Sermon preached by Susan Howdle at the Funeral Service of the Revd Dr. Brian Beck. 19^th December 2022 Wesley Church, Cambridge

Based on the Gospel reading, Luke 4:16-21, read just before the proceeding sermon.

Luke was the gospel about which Brian had written widely, as had other members of the congregation!

Let us pray: May my words and our thoughts be true to the gospel of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Now there’s an opener for a sermon.

Inevitably mine has to be slightly less dramatic. I start by expressing thanks (I think!) to Margaret and the family – for the invitation to accept this daunting privilege. But much more, on behalf of us all, to thank and honour them for all the love and support and joy offered to Brian over so many years and particularly for the wonderful care they and all their families have shown over the more recent difficult days.

You’ll hear from them later, but it falls to me to do the impossible. There’s so much to be said about all that Brian offered, all that he achieved in the life of the Methodist Church and far beyond it – and there will be time for that at the Memorial Thanksgiving Service later in the New Year.

But today, in this, his spiritual home of Cambridge, surrounded by so many people who knew and loved him (and as an Oxford interloper!), I am asked to set Brian’s life and ministry in the context of preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the Advent message of good news: the eternal coming of God to us and our world – a world so much in need of it.

There are so many passages of scripture we could have chosen, but – though surrounded by so great a cloud of scholars – I dared to suggest this passage from the gospel of, yes, Luke.

A passage about the faithful promises of God. Yes they have always been there, in the prophet Isaiah – but now, here and now in the synagogue, they become a reality in Jesus, the one who has been sent. God has taken a new, long-awaited and decisive initiative. A promise of release, freedom from oppression. Good news indeed.

Good news for his hearers in the synagogues of Galilee where he was wowing the crowds as he began his public ministry. And now here too, in Nazareth, until – spoiler alert! – many of you will recall the end of this account: the reaction of Jesus’s hearers, once it’s clear that this wonderful promise is not just for a few favoured people, but for all who know their need of it. He’s among his own folk, one of them (in Yorkshire we might say ‘we knew him when he had nowt’), a regular at the synagogue, now claiming to be someone special: anointed, sent. Can’t you hear them? “He seems to think he’s God’s gift to the world. Getting above himself. That sort of thing was all very well in the good old days of the prophets, but here and now? We might be looking for revival, but not like this. Who does he think he is?” And in the violence that follows we have a pre-figuring of the death he is to die.

Who does he think he is? Who did Brian think he was? Brian was a modest man, but with great gifts. But amidst all the qualities and achievements he would disclaim, the one fixed point was his calling to be a minister of the gospel, ordained to a ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral care. That’s who he thought, that’s who he confidently knew, he was.

The testimonies that have poured in bear witness to his faithfulness in that calling in all the different places he was called to be, including his beloved Wesley House, and in this church and circuit.

So many testimonies. And I divert to add my own personal testament of friendship. Not that we always saw eye to eye (my Primitive Methodist DNA sometimes pushed me to challenge his assumptions – I usually lost!). On a lighter note, it was a disappointment to me that the merits of Jane Austen on the whole passed him by! But a dear friend and revered colleague, in many tasks over the years.

And one capable of surprising me. I recall arriving at Derby in 1993 as we were about to take up office as President and Vice-President of the Conference. We’d each had delivered to our respective hotel bedrooms a very large bouquet of flowers – small hotel rooms don’t often offer big vases. “What on earth have you done with yours?” I asked. “Oh,” he said airily, “I called down to the bar for a champagne ice bucket”!

But to return to our text and what I see of Brian in what I read there. Two points. First, Jesus’s own embracing of God’s word as he had received it in the Hebrew Scriptures, making it his own and proclaiming it in the synagogue that day.

I started today with the prayer that Brian was wont to use in beginning his sermons, seeking that his words would be true to the gospel of God. Brian embraced scripture, delighted to explore with all his mind and heart its meaning, mining its depths, making it his own, and emerging to share the treasure that he had found there, preaching and speaking and writing with language and imagery that we could understand, challenging as well as comforting.

Only once did I see him looking slightly worried when processing to the pulpit on a big occasion – the message he’d sent as to the bible passages to be read, upon which he’d carefully prepared his sermon, had not come through, so he had to adjust what he was saying, seamlessly, to weave together the passages the congregation had heard and the ones he’d wanted them to hear. [Thanks to Julian for reading the right passage today!].

Treasuring and exploring God’s word – and not just in the pulpit. I recall during our year of office, meeting up after we’d done separate Presidential and Vice-Presidential visits. He’d been to a district where the District Chair had asked him to spend an afternoon sharing in the regular Bible Study of a small group of army wives at Catterick barracks. His eyes shone: “It was wonderful, Susan”.

Brian sought to be true to the precious gospel of God in all that he thought and wrote and preached upon scripture.

But – my second point - even more was he true to the gospel of God in what he was. He witnessed to Christ, the eternal Word made flesh, and what that meant to the world: God’s grace in Christ – yes, God’s gift to the world. Brian lived this gospel passage of good news for the ‘poor’ and release for the oppressed, in his quiet but passionate care for those not offered dignity or respect in the world – or even more, in the church. Never more so than in his 14 years as Secretary of the Conference.

Equality, diversity, inclusion: he modelled them long before ‘EDI’ became a familiar acronym. Not because it was the right thing to do (though it was) but because it was natural to him. So, long before others would acknowledge it, he identified the racism too often inherent in church life. He worked for racism awareness workshops and racial justice concerns to be embedded in church life long before ‘unconscious bias’ was named as such.

Similarly, he ensured that the views of young people were heard not in a patronising way but by creating the Methodist Youth Conference, to have an official constitutional voice in church life.

And then his recognition of the ministry of lay people, and women in particular, came at a time when it was still slightly ‘woke’. The recognition that the sky wouldn’t fall in if the Conference Secretariat on the platform was not entirely made up of white men in grey clerical attire, but had room for the likes of me and others. And, in our year of office together, he would say to me: “why should the President have all the best preaching engagements when we’re together? I will fulfil my sacramental ministry, and also talk to the children, and you preach”. Those of you who trained as preachers with him will recognise the challenge that was to me – having been fully accredited as a local preacher only the week before taking office!

By now, he’d certainly be saying: “back to the text, Susan – never mind about me, what is this gospel saying to everybody here today?”.

As we look at our world, it is so often difficult to hold on to the Advent hope. As we live in a society of fuel poverty and food banks, yet one where destitute asylum seekers drown in the freezing waters of the Channel to arrive in this place of safety, what is our good news for the poor? And how are we to release captives whether from the desperately overcrowded prisons in our own nation, or those oppressed by fear and bombs and bitter weather in Ukraine, or the millions all over the world confined by the low expectations of others and themselves? There aren’t easy answers. But I and I hope you take heart from all the many people – of all faiths and none – who seek in their own words and lives to offer a message of hope.

And, like Brian, we ourselves are called to offer – in whatever small way we can – the love, liberation, new life in the name of Christ in whom that text was to be fulfilled, became true – fulfilled not simply because he preached it in the synagogue that day but in his very being as the Word made flesh, emptied (as we shall sing) of all but love, getting not above, but below himself, suffering with the poor, the homeless, ending his earthly life as a broken victim, the ultimate prisoner, God nailed to a cross.

For that is where this and every act of Christian worship is centred, upon Christ and his cross. Brian’s preaching, his sacramental ministry and his pastoral heart recalled us to this, and reminded us that ‘evangelical’ described not a party label but the high calling of every Christian to witness in what we say and who we are, to Christ crucified, risen and ascended.

For the cross is the centre but not the end. Brian’s hope was in the God of resurrection. In his words, God who takes what cannot be and makes of it what can be. That was and is the gospel of God, to which Brian remained true. Remained faithful through all the vicissitudes, pressures and disappointments, as well as the joys and fulfilment of a long life, always striving for holiness, to be a more faithful follower of Christ.

I close with some words with which he closed a sermon he preached some years ago in St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street (a place with a special meaning to his father and then to him). He had been talking of St. Paul writing to the church at Philippi. Paul, he said, had not yet grasped all it meant to be shaped as a person after the pattern of Christ. But he pressed on, like an athlete toward the finishing line, because God in Christ was constantly calling him on. Brian then went on: “The Times newspaper has been running a series of correspondence on what might go on people’s tombstones”. What then would he, Brian, like as an epitaph? Brian concluded, “I know what I would like, and pray that it would be true. It is what was said of Mallory when he was lost climbing on Everest in 1924. ‘When last seen he was still going upward’”.

So let us, in that same faith, sing Brian’s chosen hymn*, the one being read to him as his earthly life closed, giving thanks to God that for Brian glory has now ended what grace began.

Amen

*How do thy mercies close me round [Hymns and Psalms no. 562]