St Benedict’s Day
Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
‘Sell all that you own… then come, follow me’, says Jesus. And the pragmatist in me immediately starts making exceptions and objections. If everyone gives up everything then how will anything happen? How do we feed ourselves and one another, clothe ourselves, house ourselves? And does ‘all that you own’ mean everything? What about the things that are of only sentimental value? Or the stuff I’ve worked hard for? All my books?
On the day of his profession in a Benedictine monastery a novice gives away any possessions he has, either to the poor or to the monastery: as St Benedict writes in his Rule ‘without keeping back a single thing for himself, well aware that from that day he will not have even his own body at his disposal.’
There’s something in most of us, I think that baulks at this, and the idea of living according to a rule. Who is someone else to tell me what to do? The sovereign will chafes against the restraints and obligations a rule such as Benedict’s imposes on it. We view obedience with suspicion – sometimes rightly so, for authority is easily misused – and want to make our own decisions about what we do, and when we do it, and who we do it with. These are some of the issues behind the arguments over the next easing of restrictions. We can all make up our own minds.
This would have sounded thoroughly bizarre to Benedict. He knew, first, that we need formation – in wisdom and goodness and holiness – to be able to make decisions that are not merely selfish or short-sighted. We are not all as good or wise or as holy as we might like to think we are. And he knew that our lives are bound up in each other’s: my actions and attitudes affect you, and yours affect me. My good is bound up with yours, and yours with mine.
And this imbues the Rule, from the allocation of different roles within the community, to the vows of obedience, stability, and conversion of life, to the dignity accorded to every task. The sort of community Benedict is trying to form is one in which each person is helped to grow in holiness, to ‘prefer nothing to Christ’. Giving up one’s possessions is part of this, for it makes you depend on the community: there is no such thing as ‘mine’ or ‘yours’ but ‘ours’. Just as the ruler who approaches Jesus would not truly know what it is to inherit eternal life until he had been dispossessed of his possessions and learnt to find his stability and security elsewhere, so the Benedictine practice of poverty teaches dependence. In the transformation from ‘mine’ to ‘ours’ lies the possibility of learning that I am not self-sufficient, that I depend on God and the community for my life. Just as we pray that God will give us each day our daily bread – not mine, but ours – so Benedict’s Rule will not allow us to forget that all we have and receive is gift, not to be hoarded but used justly and shared. We may not live in communities under this Rule but Benedict’s wisdom has much to teach and challenge us about how we live, what we consume, and how our lives affect others, whether those others are nearby in churches or shops or pubs, or thousands of miles away at the other end of a production line.
And community life itself is there as an aid to holiness. It’s perfectly possible to form communities that are toxic, where power is abused or grievances nursed, or where common life is so cut off that it becomes insular and stunted. Community life per se is not what Benedict is interested in. He wants to form the sort of communities where people grow in holiness: where they learn to see Christ in each other and in themselves. And here there is so much wisdom for us in the church today.
Before the pandemic started I used to have a vague fantasy about being a hermit. It usually got activated when I was feeling tired and busy, and I would think with a degree of longing and a large dollop of unreality about how lovely it would be to have my own little cell where there was just me and God and nothing else that demanded my time or attention. A week of lockdown cured me entirely of this fantasy as I realised not only how much I missed community life – you – but how much I need it. I can’t be a priest, and I can’t be a Christian, on my own.
Don’t get me wrong, I can think all sorts of wonderful holy thoughts on my own, I can dedicate good time to prayer and see its fruits in self-knowledge and penitence and praise. But the holy thoughts need to turn into actual holiness; the prayer needs living out, and for that I need to belong to a community where the call to love my neighbour isn’t abstract but real, in flesh and blood human beings. A community where the call to reconciliation isn’t simply about praying harder for someone who’s wronged me or whom I’ve wronged, but involves the hard work of truthfulness and love in restoring relationship. And if sometimes community life shows me up to be impatient or unkind or stubborn or judgemental, then rather than blaming others for that I am asked to take a deeper look at myself, and the ways in which the Holy Spirit, in the people of the community, is inviting me to a deeper charity, a more open heart.
Belonging to a church is an odd thing. You have some choice in the matter, of course – you come to this church, not a different one – but you don’t get much say in who else is part of the community. We are brought together by a common belonging to Christ, and that puts us in the position of needing to learn to love each other and to receive each other as gift.
Sometimes that’s easy. We meet people who are kind and loving and wise and holy, from whom we learn more of what it means to follow Christ, whose lives inspire us and whose encouragement supports us. And sometimes it can be really hard. We might be tempted to think that God has very questionable taste in those he calls to follow his Son: really, Lord: him? We may find ourselves in a pew next to someone whose opinions offend us, or whose habits irritate us, or whom we just don’t like very much. And the temptation then is to up sticks in pursuit of a better church, with a better quality of Christian, or to ignore the person, or to grumble and complain and nurse resentment – or more often in English Christianity, to refuse to acknowledge it or address it and practise the sort of false relating that is fatal to true community.
Benedict’s call to stability asks for more than that. Professed monks and nuns commit to the same community for life – as if to say that here, on this plot of earth, with these imperfect people, in the daily round of work and prayer, the way to God is to be found.
That level of commitment’s not possible for us – and Cambridge is a city that is very transient – but the commitment to people, to place, and to time still matters, whether that commitment lasts decades or months, depending on how long people are here. And as we emerge from life under Covid restrictions, there is work to be done in rebuilding a sense of community: work that asks us to seek each other’s good; to be persistent in seeking Christ in each other, and allowing life together to chip away those things that obscure Christ’s image in us; work that makes us the sort of community in which Christ’s life is made real and visible as together we follow the one who asks us to prefer nothing to him, and whose eternal life starts right here, in this place, with imperfect people like you and me as together we learn to love and serve God and each other.