From Subjugation to Redemption
A Sermon preached by the REV. NILS CHITTENDEN
Sunday, JUNE 28TH, 2020
There’s a wonderful picture in your bulletin today (and below) of one of the finest cathedrals in Europe, and a church which I had the privilege of being on the staff of for a number of years. It’s a building that has played, of all the buildings in my life, the greatest role in my life.
As an undergraduate in the late 1980s I lived right next to it for three years – my window looking out at its magnificent east-end rose window (at the far end of the picture) not more than 100 feet away.
As a student, I served as an acolyte there, I sang in one of its choirs. I was ordained a deacon there exactly 25 years ago this coming Wednesday. I was ordained a priest there. I celebrated the Eucharist there for the first time, Kelly and I had our marriage blessed there. In short, it means more to me than almost any other building on earth. It is the UNESCO World Heritage site of Durham Cathedral in the north-east of England.
Way back in, probably, 1990, when I was in my final year as an undergraduate, there was an outdoor art exhibition in the town, and one of the exhibitors evidently specialized in disturbing dystopian landscapes. One of his pictures had a really profound effect on me – a real, visceral gut punch such that I can still visualize the picture to this day.
It was a picture of Durham Cathedral in some future time, a time when it was no longer deemed a necessary or desirable building and was half-way through demolition. It was so detailed that it was almost like one of those anatomical pictures where layers had been stripped away to reveal the minutiae beneath and it really left me reeling – and thinking what a unthinkably devastating fate that would be for a building which has currently been there for nigh on a thousand years.
Many years later, when I was back at my undergraduate college as a member of staff, I would regularly take groups of students on behind-the-scenes tours of the cathedral, and the tours would always start with some teaching on how the cathedral came to be there in the first place.
The year 1066 may not be ingrained into the American psyche, but it is in the English. 1066 was the biggest humiliation in English history, when the powerful Norman duke, William, conquered King Harold’s kingdom and changed the entire course of history. Almost overnight, England changed beyond recognition. The old Anglo-Saxon order was swept away in a policy of cultural extermination. Huge stone castles sprang up and the populace quelled with often immense cruelty.
Durham, being far in the north and less in harm’s way, was a center of a powerful uprising. The Norman response was, however, swift and brutal. The rebellion was cut down, and a massive stone fortress constructed. There had been an important Anglo-Saxon cathedral in Durham. It was razed to the ground as an act of cultural genocide and, in its place was built one of the biggest, most solid, most awe-inspiring cathedrals in the new Norman style.
It was there primarily for one purpose: it was to send out a message very loud and very clear: “We are the Normans. We are in charge now. And if you mess with us you will be obliterated.” Yes, it was also built as a church, but with new architecture, new monks, new leaders and new politics. But the truth is that Durham Cathedral was built as a tool of ethnic, cultural and political subjugation. Nothing less than that. It was built to intimidate, to cow, to reprogram a population.
And, yet, despite this – despite all of this – it was capable of being redeemed. No matter how humans had been motivated, the building took on its own identity. Something that had been built as a tool of oppression and conquest became a tool of God’s redemption and spiritual blessing.
This is a process that doesn’t happen by accident, I believe. Rather, in spite of its original intent, year upon year, upon decade upon century of prayer took that original violence and oppression and laid upon it layer after layer of patina of prayer and spiritual searching until the bad things had been totally smothered by the good, and it stands, today, as an unambiguous testament not to human subjugation but to God’s freedom.
That is the power of redemption. God can take what has been born out the things that are worst about this world and transform them, through every tiny little kindly action into something which over time becomes that which is best about the human spirit.
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus talks to his disciples about how our actions, when offered for the good of another build a capital in us and in society like that patina on Durham Cathedral.
All through history, of course, humans have looked at the state of their world, and despaired of it, and have wondered what on earth difference they could possibly make, and have been through endless disillusionment about their ability to change anything at all.
Large, grandstanding gestures, by prominent, grandstanding people can make us feel inadequate, or ineffectual, or apparently ambivalent. Whenever you feel like that, and there are plenty of opportunities to feel like that in these times right now, think of the redemption wrought on Durham Cathedral, little prayer by little prayer, small kindness by small kindness, knit into a wondrous blanket of goodness that encapsulated God’s redemption through that building and can redeem our world today.
So when you pray today, in what you might think a seemingly insignificant act, know that you have just added a little bit more goodness and love to the patina on this world which is redeemed through our loving, liberating and life-giving God.
