Material for Heaven: A Sermon preached at Uppingham School
17 September 2006
You might find it very difficult to believe but you are the raw material for heaven. You might find it even more difficult to believe but the person sitting next to you, sitting in front of you or behind you is also the raw material for heaven. From my vantage point, it is even more difficult to believe as I look out onto a sea of faces thrilled with the joys of compulsory religion.
But it must be true: it must be so. If we are made and created in the image of God; if Jesus Christ was God made man, incarnate, made flesh like you and me, of the Virgin Mary in this world of time and space to take up our humanity into his divinity; if that same Jesus Christ suffered a death of self-sacrifice on the cross of Calvary, a death like no other to save us from the everlasting burden and slavery of sin; then heaven is our destiny, our appointed place, our true home and native land.
You may think that your destiny lies at the Bar or, if you have reached the requisite age and status, in the bar, in the city, in the schoolroom, in the armed forces, the professions, on expeditions in the great adventure of life; or, if all else fails, as a priest in the Church of England; but you will find these are but temporary and transient resting places. There you will find no abiding city. Despite the adolescent presumption of immortality, your destiny is the grave and beyond. With that happy contemplation, how might we be prepared and equipped for that destiny?
My work in Pusey House in Oxford, that forlorn bastion of dreaming spires and lost causes to which some of you may aspire, if you can overcome the disadvantage of a Public School education in these egalitarian times, but whose University is now gradually and tragically succumbing to the values of a debased secular culture, not least the heresy of egalitarianism, is varied. There is the Machiavellian scheming and plotting in the minefield of church politics of which even a Borgia Pope may have reservations; there is the quasi-academic work of lecturing, writing and reviewing, there is the teaching of the Catholic Faith as the Church of England has received it and understands it, now somewhat imperfectly, there is the liturgical celebration of the daily prayer of the Church, the work of God, the Opus Dei for those of a classical persuasion and the Holy Mass, there is the pastoral encounter with undergraduates – the problems are invariably variations on the same theme, religion and sex, although not necessarily in that order, but above all that I am enjoined to urge upon those several generations of undergraduates who cross the threshold of the House the urgency of holiness of living. Christian discipleship can only authentically be accomplished, or even attempted, within the context of the Church, the Body of Christ, the community and society of faith. Only within our communion with Christ, who took upon himself our perfect humanity with his perfect divinity, can our common humanity, our common purpose, our common society be perfectly articulated and explained and make sense.
We are made and fashioned for relationships, relationship with God as Father, with Christ as brother and friend, with Our Lady as mother and intercessor, and relationship one with another. We cannot exist alone, we are not islands entire to ourselves: there is such a thing as society, in which we cannot slough off our engagement and participation and responsibility. Those of us who have been the recipients of privilege and would see Christ in others must follow the example of Our Lady and give ourselves freely and without reservation, selflessly in the service of Christ and those who bear his image within them. A view which accords primacy to the selfish exercise of the individual will is defective, although entirely consonant with the contemporary values of a culture which asserts rights above responsibilities and obligations. You here should understand and appreciate that mutuality of concern and endeavour because you form in this school a society and a community of mutual dependence and reciprocity.
But a Christian understanding would go beyond that, beyond the practical rules and conventions of an orderly society. Truth is not something culturally conditioned, something built upon the shifting sands of contemporary taste. Truth, rather, is what is guaranteed by authority, the authority of divine revelation and the authority of the Tradition of the Church, both of which are mediated through the authority of the Church, which is a divine society. Our way of living, both as individuals and as members of this society, or any civil society, our moral choices do not depend upon personal preference and private decision, upon self-interest and self-indulgent satisfaction – that would be a moral life no more significant than an emotional spasm – but, rather, our responses and choices ought to depend upon right reason and divine order, the product of an informed conscience, not some self-referential whim.
Peter’s startling assertion in the Gospel we heard a few moments ago gives us the clue and the key. “You are the Christ.” (S. Mark 8:29). That acknowledgement opens up for us the entire system of God’s love in which we shall be able to love as we are loved. But, beware, that love is not some vague, wishy-washy, saccharine sentimentality, some doe-eyed, adolescent drooling, something anaemic, safe and conventional. Christ’s love was forged in the terrifying heat and sweat of his Crucifixion. His love is not trapped and diluted in stained-glass or in the remoteness of two millennia, his love for us drips blood from the cross still.
That love is manifested in the bread and wine that is his Body and his Blood in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the Holy Communion. The Mass, which is the pre-eminent and indispensable Sacrament of God’s love in Christ is the re-presentation of that defining moment in history, the anamnesis, that is the bringing into the present his perfect sacrifice on the cross, bringing here and now what happened then and there. Past and present, time and eternity meet on the altar. Here is the authentic encounter with Christ. Here in the elements of his Body and Blood we can say with Peter, “You are the Christ.” Here is his Body broken, his Blood spilled, his love poured out unselfishly. But what is love other than self-sacrifice? Here he offers himself in all humility and vulnerability. Here he risks himself for humankind. Here he challenges us to meet him: not to turn away and turn our backs, not to shirk our duty and responsibility but to take up our cross, our own commitment to serve and to love, to demonstrate our willingness to risk all for the sake of love as he risked all for us, to be transformed and transfigured from our tangle of neuroses and uncertainties into something greater and better.
This is not the safe option of dull conformity and dreary conventionality but a radical turning away from the delusion and tyranny of self; all our pettiness, pride and worldly ambition. That is the true liberty and freedom of our humanity. To encounter Christ in this Sacrament of his Body and Blood is to be swept up in a love affair like no other.
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library