In 1622, Lancelot Andrewes, the bishop of Winchester, preached a nativity sermon that has echoed down the centuries. Most famously, it had a profound impact on T. S. Eliot’s classic poem “Journey of the Magi,” the first line of which is lifted almost verbatim from the sermon. Toward the end, Andrewes describes the Magi’s journey thus: “Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off . . . the very dead of winter.”
It is an exquisite, evocative picture that reflects Andrewes’s rich imagination. It effortlessly translates the Magi’s journey into a cold English winter. It confirms Eliot’s claim that in Andrewes, “we find . . . that breadth of culture, an ease with humanism and Renaissance learning, which helped . . . to elevate [his] Church above the position of a local heretical sect.”
I often worry, for good or ill, that the modern church risks retreating into a crummy, inward-looking sect. When I do I remember Andrewes’s ease with imagery, his learning and his breadth of culture, and I try to embrace it as the very vocation of the church. I would like to think such a vocation flows from faith in Jesus. For surely the church is the inheritor of a kingdom of precious fields and priceless pearls, of lost sons and widows who sweep the house in search of a lost coin. In short, to be God’s people is to be caught up in parable, in story and storytelling. We are people who dare to puzzle, question, and make things new in the realm of the imagination.
