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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor on Sunday 19 July 2009
"FAREWELL TO CHORISTERS"
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you”
Luke 11: 9
Christian faith is a profoundly, you might say perversely, optimistic religion. We believe in a God who expects the best and forgives the worst, and we who follow in the Christian way have this same attitude to life imprinted on us. You may say it’s a perverse optimism for a religion that has a cross at the heart of its proclamation. But that’s the point: Christianity is realistic about the way the world is, it sees the depths to which human beings can descend, it feels the pain of our human condition. How could it not, since the man we revere as God was finished off by the cruelty of his fellow men who thought they were gods. But their cruelty didn’t finish him off, did it? His death began a movement of which we are the heirs, which declared that life began with the death of Jesus, that something irreversible flowed down with his blood from the cross; and that something was God’s love for us and our world, and we have been enfolded in that love, and we have been indelibly stained by it, and in our best moments, our simplest moments, our most needy moments, we know that this is true: God loves us.
That is the only thing we really need to take away from church, from hearing the Gospel and receiving the sacrament, the reality that God loves us, and the implications of that extraordinary statement for the way we live our lives.
That statement and that reality is the source of Christian optimism. We can face the brutality and sorrow and pain of our world with eyes wide open, not naively blinkered (though our optimism may cost us much) because the God we believe in loves us. It is this God who says to us, against all the advice to the contrary, “Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you”. Very often our experience of life will incline us to sadder conclusions: “Ask and the answer will almost always be ‘no’; seek and almost certainly someone else will find; knock and the door will surely be slammed in your face”. That’s what our experience of life may teach us. But we are Christians and we believe in a God who contradicts worldly wisdom and invites us, secure in his love, to do the same. In the face of every disappointment and seemingly unanswered prayer, our God slips his hand into ours and whispers, “Ask and it will given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you”.
I would love those words to be words of encouragement to us all, but especially those choristers who are leaving us today: Alex, Robert, Rupert, Thomas, Ellie, Annie, Hannah, Immie, Ros and Nikita.
Of course there will be sadness at the parting of friends, but friendship survives the inevitable partings, and we take with us much, much more that we leave behind. What will you take from this place and the years you have spent singing day by day in this holy place? Most of you were confirmed here and some of you baptized here, and you have been formed, consciously or unconsciously, in the Christian life. We have all been given five, rather slender, pieces of equipment for our Christian journey – but they are precious and all that we need to grow more deeply into God’s love. We have been given a name, a story, a fragment of bread, a sip of wine and each other. The name, alongside our own baptismal name, is the name of Jesus, the name above all names. The story is his story, which so amazingly meets our own story and gives our story its point and purpose. The bread and wine – just a fragment, just a sip – are our daily bread and refreshment, in which we come closer to the God who loves us – which is what communion means. And then, finally, he gives us each other: a community of companions, of fellow bread-breakers, who pray with us, share with us, encourage and support us. God has given us each other to remind us of his constant presence. That’s all we need – that’s all we are given as Christian people.
Well not quite all. Choristers remind us all of other things we are given, and I want to reflect briefly on three of them. St Luke it was who recorded Jesus as saying “Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find”. And it is Luke who also records Jesus as saying “Give and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap”. Another piece of blind optimism? Perhaps – but it’s a profound Christian truth: not only ask and you will receive but, absurdly, give and you will receive abundantly. Choristers give: every day of their lives for four or five years during term, they give – in song and commitment and discipline and worship. And for that we, the Cathedral community, which includes the countless visitors who come to worship here and are brought closer to heaven by the music of this place – we, the Cathedral community, thank you.
Give: and there will be gifts for you. You have given: are there gifts for you? Yes, there are. You will leave this place with many gifts but three in particular I want to mention. You will leave with a lot of words stored in your memory. You don’t know it yet but in the years to come you will remember the words of John Donne and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan and the prophet Isaiah and Thomas Aquinas and Jesus himself because you sang them here. But, most of all, day by day, you will have sung the psalms – certainly all the evening psalms. And though you may not always have understood them, and you may have hoped that Psalm 78 set for the 15th evening might coincide with your day off, the psalms have without your knowing it passed into your memory, where they will remain until the end of your life. And the psalms can become a repertory of prayer which you will find yourself quoting when your own words won’t form.
The other thing that you have been given is a sense of place. When you were admitted to the choir you were given your own place among your fellow choristers. Here in this particular place of holiness and beauty you have had your seat and your place … a seat and a place which next term other choristers will occupy, choristers whom you have had a hand in teaching and encouraging. This place, with its spire and amazing arched spaces, and gothic proportions, will always hold a place of affection in your hearts, and you will remember that you had a place here. You will often be drawn back here for services, for school reunions, or to show your own children where you once sang. But this place is also a symbol that you take with you. It symbolizes the place which you have in God’s place, wherever you are and however far from Salisbury. The memory of this place reminds you that God holds you in his love: that you have your place in his purposes.
And thirdly: you have given us music here and you have been given music. You have discovered its joys, its demands, its discipline. You have learned to be a team that works together, because you can’t make harmony on your own. Running like a thread through this Southern Cathedrals Festival has been not only the contribution made by the current choirs of the three cathedrals, but the contribution made by former choristers. Whether we listened to Bach by candlelight or Mozart’s C minor mass or Sarum Voices or the Sarum Consort or virtuoso solo performances in the Cathedral School, we were being enthralled by young men and women who were choristers before you and who now make music on a bigger stage. You will leave this place more accomplished musicians that when you arrived. Music is God’s gift to you and you carry it with you. You will use it for your own delight and the enjoyment of others. You will perform it in churches and concert halls, as amateurs or as professionals; music will be a constant throughout your lives. But it is not only a technical accomplishment. Music is also a spiritual gift, that gives you access to other worlds beyond the material and the mundane.
For some reason that has completely baffled scholars, the great C minor mass by Mozart, that the boy choristers sang last night, remained unfinished – maybe part of the manuscript was lost, maybe Mozart was preoccupied by the death of one of his children. We have the Creed in the mass as far as the Incarnatus: Jesus became incarnate of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost and was made man. There Mozart leaves us in the lurch, doctrinally and musically speaking, with the Word made flesh and dwelling among us.
But let us make a virtue of necessity. Let the incompleteness of the great C minor mass of Mozart stand as a symbol of your musical and spiritual pilgrimage as you leave this place. You have been given music in this place, but the music is not complete. The first movements have been performed and well performed, too. But there are other movements to come, to be discovered and completed. That is your task and may God bless you in it. Amen.
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Luke 11: 9
Christian faith is a profoundly, you might say perversely, optimistic religion. We believe in a God who expects the best and forgives the worst, and we who follow in the Christian way have this same attitude to life imprinted on us. You may say it’s a perverse optimism for a religion that has a cross at the heart of its proclamation. But that’s the point: Christianity is realistic about the way the world is, it sees the depths to which human beings can descend, it feels the pain of our human condition. How could it not, since the man we revere as God was finished off by the cruelty of his fellow men who thought they were gods. But their cruelty didn’t finish him off, did it? His death began a movement of which we are the heirs, which declared that life began with the death of Jesus, that something irreversible flowed down with his blood from the cross; and that something was God’s love for us and our world, and we have been enfolded in that love, and we have been indelibly stained by it, and in our best moments, our simplest moments, our most needy moments, we know that this is true: God loves us.
That is the only thing we really need to take away from church, from hearing the Gospel and receiving the sacrament, the reality that God loves us, and the implications of that extraordinary statement for the way we live our lives.
That statement and that reality is the source of Christian optimism. We can face the brutality and sorrow and pain of our world with eyes wide open, not naively blinkered (though our optimism may cost us much) because the God we believe in loves us. It is this God who says to us, against all the advice to the contrary, “Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you”. Very often our experience of life will incline us to sadder conclusions: “Ask and the answer will almost always be ‘no’; seek and almost certainly someone else will find; knock and the door will surely be slammed in your face”. That’s what our experience of life may teach us. But we are Christians and we believe in a God who contradicts worldly wisdom and invites us, secure in his love, to do the same. In the face of every disappointment and seemingly unanswered prayer, our God slips his hand into ours and whispers, “Ask and it will given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you”.
I would love those words to be words of encouragement to us all, but especially those choristers who are leaving us today: Alex, Robert, Rupert, Thomas, Ellie, Annie, Hannah, Immie, Ros and Nikita.
Of course there will be sadness at the parting of friends, but friendship survives the inevitable partings, and we take with us much, much more that we leave behind. What will you take from this place and the years you have spent singing day by day in this holy place? Most of you were confirmed here and some of you baptized here, and you have been formed, consciously or unconsciously, in the Christian life. We have all been given five, rather slender, pieces of equipment for our Christian journey – but they are precious and all that we need to grow more deeply into God’s love. We have been given a name, a story, a fragment of bread, a sip of wine and each other. The name, alongside our own baptismal name, is the name of Jesus, the name above all names. The story is his story, which so amazingly meets our own story and gives our story its point and purpose. The bread and wine – just a fragment, just a sip – are our daily bread and refreshment, in which we come closer to the God who loves us – which is what communion means. And then, finally, he gives us each other: a community of companions, of fellow bread-breakers, who pray with us, share with us, encourage and support us. God has given us each other to remind us of his constant presence. That’s all we need – that’s all we are given as Christian people.
Well not quite all. Choristers remind us all of other things we are given, and I want to reflect briefly on three of them. St Luke it was who recorded Jesus as saying “Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find”. And it is Luke who also records Jesus as saying “Give and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap”. Another piece of blind optimism? Perhaps – but it’s a profound Christian truth: not only ask and you will receive but, absurdly, give and you will receive abundantly. Choristers give: every day of their lives for four or five years during term, they give – in song and commitment and discipline and worship. And for that we, the Cathedral community, which includes the countless visitors who come to worship here and are brought closer to heaven by the music of this place – we, the Cathedral community, thank you.
Give: and there will be gifts for you. You have given: are there gifts for you? Yes, there are. You will leave this place with many gifts but three in particular I want to mention. You will leave with a lot of words stored in your memory. You don’t know it yet but in the years to come you will remember the words of John Donne and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan and the prophet Isaiah and Thomas Aquinas and Jesus himself because you sang them here. But, most of all, day by day, you will have sung the psalms – certainly all the evening psalms. And though you may not always have understood them, and you may have hoped that Psalm 78 set for the 15th evening might coincide with your day off, the psalms have without your knowing it passed into your memory, where they will remain until the end of your life. And the psalms can become a repertory of prayer which you will find yourself quoting when your own words won’t form.
The other thing that you have been given is a sense of place. When you were admitted to the choir you were given your own place among your fellow choristers. Here in this particular place of holiness and beauty you have had your seat and your place … a seat and a place which next term other choristers will occupy, choristers whom you have had a hand in teaching and encouraging. This place, with its spire and amazing arched spaces, and gothic proportions, will always hold a place of affection in your hearts, and you will remember that you had a place here. You will often be drawn back here for services, for school reunions, or to show your own children where you once sang. But this place is also a symbol that you take with you. It symbolizes the place which you have in God’s place, wherever you are and however far from Salisbury. The memory of this place reminds you that God holds you in his love: that you have your place in his purposes.
And thirdly: you have given us music here and you have been given music. You have discovered its joys, its demands, its discipline. You have learned to be a team that works together, because you can’t make harmony on your own. Running like a thread through this Southern Cathedrals Festival has been not only the contribution made by the current choirs of the three cathedrals, but the contribution made by former choristers. Whether we listened to Bach by candlelight or Mozart’s C minor mass or Sarum Voices or the Sarum Consort or virtuoso solo performances in the Cathedral School, we were being enthralled by young men and women who were choristers before you and who now make music on a bigger stage. You will leave this place more accomplished musicians that when you arrived. Music is God’s gift to you and you carry it with you. You will use it for your own delight and the enjoyment of others. You will perform it in churches and concert halls, as amateurs or as professionals; music will be a constant throughout your lives. But it is not only a technical accomplishment. Music is also a spiritual gift, that gives you access to other worlds beyond the material and the mundane.
For some reason that has completely baffled scholars, the great C minor mass by Mozart, that the boy choristers sang last night, remained unfinished – maybe part of the manuscript was lost, maybe Mozart was preoccupied by the death of one of his children. We have the Creed in the mass as far as the Incarnatus: Jesus became incarnate of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost and was made man. There Mozart leaves us in the lurch, doctrinally and musically speaking, with the Word made flesh and dwelling among us.
But let us make a virtue of necessity. Let the incompleteness of the great C minor mass of Mozart stand as a symbol of your musical and spiritual pilgrimage as you leave this place. You have been given music in this place, but the music is not complete. The first movements have been performed and well performed, too. But there are other movements to come, to be discovered and completed. That is your task and may God bless you in it. Amen.