Recent Sermons
A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor on Sunday 7 June 2009 for the Salisbury Festival Eucharist
"SEEING VISIONS AND DREAMING DREAMS"
I don’t think Nicodemus was stupid or naïve or unsophisticated. He was after all a leader of the Jewish community and a Pharisee, whom Jesus himself describes as the Teacher of Israel. No, Nicodemus wasn’t stupid. I guess he was frightened – he came to Jesus by night. He didn’t want to be spotted by his peers and rivals talking to the opposition. But he was also prepared to take the risk, because this Jesus whom he may have heard, and certainly whom he had heard about, had something, some clue, some key to life’s meaning. God was with him: that much was clear to Nicodemus and Nicodemus needed to meet him and talk. And what he got for his pains was a riddle about being born again - whatever that meant! Jesus talked about the Spirit of God blowing like wind through the trees and he said that those who entered God’s kingdom would need to be caught by that wind in the trees – that Holy Spirit – and be re-fashioned – born again is how he put it. None of this made sense to Nicodemus: he shook his head: “How is this possible?” he asked in perplexity. Jesus isn’t very encouraging. In fact he is rather scolding: “You are the teacher of Israel: how is it that you don’t know these things?”
I don’t think Nicodemus was stupid but he was out of his depth. He was confronted by a language and an intellectual landscape which, for all his learning, was new to him. Yes, Jesus was no doubt speaking to him in the familiar Aramaic that the two men had in common, but somehow he might have been speaking in a foreign language. Nicodemus wasn’t the only one to find the message of Jesus difficult to grasp. The disciples too found his parables were riddles and had to ask for explanations. The authorities clearly misunderstood him. And his closest friends were rebuked (more or less told to go to hell) for not catching the drift of his mind.
Jesus was a poet. He never wrote anything apart from a few words in the dust which the wind blew away before they could be read. We only have the words of others to try to capture his teaching. But we know that, like a poet, he scanned the horizon of life and saw more than mere mortals saw. He saw in the harvest, in the daily life of men and women, in the double dealing of tax collectors, in importunate widows and irascible judges, in unprepared virgins and luckless fishermen; in a woman who had lost and found a precious coin or a waiting father who had lost and found a wastrel son; in the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, he heard rumours of angels and the movement of the spirit like wind through the trees, announcing the presence of God right under the noses of men and women who were mostly so preoccupied with the prose of their lives that they were totally oblivious of the poetry that spoke of heaven, and why they were there at all, and the point of it all.
Jesus didn’t speak a foreign language to Nicodemus and Nicodemus wasn’t stupid. One was a poet and the other wasn’t. And the simplicity of the one seemed like nonsense to the other. Such is the lot of poets – and those who struggle to hear them.
We have come to the end of another triumphant Salisbury Festival, full of colour and variety, in which all the arts have been represented. And the diversity has been matched by the quality and intensity and commitment of dancers, actors, musicians, novelists, poets and artists. There have been tears, hilarity, profound silence, rapturous applause, as we have been deepened, enthralled, moved and challenged by works ancient and modern in which water, dance, spiritual devotion and Indian culture have been allowed to run like golden threads through the two weeks of Salisbury’s festivities. This is an opportunity, as we celebrate the arts today, to record our appreciation and congratulations and gratitude, not only to all the artists who participated but to Laura Philips and her Festival Board and especially to Maria, the Festival Director, and her devoted staff who have worked so hard to provide a festival for Salisbury of which we can all be proud.
A festival of the arts is an opportunity for us to celebrate as a community the things that we often do in isolation, often in London or abroad, and to remind ourselves of things that matter in our lives but which so often get squeezed out of our busy agendas. It’s a moment to acknowledge, recognise and be grateful to the artists – whom I am going to refer to as poets (which after all simply means ‘makers’) – the poets who offer us a new language and a different perception with which to frame our lives, deepen its meaning and even rediscover our humanity.
We need the poets and their poetry – the artists and their artistry – to provide more than moments of release or escape from the exigencies of life. Indeed it will be the poets in the broadest sense who will, often with unflinching and sometimes uncomfortable truthfulness and honesty, reveal to us our human predicament, the way the world is, and our responsibilities for the future. We here in Salisbury haven’t, like some latter day Neros, been fiddling while our political system has been imploding, unmindful of the way the political landscape had begun to be redefined. We haven’t been listening to Beethoven and Mozart, Chilcott and Vikram and Alex’s Confluences, Tony Benn and Melvyn Bragg, as though to escape the new possibilities articulated this week in President Obama’s speech in Cairo. We didn’t bring the Festival to a tumultuous climax with a picnic in the park hoping that our fireworks would drown out the thunder claps of an embattled world that embraces Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Iraq and Gaza City and Lahore. Poets and poetry – artists and their artistry – need to be attended to every day, not just for a fortnight, because it is poets and their poetry, even in the delicacy and passion of their art, who help us to confront our human condition and to offer us clues about its meaning, ways to celebrate its possibilities, and visions of what it might become.
Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, hoping to find pat answers to intractable problems. He found a poet who told him a story about wind whistling through the trees and told him to catch it. We come here today to give thanks for poets and poetry, for artists and artistry, through whose imagination we catch a glimpse of heaven. I’m glad we come here to this place, which is in itself an International Festival of the Arts and which has spoken to men and women for 750 years in the language of poetry and song and movement and silence and architectural form, of the things that like the Holy Spirit of God blow through the trees. This place, an icon of the arts, speaks of those gifts of the Holy Spirit, which we need to capture and which need to capture us, if we are to be born again and discover a deeper humanity, which is God’s most precious gift to us. Amen.
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I don’t think Nicodemus was stupid but he was out of his depth. He was confronted by a language and an intellectual landscape which, for all his learning, was new to him. Yes, Jesus was no doubt speaking to him in the familiar Aramaic that the two men had in common, but somehow he might have been speaking in a foreign language. Nicodemus wasn’t the only one to find the message of Jesus difficult to grasp. The disciples too found his parables were riddles and had to ask for explanations. The authorities clearly misunderstood him. And his closest friends were rebuked (more or less told to go to hell) for not catching the drift of his mind.
Jesus was a poet. He never wrote anything apart from a few words in the dust which the wind blew away before they could be read. We only have the words of others to try to capture his teaching. But we know that, like a poet, he scanned the horizon of life and saw more than mere mortals saw. He saw in the harvest, in the daily life of men and women, in the double dealing of tax collectors, in importunate widows and irascible judges, in unprepared virgins and luckless fishermen; in a woman who had lost and found a precious coin or a waiting father who had lost and found a wastrel son; in the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, he heard rumours of angels and the movement of the spirit like wind through the trees, announcing the presence of God right under the noses of men and women who were mostly so preoccupied with the prose of their lives that they were totally oblivious of the poetry that spoke of heaven, and why they were there at all, and the point of it all.
Jesus didn’t speak a foreign language to Nicodemus and Nicodemus wasn’t stupid. One was a poet and the other wasn’t. And the simplicity of the one seemed like nonsense to the other. Such is the lot of poets – and those who struggle to hear them.
We have come to the end of another triumphant Salisbury Festival, full of colour and variety, in which all the arts have been represented. And the diversity has been matched by the quality and intensity and commitment of dancers, actors, musicians, novelists, poets and artists. There have been tears, hilarity, profound silence, rapturous applause, as we have been deepened, enthralled, moved and challenged by works ancient and modern in which water, dance, spiritual devotion and Indian culture have been allowed to run like golden threads through the two weeks of Salisbury’s festivities. This is an opportunity, as we celebrate the arts today, to record our appreciation and congratulations and gratitude, not only to all the artists who participated but to Laura Philips and her Festival Board and especially to Maria, the Festival Director, and her devoted staff who have worked so hard to provide a festival for Salisbury of which we can all be proud.
A festival of the arts is an opportunity for us to celebrate as a community the things that we often do in isolation, often in London or abroad, and to remind ourselves of things that matter in our lives but which so often get squeezed out of our busy agendas. It’s a moment to acknowledge, recognise and be grateful to the artists – whom I am going to refer to as poets (which after all simply means ‘makers’) – the poets who offer us a new language and a different perception with which to frame our lives, deepen its meaning and even rediscover our humanity.
We need the poets and their poetry – the artists and their artistry – to provide more than moments of release or escape from the exigencies of life. Indeed it will be the poets in the broadest sense who will, often with unflinching and sometimes uncomfortable truthfulness and honesty, reveal to us our human predicament, the way the world is, and our responsibilities for the future. We here in Salisbury haven’t, like some latter day Neros, been fiddling while our political system has been imploding, unmindful of the way the political landscape had begun to be redefined. We haven’t been listening to Beethoven and Mozart, Chilcott and Vikram and Alex’s Confluences, Tony Benn and Melvyn Bragg, as though to escape the new possibilities articulated this week in President Obama’s speech in Cairo. We didn’t bring the Festival to a tumultuous climax with a picnic in the park hoping that our fireworks would drown out the thunder claps of an embattled world that embraces Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Iraq and Gaza City and Lahore. Poets and poetry – artists and their artistry – need to be attended to every day, not just for a fortnight, because it is poets and their poetry, even in the delicacy and passion of their art, who help us to confront our human condition and to offer us clues about its meaning, ways to celebrate its possibilities, and visions of what it might become.
Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, hoping to find pat answers to intractable problems. He found a poet who told him a story about wind whistling through the trees and told him to catch it. We come here today to give thanks for poets and poetry, for artists and artistry, through whose imagination we catch a glimpse of heaven. I’m glad we come here to this place, which is in itself an International Festival of the Arts and which has spoken to men and women for 750 years in the language of poetry and song and movement and silence and architectural form, of the things that like the Holy Spirit of God blow through the trees. This place, an icon of the arts, speaks of those gifts of the Holy Spirit, which we need to capture and which need to capture us, if we are to be born again and discover a deeper humanity, which is God’s most precious gift to us. Amen.