Yesterday's worship was at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, which was founded in the 13th century and is one of the most famed churches in Oxford and, I have to say, the first church I have ever been to that served up sherry as a part of the reception right after service.
The congregation was friendly and the sermon by Canon Brian Mountford was at once quite humorous and deep. It was about the connection between our speech and our theology and the way in which we talk and relate to one another communicates deeply theological assumptions. I left inspired -- and inspirited.
Canon Mountford has a lot to live up to. Some of the greatest preachers and theologians have ascended the high and dark wooden pulpit St Mary the Virgin and preached truly historic sermons from its platform. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached here more than once and John Henry Newman, who brought mind and soul back into campus ministry first in the Anglican Church and later in the Catholic, was vicar here in the mid-19th century. And here C.S. Lewis preached his famous "The Weight of Glory" sermon, wherein he described the force behind our human longing for the beautiful and the poetic and the sublime as but mere expressions of our ultimate desire to be caught up in the glory of God.
Here is a worthy snippet of Lewis's most-worthy sermon about our secret desire for God:
"I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both."
But not all things which have taken place in University Church have been so, well, sherry. This was also the place for the trial of the Oxford Martyrs -- the Anglican bishops Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer. The three were tried for heresy in 1555, found to be guilty of being sufficiently Protestant, and sentenced to be burned at the stake.
Cranmer, then Archbishop of Canterbury, might actually have escaped the fate of the other two as he was willing to recant and profess his loyalty to the monarch and to Rome. But several months later, as he was preaching in University Church he suddenly diverged from his prepared and printed text, denounced the pope, and declared himself indeed a Protestant. He was then yanked from the pulpit, led to the city centre and burned like the other two. As the pyre flames grew near he is said to have plunged his right hand first into the fire as an act repentance for having originally signed his recantation.
A memorial to all the martyrs of those bitter years -- Protestant and Catholic -- now stands solemnly inside the nave. I set just behind and looked over it throughout the Sunday service.
How can this be I wonder? How can a place of such spiritual richness and life also be so vile and full of death?
Then I remember the parable that Jesus taught -- about the wheat and the weeds growing up together in the field and how it's impossible to separate the two until the harvest comes; and how the wheat symbolizes the good of the earth while the weeds the evil, and there they are together in one single place, in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin and everywhere else -- every field, every church, every city, and every country -- also.
And then it makes clear sense what Lewis was saying in that famous sermon -- how he ended it with a sobering and unsettlingly-true reminder about just how glorious or depraved the destiny of humanity really is:
"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare."
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