The last time I preached from this pulpit, I promised you a sermon about Vaughan Williams, who remains one of the two people I most want to meet in heaven (the other being the author of Ecclesistes). But we have other business today: your Vicar has been here for ten years and we must mark this occasion. There is so much that could be said about Fr Stephen: when I rang him a few weeks ago to check what the lessons were to be for today, he suggested I might want to preach about suffering. ‘Yours or the congregation’s?’ I asked.
Vaughan Williams and suffering. We might come back to them. I suspect not, though, because the readings for this service point us in a different direction. They remind us of two really rather important qualities that need quickening in the life of any Christian: intelligence and colour.
Firstly, the book of Proverbs. Seek wisdom, the writer tells us, have her as your companion and your guide. See her as far more than a mindless obedience to rules and regulations. Know and value wisdom as God’s creation from the beginning of time; receive her instruction and so find life.
Eighty six years ago the poet and theologian Charles Williams was in conversation with a friend who remarked, somewhat despairingly: ‘It is all very well to talk about living the Christian life, but what exactly does that mean? What exactly is one supposed to do?’ Williams replied in six words: ‘Love, laugh, pray and be intelligent’. After a brief pause he added: ‘But we should not, perhaps, try all of them all at the same time; human nature is not yet ready for such felicities’.
It seems to me that all of these qualities, love, laughter, prayer and intelligence, are in dangerously short supply at present in many parts of the contemporary Church of England. The reasons are many, and beyond the scope of one sermon. Suffice it to say that we live in a world, and (God help us) a church, where the banal and the plain stupid are given far too much air time, where philistinism is exalted as a virtue in the name of inclusiveness or comprehensibility, and where any challenge to this state of affairs is seen as elitist. I reject this dangerous nonsense, I always will, and I hope you do too.
Stephen Tucker, thanks be to God, has spent the last ten years giving you the fruits of his intelligence. There are not many priests around at the moment who do that sort of thing, and do it well.
So be thankful. And do not let him go.
And then we had the Book of Revelation, the vision of the rainbow around the throne. Now here’s a thing: have you ever noticed how very colourless the Bible is? There is an awful lot of beige. I discovered the other day that out of the 180,000 words in the Authorised Version of the New Testament, there are only twenty-seven words denoting colour outside the Book of Revelation. White crops up eight times, followed by purple (seven times), red and black (three times each), and two mentions each of gold, green and scarlet. No brown, yellow or blue. Colours are usually mentioned in relation to clothing, there being only two references to the landscape, one to the sky and none at all to the sea. The rest is beige: sand and stone bleached by the sun. It is not until we get to the Book of Revelation – written not in Palestine but on a Greek island – that we get an outpouring of colour in the Bible. Rainbows round the throne, that sort of thing. As Christianity grows, it gets more colourful.
Now I’m about to go on about the importance of colour and variety and beauty and so on, and I am aware that I need to be careful. When I talk about the need for colourful religion, I am most certainly not advocating a sort of theological free-for-all, or the kind of fatuous triviality that masquerades as Christian worship in so many places these days. This, unfortunately, is very popular, very user-friendly, very seductive, very nice. It is also completely wrong. The religion that is marketed by this means leads eventually to a dull, short sighted, propositional kind of spiritual comfort food, slickly packaged but with very little nutritional value when the going gets tough.
Colourful religion is not like this. It takes a lot of effort, and we can’t have it all the time. Perhaps this is just as well. The fact that our emotional and intellectual experience of church is not regularly on the same uniformly high level ought not to surprise us. Indeed we should be relieved: if we were to spend all our lives in constant states of spiritual ecstasy, we would soon collapse from exhaustion! We need to bear in mind that our lives for the most part are prosaic, routine, sometimes rather dull, and there is nothing wrong with that. And a large part of living the Christian faith is prosaic, routine, sometimes rather dull. A large part of living the Christian life is the daily working out of that exchange of love from God to human beings called grace, and from human beings to God called worship: the exchange that expresses itself in lives of service to others. And much of that is necessarily routine and apparently unrewarding a lot of the time. We need beige.
But beige religion on its own is boring, misleading and deadening. We do need other colours to keep us going. Spiritual colours. The kinds that knock you backwards in your pew, or reduce you to amazed silence or that lock you in a grip that will never let you go. We need a bit of colour to brighten up the landscape. Sometimes we need colour to give some sort of shape or form to the apparently chaotic or meaningless or terrible, what Rowan Willams calls ‘the chromatic pains of flesh’ in one of his poems. And the right use of colour requires artists. And they are in short supply.
Stephen Tucker, thanks be to God, is a theological painter. He has spent the last ten years adding splashes of colour to the rough-hewn canvas of your Christian lives, trying to ensure that beige is not your colour of choice all the time. There are not many priests around at the moment who do that sort of thing, and do it well.
So be thankful. And do not let him go.