The Second Sunday of Advent, 7 December 2008: JUDGEMENT

‘Mother of Pure Evil’ screamed Friday’s headlines after the conviction of the kidnappers of Shannon Matthews. Those headlines were a reminder, as if one were needed, that judgement is a theme that fascinates and implicates us in equal measure.

For more than four years before I came to St Peter’s I worshipped every Sunday underneath something almost as cataclysmic as a red-top headline: painted above the chancel arch of St Thomas’s, Salisbury it dates from the late fifteenth century and is one of the largest surviving mediaeval frescoes in England. The tabloids’ judgement of the kidnappers is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper; but the subject of the painting is, of course, the Doom, or The Last Judgment, the theme of this second address in our Advent series.

It depicts Christ robed in majesty outside the walls of the New Jerusalem. He is the judge of all creation. Beneath his feet sit the apostles in their long-promised places of honour. To the north and south of the chancel arch, and to the right and left of Christ, members of our race go to the fate decreed for them. Angels give the righteous a helping hand and they are raised to life, while the damned are dragged towards the gaping maw of hell. Numbered among them are crowned, mitred and tonsured heads.

No doubt the citizens of late-mediaeval Salisbury would have marvelled at the painting’s colour and detailed sophistication; no doubt they would have been cheered by the rewards promised to the saved; no doubt they would have shivered at the gruesome end of the condemned. To twenty-first century eyes the colours have faded, the detail appears crude, and the rewards and the gruesome end cruder still.

Today few are prepared to argue seriously for the existence of hellfire; fewer still accept that the fate of the unrighteous will be to be tortured for all eternity. Yet our principled loss of faith in hell’s gaping maw has not heralded an equally principled new era of faith in compassionate, forgiving human judgement. Friday’s headlines and the public reaction to every conviction of a child abuser testify to that. And we should not dismiss such outrage as mere populism of little consequence. It does not happen in a vacuum – it influences public policy. The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales has recently reminded all judges that their primary purpose in passing sentence is the punishment of the accused. Deterrence of others from committing crime, let alone the rehabilitation of the offender, is a secondary consideration. We inhabit a punishing society.

Our standards conflict in this as in so many spheres of life and faith. God cannot condemn us, we insist. He must love us just as we are, coming alongside us and responding to our needs and concerns. Yet we may (indeed we must) condemn the offender in our midst. We have learned a new way of understanding God – we have not learned a new way of understanding judgement. Our model is still the one painted above the chancel arch in Salisbury. It’s just that we’ll no longer allow Christ to sit in majesty. Preferring the court of public opinion, we’ve enthroned ourselves.

My belief is that it’s time to rediscover and renew our understanding of divine judgement, and that in the light of that understanding we’ll find our view of human judgement changing too. For if we remove God from the judgement seat and turn him into a divine social worker then we turn our backs on our tradition. Punch the word ‘judge’ into your Bible software and you’ll find that it occurs no fewer than 587 times between the books Genesis and Revelation; while ‘saviour’ appears 59 times and ‘creator’ 21. God is our judge: that is a non-negotiable Christian doctrine.

Yet if God is our judge then we must ask: what sort of judge is God? Is he like our own punishing judges, only on bigger scale? In the Salisbury Doom painting Christ holds his hands up in blessing. He is bare-chested and his feet are unshod. At the end of time, all things being complete, blood still streams from his wounds. All-powerful and glorified, his humanity is ever present, ever visible. Christ is transformed from suffering prophet to omniscient judge; yet the omniscient judge is still the suffering prophet. God’s longing is not for the obliteration of humanity (hence the painting’s rainbow throne, token of God’s promise to Noah that never again would humankind be destroyed); his longing is for its transformation. His judicial concern is not with our rehabilitation. He does not want to make us into different people, but to make us more fully the people we essentially are, the people he loves and knows we might become.

And how is this transformation effected? The mediaeval artist shows the cross, spear and crown of thorns brandished trophy-like behind the throne. Christ’s victory is complete, but he is a wounded victor, and his victory is a victory of love. It is love that keeps Christ faithful to his vocation and bears him to the cross; it is love that scars him with eternal wounds; it is in love that we will judge us. On the last day, however we conceive of that, we will discover what it is to stand in the presence of pure love. What would a human court of law look like if it were constructed on a similar foundation?

For no one should imagine that that will be a reassuring or comforting thing. Imagine the light of a love so intense that it shines like a penetrating laser into the darkest corners of our souls. Imagine the heat of a love so coruscating that it burns away the dross and filth that have accumulated within us. Imagine the gaze of a love so clear that it knows us better than we know ourselves and has held us in being from the moment of our first creation.

Demons, fires and toasting forks are terrifying; but to see ourselves as we really are and to let ourselves be changed – that is the judgement of Christ. Perhaps that’s why we remain stuck, content with our overcrowded and unsanitary prisons, content with religion that constrains and demeans, and content with the Doom: because the reality is even more terrifying. Amen.

Christ the King, Sunday 23 November 2008

Like a refreshment stall temptingly positioned somewhere in the twenty-fourth mile of a marathon, the feast of Christ the King beckons the unwary as they enter the last week of the Church’s year. Its imperious title suggests that the last seven days can be run with omniscient warmth in the heart and a royal spring in the step. Christ is King, after all, and with that dynamic assurance the purple wastes of Advent are so many puddles to be vaulted over on the way to the rapture that indubitably awaits. However, if a long-distance runner succumbs to the lure of the refreshment stall, takes a rest and enjoys a long cold beer when he has a mile of his course still to run he’ll find that last mile longer than all the preceding miles put together. A similar fate awaits those who too readily take refuge in the seductive promise that because Christ is King all is necessarily well. And maybe I’m becoming wise, or maybe I’m becoming cynical, but I am refusing the comforting blandishments proffered by today’s feast and, feeling neither omniscient nor royal, am approaching the end of the year with a sense of dissatisfaction.

I am at risk of sounding more like a chairman giving an end-of-year report than a priest proclaiming the Gospel, and I apologize, but it’s me preaching today rather than James or Mark because it had been our hope that today we would bring to an end our Giving Campaign for 2008. You all know the facts. Increased basic costs mean that for St Peter’s simply to keep going as it always has we need to find an additional £30,000 in 2009. If we want to achieve the relatively modest new ambitions we have set ourselves then we need to find an additional £38,000. The need is therefore urgent: but I am unable to tell you today that we have met it. Circumstances that no one could have foreseen or overcome mean that the Campaign’s mailing has only just gone out. I remain very confident that we will raise our income and plug the hole in the budget, but at the year’s end I regret that we have not done so already and as we had planned.

It had also been our hope that we would go into Advent with a new sound system in Church, one that would enable the many people who will worship here in the next month to participate in that worship in a more effective way, perhaps even by actually hearing the preacher. This is occasionally thought to be a good thing. Although we have identified the system and the supplier that we would like, we have also discovered unexpectedly that its introduction into our building will require a faculty from the Chancellor of the Diocese. Again, I am confident that we will obtain the faculty and that the system will enhance what we do here, but I regret that it will be 2009 before I am able to address you without the risk of the microphone dying or the speakers booming.

I could go on, and point to other areas of our common life where we have not achieved what we have set out to achieve within the time-frame we had set out to achieve them: hence springs my year-end sense of dissatisfaction and of a job only half-done. But if we cannot help how we feel, we can help what we do with our feelings. What might I do with my sense of disappointment?

Ignore it, I suppose, and preach a different sort of sermon, telling you that the plan all along had been to delay the Giving Campaign until Advent when people are in the mood to spend money, and that the new sound system was always destined to be part of our Lenten adventure. Or get angry, blame the PCC, blame the printer, blame the Diocese and inform the Assistant Priest that he will be preaching on Christ the King.

Or, or – draw breath and think for a moment about today’s claim. Christ is King. Of course he is: every breath in our lungs, every sinew in our bodies, every drop of blood in our veins compels us to this conclusion: that in Christ is all authority ultimately vested; that in Christ all history finds its meaning; that in Christ the nations will be one. Christ is king. Yet look at the chaos and agony of the world which is his, a world stalked by injustice and violence, a world where evil runs unchecked, a world where innocence is put to the sword every hour of every day. Look at all that and acknowledge that while Christ is King his kingdom is not yet Christ-like.

To commit to the proclamation that Christ is King is to commit to dissatisfaction, to disappointment, and to a sense of a job half-done. To proclaim that Christ is King is perpetually to reach the year’s end unfulfilled. For to proclaim that Christ is King is to proclaim that the kingdom has not yet come and that in the forests of the Congo and on the streets of this very city it sometimes seems an awfully long way off. And to proclaim that Christ is King is to respond to our dissatisfaction at that distance not by ignoring it and not by getting angry with it, but by learning humility in the face of it. Christ is King is a shout of triumph, but it is also a call to action. It is a defiant statement of hope in the face of human sin, but it is also an indictment of human sin. It starkly holds before us the scale of the task that is ours, the task of working alongside the God who was, who is, and who is to come, for the Earth’s redemption.

The year is ending, there’s no shiny new PA, and we face a deficit next year. I - we - must learn to plan better and to deliver on the expectations we raise. But Christ the King convinces me of disappointments and dissatisfactions which dwarf mine ten thousand times over. Christ the King propels us into the season of Advent and compels us to pray the Advent prayer with greater urgency than ever: ‘Come, Lord Jesus’. And Christ the King bids us transform this world to make it one fit for a King.

Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people… Amen.

All Souls Day, Monday 3 November 2008

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.


One of the realities of ordained life is that if a priest is invited to supper the meal will inevitably be preceded by an awkward pause in which the host wrestles with whether or not Grace should be said and, if it should, by whom it should be said. A priest I know regularly overcomes this embarrassment by declaring categorically that only meals involving potatoes are proper meals, and necessitate Grace, while others are not and do not. I had supper with him last week and was thrown into confusion when, confronted with a plate of chicken and rice I assumed myself to be in safe territory and picked up my knife and fork. He took this as the cue to launch us into prayer. I blurted out my ‘Amen’ and in my defence pointed out the lack of the aforementioned root vegetable. He smiled and said ‘ah, but the presence of a friend makes the meal proper’.

I should not have been surprised. The priest in question is in fact a rather senior bishop of the Church of England, and he has made known on several occasions his opinion that priests ought to be taught less about the Bible and more about how to cook.

This opinion has (in my view) much to commend it, although it is considered shocking by many. It’s been much influenced by the sublime words of George Herbert, with which I began. They comprise a dialogue between the poet and his host, between humankind and God. Invited to dine and painfully conscious of his frailty the poet tells his host that, in response to his enquiry, all he lacks is a guest worthy of the invitation. ‘You shall be he’ insists the host. But ‘I cannot look on thee’ returns the poet. ‘Who made the eyes but I?’ says the host; ‘but I have marr’d them’ says the poet, ‘let my shame go where it doth deserve’. He is fearful. He dares not approach the table.

It is no coincidence that tonight, as we remember those we love but see no longer, we do so in a setting similar to that envisaged by Herbert. We gather around a table, around a table at which we are invited to sit and eat. Each of us stands where the poet stands, and in our Eucharist we discover the truth of what Herbert believed of God. This is that he is not the zealous receptionist, armed with a roll call of those who are invited and those who are not. Nor is he the muscular door-keeper, whose task it is to root out the unwashed and eject them from the party. He is instead the eternally generous host, welcoming in whoever wishes to approach, cooking and serving, and paying the bill. What he serves, what we feast upon, is his life, his presence, given to us and for us.

For the readings for All Souls Day attest that God is as George Herbert portrays him: he is Love, eternally turned towards the world with arms outstretched, the world which he loves into being and constantly holds in being. His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; and they are offered to every one of his children, to the departed as to the living. In that invitation; in that hospitality; in that love is our hope.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

Come, let us taste Love’s feast. Amen.

The Last Sunday after Trinity, 26 October 2008

Anna has chosen an auspicious day on which to be baptized. It’s not just that her parents had an hour’s extra sleep last night, fortifying them for the rigours of the day. It’s not just that it’s the fourteenth anniversary of Israel’s historic peace treaty with Jordan. It’s not even that it’s the birthday of Domenico Scarlatti, Francois Mitterand and Hilary Clinton. No: it’s that it’s the Sunday before the release of the twenty-second James Bond film.

This might appear an odd coincidence for a Baptismal sermon to celebrate, even a sermon preached in a parish on the borders of which Ian Fleming once lived. For James Bond is licensed to kill rather than to preach; he’s more likely to fire a Beretta than wear a biretta; his taste is for vodka Martini rather than Eucharistic wine. James Bond is not Jesus Christ. But those who follow Jesus Christ have to accept that many more people are likely to go and see the new Bond than they are to go to Church. So we have two options. Either we ignore Bond, or we consider what he might have to teach us, and whether he and we might make common cause for the Gospel. It’s not a trivial or shamelessly populist task: it’s the same as that attempted by the young Galilean teacher who sat down with the crowds and talked about sowers and travellers and wedding feasts, the occupations and amusements of his day.

James Bond has shown remarkable resilience and remarkable adaptability: the first novel was published more than fifty years ago. In the decades since Bond has not stood still. Fleming originally conceived him as a veteran of Second World War military intelligence. His early adventures were peppered with references to the war years; his early enemies were renegade Nazis who had survived. As time went by he became a Cold Warrior; after the fall of the Berlin Wall he turned his attention to the power vacuum that its fall brought about. More recently he has fought the sinister power of the international media and the threat of terrorism. He has never been trapped by yesterday’s battles; he has never aged; he perpetually dons his dinner jacket, picks up his shoulder holster, flirts with Moneypenny and, with Q’s latest gadget in his pocket, he strolls into the crisis of the moment.

Bond’s surroundings change, his challenges change, but he is the same yesterday, today and for ever. And in his missions we catch a glimpse of our mission. The Gospel is the same yesterday, today and for ever, but those to whom it is preached are not. Anna will do most of her growing up in the second decade of the twenty-first century, not the third and not the fourth. It is to her, a child of this time that the Church must learn to speak. This does not mean the Church deserting her foundational traditions. That would be the equivalent of Bond suddenly drinking Pina Colada. But she must find a vocabulary for the age, interpret the tradition for the moment, and accept that the world in which God is active may have changed while she has not. Bond reminds us what it is to be incarnate, enfleshed in a particular place at a particular time, and that is a skill and grace that the Church must re-learn.

James Bond has a huge relish for life and for living. I’m not defending his sexual mores (not that I’m sure he has any), his general attitude towards women, or his apparent indifference to killing. But a flick through Fleming’s novels makes it clear why they were such a hit in 50s austerity Britain. Bond enjoys life. The stories are awash with vintage champagne, served always with mounds of fine caviar and hot toast. They luxuriate in the details of Bond’s cotton shirts and linen suits; they linger over the perfection of his Aston Martin.

Paeans to materialism? Of course. But we live in a London borough whose streets are soon to be filled with buses bearing the slogan ‘There is probably no God. So relax and enjoy your life’. Obviously, believing there probably is a God means not enjoying it. We are poor advertisements for faith if our faces are long and our attitudes sanctimonious. I’m absolutely not encouraging an irritating cheerfulness among Christians. But I am encouraging a little less defensiveness and anxiety. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy and peace. Unsurprising, really, as we’re the ones who have in Christ stumbled across the meaning of life.

And lastly, we are all so inured to James Bond’s lifestyle that its frankly rather hazardous quality goes unnoticed. In every film, in every book, he flings himself into the teeth of whatever’s coming at him. It may be the Communist agency SMERSH; it may be Blofeld, armed with military tunic and fluffy cat; it may be Jaws, or Oddjob, or the man with the golden gun. Whichever, Bond scarcely thinks twice, plunging in without a thought for his own safety. Why does he do it? Why not retire to play golf and write his memoirs? Well, Fleming writes this of one of Bond’s early interviews with M: ‘he sat down and looked across into the tranquil, lined sailor’s face that he loved, honoured and obeyed’. Bond’s motivation is his profound loyalty and his deep love for his service and his country. He is passionately, recklessly devoted to these causes, to which he has pledged his life and allegiance.

Perhaps this sermon should carry the sort of warning that we all remember from childhood: don’t try this at home. I’m not asking anyone to go out and start behaving like 007, and certainly not on a Sunday in Belgravia. But if as a community the Church exhibited just a little of that exuberant spark, just a little of that relentless fire, just think what she might achieve for her Lord.

Rooted in tradition but living in the present, relishing life, and giving everything for the great cause: true of James Bond and, I would have thought, not a bad prescription for the Church into which Anna is about to be baptized. On this her baptism day my hope is that those three thoughts offer her (and all of us) a measure of comfort; as it were, a quantum of solace. Amen.

Sunday 19 October 2008, 22 after Trinity

‘We will not go to Canossa’ Otto von Bismarck told the Reichstag in 1872. He was not discussing his colleagues’ travel plans, but was referring to a journey made to a northern Italian city eight hundred years earlier. The Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, had very rashly claimed for his Imperial throne the right to invest all the bishops of his Empire. For this trespass on the rights of the Church, Pope Gregory VII excommunicated him.

Henry made his way to the fortress at Canossa in January 1077, dressed as a penitent in a hair shirt. When he arrived the Pope made him wait outside in the snow for three days before receiving him with a kiss and accepting his penance. Canossa was thus the moment when temporal power accepted that it had no authority over spiritual power. It is a seminal moment in European history, comparable to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon or the Paris mob’s storming of the Bastille.

Bismarck’s successors, the statesmen and stateswomen of modern Europe and of the United States, will in recent weeks have been less occupied with ecclesiastical matters than was he when he addressed the Reichstag. Still, the next time they meet they might well consider whether Canossa would be an appropriate venue for their meeting. For in these last weeks we have witnessed an encounter which may prove to be every bit as significant as was that of Gregory and Henry. The encounter has changed geopolitical relationships in ways which seemed unimaginable only a few weeks ago. It may have marked the end of an era. It will almost certainly shape the one to come. It’s just that the parties to the encounter are different. At Canossa the Empire met the Church. In October 2008 the private sphere met the public sphere; the bankers met the elected leaders. And exactly who prevailed is not yet clear.

‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s’. Henry’s submission to Gregory allowed prince and prelate to put Christ’s command into effect. By making Henry wait in the January cold Gregory punctured the medieval obsession with the all-encompassing near divinity of emperors and their courts. The reforms of his pontificate were directed to the development of critical distance between the spheres of influence dominated by church and state. The great irony is that - arguably - it was this division that would in later centuries allow the state to insist on the rights of religious minorities and, more recently, of people of no faith. Modern secularism and contemporary multiculturalism have their roots in the reforms of a medieval Pope. It’s an irony probably lost on Richard Dawkins.

So does the history of Canossa have anything to teach us about the encounter between public and private through which we are living? The banks’ acceptance of subsidies can be caricatured as Henry-like, and the politicians’ use of public funds as Gregory-like. And just as the thirteenth century did not witness the development of either theocracy or atheist autocracy the twenty-first is unlikely to herald an era of either centralized control or unfettered laissez-faire.

But perhaps it will see a new balance emerge, as it did in the era after Canossa. Perhaps it will see more effective regulation and more effective control of excess. And perhaps that balance will set the banks free to serve the economy in ways which at present they cannot; perhaps such balance will also prevent politicians from promising a cost-free, ever more affluent future, in which the value of property will rise in perpetuity and the earth’s resources will be deemed inexhaustible.

If we are at the beginning of a new chapter of Western history, at a new balance between the modern powers, then what can the Church contribute to the narrative? Ought she content herself with Gregory’s sphere, the post-Canossa settlement which concentrates on the things that are God’s and leaves the emperor to the mercies of Darling, Paulson and the bankers? I suggest she cannot. For at the heart of whatever economy emerges from the trauma will still be human beings, bringing with them human needs and human emotions, human vices and human virtues.

‘A modern market economy cannot do without a measure of moral corrosion’ writes John Gray, emeritus professor at the LSE. Greed and envy are powerful economic stimulants in the marketplace; thrift and caution are not. How does the Church speak into the balance? As public and private adjust to a new relationship she must counsel and warn, advise and admonish, prophesy and proclaim, recalling always that God’s people are more than customers and investors. The denarius, of course, bore the image and likeness of Caesar; God’s people bear the image and likeness of God.

And God’s people are citizens not just of Europe or the United States. They are citizens of God’s kingdom. Theophan the Recluse writes of the transplanting of humankind’s treasure and of humankind’s hopes, a transplanting from the temporary realm to the eternal. This ‘makes man essentially a pilgrim on earth, seeking his fatherland, the heavenly Jerusalem’. And the heavenly Jerusalem of which Theophan writes is a kingdom which has no market but that of grace freely given; that has no economy but that of salvation; that has no law but that of love. Only through the recalling of that citizenship can we gain a proper perspective on our contemporary way to Canossa. Amen.


Sunday 19 October 2008,
22 after Trinity,
Matthew 22: 15-22

Harvest Thanksgiving and Giving Campaign Launch, Sunday 5 October 2008

Harvest Thanksgiving at St Peter’s Eaton Square,
Sunday 5 October 2008,

Address given by the Vicar at the Parish Eucharist



I have to own up to something of an internal tussle this morning, as I debated where I should address you from - behind a lectern or not behind a lectern. Those of you who are students of politics will know that in the last year or so whether or not to speak from behind a lectern has become a rather hot issue. Mr Cameron first came to prominence when he made a speech to his party’s conference in which he shunned the lectern and strode about the platform. It was such a good idea that his rival Mr Clegg addressed his party conference this year doing exactly the same thing. The following week the Prime Minister - declaring himself a serious man for serious times - stood very firmly behind a lectern to address the party faithful; and last week, not wishing to be outdone, Mr Cameron too retreated behind a lectern there to address the gathered flock.

This morning I have to address you in serious times on a serious matter and so I suppose - following conventional political wisdom - I ought to do so from behind a lectern because I have to talk to you about one of the things that we cannot talk about in church, which is money, and giving, and that, in this of all weeks, is a serious matter that needs serious attention. But my brothers and sisters I am not going to speak to you from behind a lectern - not because these are not serious matters to which I pay serious attention. They are, and I do, but because this is Harvest Thanksgiving, when the focus of our worship is on what we have been given; it’s on what God is doing here among us; what God’s purpose is for this community; what we are achieving on his behalf; and when I speak to you about those things I am not going to hide myself behind a lectern so to do, even if it means there is nothing between me and the rotten eggs that may follow. I am not going to speak behind a lectern because I want to celebrate, I want us to spend a moment or two thinking about what is God is doing with us and among us.

Let’s just pause for a moment and consider what it is that we give thanks for at Harvest Thanksgiving. We can try it this way, I suppose: please raise your right hand if you believe yourselves to be part of a decaying, defensive and dwindling community which is dying on the stem. I see no hands. The fact is that the growth of worship at this church continues, the trend that began under my illustrious predecessor and to which even I have not been able to put an end. More people are worshiping at St Peter’s today than there were two or three years ago. We are growing community - none of us, I hope, has a sense of our being a declining community. Please raise your right hand if you believe that the quality of music we offer or the quality of worship we offer here is sub-standard and dull and tawdry and boring. I see no hands. That is because we have in our midst some of the finest musicians in London. I know. I have worshipped in two of our neighbouring parishes in the last fortnight and the quality of the music that we offer here from Stephen and the 10 o’clock choir through to Andrew and Dan and the 11.15 choir leave other musicians in this Deanery and Diocese standing. We are blessed with an extraordinary quality in what we offer here Sunday by Sunday. Put your hand up please if you think that the school - that we founded and that we continue to support financially and through our time - is a school which deserves a place at the bottom of the bottom most league table. I see no hands, because our school is a vibrant, lively place that children like to attend and where the quality of learning and education is good and high. We are a growing community, we offer vibrant worship, we sponsor a good and lively school. Put your hand up if you find this a depressing building that’s dark and dusty and filled with unwanted clutter like some other churches you all have visited. It isn’t. It’s warm and it’s welcoming; it’s beautiful; it’s a place of tranquillity, and a place where it is possible to feel near to God. We are a growing community, a community that offers authentic and beautiful worship, we have a wonderful school, we have a marvellous building, all this we have to give thanks for at Harvest Thanksgiving.

But there is more because in twelve months time when I address you, I don’t want to be able to say, twelve months ago I spoke to you and today St Peter’s looks the same as it did then. We have plans for the parish, we have ambitions. We want to refurbish the public address system, so that at last you can all hear what is being said at the front. We want to kit the servers out in new albs, a closer look will reveal that the ones they are wearing more properly belong in a jumble sale than in this glorious building. Those are very internal matters. We don’t stop there. We want to send the young people of our parish on pilgrimage to Canterbury, to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Becket, and learn for themselves what it means to live a holy life. We want to send our teenagers to Taize (and bring them back again, or most of them at any rate), so that they can experience what it is to be part of a global church, a world wide Christian family. We want to build a school in Angola because we believe education is important, and we believe it should be shared. We want to partner the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a local charity which works with the poorest of the country’s poor. We don’t want to stand still and rest on our laurels: we want to grow and to build and to do more. And as I look at you, my brothers and sisters, I am more convinced than ever of what I said to the first PCC meeting I attended here, which is that I do not believe that there is anything that this community cannot achieve for God, if it is determined to do it.

That is why I am not going to retreat behind a lectern to talk to you about the financial problem that we have at the moment, because I am quite sure that once we think about it, once we focus on it, the problem will go. And the problem is quite simply this. If we are to keep going as we are now, next year, we need to raise an extra £30,000. Why? Because our utilities bills have gone up, because our insurance costs have gone up and because the costs of what we pay to the Diocese, the costs of belonging in the Church of England, have also gone up. Not because of profligacy or waste on our part, but because our bills have gone up and because we don’t expect to receive as much from giving this year as we had hoped to. We need to raise £30,000 extra just to stand still. If we want to do some of the things I have spoken about if we want to achieve some of our ambitions we need an extra £8,000. The target before us is to raise an extra £38,000 next year. I am well aware that in this of all weeks that sounds like a huge sum, but your PCC has thought about it in these terms. There are roughly 250 households associated with our parish. If every household in the parish was to look at what it gives at the moment week by week, and was to give £10 extra per month, then we would raise what we need - if the £10 was given through the Gift Aid system. Gift Aid is the Giving Plus system which means that Alistair Darling gives us money for free, if only we can be bothered to fill out the Gift Aid declaration form. £10 extra per family per month given through Gift Aid, £2.50 per family per week given through Gift Aid. £2.50 will almost buy you a tall latte in Starbucks; it will buy you I suppose almost a third of a bottle of Prosecco from Oddbins; it will almost hire you a James Bond movie for a week from Blockbuster Video. £2.50 will be beyond some of us but it will not be beyond all of us and, I dare to say, it will not be beyond most of us.

My brothers and sisters again raise your hands if you believe you are part of a community that is dying. We are not. We are eminently capable of doing this. At this time we are all thinking about what our commitments are: the global situation is making us all consider what we really value, where we really place worth, what we can really afford week by week. When you look at this building, at this community which welcomes you, when you think of our school, when you think of the music we offer here, I want to suggest that that £10 extra per family per month is easily achievable; that we will raise £38,000 and that in a year’s time we will have balanced our budget for next year, spent the extra we want to, and have grown our plans and ambitions accordingly.

In a few moments we are going to make Harvest offerings at the altar and as you come forward to bring up what represents your offering to God for this year, please think and pray about the extra that you can give, as a thanks for all we have received and to help us to continue to grow.

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

Sunday 28 September 2008, Michael and All Angels

‘You do not walk alone into the next life. With you walks your greatest friend, your guardian angel who was with you when you were born into the physical world and is with you now at the end of your earthly life’.

I quote from the homepage of the Psychics and Mediums Network, not because I am feeling the irresistible pull of the New Age but because the quote’s very existence is evidence for a hypothesis that I accept, that, in this irreligious age, angels are enjoying something of a renaissance.

They are to be found everywhere. Any Registry Office will tell you that among the most popular songs to which brides make their entrance is ‘Angels’, recorded by Robbie Williams in 1997. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide. And if musical popular culture does not convince you then perhaps visual popular culture will. Travel to Gateshead and you will see the country’s most famous and (to abuse a word) iconic piece of public art. It is Antony Gormley’s 1998 sculpture, ‘The Angel of the North’.

The sea of faith may have receded from our shores, but in its place the beating of angels’ wings resounds. Why? I will hazard three reasons for the popularity of angels and for the devotion they continue to inspire.

The first is that they bring a touch of mystery to a world which has a tendency to be information-laden, a tendency which has reached new heights in the last week. We are bombarded with data by countless media outlets: words, statistics, and images. The mention of angels brings blessed relief. They are other-worldly, ethereal, and transcendent.

The second is that they are highly personal. You can conceive of angels in any way you choose. Few will dare to correct you and tell you that your particular image of the angelic is misplaced or erroneous. So there is huge scope for the subjective imagination, for fantasy even. And the angel thus conceived will of course be your angel; your guardian indeed, your friend and your companion.

The third is that angels come doctrine-light. Conceiving of angels does not commit you to an institutional church, or to a church of any sort. It does not requite that you subscribe to any of the tiresome dogmas with which such churches have encumbered themselves – the Trinity, the Atonement, or the Ascension. Angels take their place on the pick-and-mix counter, along with crystals, copper bracelets and the Loch Ness Monster.

So what sort of response can or should we make to a culture apparently fascinated by angels, even if the angels by which it is fascinated are not recognizable to orthodox Christians?

One response, I suppose, would be to ignore the phenomenon and to concentrate on the Gospel we have received, leaving the psychic, Robbie Williams-humming, Antony Gormley-visiting hordes to stew in their ignorance. But you will have guessed that this would not be my preferred course. My preferred course would be to understand the longing for transcendence, for intimacy and for liberty that I believe the angel-fixation represents as nothing other than a contemporary version of the human longing for God, which is as old as history itself.

People yearn for mystery. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as roughly equivalent with someone you might meet in the pub, a wise soul who listens to our problems and looks kindly upon them. God is our friend, perpetually, to employ a modern cliché, ‘there for us’. Or, rather more traditionally, we present him still clinging to his cane and mortarboard, stern, disapproving, incapable of empathizing with our condition. God is the headmaster or, as Rowan Williams would have it, ‘the management’, perpetually out to trip us up and catch us out. Both presentations are useless. If God is the former, then we would be better off in the pub, where the beer is likely to be better; if God is the latter, then most of us already have to deal with tyrants domestic or professional, and don’t need to add more to the pantheon. Yet we are heirs of an apophatic tradition of spirituality, a tradition that insists that there is more that we cannot say about God than there is that we can say about him, a tradition that values silence rather than words and prayer rather than doctrine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their dose of the transcendent, or we have nothing to offer at all.

People yearn for intimacy. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as blandly accepting, meeting us where we are, understanding our frailties and failings, weeping over them, and loving us in spite of them. Or we present him as judging us, ruling on those frailties and failings, holding us to an impossible standard, condemning us to disappoint him eternally and offering us cold, impersonal justice. Again, both presentations are useless. Warm affirmation of who we already are is not all we need; neither is everlasting censure of who we have been. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which God was, God is and God is to come, a tradition in which God the Father loves us into being, God the Son shares our earthly life, and God the Holy Spirit promises to remake us in ways we cannot begin to imagine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their moments of intimacy and self-knowledge, or we have nothing to offer at all.

People yearn for liberty. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present a faith of positions and propositions, of claims and creeds. We enact incomprehensible liturgy dressed up with esoteric language and inaccessible rites, and appear an introspective community concerned only with our own survival. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which faith and liturgy, doctrine and worship have as their end the transformation of the world in which we are set. We seem to be prisoners of our faith; we are in fact the inheritors of a faith that may yet turn the world upside down; we serve a God whom to serve is perfect freedom. We indeed have something to offer those who look to angels for their liberty, or we have nothing to offer at all.

This is the God who I believe the angels still proclaim –a God of mystery, a God of intimacy and a God of liberty. This is the God we too must proclaim – or I fear that we in our way and our whole generation with us will be stuck, ‘loving angels instead’. Amen.

Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 20 July 2008

‘What are the symptoms, by which one may judge most fairly, whether or no a nation, as such, is becoming alienated from God and Christ? And what are the particular duties of sincere Christians, whose lot is cast by Divine Providence in a time of such dire calamity?’

I doubt that any sermon preached in England this morning will be remembered twelve months from now. Preachers’ words are rarely milestones or historic turning-points. Yet last week the Church of England’s Calendar remembered a sermon, a sermon preached 175 years ago. On July 14 1833 John Keble ascended the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford, to deliver the Assize Sermon. His words on the theme National Apostasy, with some of which I began, have generally been regarded as the launch-point of the Oxford Movement, and can fairly be said to have changed the face of the Church.

Keble’s world was self-evidently very different from our world, and it is hard for a liberal-minded citizen of our pluralist culture to sympathize with his outrage at some of the societal changes that prompted his sermon. These included moves towards Roman Catholic emancipation and towards the admission of non-conformists to Parliament. A creature of his time, Keble could detect in these only attacks on the Church he loved, the Church he believed to the successor of the Church of the Apostles. What he perceived as the State’s willingness to diminish and marginalize an institution of Apostolic foundation he diagnosed as symptomatic of national apostasy. England was becoming faithless.

Thus was conceived the principal cause of the Oxford Movement: the re-assertion of the Church’s fundamental independence from the State, and its re-awakening to its roots in ancient and undivided Christendom rather than in Reformation England. This re-assertion and re-awakening was timely and welcome and its effects thoroughgoing: they are still visible in this very building in the extension and adornment of the east end, carried out late in the nineteenth century, an attempt visibly to re-connect the Ecclesia Anglicana with the historic life-stream of the universal Church. The Oxford Movement was a moment of confident revival, of the sort that many would like to see in global Anglicanism today.

Yet there is a cost to such moments, to moments when the Church defines herself in opposition to the world. Whenever the Church believes she has uncovered her raison d’etre (whether in her apostolic heritage or in the words of Scripture) she turns her back on the community which she exists to serve. Her new-found confidence and freshly-discovered self-reliance breed a self-sufficient complacency that is ultimately destructive. Early enthusiasm turns to unthinking certainty and bold innovation to soulless repetition. The catholic ceremonial which once offered the worshipper a dramatic glimpse of the world to come becomes instead a tired ritual of this one; the word of God which once spoke liberation to its hearer becomes instead the dead letter of another age. Churches cling onto what once served them well, and they become refuges from the world rather than places of transformation for the world.

So what is to be made of Keble’s sermon? He saw a nation losing faith in its Church; what your preacher sees today is a Church losing faith in its nation, a Church that is trapped in her own self-perpetuation, a Church that has become a refuge for those who do not like the nation, a Church that does not like what the modern word has brought. In no other place in twenty-first century Britain is it considered legitimate (indeed appropriate) to discriminate against people on the grounds of their gender or sexual orientation. We at last (thank God!) inhabit a culture in which such discrimination is as unacceptable as was that on grounds of race a generation ago. By colluding with it in the Church we reinforce our ghetto appearance and our ghetto mentality: it is us who are right; it is them out there who are not.

Keble argued that the Church must not follow slavishly the beliefs and behaviours of the apostate society in which it is set. He was right. But God’s saving action is not limited to (or by) his Church, however rooted it may be in the apostolic tradition or however wrapped up it may be in Scriptural authority. Truth makes herself known through the labours of theologians, yes, but also through every scholarly discipline; through public worship, yes but also through private prayer; through the debates of Synods and councils, yes, but also through public discourse and private conversation. Sometimes the Church needs to catch up to where society has already arrived. That may be a sobering reality, but it is one that is entirely consonant with a doctrine of a sovereign God of limitless creative freedom and boundless loving resourcefulness.

There is much in society of which the Church must be critical if she is to be faithful to her Lord: omnipresent pornography, rapacious greed, rampant inequality, universal commercialism, the naked exploitation and brutal oppression of God’s children. But when she shuts her eyes to the common values that unite the nation (and tolerance and equal treatment are among these) then she loses all credibility and denies herself a place at the table. When the Church discriminates in its ordered life which is apostate – Church or State? No one will listen to a self-sufficient sect, a ghetto church. It is time for us to re-assert our faith in the nation we serve as the place where God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness must be built.

‘I do not see’ said Keble ‘how any person can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolical Church in these realms’. Perhaps the Apostolical Church needs to give similar devotion to the cause of discovering what God is doing in the nation; perhaps she needs humbly to learn from what she discovers; so that then she can be the agent of its Godly transformation. Amen.

Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 6 July 2008

‘The bishop’s whole role as bishop makes no sense apart from his role as the one through whom all divisions are transcended. His primary function is always to make the catholicity of the Church reveal itself in a certain place’.

Those are the words of the Eastern theologian John Zizioulas, and they are a timely call to our Church.

For last weekend the Global Anglican Future Conference drew to a conclusion in Jerusalem. On its agenda was the ministry of bishops. This weekend the General Synod of the Church of England is meeting in York. On its agenda is the ministry of bishops. The GAFCON delegates debated what they describe as the ‘false Gospel’ of the North American bishops. The Synod representatives in York will debate the ordination of women as bishops in our own Church.

So what are bishops – those hapless individuals whose ministry is at the heart of such fierce debate – what are bishops actually for? Their role has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times and can barely resemble that exercised by those who first bore the title in cities around the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago. We expect a contemporary English bishop to be a manager of staff, a tribunal chair, an ambassador for a brand, a master of communication, a mediator, a strategist and diplomat. We expect him to be as at ease with schoolchildren as he is with captains of industry; we expect him to pastor his clergy and to appear on radio phone-ins. We expect him to be a person of profound faith and prayer, and at the same time to be prepared to put on his Wellington boots and baptize in the village duck-pond without so much as a grimace.
Ours is not the first generation to create its own expectations of the ministry of the bishop, and it will not be the last. Yet we must recognize that much of this is culturally-conditioned and transient: a few years hence we will doubtless look for different qualities in our bishops. What will not change is their ministry’s essence: episkope, or oversight, which has two vital dimensions.

First, our bishops occupy a historic office that has its origins in the earliest days of the Christian Church. Only the bishop ordains priests and deacons. Only the bishops ordain other bishops. Through this ordered pattern of episkope the bishop links us to our ancient roots in Canterbury, Rome and Jerusalem and is thus the touchstone of our ecclesial authenticity. Without the bishop we might well be a Christian church meeting in Eaton Square in 2008; because of the bishop we believe ourselves to be a local manifestation of the church, the church of Jesus Christ, the church of Peter and Thomas, the church of Gregory and Augustine, the church of Laud and Cranmer, the church of Richard Hooker and Michael Ramsey.

Secondly, the bishop oversees not only the Church’s ordered life but also the deposit of faith which is entrusted to it in every generation. He teaches and upholds the historic gospel: both the Scriptures and the doctrines of the Creeds to which, vitally for Anglicans, the pages of Scripture bear witness. This inheritance of faith and order the bishop hands on to those who come after him.

And the genius of episcopacy is that locally this inheritance always rests not with a committee or a handbook but with the bishop of the diocese. As we believe God to be one and undivided so we believe Christ to be one and undivided; as we believe his Church to be one and undivided so we Episcopal Churches have vested our life and our faith in one ordained to receive our life and our faith and to preserve and proclaim them.

It is only when we recall the responsibilities of episkope and where we place them that we can consider the debates of this week.

So what of Synod and the women bishops’ debate? The Church has already affirmed that there can be no theological objection to a Church which ordains women as priests proceeding to ordain them as bishops. The question is what provision should be made for those who cannot in conscience accept their oversight. My view is that any such provision must fall short of legislative provision. We simply cannot create a situation in which the life and faith of the Church is vested in a bishop whose Episcopal ordination can be ignored or disbelieved by some. If we do that then we destroy our catholicity; we destroy the claim we make that Christ’s Church is fully realized locally in the office and presence of the diocesan bishop.

And what of GAFCON and its Jerusalem Declaration? This first sets out some principles for which its members wish to campaign within the Communion. Some of us may find these principles disagreeable, but there is no shortage in history of groups publishing manifestoes: this parish has signed up to one or two in its lifetime. But it also sets out a methodology for action in pursuit of its principles. It has created a Primates Council which will presume to classify some churches or congregations as doctrinally sound and ideologically acceptable, and some as not, and it reserves to itself the right to intervene in the life of provinces and dioceses on behalf of those churches or congregations of which it approves.

This I find scandalous, as scandalous as continuing with an episcopate which is the preserve of men only or in which legislation is passed enabling some bishops to be regarded as less than bishops by some of the faithful. Subvert a local bishop’s oversight; introduce bishops from elsewhere to pronounce on the authenticity of his actions and to recruit an opposing following, and again we destroy our catholicity. We are no longer one church, under the oversight of one bishop.

The great irony in all this is that Jesus Christ chose to entrust his legacy to a group of twelve men who were, on the face of it, not up to the task. To this unreliable bunch he trusted everything: yet we are utterly unable to trust one another. We must have laws to protect our consciences because we cannot trust our fellow believers to do so; we must bring bishops from across the globe to care for us because we cannot trust our diocesans to do so. In our inability to trust I believe we betray Christ and hand him over to his enemies all over again.

‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn’.

Children calling to one another in the market place. Christ’s words echo down the centuries, and are spoken to us as surely and as sharply as they were to his first hearers. Amen.



Matthew 11: 16-19; 25-end.

Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 22 June 2008

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,silence the pianos and with muffled drumbring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

The moment when Auden’s lines are read aloud in the packed church is for many the most poignant in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. The gang of scatty, reckless, beautiful friends gathered around Hugh Grant have not realized that two of their number, Gareth and Matthew, have been in love for many years. The secrecy of their love, constant, but hidden amidst the gaudy glitz of the English wedding scene is what makes Matthew’s poetic mourning at Gareth’s unexpected funeral so unbearably sad.

The film was made in 1994, and, even in fourteen years, times have changed. Today a script could not conceive of so sophisticated and worldly a group overlooking such a relationship blossoming in their midst. The age of enforced secrecy is passing. And if public perception has changed then the law has, too. The film’s title might now read Four Weddings, a Funeral and a Civil Partnership. Such changes must surely be welcomed by all who prize honesty and justice, and by all who abhor prejudice and persecution.

How ironic it is that one of the churches in which one of the Four Weddings was celebrated should have been the venue for a service which has scarcely been out of the news this week. There have been comments from many quarters, and many of them have been unhelpful. But perhaps the sound and fury require us to think hard about what we do in church, and that, at least, is never a pointless exercise.

As you know, the Greek root of the word liturgy is leitourgeia, and leitourgeia means ‘public work’. Liturgy is the church’s public work, and remembering the root reinforces for us that the church’s liturgy can never be private. What happens within the church’s doors is essentially public: ours are made of glass, so we of all parishes have no excuse for forgetting. A service may have the appearance of a baby’s Christening, celebrated at a refined time of day in a quintessentially English village; it may have the appearance of a state funeral with the great and the good in black-suited attendance; or it may have the appearance of a hasty wedding, with only a priest, the couple and their witnesses present. Whatever its appearance, it is always the Church’s worship of God, and all are always welcome to participate in it. That’s one of the reasons I was cross at last year’s suggestion in the press that the Archbishop was coming here to preside at a private Eucharist. Private liturgy is a contradiction in terms.

And the public nature of liturgy is particularly important for Anglicans, particularly for those of us who value its historic breadth and generosity. We don’t have a confessional statement of the doctrine we hold and, please God, we never will. We have the Scriptures, the Creeds, and our liturgies, and that is all. If you want to know what Anglicans believe then don’t look for a form with a dotted line at the bottom, go and watch them worship. Every word we use here is carefully weighted and replete with meaning. This is the case when the words are starkly clear: ‘We believe in one God’, leaving the worshipper in no doubt but that ours is a monotheistic faith. It is also the case when they are studiedly nuanced: ‘let these gifts be to us the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ’, allowing both the Catholic believer in the Real Presence and the Protestant exponent of receptionism to take Holy Communion with integrity.

Liturgy is public, and liturgy expounds the articles of our faith, enabling all who call themselves Anglicans to find a worshipful space that is theirs. The issue at stake is whether the service held at St Bartholomew the Great held true to these two fundamental principles. I wan not there, and I have not seen the liturgy used, so I will refrain from commenting. It seems to me that the habit of uninformed people making specious pronouncements on the matters about which they are uninformed is a habit that the Church would do well to lose. But to these principles I want to add a third which, it seems to me, is of critical importance to the other two and indeed to the whole of our common life in Christ. If liturgy must reflect doctrine then life must reflect liturgy. More particularly: the public work in which we are engaged this morning must reflect the faith of the Church. But if our lives, those lives that have participated in the public work in this place and in every corner of the globe, do not reflect the liturgy in which we have participated, then this is a meaningless charade and you and I are the most miserable of hypocrites.

We have heard the words of absolution. We are therefore called to live as sinners who know themselves freely forgiven, forgiven at enormous cost; we must forgive others even as we are forgiven. We will take our places around the holy table without rank or status. We are therefore called to believe ourselves equal before the throne of grace, one with Christians of every age and race; we must not judge. And we will hold in our hands the very body of God incarnate, believing that he lives within us, within every one of us. We must remember that, as we look into the eyes of those with whom we disagree, the eyes of those of whom we disapprove, the eyes of those whom we dislike. Liturgy is no one’s plaything. Like the faith which it sets forth, it makes demands of us all. Amen.

Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 15 June 2008

Five Christians are on an aeroplane flying over the Pacific Ocean. It crashes on a desert island. All five survive and indeed flourish. The island is verdant and fertile and in no time shelters have been built and a meal prepared. However it is also remote, and there is no prospect of rescue. Days turn into weeks which turn into months. The five Christians pray and read the Bible together (for a copy has miraculously survived the crash).Yet what they long to do is celebrate the Eucharist and thus experience the sacramental mystery of God’s presence with them. But none of them is ordained. Will they ever share the Eucharist again?

Petertide is approaching, the season not only of our patron saint, but also of the sacrament of ordination. Over the next few weeks in cathedrals and churches across the world men and women will have Episcopal hands laid upon them, and will thereafter be addressed differently, will in particular circumstances behave differently, and, often, will dress differently. We inhabit a democratic and populist age in which this rite and its consequences can seem seriously outmoded, for it appears to create a species of religious expert or professional, and the very notion of experts or professionals is under attack. With a decent search engine and a self-help manual or two most of us can discover whatever we need to know about any subject whatsoever, and lawyers, or accountants or indeed priests appear to be self-interested gatekeepers concerned only to preserve their own status.

So why does the Church continue to ordain men and women as deacons, priests and bishops? Many reasons that might appear compelling have fallen away. The ordained are not the sole theological scholars of the Church. The highly-regarded Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, for example, now has only one ordained member of staff: all its systematic theologians and church historians are lay people, and so are all but one of its Biblical studies’ experts. The ordained are not the sole spiritual giants of the Church. There are of course men and women of profound and luminous holiness among them, but I have met as many or more among the laity. The ordained are not the sole pastors of the Church. We are surrounded by a wealth of caring agencies and, thankfully, many communities still boast strong social networks for picking up the fallen and binding up their wounds.

In these circumstances I ask again: why does the Church continue to ordain men and women as deacons, priests and bishops? At James’s licensing in April the Archdeacon of Charing Cross offered us an answer. We have ordained ministry, he said, because we have sacraments, and because without ordained ministry we could not have them. His answer does not hold out much hope for that group of five Christians marooned in perpetuity on the desert island. They have no priest; so they have no Eucharist. The moral may be always to ask a priest to accompany you on your exotic foreign holidays. But you would find that inconvenient and, with due respect to the Archdeacon, I am not sure that I agree with him.

The view of ordination that he espoused, and that denies the five the sacraments, is purely functional. Its essence inheres in its capacity to confect a particular consequence: consecrated bread and wine, reconciled penitents, authentically blessed congregations. It turns the ordained into specialist operatives in an ecclesial process, chosen managers of unique powers to effect certain results. There is no such priest on the island, no functionary with divinely-given authority, secret words and special gestures, and there can therefore be no ritual or rite. The priest is – and I don’t think this is a caricature – a witch doctor or magic man.

Today’s readings hint at a rather different view of ordination, one that allows the five to celebrate the sacraments, and it is this that I invite you to consider as we approach Petertide and prepare to receive one of the newly-ordained among us. The readings suggest that the effect of ordination is the creation not of empowered individuals but of a representative focus for God’s liberating action. In the wilderness of Sinai God speaks through Moses to the children of Israel. He has delivered them from slavery in Egypt, bringing them out of the land of oppression. Now, he says, ‘if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’. Priesthood in the desert years of exile belongs not to a priestly class but to a whole people. In the wilderness it’s not that priests are to mediate the liberating power and presence of God, to manage it on his behalf and jealously guard its boundaries. It’s that a whole people are to bear that liberating power and presence to the world; that a whole people are to take responsibility for God in the world that is his. Israel will be the representative focus of God’s liberating work.

And if Israel is God’s representative to the world then the twelve apostles, the account of whose sending-out we hear in Matthew’s Gospel, are his representatives to the representative. Like the exiles in the desert before them they are to bear God’s liberating power and presence to the lost sheep of Israel. Their task is priestly, as Israel’s is priestly. The Twelve are to be the representative focus of God’s liberating work.

Ordination is never principally about the individual ordained (even if some of the ordained are among the most precious of individuals!). It is about God, God who cannot but involve himself in the world, who works perpetually for the world’s redemption, and who calls his people to work with him. Ordination never sets up the few against the many; it never divides or stratifies God’s people. It belongs to God and to the whole people of God. As he calls Israel to be a priestly people so he calls you, my brothers and sisters - us - the baptized, to be a priestly people, for we are, as Paul writes to the Romans, the ones into whose hearts God’s love has been poured through the Holy Spirit. We are the representative focus of God’s liberating work.

And yes, from among our number he calls some, some whom he probably can’t trust to be lay people, to be the representatives to the representatives, some whose task it is to set before our eyes our common calling, and whose task it is to hold us all to it. But ordination is, because God is in Christ, and because we are God in Christ’s people. Amen.

Exodus: 19: 2-8a;
Romans 5: 1-8;
Matthew 9: 38 – 10: 23.

Trinity Sunday 2008

These are dark days for the Vicar of St Stephen’s Ambridge. His engagement to a local solicitor who just happens to be a devout Hindu has been the subject of lurid speculation in the local press. It has prompted a display of prudery on the part of one of his churchwardens that has taken even diehard Archers fans by surprise, and has inspired the publication on the internet of a ditty cataloguing the peaks and troughs of his ministry among the simple country folk of Borsetshire. It’s to be sung to a well-known Gilbert and Sullivan tune (not that I’ll inflict that on you), and it goes like this:
I've taken up each trendy cause, I've filled the manse with down-and-outsI'm very good at counselling (I say "It's swings and roundabouts")It won't be long till I've removed all pews from the vicinity But please don't press me hard about the meaning of the Trinity.

Please don't press me hard about the meaning of the Trinity…this is the day that the preacher fears above all others, of course. It is the day when he or she has to stand before the faithful and find something to say (preferably something new and full of insight) about the central mystery of orthodox Christian doctrine, the mystery that appals our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters and remains the surest way of really upsetting a Jehovah’s Witness, the mystery of God the Holy Trinity..

I’ve never had the benefit of hearing the Vicar of Ambridge preach on the meaning of the Trinity, but my guess would be that he is a devotee of what has become known as its ‘social’ meaning. Put simply, if that is not a contradiction it terms, belief in the Trinity means belief in one God, but in one God who is three Persons. Any attempt to explain that further, and there have been many, must inevitably emphasize the One God at the expense of the Three Persons, or the Three Persons at the expense of the One God. The social understanding definitely does the latter, and in so doing it draws extensively on the tradition of the Eastern Churches, and, alongside the vogue for all things Orthodox, such as John Taverner’s music and Andrei Rublev’s famous icon, it has been hugely fashionable and influential in recent years.

God, say social Trinitarians, is a perfect community. Father, Son and Spirit are locked in an eternal embrace that is characterized by their giving to one another and receiving from one another mutual and reciprocal love. The internal life of the Trinity models a pattern of unity amidst diversity, and so God is in Godself an exemplar for human behaviour and human belonging. We are called to live in perfect love just as the divine family lives in perfect love.

This is infinitely preferable, in my view, to the classical Western understanding of the Trinity. Ever influenced by Platonic thought this has constantly emphasized the essential unity of God and his utter changelessness and impassibility. But although I owe a personal debt to the social Trinitarians I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with their understanding of God, or at least with some of its more casual and sloppy manifestations. The reason is that I can’t help thinking it a little smug. It may be very reassuring to conceive of God’s interior life as being a life of love given and received in perfect proportions, but I find myself asking, (and feeling rather churlish as I do so), well, what about us?

We inhabit a world whose internal dynamics are not those of perfect love, a world whose internal dynamics are rather different. We need look no further than the streets of this city, in which young men are stabbed or shot every week, or so it seems. The eternal dance of love that is the social Trinity’s reality is all very well, but what difference can it make to Lambeth or Stockwell’ internal reality? Our exhortation that God’s life is different to ours and that we had better change ours to match his echoes mockingly around the car-parks and estates that are the backdrop to so much of this city’s life.

It seems to me that we are in need of a theology which more robustly links the Trinity to earth, air, fire and water; to bubbling magma and shifting tectonic plates; to asphalt, glass and concrete; to flesh and blood; to a poisoned atmosphere and a changing climate. We are in need of a theology that does not detach God from our lived reality and lock him up in a realm we label ‘spiritual’; we are in need of a theology that only the Trinity can provide.

We need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Father: of God the creative energy that blew the universe into being and that crackles at the heart of all matter. This is God who cradles creation in his arms, sustaining it at every second, ceaselessly pouring himself out into it, giving himself as our life-blood and beating heart.

We need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Son: of God the enfleshed reality in our midst. This is the incarnate God, incarnation not being something God gave up on the first Ascension Day. It is something as fundamental to God’s nature as is creation. God the Son is among us as surely as he was when Jesus of Nazareth walked the byways of Galilee and sought out the poor and the despised. Look under the fallen buildings of Chengdu or into the heart of the Burmese cyclone, look at those places where God’s people are suffering, and there you will see divine footprints, there you will place your fingers into the eternal wounds of Jesus Christ.

And we need to learn to speak more confidently of God the Spirit: of God the bringer of truth and unity. This is the God who burns in our hearts and who today reaches out to embrace us, God whose impetus is always towards our unity and never towards our division, God whose leading is always into truth and never into suspicion and fear.

To to this God, the Triune Majesty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be all honour, glory and praise, today and always. Amen.

Sunday after Ascension Day 2008

We inhabit in-between times. An election has taken place, and our city has chosen a new Mayor. The outgoing incumbent has said his farewells. The analysis of his failure has begun. The new Mayor has yet to receive the seals of office, and he will not do so until midnight. Today, popular authority has passed to him; actual power is rather harder to locate. So today absence and anticipation haunt London’s body politic.

It’s a scenario not entirely dissimilar to the one that confronts us liturgically. This Sunday is surely one of the strangest in the church’s year. For weeks now we have tuned our Alleluias, rejoicing in the resurrection of out Lord Jesus Christ. For weeks now we have heard the promise that the Holy Spirit will come as our guide and strength. Then on Thursday we celebrated the glorious Ascension with hymns of triumph. The Son has returned to the right hand of the Father.

So today we inhabit in-between times. Absence and anticipation haunts the body ecclesiastic. We can ask legitimately: where is God? Not enfleshed in the world, for the Son has ascended. Not burning in our hearts, for the Spirit has not yet come. Where is God?

Some would answer that question very quickly, surprised that, in its apparent faithlessness, it should even be put. Yet surely our tradition demands it. Our tradition’s history is not an unending demonstration of God’s omniscient power. ‘Leave us not comfortless’ we have prayed in the Collect. The implication is that today, we are comfortless. Despite the miracle of Easter God is somehow absent and we are somehow alone, just as we were when we waited with the blessed Virgin, with Mary of Magdala, and with the disciples in the dark of Easter Eve for the spark of resurrection life. We forget that at our peril, for we minister in a world in which divine absence often seems more plausible than divine presence.

Of course, it’s the job of the visiting preacher to seek to convince the congregation that this is not so; he should produce cogent arguments for God’s inexhaustible vitality; he should face down any counter-suggestion with irrefutable logic. I think it more honest instead to attempt to remain constant to the tradition, to the absence of God, to the experience of the Virgin and the disciples, to that which continues to be the experience of many. I offer in place of proofs a survival kit for times like this, times when God is distant, difficult to locate and difficult to discern.

The first hardly needs mentioning in these surroundings, for is the celebration of the sacraments, those tactile symbols, vehicles of God’s presence, that the Church has proclaimed in generation after generation. Today, in these in-between times, and in common with Christians of every age and in every place, we will still break bread and share wine together. The Eucharist we believe to be the gift of Christ to his Church, commended and instituted as a means of his being with us. In these in-between time we can still take broken fragments in our hands; we can still raise the chalice to our lips. Perhaps we will not see God coming with power today, but perhaps we will trace his fingerprints, the marks of where he has been; perhaps we will touch and taste the things that he has left behind. These are the iron rations of a desert people, whose guiding star has been obscured by the treacherous mist. They are for us the mantle of Elijah, bearing divine presence and heavenly authority across the years and equipping us to minister in Christ’s name.

The second is prayer. By this I do not mean petitions offered up in expectation of early reward. I mean prayer as Michael Mayne understands it when he writes of it as ‘…a disciplined taking of time to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are, in which the one necessary element is stillness’. I mean the prayer commended by Peter to his readers, prayer that is watchful and sober, expectant and anticipatory. I mean the prayer that we may imagine to have been the Virgin’s as she awaited the unfolding of the angel’s promises to her.

The third is this gathering, the people round about us, the worshipping community. Of course human company is a good thing in itself, and of course human relationships are vital to human flourishing, but for Christians there is a particular and unique importance to our being together. It is that we believe that God becomes incarnate as one of us and that he thus shares and makes holy the life the life of human beings. If we believe, as I think we must, that God cannot change, then this incarnation cannot have been a phase God went through, a phase that, after Easter, he thought better of. God cannot be like a rebellious teenager shrugging off one fashion and adopting another. The incarnation must still be true; it must be happening today. Jesus Christ must be in our midst as surely as he was in the disciples’ midst when he promised them the Spirit’s gift. His Ascension means that the nature of the incarnation changed, but the Son of God who was present with his Father ‘before the foundation of the world’ is still in that world today, and still calling us to follow him.

So today let us pray for our new Mayor and his colleagues and for an end to these in-between times. Let us commit ourselves afresh to sacrament, prayer and common worship: to doing, praying and being. For my guess is that if we can remain faithful to these then despite our apparent distance and estrangement from the divine we will find ourselves stumbling over St Augustine’s great discovery and the most profound truth of our existence, that ‘God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves’. Amen.

The Sunday after Ascension Day,
4 May 2008,
St Mary's Bourne Street

Sixth Sunday of Easter 2008

‘Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog-lovers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’.

Fifteen years on from then, John Major’s words to his party’s Group for Europe are still remembered. What they are remembered for is not the nobility of their vision but rather their mawkishness of their sentiments. They remain the quintessential politician’s attempt at sepia-tinted nostalgia, aimed directly at their hearers’ heart-strings, and weighted for maximum emotional impact.

Yet it’s Major’s voice I hear when I read the prophet Zechariah. He foretells not pints supped on the square-leg boundary in the shadow of the village steeple, but old men and old women sitting once more in the streets of Jerusalem, their staves in their hands because of their great age. He foretells the city’s streets filled once more with boys and girls playing. And his words might easily have come from that infamous speech, or from some strategy document on inclusiveness and national cohesion.

This alarming closeness between the vision of a saintly prophet and the vision of a struggling Prime Minister has been much in my mind this week, when my diary has been dominated by two events. The first was the Annual Parochial Church Meeting, an institution that only the Church of England could have devised, an institution that is sadly beloved of far too many of its worshippers. The second was the licensing of a new priest colleague. I wield no political power and I claim no prophetic status, yet at both of these occasions I was expected to articulate a vision for the ecclesial community that is my responsibility.

I found this easy. Reading Zechariah and remembering Major, I think I found it too easy. The so-called dark arts of spin have embedded themselves very deeply in our culture. Assembling sound-bites, dressing them up in management-speak, and lacing them with suitably bathetic appeals to Gospel truth is simple, and superficially both very attractive and very effective. But it is plainly dishonest, and equally plainly perilous. There is surely an alternative. How can the Church be authentically prophetic?

That it must be is not a question for anyone who believes that Christian faith is intended to have an impact on the public sphere. It is not a question for anyone who believes that Christian faith is not intended to be a purely internal, purely private matter. John’s apocalyptic vision is of God at the heart of the city, of God as the light of the city. It is not of God at the city’s margins, or of God locked away in a sacred building. It is God at the heart of things that the Church is called to proclaim and that God’s prophets are called to name.

So the prophet first shuns popularity. His vocation, or hers, is not to be loved by the audience. It is not to reassure them or make them feel better. It is not to collude with the assumptions of the age, whether these are assumptions about the necessity of material accumulation or assumptions about the inevitability of energy consumption. John, of course, writes from exile on Patmos, there sharing the fate of many of his Hebrew forebears. The prophet must expect to be misunderstood, must expect to be misrepresented and must expect, quite possibly, to be mistreated.

Second, the prophet recalls always that through the middle of the heavenly city flows the river of life, and that it flows with water as bright as crystal. So he or she takes responsibility for those whose water is brackish and brown, for those who cannot reach down into the river to drink of its cooling flood or bathe their faces in its cleansing stream, and for those for whom the river has dried up and who are confronted with only the barren dryness of the riverbed. The prophet is alert to those who seek to dam the river and create their own reservoirs, for those who divert its course away from the city’s centre, and for those who are careless of its purity and cleanliness. The prophet must always speak for the poor.

And lastly the prophet will remember what it is that the tree of life puts forth: leaves, leaves for the healing of the nations. The prophet recalls God’s ultimate saving purpose, which is the unity of all created things. The prophet proclaims the end of strife and division, and the reconciliation of all humankind. The prophet, herself forgiven, represents God’s forgiveness to a world plagued by poverty and war. In the prophet’s faithfulness to God’s cause he offers an icon of human life, of human life as it might be lived. The prophet must preach unity amidst the world’s diversity.

I am fond of warm beer and of cricket; I grew up in a green suburb; and although I own a bicycle I walk regularly to Holy Communion. God’s vision and the vision of God’s prophets must surely be wider; it must surely be deeper. Amen.

Evensong at Magdalene College, Cambridge,
Sunday 27 April 2008

Fifth Sunday of Easter 2008

‘In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places’

A familiar translation speaks of many ‘mansions’, which is less accurate. The original Greek word is monai. In the fifth century the Latin translation of the Scriptures known as the Vulgate transliterated this as mansiones. Then when John Tyndale translated the Vulgate into English in 1526, an act which cost him his life, he used the word ‘mansions’, which stuck.

‘Mansions’ are undeniably less prosaic and more impressive than ‘dwelling-places’. Mansions are either the stately country piles that adorn the English landscape, or they are the equally stately red-brick edifices that adorn this city’s streets as mansion flats. In either case they are solid, lasting and seemingly unchangeable. Yet monai means dwelling-places, and a dwelling-place need be neither solid, nor lasting nor unchangeable. A cardboard shack can be a dwelling-place (and is, for far too many of the world’s inhabitants).

Of what was Jesus thinking when he spoke of the dwelling-places in his Father’s house? Buildings that are massive and constant, or a refuge that is fleeting and transient? Our every fibre, I suspect, yearns for the former, for the assurance that we, together with the disciples, are destined for a place, for somewhere secure and immutable. Yet Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham and Biblical scholar, has recently challenged that view and has suggested that Jesus had something different in mind in this passage.

Tom Wright’s views appear provocative. Orthodox Christians, he argues, do not believe that when they die their souls go to a place called heaven. What they believe is that God’s longing is for the renewal of the whole of creation and that one day this longing will be realized; that the earth and the skies that we know will be made again; they will be finished and perfected as the places that God has always wanted them to be. They will be inhabited by those who God raises to life, by those called from the long sleep of death to enjoy all of eternity in what will really be God’s kingdom on earth.

So Wright observes that Jesus has used the phrase ‘my Father’s house’ before in John’s Gospel, specifically in the second chapter, when he visits Jerusalem for the first time and drives the traders from the Temple. ‘Stop making my Father’s house a market-place’ are his words on that occasion. Now, in the upper room, he speaks of his Father’s house again and insists that within it ‘there are many dwelling-places’. In the Temple, of course, there are many dwelling places. Yet although the size and scale of the Temple buildings was impressive the dwellings it offered were not. They were modest and temporary, comprising shelter and short-term accommodation for guests and visiting pilgrims.

On Wright’s account, what Jesus is offering his disciples in these words is not a glorious vision of heaven as a distinct place, whether a mansion or a cardboard shack. What he is offering instead is a glimpse of the temporary sleep of death before life’s pilgrimage is brought to fulfilment and all creation is reborn on the day of resurrection.

I’m not sure what you make of Wright’s argument. If I’m honest I’m not yet sure what I make of it. But it seems to me that it is assisted by Luke’s account of the death of Stephen; and it also seems to me that in common with that account it contains at least one powerful and important corrective that we would be well advised to digest.

In Stephen’s dying moments the vision that confronts him is not of the heavenly city, of the sapphire battlements and crystal towers through which he is soon to pass. It is of Jesus, of the crucified, risen and ascended Jesus who is sitting at God’s right hand. Here there is support for Wright. In Jesus we see God’s work of rebirth and renewal already complete. He is the first fruits of the new creation; he is not a disembodied spirit, he is Jesus, identifiably and unarguably Jesus, but now raised on high and glorified, as all the faithful will be on the day of resurrection.

Secondly, whether we are with Wright or whether we are not, Stephen’s dying plea is that Jesus will receive his spirit. It is the trust that is crucial. Stephen relies on God and God alone as the one who has power to save. The same emphasis is present throughout the address to the disciples in John 14. Where I am is where you will be: that is what Jesus promises. The place is unimportant, be it lofty mansion or humble shack, Jesus will be with them.

‘See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious;
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame’

Amen.

Sunday 20 April 2008

Third Sunday of Easter 2008

‘God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple’

On Tuesday I sent an email to the members of my Parochial Church Council. In it I explained to them that I had arranged for the removal of the ornate gold cross which crowns our church’s Georgian portico and looks out over the impassive white-fronted terraces of Belgravia. I further explained that in order to demonstrate our commitment to environmental sustainability it was to be replaced by a wind turbine. Tuesday was, of course, April the First. Unfortunately I had misjudged the capacity of some of my colleagues to appreciate a joke.

Buildings are very dear to us, sacred buildings particularly so. Their roots are deeply entrenched in our architectural and imaginative landscapes. Their imagery is pervasive, and it dominates this afternoon’s readings.

Paul’s words to the Corinthians seem subtler than those of the prophet Haggai, and perhaps intellectually preferable to them. For whereas Haggai records God’s approbation of a sacred building built in stone and wood, Paul recalls his readers to their own flesh and blood. God’s sacred building is here, says Paul: God’s temple is you.

This subtle substitution of the exterior by the interior is seductive in our age, suspicious as it is of authority, unconstrained as it is by geography, and (all too often) careless as it is about humanity. If you and I are the temple of God, the seat of God, then we are licensed to interpret the longings of our own hearts as the longings of God. If you and I are the temple of God, then we are licensed to locate God in whatever place we happen to be. And if you and I are the temple of God, then we are licensed to overlook his other temples, his other seats, those that surround us and press their claims upon us.

Haggai understands the temple built in stone and wood as the place where God will be glorified, and we misread Paul if we attribute any different understanding to him, however liberated and post-modern we may think we are being. Paul and Haggai are united in their witness to a God to whom authority, geography and humanity matter; to a God of promise, of place and of people.

They both write of God’s covenant, albeit a covenant understood and expressed differently in their different contexts. Through Haggai, God promises to restore the fortunes of Israel. He has not forgotten them and will no longer neglect them. Israel is still God’s people; he is still Israel’s God, eternally faithful, eternally loving, patiently awaiting their return to him and ready to celebrate that return. Paul does not serve a God whose character has changed in the years that separate him from his prophetic forebear. He writes to a community in whom God’s own Spirit dwells, a community chosen and called by God. Our generation is convinced, sometimes justly, that ‘they’ are out to get us, ‘they’ being management, or government, or business. Haggai and Paul remind us that God is never out to get us. He is perpetually for us; he is always on our side, loving us into perfection.

They both write of God’s concern for the particular. It is the neglected, ruined temple of Jerusalem that God pledges to build again. His mind is turned to a specific place and to a specific set of historical circumstances. He gazes upon the rubble, upon all that is left after the years of exile in Babylon. This will be the place where he is revealed. The same is true of Paul’s God. His letter is written to a distinct group at a distinct time. Read it in full and it is littered with references to men and women known to him, Apollos and Timothy, Stephanas and Fortunatas, men and women active in the community of Corinth. To our generation much of life is virtual, lived at arm’s length from reality. Time and place mean less and less. Yet it is here and now that God cares about, real places and real situations. His glory will be revealed in Westminster or Harare, in Beijing or Tibet, in April 2008, or it will not be revealed at all.

And they both write of God’s care for people. Haggai’s prophecy is directed at named individuals just as Paul’s letter is. Through Haggai God addresses the high priest Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, and the governor Joshua, son of Jehozadak. To these are entrusted the remnant of Israel. God deals not with patients or clients, not with customers or consumers, not with projections or trends. He deals with human beings, not human resources, human beings in all their fragile vulnerability and imperfection.

Promise, place, people: such a God calls you and me to be his temple, the place where he is glorified. He call you and me to be nothing less than a house of splendour and a source of prosperity for the world. So to him be glory, in this and every place. Amen.

Evensong at Westminster Abbey,

Sunday 6 April 2008

Easter Day 2008

All the Gospel writers agree that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ coincide with the celebration of the Jewish Passover. They draw from this coincidence points of significance both practical and symbolic.

Practically, the Passover explains why Jerusalem is temporarily home to a fickle mob; why Jesus and his friends share a poignant last supper together; and why the murderer Jesus Barabbas is exchanged for the prophet Jesus of Nazareth. Symbolically, Passover has as at its heart the slaughter of a lamb whose blood is poured out and whose carcass is given to sustain the faithful. Not only that: Passover is a feast of liberty, celebrated in honour of the night when Israel’s God struck down the first-born of Egypt and freed his people from slavery.

So the coincidence is profound and multi-faceted, and it is to just one facet that I would like to draw your attention. It is that the delivery of Israel from captivity in Egypt is the defining moment in the nation’s history. God acts to free his people, and in so acting he creates a people. Henceforth Israel understands herself as the community brought out of Egypt and given the land of Canaan. Passover is the distinctive and defining narrative of a distinct and defined people.

So too are the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Like the crossing of the Red Sea and the thwarting of Pharoah’s army they create a people and become the defining moment in a new community’s history. The Church exists because Jesus Christ was crucified and was raised. It exists for no other reason. Things that happened over the course of a few days in and around a provincial capital of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago are the reason we gather this morning. The death and resurrection tell us who we are and why we belong.

Who we are and why we belong are live contemporary issues. The emergence of home-grown Islamist terrorism has been a sharp prompt to the current debate about the nature of our national identity, but such a debate is arguably long overdue in the diverse and pluralist society we have become. The concern at large is that while diverse and pluralist it may be, cohesive and harmonious it is not, and it is these latter qualities that are sought avidly by the debate’s protagonists. The hunt is on for what unites the British, and what the hunt has focussed on almost exclusively is what are called ‘British values’. There are suggestions of a British day and of pledges of allegiance for school-leavers and new arrivals, but what is at their heart is an agreed list of the values that we Britons hold dear.

The debate is welcome and the motives often laudable, but this proposed solution is, in my view, far wide of the mark. Democratic governance, the rule of law, fairness: all these would surely feature in the agreed list, and all are admirable. But any process that has those in power constructing the list on behalf of those who are not is a flawed process. More importantly, does not toady’s feast inform us that values alone cannot hold a community together? Values are culturally and environmentally conditioned, and are endlessly susceptible to a variety of interpretations.

What Passover and Easter offer instead is a narrative, an account of God’s actions in history, actions that have brought communities to birth, communities that have flourished for good or ill across generations and millennia, narratives in which we take our place as latter-day participants. There are such things as Christian values, naturally, but values do not draw us here today. We have not come to celebrate the triumph of hope or commemorate the victory of love. We have, of course, but only because we have come first and foremost to celebrate the rolling away of a stone and the discovery of an empty tomb. We have come to celebrate events, events with whose narrative we have joined the narratives of our own lives. We have come because by our Baptism we have been united with the one whose tomb it was and because we believe that in this Eucharist we will feed on his risen life. The narrative of cross and resurrection has endured and embraced us and countless millions alongside us.

Does not the debate about national identity need to discover its own story, its own his-story, a story that tells us who we are and why we belong? I suspect that we shy away from this, preferring to begin from where we are now and ignoring our past, perhaps because our past contains episodes that are shameful, of naked imperialism and of unchecked greed. Yet it contains episodes that are heroic, of resistance to tyranny and of artistic inventiveness. It is the story of people and their struggle, of the pursuit of truth, beauty and justice, of countless deaths and of countless resurrections. It is all this rather than a fashionable check-list of values. And in the discovery and relating of that narrative might the Church not find her voice again, speaking for the Christ who died and was raised, who died and was raised that he might draw all people - all people - to himself?