ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 14, 2006

Fr Alan Moses

High Mass
All Saints, Margaret Street
Proper 19, Year B

One Sunday last year, when we were on holiday in France, the Cure of the village in which we stay had an asthma attack which prevented him, or perhaps rescued him, from preaching on St. Matthew’s version of today’s gospel. The congregation, which included two Anglicans sceptical of overblown Roman claims for the Petrine ministry, was invited instead to spend five minutes in silence contemplating the first pope being reproved by Jesus for fallibility in a matter of doctrine.

It is not difficult to imagine what Pope Benedict is thinking about as he celebrates the Eucharist today. Although we read the same gospel as our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, we read different passages from the Letter of James, but if the pope was reading James 3.1-12 as we have done, he could hardly fail to be struck by the relevance to the present situation, the consequences of his recent speech, of what St. James has to say: How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.”

Of course, most of us have not read what was an academic lecture, and I’m sure that few if any of those demonstrating so angrily on the streets of the Muslim world have either. We must hope and pray that in the febrile atmosphere of militant Islam with its victim culture and refusal to consider any critique of its own faith and practice as legitimate, nothing more than effigies of the pope are set on fire and that no lives are lost.
James can be seen as speaking on two different levels. He begins with those who would be teachers of the faith, warning them of the perils of their calling: “Not many of you should become teachers,…, for you know that we who teach will be judged greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.” It is one which people should be in no hurry to take up. At first hearing, this does not sound like very good recruiting policy but there is wisdom here.

“The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.” God does call and send ministers who by their preaching and teaching are to sustain his people. But teachers must speak, they must use words, and because they do they run the risks associated with speaking, with the tongue. The tongue is particularly dangerous because of its power to direct the rest of our being, just as James says, like the bit in a horse’s mouth or the rudder of a ship - a power which seems out of all proportion to its size. Bit and rudder allow us to control much larger things, but we find it difficult, if not impossible, to control a seemingly small thing like our tongue. Of course, our tongue - unlike that of an animal – is something which expresses our personality, communicates our thoughts, manifests out feelings. But as we use it, it has power over us, or at least sin is able to exercise influence over us.

We know that speech, oratory, rhetoric, can be a powerful tool of persuasion - It can be a force for good: teaching, informing, comforting, sustaining. It can also be perverted in the cause of evil; we need only think of the effect of the speeches of Adolf Hitler

Each year I teach a course on the Sacrament of Reconciliation , “Hearing Confessions”, to curates in the diocese of Southwark. Part of course is on the Seal of the Confessional: the absolute secrecy of the confessional. What a priest hears in confession cannot be disclosed to anyone, in any circumstances, without the permission of the penitent.

One of the things I try to impress on new clergy is that in their ministry they will hear, they will be told, lots of things which, while they may not be strictly speaking a sacramental confession, are heard in quasi-confessional circumstances. These should be regarded as confidential, as under the seal, too. The clergy, like any profession, any close-knit group, can be a gossipy lot. We run the risk of crossing boundaries without realising that we have done it until it is too late. If people see us as loose-tongued, gossipy, indiscreet, not to be trusted, they are hardly likely to come to us with their deepest sins and troubles. One of our greatest gifts to the people we are called to serve - as important as any eloquence in the pulpit - is our discretion. What is true of the clergy and discretion is also true of every Christian in our relationships with family, neighbours, friends, colleagues.

The second level at which James speaks, to which he directs his words, as the wider context of the epistle shows, is to all Christians. The peril of the tongue applies not just to preachers. “With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” We are all prone to sin by use of the tongue. As Christians, we know, at least some of the time, how quickly we can go from singing hymns of praise to gossip and grumbling. We can sing of the glories of the love of God and then chatter on about religious trivia in ways which do not only not commend the faith but which actively put off some people exploring faith or worse still perhaps, draw them into a trivial and all too human version of things which ought to be divine.

“No one can tame the tongue.” St. Augustine in his commentary on this passage, held that control of the tongue was impossible without the grace of God. How does that grace work? Well, it works in one way by showing us how and when we have made mistakes, so that we might repent of them. It works too by filling our minds, placing on our tongues, good words, blessings rather than curses, praise rather than condemnation.

“Morning by morning, he wakens - wakens my ear,
to listen as those who are taught.”

It has to be morning after morning after morning, as long as this life endures, for there will never be a time when we can say that we have obtained complete mastery of the tongue. If we do, we will be wrong and the tongue will have mastered us.

After his private rebuke of Peter, Jesus says to the crowd and his disciples: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Last week we celebrated the feast of St. John Chrysostom, who was Patriarch of Constantinople in the 4th century. “Chrysostom” means “golden mouthed” and John was given this nickname because of his eloquent and powerful preaching. This does not mean that he was universally popular. His preaching included some remarkably plain speaking, about the immorality of the imperial court and of the clergy. This earned him the displeasure of the empress and he was twice exiled from his see. The second time, there was to be no return: he died in exile from exhaustion and starvation. He experienced in his own ministry, something of that rejection experienced by the prophet Isaiah,

“I gave my back to those who struck me,
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face
from insult and spitting”

- words we read on Good Friday as foreshadowing the suffering of the Son of Man.

Yesterday, one of the people who came to see the church as part of the “Open House Day” , stood in the courtyard, puzzling over the Latin inscription above the door at No. 8: Domus Ecclesiae Omnium Sanctorum - Christum Scire Omnium Scire”. As I happened to be passing, he asked for help, confessing that he had only just managed to pass his Latin O level several decades ago. Well the first part says: “Domus Ecclesiae Omnium Sanctorum” - that is “The House of the Church of All Saints”. Underneath is the motto of the choir school which used to be housed there “Christum Scire, Omnium Scire” - “To know Christ is to know all.”

When Christians set out to answer that question Jesus addresses to the disciples, and through them to us: “Who do you say that I am?”, we say that he is God, that he is the source and meaning and end of all life; the reason behind the universe which the Pope was speaking about in his lecture. To know him is to know all. What today’s gospel warns us against is thinking that what we know of Christ now is all there is to know ever.

This Thursday we celebrate St. Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist. In his gospel Matthew speaks of the wise teacher who “brings out of his treasures that which is old and that which is new”. The wise teacher, and indeed the wise Christian, must listen morning by morning to the one who wakens our ear “to listen as those who are taught”.
So your priests, your teachers, will be here in church tomorrow morning and the next, day after day, in silent meditation and in reading and hearing of the words of Scripture in the office and the Eucharist; words of wisdom and knowledge, of penitence and praise, to shape and inform our thoughts and words and actions.

That listening cannot be confined within the walls of the Church. It has to go on as we meet people in the business of our daily lives, as we read the papers or listen to the news on radio or TV, as we read books or watch movies or look at pictures. Your teachers have a particular responsibility on your behalf, but in baptism we are all commissioned to share in the priestly and prophetic ministry of Christ; we all need to listen that we might “sustain the weary with a word.”

We must all, priests and people, expect in that wakening of our ear to find Jesus constantly broadening and deepening our knowledge of him, challenging our fixed opinions about him, about God, about the church, about creation and humanity.