Lent 3
Sermon preached by The Reverend Dr Mark Oakley, Dean of Chapel, St John’s College
This is not a sermon I ever thought I would preach.
Anna Matthews came into my life around the same time she came into yours. Just as she was invited to become your Vicar here, she asked me if I would be her Spiritual Director - and for 10 years I have had that privilege. The priest and poet John Donne said that it is not the eloquence, or the wit, or the intelligence of a preacher that matters. It is, he says, their ‘nearness’. Today, to be honest, I don’t feel eloquent, or witty, and I can’t make sense of much, but I do think we might share a ‘nearness’. We are all in shock. We are living with a
chaos of emotions. This doesn’t feel real. We’re looking for something that will just help us comprehend what’s happened, and we can’t find it. Instead, we just find ourselves here, together, puzzled, angry, sad, and near to each other’s confusion and pain. Christians gather, they come together, its how we believe. But Anna isn’t here. And it can be tempting in this loss to ask, with those Israelites, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’
But I can hear her now, I can see her head tilt down and the eyes look up with a challenging and correcting sparkle: ‘Father, you’re there to preach the Gospel not talk about me’. Well, with Anna, you can do both at the same time very easily. The Gospel teaches us that God has given us all a gift, it is our being, and we are asked to give a gift back in return for it, our becoming, who we become. It is the role of a Spiritual Director to help someone see themselves from the inside out, to survey the inner landscape, its scars and its potential, to see what might yet be and how full stops might be turned into commas. I want to tell you that Anna took that work of ‘becoming’ hugely seriously, with great purpose and intent, prayerfully, and often with some cost. And she did this very much for you, for us, for God, because she always wanted to become a more faithful parish priest, a more loving friend, a more attentive confessor and guide, a more effective preacher, a more Christian Christian, a truer, more authentic, integrated, compassionate human being. The Church talks a lot about ‘wounded healers’, but Anna and I got the giggles once when we reflected that the church seemed to be rather more full of unhealed wounders. And she didn’t want to be one of them. She did this inner work, not for her ego, but because, in the words of her Lord we heard just now, she too wanted ‘to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work’. Her spiritual life as a priest, and as a person, was as dutiful and attentive as her day to day ministry and friendships.
And that ministry and those friendships were her gift to our lives. Anna was strong and wise and funny and formidable and prayerful and private and insightful and sharp and clever and teasing and inspiring. She was a presider, she simply slipped into her place in this world as she presided at the eucharist, and presided as a pastor amongst this community. She preached carefully and with a tuned resonance. She believed it. She helped many discern God’s call in their lives, ordinands and others, and stayed with them as they translated this
call into their life. She was to so many an example of Christian living. She was second to nobody in her ability to keep confidences, to remain loyal to the trust you had shown her. She was second to nobody in her ability to allow you to speak openly and, never making you feel judged, she was ready to take your hand to help you out of your hell. Anna prayed for us.
She was also fiercely efficient in administration, and was never afraid to take on the church hierarchy if she felt they needed to up their game. As her Twitter account said, ‘opinions are my own though I often wish they were the Church’s’. She wanted, and she lived for, a sacramental, poetic, and just, Church that, in Paul’s image to the Romans, shares the glory of God, a Church that points to the beauty, mystery and life of God, not to the prosaic and
narcissistic let-downs of itself. She was a priest’s priest too, reminding us of the seriousness of our vocation, never allowing the irony and jaundice that we can too often trade in, to shadow the great privilege and charge of our vocation. I always felt I had renewed my ordination vows after a conversation with Anna, she had a knack for calling me back to my first love of God. She was also one of those rare people who, when you felt like walking away, just to know she was there and part of the church, made it all the more bearable
somehow. One cannot underestimate the stability she brought to many people’s commitment to the Christian faith not just by what she said or did, but because she was.
She was also a person of small kindnesses, kindnesses that were significant. Look at social media and see the enormous collage of stories that relate the kindness of Anna Matthews. The gift given, the walk taken, the bottle or flowers sent, the card written, the call made – all saying to us we mattered and weren’t forgotten. Yes, the gospel and her life are preached easily together.
Three years ago, at the Peterhouse Chapel retreat, Anna reflected on the passage from St John’s gospel we just heard. As many of you know, Anna was drawn to the Ignatian discipline of imaginative engagement with the gospel stories, and her reflection is beautifully evocative. It is, of course, the story of a woman who meets Christ and discovers him to be the one who cuts through boundaries and seems to know her, to understand her beauty and dignity at a level no one had ever shown her before. This woman, while the men are going on about something to eat, is the true apostle who converts the town and
introduces them to Jesus.
It is easy to see Anna here, perhaps, the one who had the important conversations and then got on with it. But, I want to be honest with you. For all her strength and composure, her faith, her loyalty, Anna’s self-scrutiny could be quite tough on herself. In many ways she didn’t feel worthy of being your priest, and sometimes, if she ever felt she had let one of us down, or let God down, it cut deep. The extravagant and unconditional love of God she
showed to others, she sometimes found harder to see belonged to her too. Her story about herself was sometimes different to the one we gratefully related. She was very private, as you know, but those who got close to her will recognise this fragility in her. We loved her for it but she doubted it was loveable. But, working to become, she turned to face the Gospel again and again because she knew that it reaches beyond our surface to repair unsure
hearts. She said this of the Samaritan woman:
The man who told her all she ever did helped her to
see that her story wasn’t finished yet, because her story was being drawn
into the story of God’s activity in the world to heal, to restore, to make
new. That’s the story still being told. Whatever story we tell about ourselves,
or that others tell about us, is not finished until it has encountered the
living water of God’s love. From this encounter we learn that God will not
let the barriers of gender or ethnicity or shame or sin stand in the way of
his love. A foreign woman with a past became the first Christian preacher,
and through that was given dignity, community and a future. There are no
outcasts with God, who in Jesus became an outcast so we can no longer
be. And what he offered to the woman he offers to us all: a spring of living
water gushing up to eternal life – if we will but acknowledge our thirst.
Anna tuned her heart to acknowledge her thirst. She believed with all her soul that God is the fresh water and she knew that whereas she was more prone to sip from it rather than swim in it, that sometimes things held her back from being fully liberated in the love of God, nevertheless, as she helped others to that compassionate place, and she did time and time again, she would, also, try and fall back on grace herself more and more. And when she did, and could see it, she smiled with such radiance for the goodness and beauty of experiencing God’s love. I’ll never forget those smiles. Travelling with her soul over the years took us on a few high seas but into far more harbours.
And it is to the final harbour of love that we commend her now. I’m praying that she and John Hughes, and others she had loved and lost, are together in that harbour. I’m no more making sense of her loss to us than you are. All I do know is that Anna was a gift to you and to me, and to a vast amount of others across the country, and that this gift was from God. Everything she did in her ministry wanted us to deepen our relationship with God, living water to parched hearts, and I know that her memory will continue doing that. God will, she continuously preached, give us all we need to keep going, even when we can’t see ahead, and that is as true now on this painful day, as it will always be. Last week, as you know, she stood here and preached this:
‘The Holy Spirit isn’t done, yet. In the darkness of the tomb new life stirs. And on the third day the door will be opened to the dazzling light of the resurrection. This is where Nicodemus’s journey leads him: from the cover of darkness to the radiant dawn of everlasting day… I want to imagine a fourth encounter for Nicodemus, though John’s Gospel is silent. I want to see him meet the risen Lord, in the full light of day, all concern for reputation and status gone, all his answers questioned as he follows Jesus into the new creation, enters in full into his birth from above. For this is where our Lenten journey is leading us, too: drawing us along that path, or catching us up in the breath of the Spirit, where all our darkness turns to light; where all that is dead lives; and where we are given our lives back in Jesus in being born from above.’
May Anna, faithful priest, faithful friend, deeply loved here in the hearts she touched, be gently led from cover of darkness to the radiant dawn of everlasting day, knowing herself cherished deep within the mercy, love and embrace of her saviour. Peace be hers now, and peace be to Stephen and the family in their deep loss of their Anna, and peace be ours in the days ahead, as we look after each other, and remember her, and all she has given us by the grace of God.