Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!
Almost exactly 150 years ago, the preacher in this place was Bishop George Selwyn – Bishop of Lichfield, and not long returned from having been the first Bishop of New Zealand.
He didn’t pull his punches in that first Denstone sermon. He thought the Lord was in this place, and he knew it. The problem was what was going on out there. “The neglect of religious education in this country has caused the downfall of the people of God,” he fulminated. “Are we to sit still and see all Church teaching and even Christianity itself banished from our schools?!”
“The fate of our nation seems to be trembling in the balance,” he asserted. “It will not be saved by false philosophy, or secular education, or commercial prosperity; for none of these things can avert the downfall of a nation in which God is lightly esteemed.”
Not so at Denstone, the Bishop averred. This school was to be a place “where children may be taught of the Lord and trained up for immortality and heaven.”
“Here will be taught the true foundations of a nation’s strength: to fear God and honour the King. No visions of unattainable equality; no assertions of imaginary rights; no covetousness, nor self-seeking, nor worldly-wisdom; no desire to do what seems best in their own eyes; but all our children will be ‘taught of the Lord,’ taught to look to the Cross of Christ, and then to learn to be subject one to another and to be clothed with humility.”
Powerful stuff! Bishop Selwyn’s language will, I guess, make some of us wince. Things are different now. Or are they? The debate about the place of faith in our schools … well, not much seems to have changed on that front.
150 years on, Denstone would probably demur at being described as a faith school. But I hope a Woodard school can still affirm that, even if we wouldn’t want to call this a faith school, it is a school whose vision and ethos is rooted on the principles of our faith. We do these things because of what we believe a human being is, was made for, and can become – as revealed to us through the lens of the Christian Gospel.
Your Head describes Denstone as a community of believers. I take that to mean that some are believers in the tenets of the Christian faith, but that all are believers that each member of this community is more, much more, than merely the sum of her or his parts; that they are more, much more, than what can be merely measured of them; that there is more, much more, to reality than merely meets the senses; that, to paraphrase the good Bishop, there is more, much more, to our purposes than the pursuit of merely the world’s philosophies, merely a solely secular education, or merely the chasing after commercial prosperity.
The good Bishop, concluded his sermon bidding Denstonians to look to the Cross of Christ, and then to learn to be subject one to another and to be clothed with humility. I think we can affirm those essentials of a Denstone education, without embarrassment, with as much conviction now as 150 years ago.
Lignum Crucis Arbor Scientiae. That is your motto. Look to the Cross; in that is to be found wisdom.
Your founders wanted you to look to the Cross – the lignum crucis. Its story interprets, translates, makes sense of, your story – whether it last a lifespan or 150 years. Through that lens, our stories become arbor scientiae – a bifurcating family tree of wisdom and knowledge, with a goal and a purpose otherwise unseen.
Your Chaplain chose ‘The Road to Emmaus’ from Luke’s Gospel as our reading today. The story begins with a gathering of travellers on a Sabbath day in the presence – but unnoticed presence – of the risen Jesus. They give voice to their disappointment. They have the Scriptures expounded to them. They exercise hospitality. They sit down for a meal of fellowship. Bread is taken, blessed, broken, and given.
A moment of recognition occurs. They go out to tell others of their epiphany.
Does the shape of that story sound familiar? It should. It is, of course, the shape of this story – our Eucharist. That is why doing this, in remembrance of him, is so essential to looking to the Cross.
Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!
We can, like those travellers on the road to Emmaus, be so lost in our own interpretation of events in the light of our hopes that we fail to see what’s right in front of our faces. God is at work in our world, only not in the way that we might have anticipated. He hasn’t followed our script. In him our hopes are being fulfilled in ways we couldn’t possibly have imagined.
At the end of the story there is the simplicity of the revelation. Their eyes were opened and they recognized him in the breaking of the bread.
The Road to Emmaus is a story which mirrors the journey of life, the 150-year journey of a community of faith. It also mirrors what goes on in this Chapel every time we break bread here in remembrance of the Lord Jesus.
Bidden or not bidden, surely the Lord is in this place.
Happy Birthday, Denstone. Congratulations for all you have achieved. Looking to the Cross, and fed with this holy food, may you look to the next 150 years of your story with faith and hope and love.
