Evensong, 14^th May 2006
Isaiah 60 vv 1-14

In the Old Testament lesson that we heard Isaiah was speaking to the Israelites in exile.  The situation was desperate, almost hopeless.  They had been utterly defeated by the current superpower, broken up and dispersed.   The aim was to obliterate them as a nation, it was the usual practise in those days to obliterate rebel nations.  But Isaiah was giving them hope, and it was this hope that kept them going and eventually was realised against all odds.

This evening I want to talk about hope.  Paul doesn’t really give it a very good press, but hope is absolutely essential in this world.   For myself my faith is variable and my love inconstant, but my hope endures and to that I cling on.

William said that every lay person has one good sermon in them.  I have major doubts about this in my case, and William had to ask me twice before I would agree, but then I thought there must be lots of people like me, and perhaps I have something to say to them.   And so I would speak to all those like myself who rely on hope.  Charlotte Elliott who wrote that beautiful hymn Just As I Am has this verse:

Just as I am though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt
Fightings within and fears without
Oh lamb of God I come.

And it is comforting to me to know that I am in such good company.

William suggested the theme of ‘Why am I a Christian?’, this is only interesting if you know the speaker.  I am known to many of you in varying degrees, to some only a little.  I was born in Esher in 1922 in Ember Lane in a house called Cranstoun.  My father was a moderately well off wholesale butcher, and he came to Esher to be near the station and a good train service to London so that he could catch the 2.10am train each morning.  He came from a large and eccentric family, he was the ninth child but only the second boy.   He was born at Hadley Wood, a part of Barnet and his parents could not think of a name so they called him Hadley Barnet Dixon.   Rather like calling your child Hinchley Esher.  I wanted to be a doctor from the age of 15 and studied at St Mary’s Hospital, the home of penicillin.  I was there all through the Blitz and as the war was on our studies were hurried through without any breaks, and so I qualified in record time at the age of just 22, a very unfinished product.

When I was called up into the army I met my wife Anne, and we were married soon after I was demobbed, in 1948.  So you see we have been together a very long time.  At first I wanted to be a surgeon and passed the necessary higher qualifications but later tried general practice, a decision I have never regretted.  I practised as NHS GP in Esher for 39 years, and am now semi-retired, seeing just a few patients on a private basis.   My only claim to have achieved anything out of the ordinary was as a help to Anne in her vision of helping drug addicts especially those on heroin.   That was because we got to know a young heroin addict and his wife and baby daughter intimately.  We started in the house in which I had been born, Cranstoun in Ember Lane and since then the organisation known as Cranstoun has grown into a large agency with a seven figure annual turnover and is one of the major providers of rehabilitation in the country.

But why am I a Christian?  Basically because despite myself, God won’t leave me alone.  It started in quite a low key when I was about 10 and I was baptized in Christ Church by Canon Home.  The stage was set, and then, when I was about 12, I was invited by a classmate at school to a meeting of the school’s section of the Student Christian Movement.  There we had a lot of fun and learned about God and Jesus.  I kept in touch with the SCM until I was twenty.  The birth of my children, and later of my grandchildren, made me particularly aware of the frailty and transience of our existence, and it was not possible to practise as a GP and not be aware of this all the time.  But the next particular time God had another go at me was when Bill Davidson the rector at the time decided to organise a mission to Esher.  The missioners were Sister Geraldine, a quite young and charming nun, Wilfred Wood a young earnest priest who later became the first black bishop in this country, and Father Shand an Anglican monk from the Community of the Resurrection. I  was intrigued by the mission but it had no great impact on me, but at the end Father Shand took a weekend retreat.  He was a rather ascetic figure, and the retreat house was distinctly bleak and I think this all contributed to having a profound effect on me.   I became a great deal more involved in Christ Church, and became a Church Warden.

I have always envied those who have had a sudden revelation.  The nearest thing to this that happened to me, yet another of God’s nudges, was when I made my first confession.  Bill Davidson urged this on me, and I wasn’t too keen, too much high church if not actually Roman, and in any case I didn’t have much of importance to confess.  But the effect afterwards was amazing.  I had the most tremendous sense of liberation, as if a great burden had been removed.  I knew then what it meant about Jesus bearing the burden of our sins, and what an incredible burden it was for him.   I have never been able to repeat that experience, but it is one I will never forget.

When Bill Gulless and I were the first lay people to administer the chalice at Holy Communion, now exactly forty years ago, that was a real spiritual experience, and so these promptings and nudgings have gone on and being asked to give this sermon is another such one.  It has forced me to overcome my natural mental laziness and confront my situation and state publicly my beliefs, a really cathartic experience believe you me, and for this I am very grateful to William, although I didn’t feel grateful at the time when he asked me.

So why am I a Christian?  I believe Jesus is the son of God, fully human and fully divine, and that he died and was raised from the dead, and he bears our sins for us if we let him.  All these things seem impossible when seen with our limited intellect, but I also believe that God is unknowable.   But how can we know an unknowable God?  Only if he chooses to communicate with us, and that he has done in the person of Jesus.  Jesus made some stupendous and categorical claims.  He said that no one can come to the father except through him and that he knows the father.  As CS Lewis has said either Jesus was a charlatan and an imposter or else it’s all true.  There can be no halfway, no compromise.  The lives of countless Christians bear out the truth of all this, the experience of great saints and so many others unknown.  Many of my patients have been saints and heroes, both patients and carers, and yet go completely unsung.  All the great religions try to communicate with God, but I believe Jesus was the most complete revelation of God that we have, God’s most complete identification with the suffering of the world.  He gives us continuing hope.

You know that GPs know less and less about more and more, and specialists know more and more about less and less.  But one thing that GPs know more about even than psychiatrists is depression.  Depression is all too common, and involves in one degree or the other loss of hope.  My patients who have been severely clinically depressed have said that any physical illness is preferable.  In its most severe form there is complete hopelessness and no point in life, which might just as well be ended.  I think a major problem with our society is not loss of faith but loss of hope.   Jesus can give us all hope.  The Israelites who wept by the waters of Babylon needed hope, and hope led on to realisation.

I am sure we don’t need to make things too complicated.  I like the story of the world famous theologian who gave an erudite lecture, but he had a bad cold and by the end had nearly lost his voice.  Instead of the usual questions and answers, he was asked to sum up his theological insights in a short sentence.  He paused while his distinguished audience waited expectantly, and then the great man said, ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so’.  The whole thing is really quite simple, and I pray we should all be like little children, trusting and full of hope.

Amen