Bristol University Sermon by Fr Jack

‘Pro Aris et Focis’

‘for our altars and our hearths’

The Wills family motto

St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians 15.1-11

St Luke’s Gospel 18.9-14

Firstly I should apologise for wearing a hood that is not of this great university… I left here for Sheffield, and bought that hood when I knew that I would never - blessedly - sit another exam. But it does feel rather silly to be here in South Yorkshire green and pink, not Bristol burgundy.

Anyway, forgive me.

Although my friends with whom I was here at Brizzle would be the first to tell you that I barely merited the Bristol burgundy, having spent most of my time dedicated to other things that began with B - beer and the bar here at Wills that I helped to run. Bond - I read the entire canon of James Bond whilst at Wills, mostly in the lovely big enamel bathtubs at the top of the old quad staircases. (I was a history undergraduate you understand, so I didn’t have anything else to read, or so I imagined). And a final B: Birds of Baldwin Street - the wonderful tobacconist run by the chain smoking Mr Bird (presumably now called home to glory considering how much he smoked). I spent most of my student loan there over my three years.

So really (never mind the wrong hood) I have no learning to justify myself as the preacher here this morning. Luckily, Cranmer’s genius in Prayer Book Mattins, St Paul’s Epistle and our Lord Jesus Christ Himself are not constrained by my lukewarm abilities.

This morning in the first lesson St Paul invites us in his usual enthusiastic manner to be faithful to that which we have received. He is talking about the Gospel of course: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

And I heartily recommend this approach to life, obviously. Nothing matters more, is more true, or as much of an adventure as doing life wholeheartedly with Christ. I began to discover that right here in this chapel. So it’s lovely to be back.

But we can also hear St Paul’s enthusiasm and wisdom - be faithful to that which you have received - for this university: to pray that we would be faithful to the high ideals of the academy, and the delight and seriousness of learning. (Unlike me aged 18).

One of the mistakes we’ve made in recent centuries in the West, it seems to me, is to divorce the disciplines one from another, and divorce them from common life, and from worship. We have put subjects in insulated boxes as if people and ideas only exist in such slithers; which of course we don’t. Physics and philosophy belong together. Biology and theology  belong together. Likewise, to pursue learning in communities of learning, sharing the great and the petty things of life with other humans. Meals, conversations, random moments, and the bigger rhythms and seasons of life - this the soil in which humans and scholarship flourish. And best of all when that rhythm is held by the round of worship. The recitation of the psalms and lessons, choral services, Holy Communion. That spaciousness that comes from turning up to worship, and being held in connection together with that which is greater than us. The lab, the seminar room, the refectory and the chapel - parts of the same whole. This healthy balance of scholarship, community and worship, has been too quickly dismantled, and more is lost than we realise.

And (back to St Paul’s call to faithfulness) for ourselves, perhaps being renewed in being faithful to that which we each received whilst here at Brizzle. It will be different for each of us. Perhaps it was learning to think (I think that’s what I learnt here), or to write. Or gaining some definite mastery of our subject. Perhaps we fell in love or found a vocation, or the doorway to adulthood. Or any number of those things and other things. What did you receive? Good, bad or indifferent, I wonder, that you wish to be faithful to?

I must admit I shudder slightly thinking of myself here. As I said, I didn’t make the most of the academic opportunities, and on a personal level was a pretty dreadful oik, I think. I was a mass of confusion and unresolved development which I inflicted on everyone around me. Not my finest hour.

Thank God for the hymns we have today. For all my teenage angst, whatever your story here, or since here… nothing can stop the resurrection of Jesus - that’s how we began: ‘ thine be the glory’

And then our other two hymns have a wonderful sense of God being on the journey with us. We don’t have to be the finished article, we never are. God is with us for the long haul. Our hymns today remind us that God commits to us, all we need to do is be stubborn enough to stick with Him. As John Wesley famously said on his deathbed ‘the best of all, is God is with us’.

So to today’s second lesson. The beautiful humility of the tax collector (publicanus). Despite a life spent betraying his own people and corruptly extorting the poor unfortunates in his way, this publican is faithful to that which he has received because he comes back. He comes home to God’s mercy and asks for a fresh start.

And that, more than any learning, more than anything else we have received is really (of course) the bedrock to which we are invited to be faithful; that which we have received being God’s eternal mercy and love.

The Wills family built this hall and so much of this university and city. Their motto is ‘for our altars and our hearths’.

It speaks of what we value, what we long for. From their tobacco fields in far-flung countries, what home do we hold in our hearts. Decades on from our student days (whether they were the best years of our lives, or, as in my case, a bit clunky) what hearth, what altar do they represent in our sense of ourselves?

Some of us will have seen Christopher Nolan’s epic Odyssey in the cinema recently. It poses similar questions of where our home is (our altars and hearths), what do we seek, what do we long for? Where is our true place? And therefore who is our true self?

The trust and humility and home coming to God of the publican is a shining example for all of us no matter our story.

Odysseus or publican, undergraduate or very long since graduate, we find in the publican and in St Paul’s call to faithfulness that the hearths and altars we are called to live for are not nostalgic places, or anything as passing or temporal, but a call to relationship. A truer home than any other could ever be. That’s why I was ranting about with the scholarship and common life and worship, because it’s not just true in the academy. It’s true for all of us. Worship, community, and all our endeavours are interwoven in a life that is connected, plugged in to the true fundament (that our readings together give us today)

Because, friends, it is the greatest of adventures: the human vocation of sharing life with God and other people. In joys and pains, seasons that come and go, and through it all, the invitation (as the publican so insightfully realises) to relationship in God’s mercy and love, the gift of Gospel that can never leave us. And that always calls us home.