Luminescence, Volume 1. C. K. Barrett
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chapels of this county; on Sundays they have been my world and I would not change it for another. But to be honest, one does not visit the chapels for their music. For good, hearty singing—yes; but not for music. With one exception—Langley Park. Here indeed there was hearty singing, but there was also the finest of pure music, J. S. Bach and all his organist successors, up to the present day. And this great music was played with the most sensitive artistry and taste.
The other theme is preaching. It is not merely that Lloyd had heard and read the great preachers and loved to talk about them and tell stories of their lives. He was a practitioner too. To hear Bach well played is not an every day, or an every Sunday, experience. To hear a sermon conveyed in a pure, simple, powerful English style, enriched with an incredible width of reading, and at the same time full of the Gospel that the rest was remarked only in recollection—this too was not an every Sunday experience.
Music and preaching; for years on the Langley Park organ, for years as local preacher secretary in the Durham circuit, with the editing of Contact, the best circuit preacher’s magazine I have seen anywhere; already on Thursday afternoon I was turning over the question how we could put these two things together in the few moments of this service. I thought of Bach’s great Mass, which some of us will hear next week in Durham Cathedral. That would do, beginning as it does with the great Kyrie Eleison, “Lord have mercy.” As Edwyn Hoskins said, there is only one fitting inscription for a Christian to put on his tombstone; not John Smith, Prime Minister of England, but only “Jesu mercy.” Lloyd would have understood that.
But Brahms has done it better for today, when he begins his Requiem with the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes—“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” And that is where we ought to begin, for if there is anyone here to whom the Gospel is to be preached it is you, who cared for him with so much love and care, Eva and Marian, and you who stand beside them. And this is the word of Christ to you—“Blessed are they who mourn.” God always begins where we are; not where we ought to be, but where we are. He knows what we need, what at any time we need most, and he never turns away from that necessity. There is a blessedness in mourning, not in itself, but in what God does about it; “they shall be comforted.”
Brahms is a good preacher. He doesn’t let us run away from the facts. “All flesh is grass, and all the good blooms of it as the flower of the grass; the grass withereth, the flower fadeth.” All this is true and well we know it today. But—how the music brings out that tremendous but! “But the Word of the Lord standeth for evermore.” Today, you need no one to lecture you on the fragility of human life; perhaps you do need to be reminded of the Word of God, which endures forever—the word of goodness and love and life, which Jesus spoke, which Jesus is.
“Blessed are they that mourn”—the musical theme returns at the end, with new words, “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.” The subtle musical continuity brings out the continuity of meaning. There is blessedness for the mourners only because there is blessedness for the dead, not because they are dead, but because they are in the Lord. As they have been, so they are.
That is the last word. We can only paint pictures and the best pictures are inadequate. But we know that Lloyd that good man, so richly endowed with God’s gifts not only of mind and ear but of heart, and home, and family and friends, is now with all the saints, for whom music and the proclamation of the Gospel are one as they write in the hymn of praise, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” And the saints on earth will learn in their comfort to join the hymn.
“NOT TO DESTROY BUT TO FULFILL”—Matthew 5.17
[Preached fourteen times between 12/12/43 at Bondgate Darlington to 12/11/77 at Trimdon Station]7
“Think not”—then there was presumably the possibility that they might think just that very thing. And they might well have claimed that there was reason on the other side for thinking so. When Jesus ran roughshod over a whole string of commandments and berated the whole legal system with a regal freedom, they might well feel justified in assuming that he had come positively to destroy, to bring to ruins the whole legal system. But, no, says Jesus. Make no mistake. Entirely the opposite is the case. “I came not to destroy but to fulfill.”
For a moment I want that particular instance to serve as a reminder of something that is generally true. It was, and it remains, dangerously easy to misunderstand Jesus. It is certainly true that anyone, wise or foolish, learned or ignorant, is able to lay hold of the blessing of Christ. Salvation is by no means a privilege for scholars only. But that doesn’t mean it is all as easy to understand as it is to believe and receive. It is not. I was (I think) a Christian for years before I began to understand what Christianity is all about.
Therefore I propose that this morning we should all do some hard thinking together. If you ask me whether this is really necessary, I answer without hesitation— Yes. Not only because obviously it is a good thing to know what you believe, but for this even more important reason—it is the calling of every Christian to be a witness, and evangelist, to make other Christians. You may remember the story, it came I think from Madras, of the Indian bishop who was lamenting that only 90 percent of the Christians in his diocese were witnessing Christians. “90 percent,” said the London vicar to whom he said it, “hardly 5 percent of my parish are witnessing Christians.” What would the percentage here be? But my point at the moment is this—if we are called to be witnesses, to commend our faith to others, it seems to me no more than common sense to say that the better we understand our faith, the better we shall do our job. Hence the necessity for really instructed Christians.
Let us see then what we can dig out this morning. Let us really do some thinking. Jesus came to fulfill the Law. Can you define the word “fulfill” there? It is easy enough in connection with prophecy, but what about fulfilling the Law? I will not pretend to have exhausted the word, but I take it to mean at least this—to consummate the purpose for which the Law came into being. Let us then see what men believed about the Law. Firstly, the Law was that which related people to one another.
RELATED PEOPLE TO ONE ANOTHER
That I think is fairly obvious. Any law in the nature of the case does that. The law of this country relates us to one another. It establishes us in families, constituting the rights and obligations of husbands and wives, and it sends us to school and establishes the teacher over his pupils, and it regulates the mutual contract between employer and employee. It is perhaps not the Law that brings us together, nature does that. But the law determines our relationship to each other when we are in contact. If that is true of our English law, it was even more true of the Jewish Law in Jesus’ time, which because it was religious and ceremonial entered more radically and universally into the details of everyday life. The Pentateuch goes a long way in that respect, and the later developments of the Law go further. I think it is not possible for anyone not a Jew to conceive to what a degree life was regulated by the Law and its developments, but fairly detailed study of the documents leaves one staggered.
The laws of clean and unclean demanded a careful watch over one’s associations with other people. To give a modern analogy, I well remember when I had the privilege of watching operations in a hospital theater, my friend the surgeon said to me: “If by any chance, which is unlikely, a nurse should drop some instrument, do not be a gentleman and pick it up for her. You mustn’t touch it. You’re dirty.” I was an outsider to their closed corporation. Anyone can see the necessity for that in modern surgery. But suppose some such requirement were universally applied. Suppose I as a minister were bound to keep laws of ceremonial cleanness? Obviously, I should have to know that my grocer, butcher and so forth were keeping these laws; thus a group of people of different occupations would be bound together by the law. Thus the Jewish law made a compact Jewish nation, it related the people to one another.
Now, we say Jesus fulfilled the Law. He did what the Law set out to do and did it perfectly. He brought, and he brings people together. It is easy to see the defects of