Chrism Mass |
How good it is to be here today, on the very day when Jesus Christ asked his friends to prepare for a last meal together before the storm broke. It is the first time, for some years, that all the Bishops in the Diocese have been able to be present for this occasion and it is good to see so many other friends.
If you are an Internet surfer, you might care to make your way to the Harvard Business Review's Website. As the Church flirts with a managerial culture, Business is often stumbling on important spiritual truths.
There you will find an article entitled "What holds the modern company together?" by Mr Gareth Jones who is now the BBC's Director of Human Resources.
The thesis is that organisations need a combination of sociability, [people treating one another as friends] and solidarity [people working well together towards a common goal]. Any organisation with a combination of sociability and solidarity is strong; without either, it fragments.
"I no longer call you servants", said Jesus, "I call you friends." Being a priest, a deacon or a bishop can be a lonely business. With the self sacrificing figure of the Good Shepherd before us we remember the first half of the verse we shall soon sing together,
"Brother, sister, let me serve you,
Let me be as Christ to you;
But sometimes forget the second part,
"Pray that I may have the grace to
Let you be my servant too."
We are often not good at encouraging one another. Pondering this mystery, John Updike in his novel, A Month of Sundays, observes, "after all in a congress of masseurs nobody turns their back."
We have it on the authority of Jesus Christ that one of the ways in which we show that we belong to him is to be friends to one another. Look around the Deanery and the Diocese. Try to see anyone who needs encouragement and perhaps some fellow priest you find it hard to like and invite them to a simple meal. If I get a deluge of invitations after Easter, I shall get the message.
Sociability and Solidarity, working together towards a common goal. The article in the Harvard Business Review suggests that Solidarity is enhanced by an appreciation of a common threat and clarity about the common purpose.
The threat is certainly obvious. Let me give you an example. One of the best things that I have witnessed over the past month was the huge gathering here in St Paul's to interrogate the Mayoral candidates. The questions sprang from a constructive and fresh Christian contribution to the debate called "Shaping London's Future". The report was largely the work of Joel Edwards and Martin Eden of the Evangelical Alliance but all the London Church Leaders endorsed it and the Archbishop of Westminster accepted my invitation to be here. It has been the largest public meeting of the campaign to date but the reaction of the news editor of the Evening Standard was " the churches are a thing of the past. Church attendance is claimed to be 10%, I think that the reality is more like .001%. We are not interested. "
It is refreshing to have such a clear statement. London's churches assemble more than 600,000 people each week, people who reflect London's ethnic diversity, but the perception is that Christians are of no significance to the public life of this world city.
As the friends of Jesus assembled for that final meal before the storm, the threat was clear enough but he did not spend his time bemoaning his fate, instead he entrusted his future in the world to his friends. "Do this in remembrance of me" Build a new community of love through which God can communicate the reality of the Jubilee prophecy, read as our gospel, with its good news for the poor, its promise of freedom and healing.
Far too often we are engaged in massive displacement activity, getting worked up with one another about ecclesiastical matters, terms and conditions for churchwardens and the latest edict from the Pontifical Commission on Tassels and Phylacteries. Work is underway at present to prepare a second draft of our "Manifesto for the New Millennium" for your comment and input. Every priest and deacon will receive a copy with a request for your help in clarifying, for our generation, the common task entrusted to us by Jesus Christ and its consequences in terms of policies and resources.
The prophet-poets of the 20th century described the spiritual landscape of Europe as the Wasteland, at the sagging end and chapter's close, with a litter of dead symbols and the stream by the altar of God very low. It seems to me that we are moving out of the 20th century Wasteland into the storm where everything familiar could be blown away and almost anything is conceivable. The world is being refashioned partly by the torrential flow of money through this city but also by a loss of memory. We must prepare for the storm with its perils and possibilities. If we are to serve our times for the sake of Jesus Christ we should work with sociability and solidarity. Jesus Christ called us his friends, we must be friends to one another. He called us to live out his Jubilee prophecy, we must dwell on our solidarity in the essentials for the sake of Jesus,
Anointed by the Spirit, Pioneer of the Faith perfected in Suffering, Risen Son of God. Amen.
