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29th July 2007 Sermon for
Guild Sunday 29th July 2007
Again, I was at the Trophies and Awards Dinner in Guildhall when the guests of honour were the surviving glider pilots – all in their eighties – the glider pilots who flew silently over Normandy the night before D-Day to blow up enemy infrastructure. They navigated by pure instinct and then had to engage in virtually hand-to-hand fighting as soon as they’d landed. You should have been in the packed Guildhall and seen those old men as they walked so jauntily to receive their awards. So humbly, as if they had done nothing special. Ah yes, and I confess I was in a Guild Court meeting during the 2005 Ashes series. I had my little radio in my inside pocket and the microphone in my ear. The Clerk kept whispering across to ask me the score. All right Paul – you’ll probably get your P45 first thing tomorrow morning. Suddenly the Master – a man I’d previously taken to be a creature of monumental restraint and saintly forbearance – shouted at one of the Court Assistants for non-too-surreptitiously reading The Daily Telegraph. Never has a microphone been withdrawn from an ear-hole at such a rate of knots. What I’m talking about in all these examples is friendship. When I walk into a room with Guild members in it, my spirits are lifted at once. There’s a lot of talk about making love. How about making friends – perhaps an even greater activity? Friendship is a forgotten virtue in an age when anyone can be described as a friend – even if you’ve only spent an hour with him in the pub. Friendship is a gift of grace because it frees you from self-absorption, self-obsession and the tyranny and misery of self-pre-occupation. Your concern for yourself is automatically removed when you look to your friends instead. And what is it to be a friend? Soren Kierkegaard told us what it is, what our true aim in life should be. He said, Most people are subjective towards themselves and objective towards others. The task is to become subjective towards others and objective towards yourself. That’s it really. You see it all around. Crass insensitivity and self-obsession. You suspect that so many people don’t even understand that other people’s feelings are really real. What we are called to do – the whole secret of practical living – is to give ourselves away to others in friendship. There is philosophy and religious truth in this too. What do I mean by that? I mean: Your true self is not something contained beneath your skin, in here. Your true self is in the relationship – in what you might call the spiritual space – between you and your friends. When Our Lord said The Kingdom of God is within you, the word he used s is better translated as among. The Kingdom of God is what is among you. The Kingdom of God is your friendships. If you try to find your reality within your skin, in here, the result is atrophy of mind and disease of spirit – what the Psalms and the Gospels call death. Your reality is in the movement of relationships, ultimately grounded in God – the glorious interplay of which the analogy and tangible sensation is music, the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, for instance, the apotheosis of the dance What do I want us to be and do here in St Michael’s? I want us to be close to God and close to one another. When people ask me about St Michael’s, I say we are an informed, devout and affectionate congregation. There is no social churchgoing here. No competitive dressiness. People don’t join our congregation for what they can get out of it but for what they can give. There is even more to friendship. Practical friendship illuminates the deepest problems of life. Take the problem of pain and suffering for instance. Well, the vivacious empathy of true friendship brings you closer to understanding even the great problem of suffering. If you want to know why suffering, what is the point of all the pain in the world, don’t start by examining your own pain and suffering. Look instead at Eliot in Four Quartets where he explains that: We experience this better in the agony of others, nearly experienced, involving ourselves, than in our own We can go up even higher than Mr Eliot – to the words of Our Lord himself who said, This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you. And he follows this saying with the words: Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends. Jesus puts friendship right at the heart of his saving work, the Atonement, Calvary – because of which we live. He says: Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends. This then is friendship. It is the glory of us, reflecting the glory of Christ. Friendship is sacrificial and it is redemptive. But back to the Guild Court meeting for a minute. As I sit there in my Chaplain’s gown, just occasionally I wonder how such wonderful chaps can spend so much time talking about…some of the stuff they talk about. Should Guild members flying upside down in Australia have the same rights as members flying the right way up in England? Or something like that. Or so it seems on a drowsy afternoon. They talk about such things because Courts and Committees have to talk about such things. Then abruptly there is a shaft of light. Duncan stands up and proposes an award for gallantry. And he mentions who might be a candidate for such an award: Those men who were winched down from their helicopter onto the deck of the stricken ship. And there they unfastened their winch – knowing that this would mean almost certain death. To rescue the men on the ship. Yes. Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends." Peter Mullen |
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Updated
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