Rt Rev'd Edwin Barnes
This week began with St Luke’s day and there in the readings was Pope St Gregory on preaching. ‘Our Lord teaches by what he does as well as what he says. He sends out disciples to preach two by two because’ says Gregory ‘two is the number of the precepts of charity: to love God and to love our neighbour. He sent out his disciples two by two, tacitly implying that the man who has no love for others should by no means take on himself the duty of preaching.’ So preaching is first an act of charity and depends on love for those to whom we preach - which can be a pretty tall order in the parish, but there we are. And then again Gregory goes on ‘He sent them two by two unto every city and place where he himself was to come to prepare the way of the Lord’ … and so on. ‘We make a highway for him when we preach his glory to your minds so that he too when he comes afterwards may enlighten them through the presence of his love’. So first charity towards our hearers, and then the knowledge that whatever we say in our sermons is only preparatory. It is preparatory to the work of Our Lord in the lives of the hearers. That is all perfectly obvious of course and we know it but we need to tell ourselves this - that we don’t do it, the Lord does it.
How do we preach? In what circumstances do we preach? Well, I suppose if Paul had known about I.T. he would have used it. It is not only from the pulpit that we spread the good news of salvation. It is done one to one, and I would say above all it’s done in the confessional - would that we used the confessional more, we priests and our people. It is broadcast through the parish magazine or the newsletter and even more through the local media - the clergy column in the local rag or the opportunities that some of you will have on local radio or local television.
But today we are thinking about the regular parish congregation, week by week by week by week. In twenty-seven years man and boy as a parish priest I learnt the trade a bit, and in the last seventeen years I have been forgetting that. So to ask me to talk about what you know day by day is a bit silly of your Chairman, but there you are, he has done it so you will have to make the best of it.
The responsibility is of opening the Word in the liturgy, and above all in the Eucharist - and to show that I am not completely antediluvian there is a new book called An Everlasting Gift. I do suggest that it might be very useful. It is by Edward Dowler who is the Vice Principal of St Stephen’s House now, and Brendan Clover who is on the staff at Bristol Cathedral. Between them they have done a remarkable thing, they have produced a practical guide to celebrating the Eucharist today. Very helpful - really making us rethink the way the liturgy is and how we do it and a lot of things that were being said yesterday about involvement of the congregation and having a plan and having some sort of foresight - all that is here and so I think you might find it useful. You could use it as a discussion starter and I could even think that you might give it as a confirmation gift to some people.
It is good, but particularly important is one chapter about the sermon. I would suggest that you read it because it will do you more good than what I am going to say. It talks about the structure of the sermon, that it should be scriptural, pastoral, liturgical, sacramental and then gives some questions for reflection and discussion which we might think about if we have time in the course of this morning.
It was a long time ago that I was in theological college, even before Robert Runcie was Principal of Cuddesdon, (and mercifully I had left before he arrived). Edward Knapp-Fisher was Principal in my time. Edward was very austere, very old school, and I remember him saying that when you preach you should not ever look at any of the congregation, you should look at the wall above their heads at the back of the church. Moreover, he said you should never say anything about yourself.
That is not advice I could give now; yet it had more than a grain of sense to it. Maybe there ought to be a little distance at times; maybe we should say ‘I know a man who’ rather than ‘something happened on the way to the pulpit this morning.’
The physical setting: the pulpit, the legilium, the chair, all these must be considered, because the way you preach depends a good deal on the physical setting of the preaching. I have chosen a chair today. Bishops have that opportunity of preaching from the chair and it really does change the dynamic, alters the way the sermon is heard. In my parish a thousand years ago we had the Bishop of Dorking to confirm. He, being very tall, had back trouble as tall people tend to do, and on one occasion he came to confirm and he could barely stand. So we sat him down to do the whole thing, and he did everything from his chair. As it happened there was a lad in a wheelchair, sitting only a few feet away from him. This boy was a bit handicapped, a bit slow, but he was intent on this - he was going to be confirmed. And it developed, did the sermon at this confirmation, into a dialogue between the Bishop and the boy, because as the Bishop spoke the boy was responding, smiling or frowning or looking excited. Bishop Kenneth was fired up by this. It was quite extraordinary. It was one of the most powerful confirmation sermons I have every heard, because it was so intimate. So the setting matters.
Whenever I go to a church I go beforehand into the pulpit and push the reading desk down as far as it will go because I am short, but even if you are not, you need to have the desk as far away from you as you tolerably can (and that depends on such things as the size of print you use for any notes you have and on the angle of the reading desk and the light on it). So often the pulpit light illuminates your belly and doesn’t light your face, which is futile because people hear you through your face. If you can’t see somebody talking to you it is much harder to listen to them. It is perfectly obvious, but they are things that we forget in church and we don’t really do anything about and we can so easily do something about it. We can get the pulpit or legilium or wherever well lit. If it is to be a legilium let it at least be high enough that you can be seen, because if your face cannot be seen people will not hear you, and what on earth is the point of preparing the most brilliant sermon if it is not heard? How shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they hear without a hearing aid? What sort of things do you want in your church? Do you want blooming great microphones and boxes all around the walls? Soon after arriving at St Stephen’s House the squawk boxes came off the walls. There was a loop system installed for the elderly who came, but we had no speakers because to they distance you, make you more remote. You are not able to communicate in the same way as if you were speaking face to face with nothing between you, and therefore the desk should be as low as possible, no unnecessary obstacles between you and the congregation - and if you can be freestanding, if you can walk up and down, try it. Get away from being pinned down.
That depends a great deal on where you prepared to sermon and how well you have prepared it. It is all very well to say you know that we should read the Gospel through the Sunday before, and we should spend a great deal of time on our knees digesting the readings and then decide what we are going to say. Then we will commit it to paper on the Friday or the Saturday morning. That may be a counsel of perfection – it is certainly not the way the parish works, is it? You know very well that in fact you are going to be writing it or preparing it at 1 o’clock on Sunday morning because you have simply not had the time before. We have got to recognise that. If you wrote it late the previous night, you will not be able to put the notes aside and just stand there and deliver it, because you will never finish the blessed thing. That is the trick about writing a sermon in full; it gives you a way to end. The end is the most important thing; ‘Has he finished?’ ‘Yes, he’s finished but he hasn’t stopped’. So whether you have bi-focal, tri-focals, no focals, get someone about your height to stand where you normally stand and go to the back of the church and see if you can see them. If you cannot, then do something about it. Make sure you can be seen.
Then what about the preaching? Are you going to read it – perfectly alright to read a sermon – if you can, read it without necessarily having your face down at the book all the time. Will you deliver it? That is the way we talk about sermons – he delivered the sermon. Like a postman. Or recite it. Or re-tell it as a story, which seems to be what Our Lord is constantly doing. If we want a model for preaching, which we do, we need to go back to Our Lord. We have got a pretty good idea that he did use instances from the things around him and that it appears that even if the Sermon on the Mount was a sermon, it was not very long.
You will need to project. You will have learnt about projecting your voice, but if you haven’t go and find a friendly drill sergeant. I remember not far from here learning in the Air Force about projecting your voice. A little Senior Warrant Officer stood at one end of his pace stick and held the other against the chest of the chap who was saying ‘About turn’ in something like a whisper. Then the S.W.O. himself said it, and the lad bounced off the end of the pace stick, because he was using his whole diaphragm to project. We need to be able to do that. We need to know what we are capable of.
Where is our voice? Is our voice naturally pitched here (a falsetto) or is it actually pitched here (a booming bass) or is it naturally pitched here (a comfortable baritone)? And is it terribly boring because it is always on a monotone, or are we capable of actually using it as if it were what it is - a musical instrument. It sounds daft, but in the bathroom see how deeply you can speak and how lightly you can speak, without it being absolutely mad and over the top - because occasionally you need to do that in a sermon. And the other thing you need to do in a sermon above all is to pause, and the pause should come, (and if you have done any acting you will know this of course), the pause should come …….. before the big word, not after it. Many people make mistakes. Actors when first on stage tend to make the pauses in the wrong places. ‘To be or …… … not to be - that is the question’; not ‘To be or not…..to be’ - at least, to my ear that seems to be right. Try pausing in different places and see how they work and be prepared to make the pause longer than you think is possible. Again if you are learning amateur dramatics you have to learn to stop and count - 3, 4, 5 - and then the word, because otherwise the pause isn’t a pause. You think it is, it feels like it, but it is not.
A sermon is not a written thing that people are going to read and re-read and be able to go back to. It is heard once and only once for the most part, unless you are in the sort of parish where you preach the same sermon every Sunday of the year – it’s the 55th Sunday after Trinity so it is that sermon. Therefore you need the thing that will grab the attention or hold the attention or sustain the attention. ‘Consider the lilies of the field, the birds of the air; they toil not neither do they sow; not a sparrow falls to the ground that your Father in heaven sees it and you are worth much more than a sparrow’. But these are the little things to Our Lord, commonplace things. He doesn’t usually take the big incident - though he does so occasionally - “Those chaps where the tower fell at Siloam the other day and they were all wiped out – do you suppose they were any worse sinners than anybody else? No, they were not”.
Generally speaking, if you take the big overpowering incidents - something that you have seen on television, the beheading of somebody or something absolutely ghastly - if you do that, it will play in the person’s mind and they won’t hear you - because they are conjuring up more images for themselves. You want the small image, the little thing that will sustain. I am going to give you an example of this soon.
And who are you talking to? We have some frightfully clever people in our congregation, and if you want the adults really to hear - and you know this as well as I do - begin by saying ‘Now this morning I hope you will forgive me but I am just going to be talking to the children, so the rest of you can switch off; I am simply saying this for the children’. That sermon is going to be better heard than any other because people bother to listen then - it is at their level, not pitched way above them. If you go to preach at a great London shrine or some famous church, use the commonplace. Do not try to be clever and give them a list of the latest books you have read or quotations from what others have written, because it cuts no ice. It is far better to use the ordinary example. I have preached at Epiphany in Margaret Street ‘On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love sent to me a load of manure’- because she had, that had been my Christmas present that year and I thought it would be good to start with manure in Margaret Street. But I had reputation in my parish church. One of the wardens there would say ‘Ah that was a Percy Thrower sermon’. (You younger ones won’t know who he was, it would be an Alan Titmarsh sermon now). Simply because I gardened a lot, therefore I did take instances from gardening. It is all right I think to have a reputation for being ‘he’s always on about the pub or he is always on about cricket……….’ that is fine, if it genuinely interests you, because your enthusiasm helps them to listen.
You will not have to do many one-off sermons I guess, certainly not as many as I do. The one-off sermon is quite different from the weekly parochial effort. It can be used, re-used and honed and because it is honed and re-used you can more easily do it on the hoof. Confirmation sermons I can generally do walking up and down and talking to the candidates. It is much easier for me because I am doing it regularly and I more or less have picked out the ones that are of some help - though my wife says ‘Oh no not that one again’. You know, I am sure, about the length of sermons and the content of a proper sermon. It should be about 10 minutes, and about God.
So where do we start? Well, we start with scripture, and that generally is the Gospel. In any event, the theme to begin with, I suggest, is the passage you find hardest in the day’s readings. Now I have been hoist by my own petard with this because you will hear later this morning that I have to preach - and I did not know when I came here that I was going to have to do so. I find, though, that I am going to have to preach to you at the midday Mass.
So we start with the difficult passage. Not more than three weeks ago we had for the Gospel ‘the dishonest servant’. Well, what did you do? Did you opt out and go to the Epistle, or did you take that Gospel head-on? I trust you took did the latter.
If you have the New Revised Standard Version – the feminists’ Bible-for-idiots which they have chosen to print in the Common Worship lectionary of the Church of England - you will have had some problems. ‘His master commended the unjust servant’ it says in that translation. Nothing of the sort. ‘O kurios -the Lord – ( not his Lord) commended the unjust servant, - and even if it was not Jesus who commended him, it is possible that ‘Lord’ is chosen deliberately to give some ambiguity and get people really worried. Did he, did Jesus really commend the unjust servant? Well yes he did, because he goes on to say ‘make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness, so that when other things fail, you have …’
So how do you do that one? The way I did it - and this may be a cop out as well, I don’t know - but it does seem to me that in the first part of that Gospel Our Lord is using irony. He is actually saying ‘sin the more that grace may abound’. You know that thing in Paul ‘Oh no, you must not say that, “sin the more that grace may abound”.’ But I think Our Lord is saying just that to them. He is saying ‘They are crafty, these so-and-sos in the world, you have go to be as clever as they are’ - but not for the world’s ends. ‘You cannot serve God and Mammon’ it concludes. But you have got to be at least as adept as any man-of-the world. It is rather like Paul saying ‘You know the runners in the games train like mad just for a wreath, we are going for something far more valuable, so we should be training much harder’. It is that sort of thing Jesus is saying here, I think. I may be wrong but in any case go for the hard reading because in the end it will be rewarding for you if you struggle with it. You will get something out of it if you really work at it. If you have always gone for the easy thing you will always be saying easy and soft things to people.
If you have a problem with the scripture for the day you may be absolutely certain that so will many of the congregation and they will say to you when you’ve tackled it head on, ‘Thank you for that Father, I have always been worried about that, you have helped me understand it’ and that’s good. So take it up. ’If your eye offends you, pull it out, if your hand offends cut it off’. Is that just hyperbole? What about Origen who made a eunuch of himself? And what about Francis of Assisi who, idiot that he was, did exactly what Our Lord said to the rich young man and gave away everything. What a thing to do, how foolish to take Our Lord literally - yet it worked! Maybe we need to make people ready to believe what the scripture actually says, rather than what they would like it to say.
I am going to give you a sermon now, but it is not one of mine - I said I would bring out of my treasure things new and old. This particular treasure is the old thing. You probably have it on your shelves - if you have not, then beg or borrow or somehow get hold of it. ‘Said or Sung’ by Austin Farrer. These are the sermons that Farrer himself chose from his great oeuvres and put together with a number of poems. The poems are also very important. And I thought I would give you this sermon, tell you this sermon, do this sermon with you, not least in this Chapel where we have the icon of the Trinity, because we do get worried, I think, about preaching the Trinity and we find it very hard (certainly I find it very hard), to speak about the relationships within the blessed Trinity. I would be very unlikely to start with a mole but that is where Austin Farrer starts.
‘There can be no doubt that either life is too short or we are too lazy - we know so little and would like to know so much about our fellow creatures. The mole, for example, there’s a quaint and agreeable beast: I have sometimes met him taking a walk, but I have not cultivated his acquaintance. Those who have tell me he is a great one for his dinner; likes a bit every few minutes if he can get it, and if kept waiting ten hours, will lie down and die. Luckily worms are in good supply, especially if one keeps one’s head well down. But to me this is only hearsay: I do not really know any moles, though I have, in my own less subterraneous walk of life, met a sort of social mole, people as dependent on society as the mole was dependent upon his worms; more so, really, because a mole will hold out for nine hours, whereas your real glutton for society is at the end of his tether in one or two. Why, we knew a girl who had to take her bath with the crack of the door open, so she could still be talking to her friends. When her mother objected to manicure in the drawing-room and drove her upstairs to do her nails, she had to sit half out of the bedroom window so she could talk to the gardener below.
You think I am going to blame this sort of character? You are wrong; I am not going to blame it at all. Our souls, like the poor mole’s body, die away when they have no humanity to feed upon; and there would be little to say against that girl’s plan of life, if only humanity would stand up to the test. The trouble is, that we are always enjoying our friends by the direct method, we such them, and they such us, dry. Presently we begin to grate against the empty bottoms of one another’s minds; we are sharing between us precisely nothing; or perhaps trivial amusements, which we might just as well be sharing with any one else; it does not matter with whom; for such purposes every one’s the same.”
He talks then about needing to hold people at arm’s length, and get stimulated by reading instead… and even our dear friends we would sometimes rather pray for than see… but whether reading, talking or praying, “we get our mouth full on mankind; and mankind is our proper food. Some men become monks, but very few monks become solitaries … few hearts can like simply on what our creed calls ‘Communion of saints’. Most of us need a full flesh diet; we want faces, voices, hands; a short fast from these will kill us. We have not been created to lift our noses much above the surface of our mother earth.
Humanity is my natural food, but you my God, have said a divine grace for it; you have blessed it, in your own body and blood, the body and blood of man, and given it me to eat. You have taught me to seek, and to find, yourself, in all men; whatever I can truly love in them will all be you. Increase my hunger, famish my heart, threaten me with hourly fainting and daily death, that I may put my lips to the river of life and drink, may eat the bread of life, and fill my soul with good. For you are the good in all our good, the nourishment in our meat, the warmth in our sunlight … Grant us so to walk in the strength of God-given bread, that we may come to the everlasting feast, there to drink the light of your countenance, and be filled with the society of your saints, O Lord our God.”
Now that is about a third of the way into the sermon and we have moved on from considering the mole to speaking directly to God. A very bold thing to do that in a sermon - Farrer is preaching to us as he speaks to God. The mole which has to be constantly fed he takes as typical of us in the human community, always needing the bread of human companionship, but needing much more the Bread of Immortality.
“You fulfil all our hunger, you are the bread of our life and yet on earth you hungered for our sakes. Your disciples called you to eat but ‘I have meat’ you answered ‘that ye know not of; my meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work.’ What is this? The Son nourishes his heart on the Father’s good pleasure; the Father’s work is meat and drink to his Only Begotten, he who is God himself feeds upon God. Always turning to his Father with an infinite hunger, he everlastingly receives an infinite satisfaction; for the whole Spirit of the Father pours into the Son, and in so doing becomes the Son’s own Spirit”
And so we move to the icon of Trinity. This is an extraordinary passage: “For this is the way of the Holy Ghost, that he becomes the Spirit of those he indwells, and moulds himself upon the form of their life. This is precisely what ‘indwelling’ really means. No one supposes that, when the Spirit indwells us he takes up a local habitation in some corner of us, like a lodger in a house – No, what is meant is that his action becomes the soul of our action, his mind the soul of our thought: he shapes himself to us so that he may shape us to himself”. [Which almost quotes Augustine, ‘He became what we are that we might become what He is’] “A human act is performed, a human life is lived, a human aspiration aroused, and yet all this is the very act, and life, and love of God in us. And it is no different when a far ampler vessel than your heart or mine receives the Spirit of God – when the vessel is great enough to receive the whole of the Spirit, for the vessel is the divine Son. It is the Spirit of the Father, the act and love of the Father which lives in him, and yet it is the whole purpose of the Spirit’s indwelling of the Son that he should act in the Son, and as the Son. The Father gives his Spirit to the Son, but what he gives he really does give and make over, to live the life of the Son and to be his. The Son, receiving this gift, feeds his love for the giver, and in the Father’s bounty experiences the Father who bestows it. For, as we began by saying, man feeds his soul on God-in-Man, but the food of God is nothing but God.
And now we come to the greatest mystery of all, that the Father himself feeds his life and love with his Son. It seems that, possessing the fullness of all life, and the heart of all joy, he needs nothing beyond himself; and this is true; he needs nothing beyond himself and yet, to enjoy himself, he puts himself before himself in an answering face; the Father feeds his eyes upon the Son in whom he is well pleased and whom his love perpetually begets; nor will he satisfy his love by contemplation; he completes it in union, pouring his Spirit into his Son that he may live in him by the Spirit, and be the very love of his heart.
About such things as these we talk not because we can speak rightly because it is impossible to keep silence: we must try to praise what is best, especially on the feast of this glorious and undivided Trinity. The mystery of a divine love above all worlds dazzles our eyes and paralyses our tongues and if you did not understand what I have just said don’t be downcast you are no worse case than I am. I did not understand it myself: yet what I do not understand is what alone I can adore. Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God who is and was and is to come, the almighty love.”
It goes on for another page or so. It is a tour de force, it seems to me, and he had this tremendous gift, did Austin Farrar, taking the most profound truths of the Gospel and making them accessible. If someone was lost as I was [and I didn’t even read it to you properly], well, that is alright because we have still got the moles, the mole which needs constantly feeding as we need constantly feeding with God - so that is alright. The mole stays with us even when the inter-penetration of Father, Son and Spirit is beyond us: because it must be beyond us and you can only put it down in paint or poetry or music. You cannot comprehend it. That’s O.K. But you do try to convey it, and it won’t always get across, and Austin says that, too. He knows it is not getting across, he knows much of it is too heavy to swallow at once. The virtue of his sermons was that these were preached mostly at Pusey House, and they were there in full text, available for everybody who had been to church straight afterwards - and they are there in a hard cover as well. So you can go back to the sermon and work through it. But even when we have done that, the thing that you remember is that little – what shall we call it? It is not an illustration – it is that little sustaining principle of the sermon. Now to get that I find is the most difficult thing, to discover the thing which will uphold and penetrate the whole sermon and illuminate it so that people can grasp it. The blind mole, constantly feeding, bears the message of the Trinity.
When I brought this book in, Fr Stephen said ‘Are you going to give them Cherry Stones?’ Cherry Stones is a little story about the All Soul’s examination - I commend it to you. It starts with, “When I was a young man I devoutly used to believe that fellows of All Souls were selected by a simple test. They were given cherry pie to eat. If they spat the stones they were disqualified for boorishness, and for smoothness if they swallowed them. The serious competition lay between those who, with various degrees of elegance, got the cherries into their throats and the stones into their spoons”. He was preaching to undergraduates of course. There is another one which begins, “The sermon I am going to preach to you came to me ready made - it drove into the front Quadrangle where I happened to be standing – drove in on four wheels, and came to a stop in front of my nose; a brisk little van with this inscription painted on its doors, ‘Crosses and wreaths made to order’.” And then he expands on this whole thing that we want our crosses made to order. We want a blooming great cross – oh, if only God would give me something enormous to bear - instead of having to put up with my next door neighbour. And little modest wreaths. We just want something modest, we don’t want to be too showy; and in fact he gives an enormous wreath. Then that he continues with a vision. In some ways it seem to enlarge on the poem “The World” by Henry Vaughan “I saw eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm as it was bright…” Or it may be that he had in mind Richard Crashaw’s poem, “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa”. ‘Thou shalt look round about, and see/ Thousands of crowned souls throng to be/ Themselves thy crown’. In his vision, Farrer sees this and asks how it is possible that he is going to wear this wreath, this wreath of glory – “But on nearer approach what had seemed a wreath for the head appeared now as a wide circle of light, such as we sometimes admire in the clouds round the moon. Still more nearly seen, the clouds were revealed as hosts of heavenly witnesses, blessed saints, on who rays from the centre broke, and were reflected in the form of a shining crown. The newcomer thought with relief, ‘After all, I do not have to wear this crown; I way lose myself among the myriads who make it up’. He dropped into his place among old friends, and was at peace. But he was no sooner there than his mind slipped away from him, and flew into the heart of that glory which sat throned in the midst, a glory in whose body there were five wounds, like sun-spots in the body of the sun. United with the centre from which all love goes forth, and to which all love returns, he felt the whole wreath of light, the company of the saints, pressing round him; and so he wore the crown, the crown of which he was himself a part, and which no cross of his had merited”. To get to this from a brisk little flower-van is an act of genius, and we shall seldom achieve such a transition – but it is worth trying, worth stretching ourselves sometimes as we attempt a more daring sermon than usual.
Just to show, I will give you just something that came my way the other day when I was preaching for a school. I hate preaching for schools, and this was ‘Founders and Benefactors’. There were the great and the good of Bedford, with Mayors and Corporations and all those things, and there were kids from the prep school up to the top, you know, everybody there and it’s all desperately pompous. ‘Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us’ was the reading - only they would use a modern translation. They had had, it appears, some very famous men in Bedford. They ran off a list of benefactors from the 14th century burghers through Edward VI (who actually made money from the dissolution of the monasteries and then graciously re-founded in his own name schools which had previously been monastic foundations) and on to the present day. ‘So’, said I, ‘we are not going to praise famous men. We have done enough of that already. I’m going to praise my father who begat me – for he was a submariner. I thought of him because of this business with the submarine which Britain had sold, supposedly refitted, to Canada. It was in terrible danger in mid-Atlantic this week - you saw pictures of it on TV, rolling around without power. How desperate life must have been on board. One person died and two others were seriously injured. What happened to them was that they changed from being just a scratch crew sent out to bring an old sub back to Canada to being a ship’s company. And what is a ship’s company? It is about the closeness of people, and it is perhaps the biggest lesson that you learn in school. You come as individuals but you become a company. What does company really mean? Company : com - pane – Latin - together, bread. Well company refers to people who take bread together. You do this in school and it builds you up into a company of people - but of course even more important than that is the company of believers. It is ‘therefore with angels and archangels all the company of heaven’ that we worship God’.
I learnt from Austin Farrer the importance of the little image - the bit about submarines might have been too big a picture, but this image of the ship’s company really underpinned that school sermon. You can just hope that the smallest boy will at least take that away, whereas others may gain other things from it. When the image works, it is a happy occasion, but it does not and it can not work week by week - it really can not. There will be times when it the sermon will seem dire, and you feel floored by this having been your worst ever effort, though you drudged and toiled over it. You find yourself thinking in mid-sermon ‘What am I saying?’ And lo and behold, somebody comes up afterwards and says ‘O that was so helpful, I wish I had heard that before – could I have a copy?’. That is what Pope Gregory said - that it starts with us, and with charity towards those we are addressing; but the real work is God’s. We just do the best we can - and that, my dear fathers, is the best I can do for you now.
There is one final clue. Do not, please, bring your sermon to an end by saying ‘Amen’. It means “I agree” – and it is an imposition to ask the congregation to agree with your sermon as if it were a prayer. Even at best, ‘Amen’ at the end of the sermon is a cop-out ending like the public speaker who says ‘thank you’, meaning, ‘That’s it, you can clap now’. At worst, to say Amen at the end is asking to ask for approval. That is not what a sermon is for. You could only say ‘Amen’ if there were an ascription concluding it. To show you what I mean, may I return to Austin’s sermon on the Trinity? Here is how he ends:
‘Mass is done, the congregation departs, and now God scatters the image of his Triune Being through the town; an image now less easy to see, but even more necessary to consider; when each of you goes to his own place, bearing in yourself the person, name, honour and action of the Son of God; moving under the benediction of the Everlasting Father, and quickened by the overflowing Spirit of the Father and the Son.
Blessed Lord, who by an unspeakable mercy and a blood-bought redemption hast made us partakers of thy Sonship, and set us with thee before thy Father’s face; add thy prayers to ours, and ours to thine, and ask for us the boon which will not be denied, the living love, the Holy and life-giving Spirit: to whom, with the Father and thee, be ascribed as is most justly due all might, dominion, majesty and power, henceforward and for ever.’ You could certainly say Amen to that.