Lincoln College Sunday after Ascension, 2012 'And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves'

(1 Pet. 4.2) Words from our first lesson; may I speak &c.

Because our focus this evening is on the altar, and not the pulpit, I don't speak from the usual position, and you may be glad to know not for the usual length. So, perhaps with more attention to economy than eloquence, a few short reflections on several remarkable things which converge in this evening's service - all of which invite us to respond to St Peter's encouragement for us to 'have fervent charity among ourselves'. In the church's year, this is the Sunday after the Ascension of Christ. The Ascension itself was of course kept just this past Thursday as the rightly jolly occasion it is in the Lincoln calendar. Beating the bounds, tower anthems, hot pennies, and ivy beer are all fitting expressions of joy that on that day Christ was bodily taken up in triumph, first from the grave at Easter, and then, forty days later, to His Father and the whole company of saints in heaven. And those celebrations are so fitting because they are so physical, so bodily. The disciples themselves did not slope away from the scene of the Ascension, depressed at the disappearance of Christ's physical person from them; but, according to Luke's Gospel, 'they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.' In the forty days after his

Resurrection, Christ had schooled his disciples against clinging to his physical person against making their faith simply a matter of attachment. Instead they learned the lessons that He would be just as powerfully, indeed more powerfully, known to them and others by the opening of the Scriptures, and in the breaking of bread - and that they were themselves now the Body of Christ, living branches of the True Vine, and that they woud soon receive the confirming power and comfort of the Holy Spirit. Christs Ascension carried human flesh up to the very height of divinity in Heaven, and faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit would bring the power of the divine down among the human. But that said, these ten days between the Ascension and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost do constitute an almost eerie hiatus, a period of anxious anticipation for the completion of the economy of salvation that stretches from Incarnation at Christmas, to Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, and finally Pentecost. The church focusses thoughts about that in-between phase on this Sunday in the words of the collect, which acknowledges the triumph of the Ascension, but swiftly turns to we beseech thee leave us not comfortless, but send to us thine holy Ghost. And the lesson from St Peters first letter urges us to turn in the meantime to the comfort that is watchful sobriety, prayer, and above all things the charity among ourselves that shall cover a multitude of sins because charity, love alone, is faith in action.

When the disciples departed to Jerusalem after the Ascension, they did so to worship in the Temple, following their traditional rites and customs of corporate woship corporate in the sense of both a corporal act by individuals, but also corporate in the sense of a community of individuals gathered together to do so according to a set form. That is what we also call liturgy. And tonight we honour the inheritance of the liturgy established for worship in the Church of England, the final 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer, which this year celebrates its 350th birthday. It was itself the product of three previous versions, the first and second overseen by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer over one hundred years earlier to provide set forms of worship in English for the reformed church in England. Like the King James Bible, which celebrated its 400th birthday last year, the Prayer Book can attract rather sentimentalised praise but the language of neither is particularly different, much less superior, to other writing of that time, and attachment to it often has more to do with familiarity than qualitative judgment. And the idea that it is should be protected from modernisers at all costs, preserved in hallowed aspic untouched for over three hundred years, would bring down nothing but disapproval from those who compiled it, committed as they were precisely to the immediate, modern, accessibility of the liturgy in a language understanded of the people. But the words of the Prayer Book have seeped into English speaking consciousness more than those from any other book, including the Bible for richer for poorer, for better or for worse, ashes to ashes the prayer

book services that mark the passage of life from baptism to marriage to burial contain phrases used instinctively for generations by millions who otherwise never darkened the door of a church, opened a Bible, or professed a faith. The 1662 Prayer Book should also be a point of pride for particular to Lincoln. It of course gives us a thread of historical continuity in our regular worship, providing as it does for most colleges and cathedrals the quintessentially 'Anglican' service of evensong. But also, just as the King James Bible had as one of its translators our Jacobean rector Richard Kilby, the most significant reviser of the 1662 Prayer Book was an even more distinguished former undergraduate and fellow, Robert Sanderson, who was tutored by Kilby and elected to a fellowship. Sanderson was unanimously admired in College for having no enemies at a time when it was torn by faction; he brought honour to the College by distinguished University service as a Proctor, admired for his pastoral, rather than penal approach to discipline; his lectures on logic, delivered in our Hall, were celebrated when delivered, and when printed became the standard textbook on the subject for over two-hundred years. During the Civil War Sanderson served quietly and patiently as a parish priest in rural Lincolnshire, cautiously changing the words of the prayer book just enough to keep Cromwellian spies happy, and at the Restoration of the monarchy and episcopacy, he became the first - and to date only - member of Lincoln to become Bishop of Lincoln. His reputation for moderation fitted him perfectly for the job of carefully modifying the prayer book

for its reintroduction in 1662. And, fittingly for us tonight as we think about the 350th anniversary of 1662, he died in that very same year. He is, without doubt in my mind, the most distinguished member of this college as yet unrecognised by us with portrait, plaque or naming and in that I see a reminder to us that we too often in Colleges, for obvious reasons, limit our institutional memories to those whose legacies are measured in money. We need to protect a richer sense of what it means to be a benefactor than giving bequests or buildings; Sandersons quiet but powerful example reminds us that giving from what we have been given in this College is often more influential, and more beneficial, when it is given to the wider world. Liturgy, I said, is corporate. It is a corporal act and homage by bodies as well as minds, for liturgy is not something you say, but something you do. And it is an act of individuals coming together as a body, the body of Christ. It also incorporates - even, if you will - incarnates different times. No matter what the version or translation, the liturgies of the Church repeat texts and actions used long before 1662. And the sacrament we celebrate now is one of the most fervent love; we receive God's love for us made manifest in the sacrifice of his Son and its benefits of grace and forgiveness conveyed to us in consecrated bread and wine and that tonight with the added privilege here of doing so together as members of our own much loved corporate body of this College. But even more importantly, this supreme liturgy, this Holy Communion, transcends our temporal bodies and present time and unites us not just to our inherited

religious and corporate past, but also with the eternal we join our voices with angels and archangels' to offer 'together with them and the whole company of heaven our 'sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.' Amen.