Anna has chosen an auspicious day on which to be baptized. It’s not just that her parents had an hour’s extra sleep last night, fortifying them for the rigours of the day. It’s not just that it’s the fourteenth anniversary of Israel’s historic peace treaty with Jordan. It’s not even that it’s the birthday of Domenico Scarlatti, Francois Mitterand and Hilary Clinton. No: it’s that it’s the Sunday before the release of the twenty-second James Bond film.
This might appear an odd coincidence for a Baptismal sermon to celebrate, even a sermon preached in a parish on the borders of which Ian Fleming once lived. For James Bond is licensed to kill rather than to preach; he’s more likely to fire a Beretta than wear a biretta; his taste is for vodka Martini rather than Eucharistic wine. James Bond is not Jesus Christ. But those who follow Jesus Christ have to accept that many more people are likely to go and see the new Bond than they are to go to Church. So we have two options. Either we ignore Bond, or we consider what he might have to teach us, and whether he and we might make common cause for the Gospel. It’s not a trivial or shamelessly populist task: it’s the same as that attempted by the young Galilean teacher who sat down with the crowds and talked about sowers and travellers and wedding feasts, the occupations and amusements of his day.
James Bond has shown remarkable resilience and remarkable adaptability: the first novel was published more than fifty years ago. In the decades since Bond has not stood still. Fleming originally conceived him as a veteran of Second World War military intelligence. His early adventures were peppered with references to the war years; his early enemies were renegade Nazis who had survived. As time went by he became a Cold Warrior; after the fall of the Berlin Wall he turned his attention to the power vacuum that its fall brought about. More recently he has fought the sinister power of the international media and the threat of terrorism. He has never been trapped by yesterday’s battles; he has never aged; he perpetually dons his dinner jacket, picks up his shoulder holster, flirts with Moneypenny and, with Q’s latest gadget in his pocket, he strolls into the crisis of the moment.
Bond’s surroundings change, his challenges change, but he is the same yesterday, today and for ever. And in his missions we catch a glimpse of our mission. The Gospel is the same yesterday, today and for ever, but those to whom it is preached are not. Anna will do most of her growing up in the second decade of the twenty-first century, not the third and not the fourth. It is to her, a child of this time that the Church must learn to speak. This does not mean the Church deserting her foundational traditions. That would be the equivalent of Bond suddenly drinking Pina Colada. But she must find a vocabulary for the age, interpret the tradition for the moment, and accept that the world in which God is active may have changed while she has not. Bond reminds us what it is to be incarnate, enfleshed in a particular place at a particular time, and that is a skill and grace that the Church must re-learn.
James Bond has a huge relish for life and for living. I’m not defending his sexual mores (not that I’m sure he has any), his general attitude towards women, or his apparent indifference to killing. But a flick through Fleming’s novels makes it clear why they were such a hit in 50s austerity Britain. Bond enjoys life. The stories are awash with vintage champagne, served always with mounds of fine caviar and hot toast. They luxuriate in the details of Bond’s cotton shirts and linen suits; they linger over the perfection of his Aston Martin.
Paeans to materialism? Of course. But we live in a London borough whose streets are soon to be filled with buses bearing the slogan ‘There is probably no God. So relax and enjoy your life’. Obviously, believing there probably is a God means not enjoying it. We are poor advertisements for faith if our faces are long and our attitudes sanctimonious. I’m absolutely not encouraging an irritating cheerfulness among Christians. But I am encouraging a little less defensiveness and anxiety. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy and peace. Unsurprising, really, as we’re the ones who have in Christ stumbled across the meaning of life.
And lastly, we are all so inured to James Bond’s lifestyle that its frankly rather hazardous quality goes unnoticed. In every film, in every book, he flings himself into the teeth of whatever’s coming at him. It may be the Communist agency SMERSH; it may be Blofeld, armed with military tunic and fluffy cat; it may be Jaws, or Oddjob, or the man with the golden gun. Whichever, Bond scarcely thinks twice, plunging in without a thought for his own safety. Why does he do it? Why not retire to play golf and write his memoirs? Well, Fleming writes this of one of Bond’s early interviews with M: ‘he sat down and looked across into the tranquil, lined sailor’s face that he loved, honoured and obeyed’. Bond’s motivation is his profound loyalty and his deep love for his service and his country. He is passionately, recklessly devoted to these causes, to which he has pledged his life and allegiance.
Perhaps this sermon should carry the sort of warning that we all remember from childhood: don’t try this at home. I’m not asking anyone to go out and start behaving like 007, and certainly not on a Sunday in Belgravia. But if as a community the Church exhibited just a little of that exuberant spark, just a little of that relentless fire, just think what she might achieve for her Lord.
Rooted in tradition but living in the present, relishing life, and giving everything for the great cause: true of James Bond and, I would have thought, not a bad prescription for the Church into which Anna is about to be baptized. On this her baptism day my hope is that those three thoughts offer her (and all of us) a measure of comfort; as it were, a quantum of solace. Amen.
Sunday, 26 October 2008
Monday, 20 October 2008
Sunday 19 October 2008, 22 after Trinity
‘We will not go to Canossa’ Otto von Bismarck told the Reichstag in 1872. He was not discussing his colleagues’ travel plans, but was referring to a journey made to a northern Italian city eight hundred years earlier. The Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, had very rashly claimed for his Imperial throne the right to invest all the bishops of his Empire. For this trespass on the rights of the Church, Pope Gregory VII excommunicated him.
Henry made his way to the fortress at Canossa in January 1077, dressed as a penitent in a hair shirt. When he arrived the Pope made him wait outside in the snow for three days before receiving him with a kiss and accepting his penance. Canossa was thus the moment when temporal power accepted that it had no authority over spiritual power. It is a seminal moment in European history, comparable to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon or the Paris mob’s storming of the Bastille.
Bismarck’s successors, the statesmen and stateswomen of modern Europe and of the United States, will in recent weeks have been less occupied with ecclesiastical matters than was he when he addressed the Reichstag. Still, the next time they meet they might well consider whether Canossa would be an appropriate venue for their meeting. For in these last weeks we have witnessed an encounter which may prove to be every bit as significant as was that of Gregory and Henry. The encounter has changed geopolitical relationships in ways which seemed unimaginable only a few weeks ago. It may have marked the end of an era. It will almost certainly shape the one to come. It’s just that the parties to the encounter are different. At Canossa the Empire met the Church. In October 2008 the private sphere met the public sphere; the bankers met the elected leaders. And exactly who prevailed is not yet clear.
‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s’. Henry’s submission to Gregory allowed prince and prelate to put Christ’s command into effect. By making Henry wait in the January cold Gregory punctured the medieval obsession with the all-encompassing near divinity of emperors and their courts. The reforms of his pontificate were directed to the development of critical distance between the spheres of influence dominated by church and state. The great irony is that - arguably - it was this division that would in later centuries allow the state to insist on the rights of religious minorities and, more recently, of people of no faith. Modern secularism and contemporary multiculturalism have their roots in the reforms of a medieval Pope. It’s an irony probably lost on Richard Dawkins.
So does the history of Canossa have anything to teach us about the encounter between public and private through which we are living? The banks’ acceptance of subsidies can be caricatured as Henry-like, and the politicians’ use of public funds as Gregory-like. And just as the thirteenth century did not witness the development of either theocracy or atheist autocracy the twenty-first is unlikely to herald an era of either centralized control or unfettered laissez-faire.
But perhaps it will see a new balance emerge, as it did in the era after Canossa. Perhaps it will see more effective regulation and more effective control of excess. And perhaps that balance will set the banks free to serve the economy in ways which at present they cannot; perhaps such balance will also prevent politicians from promising a cost-free, ever more affluent future, in which the value of property will rise in perpetuity and the earth’s resources will be deemed inexhaustible.
If we are at the beginning of a new chapter of Western history, at a new balance between the modern powers, then what can the Church contribute to the narrative? Ought she content herself with Gregory’s sphere, the post-Canossa settlement which concentrates on the things that are God’s and leaves the emperor to the mercies of Darling, Paulson and the bankers? I suggest she cannot. For at the heart of whatever economy emerges from the trauma will still be human beings, bringing with them human needs and human emotions, human vices and human virtues.
‘A modern market economy cannot do without a measure of moral corrosion’ writes John Gray, emeritus professor at the LSE. Greed and envy are powerful economic stimulants in the marketplace; thrift and caution are not. How does the Church speak into the balance? As public and private adjust to a new relationship she must counsel and warn, advise and admonish, prophesy and proclaim, recalling always that God’s people are more than customers and investors. The denarius, of course, bore the image and likeness of Caesar; God’s people bear the image and likeness of God.
And God’s people are citizens not just of Europe or the United States. They are citizens of God’s kingdom. Theophan the Recluse writes of the transplanting of humankind’s treasure and of humankind’s hopes, a transplanting from the temporary realm to the eternal. This ‘makes man essentially a pilgrim on earth, seeking his fatherland, the heavenly Jerusalem’. And the heavenly Jerusalem of which Theophan writes is a kingdom which has no market but that of grace freely given; that has no economy but that of salvation; that has no law but that of love. Only through the recalling of that citizenship can we gain a proper perspective on our contemporary way to Canossa. Amen.
Sunday 19 October 2008,
22 after Trinity,
Matthew 22: 15-22
Henry made his way to the fortress at Canossa in January 1077, dressed as a penitent in a hair shirt. When he arrived the Pope made him wait outside in the snow for three days before receiving him with a kiss and accepting his penance. Canossa was thus the moment when temporal power accepted that it had no authority over spiritual power. It is a seminal moment in European history, comparable to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon or the Paris mob’s storming of the Bastille.
Bismarck’s successors, the statesmen and stateswomen of modern Europe and of the United States, will in recent weeks have been less occupied with ecclesiastical matters than was he when he addressed the Reichstag. Still, the next time they meet they might well consider whether Canossa would be an appropriate venue for their meeting. For in these last weeks we have witnessed an encounter which may prove to be every bit as significant as was that of Gregory and Henry. The encounter has changed geopolitical relationships in ways which seemed unimaginable only a few weeks ago. It may have marked the end of an era. It will almost certainly shape the one to come. It’s just that the parties to the encounter are different. At Canossa the Empire met the Church. In October 2008 the private sphere met the public sphere; the bankers met the elected leaders. And exactly who prevailed is not yet clear.
‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s’. Henry’s submission to Gregory allowed prince and prelate to put Christ’s command into effect. By making Henry wait in the January cold Gregory punctured the medieval obsession with the all-encompassing near divinity of emperors and their courts. The reforms of his pontificate were directed to the development of critical distance between the spheres of influence dominated by church and state. The great irony is that - arguably - it was this division that would in later centuries allow the state to insist on the rights of religious minorities and, more recently, of people of no faith. Modern secularism and contemporary multiculturalism have their roots in the reforms of a medieval Pope. It’s an irony probably lost on Richard Dawkins.
So does the history of Canossa have anything to teach us about the encounter between public and private through which we are living? The banks’ acceptance of subsidies can be caricatured as Henry-like, and the politicians’ use of public funds as Gregory-like. And just as the thirteenth century did not witness the development of either theocracy or atheist autocracy the twenty-first is unlikely to herald an era of either centralized control or unfettered laissez-faire.
But perhaps it will see a new balance emerge, as it did in the era after Canossa. Perhaps it will see more effective regulation and more effective control of excess. And perhaps that balance will set the banks free to serve the economy in ways which at present they cannot; perhaps such balance will also prevent politicians from promising a cost-free, ever more affluent future, in which the value of property will rise in perpetuity and the earth’s resources will be deemed inexhaustible.
If we are at the beginning of a new chapter of Western history, at a new balance between the modern powers, then what can the Church contribute to the narrative? Ought she content herself with Gregory’s sphere, the post-Canossa settlement which concentrates on the things that are God’s and leaves the emperor to the mercies of Darling, Paulson and the bankers? I suggest she cannot. For at the heart of whatever economy emerges from the trauma will still be human beings, bringing with them human needs and human emotions, human vices and human virtues.
‘A modern market economy cannot do without a measure of moral corrosion’ writes John Gray, emeritus professor at the LSE. Greed and envy are powerful economic stimulants in the marketplace; thrift and caution are not. How does the Church speak into the balance? As public and private adjust to a new relationship she must counsel and warn, advise and admonish, prophesy and proclaim, recalling always that God’s people are more than customers and investors. The denarius, of course, bore the image and likeness of Caesar; God’s people bear the image and likeness of God.
And God’s people are citizens not just of Europe or the United States. They are citizens of God’s kingdom. Theophan the Recluse writes of the transplanting of humankind’s treasure and of humankind’s hopes, a transplanting from the temporary realm to the eternal. This ‘makes man essentially a pilgrim on earth, seeking his fatherland, the heavenly Jerusalem’. And the heavenly Jerusalem of which Theophan writes is a kingdom which has no market but that of grace freely given; that has no economy but that of salvation; that has no law but that of love. Only through the recalling of that citizenship can we gain a proper perspective on our contemporary way to Canossa. Amen.
Sunday 19 October 2008,
22 after Trinity,
Matthew 22: 15-22
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
Harvest Thanksgiving and Giving Campaign Launch, Sunday 5 October 2008
Harvest Thanksgiving at St Peter’s Eaton Square,
Sunday 5 October 2008,
Address given by the Vicar at the Parish Eucharist
I have to own up to something of an internal tussle this morning, as I debated where I should address you from - behind a lectern or not behind a lectern. Those of you who are students of politics will know that in the last year or so whether or not to speak from behind a lectern has become a rather hot issue. Mr Cameron first came to prominence when he made a speech to his party’s conference in which he shunned the lectern and strode about the platform. It was such a good idea that his rival Mr Clegg addressed his party conference this year doing exactly the same thing. The following week the Prime Minister - declaring himself a serious man for serious times - stood very firmly behind a lectern to address the party faithful; and last week, not wishing to be outdone, Mr Cameron too retreated behind a lectern there to address the gathered flock.
This morning I have to address you in serious times on a serious matter and so I suppose - following conventional political wisdom - I ought to do so from behind a lectern because I have to talk to you about one of the things that we cannot talk about in church, which is money, and giving, and that, in this of all weeks, is a serious matter that needs serious attention. But my brothers and sisters I am not going to speak to you from behind a lectern - not because these are not serious matters to which I pay serious attention. They are, and I do, but because this is Harvest Thanksgiving, when the focus of our worship is on what we have been given; it’s on what God is doing here among us; what God’s purpose is for this community; what we are achieving on his behalf; and when I speak to you about those things I am not going to hide myself behind a lectern so to do, even if it means there is nothing between me and the rotten eggs that may follow. I am not going to speak behind a lectern because I want to celebrate, I want us to spend a moment or two thinking about what is God is doing with us and among us.
Let’s just pause for a moment and consider what it is that we give thanks for at Harvest Thanksgiving. We can try it this way, I suppose: please raise your right hand if you believe yourselves to be part of a decaying, defensive and dwindling community which is dying on the stem. I see no hands. The fact is that the growth of worship at this church continues, the trend that began under my illustrious predecessor and to which even I have not been able to put an end. More people are worshiping at St Peter’s today than there were two or three years ago. We are growing community - none of us, I hope, has a sense of our being a declining community. Please raise your right hand if you believe that the quality of music we offer or the quality of worship we offer here is sub-standard and dull and tawdry and boring. I see no hands. That is because we have in our midst some of the finest musicians in London. I know. I have worshipped in two of our neighbouring parishes in the last fortnight and the quality of the music that we offer here from Stephen and the 10 o’clock choir through to Andrew and Dan and the 11.15 choir leave other musicians in this Deanery and Diocese standing. We are blessed with an extraordinary quality in what we offer here Sunday by Sunday. Put your hand up please if you think that the school - that we founded and that we continue to support financially and through our time - is a school which deserves a place at the bottom of the bottom most league table. I see no hands, because our school is a vibrant, lively place that children like to attend and where the quality of learning and education is good and high. We are a growing community, we offer vibrant worship, we sponsor a good and lively school. Put your hand up if you find this a depressing building that’s dark and dusty and filled with unwanted clutter like some other churches you all have visited. It isn’t. It’s warm and it’s welcoming; it’s beautiful; it’s a place of tranquillity, and a place where it is possible to feel near to God. We are a growing community, a community that offers authentic and beautiful worship, we have a wonderful school, we have a marvellous building, all this we have to give thanks for at Harvest Thanksgiving.
But there is more because in twelve months time when I address you, I don’t want to be able to say, twelve months ago I spoke to you and today St Peter’s looks the same as it did then. We have plans for the parish, we have ambitions. We want to refurbish the public address system, so that at last you can all hear what is being said at the front. We want to kit the servers out in new albs, a closer look will reveal that the ones they are wearing more properly belong in a jumble sale than in this glorious building. Those are very internal matters. We don’t stop there. We want to send the young people of our parish on pilgrimage to Canterbury, to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Becket, and learn for themselves what it means to live a holy life. We want to send our teenagers to Taize (and bring them back again, or most of them at any rate), so that they can experience what it is to be part of a global church, a world wide Christian family. We want to build a school in Angola because we believe education is important, and we believe it should be shared. We want to partner the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a local charity which works with the poorest of the country’s poor. We don’t want to stand still and rest on our laurels: we want to grow and to build and to do more. And as I look at you, my brothers and sisters, I am more convinced than ever of what I said to the first PCC meeting I attended here, which is that I do not believe that there is anything that this community cannot achieve for God, if it is determined to do it.
That is why I am not going to retreat behind a lectern to talk to you about the financial problem that we have at the moment, because I am quite sure that once we think about it, once we focus on it, the problem will go. And the problem is quite simply this. If we are to keep going as we are now, next year, we need to raise an extra £30,000. Why? Because our utilities bills have gone up, because our insurance costs have gone up and because the costs of what we pay to the Diocese, the costs of belonging in the Church of England, have also gone up. Not because of profligacy or waste on our part, but because our bills have gone up and because we don’t expect to receive as much from giving this year as we had hoped to. We need to raise £30,000 extra just to stand still. If we want to do some of the things I have spoken about if we want to achieve some of our ambitions we need an extra £8,000. The target before us is to raise an extra £38,000 next year. I am well aware that in this of all weeks that sounds like a huge sum, but your PCC has thought about it in these terms. There are roughly 250 households associated with our parish. If every household in the parish was to look at what it gives at the moment week by week, and was to give £10 extra per month, then we would raise what we need - if the £10 was given through the Gift Aid system. Gift Aid is the Giving Plus system which means that Alistair Darling gives us money for free, if only we can be bothered to fill out the Gift Aid declaration form. £10 extra per family per month given through Gift Aid, £2.50 per family per week given through Gift Aid. £2.50 will almost buy you a tall latte in Starbucks; it will buy you I suppose almost a third of a bottle of Prosecco from Oddbins; it will almost hire you a James Bond movie for a week from Blockbuster Video. £2.50 will be beyond some of us but it will not be beyond all of us and, I dare to say, it will not be beyond most of us.
My brothers and sisters again raise your hands if you believe you are part of a community that is dying. We are not. We are eminently capable of doing this. At this time we are all thinking about what our commitments are: the global situation is making us all consider what we really value, where we really place worth, what we can really afford week by week. When you look at this building, at this community which welcomes you, when you think of our school, when you think of the music we offer here, I want to suggest that that £10 extra per family per month is easily achievable; that we will raise £38,000 and that in a year’s time we will have balanced our budget for next year, spent the extra we want to, and have grown our plans and ambitions accordingly.
In a few moments we are going to make Harvest offerings at the altar and as you come forward to bring up what represents your offering to God for this year, please think and pray about the extra that you can give, as a thanks for all we have received and to help us to continue to grow.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Sunday 5 October 2008,
Address given by the Vicar at the Parish Eucharist
I have to own up to something of an internal tussle this morning, as I debated where I should address you from - behind a lectern or not behind a lectern. Those of you who are students of politics will know that in the last year or so whether or not to speak from behind a lectern has become a rather hot issue. Mr Cameron first came to prominence when he made a speech to his party’s conference in which he shunned the lectern and strode about the platform. It was such a good idea that his rival Mr Clegg addressed his party conference this year doing exactly the same thing. The following week the Prime Minister - declaring himself a serious man for serious times - stood very firmly behind a lectern to address the party faithful; and last week, not wishing to be outdone, Mr Cameron too retreated behind a lectern there to address the gathered flock.
This morning I have to address you in serious times on a serious matter and so I suppose - following conventional political wisdom - I ought to do so from behind a lectern because I have to talk to you about one of the things that we cannot talk about in church, which is money, and giving, and that, in this of all weeks, is a serious matter that needs serious attention. But my brothers and sisters I am not going to speak to you from behind a lectern - not because these are not serious matters to which I pay serious attention. They are, and I do, but because this is Harvest Thanksgiving, when the focus of our worship is on what we have been given; it’s on what God is doing here among us; what God’s purpose is for this community; what we are achieving on his behalf; and when I speak to you about those things I am not going to hide myself behind a lectern so to do, even if it means there is nothing between me and the rotten eggs that may follow. I am not going to speak behind a lectern because I want to celebrate, I want us to spend a moment or two thinking about what is God is doing with us and among us.
Let’s just pause for a moment and consider what it is that we give thanks for at Harvest Thanksgiving. We can try it this way, I suppose: please raise your right hand if you believe yourselves to be part of a decaying, defensive and dwindling community which is dying on the stem. I see no hands. The fact is that the growth of worship at this church continues, the trend that began under my illustrious predecessor and to which even I have not been able to put an end. More people are worshiping at St Peter’s today than there were two or three years ago. We are growing community - none of us, I hope, has a sense of our being a declining community. Please raise your right hand if you believe that the quality of music we offer or the quality of worship we offer here is sub-standard and dull and tawdry and boring. I see no hands. That is because we have in our midst some of the finest musicians in London. I know. I have worshipped in two of our neighbouring parishes in the last fortnight and the quality of the music that we offer here from Stephen and the 10 o’clock choir through to Andrew and Dan and the 11.15 choir leave other musicians in this Deanery and Diocese standing. We are blessed with an extraordinary quality in what we offer here Sunday by Sunday. Put your hand up please if you think that the school - that we founded and that we continue to support financially and through our time - is a school which deserves a place at the bottom of the bottom most league table. I see no hands, because our school is a vibrant, lively place that children like to attend and where the quality of learning and education is good and high. We are a growing community, we offer vibrant worship, we sponsor a good and lively school. Put your hand up if you find this a depressing building that’s dark and dusty and filled with unwanted clutter like some other churches you all have visited. It isn’t. It’s warm and it’s welcoming; it’s beautiful; it’s a place of tranquillity, and a place where it is possible to feel near to God. We are a growing community, a community that offers authentic and beautiful worship, we have a wonderful school, we have a marvellous building, all this we have to give thanks for at Harvest Thanksgiving.
But there is more because in twelve months time when I address you, I don’t want to be able to say, twelve months ago I spoke to you and today St Peter’s looks the same as it did then. We have plans for the parish, we have ambitions. We want to refurbish the public address system, so that at last you can all hear what is being said at the front. We want to kit the servers out in new albs, a closer look will reveal that the ones they are wearing more properly belong in a jumble sale than in this glorious building. Those are very internal matters. We don’t stop there. We want to send the young people of our parish on pilgrimage to Canterbury, to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Becket, and learn for themselves what it means to live a holy life. We want to send our teenagers to Taize (and bring them back again, or most of them at any rate), so that they can experience what it is to be part of a global church, a world wide Christian family. We want to build a school in Angola because we believe education is important, and we believe it should be shared. We want to partner the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a local charity which works with the poorest of the country’s poor. We don’t want to stand still and rest on our laurels: we want to grow and to build and to do more. And as I look at you, my brothers and sisters, I am more convinced than ever of what I said to the first PCC meeting I attended here, which is that I do not believe that there is anything that this community cannot achieve for God, if it is determined to do it.
That is why I am not going to retreat behind a lectern to talk to you about the financial problem that we have at the moment, because I am quite sure that once we think about it, once we focus on it, the problem will go. And the problem is quite simply this. If we are to keep going as we are now, next year, we need to raise an extra £30,000. Why? Because our utilities bills have gone up, because our insurance costs have gone up and because the costs of what we pay to the Diocese, the costs of belonging in the Church of England, have also gone up. Not because of profligacy or waste on our part, but because our bills have gone up and because we don’t expect to receive as much from giving this year as we had hoped to. We need to raise £30,000 extra just to stand still. If we want to do some of the things I have spoken about if we want to achieve some of our ambitions we need an extra £8,000. The target before us is to raise an extra £38,000 next year. I am well aware that in this of all weeks that sounds like a huge sum, but your PCC has thought about it in these terms. There are roughly 250 households associated with our parish. If every household in the parish was to look at what it gives at the moment week by week, and was to give £10 extra per month, then we would raise what we need - if the £10 was given through the Gift Aid system. Gift Aid is the Giving Plus system which means that Alistair Darling gives us money for free, if only we can be bothered to fill out the Gift Aid declaration form. £10 extra per family per month given through Gift Aid, £2.50 per family per week given through Gift Aid. £2.50 will almost buy you a tall latte in Starbucks; it will buy you I suppose almost a third of a bottle of Prosecco from Oddbins; it will almost hire you a James Bond movie for a week from Blockbuster Video. £2.50 will be beyond some of us but it will not be beyond all of us and, I dare to say, it will not be beyond most of us.
My brothers and sisters again raise your hands if you believe you are part of a community that is dying. We are not. We are eminently capable of doing this. At this time we are all thinking about what our commitments are: the global situation is making us all consider what we really value, where we really place worth, what we can really afford week by week. When you look at this building, at this community which welcomes you, when you think of our school, when you think of the music we offer here, I want to suggest that that £10 extra per family per month is easily achievable; that we will raise £38,000 and that in a year’s time we will have balanced our budget for next year, spent the extra we want to, and have grown our plans and ambitions accordingly.
In a few moments we are going to make Harvest offerings at the altar and as you come forward to bring up what represents your offering to God for this year, please think and pray about the extra that you can give, as a thanks for all we have received and to help us to continue to grow.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
Sunday 28 September 2008, Michael and All Angels
‘You do not walk alone into the next life. With you walks your greatest friend, your guardian angel who was with you when you were born into the physical world and is with you now at the end of your earthly life’.
I quote from the homepage of the Psychics and Mediums Network, not because I am feeling the irresistible pull of the New Age but because the quote’s very existence is evidence for a hypothesis that I accept, that, in this irreligious age, angels are enjoying something of a renaissance.
They are to be found everywhere. Any Registry Office will tell you that among the most popular songs to which brides make their entrance is ‘Angels’, recorded by Robbie Williams in 1997. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide. And if musical popular culture does not convince you then perhaps visual popular culture will. Travel to Gateshead and you will see the country’s most famous and (to abuse a word) iconic piece of public art. It is Antony Gormley’s 1998 sculpture, ‘The Angel of the North’.
The sea of faith may have receded from our shores, but in its place the beating of angels’ wings resounds. Why? I will hazard three reasons for the popularity of angels and for the devotion they continue to inspire.
The first is that they bring a touch of mystery to a world which has a tendency to be information-laden, a tendency which has reached new heights in the last week. We are bombarded with data by countless media outlets: words, statistics, and images. The mention of angels brings blessed relief. They are other-worldly, ethereal, and transcendent.
The second is that they are highly personal. You can conceive of angels in any way you choose. Few will dare to correct you and tell you that your particular image of the angelic is misplaced or erroneous. So there is huge scope for the subjective imagination, for fantasy even. And the angel thus conceived will of course be your angel; your guardian indeed, your friend and your companion.
The third is that angels come doctrine-light. Conceiving of angels does not commit you to an institutional church, or to a church of any sort. It does not requite that you subscribe to any of the tiresome dogmas with which such churches have encumbered themselves – the Trinity, the Atonement, or the Ascension. Angels take their place on the pick-and-mix counter, along with crystals, copper bracelets and the Loch Ness Monster.
So what sort of response can or should we make to a culture apparently fascinated by angels, even if the angels by which it is fascinated are not recognizable to orthodox Christians?
One response, I suppose, would be to ignore the phenomenon and to concentrate on the Gospel we have received, leaving the psychic, Robbie Williams-humming, Antony Gormley-visiting hordes to stew in their ignorance. But you will have guessed that this would not be my preferred course. My preferred course would be to understand the longing for transcendence, for intimacy and for liberty that I believe the angel-fixation represents as nothing other than a contemporary version of the human longing for God, which is as old as history itself.
People yearn for mystery. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as roughly equivalent with someone you might meet in the pub, a wise soul who listens to our problems and looks kindly upon them. God is our friend, perpetually, to employ a modern cliché, ‘there for us’. Or, rather more traditionally, we present him still clinging to his cane and mortarboard, stern, disapproving, incapable of empathizing with our condition. God is the headmaster or, as Rowan Williams would have it, ‘the management’, perpetually out to trip us up and catch us out. Both presentations are useless. If God is the former, then we would be better off in the pub, where the beer is likely to be better; if God is the latter, then most of us already have to deal with tyrants domestic or professional, and don’t need to add more to the pantheon. Yet we are heirs of an apophatic tradition of spirituality, a tradition that insists that there is more that we cannot say about God than there is that we can say about him, a tradition that values silence rather than words and prayer rather than doctrine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their dose of the transcendent, or we have nothing to offer at all.
People yearn for intimacy. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as blandly accepting, meeting us where we are, understanding our frailties and failings, weeping over them, and loving us in spite of them. Or we present him as judging us, ruling on those frailties and failings, holding us to an impossible standard, condemning us to disappoint him eternally and offering us cold, impersonal justice. Again, both presentations are useless. Warm affirmation of who we already are is not all we need; neither is everlasting censure of who we have been. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which God was, God is and God is to come, a tradition in which God the Father loves us into being, God the Son shares our earthly life, and God the Holy Spirit promises to remake us in ways we cannot begin to imagine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their moments of intimacy and self-knowledge, or we have nothing to offer at all.
People yearn for liberty. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present a faith of positions and propositions, of claims and creeds. We enact incomprehensible liturgy dressed up with esoteric language and inaccessible rites, and appear an introspective community concerned only with our own survival. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which faith and liturgy, doctrine and worship have as their end the transformation of the world in which we are set. We seem to be prisoners of our faith; we are in fact the inheritors of a faith that may yet turn the world upside down; we serve a God whom to serve is perfect freedom. We indeed have something to offer those who look to angels for their liberty, or we have nothing to offer at all.
This is the God who I believe the angels still proclaim –a God of mystery, a God of intimacy and a God of liberty. This is the God we too must proclaim – or I fear that we in our way and our whole generation with us will be stuck, ‘loving angels instead’. Amen.
I quote from the homepage of the Psychics and Mediums Network, not because I am feeling the irresistible pull of the New Age but because the quote’s very existence is evidence for a hypothesis that I accept, that, in this irreligious age, angels are enjoying something of a renaissance.
They are to be found everywhere. Any Registry Office will tell you that among the most popular songs to which brides make their entrance is ‘Angels’, recorded by Robbie Williams in 1997. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide. And if musical popular culture does not convince you then perhaps visual popular culture will. Travel to Gateshead and you will see the country’s most famous and (to abuse a word) iconic piece of public art. It is Antony Gormley’s 1998 sculpture, ‘The Angel of the North’.
The sea of faith may have receded from our shores, but in its place the beating of angels’ wings resounds. Why? I will hazard three reasons for the popularity of angels and for the devotion they continue to inspire.
The first is that they bring a touch of mystery to a world which has a tendency to be information-laden, a tendency which has reached new heights in the last week. We are bombarded with data by countless media outlets: words, statistics, and images. The mention of angels brings blessed relief. They are other-worldly, ethereal, and transcendent.
The second is that they are highly personal. You can conceive of angels in any way you choose. Few will dare to correct you and tell you that your particular image of the angelic is misplaced or erroneous. So there is huge scope for the subjective imagination, for fantasy even. And the angel thus conceived will of course be your angel; your guardian indeed, your friend and your companion.
The third is that angels come doctrine-light. Conceiving of angels does not commit you to an institutional church, or to a church of any sort. It does not requite that you subscribe to any of the tiresome dogmas with which such churches have encumbered themselves – the Trinity, the Atonement, or the Ascension. Angels take their place on the pick-and-mix counter, along with crystals, copper bracelets and the Loch Ness Monster.
So what sort of response can or should we make to a culture apparently fascinated by angels, even if the angels by which it is fascinated are not recognizable to orthodox Christians?
One response, I suppose, would be to ignore the phenomenon and to concentrate on the Gospel we have received, leaving the psychic, Robbie Williams-humming, Antony Gormley-visiting hordes to stew in their ignorance. But you will have guessed that this would not be my preferred course. My preferred course would be to understand the longing for transcendence, for intimacy and for liberty that I believe the angel-fixation represents as nothing other than a contemporary version of the human longing for God, which is as old as history itself.
People yearn for mystery. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as roughly equivalent with someone you might meet in the pub, a wise soul who listens to our problems and looks kindly upon them. God is our friend, perpetually, to employ a modern cliché, ‘there for us’. Or, rather more traditionally, we present him still clinging to his cane and mortarboard, stern, disapproving, incapable of empathizing with our condition. God is the headmaster or, as Rowan Williams would have it, ‘the management’, perpetually out to trip us up and catch us out. Both presentations are useless. If God is the former, then we would be better off in the pub, where the beer is likely to be better; if God is the latter, then most of us already have to deal with tyrants domestic or professional, and don’t need to add more to the pantheon. Yet we are heirs of an apophatic tradition of spirituality, a tradition that insists that there is more that we cannot say about God than there is that we can say about him, a tradition that values silence rather than words and prayer rather than doctrine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their dose of the transcendent, or we have nothing to offer at all.
People yearn for intimacy. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present God as blandly accepting, meeting us where we are, understanding our frailties and failings, weeping over them, and loving us in spite of them. Or we present him as judging us, ruling on those frailties and failings, holding us to an impossible standard, condemning us to disappoint him eternally and offering us cold, impersonal justice. Again, both presentations are useless. Warm affirmation of who we already are is not all we need; neither is everlasting censure of who we have been. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which God was, God is and God is to come, a tradition in which God the Father loves us into being, God the Son shares our earthly life, and God the Holy Spirit promises to remake us in ways we cannot begin to imagine. We have something to offer those who look to angels for their moments of intimacy and self-knowledge, or we have nothing to offer at all.
People yearn for liberty. All too often we serve up a vision of God which does not answer that yearning. We present a faith of positions and propositions, of claims and creeds. We enact incomprehensible liturgy dressed up with esoteric language and inaccessible rites, and appear an introspective community concerned only with our own survival. Yet we are heirs of a tradition in which faith and liturgy, doctrine and worship have as their end the transformation of the world in which we are set. We seem to be prisoners of our faith; we are in fact the inheritors of a faith that may yet turn the world upside down; we serve a God whom to serve is perfect freedom. We indeed have something to offer those who look to angels for their liberty, or we have nothing to offer at all.
This is the God who I believe the angels still proclaim –a God of mystery, a God of intimacy and a God of liberty. This is the God we too must proclaim – or I fear that we in our way and our whole generation with us will be stuck, ‘loving angels instead’. Amen.
Monday, 21 July 2008
Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 20 July 2008
‘What are the symptoms, by which one may judge most fairly, whether or no a nation, as such, is becoming alienated from God and Christ? And what are the particular duties of sincere Christians, whose lot is cast by Divine Providence in a time of such dire calamity?’
I doubt that any sermon preached in England this morning will be remembered twelve months from now. Preachers’ words are rarely milestones or historic turning-points. Yet last week the Church of England’s Calendar remembered a sermon, a sermon preached 175 years ago. On July 14 1833 John Keble ascended the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford, to deliver the Assize Sermon. His words on the theme National Apostasy, with some of which I began, have generally been regarded as the launch-point of the Oxford Movement, and can fairly be said to have changed the face of the Church.
Keble’s world was self-evidently very different from our world, and it is hard for a liberal-minded citizen of our pluralist culture to sympathize with his outrage at some of the societal changes that prompted his sermon. These included moves towards Roman Catholic emancipation and towards the admission of non-conformists to Parliament. A creature of his time, Keble could detect in these only attacks on the Church he loved, the Church he believed to the successor of the Church of the Apostles. What he perceived as the State’s willingness to diminish and marginalize an institution of Apostolic foundation he diagnosed as symptomatic of national apostasy. England was becoming faithless.
Thus was conceived the principal cause of the Oxford Movement: the re-assertion of the Church’s fundamental independence from the State, and its re-awakening to its roots in ancient and undivided Christendom rather than in Reformation England. This re-assertion and re-awakening was timely and welcome and its effects thoroughgoing: they are still visible in this very building in the extension and adornment of the east end, carried out late in the nineteenth century, an attempt visibly to re-connect the Ecclesia Anglicana with the historic life-stream of the universal Church. The Oxford Movement was a moment of confident revival, of the sort that many would like to see in global Anglicanism today.
Yet there is a cost to such moments, to moments when the Church defines herself in opposition to the world. Whenever the Church believes she has uncovered her raison d’etre (whether in her apostolic heritage or in the words of Scripture) she turns her back on the community which she exists to serve. Her new-found confidence and freshly-discovered self-reliance breed a self-sufficient complacency that is ultimately destructive. Early enthusiasm turns to unthinking certainty and bold innovation to soulless repetition. The catholic ceremonial which once offered the worshipper a dramatic glimpse of the world to come becomes instead a tired ritual of this one; the word of God which once spoke liberation to its hearer becomes instead the dead letter of another age. Churches cling onto what once served them well, and they become refuges from the world rather than places of transformation for the world.
So what is to be made of Keble’s sermon? He saw a nation losing faith in its Church; what your preacher sees today is a Church losing faith in its nation, a Church that is trapped in her own self-perpetuation, a Church that has become a refuge for those who do not like the nation, a Church that does not like what the modern word has brought. In no other place in twenty-first century Britain is it considered legitimate (indeed appropriate) to discriminate against people on the grounds of their gender or sexual orientation. We at last (thank God!) inhabit a culture in which such discrimination is as unacceptable as was that on grounds of race a generation ago. By colluding with it in the Church we reinforce our ghetto appearance and our ghetto mentality: it is us who are right; it is them out there who are not.
Keble argued that the Church must not follow slavishly the beliefs and behaviours of the apostate society in which it is set. He was right. But God’s saving action is not limited to (or by) his Church, however rooted it may be in the apostolic tradition or however wrapped up it may be in Scriptural authority. Truth makes herself known through the labours of theologians, yes, but also through every scholarly discipline; through public worship, yes but also through private prayer; through the debates of Synods and councils, yes, but also through public discourse and private conversation. Sometimes the Church needs to catch up to where society has already arrived. That may be a sobering reality, but it is one that is entirely consonant with a doctrine of a sovereign God of limitless creative freedom and boundless loving resourcefulness.
There is much in society of which the Church must be critical if she is to be faithful to her Lord: omnipresent pornography, rapacious greed, rampant inequality, universal commercialism, the naked exploitation and brutal oppression of God’s children. But when she shuts her eyes to the common values that unite the nation (and tolerance and equal treatment are among these) then she loses all credibility and denies herself a place at the table. When the Church discriminates in its ordered life which is apostate – Church or State? No one will listen to a self-sufficient sect, a ghetto church. It is time for us to re-assert our faith in the nation we serve as the place where God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness must be built.
‘I do not see’ said Keble ‘how any person can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolical Church in these realms’. Perhaps the Apostolical Church needs to give similar devotion to the cause of discovering what God is doing in the nation; perhaps she needs humbly to learn from what she discovers; so that then she can be the agent of its Godly transformation. Amen.
I doubt that any sermon preached in England this morning will be remembered twelve months from now. Preachers’ words are rarely milestones or historic turning-points. Yet last week the Church of England’s Calendar remembered a sermon, a sermon preached 175 years ago. On July 14 1833 John Keble ascended the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford, to deliver the Assize Sermon. His words on the theme National Apostasy, with some of which I began, have generally been regarded as the launch-point of the Oxford Movement, and can fairly be said to have changed the face of the Church.
Keble’s world was self-evidently very different from our world, and it is hard for a liberal-minded citizen of our pluralist culture to sympathize with his outrage at some of the societal changes that prompted his sermon. These included moves towards Roman Catholic emancipation and towards the admission of non-conformists to Parliament. A creature of his time, Keble could detect in these only attacks on the Church he loved, the Church he believed to the successor of the Church of the Apostles. What he perceived as the State’s willingness to diminish and marginalize an institution of Apostolic foundation he diagnosed as symptomatic of national apostasy. England was becoming faithless.
Thus was conceived the principal cause of the Oxford Movement: the re-assertion of the Church’s fundamental independence from the State, and its re-awakening to its roots in ancient and undivided Christendom rather than in Reformation England. This re-assertion and re-awakening was timely and welcome and its effects thoroughgoing: they are still visible in this very building in the extension and adornment of the east end, carried out late in the nineteenth century, an attempt visibly to re-connect the Ecclesia Anglicana with the historic life-stream of the universal Church. The Oxford Movement was a moment of confident revival, of the sort that many would like to see in global Anglicanism today.
Yet there is a cost to such moments, to moments when the Church defines herself in opposition to the world. Whenever the Church believes she has uncovered her raison d’etre (whether in her apostolic heritage or in the words of Scripture) she turns her back on the community which she exists to serve. Her new-found confidence and freshly-discovered self-reliance breed a self-sufficient complacency that is ultimately destructive. Early enthusiasm turns to unthinking certainty and bold innovation to soulless repetition. The catholic ceremonial which once offered the worshipper a dramatic glimpse of the world to come becomes instead a tired ritual of this one; the word of God which once spoke liberation to its hearer becomes instead the dead letter of another age. Churches cling onto what once served them well, and they become refuges from the world rather than places of transformation for the world.
So what is to be made of Keble’s sermon? He saw a nation losing faith in its Church; what your preacher sees today is a Church losing faith in its nation, a Church that is trapped in her own self-perpetuation, a Church that has become a refuge for those who do not like the nation, a Church that does not like what the modern word has brought. In no other place in twenty-first century Britain is it considered legitimate (indeed appropriate) to discriminate against people on the grounds of their gender or sexual orientation. We at last (thank God!) inhabit a culture in which such discrimination is as unacceptable as was that on grounds of race a generation ago. By colluding with it in the Church we reinforce our ghetto appearance and our ghetto mentality: it is us who are right; it is them out there who are not.
Keble argued that the Church must not follow slavishly the beliefs and behaviours of the apostate society in which it is set. He was right. But God’s saving action is not limited to (or by) his Church, however rooted it may be in the apostolic tradition or however wrapped up it may be in Scriptural authority. Truth makes herself known through the labours of theologians, yes, but also through every scholarly discipline; through public worship, yes but also through private prayer; through the debates of Synods and councils, yes, but also through public discourse and private conversation. Sometimes the Church needs to catch up to where society has already arrived. That may be a sobering reality, but it is one that is entirely consonant with a doctrine of a sovereign God of limitless creative freedom and boundless loving resourcefulness.
There is much in society of which the Church must be critical if she is to be faithful to her Lord: omnipresent pornography, rapacious greed, rampant inequality, universal commercialism, the naked exploitation and brutal oppression of God’s children. But when she shuts her eyes to the common values that unite the nation (and tolerance and equal treatment are among these) then she loses all credibility and denies herself a place at the table. When the Church discriminates in its ordered life which is apostate – Church or State? No one will listen to a self-sufficient sect, a ghetto church. It is time for us to re-assert our faith in the nation we serve as the place where God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness must be built.
‘I do not see’ said Keble ‘how any person can devote himself too entirely to the cause of the Apostolical Church in these realms’. Perhaps the Apostolical Church needs to give similar devotion to the cause of discovering what God is doing in the nation; perhaps she needs humbly to learn from what she discovers; so that then she can be the agent of its Godly transformation. Amen.
Monday, 7 July 2008
Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 6 July 2008
‘The bishop’s whole role as bishop makes no sense apart from his role as the one through whom all divisions are transcended. His primary function is always to make the catholicity of the Church reveal itself in a certain place’.
Those are the words of the Eastern theologian John Zizioulas, and they are a timely call to our Church.
For last weekend the Global Anglican Future Conference drew to a conclusion in Jerusalem. On its agenda was the ministry of bishops. This weekend the General Synod of the Church of England is meeting in York. On its agenda is the ministry of bishops. The GAFCON delegates debated what they describe as the ‘false Gospel’ of the North American bishops. The Synod representatives in York will debate the ordination of women as bishops in our own Church.
So what are bishops – those hapless individuals whose ministry is at the heart of such fierce debate – what are bishops actually for? Their role has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times and can barely resemble that exercised by those who first bore the title in cities around the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago. We expect a contemporary English bishop to be a manager of staff, a tribunal chair, an ambassador for a brand, a master of communication, a mediator, a strategist and diplomat. We expect him to be as at ease with schoolchildren as he is with captains of industry; we expect him to pastor his clergy and to appear on radio phone-ins. We expect him to be a person of profound faith and prayer, and at the same time to be prepared to put on his Wellington boots and baptize in the village duck-pond without so much as a grimace.
Ours is not the first generation to create its own expectations of the ministry of the bishop, and it will not be the last. Yet we must recognize that much of this is culturally-conditioned and transient: a few years hence we will doubtless look for different qualities in our bishops. What will not change is their ministry’s essence: episkope, or oversight, which has two vital dimensions.
First, our bishops occupy a historic office that has its origins in the earliest days of the Christian Church. Only the bishop ordains priests and deacons. Only the bishops ordain other bishops. Through this ordered pattern of episkope the bishop links us to our ancient roots in Canterbury, Rome and Jerusalem and is thus the touchstone of our ecclesial authenticity. Without the bishop we might well be a Christian church meeting in Eaton Square in 2008; because of the bishop we believe ourselves to be a local manifestation of the church, the church of Jesus Christ, the church of Peter and Thomas, the church of Gregory and Augustine, the church of Laud and Cranmer, the church of Richard Hooker and Michael Ramsey.
Secondly, the bishop oversees not only the Church’s ordered life but also the deposit of faith which is entrusted to it in every generation. He teaches and upholds the historic gospel: both the Scriptures and the doctrines of the Creeds to which, vitally for Anglicans, the pages of Scripture bear witness. This inheritance of faith and order the bishop hands on to those who come after him.
And the genius of episcopacy is that locally this inheritance always rests not with a committee or a handbook but with the bishop of the diocese. As we believe God to be one and undivided so we believe Christ to be one and undivided; as we believe his Church to be one and undivided so we Episcopal Churches have vested our life and our faith in one ordained to receive our life and our faith and to preserve and proclaim them.
It is only when we recall the responsibilities of episkope and where we place them that we can consider the debates of this week.
So what of Synod and the women bishops’ debate? The Church has already affirmed that there can be no theological objection to a Church which ordains women as priests proceeding to ordain them as bishops. The question is what provision should be made for those who cannot in conscience accept their oversight. My view is that any such provision must fall short of legislative provision. We simply cannot create a situation in which the life and faith of the Church is vested in a bishop whose Episcopal ordination can be ignored or disbelieved by some. If we do that then we destroy our catholicity; we destroy the claim we make that Christ’s Church is fully realized locally in the office and presence of the diocesan bishop.
And what of GAFCON and its Jerusalem Declaration? This first sets out some principles for which its members wish to campaign within the Communion. Some of us may find these principles disagreeable, but there is no shortage in history of groups publishing manifestoes: this parish has signed up to one or two in its lifetime. But it also sets out a methodology for action in pursuit of its principles. It has created a Primates Council which will presume to classify some churches or congregations as doctrinally sound and ideologically acceptable, and some as not, and it reserves to itself the right to intervene in the life of provinces and dioceses on behalf of those churches or congregations of which it approves.
This I find scandalous, as scandalous as continuing with an episcopate which is the preserve of men only or in which legislation is passed enabling some bishops to be regarded as less than bishops by some of the faithful. Subvert a local bishop’s oversight; introduce bishops from elsewhere to pronounce on the authenticity of his actions and to recruit an opposing following, and again we destroy our catholicity. We are no longer one church, under the oversight of one bishop.
The great irony in all this is that Jesus Christ chose to entrust his legacy to a group of twelve men who were, on the face of it, not up to the task. To this unreliable bunch he trusted everything: yet we are utterly unable to trust one another. We must have laws to protect our consciences because we cannot trust our fellow believers to do so; we must bring bishops from across the globe to care for us because we cannot trust our diocesans to do so. In our inability to trust I believe we betray Christ and hand him over to his enemies all over again.
‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn’.
Children calling to one another in the market place. Christ’s words echo down the centuries, and are spoken to us as surely and as sharply as they were to his first hearers. Amen.
Matthew 11: 16-19; 25-end.
Those are the words of the Eastern theologian John Zizioulas, and they are a timely call to our Church.
For last weekend the Global Anglican Future Conference drew to a conclusion in Jerusalem. On its agenda was the ministry of bishops. This weekend the General Synod of the Church of England is meeting in York. On its agenda is the ministry of bishops. The GAFCON delegates debated what they describe as the ‘false Gospel’ of the North American bishops. The Synod representatives in York will debate the ordination of women as bishops in our own Church.
So what are bishops – those hapless individuals whose ministry is at the heart of such fierce debate – what are bishops actually for? Their role has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times and can barely resemble that exercised by those who first bore the title in cities around the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago. We expect a contemporary English bishop to be a manager of staff, a tribunal chair, an ambassador for a brand, a master of communication, a mediator, a strategist and diplomat. We expect him to be as at ease with schoolchildren as he is with captains of industry; we expect him to pastor his clergy and to appear on radio phone-ins. We expect him to be a person of profound faith and prayer, and at the same time to be prepared to put on his Wellington boots and baptize in the village duck-pond without so much as a grimace.
Ours is not the first generation to create its own expectations of the ministry of the bishop, and it will not be the last. Yet we must recognize that much of this is culturally-conditioned and transient: a few years hence we will doubtless look for different qualities in our bishops. What will not change is their ministry’s essence: episkope, or oversight, which has two vital dimensions.
First, our bishops occupy a historic office that has its origins in the earliest days of the Christian Church. Only the bishop ordains priests and deacons. Only the bishops ordain other bishops. Through this ordered pattern of episkope the bishop links us to our ancient roots in Canterbury, Rome and Jerusalem and is thus the touchstone of our ecclesial authenticity. Without the bishop we might well be a Christian church meeting in Eaton Square in 2008; because of the bishop we believe ourselves to be a local manifestation of the church, the church of Jesus Christ, the church of Peter and Thomas, the church of Gregory and Augustine, the church of Laud and Cranmer, the church of Richard Hooker and Michael Ramsey.
Secondly, the bishop oversees not only the Church’s ordered life but also the deposit of faith which is entrusted to it in every generation. He teaches and upholds the historic gospel: both the Scriptures and the doctrines of the Creeds to which, vitally for Anglicans, the pages of Scripture bear witness. This inheritance of faith and order the bishop hands on to those who come after him.
And the genius of episcopacy is that locally this inheritance always rests not with a committee or a handbook but with the bishop of the diocese. As we believe God to be one and undivided so we believe Christ to be one and undivided; as we believe his Church to be one and undivided so we Episcopal Churches have vested our life and our faith in one ordained to receive our life and our faith and to preserve and proclaim them.
It is only when we recall the responsibilities of episkope and where we place them that we can consider the debates of this week.
So what of Synod and the women bishops’ debate? The Church has already affirmed that there can be no theological objection to a Church which ordains women as priests proceeding to ordain them as bishops. The question is what provision should be made for those who cannot in conscience accept their oversight. My view is that any such provision must fall short of legislative provision. We simply cannot create a situation in which the life and faith of the Church is vested in a bishop whose Episcopal ordination can be ignored or disbelieved by some. If we do that then we destroy our catholicity; we destroy the claim we make that Christ’s Church is fully realized locally in the office and presence of the diocesan bishop.
And what of GAFCON and its Jerusalem Declaration? This first sets out some principles for which its members wish to campaign within the Communion. Some of us may find these principles disagreeable, but there is no shortage in history of groups publishing manifestoes: this parish has signed up to one or two in its lifetime. But it also sets out a methodology for action in pursuit of its principles. It has created a Primates Council which will presume to classify some churches or congregations as doctrinally sound and ideologically acceptable, and some as not, and it reserves to itself the right to intervene in the life of provinces and dioceses on behalf of those churches or congregations of which it approves.
This I find scandalous, as scandalous as continuing with an episcopate which is the preserve of men only or in which legislation is passed enabling some bishops to be regarded as less than bishops by some of the faithful. Subvert a local bishop’s oversight; introduce bishops from elsewhere to pronounce on the authenticity of his actions and to recruit an opposing following, and again we destroy our catholicity. We are no longer one church, under the oversight of one bishop.
The great irony in all this is that Jesus Christ chose to entrust his legacy to a group of twelve men who were, on the face of it, not up to the task. To this unreliable bunch he trusted everything: yet we are utterly unable to trust one another. We must have laws to protect our consciences because we cannot trust our fellow believers to do so; we must bring bishops from across the globe to care for us because we cannot trust our diocesans to do so. In our inability to trust I believe we betray Christ and hand him over to his enemies all over again.
‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn’.
Children calling to one another in the market place. Christ’s words echo down the centuries, and are spoken to us as surely and as sharply as they were to his first hearers. Amen.
Matthew 11: 16-19; 25-end.
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)