Third Sunday of Epiphany 2007

Ian McEwan’s most recent novel tells the story of twenty-four hours that many of you will remember. It tells the story of Saturday 15 February 2003, when tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on this city to protest against the looming attack on Iraq. At least, it tells the story of Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon living not far from this parish. It tells of the different ways in which that day’s anger, elation and foreboding connected with what ought to have been the ordinary routine of his Saturday - a squash match, a call on his elderly mother, a family reunion supper. It tells one man’s story, mingled with the stories of many.

Thursday’s celebration and this morning’s Eucharist mark a convergence of the sort that fascinate McEwan, although I hope without some of the more dramatic consequences that he fashions for his characters. Today the story of your new priest meets the stories of as many of you as are here, and meets also the greater, more elusive story that is the story of this parish, this church and this congregation. It is a story which my predecessor, Prebendary Tillyer, enriched immeasurably in the years he served here with such distinction. In his valedictory homily he urged upon you that verse beloved of his predecessor, George Howard Wilkinson, “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward”. So the story continues to be told, and together we will write the next chapter, perhaps the next volume. But what will we write; and, as important, how will we write it?

McEwan’s hero, Henry Perowne, would be happy to be described as an atheist, but he would not be happy to let matters rest there. He is no arid fundamentalist of the sort demolished so effectively (and with such relish) by the Bishop on Thursday. A neurosurgeon, he is entranced by and overwhelmed at the mysterious complexity of the human brain, its unimaginable power and its hidden depths. Why look to the supernatural, he would say, when human beings should simply marvel at their capacity for thought? And on the Saturday that the novel follows, when the outworkings of organized religion’s murderous insanity are more than usually evident in London’s crowded streets Perowne is doubtless confirmed in his preference for the mystery of the operating theatre above the mystery of the temple.

Each of you knows a Henry Perowne, a person intelligent, civilized and responsible, yet who sees no need to be doing what we are doing this morning. What sort of story might we craft together that would attract him, or her; and how might we write it?

Let me start with the how, which I have already said is as important as the what. For how we create narrative has changed. My first Head of Chambers was a wise, kind man whose considerable virtues far outweighed his two failings: a mania for the nascent information technology of the early 90s; and a tendency to treat his colleagues like his children. Every day would bring showers of memoranda from the cumbersome lap-top and wire-managed desk of which he was inordinately proud, purporting to govern every area of Chambers life from the lavatories to the telephones. But we live in the era of YouTube and MySpace, when the communication of narrative, the telling of story, is no longer controlled by a select few. It is, after a fashion, democratic, something to which we can all contribute, and to which many expect to and do, particularly the young.

Offer Henry Perowne a church which resembles my Chambers of fifteen years ago and he will leave before the end of the first hymn. He will not be told what the answers are or where truth lies, and in a climate which is suspicious of experts, he will very definitely not trust a priest. He will expect to be heard and to be listened to; he will expect to question and be questioned; and he will expect to be among the like-minded. If ‘Father knows best’ was ever a good rule of thumb for the Church of God (and I doubt that it was) then it is not now, and it needs to be consigned to history’s dustbin. Father does not necessarily know best – he is like you, a disciple of Christ who is struggling to understand what that means in this place in 2007.

But our tradition offers us another image, one articulated by Paul in the first Epistle to the church in Corinth, an image with which we are so familiar that it has perhaps lost some of its power to shock: “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it”. Paul’s vision of the church - of this church - bears examination and re-examination. It is a vision of a community of gifts, different, but equal, with no rank or status. The Gospel and its proclamation is a shared endeavour. Each contributes; and should any cease to contribute then the whole ceases to function. That would surely appeal to Perowne’s appreciation of human physiology and sense of justice. The implications of the vision are far-reaching: they mean each of us, each of us, thinking afresh about what we bring to this place, what we take from it, and how we nourish our common life as disciples of Christ. The vision is dazzling, and I wonder if we dare be dazzled by it.


But if the writing of the story is to be something that is done by us all, and not by them or, worse still, by him, then what will be the plot; what story will we tell? What will make Henry Perowne keep turning page after page? Throughout my ministry I have been drawn to the Gospel account of Jesus’s return to Nazareth, of that moment when he stands up in the synagogue and, as Luke puts it: “the eyes of all...were fixed on him”. He reads from the scroll handed to him and no church looking for a mission statement need look any further:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”.

Good news for the poor; release for the captives; sight for the blind; freedom for the oppressed; the year of the Lord’s favour. We have no other mission than that. The story that we write will not be about us. It will not be about a few hundred souls who together indulge in a harmless Sunday past-time called church. It will be about the poor: those who lack the resource to lift their eyes or their hearts or their aspirations. It will be about the blind: those bedazzled by the glitter of wealth or punch-drunk with the intoxication of power. It will be about the oppressed and the imprisoned: those languishing in the world’s dungeons, built sometimes out of steel and concrete, but often out of the psychoses and addictions that disfigure God’s creation and hold his children captive. It will be about the year of the Lord’s favour: the great jubilee promised by God and vouchsafed to all humankind in the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I don’t believe that Henry Perowne could resist it, and seeing such a company embarked on such a task he would rush to join us.

I began with a British novelist. I will conclude, if I may, with an American poet, and with words to reflect upon as together, like the children of Israel, we go forward:

“So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute.
Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Practice resurrection.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

21 January 2007,
1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a;
Luke 4: 14-21