The Feast of St Benedict

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

Today we had been hoping to be together in church, for a great celebratory service and party to mark the 1000th birthday of St Bene’t’s. Instead, I’m preaching to my phone in an empty building, and we’re worshipping together apart.

Now, from the perspective of eternity, a thousand years isn’t much. ‘A thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday, which passes like a watch in the night’, says the Psalmist of God. But our ways are not God’s ways, and from a human perspective a thousand years represents considerably continuity, stability and history. Since the Saxon tower at St Bene’t’s was built, the city has changed around it, universities have been founded, war and plague and reformation have occurred, the electron and the structure of DNA got discovered next door. The building itself has changed over the centuries, to accommodate differing tastes and needs, and it goes on being developed. Prayer books have come and gone, the language and ritual of the liturgy has shifted, and yet for a thousand years St Bene’t’s has been a place for the offering of prayer and worship; a place where the people of God have gathered around Christ in word and sacrament; have offered their prayers; have hallowed the significant moments of their lives and passed on the good news to those who come after. In a city not short of old and distinguished buildings, this, the oldest, stands as a witness to the enduring, faithful love of God, the one in whom true stability is to be found. 

That the city’s oldest building should be dedicated to St Benedict seems fitting, given the Benedictine emphasis on the importance of stability. Benedict lived during a period of considerable unrest. The Roman Empire had fallen in the west, bringing in its wake political and economic chaos, cultural and moral disruption. It ushered in what has been called the Dark Ages as old certainties collapsed along with political and social order. And yet from the middle of what is now Italy emerged a monastic Rule that has endured beyond institutions, empires or economies. Benedict wrote of the monastery as a ‘workshop of the virtues’. His Rule covers all aspects of life, from the hours of prayer and the cultivation of humility to the ways of ordering community life and how much wine should be taken at meals. And it covers all aspects of life because for Benedict, the whole of life is to be oriented towards God: the Rule is there to help those who follow it to ‘prefer nothing whatever to Christ’. 

The first word in Benedict’s Rule is ‘listen’. ‘Listen, child of God, to the guidance of your teacher.’ So we are encouraged, first, to listen to God, particularly through the Scriptures – though as today’s Gospel reading reminds us, that will bring challenge as well as comfort. True listening means responding, not letting what God says go in one ear and out the other, but receiving what he says as an invitation into life. In Latin the words for listen and obey share the same root. In today’s Gospel reading we hear of a listening that is partial: Jesus sees that the rich young man’s wealth is what holds him back from following God. It gives him influence and security and status. And Jesus calls him to give that up, so he can find his true identity and worth in God. The young man hears, and is sad. We don’t know whether he truly listens, and obeys. The end of the story is left open. 

So we are to attend to the voice of God in the scriptures. And we are to listen to one another. Benedict’s Rule is written for a community. It recognises that on the path to holiness we need each other, that just as in a normal workshop wood or metal is planed or moulded or chipped or formed, so in communities or workshops of virtue we knock the edges off each other, learn together to be moulded and formed more in Christ’s image as we forgive and are forgiven, as we put up with the people who irritate us and learn to love them, and they learn to love us. Benedictine monks take a vow of stability, which means they stay in the same community. A commitment to a people, in a place, over time, is a gift for those who would grow in the desire to prefer nothing whatever to Christ, for it is the members of a community who root that desire in real life: not an abstraction, not an escape from the world to the realm of the spiritual, but the practical outworking of spirituality in learning to love your neighbour. And Benedict counsels that all members of the community should be listened to. The older members will speak from wisdom and experience, but, says Benedict, ‘the Lord often reveals what is better to the younger.’ As we face the climate crisis and the economic fallout from the coronavirus, what might it mean for us to listen to the young?

There’s a tendency in some parts of the Church to long for a new expression of Benedictine life by withdrawing from the world and forming communities that can endure and resist the cultural and political and economic and moral upheavals of the world. A kind of retrenchment from which the Church can emerge purer and stronger. Benedict spent three years living in a cave as a hermit after he fled student life in Rome because he was horrified by the corruption he saw around him. His first monks tried to poison him because they found the demands of his way of life too difficult. Benedict, whose whole life and Rule is shaped by the desire to prefer nothing else to Christ, would need no convincing of the radical demands of the Gospel. But for Benedict, the monastery does not exist for its own sake, or even for the sake of the Church. It exists for the sake of the world which God loves and longs to draw back to the relationship for which he made it. A Christianity that cuts itself off from the world too quickly becomes forgetful of the God who became incarnate in the world in Jesus Christ. That’s why Benedict insists that his communities practise hospitality. There is an openness to the other, to the stranger, at the heart of the Rule, and that means paying attention to them, listening to them, as well. As we listen to God speaking through the scriptures and one another, we are to listen too to the world, in its cries and its questions and its pain. For it is in these communities or workshops of virtue, where we learn to love and be loved, to hear and respond to God, to welcome the stranger as a friend that we can be a people of hope. Where so much is uncertain and fragile we root ourselves in Christ, who is the same yesterday and today and for ever, and we point to a kingdom that endures throughout all ages.

For just as Benedict saw the monastic vocation as serving the purposes of God in the world, so too this is the call of the church. 1000 years provokes gratitude: for all who have gone before us in faith, who have loved and cherished and restored and cared for the building, who have hallowed it with their prayers and passed on the faith to us. As we restart public worship I am full of gratitude for what we have inherited and for all that so many of you have been doing to continue the work of God in this place, even while we are dispersed. This is not how I would have chosen to celebrate our 1000th birthday. But I am glad today to give thanks for you and with you, and above all to give thanks to God, for whom a thousand years is but a day – but that’s because his faithfulness endures for ever.