Southern Choir Festival -- Chichester Cathedral
16th July, 2004
Bless the Earth
The last time I was at a service in this Cathedral was 24 years ago for a wedding - my own! And I was feeling a good deal more nervous than I do today! When the writer Thomas Carlyle, who was famously rather tetchy, married his wife Jane, who was equally famously rather grumpy, it was said of them: "How good of the Carlyles to marry each other .and in so doing making only 2 people miserable instead of 4!"
I bring you greetings from the Diocese of Liverpool where I fly back this afternoon for our Cathedral Centenary weekend which will feature the first performance of the specially commissioned Atma Mass by John Taverner.
I sang in church choirs from the age of 7 right through to university where I ended up under the direction of the now Dean of Chichester. Time allotted for the sermon does not permit any anecdotes but there's a good one about blood and Widor's Toccata!
Those years of singing sacred music were more formative than I realised at the time. I've found myself returning to them, fortunately only lightly buried in my memory and therefore easily retrievable.
In times of indecision about the future musical prayers have come to the surface:
"Lead me Lord, Lead me in thy righteousness .. Make thy ways plain before my sight".
At times as Bishop of Hull and now Liverpool as I've contemplated the injustices of this world the Advent Prose has stirred my soul:
"Drop down ye heavens from above and let the skies pour down righteousness .. the Holy Cities are a wilderness."
For the past ten years I've been caught up in the renewal of the great Northern cities, in the transformation of industrial wildernesses and in how the Gospel might make sense to the poor.
I've been struck by how difficult it is to persuade people including myself to see the world through the eyes of the poor, to side with them, and to see that what happens to the earth lies at the very heart of the Christian Faith.
So in this brief address I want to explore the relationship between liturgy and the earth.
According to the Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees the planet has only a 50/50 chance of surviving the 21st Century. The catalogue of ecological disasters afflicting the earth is so serious it might make us think that our music making is akin to Nero's fiddling while Rome was burning!
Recently I visited Central America. I spent a week living with the indigenous people of La Mosquitia in Honduras. I had beans for breakfast, beans for lunch and beans for supper and all the consequences of such a healthy diet. I also spent two days in a dug-out canoe sailing through the last and rapidly disappearing rain forest. In 50 years they've lost, we've lost, 80% of the forests. Last year the Amazon Rain Forest alone lost an area the size of Wales! The trees are the lungs of the earth. How much more can the planet take without irreparable damage to its lungs and its body?
In Gerard Manley Hopkin's poem "God's Grandeur" he writes "Nature is never spent". I wonder if he would be so optimistic if he were writing today.
But why has the church been so slow to speak up for the planet? Why is it so disconnected from the earth and its future - so slow to appreciate the African Proverb: "We have borrowed the present from our children"?
The answer might lie - to our surprise in "liturgy". Week in, week out, day in and day out we reinforce our disconnectedness from the earth by the way we say the Lord's Prayer.
Our Father who art in Heaven Pause
Hallowed be thy name Pause
Thy Kingdom come Pause
Thy will be done Pause
On earth as it is in heaven Pause
We separate out 'On earth as it is in heaven'. We divorce if from "Thy will be done". But the petition which parallels the praying for the coming of God's Kingdom is "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven".
Last year in Nairobi Cathedral I heard for the first time 3000 people together pray the Lord's Prayer prayed as it should be: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven".
I suppose it's because perforce they live so much closer to the earth.
It's a prayer for what I call the "earthing of heaven", all of a piece with that Advent Prose:
"Drop down ye heavens from above and let the skies pour down righteousness . the Holy Cities are a wilderness".
You will recall that in the Book of Common Prayer the petition is "Thy will be done IN earth as it is in heaven". This captures something deeper and more providential about the will of God than the modern translation, "Your will be done ON earth". The preposition is all-important. Rather like a true sailor who talks about working not on a ship but in a ship.
God's will touches not just the surface of the earth but delves deeper into the complexity of nature and sustains the whole of creation. The earth is a living organism of which we are a part that God is committed to renewing and transforming.
In Common Worship in one of the Eucharistic Prayers we therefore pray
"Bless the earth
Heal the sick
Let the oppressed go free".
Here is liturgy that connects us with the world and affirms the earth, its present and its future.
When in the Old Testament the City of Tyre did the opposite and cursed the earth, ignored the sick and oppressed the poor God warned them through the Prophet Ezekiel (26 v13):
"I will silence the music of your songs"
and conversely in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation, when Heaven has finally dropped down from above the air will be filled with the music of our songs.
This vision inspired Milton's poem "Blest Pair of Sirens".
"O may we soon again renew that song
And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long
To his celestial concert us unite
To live with him in endless morn of praise"
Music is what happens when Heaven drops down from above and is joined with the Earth in "celestial concert", in a "celestial marriage" which is why the image of bride and bridegroom abound in the Revelation to St. John.
I said earlier that I am often surprised at how music from my youthful singing has returned to sustain me. At the age of about 7 the Vicar invited me to choose a hymn one Sunday. I chose "Thou didst leave thy throne and thy Kingly Crown when thou camest to earth for me ." with the chorus "O come to my heart Lord Jesus there is room in my heart for thee".
It's a prayer for all, for a child and for an adult, for a Chorister and for a Bishop.
I see now more fully than I did as a child that the earth, which he graced and sanctified by his entrance into our world, is also the object of his salvation as well as our souls.
That is why the earth quaked at his Crucifixion and why it quaked again at his Resurrection.
The quaking of the earth was the liturgy of all creation aching and groaning to be free from all that curses, sickens and oppresses the world, inviting us to long for our own liberation from the bondage to sin and decay.
So let our music-making therefore stir our souls. Let us pray that the Heavens would indeed drop down from above, and the skies pour down justice. Let us pray for this "earthing of Heaven" and let us with God in the liturgy of our lives
Bless the earth
Heal the sick
And let the oppressed go free.