Leavers’ Service 2023

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

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If ever the scripture readings assigned for the service were appropriate to the day…

Some of you will have just completed your final exams. Others may still be looking forward to prelims or dues dates or vivas. Still others may be looking forward to a long vacation filled with exciting research and writing. But, one way or another, the end is nigh; an academic year is drawing to a close, and it will be many months before our evening song fills this house again.

The last Evensong of the year is always a tender and wonderful thing. Some of you who are here tonight might be here for the first time. Others might have been here every Sunday this academic year, or even for years before this.  Many members of the choir have sung in this plae week in week out, sometimes several times in the week, to help make our worship a beautiful thing, a means by which some of us a granted a window into the beauty of the divine.

And one of the things the last Evensong of the year means is that never again will this community, built up of the course of weeks and months, gather together in this form again.

There is a beauty to this transience, and it is a beauty that characterises academic communities the world over. We come here for a season to work and to learn, to make friendships and discover new insights about the world and ourselves. And then we move on, back into the world, on to new and as-yet-unknown adventures.

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Today is the feastday of Saint Barnabas, fellow traveller with Saint Paul, once known as Saul, as they helped found and nurture the first Christian communities around the Eastern Medieterranean.

Like most of the earliest leaders and luminaries of the faith, Barnabas has almost completely disappeared from the consciousness of Christians, except as he is memorialised in Church dedications such as our own St Barnabas in Jericho here in Oxford. Like the twleve apostles who were Jesus first followers, Barnabas left no mark on the historical record outside the accounts of the New Testament.

Anything that we know about his personality or his history before or after the events described in the Acts of the Apostles is derived from speculation, inference, or the pious legend that grew up in the first centuries of the Church and then faded out of the knowledge of most.

And yet.

And yet, the beauty and promise that we celebrate here every day is that however famous and legendary, or anonymous and forgotten any of us may be today or may be generations from now, all is held in God’s love, even as generations of scholars have found a home in the honey-coloured walls of this college, who have sat in the seats of this Chapel.

Wherever we go, and however we find ourselves, we remain bound together in that love, bound together in relation to the one who knows us, who holds us in being and life. Though we may not return to this place, or gather again in this way, not one of you will be forgotten.

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It is customary at an ending for whose leaving to receive a charge, or an instruction on how to go from here.

I would not presume to instruct you, but I can, at the very least, appeal a final time to the Scriptures. While all of us, I think, can sympathise with the weariness of the flesh which much study brings about, and whether we find ourselves on the consuming or producing end of the world of scholarly publication, I think we can all agree that of making many books there does indeed seem to be no end.

There comes a point, however, when we close our books and go out into the light of day, to offer to the world what we have learned, what we have made, ourselves prepared for service and perpared to work for the good not only of ourselves, but for others.

And this is our calling not because it wins us praise or wealth or even salvation. We are each one of us called to love God, to love our neighbour, to love one another because in so doing we participate in what God is doing in the world, because in so doing we find ourselves, because in so doing, we find peace, we make peace.

All has been heard.

Until we meet again, refreshed by rest and illumined by God’s grace, may she guard you in the shadow of her wings and bring you safe to your journey’s end.

Amen.