Hallowed Be Thy Name

Please note:

This script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors that were corrected before the radio broadcast.

It may contain gaps to be filled in at the time so that prayers may reflect the needs of the world, and changes may also be made at the last minute for timing reasons, or to reflect current events.

OPENING ANNO
BBC Radio 4. It’s ten past eight. Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics in Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity Catherine Pickstock is the preacher for this morning’s Sunday Worship which comes live from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. It’s the second in an occasional series on the Lord’s Prayer and is introduced by the Chaplain, the Revd David Neaum*.

CHAPLAIN
Good morning, from the steps of Chapel overlooking the open, main Court of St Catharine’s College. This morning’s service takes the second phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘hallowed be Thy Name’ as its inspiration. St Catharine’s was founded in 1473, at a time when the Lord’s name certainly would have been ‘hallowed’ as a matter of course in places of learning. There’s a lot in those four words about the Holyness and the Name of God. Both this Chapel and its antecedents have been hallowed places within the College, and they are still places where we know God by name in worship and prayer. Inside the Chapel are gathered our student choir and our junior girls’ choir, along with the students who have just returned to begin a new term and who will begin our service by singing the hymn ‘The God of Abraham Praise’.


HYMN: THE GOD OF ABRAHAM PRAISE

CHAPLAIN

So, let us pray:

Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for those places where you reveal yourself to us and we learn to speak your name. As your name is hallowed so may your presence mark the places where we encounter you, making them holy and sacred in our memories and reminding us that you, our God, are with us now and always.
All: Amen.

MUSIC O God to whom all hearts are seen Robert Kindersley

O God to whom all hearts are seen, composed by Robert Kindersley. The Master, Professor Dame Jean Thomas gives our first reading now, from Exodus, Chapter three, beginning at the first verse.

READING – THE MASTER

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’ When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ Then he said, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ He said further, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’
 But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.” ’ God also said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you”:
This is my name for ever, and this my title for all generations.
This is the word of the Lord,
Thanks be to God.
CHAPLAIN

The God who revealed his name to Moses in the wilderness, is a God we still encounter. Not through a burning bush perhaps, but in ways and places that are still hallowed by God as he continues to reveal his name [to us].

We’ll now hear three reflections by a student in divinity, a junior chorister, and a teaching fellow of the College recorded in and around the College where they have discerned the presence of God.

CHOIR: Chant: Bless the Lord my Soul (Taize)

ENCOUNTER 1 (PRE-RECORDED INSERT)
My name is Rebecca Webster. I am a second year student in Theology and Religious Studies and Chapel Clerk here at St Catharine’s College. Here in my room in college I am fortunate enough to have a window seat that overlooks some playing fields. Strange for a city, the view is of grass, trees and the sky. When I’m sitting there I’m reminded of the constancy of nature, the steadfastness of the Lord’s peace and presence. No matter what is happening in my life at that time, I am under the same sky that I have always been under, the same sky that all before me have lived under. I am reminded that in God’s transcendence, He is, and always has been, present with us.

CHOIR: Chant: Bless the Lord my Soul (Taize)

ENCOUNTER 2 Francesca (PRE-RECORDED INSERT)

CHOIR: Chant: Bless the Lord my Soul (Taize)

ENCOUNTER 3
My name is Dr Michael Hurley. I am a Fellow in English at St Catharine’s, and I am in the old library. The eighteenth century panelling and décor, and the elevated view onto the College’s main court, makes for a lovely working environment. But I am less moved by the aesthetics of this place than by the hushed industry that goes in here. It’s the desultory browsing, reading and writing that, for me, consecrates this place – every single day of the term. So much of what is said about education today figures it instrumentally. Studying is said to get you somewhere or something: a qualification or a job. But the collective energy in this library, any day of the week, suggests the opposite possibility -- that learning might have value for its own sake. The desire to satisfy curiosity, to know, is certainly a very human impulse. But the purity of that impulse feels to me to be highly spiritual too.

MUSIC Locus iste Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)

CHAPLAIN

Locus site by Bruckner, the words for which are: this place was made by God a priceless mystery; it is without reproof.

In a few moments Professor Catherine Pickstock, an alumna of this College and Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics in the Faculty of Divinity here in Cambridge will give the address. But first, a reading from the Gospel of according to John, Chapter seventeen, beginning at the first verse.’

READING - TBC

Jesus looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.

‘I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.

This is the word of the Lord,
Thanks be to God.

SERMON PART 1

We utter the phrase, “Hallowed be Thy name”, so often that we seldom consider how strange it is. Why hallow ‘Thy name’, and not God directly? Is honouring a ‘name’, whether human or divine, the same as honouring the person so named? Is it just a manner of speaking?
But a name may be given to many different people, and even when attached to one person, there is no perfect identity of the two, the name and the person. This is why one can act representatively ‘in the name of’ another person. To act in someone’s name is to honour that individual person, but also all their emanations, roles and influence.

To hallow is to honour, but it has more layers to it than that. It means not just to proclaim, but also the opposite, to reserve, to make somewhat secret. It means to consecrate. So to hallow a name is paradoxical; it is to render somewhat hidden the very word that most shows forth, or proclaims identity.

And so it was with the most intimate name of God for the ancient Hebrews, the unpronounceable name of the Tetragrammaton, the four unsayable consonants: Y, H, V, H. This name was both clarified and obscured to Moses, as a repeated ‘I AM’, or ‘I AM AND ALWAYS WILL BE’, giving rise to later argument as to whether it proclaims God as unchanging being, or as absolute power of self-definition. For God to claim the name ‘I AM’ is to say that his name uniquely coincides with his existence. With ordinary names, this is not the case: a human being may be called Jack or William. But God is simply called ‘is’ according to the Bible.

Does this mean that God is unchanging and reliable, or that he is utterly unpredictable? Again we can look at the way names normally work. Names come to be associated with the traits of particular persons. So the name ‘Raskolnikov’ in Dostovevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment denotes urban alienation and nihilistic wickedness. And yet a name can also indicate that same person, despite changed characteristics, as when Raskolnikov later repents.

So names are strange: they seem to mark both habitual consistency of character, and persistence of identity despite change.

What then of the name of God? Is his name ‘being’, because, like existence as we know it, he might turn out to be anything? Or, is he ‘being’ as an unalterable, reliable, rock-like standard of goodness? Is his name really ‘surprise’, because we cannot know? Or is his name ‘sameness’? The Exodus passage suggests both ‘surprise’ and ‘sameness’ at once, because always a good surprise. For the name ‘I AM’ is given in a very particular worldly context that occasions an epiphany of the eternal. The ‘brightness of the lit bush’ is a momentary intimation of an abiding fire that does not burn, yet the voice that speaks from this fire proclaims a specific future of freedom from captivity for Israel, and arrival at a new place of flourishing.

So the name of God is more than everything, and beyond any place, and yet just for this reason, must be mediated by many particular attachments, affinities and places. This unites for us consistency with surprise, as intimations of eternity suddenly interrupt our ordinary hurried experiences of time. And we have heard already some of the ways in which eternity seems to interrupt time in particular places – the hushed library, the playing fields – for students and staff of the College.

Our own names are not identical with our existences, but hold open a sort of gap between what we have been so far, and what we might yet become. This is an interval both of danger, and of promise. For a contaminated human name is always redeemable, if we act in the name of God as consistently good being, who is a source of endlessly new and surprising goodness. If we do so act, then our names may come to coincide with our existence, and both as individuals and as peoples, we can start to be newly identified as unpredictably consistent in our surprising creativity. That is the mark of God’s name upon us.

HYMN Bright the vision that delighted Richard Mant (1776-1848)

SERMON PART 2

Christ manifests to his followers the name of God. But what name is this?

One may suppose it is the Tetragrammaton – the unknowable ‘I AM’. For only this name was worthy to be hallowed by any Jewish preacher.

So Christ, like Moses, proclaimed the secret name of God. As a second Moses, he linked the manifestation of this name with a new law or rite.
The place where Jesus announces that he has shown the name of God is also the place where he gives the new rite at the last supper; no longer the height of a mountain, but an upper room. And in place of a non-consuming divine fire in a natural bush, he exhibits a divine-human body as ordinary bread and wine. In contrast to the Old Testament unity-in-tension of universal truth with specific revelation, here is the mystery of the absolute coincidence of the two, since earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus had identified himself with the ‘I AM’.

But it cannot just mean the hidden ‘I AM’. Jesus manifests the name through showing the words of the Father to his disciples so perfectly that they are equally his own words; as he glorifies his Father, so his Father glorifies his Son. As he has given the disciples, who hear these words, to his Father, so his Father has given the disciples to him.

Therefore, even though that name was humanly bestowed, the name ‘Jesus Christ’ is the eternal name of God Himself, and the ritual utterance of that name attunes us to God, bringing about in us a God-likeness.

What can this mean?

First, it reveals a surprising distance between existence and name, even in God, but a perfectly relational distance; the being of the Father exhaustively expresses his name in the Son. Even the reception of a name remains in God in the form of the Holy Spirit. God is thereby eternally united with the human history of the Jews, and its consummate realisation in Christ and the Church.

Secondly, it means the promise of God to the Church of a new Exodus and homecoming. The time of final naming of all creatures and their thrice hallowing in the name of the Trinity. The final surprise of the arrival of an astonishing complete harmony and consistency on earth. A threefold hallowing therefore of all, in which we gradually become what we sing, in triple time: Holy, Holy, Holy: the diversely shared name of Being and action together.

MUSIC Sanctus and Benedictus from the Messe Basse
Gabriel Fauré (1845 - 1925)

CHAPLAIN
The Sanctus and Benedictus from Faure’s Messe basse, sung by Agatha Petters, a Chorister here at St Catharine’s College and winner of this year’s BBC Radio 2 Young Chorister of the Year Competition, with the Girls Choir of St Catharine’s College directed by Edward Wickham and accompanied by our Senior Organ Scholar Will Fairbairn. This year’s competition launches today.

Let us pray.

SPEAKER 1
God Almighty, we give you thanks for the opportunities we have to praise you in this College Chapel, hallowed by centuries of worship and by your presence, and we pray that all who pass through this Chapel’s doors will continue to encounter your holy name in this place. We pray for St Catharine’s College, its Master, fellows, students and staff and our research teaching and learning.
Thy kingdom come
thy will be done.


SPEAKER 2
Heavenly Father we ask for your blessing upon the world in the midst of its disorder and injustice. We pray for increased international cooperation and resolve to address the disparities of wealth and inequalities of opportunity that exist between peoples and nations. We pray for all in governance that they may be inspired to pursue peace and the common good.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done.

SPEAKER 1
Lord Jesus Christ we give you thanks for all the ways we encounter you in our daily lives. We give thanks for those whose love for us expresses something of your love, for the times when we are able to acknowledge that we are in the wrong and receive your forgiveness. We pray that all may come to know your name in your hallowing and sancitfying of our lives.
Thy kingdom come
thy will be done.

SPEAKER 2
Spirit of God we pray that you will animate our thoughts and minds, inspiring us to recognize your presence in the world and the gifts we have received at your hands. May we be faithful interpreters of your Gospel, active witnesses to your love and hopeful recipients of your peace.
Thy kingdom come
thy will be done.

CHAPLAIN
We gather together all our prayers in the Lord’s Prayer, which is sung here to a setting in German by the Estonian composer Arvo Part, accompanied by our Junior organ scholar, Alex Coplan.

MUSIC Vater Unser Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

CHAPLAIN
Let us now sing of the majesty of our God, hallowing his name with our praise in the hymn ‘How shall I sing that Majesty’.

HYMN – How shall I sing that majesty? John Mason (c.1645-1694)

BLESSING

May the God of all holiness draw you into his presence, reveal to you his saving love and strengthen you to do his will. And the blessing of God almighty, the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit be upon you now and remain with you always. Amen.

CHORAL BLESSING: God be in my head Judith Bingham (b. 1952)

Text: Anonymous: Medieval
Book of Hours, 1514, in English in the Sarum Primer of 1558

[[ORGAN VOLUNTARY – Fugue on the Magnificat (Bach)]]