Sermon, 2026 Corporate Communion

In the two years since I’ve been at Christ Church I have tried to make time for a daily walk or a run around the paths of Christ Church Meadow. Much of the Meadows, which fills the expanse between St Aldates, the Thames and the Cherwell, were bequeathed to Christ Church by Elizabeth Montacute in 1346, with later parts added after the dissolution of the local monasteries. We are lucky to have it intact – the Meadows narrowly avoided being torn in two by a major relief road in the 20th Century!

The Meadows’ most familiar residents are the Longhorn Cattle, reintroduced during Christoper Lewis’ time as Dean. By day the Meadow is teeming with students, residents and tourists, and – if my daily visits are anything to go by – a popular spot for the city’s College Chaplains, for pastoral conversations, and a quick pre-Evensong wander. By dusk, night and dawn the Meadow takes on a new life, with badgers, foxes, and even the occasional. And last May, during a tour organised for Mental Health Awareness Week with our Head Gardener Steve, a few of us had the chance to meet the Meadow’s likely oldest resident; a cluster of tiny ancient Adder’s Tongue ferns, which will have grown on these floodplains long before St Frideswide made them her home. To walk on the Meadows is to trace the past and present as they interweave.

We gather this evening as those with a shared history of land and living, as rich as the life of our beloved Meadows. The two endowments which created first Cardinal College in 1525 and then Christ Church in 1546, continue to shape this institution and large swathes of the country; we retain about 10,000 acres of that land to this day. And, of course, with it the 80 benefices of which Christ Church is sole or shared patron. The body we gather to celebrate today.

This relationship can be as complicated as any other. The dissolution of the monasteries which fuelled much of the endowments, was welcome in some parts, and deeply wounding in others. Power plays its inevitable tune – the riches of this small corner of Oxford a million miles from the reality of life in parishes across the country, and across this very city. And as our Archivist Judith can testify, the correspondence between Christ Church and its incumbents and parishes is a chequered history of great challenges and great joys.

We gather too at a time in which questions of land and its possession are more important than ever. On the international stage, geopolitics is ever in the headlines, most obviously in places like Ukraine, and the Middle East. The question of to whom the land belongs, is a matter of war and destruction.

Our national politics is not immune. Tensions are flaring again in Northern Ireland. England’s southern coast has become a migration battleground. Nationalist politics is on the rise, here as across Europe. To whom does England and the UK belong, many ask? And to whom do Christian images and ideas belong in that debate?

Our own localities are also contested places of belonging – everything from debates about housing asylum seekers, to building new housing estates, to the rights of farmers, to questions about the care of graveyards.

To whom does the land belong? Or perhaps that’s the wrong question?

Instead, inspired by the creative ecosystems of Christ Church Meadows, and in conversation with tonight’s readings, we might instead ask: what does it mean to belong to the land? For that’s the final concern of tonight’s passage from Deuteronomy, and pertinent too in Jesus’ remarks about our relationship to the earth in his Sermon on the Mount.

Tonight’s reading from Deuteronomy is not without its challenges. It’s passages like this which play into a theology of land that can become possessive and exclusionary. “Go in and occupy”, God proclaims. If we ask to whom the land belongs, the tone quickly becomes destructive. But what about belonging to the land? Here Deuteronomy is rich. We begin a relationship of belonging by receiving the land as a gift, a gift of God in which we are invited to share. Because of course the land only truly belongs to God its Creator. We are at best its custodians, those who share in its cycles and fortunes and challenges.

Unlike the Israelites’ experience of Egypt, in which the land represented work and hardship, the promised land is fruitful in its own right, because of its diversity and its cycles of life and growth, because, we are told, this is a land “the Lord our God looks after”. And that means that to belong to the land – to any land – we must belong first to God, its Creator. The biblical language of land is so often tied with language of relationship. God’s expectation in Deuteronomy is that the Israelites will enter into the land he has promised them, and nurture their belonging there by keeping his commandments to love God and love and serve each other.

The land is not merely a possession or a resource. It is the place where they learn what it means to be faithful. And thus, to belong to the land is also to belong to one another. The land, whether of our nation, or in each of our parishes, is where neighbours are encountered, where the vulnerable must be cared for, where the rhythms and cycles of life teach us dependence upon God. To belong to a place is to allow that place and its people to make claims upon us and to shape us as we shape it in turn.

And how do we enter into such a relationship, with the land, with God and with one another? Here Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount help us. For we are to be both the meek who inherit the earth, and the salt of earth; those who sit lightly to the land, and those who season it, those who remind others that to truly belong to the land – and to the inheritance of all God’s promises - requires us to love and serve God and one another.

That is our calling as the people of God, in each parish in which we minister, and as those gathered into the Christ Church family. For as we belong to God, so we belong to one another, and to the many places we inhabit. And as we belong, so God does his good work in us.