Sermons
Sermons from the Chaplain
“Humans in Creation”
Our Director of Music, Dr Ewan Campbell, developed a special concert on the theme of humans and nature. He and I adapted this for use in the chapel in the form of a vigil service. These are the texts I composed for this.
I was interested in the way one strand of biblical and Christian thinking sees humans as very much just another part of God’s created order. We have our own special role, but so do all the other parts.
“Trust”
Trust seems to be plummeting in our society at this point in our history. Might Christianity have anything to contribute?
I have been persuaded for a long time that the word in the New Testament usually translated as faith would usually be better translated as trust. Might this be a starting point, especially with those who are troubled by the ‘believing’ talk among Christians. Do we not all have some level of trust in life to get through it.
“The history of the Jesus tradition”
Do we have the ipsissima verba of Jesus recorded in the gospels? I very much doubt it, but we do have a method and a theory that can help us assess how the tradition of Jesus’s sayings evolved up to the point they appeared in the synoptic gospels. This looks at a particular passage in Matthew and compares it with parallel texts and hazards some conclusions on what Jesus might have said that is of relevance to today.
This, I fear, was rather too dense for listeners to follow. I hope it will be easier to read, when one can take time and look back and forth between the text and the diagram at the end.
“A walk through the Eucharist”
The choir had worked up Schubert’s Mass in G major for the Easter term in 2025. They sang much of it in the context of a Church of England Mass or Eucharist as well as all of it in a concert. This seemed a great opportunity to explain this central service of the Christian liturgy.
“What might be the tasks of this chapel”
Here I think aloud about what our chapel is all about. I categorise this under the three Transcendentals: beauty, truth and goodness – I am very fond of these Transcendentals as I think they are the most obvious route into thinking about God for those who have not been brought up as churchgoers.
I praise the beauty of the chapel’s architecture and the music that goes on here. I try to justify my style of preaching as seriously Christian, but welcoming to those who disagree and wish to contest it. I speak of the support to mental health by facing up to the massive challenges the world faces ahead.
“Passing on the baton”
This was an attempt to be encouraging in the face of the future. Again, I referred to the Transcendentals, but also dwell on one of the three Theological Virtues, hope – the others being faith and love. “My repeated retort is that hope is a spiritual discipline, not an estimate of probabilities.”
I also quote J. M. Barrie, of Peter Pan fame. He said to students in 1922, “Courage is the thing.”
“The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is mystical not mathematical”
This was the third, though logically/historically the first, in a series of three sermons on the three core doctrines of the Church. From the first, the early Christians somehow thought of Jesus Christ as also God, despite their absolute Jewish commitment to one God. The Holy Spirit also joined in the Godhead, but they were less clear on how.
What possible sense can there be in saying God is both three and one?
I offered two slogans as ways to conceptualise this three-in-one.
The Father, Son and Spirit are the Lover, the Beloved and the Reflector of Love.
The Father, Son and Spirit are the Unimaginable, the Image and the Imagination.
“Jesus God and human, the richness of the Council of Chalcedon”
For rather accidental reasons, the developed understanding of how Jesus was both God and a man, did not get formulated into one of the creeds the Church uses in worship. The Nicene Creed hints at it, but the full development at the Council of Chalcedon is not frequently rehearsed in services. I begin with the text of the council.
It is well established that Jesus reveals the Father to us, but I also claim that he reveals the true nature of the human to us. I explore how the full nature of the Godhead empties itself in order for God the Word to become a human being – Kenosis. But then also explore how the human in each of us becomes taken up in Christ into the Godhead – Theosis.
“If Jesus death is the solution, what is the problem?”
Typically, the Church speaks of Christ dying for our sins and certainly there is a lot of sin and the grief it brings in the world. But by no means all the evil in the world is the result of human sin. Famously, nature is red in tooth and claw. Does the death of Jesus address that? I think it does.
The responsibility for evil reaches back to God the creator and the crucifixion is God accepting the consequences of that responsibility. But more, creation itself is the bringing to be of something out of nothingness. In his death, Christ journeys into the nothingness to bring back life. “It is the self-giving unto death that is the gift of life to creation, and which in turn then reflects back the love that brought it into being. No longer shall we feed on the slaughtered corpses of our fellow creatures, but on the Eucharistic body and blood of Christ, freely and lovingly offered through the sacrifice of his life.”
“Is there a conversation to be had between religion and science, or is it all one way”
As a biologist, it seems self-evident to me that evolution is basically correct, and I adduce some evidence for this. Yet, I also challenge a one-sided emphasis on the metaphor of ‘selfish genes’ and discuss the important role of cooperation in the history of life.
Then I argue that science, illuminating as it is, cannot answer whether there is a god or not. This is quite a common Christian position, but I explore a novel way of explaining this (some listening were not convinced I succeeded). I drew on the methods of anthropology, particularly the distinction of outsider (scientific) and insider points of view. If God is noticed from the insider perspective, it may be as something deeply interior or beckoning from the beyondness. Neither of these views are available to someone studying a culture from outside. Only insiders can debate the significance of them.
Sermons from Guest Speakers
“Creation Care”
Caroline Blackmun is a regular at chapel services and an alumna of Churchill. She is also an Authorised Lay Minister at St Andrew’s Church, Girton.
In her sermon, Caroline explores Genesis 1 along the lines of a call to humans to exercise stewardship. She points out that although humans are told to be fruitful and multiply, but so are all the other animals. Wealth inequality amongst humans is also a driver of environmental harm. Those of us who are relatively wealthy should really watch how much of all the stuff we have we really need.
“Angels in the Architecture”
This sermon was given by Dr Nigel Walter, who is a leading church architect and also a Licensed Lay Minister in the Church of England.
He explored the concept of sacred space with particular reference to three buildings: our chapel, the parish church of St John the Evangelist, Little Gidding (made famous by T S Eliot) and Lodge Road Community Church, Birmingham. He uses Eliot to help explore the difference between sacred and supernatural spaces, concluding that churches are the former and not the latter.
“A Frog Before Breakfast”
This talk was given by choir and chapel stalwart, Elsa Steitman.
Elsa shared her wisdom with us, but with a special focus on those who were shortly to graduate and leave Cambridge.
She exhorted us with a piece of French advice: “He who swallowed a frog before breakfast, for him the day holds no terrors”. She reminded us that we all have already swallowed several frogs and so the future should hold no terrors – even if it can seem a bit scary in prospect. She ended by quoting Donne: “No man is an island, entire of itself”. Summing up our task to build community, wherever we go.
“A talk at Little Gidding on Eliot’s poem of the same name”
By Elsa Stietman, Fellow of Murray Edwards
Following Nigel Walter’s sermon, many members of the choir visited Little Gidding church one evening. As the light was falling, Elsa gave an exposition of T S Eliot’s fourth Quartet, Little Gidding. This was for all, whatever one’s approach to religion.
She reflects on its setting in the time of war and related that to our present worsening situation. She pulls out of the poem signals of hope. And she sketches the vision of the poem of what a good community can be like.
“Ecocide – a religious (but non-Christian) view”
By Dr Patrick Curry. Patrick is an independent academic with a particular concern for the natural world and who has been much influenced by Buddhism.
Patrick begins by reminding us of the parlous state of the earth. As an ecological citizen, he emphasises, “more people must to come to value the Earth, its places and creatures as not only what make life possible, and indeed not only what make life worthwhile, but also to take the next step: which is to value them for their own sakes.” He also identifies, “the terrifying ingenuity and industry with which capitalism instils and encourages an ecocidal attitude and way of life.” He identifies this as a crypto-religion. Against this he advocates valuing nature as sacred. Doing so would, he hopes, at least slow down the destruction sufficiently to give a fighting chance for the Earth and its creatures, including us, to survive and, maybe, even flourish.