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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Edward Probert, Chancellor on Sunday 20 January 2008
I Corinthians 1.1-9, John 1.29-42
"WHERE ARE YOU STAYING"
I Corinthians 1.1-9, John 1.29-42
Any form of communication is an interactive process. This is obviously so in things like conversation and debate; but it applies even to processes which seem on the face of them to be one way, such as books, TV programmes and films, lectures, and - in the present circumstances – sermons. I’ve seen the same film years apart, and found it wildly entertaining the first time, and rather dull the second – because my approach to it the second time has been different. What I may be communicating in the next few minutes will be greatly affected by such individual things as whether or not you are listening, whether you are deaf or distracted, whether you like me or loathe me, or simply disagree with me. Any preacher soon learns that what people have heard is not by any means always what the preacher thought he had said.
This is one of the reasons why the rather repetitive character of our use of scripture should not be too much of a collective embarrassment to us. If we understand our sacred texts to be a means by which God communicates with us – after all, we say ‘This is the word of the Lord’ – then we should not expect it always to be saying the same thing to us. It’s worth coming back and seeing what it has to say the next time, when our different experiences and circumstances will affect our perception.
I don’t know how many dozens of times I have read or heard the first chapter of John’s gospel; but these last 2 days have been the first time when I have read today’s gospel in close conjunction with an encounter with the sculptor Robert Koenig’s exhibition which arrived here on Friday morning; and I am conscious how much my reading is affected by it. So can I encourage you to make your own encounter with that exhibition.
Robert Koenig is British, but his mother was a Polish victim of the Nazis, deported from her home to labour camps, lucky to survive the war, and displaced for the remainder of her life from her origins. The figures in this exhibition explore the implications of that personal odyssey: carved from wood which grew in the fields around the Polish village where it started, travelling to a series of stops along its route, added to and changed in each place.
I came away from it with a range of things chuntering away in my mind. Questions: how important are origins?; what is a home?; what is it like to be uprooted? Recollections from our common history: the horrors and displacements of the Second World War. Modern equivalents: Palestinians still living in refugee camps 60 years on; Rwanda; the implosion of Yugoslavia and the invention of ‘ethnic cleansing’. And more personal, domestic things: my own sense of belonging in England, but also my loyalty and pride in the fact that my parents were not English, but American and Welsh.
Where we come from is immensely important to us: look at the number of people who are busy tracing their family trees, the urge many adopted people have to find out about their birth parents. Perhaps this urge to belong somewhere is the counterpart to the great and increasing fluidity of modern society, which in both rich and poor countries sees people moving away from their place of birth and finding, or at least seeking, a life elsewhere. For those who come to Salisbury to retire, that can be a good thing; for those who leave the coast of north Africa on a boat run by people smugglers, hoping from desperation to make some kind of living in Europe, it is hard to see the advantages of our modern fluidity. The existence of the British National Party, the constant news stories about immigration issues, NIMBYism – these are all symptoms of concerns with place and belonging which will only grow as our social change accelerates.
And so to the gospel of John. It was the second part of today’s reading that took my attention. John the Baptist points out Jesus to two of his disciples; they go after Jesus. He asks them what they are looking for. They ask him where he is staying. He tells them to come. They do, and then bring others to see too.
Every one in that passage is mobile. We see people switch their allegiance from one leader to another. They enlist others. Several of these people will be put to death. None will go back home to a normal life. The nicknames which bracket the paragraph are ‘Lamb’ and ‘Rock’ – and the remarkable thing is that the sacrificial victim is the one who is the immutable God himself, and the ‘Rock’ is the one who is reckless and fickle.
These things are paradoxical and provocative; they ask us where we are rooted, where we find our identity and security; they ask us what is solid and dependable?
This passage has nothing to do with place. The homing point here isn’t say Nazareth or Jerusalem, but Jesus himself, one who is identified with weakness and vulnerability, and who invites others to join him. As we encounter this gospel, as we engage with Robert Koenig’s sacred pieces, we are invited to think of roots and relationships, movement and security. And our paradox is that as Christians, our ultimate security is not in our origins or our place, but in our encounter with, and our going after, an itinerant who is as weak as a lamb to the slaughter.
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This is one of the reasons why the rather repetitive character of our use of scripture should not be too much of a collective embarrassment to us. If we understand our sacred texts to be a means by which God communicates with us – after all, we say ‘This is the word of the Lord’ – then we should not expect it always to be saying the same thing to us. It’s worth coming back and seeing what it has to say the next time, when our different experiences and circumstances will affect our perception.
I don’t know how many dozens of times I have read or heard the first chapter of John’s gospel; but these last 2 days have been the first time when I have read today’s gospel in close conjunction with an encounter with the sculptor Robert Koenig’s exhibition which arrived here on Friday morning; and I am conscious how much my reading is affected by it. So can I encourage you to make your own encounter with that exhibition.
Robert Koenig is British, but his mother was a Polish victim of the Nazis, deported from her home to labour camps, lucky to survive the war, and displaced for the remainder of her life from her origins. The figures in this exhibition explore the implications of that personal odyssey: carved from wood which grew in the fields around the Polish village where it started, travelling to a series of stops along its route, added to and changed in each place.
I came away from it with a range of things chuntering away in my mind. Questions: how important are origins?; what is a home?; what is it like to be uprooted? Recollections from our common history: the horrors and displacements of the Second World War. Modern equivalents: Palestinians still living in refugee camps 60 years on; Rwanda; the implosion of Yugoslavia and the invention of ‘ethnic cleansing’. And more personal, domestic things: my own sense of belonging in England, but also my loyalty and pride in the fact that my parents were not English, but American and Welsh.
Where we come from is immensely important to us: look at the number of people who are busy tracing their family trees, the urge many adopted people have to find out about their birth parents. Perhaps this urge to belong somewhere is the counterpart to the great and increasing fluidity of modern society, which in both rich and poor countries sees people moving away from their place of birth and finding, or at least seeking, a life elsewhere. For those who come to Salisbury to retire, that can be a good thing; for those who leave the coast of north Africa on a boat run by people smugglers, hoping from desperation to make some kind of living in Europe, it is hard to see the advantages of our modern fluidity. The existence of the British National Party, the constant news stories about immigration issues, NIMBYism – these are all symptoms of concerns with place and belonging which will only grow as our social change accelerates.
And so to the gospel of John. It was the second part of today’s reading that took my attention. John the Baptist points out Jesus to two of his disciples; they go after Jesus. He asks them what they are looking for. They ask him where he is staying. He tells them to come. They do, and then bring others to see too.
Every one in that passage is mobile. We see people switch their allegiance from one leader to another. They enlist others. Several of these people will be put to death. None will go back home to a normal life. The nicknames which bracket the paragraph are ‘Lamb’ and ‘Rock’ – and the remarkable thing is that the sacrificial victim is the one who is the immutable God himself, and the ‘Rock’ is the one who is reckless and fickle.
These things are paradoxical and provocative; they ask us where we are rooted, where we find our identity and security; they ask us what is solid and dependable?
This passage has nothing to do with place. The homing point here isn’t say Nazareth or Jerusalem, but Jesus himself, one who is identified with weakness and vulnerability, and who invites others to join him. As we encounter this gospel, as we engage with Robert Koenig’s sacred pieces, we are invited to think of roots and relationships, movement and security. And our paradox is that as Christians, our ultimate security is not in our origins or our place, but in our encounter with, and our going after, an itinerant who is as weak as a lamb to the slaughter.