An Evensong meditation by the Rev. Canon George Maxwell
The Feast of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury
This evening's first lesson holds one of the most tender sentences in the Law of Moses.
If you take your neighbour's cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down; for it may be your neighbour's only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that person sleep?
In what else shall that person sleep?
The God who brought Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm pauses here, in the middle of the commandments, to think about one man's bedding. One cloak. One night. The sun going down.
That is where the Law lives. It reaches all the way down to dusk, to the hour when the air cools and a poor man reaches for the only thing he owns that will keep him warm. And when he cries out, God says: I will listen, for I am compassionate.
The choir sang a few minutes ago, Oh, how I love your law. Listen to that again with the cloak in mind. Here is a law a person could fall in love with. A law that knows what time the sun sets. A law that wonders where you will sleep. How sweet are your words to my taste. Sweet, because every one of them is about someone.
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This evening we keep the feast of William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the darkest years of the Second World War. Our collect asks that we be led to establish that city which has justice for its foundation and love for its law.
Love for its law. The cloak handed back before sundown is what that looks like. Love made specific enough to fold over an arm and carry across the road.
Temple came to that conviction through the Gospel of John, the book he loved above all others. He spent years with our second lesson. The Word became flesh and lived among us. He took that sentence with complete seriousness. Christianity, he wrote, is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions. He meant it as praise. If the eternal Word took flesh, then flesh matters to God. Bodies matter. Bread matters, and rent, and wages, and whether the coal lasts through February. The Incarnation means God cares about the cloak.
So Temple, philosopher and bishop, son of an archbishop, a large man with a famous laugh, spent his life asking the Exodus question of a whole nation. In what else shall they sleep? He wrote a slim paperback, Christianity and Social Order, that ordinary people bought and read and argued over. In the middle of the war he set the “warfare state” beside what he called a “welfare state”: a nation ordered for the good of its people, so that the cloak comes back before sundown, every night, for everyone. And Temple was careful about one thing. The church, he said, should hold up principles and leave the programs to Christians as citizens. The cloak belongs to no party. It belongs to the neighbor.
He was Archbishop for two and a half years. He died in October 1944, worn out, before the war he had prayed through was over. He never saw the city built. Few of its builders ever do.
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Here is what moves me most. All of it, the books and the committees and the long arguments about housing, grew out of worship. For Temple, prayer and justice were one love facing two directions. To worship, he wrote, is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.
Quicken the conscience. Feed the mind. Purge the imagination. Open the heart. Devote the will. And the will, devoted to God's purpose, walks across the road with a cloak over its arm.
Think of where Temple prayed this office. Wartime England was a country of blackout curtains. Every window covered at dusk. Every street dark. And in cathedrals and parish churches, people gathered in that darkness and prayed the collect we prayed a few minutes ago. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.
That is the evening prayer of a people who know what a night can hold. It is the poor man's cry from Exodus, the cry God promises to hear. When we pray it, we stand beside everyone who will sleep in the cold tonight. And the prayer turns us around. The God who says I will listen so often answers through hands. Ours.
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So Evensong is a hinge. We come in at the end of the day, tired, carrying whatever the day handed us. This week, some of us carry relief, and some of us carry grief. The same ballot handed us both. We sing Mary's song: he hath filled the hungry with good things. We sing Simeon's. And we are sent back out into the last of the light, the sun going down over Peachtree Road, toward our neighbor and his cloak.
We have just stood and sung of the holy city John saw, where every tear is wiped away. Every cloak handed back at dusk is a stone laid in that city. Every fair wage. Every warm room. Every door opened before sundown. The city rises one night at a time.
Temple never saw it finished. Neither will we. But we know what it looks like. It looks like the sun going down, and a neighbor asleep, warm, under the one thing he owns.
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Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.
We may depart in Simeon's peace when our neighbor can sleep in peace.
And for that, O Lord, lighten our darkness. Amen.