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The Johnson Sermon: 19 September 2004 – Lichfield Cathedral TheVenerable George Frost, Archdeacon of Lichfield Emeritus
[1] Words, words, words, words.An up-market Rotary Club, holding a quite special lunch had invited a distinguished Professor from Yale as guest speaker. As speakers sometimes do, he used the letters of the word YALE as a mnemonic – Y for youth, A for adventure, L for learning and E for energy. Alas he had been speaking for at least 40 minutes before he ever got on to L for learning. When a Rotarian stood to reply and give thanks, his words were few: "I am sure we all feel very honoured to have had so distinguished an academic guest with us today, and I’m sure we are even more glad that it is from YALE that the Professor has come and not from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology!" Three years ago (1.7.2001) Christopher Sterry, Vicar of Whalley in Lancashire, got into the Guinness Book of Records by preaching a sermon, using a vast number of words, that lasted for 28 hours and 45 minutes. This sermon will not last that long. Though it may well seem to. Words, Words. The Lord’s Prayer has only 74 words. The Ten Commandments have 297 words. The American Declaration of Independence has 400 words. A Directive of the Common Market on the import of caramel and caramel products runs to 26,911 words. But this morning we shall stick with just one four letter ‘word’. [2] Dictionary Johnson Yesterday, September 18th, was the 295th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson – our very own Dr Johnson, born in Lichfield in the shop in the market place. Johnson is famous for words - writing and speaking many, many, many words. When Boswell first met him - in the back room of a bookshop – Johnson talked to him - or at him - for three hours, with very few interruptions! For sad reasons Johnson was one of the ugliest of men, and he also suffered from frequent and sometimes alarming convulsions of his body. But when he began to speak it was with a power and compelling fluency that regularly astonished his hearers. A friend and frequent member of a club they both attended was Edmund Burke – no mean orator himself. When Johnson spoke, you did not hear any ‘um, um’, nor any ‘now what was I going to say?’. He always knew what he was going to say, and he said it with polished precision, even sometimes, if he had been crossed, with very considerable and often biting vigour, and on such occasions he was a bit of a cross between Paul Merton and Alastair Campbell. So grammatically and syntactically polished was his conversation that people said he spoke like a book. One listener said he was like the second edition of a book from which any infelicities of the first edition had been removed. Johnson had a high regard for words, and is most famous for his dictionary. You can see a copy of it in the Johnson House in our market Square. There had been English dictionaries before Johnson’s but they were not a patch on his. Johnson gave not merely definitions, but – and in this he scored a first – also copious examples of the use of words from a widespread number of reputable authors with the references as well to illustrate his definition. Naturally not everyone approved of what he had done. He made a typical Johnsonian reply to one rather respectable lady who complained to him, ‘Mr Johnson, I see that you have included some very rude words in your dictionary.’ ‘Yes, Madam’ replied Johnson, ‘and you must have spent quite some time looking for them.’ Others disapproved for different reasons: Scottish people took very unkindly to his definition of the word ‘oats’. Oats – said the dictionary is –‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ His definitions were not, as they would be in a modern dictionary, dry and matter of fact – instead they were cheerfully opinionated. Today few of us like income tax or VAT. A similar fiscal feature of Johnson’s day was excise duty. He defined excise (perhaps thinking of the tax-collectors of Jesus’ day) as ‘a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged - not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.’ In a day and age when writers – and especially hard up Johnson - were desperately dependent upon gifts of money from patrons, he defined a patron as ‘Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.’ Johnson rarely flattered. At the beginning of his nine year work on the dictionary he had sought the patronage of Lord Chesterfield. But that noble Lord, though he received him courteously, had kept him waiting and Johnson was decidedly affronted. He received no more encouragement from Chesterfield all those nine years. When the dictionary was published, Chesterfield did write two approving articles, but Johnson considered him ‘false and hollow’ and wrote to that lofty man disdainfully:
Crossing swords with someone like Chesterfield took courage, though in the event Chesterfield took it in good part. A good many today have heard of Johnson, few have heard of Chesterfield. Johnson was not above occasionally - just occasionally - admitting his mistakes. He got the definition of ‘pastern’ wrong, and a lady complained – ‘Why have you defined "pastern" as a horse’s knee, and not as part of its foot?’ ‘Ignorance, Madam,’ rejoined Johnson, ‘pure ignorance.’ In fact the dictionary was an immense and successful achievement. Even with secretarial help the task had taken him nine years. But it had taken forty years for forty high-flying French academics to produce their much applauded French dictionary, and a similar Italian Group an equally esteemed Italian one. It was an astounding academic acknowledgement of Johnson’s brilliant solo work that both the French and the Italian academies made him a gift of their dictionaries. [3] Words matter. Somewhere today, some time today ...... someone will say to someone else ‘I love you’ - perhaps you will - and it will be tremendous. And today as well God’s Word to us is ‘I love you’ - as it is every day. And that’s also tremendous.
[4a] Words tell us what people are like. In almost any group of people you may find the constant talker: the sufferer from verbal diarrhoea. He rarely has anything to say, but takes a lot of words over saying it; listens little, but just rattles on. We know what sort of a chap he is. He’s told us about himself. By contrast a withdrawn person seems like a wallflower, perhaps very shy, scarcely says a word. At the end of the conversation we know nothing of him because he hasn’t spoken. He’s told us nothing of himself.
Or there’s the chap who’s had a skinful - blustering and ranting and raving….. his words tell us what he’s been doing. He’s told us about himself. Then there may be a thoughtful person who listens and speaks, doesn’t say a lot but when he does, then we listen. We know what he’s like. He’s worth listening to. He’s told us about himself. The words you say, and very often the tone of voice in which you say them, tell the world the person you are – your words reveal your inner self. S. John in his gospel calls Jesus the Word of God. One thing that John meant by calling Jesus the Word of God was that in the same way that we show people what we are like when we speak, so in what Jesus said and in the way he lived Jesus was showing us what God is like. In him God told us about himself. ‘No one has ever seen God, but God’s only Son who was nearest to the Father’s heart he has made him known.’ (John 1:18) [4b] Words can judge us. . When we hear God’s word, we not only hear a bit more of God revealed to us, but we may well be brought up a bit sharp ourselves. We may come under judgement, be shown up. Words can do this. This is very obvious when a jury returns from its deliberations with its verdict to pronounce just that one word: guilty. That’s it, that’s judgement. And the consequences are profound. Sometimes there was judgement in Jesus’ words. On one occasion Jesus - a Jew - was at that well in Sychar talking to an Arab woman – imagine that today! When the woman discovered to her alarm that this man knew more than she thought, she got more than she bargained for. Jesus said to her, ‘Would you please go and call your husband.’ ‘I haven’t got a husband,’ she replied. ‘You’re right there - you have had five husbands and the man you are now with is not your husband at all.’ (John 4: 16-19). That Word penetrated. She was brought up sharp. The hard bits in the Bible are not things like Jonah in the belly of the whale – though that’s a telling tale in itself. The hard bits are the easy to understand but hard to practise bits like – ‘love your enemies’ – ‘love your neighbour’. (Matthew 5:44; Luke 10: 25-37) That’s hard. That’s what the Bible means when it says - The word that God speaks is alive and active. It cuts more keenly than any two edged sword. It strikes through to the place where soul and spirit meet. To the innermost depths of our being." (Heb.4:12) [4c.] Words Create But God’s Word not only reveals God, and judges us, it can also create. Can words create? At the end of the second evening Boswell spent with Johnson, Johnson said to him – ‘Give me your hand. I have taken a liking to you.’ Those words created a remarkable and productive friendship. Other words create: When we get these words in a wedding – ‘Will you take this man to be your husband’ and the woman replies ‘I will’ a whole new way of life is created for that couple. You think they are merely formal, meaningless, printed words? Certainly they are formal and printed, but they are a true reflection of other very intimate words asked on much less formal occasions when the question itself was popped. Perhaps with trepidation! Perhaps when the answer couldn’t be taken for granted! Perhaps when the same question had been asked of the same person before and she had given the wrong answer! But when the hoped for answer did come then life was full, bouncily jubilant. A new friendship, a partnership was created by the single word – yes. JESUS is well described as God’s Word to us. He calls us to use our words well: not necessarily with grammatical pedantry, but with a concern to build friendships, or perhaps to repair friendships, or to renew friendships. [5] Our words And how do we use our words? Few of us are called to use our words on the international or even national diplomatic stage. But we all have our own network of friends, and sometimes that network does fade, even fray a bit. There is a piece of verse that goes: Procrastination
On this Johnson Sunday we do well to reflect on God’s Word, and how important our words are. If our words can be, thoughtful, sensitive, encouraging, cheerful, caring, it may be that people will come to say of us from how we use our words, that we are the kind of person of whom it can be truthfully said the Word of God is made flesh in them.
S. Matthew’s Day: Annual Commemoration of Samuel Johnson A sermon composed by The Very Revd Dr John Arnold OBE And delivered in Lichfield Cathedral on Sunday 21st September by The Revd Canon Tony Barnard
I have recently retired; and I spent much of my ministry working, as we used to say, ‘behind the iron curtain’, especially in East Germany, where I was a member of a youth group which stayed together and still meets for mutual support and strengthening in faith. Last year was particularly interesting. We had always known that our group, like all groups, was infiltrated. Now, through the opening of the Stasi (secret police) files, we knew who had been reporting on us, who were official and who were unofficial agents of the state. The encounter was fraught with tensions and it was a real test of the ministry of reconciliation, which, as S. Paul says, has been entrusted to us. Former East Germany is filled with bitterness, recrimination, and feelings of betrayal. Most hated and despised are those who made a good living for themselves out of exploiting, harassing and denouncing their fellow citizens at the behest of and by collaboration with an occupying imperial power, which had set up a puppet government of its own persuasion, just as Rome had done in first century Palestine. The worst exploiters were the tax collectors. When we say ‘tax collector’ we ought not to think of bowler-hatted Hector from the Inland Revenue adverts, offering to help us to get our returns back in time. They were brutal mafiosi running a state-regulated protection racket, not just collecting taxes but farming them for their own profit. Such a one was a man called Matthew, which might well be an alias if indeed, as seems likely, he was the same person that Mark and Luke call Levi. One other, perhaps rather unfair point of comparison. Especially hated in East Germany were children of the manse who, out of a secularised form of religious conviction had gone over to Communism and were among the few who really believed it. Matthew is a forename and, if his family name really was Levi, then he was a member of a priestly family, who really ought to have known better, or at very least have kept the law, rather than be classed with sinners, i.e., those who by occupation or inclination flouted the law of Moses and of God. Of such, surprisingly enough, was the Kingdom of Heaven, at least for Jesus. Men like Matthew were the raw material of the apostolic ministry, men like Peter, who was to betray Jesus three times, men like Paul, who persecuted the church was an accessory to the murder of Stephen. I mention this at a time when some sections of the Church of England are being rather choosy about their chief pastors. Even Boswell, with his elegant eighteenth century reticence, hints that not all was well with the home life of Samuel Johnson, whom we rightly delight to honour in his home town today, not that he was without sin or indeed without flagrant faults of personality and character, but because, as Mark Antony said of Brutus,:
It cannot be over-emphasised that Christianity is not a religion of faultlessness but a celebration of common humanity, not just solidarity in sin in Adam, but fellowship and communion in Christ, as S. Matthew and Samuel Johnson attest and affirm. From the pen of Matthew we find:
And from that of Boswell: Johnson was steady and inflexible in maintaining the obligations of religion and morality: both from a regard for the order of society and from a veneration for the great source of all order… but of a most humane and benevolent heart, which showed itself not only in a most liberal charity …… but in a thousand instances of active benevolence. Boswell goes on to say: He had acquired a vast and various collection of learning and That is to say he was a kind of scribe or scribbler who could be described as Matthew does in an autobiographical parable, as a steward who could bring out of his storehouse both what is new and what is old. So he has Jesus say, ‘I desire mercy rather than sacrifice,’ which is old – a quotation from the prophet Hosea; and go on to say ‘I have come to call not the righteous but sinners’, which is new, so new in fact that no one had ever said anything like it before. This is one of those points where we see that the Old Testament is old indeed – and none the worse for that – and that the New Testament new – and all the better for that. The chief way in which the New testament is new is the way in which it makes salvation available to everyone – Jew and Gentile alike – through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which we celebrate and for which we give thanks in this Eucharist. This is what S. Paul in today’s Epistle, indeed in all his teaching, calls the Gospel, the Good News – and in a magical phrase, ‘ the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God’. Surely he is drawing on his memory of his own moment of illumination on the Damascus Road, when he compares what happens to the human mind and intellect when it perceives that glory – he compares it to God’s act of creation and the passage of all things from nothing to something, from darkness into light: For it is God who said: ‘Let there be light’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of knowledge of the glory of God What later generations call ‘conversion’, S. Paul described as ‘enlightenment’ – and the origins of the Enlightenment (with a capital ‘E’) are found in his letters in the first century AD. Now it is in no small measure due to the steadfastness of the stout-hearted traditionalist, old fashioned High Church Tory, Samuel Johnson, that the English Enlightenment did not become like its French next door neighbour, rationalist, anti-clerical, sceptical, even anti-Christian. The English Enlightenment, of which Johnson was to be such an adornment, had begun very early, in the seventeenth century. It was not irreligious; and in any case it was soon followed by the Methodist and evangelical revivals which made their own contribution to the thought-world of the eighteenth century. In Germany things happened the other way round. A rationalist enlightenment, influenced by France, came late; it had a shattering effect on the pietistic revival which had already begun in the seventeenth century and it led to that separation of head and heart which was to become typical of much academic theology, through the pre-eminence of German scholarship in the nineteenth century. At their best, though, it was brave and thoughtful German theologians who made people think again about their bibles, about what kind of books they are and how they came into being. Thanks to them, and their English disciples and critics, we no longer live in a pre-critical thought-world, which simply takes the Bible for granted and then either accepts or rejects its message wholesale. We can appreciate it for what it is – the pre-eminent witness to God’s love of human kind in the stories of his people, Israel, and especially of His Son Jesus Christ, told at sundry times and in diverse manners. So, for the sake of integrity, I have to say on S. Matthew’s Day, that it is stretching probability and the laws of literary criticism (to both of which Johnson was strongly attached) too far simply to identify Matthew, the tax gatherer and Apostle, with Matthew, compiler of the Gospel and thus the Evangelist. The most we can say is that the Apostle Matthew may have made a collection of the words and deeds of Christ in Aramaic, which became one of the sources of the Gospel in Greek, which bears his name. But when we have said that, we are still faced with the challenge of discipleship. However they reached the page; the words of Jesus leap off it and they confront us with the command: Follow me , and the chance to be put right with God, not by self-righteousness but by faith in Christ. This is the Good News according to Matthew. To be declared righteous by Christ is not to be always in the right. God forbid. Samuel Johnson was not always in the right. He was often prejudiced, opinionated, outrageous and sometimes just wrong. But one thing he cared about above all others was to be in the right relationship with God and neighbour, a care which never forsook him, as is shown by Dr Bracklesby’s account of his deathbed as recorded by Boswell: ‘Faith in the sacrifice of Jesus’ – there is a phrase of Samuel Johnson’s consonant with the Good News of Matthew and the letters of Paul, for us to take with us, as we move from the ministry of the word to the administration of the sacrament – and beyond that, into our lives and loves. Amen.
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The Johnson Society, The Birthplace Museum, Breadmarket
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