Sermon: The Golden Sequence

We all have our favourite hymns, those we can bear to sing more than few times and imagine that in heaven we might go on singing for ever.  My list as the Precentor knows is quite short: many do not bear very much repetition and some should not be sung at all.  I'm sure you would like to know which are on my hit-list (or hate-list) but I am not going to indulge in that sport.  However, I am happy to disclose my best-loved Desert Island Hymns.  For today (and it may be different tomorrow), they are: How shall I sing that majesty, Of the Father's heart begotten, Praise to the Holiest in the height, Soul of my Saviour, O worship the King, King of Glory King of Peace and Come O thou traveller unknown.  That makes seven.  My eighth would be this morning's first hymn: Come, thou Holy Spirit, come. It is the greatest of the hymns for Pentecost, and one of the greatest hymns ever written. 

It was written by the 13^th century Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton, one of the most distinguished thinkers England produced in the high middle ages.  He lived from around 1150 to 1228.  One of his students at the University of Paris was Richard Poore who went on to be a Bishop of Salisbury and then Durham, and thanks to whose inspiration we owe the Chapel of the Nine Altars, so purely Early English in style and reminiscent of Salisbury Cathedral.  Langton lived through troubled times in both church and state.  Out of that turbulent era came the document dear to all the English, Magna Carta of 1215, the Great Charter of Freedoms.  As Archbishop, Langton was present at its signing by the truculent King John.  He may well have influenced its content.  He was tireless in reforming the church and raising standards of clergy education and conduct.  He was a passionate advocate of the new learning represented by the liberal arts including, of course, theology, at that time burgeoning in the recently-founded universities of Paris and Bologna and soon to flourish in England at Oxford and Cambridge.  One lasting legacy of his biblical scholarship is his division of the Bible into chapters, for he was the first to divide up the text in this way.

So much for the author.  What of his hymn?  It is known as the Golden Sequence.  Sequence refers to the position hymns such as this had in the liturgy of the mass.  No-one is sure why this sequence is Golden, unless it is a comment on the lambent beauty of its poetry and the profound spiritual insights of its prayer, for here, poetry and prayer are wonderfully married to each other.  It is an invocation of the Holy Spirit to be sung at mass on this feast of Pentecost and in the week following.  Some of the poetry is lost in translation, so listen to the Latin of the first verse:

                        Veni, sancte Spiritus, / Et emitte caelitus  / Lucis tuae radium

                        Veni, pater pauperum / Veni, dator munerum / Veni, lumen cordium. 

That fourfold repetition Veni, veni, veni, veni - ‘come' is matched by a fourfold repetition of another plea in the last verse Da - ‘give'.  So the repeated cries of come and give frame the hymn and give it its intense poignancy.  And this coming and this giving respond to our deepest needs, for the hymn knows the complexity of the human soul: poverty, sadness, emptiness, woundedness, weariness, barrenness and guilt. Langton's skill is to pile up a rich array of images of the Holy Spirit that answer these needs.  They are all drawn from the scriptures, for Langton was a devout biblical scholar.  It's an extended commentary on the prophet's vision in the first lesson: ‘a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  I will put my spirit within you....'  It's a meditation on how life is changed when the Spirit comes: faith restored, hope reawakened, love renewed; all beautifully told because authentically lived in the human heart, reverencing the deep mystery of the human person and the mystery of God the Holy Spirit that is deeper still.

In the first stanza the Spirit is the source of light and radiance, the Creator-Spirit whose energy gives birth to all life.  But he is also ‘Father of the poor', the generous giver of all that is good.  This softens the hardness of the image of brilliant yet impersonal light into a kind, personal deity who is gentle with mortals in their need.  His string of beautiful epithets has the effect of making the Spirit irresistible as the object of our hunger and desire: welcome guest, rest in labour, coolness in heat, solace in pain.  (It's striking that Langton turns away from the dramatic, perhaps ‘obvious', depictions of wind and fire for more tender images: the cool breezes that refresh in the heat, the welcoming hearth suggested by ‘melt the frozen, warm the chill'.  It is a very equable spirituality with none of the overheated rhetoric of the ‘fire of love' that is losing its currency through endless repetition in Common Worship.) All these are aspects of what it means to call the Spirit Consolator: ‘Come, of comforters the best', the word used in the upper room when Jesus speaks about going away and sending the Holy Spirit.  The poet recognises that the Greek word Paraclete can mean so many different things: comforter, consoler, encourager, strengthener, helper, counsellor, advocate.  It is one of the richest words in the gospels.

The third stanza returns to the theme of light: O lux beatissima, ‘O most blessed light'.  The thought picks up the movement of the first verse from the light of God's being to lumen cordium, the inward illumination of God's faithful people through the Spirit.  For human beings owe everything to this light within, as the Latin makes clear.  Without it, without this heavenly light to redeem us and make us new, we are nothing.  So the next stanza becomes a prayer that the Spirit may do his divine work in us: healing and forgiving, imparting life and goodness, ruling and guiding us wayward souls in the path of holiness, melting and warming our cold hearts into loving God.  And in the final verse we reach that fourfold prayer that beseeches the Spirit to give what we who confess Jesus Christ need: the reward of virtue, a happy death, and salvation at our journey's end. 

The last word of the hymn is the clue to all of it, for it's to that word that the whole poem has been leading.  Gaudium, ‘joy', ‘happiness', ‘contentment'.  Each word at the end of every third line ends with ium.  You sense that gaudium was where Langton began, and that he needed nine other words to rhyme with it: solacium, fidelium, and in the last verse the wonderful seven-fold word septenarium.  The prophet Isaiah enumerates them in his vision of the coming Messiah who will embody them: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, the fear of the Lord.  But gaudium embraces them all, for these joyful virtues make us happy in the profoundest sense of that word: if we want lasting joy, then only the Holy Spirit can bestow it.  Only the Paraclete can answer our longing for fulfilment, our hunger to be happy.  We may look for it elsewhere, and do.  But it is always a false trail that turns us back into ourselves.  Only in God's Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life, will we find lasting satisfaction and contentment.  Only in the very heart of God will we find this healer of wounds, this light divine, this shelter from storm and heat, this fount of goodness, this kindest and best of comforters, our healing, happiness and joy.

Ezekiel 36.22-28; Acts 2.22-38