“Speak the word only”
The miracles of the Epiphany season are the miracles of the Divine Word. God is the poet-maker of all creation; the poet-maker, too, of our redemption. The Greek verb “to make” is ποιεω from which we get the words poet and poetry.
God speaks the world into being. “Speak the word only”, says the Centurion to Jesus in one of the great Epiphany gospels. “Speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.” And he is.
The Gospel story for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, read several weeks ago, opens us out to the miracle of God’s Word spoken and proclaimed. It is the Word which effects what it signifies. To grasp that, as the Centurion does, is itself a wonder, a miracle, which Jesus acknowledges. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel.”
Unlike those about whom it is said, “they hear and do not hear, they see and they do not see,” the Centurion hears and sees. The Word of Christ has its echoing resonance in him and that is a miracle, too. It is, we might say, an epiphany of the understanding in him and for us. “Speak the word only,” we might say, is the miracle of the Epiphany season.
We have lost, perhaps, our faith and confidence in words. We know only too well how words can be used to cheapen and betray and to hurt and destroy. We know only too well, perhaps, the limits and the shortcomings of words. We are skeptical and uncertain about the power of words to convey truth and understanding, about the power of words to create and redeem.
“Human speech”, as Gustave Flaubert avers, “is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.” That view may or may not be exactly what Choir Directors and choristers want to hear, though it may be what they sometimes fear! Our words fall far short of our hopes and aspirations. We have, perhaps, despaired of the power of words to shape communities, especially communities of learning, “Worlds made by Words,” as the scholar, Anthony Grafton, puts it. It is to have despaired of God and his creative and redemptive Word. It is to have forgotten that the real miracle is God’s Word spoken and received.
It is not the first time that such things have been forgotten and dismissed. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States and a contemporary of the Father founder of this College and the School in Windsor, Bishop Charles Inglis, actually cut out of the New Testament all the miracle stories, leaving only the moral precepts of Jesus. It reveals, I think, the blindness of a certain form of enlightenment reason that is unable to comprehend the true power and meaning of the miracles.
The miracles, after all, point to what theologians, like St. Augustine, knew was the greater miracle, the miracle of creation itself. For theology, the created world exists for a purpose; it is not the random occasion of the chance meeting of material forces. After all, from where did they come?
There can be no greater affirmation of the doctrine of creation than the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Why? Because God wills to enter his creation. To what end? To effect redemption which is the even greater miracle of our being returned to the one who is the author of all being and truth. “Speak the word only”. The miracle stories open us out to the principle of the very being of the universe and to the idea of ourselves as thinking creatures within it. That they do so through the mechanics of poetry, through the language of image and metaphor, is the stuff of theology.
February, to all appearances, is the month of the bleak, mid-winter. Not only the shortest month, it is also the thinnest month in terms of feasts and festivals. There is the irony that the most popular festival of February is the one which has only parenthetical notice in the church calendar owing to its historical uncertainty, St. Valentine. And yet, between the two major festivals of Candlemas and St. Matthias, feasts of the Word as Light and Life, and the Word that restores and recreates the apostolic fellowship, there is the commemoration of a little known figure, Cædmon, the first recorded Christian poet in England, c. 680. The month ends, too, with the commemoration of another poet, George Herbert, one of the greatest poets of Anglican spirituality, whose poems are more than enough to drive the cold winter away, even, perhaps, the cold winter of our Anglican discontent and disarray.
Cædmon. Not exactly a household name. And certainly one of the more obscure figures for commemoration in the ecclesiastical calendar but one whose historical being is more than attested to and, not least of all, by the outstanding scholar and writer of early English history and theology, the Venerable Bede. There aren’t too many places, apart from this College Chapel, perhaps, where Cædmon is being commemorated. I may count myself, I suspect, as the lowly member of fairly rarified and odd company of those who have had to preach on his feast day! And for that honour, I have your Chaplain, Fr. Thorne, to thank!
There is something quite wonderful in the story and life of Cædmon. It speaks to what we have lost in our uncertainties and decadence about the power of words, including God’s Word.
The story of Cædmon is beautifully told by Bede. An unlettered and uneducated lay member of the monastic community at Whitby, who looked after the animals, Cædmon “never learned anything about poetry” and would always avoid having to sing a song at a feast, slipping out before the harp of story and song could come to him, by going out to the animals instead. One night asleep in the stable, he had a dream in which a man called out to him and said, “Cædmon, sing me a song.” “I don’t know how to sing,” he replied. “It is because I cannot sing that I left the feast and came here.” The man who addressed him then said: “But you shall sing to me.” “What should I sing about?” he replied. “Sing about the Creation of all things,” the other answered. And Cædmon immediately began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator that he had never heard before, and their theme ran thus: “Let us praise the Maker of the kingdom of heaven, the power and purpose of our Creator, and the acts of the Father of glory. Let us sing how the eternal God, the author of all marvels, first created the heavens for the sons of men as a roof to cover them, and how their almighty Protector gave them the earth for their dwelling place.” As Bede observes, writing in Latin, “This is the general sense, but not the actual words that Cædmon sang in his dream; for however excellent the verses, it is impossible to translate them from one language into another without losing much of their beauty and dignity.”
The actual Anglo-Saxon words have come down to us in two eighth century manuscripts. It is really all we have, despite the misattribution to Caedmon of other early Anglo-Saxon poems. Brought to the notice of Hilda, the Abbess of Whitby, Cædmon left his secular activity and entered the monastic life, “composing religious and devotional songs [so skillfully] that he could quickly turn whatever passages of Scripture were explained to him into delightful and moving poetry in his own English tongue.” As Bede observes “these verses of his stirred the hearts of many folk to despise the world and aspire to heavenly things.”
There is the lovely paradox of Bede saying that his Latinizing of Cædmon’s verse fails to capture the original when the original is derived from Cædmon’s Englishing of the Latin Bible, having heard certain passages of Scripture explained to him. Perhaps, there is a truth to translation, after all! Yet, Bede, the humble scholar, grants a beauty and a dignity to what Cædmon has expressed in English.
“Sing me a song.” “Speak the word only.” “In the beginning Caedmon sang this poem,” singing of the Creator of all things. It was a kind of miracle. It seems that Cædmon could not read or write but transposed from memory the stories of Scripture into poetry and song which then came to be written down. And yet, in his song, he sings what the wise and learned Daniel has sung in our lesson this evening: “Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever; for wisdom and might are his,” sings Daniel. “Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven’s kingdom,/the might of the Creator, and his thought,” Cædmon’s song begins.
There is a wonderful simplicity and directness to Cædmon’s song. It arises from an openness to the Divine Word, like the miracle of the Centurion’s response to Jesus.
“Though we but stammer with the lips of men yet chant we the high things of God,” as one of the Fathers puts it. It remains our ambition, our joy and our delight. Somehow in chanting the high things of God, our songs will, perhaps, be more than jigs for dancing bears. “I used to think words could do anything. Magic. Sorcery. Even miracle. But no, only occasionally,” as Margaret Laurence has Morag Gunn say in her novel, The Diviners. That novel examines writing as a way of divining or understanding. There is a magic and a miracle in poetry and song, if only occasionally. It is the miracle of the praises of God. “Sing ye praises with understanding,” as the Psalmist puts it.
Miracles do two things. They reveal God as the author of all good and wonderful things and they reveal what God seeks for the good of our humanity; in short, healing and wholeness, joy and salvation. They are found in poetry and song, in the miracle of the word. And sometimes they are revealed to us in the words of soldiers and herdsman; the words of Cædmon and the Centurion.
“Speak the word only”
Fr. David Curry
Commemoration of Caedmon
King’s College Chapel
February 10th, 2011
One thought on “Sermon for the Feast of St. Caedmon”
Great sermon, Dad!