Readings: Hebrews 11.32-12.2; Matthew 5.1-12
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
This morning we have read together the readings for All Saints Day, which has traditionally been observed on the 1st of November, as a time to commemorate people of faith throughout the ages. These are the believers, many of whose names are not recorded or recalled, whose actions and words, whose steadfastness and vision have witnessed to the love of God, and have transmitted the faith down through the generations.
And we have come together also to commemorate not so much our church building, which has been here for 275 years, but the faith of those who founded this congregation. We celebrate those who have maintained a witness to the love and mercy of God in Aston Tirrold not only all the way back to 1728, when the church was built, but back even before that, to the people who for conscience sake established dissenting worship in this area.
It has been good for me as I have prepared this sermon to become more familiar with the names which trip off the tongues of many members of the congregation, Richard Comyns and Thomas Cheesman, the first ministers, the Fuller family, the Popes, the Didcocks. In the earliest baptismal and death registers which the congregation possesses, it is impressive to see how almost every page contains names from the small number of families who were the prominent leaders of this congregation in its earliest times. It is moving to read about how the congregation grew in its first years, in the face of opposition and suppression, moving out of one barn to a larger one when the number of hearers became to great. Our present day building from 1728 remains a symbol of toleration and a greater openness to non-conformist ideas and worship. We are the proud inheritors of a dissenting tradition, of a questioning faith, of that restlessness of heart which, as St. Augustine said, yearns to find its rest only in God.
Among the archives which the church keeps of its history is a photocopy of a published sermon by Thomas Cheesman. I had contemplated preaching that sermon as it stood, but I thought that most of us wanted to get home before sunset. The sermon was Thomas Cheesman’s so-called "farewell" sermon, the sermon preached in 1662, to mark the coming-out from the established Church of England in response to the Act of Uniformity, the imposition of the Book of Common Prayer and Episcopal government. It is interesting to read the sermon, and to see the way in which the English language has changed in the years between then and now. "And oh that sinners would take note of the bowels of Christ" he exclaims at one point. This would surely induce quite a high titter factor nowadays, but then was quite normal, talking about the extreme emotion of Christ’s compassion towards people who are aware of their own sin. The ending of the sermon is quite as stern a proclamation of the punishment of sinners as you would hope to find at that period. But along the way, there are many signs that Cheesman was a deeply compassionate pastor, aware of the struggles that people have to find God in the midst of life’s tribulations.
The central theme of the sermon, the mercy of God, shows an awareness that God is sought and found not in the easy circumstances of life, but in its difficult and painful moments. He is aware of human temptation and weakness, and does not condemn, but rather insists that the present is a time of opportunity to put past behind, and to change. God’s compassion and patience are powerful themes – "it is remarkable, God was longer in destroying one City than in building the whole World; he created the World in six days, but he was seven days in destroying the city of Jericho." Cheesman speaks of God’s demand for justice, and God’s capacity to punish, but says also that the justice of God is laid aside by his mercy: "acts of mercy are performed by God with delight, because they are most suitable to God’s disposition; as the bee that gives honey naturally, but does not sting when it is forced."
Thomas Mann begins his novel Joseph and His Brothers with the wonderful line "Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?" On All Saints Day, and in this commemoration of the founding of our church we recognise the continuity which links us to our forebears. The water feature in our quiet garden, with its constant flowing, perhaps can come to symbolise for us that the witness and the faithfulness of those who have prayed and witnessed here is a fathomless well, from which we now draw the things which sustain us in our life. We reach back to Thomas Cheesman, and his insistence on the mercy of God, and back from that to the words of Jesus in our Gospel reading this morning, "blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." Deeper and deeper we go to bring to the surface something which we urgently need to discover for ourselves and for the world in which we live.
In the worship week by week, and in the work of the centre for reflection, we try to be a living embodiment of God’s mercy, a sign of the patience of God who knows our weaknesses, who forgives, who creates new possibilities from the things in our lives which seem worn out or broken. In worship we give and receive reassurance that through Christ sins are forgiven. In different ways we encourage people to discover within themselves creative abilities that they had not expressed before, to feel the love of God the creator through their own creativity. That deep well of the past provides us with the sense that the things which have been given to us, which are not of our own making, are nonetheless the life-giving source of our future. We are not the curators of a museum, the guardians of a past glory. Rather we pray that out of our past we might learn new ways of finding God’s mercy and of being merciful ourselves.
"There is a directing mercy in God," Thomas Cheesman maintained in his sermon, "God will not let his people take a step in the dark, he will be to them a Pillar of fire, leading them in the wilderness of this world." These words must have had gone way beyond an empty piety in the hearing of the first audience, as they stepped into the insecurity and danger of dissent. They also minister to us through our own doubts and uncertainties.
When I set out to write this sermon, I had thought that perhaps I would make the central theme "dissent". It struck me that the list of heroes of the faith described in Hebrews are noted not for their lives of humble conformity, but for their willingness to stand for their convictions, no matter how much it cost them.
All Saints Day might be seen as a dissenters’ charter: the cloud of witnesses who surround us are commended because they withstood tyranny and religious oppression. "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all manner of evil against you falsely on my account" says Jesus in the conclusion to the Beatitudes. These words from scripture embody an unsettling tradition, and one which fed the imaginations of our forebears. In the end, I didn’t go completely down this road, partly because in no sense are we now celebrating dissent against establishment, URC against Church of England.
It is interesting that even in the history of the Presbyterian Church in Aston Tirrold, written in 1928 for the bicentenary, a sensitivity not to gloat in a dissenting history against other Christians already comes to the fore. Its author noted that the church "stands as the one representative in Aston Tirrold of the ‘Free Churches’ in friendly comradeship with the Parish Church." We have moved a long way from forbidden meetings in houses and barns. Those old enmities have vanished, as we have entered a new situation in western culture, in which all religion and spirituality have in themselves become a kind of dissent against a prevailing individualism. Sometimes in a gentler, less overtly revolutionary way than in our dissenting past, Christians and other people of faith are united in giving priority to spiritual realities which at once are a judgement upon and a transformation of the values of our culture. We celebrate today with our fellow Christians from different traditions, and we also look to build bridges between ourselves and people of other faiths.
One of the members of the congregation in a correspondence before this service expressed what I think is in the minds of many visitors and members alike as we celebrate this anniversary. Aston Tirrold church is a special place for many, because one has a sense of encountering the sacred here. "I love the idea of the peace, which so many who have visited Aston Tirrold experience, having come out of conflict resolved – or at least endured" she wrote. That is our history, the way that has brought us to this present time. And again it links in with the reading from the Beatitudes: "blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God." The cloud of witnesses whose names we know are mostly people like myself, people remembered for having too many words. But the wonder of this place comes not from the named but the unnamed saints who have faithfully prayed here. Part of our special ministry now is not to heap up more words, but to join our silence to the silent prayer of many generations, to offer a place of peace and to make peace in the midst of the clamour and noise of our daily living.
This is a special day, to which we all bring something very personal, the memory of people who have been particularly influential in our journey of faith, the powerful sense of standing in the company of unseen women and men, whose spiritual presence still suffuses this place and all that is done here, the experience of the grace, mercy and peace of God, the very presence of Christ shared and experienced through Communion. It is a time of profound thanksgiving. And a time of prayerful hope that we truly will receive mercy to draw from the well of the past, creating new acts of faithfulness.