Lincoln College Former Students Reunion |
I thank my God on every remembrance of you says St Paul.
There is so much to thank God for in the teaching we received at the Scholae Cancellarii in Lincoln. I can still hear the inimitable tones of the Dean delivering his Pastoralia lectures. There are nuggets which have stayed with me and been of assistance over more than a quarter century.
It was the Dean who alerted me to the pitfalls of conversing with literal minded persons. “My grandmother”, he said “was at a boring dinner party about a century ago. She said to the footman, James throw a trifle on the fire and James picked up a raspberry trifle and threw it on the fire.”
But I would not have it thought that we learnt nothing form the Warden. I have been saved from social disaster on innumerable occasions by the advice “never clean your celluloid clerical collar with spittle – it goes green”.
Everyone here will have similar memories. Most important of course is the fact that Christianity is experienced in and renews itself by communities of faith, living spirit filled organisms. Lincoln for 120 years was such a community and we thank God for it.
Lincoln graduates have been on the whole moderate men and women without the extremes of churchmanship which characterised other establishments. The first students in 1874 signalled our rather modest start. One of the first four was described by Benson as “a gentleman of independent means tired of idleness with a general interest in vestments who tells his friends that he enjoyed being very plainly spoken to by me about his useless life.”
For the moment the future may not seem to lie with moderate men and women but with those whose brands have a sharper definition. Such waves beak and recede however and some truths remain. I like to think that at its best Lincoln bred in us a love for the kind of church described by St Augustine, a church in which we are united in the essentials of the faith uniquely revealed in the holy scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds; a church in which there is freedom of debate over the vast range of disputable matters and no zeal to over-define mystery; a church, however, in which everything is subject to the law and touchstone of love. It is better in Latin of course and Augustine actually said of the church “in certis unitas, in dubiis libertas et in omnibus caritas.”
The gospel reading chosen by the organisers of this service is instructive and thrilling. The passage from Luke describes the final resurrection appearance and follows that strange encounter on the road to Emmaus. The companions on the road did not recognise the risen Christ at first and the other disciples to whom Jesus appeared are described as “terrified and affrighted”.
One of the reasons for this fear and blindness is that Christ did not die as a hero for any of our causes. He always calls us out of ourselves and our disappointed ambitions and projects to focus on him, the living communication of God and his future in the world.
The very opposite to faith is not of course doubt, which the disciples entertained even as they worshipped him, but the opposite to faith is sin, the life turned in upon itself, life lived incurvatus in se as Luther says.
It is so hard as life goes on to break free of the orbit around our own preoccupations and cherished schemes but God is faithful and help is at hand.
Just as in the Emmaus scene, Jesus opens the mind of his disciples “that they might understand the scriptures”. There is no profound renewal in the church without a fresh engagement with the energies of the Word of God in scripture.
This truth has grown with years. I was so immersed in J;D;P not forgetting E and the fascinating speculations of redaction criticism that the Word was lost in analysis and the scripture was held firmly in my rather limited field of vision. Not that I regret those studies. There is no return for Western minds to a primordial innocence before the scripture and it is not desirable that there should be. Critical study has opened up new vistas and subverted illegitimate authority.
But renewal comes when we rein in the projections imposed on scripture, when we are quiet enough to listen and encounter the living word in what the great scholar, whose death we mourned earlier this year, Paul Ricoeur described as “the second innocence”, an emergence from the wilderness of criticism after honestly making the journey with intellectual and spiritual integrity.
Then by relating our listening to scripture with an earnest listening for the intimations of God in our contemporary world it is possible to be authentic witnesses to the risen Christ, to proclaim him afresh in words that are [quoting Ricoeur again] “croyable et disponsible” believable and available.
The revelation in scripture is not so much propositional, the unveiling of universal spiritual truisms but performative [to use a word beloved of Hooker], the quickening of life which comes with a genuine encounter with the Word of God himself, the risen Christ. This is as transforming an experience for us, as for the companions on the road to Emmaus or the disciples in the locked room. It comes with the gift of a re-kindling of our first love, of the stirrings which led us to offer ourselves without really knowing what we were doing as Christ’s deacons, his servants and friends.
Then what happens in the gospel. He blessed them and they worshipped and were full of joy. Back in the city they were continually in the Temple blessing God.
There is a proper emphasis at present on the need for the church to be mission shaped. This is a salutary correction to a rather introverted version of church life which insisted that people should come to us as we are, with all our funny little ways, and which does not recognise that Jesus commands us to go to them.
But we should not understand a mission shaped church to be shaped like a bullet delivering our message to the unbelieving world. There is only one mission, the mission of God whose love ceaselessly sustains his creation and when we emerge from our sanctuaries we find that God has preceded us wherever we go. It is therefore indispensable for a mission shaped church to be oriented to him in worship and praise and to understand our role in the mission of God which transcends the rather stale and misleading opposition between “maintenance and mission”.
One thing I do notice however that in those early days there is an emphasis on how the disciples were “together” when they were given the gift of the spirit, the power which Jesus told them to expect. Yet again and again we are tempted towards an idiorhythmic version of church life and a rather possessive concept of “my ministry” which enfeebles our witness.
Benson, who as Chancellor of Lincoln revived the Scholae, preached a sermon before the Bishop of Lincoln which can be said to have inspired our foundation – Where are the Schools of the Prophets. In this sermon he attacked the concept of ministry which exalted that “independence which need not stoop to such union with others as involves self sacrifice.” This is a perennial difficulty. The talk of “collaborative ministry” was meant to have dealt it a death blow. We have had to invent yet more buzz words however and some now are talking about “conjunctive leadership” but these are simply new words aimed at the same old target.
One of the mysteries of life is how difficult clergy sometimes find it to encourage one another. I hope that we are all looking for opportunities to do so in what can sometimes be a lonely ministry. I am rather attracted by the novelist John Updike’s explanation of this mystery of gifted pastors who find it hard to give or receive pastoring from colleagues – “After all in a congress of masseurs nobody turn their back”
-let it not be so with us today.
The Church as we know is not called to be an agency which caters for people’s religious tastes and feelings like some spiritual Tesco’s but people, called together by the Spirit of Jesus Christ to remember him. We remember him not as a teacher long ago and far away or his story as we might remember last year’s holiday in Frinton. But we re-member as distinct from dis-membering. We were called into one body by re-membering Jesus Christ. We become limbs and members in one spiritual organism. We are called together to be closer than family and to be a body in which the single as well as the married can be at home. Closer than a family because if your foot hurts you do not say - oh it’s only my foot - you do something about it. We are to be remembered in the liturgy which we have the privilege of celebrating by the spirit of Christ as his body. Your joys are to be my joys and your sorrows my sorrows.
Beyond and beneath all the siren calls that we should navigate a way into institutional survival by greater efficiency and smarter management or assimilate ourselves to some entertainment model [though there is nothing holy about being un-entertaining] and cater for popular religious tastes and feelings, this work of re-membering Jesus in the here and now, reconnecting with the human face of God for the sake of the people we serve and with the people we serve for the sake of God in Christ this work always brings freshness and renewal for we worship a God who is faithful and we see this in the life of the saints who have gone before us. So we thank God for this vision which so many of us glimpsed at Lincoln. What ever happens to ancient institutions, this vision is both ancient and always fresh, it flows from the God who is always faithful.
