Fourth Sunday of Easter, 29 April 2012, All Saints Margaret Street

The young man was going to plead guilty to a charge of burglary. He had been to prison many times before and he was about to do so again. I had expected that the twelve months that he would undoubtedly have to serve would be like water off a duck's back to him, old hand that he was. But when I arrived in the cell under Lewes Crown Court he was pacing the floor, highly agitated and utterly obsessed. Would his sentence definitely be twelve months, he wanted to know. Might it not be nine, or even six? I remember feeling righteous exasperation. He had sixty or seventy years of life ahead of him. His girlfriend was expecting their baby. He'd never had a job and he had no qualifications. I couldn't understand why he was so wound up about the prospect of a few months inside. He could do it standing on his head. It was the rest of his life, I thought, that he ought to be worrying about. I should explain that before I was ordained I practised as a barrister. For nearly twenty years I have interpreted that story as a significant signpost in my journey towards ordination. I have understood it as the moment when I realized that I would ultimately become dissatisfied with my wig and gown and the role they consigned me to. I have understood it as the moment when I became sure that I was called to a more holistically rounded role than that of a lawyer. I wasn't interested in his case. I was interested in him. I wanted to encourage him towards a better and more productive use of the years ahead of him. But last week, as I tried to write that interpretation up for you, an authentic illustration of a key stage in the vocational journey, I realized that I could no longer do so with integrity. Instead I read what I'd written and blushed for my former self. I still don't know why that young man was so agitated. Perhaps, despite his record, he was simply frightened. I wish I had met him with less righteous exasperation and more generous compassion. I wish I had schemed less about what his future life might hold and shared more in what his present life did hold. I wish I had not made him a case study and related to him better as a human person. He almost certainly needed a priest as much as he needed a lawyer, but he needed a priest who would share his fear and accompany him through it. He did not need a priest who would brush under the carpet the pain of today in the interests of an unimaginable tomorrow. He needed someone who would be for him the good shepherd who walks through the valley of the shadow of death. Father Alan's invitation to preach on vocation is the first such invitation I've received since becoming Area Director of Ordinands. By the time I sit down he may well be on his BlackBerry ensuring that it's the last. A sermon is a risky place for a preacher to attempt a re-assessment of his own story - a sermon preached when the preacher is a guest even more so. The encounter remains a seminal moment on my journey towards ordination. But whereas I once understood it as confirmatory of God's call to priesthood, I now understand it as confirmatory of the inadequate poverty of my grasp of God's call. In what appear to be our moments of greatest clarity, when God and God's purposes seem to be set out before us without any possibility of misunderstanding, then we most need to be on our guard. We never know the whole of our story. We may know that we long for bread, but we cannot know that manna will rain down from the heavens. We may know that we long for meat, but we cannot know that the skies will fill with quails. In the landscape of the wilderness of our lives, the immutable rocks around which we plot our course are revealed as shadows; the pleasant oasis where we drink our fill is revealed as a deceiving mirage; the star upon which we set our sights is revealed as a trick of the light. The discernment of what God is calling us to does not consist of our determining the things we would like to do or the things we would like to be. It does not even consist of our determining the things we would like to do for others or the things we would like to be for others. It consists of our listening to what the Spirit is saying. It consists of our asking God to reveal to us who we are, and who we are becoming. It consists of our opening ourselves up to those who know us best. It consists of our engaging with Christ's body, the Church. And above all, it consists of our waiting on God in prayer, of our daring to linger in our interior wilderness, of our conquering the shadows, the mirages and the tricks. It consists of our reading the new name that God presses into our hands. Then "...very, very occasionally," writes Rowan Williams, "around an unexpected corner or with an unexpected person, we catch a glimpse of the fire, the desert filled with flame". .

Maundy Thursday 2012

Red House stands in an unremarkable residential road in Bexleyheath, close to the principal corridors that connect London to the south-east. When William Morris moved into it in 1860, one year after his marriage to Jane Burden, its site was less cluttered. He had chosen it because the new railway meant that it was accessible from London and because it enjoyed an isolated, rural location. It was surrounded by an orchard of apples and cherries and afforded views of the Cray valley. But Morris did not conceive of the house as a romantic retreat for two. In its bricks and tiles he realized his vision of a great medieval dwelling reborn. Red House was built for friendship. Its doorways are wide and its porches spacious. Its bedrooms may be modest but its common areas are most definitely not. The grand dining hall, the airy drawing room, the long gallery and the wooden central staircase dominate. Morris was enchanted by Arthurian legends and by the myths of the high Middle Ages, and for his house he had in mind the castle keep in which the order of knights feasted, or the common home in which the band of artisans plied their trades.

So he gathered his friends, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Swinburne, and for five years he played the feudal host. Games of hide-and-seek ranged around the corridors and mock battles were fought in the garden. The friends dined together and frolicked together, and they worked together too. It was out of their longing to fill Red House with beautiful stained glass and delicate embroidery that the company was formed that is still selling curtains and wallpaper to the home-owning public 150 years later.

Crucial to the house, crucial to the firm, crucial to the whole artistic movement of which it was the vanguard; crucial to Morris himself was friendship - the company of the like-minded with whom he consciously surrounded himself at every stage of his life.

Friendship is an overlooked theme, both of the life of Christ and of the celebration of this holy night. Rarely do we recall that around the table in the upper room there gathered a group that Christ declared to be a group of friends. Rarely do we preach about their friendship, rarely do we read about it, rarely do we think about it. Yet Christ never wrote a book or established an institution. He drew together that group. His ministry was exercised from among that group, and therefore friendship is surely a vocation that we are called to exercise, a vocation that we are called to proclaim and to live.

If I'm right, then it is a vocation that has been tightly squeezed. The Church has properly upheld the vocation of marriage and has properly upheld the vocation of celibacy, but, unhealthily obsessed with sexual practice, it has too often forgotten the primary vocation of friendship. And in the Facebook era this is desperately important. Today the architecture of friendship is disclosed not in Morris's bricks, terracotta, and brotherly horseplay, but in the idle click of a mouse at midnight. "Posner...has a host of friends, though only on the Internet, and none in the right name or even gender" as Alan Bennett shrewdly observes in The History Boys. So tonight, as we recall the last supper that Christ's friends shared, let us be recalled to the holy path of friendship.

Aelred, twelfth century Abbot of Rievaulx, asked whether a monk, called to be a brother to all in his monastery, could enjoy particular intimacy, and concluded that he could. Friendship's foundation is love, he writes, and it is sought 'not with a view to any worldly good, nor for any reason extrinsic to itself, but from the worthiness of its own nature, and the feeling of the human heart, so that it offers no advantage or reward other than itself.' Friendship is loving and it is disinterested. He goes on, writing 'My friend must be the guardian of our mutual love, or even of my very soul, so that he will preserve in faithful silence all its secrets, and whatever he sees in it that is flawed he will correct or endure it with all his strength.' Friends are stewards of one another's deepest and most sacred depths. And although in certain circumstances friendship cannot endure, still the love that underpins it must. 'If the person you love harms you, love him still. If he is such a person that you think your friendship with him should be withdrawn, still you should never withdraw your love for him...Never betray the secrets of your friendship with him, even if he betrays yours.'

Red House was sold when Burne-Jones failed Morris by refusing to live there and establish a permanent household of co-workers and friends. His plans dashed, Morris turned his back on the house that he had loved, and, bitterly disappointed, never went there again. The friends who sat at table with him failed Christ. Judas betrays him; Peter denies him; the inner circle fall asleep in the garden; they all abandon him. Only Christ is left, loving them with a self-forgetful love, comprehending the innermost secrets of their hearts, never neglecting them despite their neglect of him. Christ is the true friend, and his pattern of loving constancy is set before us tonight in Scripture and in Sacrament: we are called to be the friend he is to us.

'Even if he is chastised, even if he is hurt, even if he is handed over to be burned or is nailed to the cross, he who is a friend loves for all time' writes Aelred. In our faithfulness to God, in our fervour for the Gospel, and in our friendships with one another let us follow the Christ, our brother and our friend. Amen.

The Fifth Sunday of Lent, 25 April 2012

When I got to know Lillian she was in her early 90s. She lived on her own in Portsmouth's North End, not very far from the house where she had spent her childhood. Her family were Plymouth Brethren, but they used to attend Sunday worship at London Road Baptist Church, where they would sit in the gallery with the Callaghan family. She always remembered that in those days their son was known as Leonard.

I used to take Holy Communion to her. Her world had shrunk to one room, where she lived, ate, and slept. She saw her City Council carers every day; she saw me every month; and she received occasional visits from the niece who was all the family she had.

She was very unhappy. She had much to be unhappy about. I remember that one winter afternoon I arrived to find her sitting in almost total darkness. Four of the five lightbulbs in her room had expired, and her carer had told her that health and safety did not allow him to climb a ladder to change them. But over time I discovered that there was more to her unhappiness than the indignity of old age. She told me about the young man who had fallen in love with her more than seventy years previously. 'He was besotted' she said. Her family approved, and gave him every encouragement. He begged her to marry him. But Lillian couldn't stand him, and longed to be free of his attentions. Times were hard and the young man decided to emigrate to Australia. He would go, he said, only if Lillian would follow him and begin a new life on the far side of the world. Seeing her chance, Lillian agreed. She went with him to the dock at Southampton and waved him off, knowing full well that she would never keep her promise. She never saw him again.

Her family were furious and were determined that she would not be so headstrong again. They arranged for her to marry her cousin, and this time she had no choice. Lillian rarely spoke about her husband. I supposed that the photograph that sat on top of the television, of a man a gentle face and wavy hair, was of him. On an early visit I was surprised to pick up a teaspoon and find it emblazoned with a swastika. Her husband had been in the navy, she told me, and the teaspoon was a trophy he'd taken from a captured Nazi U-Boat.

But that was all, until one day when I was visiting another elderly parishioner, coincidentally also called Lillian. She asked after her namesake, and then enquired 'Has she ever told you about her husband?' 'No' I said. 'He was homosexual' she said 'he left her and went to live with a man'.

Suddenly the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, and the picture the pieces revealed was of a hellish vortex. Lillian's fundamentalist Brethren upbringing; her deceit of that first suitor; her coercion into marriage; her husband whose sexual orientation would at that time have exposed him to prosecution, and would in street-fighting Portsmouth have endangered his life; his abandonment of her: all these combined to produce a toxic mix of shame, guilt, rage and disgust. She was unhappy, and her story remains one of the unhappiest I have ever heard. It is one of the reasons why I believe in redemption, which I understand as death and resurrection.

Lillian was trapped. She was trapped by her guilt at her treatment of the man who had loved her. She was trapped by her belief that as a punishment she had been married to a man who could not love her. She was trapped by the conviction that she was quite alone in the world and she was trapped by the suspicion that everyone else was happy in a way she hadn't been since those far-off days at London Road Baptist Church, where the future Prime Minister's sister had played the piano for the Sunday School.

It is easy to dismiss the notion of redemption as a concept belonging solely to the market place, as a sub-Christian theology, unworthy of the God who is love. But Lillian was trapped by her guilt at her deceit, by her belief in her punishment and by her conviction of her isolation. She was powerless to free herself. She needed to be redeemed. She needed to take hold of her Baptism. She needed to believe that God had forgiven her her deceit of that young man. She needed to believe that her marriage was not a punishment but a tragedy, for her and for her husband. She needed to believe that she was not alone. But the belief that she had been forgiven, the belief that she had not been punished and the belief that she was not alone was, to Lillian, belief that was cross-shaped. For Lillian to believe that she was forgiven; for her to believe that she was not the victim of a cosmic punishment; for her to believe that she was not alone, she would have had to surrender the foundation stones that had constituted her identity for over sixty years. She would have had to die to self and be born anew. And that death and resurrection - that redemption - is, I believe, made possible only by the grace of God's Holy Spirit.

That is what it is to be redeemed. It is to give up whatever we cling to most closely, and to re-discover ourselves as nothing less and nothing more than the beloved children of God. It is to die and to be re-born.

I wish I could offer you a post-script, a happy ending to Lillian's story, but I can't. I often sat with her, longing that through the Scriptures, through the sacrament of Holy Communion, or, more particularly, through my wise words, she might take hold of her Baptism and might believe herself forgiven and beloved. But she did not. When I left Portsmouth she was still unhappy, and she died some years later. And this apparently unhappy ending taught me one of the things from which I need to be redeemed - the false vanity of priesthood which takes itself too seriously. I am still learning, even though there is unimpeachable precedent for the Lord being carried on the shoulders of an ass.

Of course I don't know how Lillian's story really ends, if it has ended, for it ends with the One with whom it began, with whom all our stories began. We have been plunged into the cleansing, killing waters of Baptism, there to die and to be re-born. We are redeemed. And the One who has redeemed us is faithful, and he will complete his work.