Sermon for Encaenia 2022
“O where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”
At last! An Encaenia in June, not August! Who can believe it? And here in the Chapel. Today marks the last time that you are in Chapel as students. In just a few hours you will have stepped up and out into the world as graduates and alumni. Congratulations! You are the class that has suffered through the sturm und drang of the pandemic and, now, at last, you have been able to have exams! What’s not to like?! You have persevered quite well and, I hope, quite wisely. How? By that constant renewing of our minds upon the principles that animate and shape our lives together. An ending that is at once a beginning.
Encaenia is a Greek word that refers to renewal of purpose and identity, a dedication service (εν καινος) with respect to the spiritual and intellectual principles that belong to the founding of institutions. From its ancient origins in the dedications of holy places, Encaenia became associated with “the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors at Oxford University in June” (O.E.D), and extends to the academic institutions which derive from the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the English-speaking world, even to King’s-Edgehill. It reminds us that we are part of something greater than ourselves.
One hundred years ago in 1922, T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land. Written shortly after the devastations of the First World War, the poem reflects profoundly upon the wilderness of modernity imaged as a wasteland, a world in ruins. Images of death and decay are drawn from Ezekiel, the poet-prophet of the exile, and from the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures, Qoheleth or Ecclesiastes. Our humanity, ben adam, “Son of Man”, knows only “a heap of broken images” and cannot say what lives and grows “out of this stony rubbish” of a world in ruins. The image is from Ezekiel: “Your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ez. 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.
Yet the poem offers far more than darkness and dystopian despair, far more than fear and death. It suggests that wisdom may be found even in the ruins of our times. “Only There is shadow under this red rock.” The Rock is the dominant image of God in the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy: “the Rock that begot you … the God who gave you birth”(Dt. 32.18). “(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you,/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
“Fear in a handful of dust”? How is that happy making? Yet it is about hope and life. It refers to the custom of throwing earth on the casket or urn of the dead but doing so “in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life” (BCP, p. 602). Fear is more than the fear of death or the fear of Covid or the fear that haunts our broken and fragmented world of economic, social, political, and environmental uncertainties – our world, your world.