds. A third one has been the whole abortion story – where the debate has been carried out largely on the scientific question of at what stage foetuses can be born and survive rather than on the ethical questions of the human rights of the unborn child. No doubt we can all think readily of other examples.
What I want to suggest tonight is, in late autumn, amidst the dying embers of the Church’s year, that the battle of the Maccabees is being waged in this city and university. We know who the hellenisers are – those who have emptied religious language of meaning (the names of colleges, for instance), driven the role of chaplains and the study of theology to the periphery, waged war on the concept of Sunday – and we know who the Maccabean rebels are. We are the sons and followers of Mattathias.
Now let me say at once that we Christians, in our holy war, are not wielding the weapons of violence. That has been a tragic mistake, and the devil’s own opportunity throughout history, as men of violence have recruited religion for their purposes. Religion and testosterone, as they say, is an explosive mix. This week’s Economist leads on ‘The new wars of religion’. And it isn’t just the Guy Fawkes anniversary and the slightly millenarian feel evoked by the increasing darkness of lengthening nights which makes this popular. No, the weapons we wield are weapons of love. This conduct of this spiritual warfare is laid out for us in tonight’s second reading:
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with brotherly affection….be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer….Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Live in harmony with one another….
Light shining in the darkness. The light of Christ. The light of his love.
I hope that St Thomas’s works happily and well with the other churches and Christian communities in the city. One of the reasons Bishop John and I are here together is to stress that the primacy of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ and the value of working together as Christians. It is very easy for one group of Christians to write another group off as hellenisers, people who welcome in the Greeks and their secular values, who allow desecration and sacrilege. In the past, the evangelicals have written off the Anglo-Catholics as idolaters, Anglo-Catholics have written off evangelicals as despoilers of the sanctuary, those who cart off vestments and vessels, burn them and melt them down. Nowadays conservatives of different traditions write off liberal catholics and liberal evangelicals as those who water down Scripture and attack biblical morality. What we need to do, I am sure, is look at this all again and afresh. There needs to be a genuine partnership of St Ebbe’s and St Thomas’s, (and, yes, a partnership too with the liberals up the road, however much they seem to ‘hellenise’); a partnership between the Anglicans and the Baptists and the Catholics, the Kensitites and the Puseyites, the Oratorians and the Orthodox. Oxford needs this solid front in the fight against the real hellenisation – secularism - as the university struggles with the nervous breakdown of the post-Enlightenment and its so-called post-modern aftermath. The grand mosque in St Clements and the Said Business School alike have asked members of the university – as well as our parishioners - new and urgent questions, as do the laboratories and some of the research projects.
In short, we must "Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with brotherly affection…." We Christians "must live in harmony with one another."
Some years ago I sat in, as a member of staff from another college, on the interviewing process for a new Principal of Wycliffe. It was quite a few years ago, I should say. One of the candidates told me that he had come from the Far East – a European working in Asia. ‘I am surprised at the rivalry between Christians in the West’, he told me. ‘We were in such a minority out there in the East that we were pleased to work with, and alongside, any who called themselves Christian’. There’s a lesson for us there. From a Christian minority to us who have not quite learnt how to be a Christian minority.
I am delighted that Fr Hunwicke has come to be your parish priest. (My spell-check on the computer suggested that instead of ‘Hunwicke’ I should write ‘Unwise’. (Mind you, the spell-check knows a thing or two. When I wrote John ‘pritchard’ with a small ‘p’, the spell-check warned me to use a capital ‘p’. Good advice.) Fr Hunwicke, far from being ‘Unwise’, is a very wise priest, an able and clever pastor, well able to follow in the tradition of Fr Chamberlain - though we shan’t expect him to be here for 50 years. Mind you, like Fr Chamberlain he has staying power: such is his passion for education that he was a schoolmaster at Lancing for nearly 30 years. Like Fr Chamberlain, Fr Hunwicke will be passionate too about the liturgy, the bits and pieces and the fine detail. I hope too that, like Fr Chamberlain, he will be especially keen to proclaim the Gospel of Christ in the parish and to welcome the poor.
This is, of course, nowadays, a house-for-duty post and you must not expect too much from your parish priest. Most of what will happen – as is the way – only if and when the people of St Thomas’s are making it happen.
These are very challenging times for small parishes: they are the little corner shops when people prefer the supermarkets; they are like the little specialist shops whose purpose and wares most people in the neighbourhood don’t begin to understand and are often not very curious about; they are like the war memorials and other landmarks that help people find their way around without arousing further curiosity. How many people have spotted St Thomas’s as they come in on the London train, a sign to shut the lap top and get the brief case down, check the makeup or put on the rain hood?
The battle will be won – is being won – whenever and wherever the churches – the little parishes included – establish authentic belonging, authentic community, authentic discipleship, authentic love, authentic service of others and authentic worship.
.. love one another with brotherly affection….be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer… Live in harmony with one another….
That is the challenge for St Thomas’s, under new management, in the next stage of its life. May God bless you in his service.
The Rt Revd Andrew Burnham Bishop of Ebbsfleet