Recent Sermons
Sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral at the Eucharist on 27th June, The Fourth Sunday after Trinity, by The Rt Revd Dr David Stancliffe, Bishop of Salisbury
"CELEBRATING SARUM COLLEGE 150TH ANNIVERSARY"
Whether you are building a football team or a cathedral, the same techniques apply: begin at the bottom. Communities, teams and structures dropped out of thin air don’t stand up. I’ve learnt that top-down doesn’t work.
As I walk down the cathedral’s nave, and look at the stressed curves in the great Purbeck shafts supporting the crossing tower above my head, I can’t help but remember that the cathedral’s foundations are only a metre deep, set on a firmly compacted bed of gravel – a myriad of tiny stones. That’s where the stability comes from, and on this foundation, the cathedral’s survived 750 years, even with the additional weight of the spire on top.
But partly because we’re so used to thinking of the extraordinary spire, we don’t always notice that there are two churches here, one on top of another. Look up for a moment and see how the upper church, a richer and more decorated space with its carved heads, springing foliage and criss-crossing vaults sits on top of the plainer columns and arches of the nave and aisles; and look how strong a horizontal band there is at the triforium level, marking the division. In these more utilitarian days, the upper church would be thought ‘a waste of space’, and people would suck their teeth about how much it costs to heat it. But our forebears didn’t do convenience buildings: they built to remind people that there was a world beyond the practical and utilitarian, and that if we set the glass ceiling too low, we would never grow into what we were meant to be. St Irenaeus, whom we honour tomorrow, was just such a bottom-up theologian: the Glory of God is a human person, fully alive, he said. We start with what we’ve got, and build upwards. Out of the day-to-day stuff of human life emerges the glint of gold – of heavenly potential. But it all starts here.
Our cathedral was created by architects who understood that space is not meanly functional, but is crying out to be inhabited: this building evokes the hope of harmony and the pattern of praise. The foundation of our song is the ancient chant of the church – the Kyries, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer; what inhabits the upper church – the realm of the angels – is the harmonic reverberations, whether graced by the acoustics or written out by our composers. While any sounds bloom in the building, as they do so evocatively at the Advent Processions when it’s lit only from a low light-source and the sound grows from a corresponding simplicity of plain-chant, I believe that it’s the late medieval elaboration on the chant that brings the two parts of our cathedral into proportion best. Is there a better complement to this twin building than John Sheppard’s Libera nos, salva nos, justifica nos, O beata Trinitas? Just as the elaborate triforium and the vault that springs from it—the expression of heaven above—is carried on the cathedral’s sober nave with its shafted, but plain, columns, so the plainsong cantus firmus on which Sheppard’s composition is based is carried in slow notes in the bass voice which provides the foundation for two tenors, two altos, and two high trebles which weave an elaborate imitative structure, echoing the soaring ribs of the vault above. That is how music inhabits a temple like this, and makes it come alive as a space where the earthly and heavenly are welded into an equal music. Some of Olivier Messiaen’s organ music – les Mages from La Nativité for example – does the same thing. But just listen to the Sheppard with its bottom-up structure.
The Choir sings Sheppard: Libera nos
It won’t have escaped you that the text of that piece begins with the words: Libera nos: free us. In the opening verse of Chapter 5 of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, our first reading this morning, you heard: ‘For freedom Christ has set us free.’ Our feet, like our buildings and the cantus firmus of that plainchant, need to be set on the ground: we are to be rooted and grounded in the reality of our human experience. But we are to be free – free to look up and out and beyond the limits of our pre-set horizons to see the shape, the harmonic pattern of what God is doing.
So although Jesus in the Gospel acknowledges that foxes have holes, and exhorts his followers to leave the dead to bury their dead, what caused the scandal is that his face was set towards Jerusalem: he looked up and out to the possibility of transformation, to that promise of radical change where people are exploring the harmony of heaven and are no longer satisfied with the imposition of a flat, earthbound unison and wouldn’t be distracted.
When so many are puddling about in the sticky mess of the inessential, ‘Don’t get stuck there,’ is what our gospel and our cathedral builders set as the agenda: how are we responding?
We can trace our response down the years from Bishop Poore’s vision of a new kind of cathedral. Here, on the green-field site, an open cloister where you taught as you walked (like an Athenian stoa) replaced the enclosed and inward-looking or defensive structure of the Benedictine foundation on Old Sarum. Bishop Poore’s new cathedral, with its secular canons, was to share his responsibility to teach the faith and grow the church. Its liturgy, using these vast spaces to pattern the community in the divine life, had a weekly patterning of ‘going up to Jerusalem:’ every Sunday, the community in procession made a circuit of the lesser altars and the graveyard before making a dramatic entry through the west doors, passing through the gate of Jerusalem which the turreted screen of the west front provided.
But the formation was not only physical and liturgical, though we do well to remember the power of repeated liturgical patterning; it was also intellectual and spiritual. In Edmund Rich’s time as Canon Treasurer, the scholars began to flock here from the Isis, and had he not been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, we might well have become Oxford. Since then there have been repeated educational and formational ventures on the spot. When Bishop Kerr Hamilton re-founded the Theological College here 150 years ago he was only doing what all bishops seek to do – to nurture a passion for study and to attend to the formation of the church – especially its ministers.
First Salisbury, then Salisbury Wells, then Sarum College have carried and then broadened this responsibility; and we salute the continuing venture to pursue the truth by every means possible. I only wish that Bishops of Salisbury today had the wealth of their mediaeval predecessors, or even that of Bishop Van Mildert of Durham in 1832, and we could have re-founded the University here.
But this not an enterprise for Sarum College on its own: it’s a venture shared with their resident partners – STETS and the RSCM – and above all with the College of Canons of the cathedral. The whole enterprise here models and extends the way in which the bishop teaches; never on his own, using the first person singular, but always collegially, saying ‘we’, and meaning it. Another Communion does it differently! So this is an opportunity to thank all our partners in this enterprise, and to celebrate this diversity: it is at the heart of what the Christian Community is called to be. We aren’t peddling a single, flat propositional correctitude: we are exploring the harmonic structure of the song of heaven in all its variety.
But how are we to extend it? As well as waiting here for people to be drawn to this iconic building, this teaching enterprise, our formational pattern of the offering of worship as the bedrock of our common life, what are we set free to enterprise, to try out, to explore? The apostolic mission of the church works both with those who are drawn into our life – and frequently the sustaining of that life is so absorbing that it seems to demand all our energy and attention – and also with those who live, quite happily for the most part, outside it. We know that God is active in the whole of his creation, and that his energy is not absorbed by or confined to what goes on in church, what is recorded in the pages of scripture, or those peaks where we celebrate the vividness of the changes that he is working in what we name as sacraments. But if we can safely leave the dead to bury their dead – shades of the message to the women who went early to the tomb and were met with that key question: ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?’ – who are we to get on and engage with?
The challenge to those who choose to worship regularly here is just that – to make sure that those who come here not entirely clear about what they are looking for find it’s not a tomb where lifeless perfection lies embalmed, but rather a womb where life is being nurtured. The challenge to those of us who float in and out of this two-tier experience of church is to discern the upper stage, the shape of things to come, the transforming of our daily lives. ‘For freedom Christ has set us free,’ and the letter to the Galatians goes on to spell out what that may look like. ‘Don’t use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love be servants of one another.’ And after listing the fruits of the Spirit St Paul concludes: ‘If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.’
The upper reaches of our humanity, the golden glints in our human nature, are not disclosed so much by what we do, but by who we are; it’s not the nouns of our life but the adverbs, that way we do things, that discloses heaven in our midst.
We can spend our energies on the constructs of our life; on the mechanisms of communion or the structures of our courses; we can assess our clergy by the list of their achievements or the number of courses they have taken; we can secure a tick in every box in our health and safety assessments, and yet live a joyless life. What counts – certainly as far as how people experience our attempts to live by the Spirit is concerned – is the quality of our attention, our joy and delight in living the gospel, and the depth of our love.
Do you focus on people attentively? Or is your eye always wandering in search of the more important person you want to meet? Do you live joyfully and expectantly in the expectation of being changed? Or are you irritated by anything that interrupts the pre-set pattern you have planned? Do you love deeply? Or are you afraid of the risk – for you never know where the spark may fall.
This is where heaven begins, in the fragile and imaginative webs spun over the solid piers that reach up into the sky; in this and every celebration of the sacrament the ordinary stuff of life becomes the food of angels; and we are transformed into what we are called to be, children of God, made in his image.
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As I walk down the cathedral’s nave, and look at the stressed curves in the great Purbeck shafts supporting the crossing tower above my head, I can’t help but remember that the cathedral’s foundations are only a metre deep, set on a firmly compacted bed of gravel – a myriad of tiny stones. That’s where the stability comes from, and on this foundation, the cathedral’s survived 750 years, even with the additional weight of the spire on top.
But partly because we’re so used to thinking of the extraordinary spire, we don’t always notice that there are two churches here, one on top of another. Look up for a moment and see how the upper church, a richer and more decorated space with its carved heads, springing foliage and criss-crossing vaults sits on top of the plainer columns and arches of the nave and aisles; and look how strong a horizontal band there is at the triforium level, marking the division. In these more utilitarian days, the upper church would be thought ‘a waste of space’, and people would suck their teeth about how much it costs to heat it. But our forebears didn’t do convenience buildings: they built to remind people that there was a world beyond the practical and utilitarian, and that if we set the glass ceiling too low, we would never grow into what we were meant to be. St Irenaeus, whom we honour tomorrow, was just such a bottom-up theologian: the Glory of God is a human person, fully alive, he said. We start with what we’ve got, and build upwards. Out of the day-to-day stuff of human life emerges the glint of gold – of heavenly potential. But it all starts here.
Our cathedral was created by architects who understood that space is not meanly functional, but is crying out to be inhabited: this building evokes the hope of harmony and the pattern of praise. The foundation of our song is the ancient chant of the church – the Kyries, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer; what inhabits the upper church – the realm of the angels – is the harmonic reverberations, whether graced by the acoustics or written out by our composers. While any sounds bloom in the building, as they do so evocatively at the Advent Processions when it’s lit only from a low light-source and the sound grows from a corresponding simplicity of plain-chant, I believe that it’s the late medieval elaboration on the chant that brings the two parts of our cathedral into proportion best. Is there a better complement to this twin building than John Sheppard’s Libera nos, salva nos, justifica nos, O beata Trinitas? Just as the elaborate triforium and the vault that springs from it—the expression of heaven above—is carried on the cathedral’s sober nave with its shafted, but plain, columns, so the plainsong cantus firmus on which Sheppard’s composition is based is carried in slow notes in the bass voice which provides the foundation for two tenors, two altos, and two high trebles which weave an elaborate imitative structure, echoing the soaring ribs of the vault above. That is how music inhabits a temple like this, and makes it come alive as a space where the earthly and heavenly are welded into an equal music. Some of Olivier Messiaen’s organ music – les Mages from La Nativité for example – does the same thing. But just listen to the Sheppard with its bottom-up structure.
The Choir sings Sheppard: Libera nos
It won’t have escaped you that the text of that piece begins with the words: Libera nos: free us. In the opening verse of Chapter 5 of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, our first reading this morning, you heard: ‘For freedom Christ has set us free.’ Our feet, like our buildings and the cantus firmus of that plainchant, need to be set on the ground: we are to be rooted and grounded in the reality of our human experience. But we are to be free – free to look up and out and beyond the limits of our pre-set horizons to see the shape, the harmonic pattern of what God is doing.
So although Jesus in the Gospel acknowledges that foxes have holes, and exhorts his followers to leave the dead to bury their dead, what caused the scandal is that his face was set towards Jerusalem: he looked up and out to the possibility of transformation, to that promise of radical change where people are exploring the harmony of heaven and are no longer satisfied with the imposition of a flat, earthbound unison and wouldn’t be distracted.
When so many are puddling about in the sticky mess of the inessential, ‘Don’t get stuck there,’ is what our gospel and our cathedral builders set as the agenda: how are we responding?
We can trace our response down the years from Bishop Poore’s vision of a new kind of cathedral. Here, on the green-field site, an open cloister where you taught as you walked (like an Athenian stoa) replaced the enclosed and inward-looking or defensive structure of the Benedictine foundation on Old Sarum. Bishop Poore’s new cathedral, with its secular canons, was to share his responsibility to teach the faith and grow the church. Its liturgy, using these vast spaces to pattern the community in the divine life, had a weekly patterning of ‘going up to Jerusalem:’ every Sunday, the community in procession made a circuit of the lesser altars and the graveyard before making a dramatic entry through the west doors, passing through the gate of Jerusalem which the turreted screen of the west front provided.
But the formation was not only physical and liturgical, though we do well to remember the power of repeated liturgical patterning; it was also intellectual and spiritual. In Edmund Rich’s time as Canon Treasurer, the scholars began to flock here from the Isis, and had he not been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, we might well have become Oxford. Since then there have been repeated educational and formational ventures on the spot. When Bishop Kerr Hamilton re-founded the Theological College here 150 years ago he was only doing what all bishops seek to do – to nurture a passion for study and to attend to the formation of the church – especially its ministers.
First Salisbury, then Salisbury Wells, then Sarum College have carried and then broadened this responsibility; and we salute the continuing venture to pursue the truth by every means possible. I only wish that Bishops of Salisbury today had the wealth of their mediaeval predecessors, or even that of Bishop Van Mildert of Durham in 1832, and we could have re-founded the University here.
But this not an enterprise for Sarum College on its own: it’s a venture shared with their resident partners – STETS and the RSCM – and above all with the College of Canons of the cathedral. The whole enterprise here models and extends the way in which the bishop teaches; never on his own, using the first person singular, but always collegially, saying ‘we’, and meaning it. Another Communion does it differently! So this is an opportunity to thank all our partners in this enterprise, and to celebrate this diversity: it is at the heart of what the Christian Community is called to be. We aren’t peddling a single, flat propositional correctitude: we are exploring the harmonic structure of the song of heaven in all its variety.
But how are we to extend it? As well as waiting here for people to be drawn to this iconic building, this teaching enterprise, our formational pattern of the offering of worship as the bedrock of our common life, what are we set free to enterprise, to try out, to explore? The apostolic mission of the church works both with those who are drawn into our life – and frequently the sustaining of that life is so absorbing that it seems to demand all our energy and attention – and also with those who live, quite happily for the most part, outside it. We know that God is active in the whole of his creation, and that his energy is not absorbed by or confined to what goes on in church, what is recorded in the pages of scripture, or those peaks where we celebrate the vividness of the changes that he is working in what we name as sacraments. But if we can safely leave the dead to bury their dead – shades of the message to the women who went early to the tomb and were met with that key question: ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?’ – who are we to get on and engage with?
The challenge to those who choose to worship regularly here is just that – to make sure that those who come here not entirely clear about what they are looking for find it’s not a tomb where lifeless perfection lies embalmed, but rather a womb where life is being nurtured. The challenge to those of us who float in and out of this two-tier experience of church is to discern the upper stage, the shape of things to come, the transforming of our daily lives. ‘For freedom Christ has set us free,’ and the letter to the Galatians goes on to spell out what that may look like. ‘Don’t use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love be servants of one another.’ And after listing the fruits of the Spirit St Paul concludes: ‘If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.’
The upper reaches of our humanity, the golden glints in our human nature, are not disclosed so much by what we do, but by who we are; it’s not the nouns of our life but the adverbs, that way we do things, that discloses heaven in our midst.
We can spend our energies on the constructs of our life; on the mechanisms of communion or the structures of our courses; we can assess our clergy by the list of their achievements or the number of courses they have taken; we can secure a tick in every box in our health and safety assessments, and yet live a joyless life. What counts – certainly as far as how people experience our attempts to live by the Spirit is concerned – is the quality of our attention, our joy and delight in living the gospel, and the depth of our love.
Do you focus on people attentively? Or is your eye always wandering in search of the more important person you want to meet? Do you live joyfully and expectantly in the expectation of being changed? Or are you irritated by anything that interrupts the pre-set pattern you have planned? Do you love deeply? Or are you afraid of the risk – for you never know where the spark may fall.
This is where heaven begins, in the fragile and imaginative webs spun over the solid piers that reach up into the sky; in this and every celebration of the sacrament the ordinary stuff of life becomes the food of angels; and we are transformed into what we are called to be, children of God, made in his image.