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.