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?

Maundy Thursday, 20 March 2008

‘This is something people refuse to admit to themselves: at a given point you can no longer do, but can only be and accept.’

Those are the words of Etty Hillesum, written in July 1943 in a letter from the transit camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands.

Westerbork was a place where it was impossible to do very much. Life there was governed by the weekly train that took inmates on the three day journey to an unknown fate in Poland. Every week a list was published of those who were to be transported. Etty and her family had no power over their lives. They could make very few decisions. They could control nothing. They were helpless.

Helplessness is frightening. We are a generation and a community who rebel against it. We hold elections and wage wars; we choose careers and spend money; we have children, we travel the world, we decorate our homes, we read novels and write philosophy. Each is a demonstration of our independence; each is a demonstration of our autonomy. In each we declare our boundless capacity for thought and for action; in each we stretch the sinews of our God-given humanity. It’s intoxicating. On a good day it feels as though there’s nothing we can’t do.

We are mistaken: of course we are mistaken. We have fallen into the trap that ensnared that quintessential man of action the apostle Peter. He could not endure the thought of sitting passively while Christ washed his feet, just as he could not endure the thought of leaving his sword sheathed while Christ was taken away. Peter had to be on his feet; he had to be active; he had to take control of the situation. He learned at great personal cost the lesson that that is not always Christ’s way.

We need to learn the same lesson, and this is a good night to start. Christ’s command at the Last Supper was that his friends should love one another and should wash one another’s feet. There is action and activism in loving and serving, naturally, but that is only one half of the commandment from which Maundy Thursday gets its name. The other half is that we should allow ourselves to be loved and that we should allow others to wash our feet.

Allowing ourselves to be loved; allowing others to wash our feet – it can feel uncomfortable. It can because it feels like helplessness. Yet unless we are willing to be loved, unless we are willing to have our feet washed, unless we practice such helplessness before other people then we are at risk of failing to practice such helplessness before God. And then we’re really in trouble.

For when Christ kneels and washes his disciples’ feet he is signalling to them the essence of the relationship that is the heart of faith: it is that their salvation is won by him and not by anything they have done for themselves. That is what we need to learn afresh tonight and in the hours ahead. Our intellect, our wealth, our beauty, our good deeds: upon none of these but on the Christ and only on the Christ can we rely.

‘This is something people refuse to admit to themselves: at a given point you can no longer do, but can only be and accept.’ Lord Jesus, teach us to be. Amen.

Sunday 2 March 2008, 4 of Lent: One Church

We believe one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church…

What the worshipper experiences as the climactic point of the Eucharist varies. When consciousness of sin is acute the words of absolution resonate; when loneliness is all-consuming the human contact of The Peace reassures; when stress and fatigue predominate the glass of Merlot on the portico brings comfort and release. But for the outsider, viewing our worship with an untutored eye, the climactic point is obvious. It is at the heart of the Eucharistic Prayer, when the presiding priest utters the words of Christ at the Last Supper: ‘this is my body’; ‘this is my blood’.

This is a moment that we surround with ritual. The priest elevates the elements and holds them before the people, who kneel in reverence. Incense is offered and two bells sound, one within the sanctuary and one in the tower. All of Belgravia is told that this is the supreme moment, that something profound is happening.


Yet there is another strand in the Christian tradition which would consider this emphasis misplaced. Eastern Christianity understands the climactic point as the words calling upon the Holy Spirit to descend upon the bread and wine and to transform them, the words that we call the epiklesis. In the Eucharistic Prayer of the Orthodox Church this epiklesis always follows Christ’s words, and is the Prayer’s culmination, whereas in the Anglican rite the epiklesis always preceded the words of Christ and was overshadowed by them until the publication of Common Worship as recently as eight years ago.

This is not the introspective preoccupation of liturgical scholars or the unnecessary obsession of over-fussy priests. Something profound is at stake. Allow me to caricature the two traditions. In the first, the Eucharistic miracle is achieved by the careful recitation of the recorded words of Jesus by someone who has been ordained for that purpose. In the second, the miracle is achieved by the action of God the Holy Spirit, for which the people pray with confidence. One is institutional, relying on precedent, authority and guarantee; the other is dynamic, relying on faith and trust in that which cannot be seen.

Those are caricatures, of course: far more unites the two traditions than divides them, but the caricatures shed light on two very different ways of understanding the Church. That outsider, who looks on the Church with an untutored eye, will see an institution that positively glories in being an institution. It seems to define itself first and foremost by its plethora of huge and hugely expensive buildings; it boasts a hierarchy whose complexity, silly titles and frankly ridiculous outfits puts the Byzantine court to shame; and it regularly ties itself up in knots of ecclesiastical law and process that make Jarndyce vs Jarndyce look like a model of transparency. The Church is Gormenghast.

And allow yourself to become obsessed by the buildings, absorbed by the structures or bedazzled by the ceremonies and you are missing the point. ‘What is the Church?’ asks Rowan Williams. ‘It is simply those who have been immersed in, soaked in the life of Jesus, and who have been invited to eat with him and pray to the Father with him’. The Church is the work of God; it is created when the Holy Spirit is sent upon those whom Jesus calls. When the Holy Spirit is sent upon an offering of bread and wine they are transformed into a holy meal and give those who receive them new access to God; when the Holy Spirit is sent upon a disparate group of human beings they are transformed into the Church and offer to all who seek it new access to God. In both the action of God has priority; in both the Spirit is at work.

And what the Spirit creates is not a structure but a body, the Body, the Body of Christ, the Body which embodies Christ in the world and bears Christ to the world. What the Spirit animates is not ecclesial offices but the members of the Body, upon whom the Spirit bestows gifts: not our different temperaments and preferences, but rather our different relationships with God and different perspectives upon God, our different ways of making God’s work real for one another. It sounds very warm and inclusive, exactly the sort of thing that we at St Peter’s believe we’re good at. But the check upon our collective self-confidence is (or ought to be) that the Sprit’s gifts are for every baptized member, every baptized member, and that the frustration of any one member, the trampling or squashing or ignoring of any one member’s gift, is the frustration and trampling and squashing of the whole, and thus of God’s purposes for the whole. And these are real. We may kid ourselves that we’re here for the music or the company or the preaching (unlikely, that). But God has a different agenda for each of us and for all of us. Together we will realize what it is; together we will realize it; and only together.

Well, if I’ve achieved nothing else this morning I hope I’ve explained why when we use Eucharistic Prayers G and F, which are Eastern Orthodox in origin, I do not elevate the elements at the words of Christ. I instead use a gesture that indicates the equivalence of those words with the words of the epiklesis, to the intense consternation of the servers, I imagine. But I don’t believe you appointed me first and foremost to be the MD of St Peter’s Eaton Square plc. I think you appointed me to nurture and build up the common life of a people who have been called by Christ and are being transformed by the Spirit. That is what I believe you are; what we are. And that’s why, although I’ve praised the Church’s new liturgies, I shall depart from them when I distribute Holy Communion to you this morning, and use instead the formula devised by Augustine of Hippo: ‘Receive what you are: the body of Christ’ Amen.

Sunday 24 February 2008, 3 of Lent: He suffered...

He suffered and was buried, and on the third day he rose again…

The bishops who agreed the catholic Creeds of the early Church were not advised by press officers or spin doctors. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, their work has proved enduringly robust. This is due in large part to what they chose not to say about some of the central claims of the faith they were charged with codifying and defending. Read the Apostles’ Creed, the concise statement affirmed by candidates for Baptism, and you will find rehearsed the principal events of Christ’s life. What you will not find is any account of why y these are of significance: why Christ died, for example, or for the difference that his resurrection makes. Read the Nicene Creed, a rather lengthier text, and you will be a little better off, but only a little. It tells us that Christ came down from heaven ‘for us and for our salvation’, and that he was crucified ‘also for us’. So his incarnation and his passion were for our sake, but we are not told how, and we are not told why they were necessary, if indeed they were.

This silence or near silence on the part of the Creeds has enabled unity in the Church for generation after generation, as successive theologies and traditions have sought to explain the how and the why of the events that we all agree happened ‘for us’. Buy any book on the subject and you will find a chapter devoted to each of the competing interpretations of what has become known as the Atonement. Many of you will be familiar with many of these interpretations: Catholics favour the cross as sacrifice; Orthodox the cross as battleground; Protestants the cross as due penalty for sinful humanity; Liberals the cross as supreme symbol of God’s love for the world.

There is something to be said for each of these interpretations, but essential to them all are three themes for us to cling onto as Passiontide draws near, and as we contemplate afresh the hows and the whys of the season before us.

The first is our world’s stark need of redemption. This is a need that is greater than that of personal conversion and inner sanctification, however important that may be. It is a need that is plain in the bitter poverty of huge numbers of the world’s inhabitants, in the slow poisoning of its environment and atmosphere, and in the misery of its all-too-many war zones. We inhabit a world that needs radical change, a world that needs salvation.

The second is that such change, such salvation, can only have its origins in God. For God is before creation and beyond creation, and he is not constrained by it. His free and unfettered choice is to create, and so only his free and unfettered choice can re-create and save, transforming the chaos we have made of the world and bringing about peace and the holy orientation of our common life.

The third is that some human action is needed if God’s freedom is to be allowed to work in the world. In the universe of space and time, of action and movement, of cause and effect, some earthly agent must be the conduit of God’s action.

The culmination of the three themes is, of course, Jesus Christ. He is the one who allows God’s freedom into the world, the one who brings God’s love to birth in a human life lived at a specific time in a specific place, the one who embodies God. Jesus indeed comes down from heaven ‘for us and for our salvation’. And so from the moment of his birth Jesus is in terrible danger. It’s not that some divine masterplan has required the death of an innocent from before time began. It’s that when God does what is necessary to save us from ourselves we are incapable of responding other than destructively. Introduce love to a world of violence and intrigue and there can only be one outcome. Violence and intrigue take love and nail it to a cross.

Yet Golgotha is only the beginning of the story of salvation, whatever impression the Church’s different traditions sometimes give. It’s as though the crucifixion, in Rowan Williams’s words, ‘clears the ground and establishes God’s presence in the middle of the worst of our world’. Once the ground has been cleared the work of building can begin, and this building has two distinct aspects. The first is that in a very important sense nothing much changes between Good Friday and Easter Day. What the disciples discover is that despite Golgotha God is still God; God is still their God; and God still has the form and features of Jesus. The depravity of Golgotha cannot blow God off course. It cannot make him love his own any less. It cannot change his character, for it cannot destroy the Christ, who bears God’s image and likeness to his friends.

Yet in another sense, everything has changed. For whereas Christ had once called his disciples to him and sent them out, he now does something different. He breathes his Spirit upon them and breathes his Spirit into them. It is this Spirit (literally, this Breath) that energizes and equips them for his work in the world. The disciples are no longer envoys with a commission: they now breathe Christ’s breath and speak with Christ’s voice. And through prayer and the laying on of hands, through Baptism and the breaking of bread, that same Spirit, that same Breath, has passed through two millennia of change, and still envelops and fills us today. The Church is pneumatic and charismatic, adjectives that have nothing to do either with road-drills or with tambourines, but have everything to do with being Spirit-filled and Spirit-gifted. The secular world (and, rather sadly, some Christians) view the Church as a voluntary organization, something you join and leave at will, bound together by common beliefs and practices. The Church is not. It is the community breathes the breath of Christ and thus takes responsibility for his presence in the world. In that presence remains the world’s hope of redemption. Amen.