[A sermon delivered to the Oxford Unitarians congregation on Sunday, 6th of June 2021 – my last sermon to the Manchester College Oxford Chapel Society delivered as their Student Minister.]
(Readings: Vacana 820 by Basavaṇṇa and Matthew 4:12-25)
The rich will make temples for Śiva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body a shrine, the head a cupola of gold. Listen, O Lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay.
– Vacana 820 translated from Kannada by A.K. Ramanujan in Speaking of Siva (Penguin Classics)
So, this is it. The day is finally here. My last service of my first official ministry and my first time saying this sort of goodbye.
The theme of this service ‘Meetings and Partings’ was taken from one of the Engagement Group sessions that I led with you this year. That Engagement Group was, appropriately, on liminal space. As I speak to you now, about to leave my official role as Student Minister behind at the end of this month and not quite fully knowing what is next, liminal space is exactly what I’m about to be entering into.
Yet, while I pride myself on being very much an ‘open book’ kind of person, I’m well aware that the worst sermons to listen to are those that are all about the preacher. This sermon, if I get it right, should be all about you. The congregation I have served this academic year.
So why, after all this time sticking to the lectionary, would I break that pattern by including a poem by Bassannava? What relevance does the verse of a 12th Century Hindu figure have for Unitarians in Oxford today?
Well, Bassannava was not just any Hindu figure. He was a radical. One who adhered to a strict religious monotheism. But he was not just religiously radical but socially radical too. Just like our college chapel is the first chapel in any Oxbridge college to offer same-sex as well as opposite-sex marriages. Bassannava’s religious movement was one of the earliest to offer inter-cast marriages with the intent of abolishing the whole cast system. It also, at least in theory, saw men and women as equals.
As we might be able to tell from his poem we heard today, Bassannava was also not a fan of rich people. In Bassannava’s time the rich people of India would show off their piety by erecting temples with lavish architectural adornments. For those who might not know, many Indian temples were designed to represent the human body. A pot of seed would be planted in the soil at the temples base before the structure was built up around it. The two sides of the temple were referred to as hands, columns as feet, the top of the temple was known as the head, and the darkest inner sanctum of the temple went by a name that literally translates to womb-house. Bassannava observed how the rich continued to build these temples while the significance of their meaning faded into obscurity. The temple should be representative of the holiness of the body, not the wealth of those who made them. For Bassannava, those who used their body to live in poverty while moving from village to village spreading the faith were far more worthy than the rich who build temples which corrode rather than build up the body of faith that never dies.
Yet Bassannava’s movement was fundamentally inclusive. Regardless of gender or cast, you were welcome so long as you could accept the likely consequences of going against a conservative social system.
Similar can be said of Jesus’s recruitment of his first disciples from beside the Sea of Galilee. For the disciples, their time with Jesus and their time after was to be denominated by going from town to town, meeting new people and extending a message of welcome into the community of the early church. Some of us might be able to recall even Jesus seemingly beginning to get tired of this lifestyle – As Matthew’s Gospel elsewhere records Jesus saying “foxes have holes, and birds of the air have their nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
There are some other people who have worked restlessly that I can think of too. For a start – you. As a congregation you have not only managed to cope with a global pandemic that has forced you out of your chapel but have, I would contend, you have actively thrived under the circumstances. This is, of course, not in thanks to the pandemic but because of your response to it. The pastoral care you offered to each other throughout this time has been phenomenal. The energy and enthusiasm spent on creating and holding new forms of midweek events has been unparalleled. You have been able to increase numbers attending Sunday Services and hold them fairly steady – during what must have been the most difficult time for this congregation since the war.
What is more remarkable. Now you are likely through the worst of it. You have refused to stop working! Rather than winding down activity as lockdown measures begin easing you are increasing your efforts. You have signalled that next month, we will be moving to two services on a Sunday to try and cater for as many of our members and, hopefully, reach out to as many new attenders as possible.
This is normally the point in this sort of service where the departing minister might offer some words of advice to the congregation. This is probably the one job you lot have made hard for me as anyone who thinks they can offer advice to a congregation that has grown and developed itself over the course of a pandemic would be even more self-absorbed and given to immodesty than I am.
Instead, it would encourage you to learn from the example you have set yourselves, to learn from the example Jesus set all of us, and the example people like Bassavanna have also pointed to. Neither you, Jesus, nor Bassavanna (against all odds and defying the reasonable predictions of everyone) have needed a physical church, temple, chapel or cathedral in order to be successful in your ministry. Instead, you needed community and so you invested in it, and you strengthened it.
Today you are saying a kind of goodbye to me, and I to you. This is a parting. Soon we will be entering again the chapel we hold so dear and have missed so much. That will be a meeting – and a rather joyous one at that. Yet you must not allow either event to stop the ways of building a welcoming and inclusive community that you have developed up to this point. There will undoubtably be more partings to come in this community, that is a sad but inevitable fact of life. However, it is up to all of you to ensure that you meet new people and bring to them in with the offer of genuine welcome.
So, there is still work for you to do. Work out in the world. Good work. Much of that is work that I will also be doing – but no longer here.
Like the devotees that Basavanna so highly prised – one who goes meekly from town to town – and like the disciples who were commissioned by Jesus to do similar – the time has come for me to move on.
What will the next step be for me? That remains to be seen. Like a lot of things as late – my future is one of those things that is very much ‘up in the air’. There are promising leads – but noting confirmed as yet.
What is confirmed however, are the many lessons you have taught me during my student ministry here. These are lessons I will use and treasure for years to come. With a bit of luck, I hope some of you might also have learned something too.
Amen.
