Holiness, Wisdom, Love

In 1791, Joseph Haydn came to Oxford to perform a series of concerts. In July, at Encaenia, that year, he was honoured with the degree of Doctor of Music. As a musician, he was much admired in England. Indeed, his first concert at the Holywell Music Room was a complete sell-out. When Haydn was apparently prevented by an opera rehearsal in London from coming to Oxford that evening, the audience broke into a riot. It seems that the audience at the Holywell Music Room was rather less genteel than it is perhaps today. When he came to receive his honorary degree at Encaenia on 8 July, he complained about feeling rather silly in his rather cumbersome and ornate academic gown, and that he had to pay one and a half guineas for the bells of St Mary’s to be rung.

Of course, today we celebrate our Dedication Festival – and if you read the gospel for today, note that Jesus arrives on a wintry day for the Festival of Dedication in Jerusalem. The Greek word for the ‘Festival of Dedication’ is ἐγκαινια, which may be rather more familiar to us in its English form, Encaenia. I don’t know, whether our musicians, when they selected a work of Haydn to mark our Dedication Festival, were aware of this curious connection between Haydn and Oxford, but it seems particularly fitting that we pay this little homage to Haydn, as we dedicate a new chamber organ to enhance our worship and to contribute towards the flourishing of the arts in our city. It is worth saying that the last eighteen months have been particularly challenging for musicians, and it is a joy to have the choir back at full strength after a period when we have had to find ever more ingenious ways of providing opportunities for our musicians to sing. But today, we shall not only be blessing this new little organ. We will also be putting it through its paces with Haydn’s Little Organ Mass.

At the time of Jesus, the Feast of Dedication was often known as Hannukah. It commemorated and celebrated the victories of the Maccabees – we have been reading about their exploits during Morning Prayer in recent weeks. Remember that in the second century before Christ, the Holy Land had been conquered by a succession of Greek and Syrian kings. In 167 BC, during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrians had profaned the temple by erected an idol of the Greek God Zeus in the Holy of Holies. This act of aggression, this abomination of desolation, came to an end when Judas Maccabaeus drove out the Syrians, built a new altar, and restored the Temple. The Feast of Dedication was the annual celebration of the reconsecration of the altar and the Temple.

But it’s curious to note that when translating the word Hannukah, the Feast of Dedication, John, like others before him, uses the Greek word, ἐγκαινια, which literally means ‘renewal’. So when we gather to celebrate our Dedication Festival here at St Mary’s, we can of course reflect on the glory of this place, the beauty of its architecture, the contribution that it has made to the arts. We can celebrate the restoration of its fabric with the fantastic news announced this week that we have secured £422,000 from the Culture Recovery Fund towards the replacement of the nave roof. But we should also look forward to the future and think about the renewal of our life together.

Recent months have been tough for all of us, but I want to sketch briefly some of the ways in which we need to think carefully about the renewal of our life together. First, we need to commit ourselves to a deeper engagement with the life of prayer. In the course of the last eighteen months, we have perhaps come to a renewed understanding of the importance of the sacraments, particularly the eucharist.

Our Old Testament reading tells the story of Jacob who seeks to run and hide from the presence of God. He is a person much burdened with his own failures, darkened with his own blindness, so that God seems quite hidden from him. There may have been moments in the last eighteen months when we too have experienced the dark night of the soul. But when we come here to celebrate this eucharist with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven – like Jacob, we come to recognise that although there may be an infinite distance between us and God (for God is infinitely different from us in quality and nature and distinct from us in being), we also discover that God is always with us, always surprising us with his presence. By the mystery of incarnation, God by his infinite mercy identifies himself with us, and identifies us with him. We celebrate God’s presence in this place. And when we open our hearts to the mystery of his love, we are transformed into the likeness of Christ.

And in embracing that transformation, we need to cultivate in our life together: holiness, wisdom and love. First, holiness. If we are serious about the renewal of this Christian community, we need to rediscover a proper seriousness about living a holy and devout life. We need to be willing to explore ever more deeply the ethical implications of being transformed into the likeness of Christ so that we may discover the joy of the gospel in its beauty and in its costliness.

Secondly, wisdom. Does not Wisdom call? Wisdom needs to be at the heart of our renewal. One of the things that we perhaps need to articulate more clearly is what it means to be a University Church. How does the pursuit of truth and wisdom inform our life together? How do we draw on the wisdom of our tradition to engage with the questions thrown up by the injustices laid bare by the pandemic, or the threat of climate change? How do we respond when we see our own humanity diminished in the faces of those who suffer discrimination because of their race, their sexuality, their gender, or their disability?

Finally, love. How do we learn to love as Christ has loved us? This involves thinking about our personal relationships, but also the way we relate to one another as a community. One of the things that we will need to think about very carefully in the months ahead is how we renew and rebuild our community. But more than that, we need to remember those words of John’s gospel when he says that ‘God so loved the world’. So often the world is characterised as a bewildering, confusing, even a threatening place. And yet God loves the world unconditionally. If we are to be transformed into the likeness of Christ, if we are to embrace the kind of renewal that restores relationships and brings healing to a broken world, then we cannot shrink from embracing ministries of compassion, feeding the hungry, seeking out the lost, bringing hope to those who feel forsaken.

Of course, we can do none of this by ourselves. We can only do it through the grace of God, that same grace which we receive in this eucharist, which provides nourishment for our souls. And so we gather today to celebrate the Dedication of this Church, to kneel where prayer has been valid for centuries, to pray for our renewal as we look to the future, to celebrate these holy mysteries, to be fed with the bread of angels, and to join with choirs and angels and the whole company of heaven in singing ‘Hosanna in excelsis’. For then, we can say with Jacob, ‘This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven.’