This Scepter'd Isle 4: George Herbert: Sunday 29 July 2012

George Herbert died, aged forty, in 1633. He had been parish priest of Bemerton near Salisbury for barely three years. Revered for nearly four centuries as the archetypal English country parson, his ministry was brief - and he appears to have been curiously reluctant to begin it. Educated at Westminster, Herbert shone at Cambridge, reading Divinity, lecturing in rhetoric and proceeding to a role as the University's Public Orator, before being elected as Member for Montgomeryshire in James I's Parliament of1624.

 That Parliamentary session is remembered for the bellicose  campaign waged by Prince Charles in favour of war with Spain. The King eventually capitulated and tore up the peace treaty that existed between the two countries. Herbert had a horror of war: two of his brothers had lost their lives in conflict, and in his Cambridge orations he had spoken against its costly ravages. With England now set on this course he obtained leave of absence from his University duties, and sought ordination as a deacon, probably at Advent 1624.

 How might we understand this change? Herbert's immersion in the prayer of the Church, begun at Westminster and continued in Cambridge, combined with his theological studies, seem first to have persuaded him to attempt to serve God through the legislative agencies of a Godly monarch - an unimpeachably Reformed intent. When that service was frustrated through the declaration of war he turned to the Church as a preferable forum for such service. Yet even now his progress towards priesthood was remarkably slow. He served as a canon of Lincoln Cathedral for a number of years, and was only ordained priest when, eventually, he accepted the living of Bemerton in 1630. He devoted the last three years of his life to the service of that small rural community, living with his family in the rectory opposite St Andrew's Church, and accompanying them there for twice-daily prayer.

Priesthood was thus for Herbert the culmination of his life and career, the culmination of a lifetime of searching and exploration of how he might best fulfil God's purposes. The searching and exploration were not always easy. We caricature Herbert as blissfully happy among the Wiltshire shepherds with his God, and in these struggles his voice speaks to us as clearly as it did to his Stuart contemporaries. The scholars assume that his two literary works, the clerical manual The Country Parson, and the collection of poetry The Temple, were largely written before his Bemerton years. In the poems we hear him rebelling against the inexorable claim that God appears to have on his life:

I struck the board, and cried, No more.

   I will abroad.

What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the rode...

   Shall I still be in suit?

The frustration is palpable and resonates deeply with anyone who has ever contemplated doing the thing that is right but deeply unattractive. But Herbert discovers God to be patient even if he is not:

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wild

   At every word,

Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:

   And I replied, My Lord.

Herbert's Church had emerged from the long years of Elizabeth's reign with its Protestantism re-established but also with its liturgy and holy order intact. It was a Church both Catholic and Reformed. One consequence of this is the very high view that Herbert takes of the sacraments. He writes poems on Holy Communion, Holy Baptism and Priesthood. It is in one of these that he writes:

But th' holy men of God such vessels are,

As serve him up, who all the world commands:

When God vouchsafeth to become our fare,

Their hands convey him, who conveys their hands.

Oh what pure things, most pure must those things be,

               Who bring my God to me!

Herbert understands that in  the consecrated elements of Holy Communion God himself visits the faithful, and this divine use of commonplace things becomes for him a complete way of looking at the world. In the poem that we will sing as our final hymn this morning he asks:

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things thee to see...

Sacramental presence is not confined to the altar. With instruction and assistance the divine is visible in any- and everything. Recalling an image from St Paul he continues:

  A man that looks on glass,

  On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

  And then the heav'n espy.

If we choose we can discern the hand of God wherever we look.

Yet this profoundly incarnational theology is balanced by Herbert's Reformed inheritance. It's not just that the poems are saturated with Biblical references, whether explicitly cited or implicitly relied upon. It's not just that the poems assume a regular diet of worship founded upon Cranmer's Prayer Book. It's that they also constantly emphasize the individual's responsibility before God. The first person predominates: I struck the board; Teach me, my God and King - as we have already seen. Yet this individual responsibility is never full of terror because of the nature of the God to whom it is owed. The Temple reaches its climax in the third of three poems to bear the name 'Love'. Herbert writes of the soul's encounter with the divine and fro that encounter offers his reader the hope of acceptance and the assurance of salvation. The scene is not a law-court or a battlefield but a hospitable dining-table at which Love invites the soul to sit and eat. Conscious of its sin, the soul shies away. But Love, the soul's maker and the bearer of the blame that attaches to its sin, insists:

You must sit down...and taste my meat:

       So I did sit and eat.

Herbert is more than the unworldly priest of popular imagination. His history is  the history of the age in which the English Church was beginning to understand itself anew, and he both reflects and forms that understanding. Rooted in the transience of the world, rooted in God's word, and rooted in the sacraments; convinced of God's immanence in all things, and convinced of our personal responsibility before God; and, above all, fed by constant prayer, Herbert's words still enjoin all the world, in every corner, to sing 'My God and King'.

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,

  God's breath in man returning to his birth,

  The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth.

Engine against th'Almighty, sinners' tower,

  Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

  The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear.

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

  Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,

  Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

  Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

  The land of spices; something understood.

Something understood. Amen.

This Scepter'd Isle 1: Julian of Norwich: Sunday 8 July 2012

The approach of the first anniversary of last summer's riots has been marked by the completion of the tallest building in Europe. It is a considerable irony that one year after events which testified powerfully to the fractures which disfigure our splintered city we have unveiled a mighty tower whose very name is synonymous with fractures and splinters.

There is a lazy way of preaching history traditionally favoured by High Churchmen which treats the Reformation as the first great splintering of English life and which treats everything which precedes it as a fracture-free, unified, and harmonious whole. Yet the quickest glance at the late fourteenth century exposes the shortcomings of this ideal. In those fifty years the Black Death and the successive pandemics of plague that it spawned killed up to one half of the population of this scepter'd isle. Fearful of the economic power that the consequent shortage of labour handed to the rural poor the landowning barons clamped down on their tenants' new aspirations, and clamped down hard. In response the peasants marched on London. Their target was not trainers and iPods but visible symbols of oppression and authority. The Savoy Palace was burned, the Tower of London was attacked, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered.

Such was the splintered world which gave birth to a golden age for English mysticism. Death and unrest stalked the realm, but Margery Kempe and Richard Rolle recorded their visions of God and their direct experience of the divine in the newly-confident English tongue. So too did a woman who lived in an East Anglian town grown prosperous through the wool trade. This woman was not ordained; she belonged to no religious order; and she has never been declared a saint; yet her book, the first to be written in English by a woman, has informed the theology and prayer of the Church for six hundred  years.

She was an anchoress. She lived, bricked into a small cell built onto the wall of the parish church. She is unnamed. Margery Kempe visited her and calls her the Lady Julian, but Julian was the saint to which the parish church was dedicated. Her identity has become indistinguishable from his. She suffered grave ill health. It was while she believed she was dying that she received the visions that were to determine the course of her life. She gave herself to prayer, contemplation and spiritual counsel for over forty years. In response to the fractures of her age she gave her life to her God; she surrendered her identity; she experienced ill health as a point of visionary departure; and she was faithful for decade after decade. Those scant biographical facts might themselves be instructive for a generation that is manifestly confused by the contemporary spectacle of societal splintering.

Julian's visions are of the Passion of Jesus Christ, described with a gory frankness that is quite shocking to modern readers. Yet these visions, soaked as they are in Christ's blood, reveal for Julian not God's judgement or God's victory, but only God's love. In a famous passage she is shown something as tiny as a hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand. 'This is all that is made' God tells her, and she discerns that all that is made has three properties: 'First, God had made it: second, God loves it; and third, God keeps it'. This discernment, that God has made all things, and that God loves all things, is the foundation of her convictions.

She sees clearly that there is no anger in God. 'It is utterly impossible that God should be wroth' she writes 'For wrath and friendship are two opposites. He who wastes and destroys our wrath, making us meek and mild, must accordingly ever be in the same love, meek and mild, which is contrary to wrath. For I saw very clearly that where our Lord appears, there peace is established so that wrath has no more place'.

And these observations lead her to a very particular view of human sin. 'It has neither manner of substance nor part of being' she writes 'and it would not even be known save for the pain it causes'. Sin is not a foe to be vanquished and driven from the world. Its reality consists only in its effects, perceived by Julian as human pain. Sin has a purpose. It is not to catch human beings out, trip them up or condemn them everlastingly. Sin hurts us, and these hurts purge us and heal us. They make us know ourselves. And they are the cause of the compassion Christ lavishes upon us, a compassion so overwhelming that Julian is obliged to write of its origin in Christ our Mother. 'Our Saviour is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born, yet we will never come out of him'.

It is this image of an eternally hospitable God that is Julian's gift to her readers. It is perhaps no wonder that CS Lewis described her book as 'dangerous'. 'I'm glad I didn't read it much earlier' he wrote to his former pupil Bede Griffith. If God is not to be compared to a double-crossing earthly monarch such as Richard II, who betrayed his promises to Wat Tyler; if human beings facing God are not in the same dire straits as human beings facing the bubonic plague; then can any person can ever be safe from the divine love revealed to Julian? The scandal of universal salvation beckons. It is this theme that TS Eliot picks up as he quotes her best-remembered words:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

God 'the ground of our beseeching'. London's newest landmark points proudly heavenwards from the ground on which it is built. Julian reminds us that the ground upon which we are built is the eternal love of God. That is a vision that may yet draw together even a generation that clusters in the shadow of a Shard. Amen.

 

Trinity Sunday 2012

'If the Roman Pontiff, seated on the lofty throne of his glory, wishes to thunder at us...and if he wishes to judge us and even to rule us and our Churches...what kind of brotherhood, or even what kind of parenthood can this be? We should be the slaves, not the sons, of such a Church'.

It might sound like Henry VIII or Edward VI, but those are the words not of an English monarch, but of Nicetas, twelfth century Archbishop of Nicomedia, railing against Rome in a way that Elizabeth II's predecessors were to do four hundred years later. On a day of national jubilation it may seem perverse to revive a controversy which in its day tore the world in two - I refer, of course, to the filioque controversy, never, I am sure, far from your thoughts - but the Spirit blows where it wills and lease us into truth.

Filioque is a Latin word meaning 'and the son'. It appears in the translation of the Nicene Creed that we will say this morning and that we have all said a thousand times and scarcely noticed. 'We believe in the Holy Spirit...who proceeds from the Father and the Son'. However the Council of the Church which met at Nicaea in 325 AD did not include it in the common declarations which were to form the basis of the Creed. It was added by the Spanish Church approximately five hundred years after the Council, and became entrenched in the Creed used by the Western Church, which looked to Rome for its leadership. But it was never adopted by the Eastern Church, which looked to Constantinople. To this day Eastern Orthodox Christians profess their faith in God the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father. The Eastern rejection of the filioque underpinned the great schism of medieval Christianity, the devastating split between Rome and Constantinople which culminated in the sack of Byzantium and the overthrow of the greatest Christian Empire the world has ever known.

So what on earth was all the fuss about? It's a very reasonable question and in the spirit of today's Trinitarian preoccupation I will attempt to make the answer comprehensible, brief and not too dull. I may fail. 'And the Son'. It's just three words, one in Latin - but they are three words that have consequences for what we believe about God the Holy Trinity, and what we believe about God the Holy Trinity is the hallmark of whether we are bona fide Christians - or whether we are not. For the Eastern Church their impact was and is fundamentally to change what the Church believes about God.

Father, Son and Spirit: God is three Persons. Yet if God is three Persons, what is it that makes God One? The Eastern Church has long maintained that what makes God One is the Father. God the Father is the cause or source of Godhead. In theological terms, they would say that the Father is the monarch within the Godhead. God the Father begets God the Son 'before all worlds'; God the Spirit proceeds from the God the Father 'before all worlds'. God the Father is, as it were, the apex of a triangle. If God the Spirit proceeds from God the Son as well as from God the Father this pattern is disturbed completely. Suddenly there is nothing distinctive about the Father. The Father is no longer the source of Godhead. He shares that privilege with the Son. By introducing the filioque, said Constantinople, the Western Church blurred for ever the unique characteristics of the three Persons of God.

This blurring is alive and well. You'll all have heard the Son described as Jesus, who shows us who God is; and the Spirit described as the wind of Pentecost, who gives us life; and the Father described as...well, often, and rather lamely, as the Creator of the Universe. It's a standard sermon for Trinity Sunday. Yet whether we are Western or Eastern Christians, it's inadequate. Creation is the work of God, Father, Son and Spirit. Creation is not the work of the Father alone. The Father is the Father of the Son. God is the Father of all Creation. The blurring of the Persons inhibits the diversity within the Godhead, insists the East, and, in its place exalts the unity. It does not allow the Father to be the monarch within the Trinity - but it makes a diverse Godhead into a monolithic God. And for more than a thousand years the Eastern Church has detected a similar trend in the polity that allowed the filioque to find its way into the Creed. The creed of the whole Church had been re-written by the Bishop of Rome. Nicetas remarked memorably that he had thereby assumed to himself a monarchy. And that was a thing to be resisted.

It would probably be overstating the case to claim that the Greeks' current unhappiness with the economic prescriptions of those who think of themselves as her betters can be attributed to the filioque controversy. But it is indubitably the case that to this day the East treasures the diversity of the Trinity and, through the patriarchates that constitute its ecclesiastical polity, it resists the temptation to enthrone any one of its bishops as a monarch. In the West the style of Church government is either determinedly monarchical, as in the Roman Communion, or is, in response, rather dysfunctional and unhappily congregationalist, as in the Anglican Communion. Our Trinitarian theology has often been weak and subsumed beneath an agenda which emphasizes the oneness rather than the plurality of God. Perhaps - perhaps - it is time for the West to look again at both its credal formulations and at how it arrives at them.

It may appear that this sermon is tilting in a direction that is utterly inappropriate for a Diamond Jubilee. So let me conclude with this. As I have said, the Eastern view remains that the Father is monarch within the Trinity, but the Father is monarch only by virtue of what he enables in the other persons of the Trinity. The Father's monarchy is a service to the whole. It allows it to be. It gives it life. It never dominates or domineers. I would like to suggest that there could be no better exemplar of this understanding of monarchy than the monarch whose long reign we celebrate today. Her singular achievement has been for sixty years to serve the whole. Perhaps she has something to teach us about both theology and holy order.

May God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit bless and keep her - and all of us - this Trinity Sunday, this Jubilee weekend, and for evermore. Amen.

The Day of Pentecost 2012

The dubious legacy of Pentecost is that it allows the Church to behave like a man in the throes of mid-life.

We don't know how old the apostles were on the day the Spirit descended, but the story is too often told as the story of twelve men in the throes of mid-life. At Pentecost twelve men re-invent themselves, the story goes. They throw themselves into new activity. They leave behind for ever their former careers as fishermen, tax-collectors and tent-makers. They leave behind for ever the towns and villages where they have lived. They leave behind for ever the religion of their ancestors. They begin again.

Perhaps they were approaching the age at which it is not uncommon for men to re-invent themselves. Today, they acquire biker jackets, fast cars and inappropriate haircuts. Such re-invention is intended to fend off the encroachment of age. A new look, a new career, a new relationship: these are the resort of those who fear the future. Martin Smith from Croydon will never play guitar at Madison Square Gardens; he will never again receive his first-born child from the midwife;  he has lost the lean, taut physique of twenty years ago. So he re-invents himself, throwing himself into new activity that will disguise the inevitable. Because anything is better than just waiting.  

And the risk of telling the story of Pentecost as a story of energy and power, of frenzied activity, of re-birth and re-invention is that we tell Martin Smith's story - the story of a Church in the throes of mid-life, determinedly acting in the present because it is frightened of the future, frightened of waiting, frightened of God. But those who tell it thus tell it wrong. Pentecost is a story of waiting. By the time it arrives the apostles' moment for biker jackets and fast cars (or the first century Palestinian equivalents) is long gone. Christ is with them for forty days after Easter, forty days which challenge everything that they know about him, forty days which challenge everything they know about human life and human death. They are with Christ when he is taken up to heaven - and they are assured by angels of his glorious destiny. And their response is to wait, as they have been told. Despite seeing their dead friend raised, despite seeing the heavens opened to receive him, they wait. They go back to the city, back to their upper room, and they devote themselves to prayer. They do the one thing that Martin Smith would find it impossible to do.

Men in the middle of life re-invent themselves because they cannot bear to wait. The apostles are re-invented because they dare to wait. They have seen and heard mysteries beyond imagining, but their waiting is their acknowledgment that they are utterly dependent for everything on the one whom those mysteries reveal. The ministry for which they are re-invented at Pentecost is not theirs. It is never theirs. It is Christ's.

This is a truth that the Church needs to hear and that we need to hear, because the rush to activity as a displacement of or a disguise for something else is not confined to the middle of life. Waiting is no one's favourite occupation. It conjures immediate images of drab, functional rooms with hard benches and chewing-gum-spattered  floors. It is suggestive of long, uncertain, painful months while a diagnosis is reached or a bed is made available. It is reminiscent of the apprehensive agony that fills the time before the exam result is sent or the job offer is made. Yet it is because the apostles wait that the Spirit comes upon them.

If I appear in church wearing unfeasibly tight trousers or if I begin telling you about the piercings I'm planning I hope you'll remind me of what I've said this morning. The middle of life is difficult - in fact life is difficult. At whatever stage we are, the future is always uncertain and the demons of failure, envy, and anger are always threatening. Activity is always seductive and alluring. Yet activity that we devise and lead will ultimately disappoint. Such activity is the hallmark of a middle-aged, frightened Church. In the waiting places we are called to pray, we are called to be patient and we are called to be faithful. We are called to learn not to trust in our own experiences, our own wisdom, our own resources. We are called to wait on God and to rely on him alone. Everything else is vain. If we pray, if we are patient, if we are faithful, then God will find us. In rushing wind, in tongues of fire, in overwhelming love God will find us. We cannot force his hand. 'He measures us by our need'  Jeremy Taylor wrote ' and we must not measure him by our impatience'.

Look at little Jemima. We baptize her with great joy today. We baptize her although she cannot name God or worship him. We baptize her because her infancy reminds us of ours. As she is utterly dependent so are we utterly dependent. She will have to wait if she is to understand the gift poured out on her today. She is a symbol to us all of the waiting that we have to do too. Our impatience and our strength lead only to the follies of the middle of life. God's patience and God's strength lead to the glory of Pentecost. Amen.   

Ascension Day 2012

Contemporary English idiom suffers no lack of expressions employing metaphors of altitude. The psychedelic effect of taking illegal drugs, for example, is, even in this post-hippy era, still known as a 'high'. The surgical procedure that stretches the skin and removes its wrinkles is known as a 'face-lift'. The soles and heels of shoes and boots that raise their wearers several inches above the ground are known as 'platforms'. A high; a face-lift; a platform - each of these expressions employs a metaphor of altitude, of distance above the ground. Each of these metaphors implies a process of change, of altered experience.

The drug-user believes that his perceptive powers are sharpened, and senses a powerful disjunction from reality. The face-lift patient looks in the mirror and sees a younger self. The fashion victim, tottering around in her  platforms, gains height and loses the appearance of weight, or hopes to. Each goes through a process of change, of altered experience.

But for none of them is the change permanent. The high doesn't last. The effects wear off; the user crashes back to earth, sometimes with devastating consequences; and next time he has to use an even higher dosage to achieve the same effect. The face-lift doesn't last. Despite the surgeon's intervention the patient's skin continues to age; the wrinkles return; the taut flesh gives; and the operation has to be repeated if the effect is to be maintained. The platforms don't last. It's not just that no one could possibly sleep comfortably in a pair of Christian Louboutins: it's that they aren't that easy to be awake in either, as Naomi Campbell discovered when she collapsed on the catwalk while modelling a pair of Vivienne Westwood's creations.

A 'high'; a 'face-lift'; a 'platform': three metaphors of altitude, three metaphors of distance above the ground. Three metaphors which imply a process of change, of altered experience - or, rather more brutally, a process of temporary disfigurement. The heights to which drugs, cosmetic surgery and designer shoes take those who indulge in them are not heights at all. They change nothing for those who pay through the nose for them, and not infrequently lead to ill health, debt, misery, or any combination thereof. Drug abuse; body fascism; naked consumerism: three contemporary plagues.

Of course, 'Ascension' is another metaphor of altitude, of distance above the ground. It must be a metaphor because in our post-scientific era we cannot plausibly maintain that Jesus went up, that he rose through the clouds and reached a place called heaven which is just beyond our vertical horizon. 'Above us only sky' John Lennon once sang, and in a purely literal sense he was right. Above us are the great expanses of space which we are still discovering. 'Ascension' is a metaphor of altitude like the other metaphors I've mentioned, a metaphor which implies a process of change, of altered experience. At the Ascension Jesus is changed, and his disciples' experience of him is altered. And there is nothing metaphorical about that.

The change is to his physical body, the body of a carpenter from a small Galilean town, the body that has been nailed to a cross, the body that has been raised wonderfully from the tomb. After the Ascension that body can no longer be seen in the way that it has been seen for thirty-something years. The disciples cannot look him in the eye, or receive their breakfast from his wounded hands, or place their feet where his have left marks in the dust. They know that he lives; they will spend their lives proclaiming that he lives; and many of them will give their lives for their proclamation that he lives. Yet their experience of him has altered. Jesus is not confined by his wounded body, by the boundaries of space and time that confine the disciples and all of us. We can see only as far as our eyes permit; we can be heard only as far as our voices will carry; we can touch only what is within our reach. What we call the Ascension is the change in Jesus that means that there is no limit to what he can see, no place where his voice cannot be heard, and no person that is beyond his reach. Saint Paul expresses it by writing to the Ephesians that after the Ascension all things have been put under the feet of Jesus, who now 'fills all in all'. There's nowhere you can be that isn't where he is. This time I'm misquoting John Lennon.

The dubious achievement of those other metaphors of altitude, the chemical high, the reclaimed youth, the borrowed stature, is a temporary distortion. The triumphant achievement of the Ascension is everlasting glory. Everything that is, is in the presence of Jesus, crucified, risen, and ascended. That same Jesus calls us to follow him, and offers us - in place of the addiction, self-hate and inner shame that the contemporary plagues feed on - complete healing, perfect security, and unfeigned recognition. So much for the plagues. Ascension. There's a metaphor of altitude that's worth believing in. Amen. 

Vicar's Report to the Annual Parochial Church Meeting, April 2012

'This is a time for Godly ambition' said the Bishop of London. 'What would we hope to see developing here in five years time?'. Well, we've invited him back, and he'll be here on Sunday 1 July, five-and-a-half years after he issued that challenge at my collation as Vicar of St Peter's in January 2007. This, my sixth report to the Annual Meeting, seems like an appropriate moment to reflect on what we have seen develop here. What have we done?

Let me begin with some Statistics

We have grown our Electoral Roll. In 2007 it stood at 408; today it stands at 534. Inevitably that figure will shrink when a new Roll is opened next year. Inevitably it contains the names of many who've come and gone in the last five years. But nevertheless the overall picture is of growth.

We have grown our average Sunday attendance. In 2008 I reported to the APCM that it stood at 216. Today it stands at 246. Reassuringly this confirms that the growth in the Electoral Roll is the growth of a worshipping community.  

We have grown our commitment to  tax-efficient and regular giving. In 2007 100 members of the congregation had signed Gift Aid declarations in favour of St Peter's. That figure now stands at 170. In 2007 we received £35,000 annually through Standing Orders; today we receive £42,000.

We have grown the funds raised by the biennial May Fair. In 2007 our profit was just short of £16,000; last year it topped £20,000. Last year's Fair was a triumph in every respect: stripping the auction out of it gave a wonderful focus for community and children's activities. I know that all who served on the committee would want to pay particular tribute to Katherine Stephens, whose energy and industry played an immense part in the Fair's success.

Statistics are just statistics. They are not bricks and mortar. What about the Building of which we are the custodians?

We have secured long-term tenants for the crypt. As well as generating a long-term income for us this has also meant, certainly at the western end, that the fabric has been refurbished to a standard that we could only have dreamt of.

We have installed a state-of-the-art fire detection system throughout the building.

We are in the middle of the most extensive restoration and maintenance programme that the church has had in twenty years. The roofs to the Meeting and Committee Rooms have been replaced; the high-level nineteenth-century masonry is being repaired; and work is now being done to repair and clean the iconic Portico.

What about the parish's institutional structure and its human resources?

We have streamlined and modernized our structures by establishing the St Peter's Eaton Square Trading Company to receive the income from our churchyard car-parking operation, and the Pimlico St Peter Trust as an independent body that safeguards some historic assets and makes the income they generate available for spending on our mission.

All our staff, employed and self-employed, now have job descriptions and are properly on our pay-roll.

We have equipped one priest, James Mustard, to move to a good first incumbency in East Barnet; we have trained another, Mark Lowther, from his ordination as a self-supporting deacon to his taking on a stipendiary priest's role; we have played a part in nurturing the vocations to ordination of two more, David Armstrong and Philip Krinks.

Worship remains our primary purpose.

We have refreshed and re-refreshed the liturgies of the Family and Sung Eucharist, using the best of the material that Common Worship makes available. We have refreshed the ritual with which we celebrate them, and have recruited new servers and Lay Eucharistic Ministers. We have introduced special rites to commission them.

We have introduced the Parish Eucharist, enabling our congregation to worship together at key points throughout the year.

We have devised new acts of worship and established them: the occasional Taize service; the Parish Nativity Play; Christingle (celebrated at Epiphany this year); the Advent Carol Service and the Anonymous Carols (enjoyed last year by nearly 300 worshippers).

We have celebrated nearly 150 Baptisms and prepared 103 candidates for Confirmation. On Sunday that figure will rise to 115.

Discipleship was a key ambition of our last Mission Action Plan.

We have run a number of Life courses at venues in the parish but away from the church. These have offered participants the opportunity of discussing a variety of faith-related issues.

We have hosted lectures and heard from a range of guest preachers, including members of our congregation, ensuring that diverse voices are heard within these walls.

We have co-ordinated Lent and Advent programmes of teaching and worship, culminating in significant musical and liturgical events such as last year's performance of Liszt's Via Crucis.

We have reinvigorated the parish magazine, re-imagined Crossed Keys, established a Facebook group, and re-launched the website.

If all that sounds rather introspective we have also looked beyond our walls

We have established a relationship with the Victoria Business Improvement District, who have sponsored our Christmas flyer and whose Carol Service we have hosted for the last two years.

We have followed closely plans for the redevelopment of Victoria, and are registered as an interested  stakeholder by Land Securities.

We have raised funds for the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, the Passage, the St Margaret's Drop-In Centre, the Society of Mary and Martha, the Christian Aid Haiti Appeal, and for children's homes in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

We have funded the building of a school in the parish of St Joseph's, Huambo, Angola, and hope that it will be complete and open for its pupils very soon.

We have become a Fair Trade parish.

Our concert series have become well established and attract remarkable talent, an achievement that would have been impossible without the tireless commitment of Carl Muller.

We have maintained and extended the close relationship with our Primary School. One of the clergy has attended the Year 6 School Journey every year, and as well as presiding at the weekly Eucharist now we go into class to help the children write their prayers. We have overseen competitions to write a school prayer, led discussions in playtime, and, through our excellent PCC Governors, have appointed an outstanding new Head and supported her in her bold initiative to expand the School.

We regularly lead assemblies at Westminster City School, Francis Holland School and Eaton House School as well.

We have established a parish Youth Group.

Thanks

What have we done? I think we have done an awful lot: I think we have done an awful lot. One of the great privileges of serving here has been the opportunity of working with so many committed, hard-working people among our staff and volunteers.

Larry Aldridge keeps the grounds beautifully tidy and manages the lucrative white van trade which is a valuable source of our income; Susan Redwin is an unflappable book-keeper who is unfailingly efficient; the office that she shares with the equally unflappable and efficient Olivia Reed is always a happy place where my problems can be shared and solved. Our verger Douglas Longstaffe is not only able to cope with whatever he is asked to cope with - be it removal firms, May Fair storage, gluten-free Communion bread, or the Vicar's next delivery from Majestic - but he does so with immense patience and grace. Together they are a marvellous team. This was brought home to me very sharply in the weeks leading up to Easter when James had left, Mark was yet to arrive, I was the sole priest in the parish and was slowly going round the bend, and Susan, Olivia and Douglas rose to the occasion and carried me - and all of you - through.

All our musicians continue to provide us with exquisite fare. The Sung Eucharist Choir has once again offered music of the highest quality - my sincerest thanks to Andrew and to Dan - and it has been particularly good to see Andrew Sackett working with them collaboratively across the two services.

I have said goodbye to two priest colleagues since we last met. We all enjoyed Claire Maddock's ministry here. She is a wise pastor and an intelligent preacher. We were lucky to have her for a little while, and wherever she next picks up the threads of ministry will be equally lucky to have her. When we said farewell to James Mustard on Mothering Sunday I commented on his gerbil-sitting and cocktail-making skills. What I did not mention was his lively mind, his capacity for talking to anyone and everyone without any hint of condescension, and his unerring nose for those who are on the margins of the institution. I am sure he will flourish in the Diocese of St Albans. We are also about to welcome Mark, although he scarcely needs a welcome. When he expressed an interest in leaving the BBC and joining us as a stipendiary priest the Churchwardens and I gave him a very thorough grilling - but we were delighted to have the opportunity of taking on someone who we knew so well and esteemed so highly.

There is not nearly enough time for me to name all the volunteers who bear so much of the responsibility for our common life here, so let me give you just a few examples. They will hate this, because they are self-effacing people, but they are typical of those upon whom we all depend. Week after week Judith Richardson attends the Sung Eucharist, but only after she has also attended the Family Eucharist and has given time to welcoming our young servers, reassuring them, wherever necessary coaching them and, on occasion, donning an alb and serving with them. Or there are Lesley Casey, Helen Strange,Ted Gush, Nigel Gerald and Louisa  Elder, the PCC Governors of the School, all giving Ms Cottier excellent and much-valued advice and practical assistance as she negotiates with architects, caterers, teaching agencies and OFSTED. Or there is Betina Scanlon, the most recent in a series of Mums who have run the St Peter's Poppets, who has secured for it a wonderful selections of toys, offers liturgically seasonal craft activities, and has even taken it into the blogosphere.

One complaint that you will never hear me make is that this is a parish where no one is prepared to take any responsibility for anything. We are surrounded by exceptionally able, dedicated people, who give exponentially of their time and their talents, and I am very grateful.

Looking forwards

So - to repeat the Bishop's question of five years ago - 'What would we hope to see developing here in five years time?' What will St Peter's do next? When the Bishop comes on 1July we aren't simply going to invite his episcopal approval for what we've done. We're going to tell him what we'd like to do, and invite his episcopal commission. This has occupied the PCC since their residential meeting last summer. At the beginning of Lent you were all sent a draft version of our plans and these, in their final form, will be agreed by the new PCC and will form the basis of the next phase of our life together.

Underlying the plans is the purpose that I put to last year's Annual Meeting, that St Peter's exists to form disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of God's world. Underlying the plans is an acknowledgement that we have particular strengths as a community. I've touched on them already. We are good at going to Church on Sunday mornings. Our numbers are impressive. We are also good at getting stuck in. Whether it's baking cakes, moving furniture or looking over accounts, we volunteer for things and do what we say we'll do. However we also have particular weaknesses as a community. We are less good at going to Church outside Sunday morning. The great liturgies of Holy Week were this year attended by less than 10% of the Electoral Roll - disappointing for a parish of our catholic pedigree. We are less good at attending the courses and lectures offered. James was pleased that an average of 10 turned up to the last Life Course: twice that number attended the 2012 Lent course regularly, but even that is substantially less than 10% of the Electoral Roll. We have very few teenagers in the congregation - in fact very few people between the age of 13 and 30. The Bishop has asked me very pointedly why a parish of our size is sending no one to his commissioning of 2012 Young Ambassadors for Christ next week.

To gloss, our congregation of children and of thirty-something adults comes to church on Sundays, and does church-related tasks. But my sense is that many of its members would struggle to articulate very convincingly why they do either, or what the connection between them is. And that is because many of its members are as yet paying little concentrated  attention to the faith without which both going to church and supporting the church's work are ultimately rather meaningless. Faith is not getting the nourishment it needs if it is to grow and flourish.

So what are our plans for the next few years?

Let me start with what is immediate. In the weeks ahead we will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the re-consecration of the church, the Jubilee, and the arrival of the Olympics with a series of events intended to build us as a community and enhance our interdependence.

The Church will host the twentieth anniversary Dedication Festival on 6 May, the welcome return of Fathers Tillyer and Chidwick on 20 May, and a Petertide Parish Eucharist with the Bishop of London on 1 July.  The Choir will sing music from the 1952 Coronation to mark Her Majesty's Jubilee and there will be a fund-raising fete in conjunction with the PTA on 16 June. The three Olympics Sundays will be the culmination of an early summer six-week series of the best of sacred choral music from these islands over the last five hundred years. We want to leave a tangible legacy as well. Two small groups are working on proposals to renew the lighting scheme in Church and replace the four statues that we have at present with sculpture that is more worthy of the space. These projects will draw on the 2012 Appeal, which has to date raised over £60,000.

But of course we are looking beyond this year, at how we form children, young people and adults as disciples of Jesus Christ.

We believe that there is scope to increase and improve our work with the young within our immediate community and beyond it. We want to look afresh at the Poppets and at the Family Eucharist. The former has thrived for too long as the gallant work of one or two Mums and has the potential to grow and grow. The latter needs to come of age as an act of Eucharistic worship that is open to all ages - it needs to be shorter and smarter, using Godly Play, drama and all the senses to engage its congregation. We want to increase our work with the school, offering Church-based activities after school or in the holidays. We want to maintain and grow the Youth Group. And, crucially, we want to be what we are: the parish church to two secondary schools that are on our doorsteps. The pupils of Westminster City School and the Grey Coat Hospital are our parishioners, particularly when they spill out onto Victoria Street at the end of the day. We want to offer them a safe and healthy place to be in the crucial hours after school. What I have outlined amounts to a job description for a youth and children's worker, and ultimately we have the ambition to employ one, perhaps through the St Mellitus College scheme that would enable us to take on an ordinand who would work for us while training to be a priest.

We believe that we need a fresh approach to the formation of adults, one that takes account of our community's willingness to get stuck into activities, but is less inclined to commit to courses. We don't want to be the sort of church whose members go from church study group to church holiday to church book club and never encounter anyone who is not within the charmed circle. But we want to help people grow in confidence about the connections that we believe exist between baking a cake and worshipping God; between sitting on a committee and saying a prayer. We want to find places for answering the questions that we suspect they are longing to ask. We will start with an unashamedly indulgent Wholeness Day, offering complementary therapies alongside the opportunity for quiet and for spiritual counsel. We will ask people to join working parties and look to find ways of connecting the redecoration of the downstairs loos with the God-given vocation to service. We will look at how people are welcomed into St Peter's and enabled to feel at home and part of our life. We will look afresh at home groups, more regular study, pastoral visitors, and a rule of life for time-poor people.

And because we believe that formation is never undertaken for its own sake we will also place a new emphasis on the transformation of God's world. We will continue to support charities to whom we can make a real difference both through financial aid and, ideally, through recruiting volunteers. We will seek out those of our neighbours who are isolated and alone and invite them in. We will remember our responsibility to Belgravia's unseen army of domestic staff. We will build our relationship with St Joseph's Humabo. We will demonstrate our care for God's creation by conducting an environmental audit of our plant. And we will continue to write in support of prisoners of conscience identified by Amnesty International.

Lastly, we will not neglect this building and will continue to develop it so that it can play its proper part in our mission of formation and transformation. We will build a proper ramp to the portico to enable access for all. We will refurbish the Meeting and Committee Rooms and their ancillary facilities. We will refurbish this Parish Hall, creating on its south side a room that can be a base for work with the young. We will make the Welcome Room live up to its sobriquet as a cafe-style gathering space adjacent to the church itself, and easily accessible from the road, with its own toilet facility. We will attend to the office space and common parts so that the inheritance of twenty years ago and longer is preserved, enhanced, and handed on as a living legacy.

I have made many mistakes since I arrived here, but I have learned a great deal and have grown immeasurably. I believe that similar learning and growth awaits us as a parish and I look forward to it with eagerness. 'Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward'. Those words, spoken to a people who were heading towards an unimaginable future, are inscribed on our doors. They were the rallying cry of the generation that raised St Peter's from the ashes twenty years ago, just as they had been the rallying cry of my great predecessor George Wilkinson, when he was Vicar here in the late nineteenth century. They can be ours today. We go forward, confident in the God who is faithful. Thank you.

Sunday 6 May 2012, Dedication Festival

Twenty years ago the Bishop of London re-consecrated St. Peter's Eaton Square. He went around this building, raised marvellously from the ashes of the fire that had destroyed it, and in every place around the walls where a candle burns today, he inscribed the sign of the cross with the Oil of Chrism. He anointed the walls and thus consecrated this space to God.

It is this anointing that makes this building a church: not the cross hanging over me, not the altar or the font, not the hymn books and Bibles, and not the vestments and candles. The sign of the cross, inscribed in oil around our walls, marks out this plot as a sacred place. It is a place where worship is offered, prayers are said, and where, in the celebration of the sacraments, God is realized for and among his people. It is a piece of the creation given back to its creator.

Of course, worship can be offered anywhere, prayers can be said anywhere, and the sacraments can be celebrated anywhere. And they are, from boardrooms to battlefields. God is not confined to these walls; God is not contained within them; nor, in any sense, is God limited by them. But out of love God's people choose to reserve this small part of the face of the Earth for God, a small part of the face of the Earth reserved for the one who sustains the Earth out of love. Set apart for God, this place is a holy place.

The St. Peter's consecration crosses have formed the backdrop to the logo that we have used for several months in preparation for this celebration. It is on the front of your service sheets today. It ought to be a resonant image for each of us. It is not just our church that is marked with it. Every baptized person is marked with it, marked with the cross, and what is true of a building thus marked is true also of a person thus marked. Of course, any person - any person - can worship God (that is, give worth to God); any person can pray; any person can make God real for another; and many people who are not baptized do all those things and do them effectively and sacrificially. But we who are baptized, we who are inscribed with the sign of the cross, are, like this building, pieces of the creation given back to their creator. We are marked out to be spaces for God, spaces in which and from which God is offered to the world. A 'reserved' sign hangs over each of us as surely as it does over this building. We are made of the same stuff as the dust of the Earth. We are, quite literally, a part of the Earth, a part of the Earth reserved for God's presence and for God's action.

I have said often that the purpose of St Peter's is the formation of disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of God's world, and disciples share a vocation with the buildings in which they worship. Disciples are consecrated to holiness. Twenty years after the re-consecration of the building the vocation to which we who have inherited the building are called is this: the  vocation to holiness, conspicuous holiness. That does not mean conspicuous religiosity, for which I have remarkably little time. Holiness implies a discipline of prayer, a habit of worship, and an irresistible tendency to make God and God's love real to and for others. Holiness means a transparency to the love of God. When strangers enter this building for the first time they often gasp in awe. The building speaks of God. We might ask ourselves whether strangers encountering us for the first time have the same response. You can judge a person by his friends. What sort of God do we appear to be the friends of?

Last October we reminded ourselves that the baptized are those who have responded to Christ's offer of love; last February we reminded ourselves that the baptized are those who have been redeemed by Christ; today we remind ourselves that the baptized are those who have been released by Christ: released to carry the God they encounter within these consecrated walls to the world outside them, released to be Christ's presence in that world, released for world-changing holiness. We are released to be pure, to be meek, to be merciful, to seek righteousness, to make peace.

'Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward'. Those words have inspired the generations who have worshipped in this place for nearly two hundred years. We are called forward, to be living stones, to be a consecrated race, to be a holy people. To the One who calls us be glory in the Church and in all creation, now and in all eternity. Amen.