I hope you might permit me to speak a little more personally this evening than I normally would from the pulpit, because our reading from 2 Kings about Elijah and Elisha has resonated with something that’s going on in my life at the moment.
One of the nice things about being ordained to the priesthood in your own church as is the practice in the diocese of London is that you can, with the bishop’s permission, invite someone to come and preach at the service – someone who has played a significant role in bringing the candidate to ordination. God willing, I will be ordained priest in this church in July, but it was some months back that I asked my doctoral supervisor in Cambridge, the Reverend Professor Daniel Hardy, if he would do me the honour of preaching at that service. He agreed with his characteristic warm smile and said he would be delighted. But what lay behind that smile was the unspoken acknowledgment between us that this was a symbolic invitation to a commitment that he would most likely to be unable to fulfil, because a matter of days after the completion of my doctorate a few weeks before this conversation, he had been diagnosed with a very aggressive brain tumour.
He died mercifully quickly, beginning the Michaelmas term still teaching many graduate students, and declining rapidly to a peaceful death in November. Then yesterday, the request I had put to him was strangely reversed when I was given the privilege of speaking at a colloquium held in Cambridge before his memorial service on his work and his theological interests, focussing on the priestly vocation of the theologian. After I had spoken, someone came up to me in the break and thanked me for my words, saying that in my voice, he had heard Dan’s voice, and that he felt I had, quoting the words from 2 Kings, “taken up his mantle”.
That was too generous a compliment. Dan Hardy taught hundreds of clergymen and women, many of whom are now bishops around the world and principals of theological colleges, and all of whom have assumed his mantle in various respects. In fact I don’t think any one of us would be able to take up the mantle of the extraordinary man that he was. It was said in the address at the memorial service that as a doctoral student in Oxford he had spent 9 hours a day in the library – I felt pleased with myself if I did 3 or 4 and much of that was spent in the tea room!
But I can say that, like Elisha of Elijah, Dan was a person in whose spirit I do want to share. He inspired me and instilled in me core beliefs – the belief that I should be suspicious when people present things as black and white, the belief that the Church must before all things be an embodiment of hope for the world, the belief that human beings since the dawn of time have underestimated just how amazingly rich and overwhelming is the reality of the God that has been revealed in Jesus Christ. Dan fired my passion to be a disciple, to be a priest and to share with anyone who will listen to me just how glorious are God’s ways with the world.
Dan is among the most significant of many people who have shown me what Christian faith means. And I want you to think for a moment about who those people are in your life – a vicar, a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a friend perhaps. And then there are those great Christian figures who inspire us all but may touch us personally in a particular way – Martin Luther King, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Edith Stein, Mother Teresa. These are all people, whether famous or known only within a small circle, who have been bearers of the Christian faith – icons of Jesus Christ for you and me so that we may believe.
How do people become Christians? How do people know that the way of Jesus Christ is really the life in all its fullness that the gospels tell us? Is it through clever arguments that ensnare people into the church? No. Is it through being bombarded with Bible stories or the kind of childhood indoctrination that so many secularists today seem to fear? No. It is through the embodiment of Christian faith in individuals who somehow reveal God to us. Rowan Williams has written about this phenomenon of people who take responsibility for making God credible:
It starts from a sense that we “believe in”, we trust some kinds of people. We have confidence in the way they live; the way they live is a way I want to live, perhaps can imagine myself living in my better or more mature moments. The world they inhabit is one I’d like to live in. Faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we’d like to live in.
The Church is sometimes seen as the perpetuation through time of certain creeds and doctrines that people unite around in social groupings. But that dehumanises and generalises the particular experiences of faith. The history of the Church is a vast living network, surging through time, of people “taking up other people’s mantles”. When the letter to the Galatians talks about “putting on Christ” in baptism like a robe, what that so often means is actually putting on the mantle of the disciples of Christ whom we have encountered in our experience, in our lifetimes.
So two things flow from this.
The first is that, in acknowledging what we have received from such people, will we ourselves be prepared to take responsibility for making God credible to others? Some are called to be evangelists, but all the baptised are called to be witnesses. Will we pray for God’s grace to be faithful witnesses who will perpetuate the Church’s historical network of personal inspiration? Is ours a mantle that others would want to take up, and if it’s not, will we pray that God will make it one?
And secondly, I wonder if this passing on of what has become central to our lives as we have become greater and greater witnesses to God, is actually what prepares us for our own deaths. What kind of death could be more frightening than one at which we thought that all the things we believed in and felt passionately about would die with us? That can never be true for the Christian who forms part of this network of the Church. How encouraging it must have been for Elijah when Elisha refused to be pushed away by him: “As the Lord lives and as you yourself live, I will not leave you” – we might add… “because you have shown me what my life must be about so that I may be your hope for the future”. Those whom Christians inspires through their witness, become their hope for the future, hope that enables them to die at peace.
Yesterday was the Feast of Candlemas which, although we have not commemorated today, is celebrated at every evensong in the singing of the Nunc Dimitis. Simeon, after years in the temple, finally sees the hope for what he believed in, embodied in the infant Christ, so that he may pray, “Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation”.
Dan Hardy died completely at peace in his own home in the dawning light of daybreak. He died the death of a man at peace, because he had witnessed to the Gospel, and had drawn countless people into the network of witness to its truth. I want to close with some of his words about what he saw as being at the heart of the Christian faith, to share with you just a small glimpse of that witness:
The Holy Spirit does not simply draw us into the drama of Jesus. The Spirit draws us into the place in which God’s love is most deeply present, and in which God is closest to us. The only limiting factor is the degree to which we are prepared to respond in love. It is, therefore, we who insist that God is distant, and we who erect a barrier which keeps God in heaven and leaves us alone here on earth. Far from this, God is most God where in the utmost love he enters most deeply into our life, in the suffering death and resurrection of Jesus into which we are drawn by the Spirit… Not even the boundaries which we erect to separate ourselves from God are barriers to this love; this love shifts all such boundaries.
I know that the more deeply I allow that truth to penetrate my heart, the more I will be a witness to God in the world, and the more likely I will be to die in peace.
May the soul of Dan Hardy and all the faithful departed rest in peace and rise in glory.
Amen.