Psalmist | hughdbryant

Sermon for Evensong on Sea Sunday, 14th July 2024, at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan

Reading: Psalm 95 https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=587981145

Today is Sea Sunday, the day which many Christian churches throughout the world set aside to remember and pray for seafarers and their families and to give thanks for their lives and work. Charities such as the Mission to Seafarers and the Sailors’ Society conduct fundraisers today.

From our psalm today, Psalm 95:

When we enter into our worship, we remember God as a god of power, this power being expressed in the mighty ocean:

‘For the Lord is a great God: and a great King above all gods.

In his hand are all the deep places of the earth:

and the heights of the mountains are his also.

The sea is his and he made it’.

The Psalmist never forgot the forces of the sea:

‘There go the ships: there is that leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein’. It’s Psalm 104. The great sea monster, Leviathan; nobody knows what Leviathan was like, except perhaps that he might have been a bit like the Loch Ness monster. Nobody could contradict that.

Jesus’ disciples were fishermen. They were mariners; they were seamen on the sea of Galilee, which some people slightly belittle by calling it just a lake. But it was surely a place where storms could get up and the power of the waves was able to strike terror into the seafarers. The story of Jesus stilling the storm comes in all the three synoptic gospels, Matthew Mark and Luke: ‘Who can this be,’ said the disciples, ‘when even the wind and the sea obey him?’

I’m always impressed by the amount of travelling which went on even in biblical times, even though there weren’t any aeroplanes, motor-ships, trains or cars. Nevertheless, arguably the greatest Christian disciple, Saint Paul, was nothing if not a great traveller. In our lesson today, in the New Testament lesson from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, he is writing to the Romans explaining why he hasn’t come to see them yet, but reflecting on the fact that he has been on a mission to visit all the Christians who had not already been visited by others of the disciples as they spread the good news of the Gospel.

Paul travelled through Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey, Macedonia, Greece and Rhodes, and when he eventually did set off for Rome, he was shipwrecked in Malta, but eventually he did make it to Rome. Pretty impressive travelling – and most of it was done by sea.

And talking about maritime matters in the Bible, we must not forget Jonah and the Whale, which may be rather mythical, but again it illustrates the power of God, as shown in the sea and and in the maritime world. As someone who has been in practice as a maritime lawyer I am particularly partial to the story of Jonah, not because of its physiological and veterinary aspects, but because it illustrates a very early example of the concept of general average, an extraordinary sacrifice made to preserve the ‘maritime adventure’ as a whole, as it is put in the Marine Insurance Act 1906.

And we worship, we make our journey of faith, by ship. How so? You might ask. Look up – not to heaven on this occasion – but just look up to the ceiling of this lovely church. You are sitting in that part of the church which is called the nave, and the nave, that word, comes from the Latin for a ship, navis. If you look up to the roof, the ceiling of the church, you will see that it looks like the upturned hull of a ship. It’s not an accident. The sea is central to our faith.

Today, this year, there is some academic celebration of another sea, the Sea of Faith, the name of the TV series which went out on BBC television in 1984 under that name, Sea of Faith, presented by the great Cambridge theologian and philosopher, Don Cupitt. He took his title from a very well-known poem by Matthew Arnold, the son of Thomas Arnold, the first headmaster of Rugby School.

Matthew was at some time a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and he retired to live in Cobham in Surrey. He was briefly churchwarden of St Andrew’s church there. I rather warm to him, not necessarily because of the excellence of his poetry, but because my elder daughter went to Rugby; I went to Oriel; I lived for 30 years in Cobham; and I too was churchwarden at St Andrew’s. I feel we have something in common!

Possibly Matthew Arnold’s best known poem is called Dover Beach. I’ll read it to you.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

‘The Sea of Faith …. Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world’. He wrote that in 1867. The ‘sea of faith’, he thought, was retreating in the face of the rise of secularism and modern science. Well, that’s 150 years ago and we’re still here. We still debate the ideas which Don Cupitt among others promulgated in the 1960s.

That new understanding of our relationship with God, and our understanding of God himself, led to the other great theological text of the 1960s, Bishop John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’. It gave people who were beginning to be put off the Christian faith, because they found it difficult to reconcile with modern scientific understanding, it gave them a way of making sense of faith, without them having to believe in things which they had come to think of as nonsensical.

That’s for another day and another sermon, I expect. My point today is simply that it’s a good idea to look at our faith and to reflect on God against a maritime background from time to time. Our God is the God who ‘made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is.’ [Exodus 20:11] When we pray, perhaps we should be asking whether we have ‘permission to come aboard’. I think that we can be confident that, as we embark on this boat, we are welcome. Welcome aboard! Amen.

Sermon for Evensong with the Prayer Book Society on Saturday 16th November 2019

Daniel 7:15-28; Revelation 9:13-21 – see http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=440816069

Earlier this week, some of us were here in this Founder’s Chapel at Charterhouse, also under the auspices of the PBS, for the competition to select candidates to go forward to the finals of the Cranmer Awards in February next year at the Bishop’s Palace in Worcester. Thanks to Revd Chris Hancock’s excellent organising efforts and Fr Tom Pote of Holy Trinity, Guildford encouraging four good students to enter, we had a very good selection of six candidates, four juniors and two seniors, who had to read passages from the Prayer Book and from the Authorised Version of the Bible, which in the final they have to memorise and deliver by heart.

Everybody did really well and we are putting forward from the Guildford Branch two very strong candidates. Competitors in the competition can choose the passages which they use, and because the competition aims to look for people who can bring out the richness of the language in the Prayer Book and the excitement of it, it’s a good idea to find passages which are in themselves dramatic and colourful. So, for example, the conversion of St Paul (Acts 9:1-19) was one passage used and another was the reluctant wedding guests, where one who turned up improperly dressed was cast out into the outer darkness where there is ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’. (Matt. 22:1-14)

We all love the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of the Bible for many things but especially for the spiky and memorable words. I don’t know how young I was when I first registered the idea of weeping and gnashing of teeth – possibly at the time when my milk teeth were falling out, the whole idea of gnashing them was even more exciting.

Today’s lessons are cases in point. They are fanciful, metaphorical, colourful evocations of things which no one could literally experience. Prof. John Barton, in his splendid book ‘A History of the Bible’, [J. Barton, 2019, A History of the Bible, London, Allen Lane, at p 369], has pointed out that the mythical animals which you meet in Daniel chapter 7 (just before the passage which was our lesson this afternoon), a lion with eagle’s wings, and a leopard with ‘wings of a fowl’ and four heads, are not animals which anyone could meet in a zoo.

Fr Etienne Charpentier, in his commentary on Daniel ch 7, [E. Charpentier, translated by John Bowden, 1982, How to Read the Old Testament, London, SCM Press, at pp 90-91] has observed that the second half of the Book of Daniel, from chapter 6 onwards, and the whole of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine at the end of the New Testament are what is known as apocalypses; uncoverings, literally, from the Greek ὰποκαλυπτειν, ‘taking the cover off’, literally; the Latin translation of that Greek word being ‘revelare,’ taking the veil off, revealing, so, Revelation.

We have come to use the word apocalypse to connote a catastrophic end, possibly the end of the world. But this is not the whole story. Certainly in the Bible, in Daniel and in the Book of Revelation, the intention is to give a glimpse into heaven, a glimpse of the Divine at work. But this glimpse is not in the sense of a learned work of history or a Panorama documentary, but rather a metaphor, a myth, a picture of something which we cannot see. Charpentier writes, ‘History is thought to unfold in a straight line, the end of which is hidden in God’s secret.’

Saint Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13, speaks of seeing through a glass, darkly [v12], and contrasts that with the clear vision which will come with the coming of the Kingdom. We are not intended to take these things literally. We shouldn’t have nightmares about lions with wings or a beast with iron teeth. Remember that Daniel is supposed to be having his dreams and encountering the powers of evil at the time of the Persian Kings Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Darius, who cast him into the den of the lions, at the time of the exile in Babylon in the sixth century BC, whereas in fact he was writing about 165BC, at the time of the Maccabees, the great Jewish revolt against king Antiochus IV’s attempt to impose Greek religion on the Jews by force.

The historical context when these books were written is very interesting. It gives us a clue why we should still consider them as relevant to our life today. They were written at times of danger, strife, when people were worried about the future, threatened by external forces, not sure what the right thing to do should be, and in particular how to deal with earthly powers opposed to the ways of God.

Who are these four kings in Daniel, and who are the forces, a third of whom are wiped out in the vision in Revelation? They are mythical forces; but perhaps we can identify them down the ages with particular cases where faithful people have turned to the Bible for guidance and inspiration in their own times of trouble. As one scholar has written, ‘To uphold his people’s hope in dramatic times, God lifts the veil which hides the end, revealing the happy outcome to history as a result of God’s victory.’ This is the theology of apocalypse.

If we are looking for signs of the apocalypse today, you will not need me to add to the chorus of voices shouting the odds about our contemporary situation, with our general election, all the problems of the NHS, the need for food banks and the continuing consequences of the Brexit referendum. If we are looking for signs of an apocalypse, we might class the signs of climate change as ‘apocalyptic’ more than anything else.

What to do in the face of all this? The spiky words of the Prayer Book are very helpful. We pray the Collects; and as we use some of the wonderful prayers, ‘for all sorts and conditions of men’, the Book helps us to bring all those men – and women – before the Lord in humility. Let us reflect on how those apocalypses that we have read about, those revelations, visions of heaven, can tell us the true way to that place where true joys may be found.

In the words of the psalmist, in today’s psalms,

‘Defend the poor and fatherless: see that such as are in need and necessity have right.

Deliver the outcast and poor; save them from the hand of the ungodly.’ [Psalm 82] or

‘Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee: in whose heart are thy ways.

Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well: and the pools are filled with water.

They will go from strength to strength …’ [Psalm 84]

I wish you all a blessed Advent time, not too much Election or Brexit stuff, and a very happy Christmas. ‘O how amiable are thy dwellings: thou Lord of hosts!’

Welcome Aboard

Gnashers