Faith Beyond Fear: Sermons from Newman’s Pulpit

By James Crockford, Jane Shaw and William Lamb

John Henry Newman's pulpit at St Mary's, Oxford, was a powerhouse of religious innovation and reinvigoration in English religion through the 1830s and 1840s. This towering neogothic structure gave platform to preachers who conveyed a new imagination for the life of faith, and whose vision of belief provoked personal and societal awakenings. Today, we are in need once again of reimagining the challenges of our world, and the meaning of Christian faith, in ways that cut through the religious jumble, and speak to the fears and failings of our time. This volume collects sermons by one of that pulpit's most recent preachers.
Anxiety, pain, hope, and judgement are key themes. There are liturgical themes and feasts taken in fresh directions, and always an insistence on deconstructing easy answers and pious lingo. These are exercises in reading Scripture, and reading our lives, in ways that speak beyond the borders of religious identity and certainty. These sermons draw us deeper into the reality of our own predicaments and fears, to discover a presence and power that might surprise and disrupt us, and help us to reimagine faith in the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Feb 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725295018

James Crockford

James Crockford is based in Cambridge, UK, where he is Dean of Chapel, Tutor and Fellow at Jesus College in the University of Cambridge. He studied Music at the University of Nottingham, and after working in church community projects and training in counselling, he came to Cambridge to read Theology at Trinity Hall, whilst training for ordination at Ridley Hall. James served in parish ministry on the edge of south-east London, before moving to be Associate Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford and Honorary Chaplain at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Book preview

9781725294998.kindle.jpg

Faith Beyond Fear

Sermons from Newman’s Pulpit

James Crockford

Foreword by Jane Shaw

Afterword by William Lamb

Faith Beyond Fear

Sermons from Newman’s Pulpit

Copyright © 2021 James Crockford. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-9499-8

hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-9500-1

ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-9501-8

02/22/21

Photograph of the East Window, by Mark Chagall (1967) © Tudeley cum Capel ECC. Reproduced by permission.

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

The Sound of Sheer Silence

The Marketplace of Temptation

Retrieving Repentance

Angels at the Kitchen Door

The Other Mary

The Unfamiliar Christmas

Frozen Bodies

The Question of Christ

Fantasy Language

On Music

Needing the Basics

Standing Strong, Being Weak

Professional Christian Failure

Beyond Grumpiness

Fear and Fumbling

A Lion and Many Coats

The Weird and the Wonderful

Chagall at Tudeley

Easter at Beachy Head

Where Do You Come From?

Afterword

Bibliography

To Philip and Patricia

Light of the anxious heart,

Jesus, thou dost appear,

to bid the gloom of guilt depart,

and shed thy sweetness here.

Joyous are they with whom,

God’s Word, thou dost abide;

sweet Light of our eternal home,

to fleshly sense denied.

Brightness of God above!

Unfathomable grace!

Thy presence be a fount of love

within thy chosen place.

To thee, whom children see,

the Father ever blest,

the Holy Spirit, One and Three,

be endless praise addressed.

—Bernard of Clairvaux, translated by John Henry Newman

Foreword

The pulpit of the University Church in Oxford is not only that of its famous incumbents—John Henry Newman and Cosmo Lang to name just two—but also of the many men and women, ordained and lay, who have passed through it to preach a university sermon. This great parade of preachers has interpreted preaching to the university in many different ways; it is, after all, not the easiest of tasks. Intellectual showiness, academic dryness, or, conversely, blithely ignoring the university part of this congregation do not land well; the integration of serious questions with the quest for a spiritual life does. This is even more the case when preaching regularly in that place, creating a spiritual discipline in the preacher him- or herself.

From the very first of these sermons by James Crockford who, as associate vicar at the University Church, was a regular in that pulpit for two years, we know, as we read the sermons he preached there, that we are embarking on a thoughtful journey with a compelling preacher. In that first sermon, describing his arrival at the top of Mount Kenya after a nail-biting climb, Crockford contrasts cheap silence—merely the absence of noise, and rare enough to find in itself—with the sound of sheer silence, profoundly experienced at the mountain peak, and something akin to what the prophet Elijah felt. This sheer silence is there at the end of an extraordinary performance of music . . . in the lull of a very intense and emotional conversation . . . in churches and holy places. This silence changes even the way that your body and physical stuff around you feels. There’s a deep alertness it calls out in you. Crockford’s words call out in us a desire for that sheer silence, and a spiritual practice to find it and that which we find within it—which is no less than God calling to us and sending us, just as God called to Elijah and sent him out into the world to do God’s work. Ready for this spiritual adventure of learning to hear and answer God’s call, we can confidently read on.

The university context in which anyone preaches these days is radically distinctive. What is it possible to believe? Are we who are priests and preachers, believers of any kind, credible? The status or believability that was given to those who climbed the steps into the University Church pulpit in decades and centuries past is no longer automatically given; it has to be earned. Crockford beguilingly admits, in the sermon Professional Christian Failure, that he is sometimes reluctant to admit that he is a priest because of everything that will be loaded and projected on to that identity; because it may make the other person want to run in the other direction; because it may simply invite indifference, with no desire to bridge the gap between worldviews. But, he says, when someone stares me in the face and expects that I’m on some plane that they’ve just not reached, I am reminded that I am indeed there to bear witness to something about life and God and hope and healing that I have somehow glimpsed myself. It is therefore to this truth—that we can live a bigger life, go more deeply into the meaning of that life, and journey from fear to love—that the preacher can bear witness, as Crockford does throughout this collection. The credibility of this journey of faith is in the recognition that "We cannot be afraid of ourselves, or ashamed of ourselves, if we hope also to be ourselves and love ourselves and give ourselves to others."

Crockford identifies, and identifies with, the problems and difficulties of faith. In Beyond Grumpiness, his commentary on Jesus’ injunction Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple is to remind us that these are harsh and impossible words. He addresses our stumbling blocks before we do, so that we may entertain the possibility of faith. In Fear and Fumbling he openly admits that it is an awful moment when the preacher opens up the gospel for the day only to discover that it ends with someone being thrown into an outer darkness where there will be the weeping and gnashing of teeth. Our struggle is also the preacher’s struggle.

One of the tasks of the preacher, then, is to make sense of these texts, written for their very different audiences—largely illiterate, living in small face-to-face communities—two thousand years ago or more. Crockford repeatedly draws out the larger truth of life in Christ: that there is no pain beyond God’s healing and no sin beyond God’s forgiveness. Even in places of deep pain and hurt, we are not lost. Faced with what often seems like the impossible perfection of the saints, or the strange story of Lazarus being raised from the dead, we are called to look again at the world around us . . . to engage with its pain, to stare into its darkness, and to believe that everything’s not lost (The Weird and the Wonderful). In Crockford’s theology we do not avert our eyes from the pain but see the hope through it. God’s love is light for the anxious heart.

Time is central to the spiritual life that Crockford nudges us towards: embracing this new life is not instant; it takes time. Even Easter—that promise of new life at the heart of the Christian narrative—needs to bear with the reality of our day-to-day lives: loss, pain and the complexities of human relationships. We can only counter that pain and loss as we give our lives not to quick-fixes, but to the slow rhythms of love, the simple actions, over and over again, of patient trust. And so, in the penultimate sermon of the book, Easter at Beachy Head, he describes the real Easter as the truth about a world with more hope than we dared to realise, and the dawn of that hope takes time to break through the darkness. He says, if we are patient enough, if we stick around long enough, we may find joy in the unexpected places, find Easter light shining slowly through the cracks of our lives.

Stillness and the expansion of our imaginations are essential ingredients in the spiritual life precisely because they enable us to take or make time in the midst of everyday busyness