Sermon for Encaenia 2019
admin | 15 June 2019How can this be?
What? It’s all over? “How can this be?” you might ask like Nicodemus in the lesson Nick read. High School no more?! IB no more?! “Hit the road Jack and don’t cha come back, no more no more no more no more”! Really? It’s all over and I have to go? Hooray! Or perhaps not! Do I have to leave? Can’t I come back?
“How can this be?” your parents, too, might be asking? My dear little one is graduating from High School?! It seems it was only “yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away”. Now it’s all over? Well enough of the old geezer tunes from the remote past with apologies to Ray Charles and the Beatles. But you get the point. There is a question. “How can this be?”
Nicodemus’ question to Jesus conveys a sense of wonder as well as perplexity that belongs to the special qualities of this day. Today you step up and step out no longer as students but shortly as graduates and alumni of King’s-Edgehill School. As such today is an ending and a beginning, a looking back and a looking ahead but as well a looking inward.
This service is called Encaenia, which is a Greek word – ‘Oh no, not another Rev kind of word. You mean I have to think in the morning? Isn’t it all over?’! Well, duh! No. Encaenia refers to a renewal of purpose and identity. Originally an annual dedication of holy places, it has become associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D) and, by extension, to academic institutions derived from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge throughout the English speaking world; such as King’s-Edgehill. Encaenia recalls us to our beginnings, to the foundational principles and ideals belonging to the life of the School and to the nature of education. Endings and beginnings, as it were.
Those things are embodied in the Edgehill motto, fideliter, meaning ‘faithfulness’, as married to the motto of King’s, Deo Legi, Regi, Gregi, which means ‘for God, for the Law, for the King, and for the People’. Such things signify an approach to education that connects learning and living, a turning of our hearts and minds to the things that belong to service and sacrifice, to things worth doing and worth doing well, especially academically speaking, but with the intention of seeking the good of the human community. These mottos express an enlightenment sensibility about an education that contributes to lives of service whether in church, law, government or social, economic, and domestic life wherever you are and wherever you go in the world. It has very much to do with the education of the whole person within a community of persons.
Education is what is signalled in Nicodemus’ coming to Jesus. He is genuinely puzzled and wants to know, like all good ToK students! “How can a man be born again?” he asks. In response to Jesus’ answer, he then asks, “How can this be?” Yet education really is about a kind of rebirth, about being constantly born upward into mysteries that are constantly before us. There is wonder and perplexity which together lead to learning and service. “How can this be?” is Nicodemus’ wonder at the wonder of learning.
The word at our last regular Chapel services is the word for this Encaenia service. The word is metanoia… I know, I know, another Rev kind of word! But metanoia, you may remember, is about our minds, literally, a thinking after; in short, a reflection upon our life together, a reflection upon our “thoughts, words, and deeds” which encapsulate the entirety of ourselves. We are our thoughts, our words, and our deeds but only in the turning of our minds to wisdom and truth. Metanoia is usually translated as repentance but conveys this deeper sensibility about reflection and self-awareness, about maturity and understanding, about wisdom and truth.
The context is intriguing and speaks to the realities of our global world. Nicodemus is a learned rabbi from within the newly emerging traditions of intellectual Judaism, what will be known as rabbinical Judaism which arises concurrently with Christianity. He is clearly mystified and puzzled about the teachings of Jesus. But he wants to know. The meeting is not so much a collision of cultures, Jewish and Christian, as the conjunction of cultures intellectually and spiritually speaking, a kind of engagement. This has been one of our Chapel themes in which we have endeavoured to see the contrasts and the connections between different forms of religious philosophy. Being born again means something more than a slogan asserting a certain form of religious experience and identity. It is, literally, about being born upwards. It speaks to the idea of analogy, a thinking upwards which can only happen through our exposure to ideas and principles. The concept of rebirth suggests the idea of renewal and a return to the truth of ourselves. Encaenia, too, is a kind of metanoiafor it calls us to reflection.
“Know thyself” says the Delphic oracle in the culture of the ancient Greeks. That wisdom, itself a metanoia, is complemented in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding by “the fear of the Lord” as “the beginning of wisdom.” These things all involve an important self-critique of reason as essential to self-knowing. That awakening to ourselves necessarily implies our relation to others, to our world and to God. The Bhagavad Gita which embodies the ethical teaching of the Upanishads in Hindu culture is about an awakening, the awakening of Arjuna by Sri Krishna about his dharma, about who he truly is. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, becomes the enlightened one through his encounter with suffering in the form of an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a guru who seems to have the face of contentment in the face of suffering. Buddhism reflects profoundly on the illusions of the self and the world; again, a kind of critique of reason, especially of the ego-cage of the self which is the cause of suffering. Confucius’ Analects offer wonderful moments of reflection about what it means to be ‘ren’, to be good and virtuous, as it were. “‘Do you want me to say what knowledge is?’ the Master asks. ‘It is to know what you know and what you don’t know.’” Like Plato’s Meno, that requires metanoia, a change in our thinking and outlook, sometimes in ‘a talk-it-through kind of way’ that befits institutions that are serious about learning and wisdom.
In the lesson which Julia read we heard about the gifts of the spirit. Rabanus Maurus’ ninth century hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus, translated by Bishop John Cosin of Durham in the seventeenth century speaks about the sevenfold gifts of the spirit, one of the devotional and spiritual traditions of western Christianity. And yet in what Julia read only six gifts of the spirit are mentioned.
What is that all about? Once again, it has to do with the intersection and interaction of cultures and to the kind of learning which negotiates between them. The Greek Septuagint translation added piety or Godliness to the list – no one really knows why. It is even possible that the Septuagint was working with an older Hebrew text of Isaiah than what has come down to us. The mystery deepens because Jerome in his seminal and magisterial translation of the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures into Latin, known as the Vulgate, chose to follow the Septuagint at this point, thus providing the scriptural ground for the tradition of the seven gifts of the Spirit. Take note yet again of the interplay of cultures and languages.
John Wycliffe’s 14th century English translation followed Jerome’s lead but Tyndale in the 16th century and the King James Version in the 17th century reverted to the Hebrew text, hence six gifts. Yet, again showing something of the confluence of cultures and a breadth of cultural understanding, Cosin’s translation recalls the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit: “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and piety, and the spirit of the fear of God.” All these gifts are associated with God as Spirit, as beyond our comprehension and yet as the ground of our thinking. They are profoundly intellectual and spiritual qualities. Piety, shorn of the overtones of self-righteousness, signals the upward and Godward direction of our lives in all our various pursuits. Piety returns us to God, to a kind of self-awareness, to metanoia.
The sevenfold gifts of the spirit speak to the confusions of our world and day by opening our minds to the wonder and the mystery of learning and to the ethical demands such learning requires. It means the willingness to engage respectfully with one another across a wide spectrum of cultures and languages. That can only happen if we are like Nicodemus and want to know and seek to learn. It can only happen in the places of our meeting together in the pursuit of learning.
Before you in the Chapel is an icon. It is a copy of the famous 15th century Russian Rublev Icon of the Holy Trinity, also called “the hospitality of Abraham.” Already you begin to see something of the interplay of religious ideas. The scene depicts the meeting of Abraham and three angels or God as Three Persons, a scene from Genesis which is the setting for the gift of the promised son to Abraham and Sarah in their old age but in the Christian understanding signals the central Christian idea of God as Trinity symbolised eucharistically. Yet the whole tradition of icons which plays such a significant role in the piety of Eastern Orthodoxy arises out of the controversy and collision between Christianity and Islam which turned on questions about the representation of things transcendent. This results in the Eastern traditions of iconography which point to the transcendent one-dimensionally unlike the traditions of three-dimensional representations in the statuary art of the West.
Everything turns on how we think these things. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are necessarily and “unabashedly anthropomorphic” which means thinking about God in and through aspects of our humanity, but all three equally reject the tendency to collapse God into the forms of our humanity and all three equally reject the reduction of “scriptural imagery to mere metaphor” (John Renard, Islam and Christianity, 226). In other words, there is an awakening to mystery. “How can this be?”
The mystery is the dance of the understanding about how God is and is not like anything else that belongs to our knowing and being. That in turn informs our metanoia, our reflections about ourselves, our self-knowing. At the very least, it means the possibilities of a kind of thoughtfulness. Such is the weight of Nicodemus’ question.
There is something very poignant and moving about this day; one cannot not feel the thought and the emotion! We are at once sad and glad to see you go for we have been through so much together over the years and, certainly, morning after morning here in the morning miracle of Chapel. My thanks in particular to the Chapel prefects under Maddy Barbour’s gentle and outstanding leadership, not to mention Liz and Brittany competing to light the candles! “How can this be?” I wonder. Because of your commitment and willingness to think and learn, I think. We have sung and danced, marched and not-marched, sat and thought about so many things together whether it has been one year or seven, whether it has been here or in the classroom or in the venues of sports. There is so much for you to ponder and to wonder about the jam-packed and busy days, weeks, months, and years that belong to the King’s-Edgehill education, at once unique and special. It is all part of you.
We want you to come back, of course, but not as students in exactly the same sense. Yet it will be, I hope, in the same spirit of inquiry and learning that has been so much a part of our time together. We say adieu, adios, and wish you Godspeed. Gruße Gott, as Antonia might say in Munich. Go with God. You are dear to us. We say farewell to Madame Karen Jones, Mr. Ryan Alguire, Mr. Brian Casey, Mr. Liam McLaughtlin and Ms. Madeleine Killacky who have contributed so much to the life of the School.
Education seeks our coming to ourselves, to an understanding of ourselves, of God, of our world, and of one another. Such is metanoia. It requires respect and honesty; it compels us to care and compassion; to gentleness and learning. May you never lose that sense of joy and wonder captured in Nicodemus’ question, “how can this be?”
(Rev’d) David Curry
Encaenia Sermon, June 15th, 2019