Sermon: Enthronements

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.   

Psalm 110 (Book of Common Prayer) 

One word is dominating my mind at the moment - and it isn’t Lumiere (the Durham City Light Festival currently taking place); rather, it’s enthronement, as we prepare to place our new Bishop, Justin Welby, in his episcopal chair next Saturday morning. 

And so when I turned to one of this morning’s Psalms, number 110, then the ‘E’ word leapt out at me again, because this Psalm is one of the great enthronement Psalms.  Its background is almost certainly the ceremony of seating a new King on his throne in Jerusalem, a king in royal David’s line. 

So the Psalm begins with an oracle from the Lord, inviting the new king to ascend to his throne: 

            The Lord said unto my Lord:

            Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. 

While the drama of enthronement takes place on earth, it is as if the king is being elevated to the divine Presence; his earthly throne is a share in God’s heavenly throne, and so he is pictured as sitting in a most exalted place, at God’s right hand. And it’s clear that the king has no power of his own – he is commanded to sit until God makes his enemies his footstool. This subduing of enemies is God’s work.  Next in the enthronement ceremonial is the giving of the sceptre, ‘the rod of thy power’ in the Prayer Book translation. The image seems to be that if the sceptre is a metaphor of jurisdiction, God is, as it were, extending the range of the king’s power, beyond the confines of Jerusalem and Judah, so that God’s reign, symbolised by the king, is all-embracing. 

The imagery changes again. In the cultic imagination, this day of enthronement for the king is like being born again, a new birthday.  The Psalms makes reference to the dawn and to the dew, perhaps suggesting that these ceremonies began at day-break. Here is a new day for the nation, a new start, a new range of possibilities. Dew is often seen as a sign of refreshment and promise, something that is life-giving and is a sign of blessing. 

But then, a completely new thought is introduced. God speaks again, and make a solemn oath which can never be revoked. As well as being king, the new monarch is also a priest. And the Psalmist relates this priesthood to the ancient priest-king of Salem, Melchizadek, who appears in the Abraham stories; an ancient king-priest, who received offerings from Abraham and bestowed on Abraham a blessing. This new king is not simply heir of David, but heir of an older tradition stretching back into antiquity. What is more, this priesthood is not something temporary, but eternal. Again, the thought appears to be that the king represents God to the people and represents the people before God; this requires spiritual insight, rightly to discern the will of God as well as standing in holiness before God and in fidelity to his commandments. 

And the king shall exercise judgment. The Prayer Book version sounds a bit gory, with its reference to God in his wrath filling ‘the places with the dead bodies’. More recent translations employ the imagery of God ‘smiting kings’, and ‘smiting heads over the wide earth’. It is the kind of imagery we would prefer to spiritualise. If we are going to talk about God’s anger at all, then we must remember that what we can’t do is to extrapolate our human anger, so bound up with our sinfulness, arrogance and pride, onto God. Rather, we must also speak of God’s holiness, before which all that is wrong and sinful flees, and we must speak of God’s redemptive love, which vicariously through the cost and pain of divine love absorbs our wraths and angers, neutralises them and transforms them. But yes, as the Prayer Book Comunion reminds us, the temporal powers are given by God so that they might truly and impartially minister justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice and to the maintenance of God’s true religion, and virtue. 

Finally, the Psalm adopts perhaps another image of the enthronement ritual, the drinking of fresh water; the image of the thirsty vanquisher, wearied by his tasks, drinking the refreshing, cool and living water from the brook, and so being revived and re-vitalised. 

Psalm 110 is one of the great messianic Psalms. There is evidence of that in the Gospel tradition, when Jesus asked the question, ‘How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the Son of David?  David himself, by the Holy Spirit, declared, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.” David himself calls him Lord, so how can he be his Son?’ The Epistle to the Hebrews sets out the exposition that Jesus is the fulfilment of the divine oath of one who will be a priest for ever after the order of Melchizadek. Jesus is the one who, through his resurrection and ascension, has been exalted as Lord to the right hand of the Majesty on high; the one who is King of kings and Lord of lords, the one who is Saviour not only of Israel but the world, and the one to whom all judgment is given, of all things in heaven and on earth. Jesus is the one who in costly self-sacrifice, took on himself the sins and crimes and injustices of humanity, who crucified sin in his own body in order to neutralise it and redeem it and so ‘spread salvation all around’. No wonder, therefore that we sing this Psalm on the this feast of Christ the King, at the end of the liturgical year as we look forward to Advent and the promise of the coming Kingdom, when all enemies, including sin and death, will have been placed under Christ’s feet. It is no wonder that we also sing this Psalm at Matins on Christmas Day and on Ascension Day, enveloping as it does the whole of Jesus’ earthly life. In this sense, Jesus whole life is seen as his enthronement, from being laid in the mean throne of the manger, and lifted upon the coarse throne of the cross, and exalted to the right hand on high, sitting down as the metaphor of his completed work, the fruit of which is being worked out mysteriously in human history until he is revealed. 

And there are many parallels I could draw with next Saturday. Of course, a complication for any newly appointed Bishop of Durham is the trappings of history. So a symbolic walk from Durham Castle, the Bishop’s former modest house, across what we call Palace Green to this ancient Cathedral Church, or in Scott’s historical reference, ‘half church of God, half castle ‘gainst the Scot’. And then to Bishop Hatfield’s under-stated Cathedra, the highest in Christendom. Oh dear, I fear that the words ‘I will build my Church’ may have become just a little distorted. 

But as I sat in what we quaintly call the ‘horse-box’ below this pulpit at the Sung Eucharist last Sunday, my eye was taken through the back of the Cathedral to the Millennium Window where right in the middle is the mortal remains of St Cuthbert – no earthly trappings, except an inter-twined stole, perhaps symbolising the heavy yoke of the episcopate, perhaps symbolising the pressure of the care of the Churches which St Paul in his apostolic ministry felt so keenly. 

But the Psalm says yet more to us. Should it not be our prayer that the symbolic ascending of those steps opposite me should be a metaphor of a hope, an aspiration that our bishop, by God’s grace, may be given access to the heavenly court, to receive the wisdom that God alone can give in the exercise of such a demanding ministry? 

As he sits down, is this not a reminder that this ministry is God’s, not ours? For truly we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; God’s grace working through our human weakness is sufficient. 

And in the image of the extended sceptre, it this not a reminder that our vocation is to reach out into all areas of life? For there is no part of the world or of human life that Christ’s blood cannot reach in its redemptive purposes. 

And in the image of the dew, should not this inform our prayer that God will bring his church into places of refreshment and new life, and lead us into new possibilities for mission and service? 

And in the image of Melchizadek, while in one sense the See of Durham looks back to the 10^th century, nevertheless, behind that we see a longer tradition that leads back to Cuthbert and Aidan, a world away from the eventual imposition of Norman temporal power.  Can we sense here our corporate vocation as priests of the New Covenant to stand for God before the people and for the people before God? 

And in the image of the king who executes judgment, should we not see the Church’s prophetic role, challenging all that will not be able to stand in the light of God’s holiness, speaking for the voiceless and acting for the powerless? 

And in the image of the refreshing stream, are we not taken back into the sacred centre, the centrality of worship and prayer in which we, in St Bede’s words, ‘drink in with joy the word that gives knowledge of you’? 

In other words, what I’m trying to say, is that next Saturday is a corporate act; our new bishop symbolises what the Lord requires of all of us within the fellowship of the Diocese of Durham.  But as God has committed to him the task of godly leadership and episcopal oversight, may I commend Justin our bishop to your prayers, and may God with him bring all of us to bow low before Christ our King, as we begin a new day in the life of our Diocese, and commit ourselves, as we approach the Advent, to seek first the Kingdom of God.