Sermon given at Sung Eucharist on Sunday 2nd September 2012

2nd September 2012 at 11:00 am

The Reverend Andrew Tremlett, Canon of Westminster and Rector of St Margaret's Church

One of the vagaries of contemporary church life is to do with the choice of readings, Sunday by Sunday. You may be in that blissful state of ignorance whereby you think that the Rector – or more likely a Minor Canon – makes it up as we go along. And while there are many things for which I happily accept responsibility, the Lectionary, the fruit of countless years of international committee-work, is not one of them.

Throughout the year, the Sunday readings in particular relate closely to one another – the Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel all run side by side, so that the listener and the interpreter are able to weave a kind of golden thread, which stops Scripture being a series of unrelated snippets and brings them into a complementary focus.

That’s the theory. The pattern is broken, however, during the Trinity season when two sets of alternative Old Testament lessons are proposed – the first, is a continuous series, relating to each other over the twenty or so Sundays after Trinity. The second set continues the pattern of shadowing closely the New Testament texts.

Usually, the difference between these choices is not particularly illuminating. But today, when we are celebrating Iain and Larraine’s fortieth wedding anniversary it most certainly is.

Let me explain.

In place of the reading we heard from the Torah, the Lectionary also suggests an alternative reading from the Song of Solomon. It is entitled, the Springtime Rhapsody!

The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

This is the exquisite language of erotic love, of passion, of desire and of longing. I won’t be so indelicate as to ask for a commentary from the couple themselves! It is a love completely at one with the natural order and deeply rooted in the culture of the times. So often this text has been re-interpreted as an allegory for the love of God, or for the Church as the Bride adorned, or even for the Holy Trinity.

But the truth is, like Ockham’s razor, usually simpler. The Bible is a collection of literary material, divinely inspired and relating to the whole gamut of human experience. History, wisdom, law, hymnody. The Song of Solomon speaks about human love in all its passion and flame and longing.

But if you were paying attention earlier, that was most definitely not our text this morning.

The other track of the Lectionary offered us, instead, the following from the book of Deuteronomy:

So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.

And, of course, the Law, the keeping of statute, is one of the central interpretations of marriage, especially in the Church of England. The Priest acts as the Legal Registrar, in our case at St Margaret’s under the licence or faculty of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But nonetheless, the rule of law figures significantly in our understanding of marriage.

That the vows which are made before God and people are sacred tokens not rehearsed lines; they commit the one to the other, whatever may happen in the future; they are binding, cogent, powerful. So much so that they have the force of law, not for nothing ‘the marriage contract’.

And while the romantic in us may sneer at the dead-weight of the law, it’s very force is a powerful reminder that they should be broken only when all else fails and, thank God, the momentum of the Law is in this regard rightly conservative, maintaining ‘what is’.

At its best this tension, between the natural order, passion, desire in the Song of Solomon, and the strict emphasis on legal observance in Deuteronomy, is something to be celebrated. A marriage without love would be a pale shadow; a marriage without boundaries would be a sham.

By coincidence, the same interplay between nature and law is signalled in the commemoration tomorrow of the life of St Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome, who died in AD 604. The son of a Roman senator, Gregory pursued a career in government and became Prefect of Rome in 573.

A turning-point for him was the death of his father, when he resigned his office, sold his inheritance and became a monk. Elected as Pope in 590, he proved an astute administrator and diplomat, negotiating peace for Rome with the Lombards.

A bishop who knew the law, but whose writings were pastorally orientated, especially one entitled ‘Pastoral Care’ which is the cornerstone of Episcopal ministry.

But for us, sitting here in this English Church, he has a particular significance. The story is that when Gregory first encountered pale-skinned English boys in the slave market, he is said to have spoken the immortal words: Non Angli, sed angeli (They are not Angles, but angels). "Well named, for they have angelic faces and ought to be co-heirs with the angels in heaven”.

With that he dispatched Augustine to Canterbury in 597 in what was to become the founding movement of Christianity in England, and the See of Canterbury in particular.

And as if that movement of Western, juridically-based Catholicism was not enough, just at the same time one Colm Cille, or St Columba, was doing the same for Celtic monasticism in Iain’s part of the world on the West Coast of Scotland. A spirituality deeply embedded in the natural order of the world, in which God is revealed as creator in all his majesty.

So as we celebrate today with Iain, Larraine, their family, and friends, we give thanks for the gift of marriage, bounded only by the love of God. And we ask that our faith in God may replicate the witness of scripture and the lives of our Christian forebears.