The Dean's 40th Anniversary |
“I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
Philip Larkin, the poet, suggested that 1963 was a watershed year. He said that it was the year in which sexual intercourse began. Certainly the Beatles rose to fame and in an interview with the Evening Standard, John Lennon said – Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. We’re more popular than Jesus now. John XXIII and C.S.Lewis died and John Robinson published Honest to God which soon ran into 9 impressions.
The following year John Moses was ordained a deacon and in 1965 he was made a priest, by Bishop Michael Gresford Jones [ah there was a real bishop of the old school] and having been given this ministry he has not [in the word used by St Paul], “fainted”. Tonight is an opportunity not only to celebrate what God has done through John but to salute and celebrate Susan his partner for so many of those years.
We celebrate 40 years a priest on one of the most significant festival days in the religious calendar of the City of London when we remember Jesus’ call to Matthew the repentant Inland Revenue Inspector.
The past 40 years has been full of false dawns - Bishops going round like ecclesiastical Butlins’ redcoats claiming that revival was just around the corner. It is of course better than exuding perpetual gloom but what we need is sobriety because all the while despite the best efforts of two generations of convinced Christians, God has continued to recede from view. For very many he has become the hidden God. The gospel likewise as Paul remarked in the Epistle is for many “hidden” and the church has become invisible.
I received a fascinating letter last week from someone who had been responsible for 130 focus groups and polling 500 people each night of the recent election campaign. The anxieties reflected in the groups and individual interviews were remarkably uniform and centred on the decline of common values especially respect for others and the erosion of moral authority especially that of parents. All kinds of institutions and professions were blamed for this state of affairs – unfairly in my view. In the dock were politicians, the police, schools and teachers, the judges and the media.
You may hear it as good news that the church was not blamed but it is startling that the Church was not mentioned at all either negatively or approvingly. It was simply not on the radar of a huge representative sample of the population of this country.
Yet the absence of God is one of the ways in which he re-engages our attention. Human beings living without the true and living God, un-rooted in the field in which our lives unfold, un-connected to our anchor, people adrift are prey to boredom, despondency, to addictions, to the mournfulness and the spirit of heaviness the prophet Isaiah describes. Sometimes it is even worse and the place which God should occupy in our lives is occupied instead with some idol, some projection of ours, some false god who is manufactured out of our rage and lust for power. Soon after the dreadful events of July 7th a friend said to me, “these suicide bombers have fire in their minds but we what have we got?”
The hidden God is making himself felt in the distress of those who find themselves not so much living as just killing time and in the urgency of those who are calling out for an agenda of respect and values. And all the while there have been those who have ministered through this period and have not lost their nerve or confused presenting the gospel afresh [which we are charged to do] with a chronic addiction to fidgeting with structures or falling with the latest fad.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his magisterial recent survey of the Reformation Era, Europe Divided says that the peculiar course of the Reformation in England owes much to the chance survival of Cathedral Establishments where a communal worshipping life could be incubated, relatively insulated from the fashionable and passing preoccupations of other parts of the church. Cathedrals have played a vital part in ensuring that the Church of England as a while has remained hospitable to the role of symbol, beauty and especially music in communicating the truth.
This tradition has been honoured at St Paul’s in recent years and we arrive at what I believe is a new time of opportunity with a Cathedral magnificently refreshed. It was famously said of Sir Christopher Wren, si monumentum requieris, circumspice. I believe that recent work has not only preserved the monument but has gone further turning the monument into more of a place of pilgrimage, more of a place of prayer, reflection and teaching about the implications of the gospel as we try to re-discover the hidden path to respect and common values.
Like Jesus at dinner with those who were apparently estranged from God, this place is and should be hospitable and engaged in conversation with our contemporaries whatever their starting point. He did not discriminate in the way the righteous demanded when it came to choosing dinner companions –nor should we.
They were the gospel says frankly, “sinners” and I am not come said Jesus to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. Sinner is a difficult word to use in modern English because it immediately conjures up not so much people like ourselves, perturbed income tax payers but the others who do what Paul coyly called shameful things. In the New Testament “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” because sin is living as a stranger to God, alienated from our deepest selves, bound up with our surface ego, with the taste of untruth in our souls.
As Jesus invited him to “follow me” Matthew was confronted with the question of where his treasure really was. Once we are clear about where our treasure is then we can understand our heart more clearly.
Where is our own treasure? We imagine that we want so much but commonly have the experience of climbing the ladder and entering into possession only to discover that satisfaction has receded yet again and we are as far away from peace and fulfilment as when we first started.
Here people who have known poverty but who are so often rich in insight can help us to clarify our sight. Today in the cycle of prayer which we use in London we are praying for parishes in Niassa in Northern Mozambique one of link dioceses. Our relationship with them has helped to adjust our vision.
We cannot see clearly while as Paul says we are blinded by the God of this world. This is a strange world in which one of our gods which the ancients called Mammon and we call the economy is saluted daily in the news programmes which are our matins and evensong. The incantations are every bit as obscure as the most recondite liturgy. The DOW is steady; the NAZDAQ is falling; the Hang Seng is rising; the Footsie has had a good day and all the currency traders say Amen.
The Bible regards wealth as a blessing but also a snare. Jesus came to be with those who were aware that they were strangers to God. We are given a picture of him as easy and approachable but then making a demand which costs everything that we have. Repentance does not mean wallowing in breast beating about past lapses it means turning round and being clear and single minded about the way which God as we see him in Jesus Christ invites us to walk.
As a result of the work of the last few years St Paul’s has been unveiled and revealed by the cleaning as a more joyful place of pilgrimage, a high place of worship of the hidden God who is exerting a gravitational pull on our society. The Cathedral is more and more a place for reflection and repentance where the church needs to see clearly that being a monument is not enough and that there is urgency in communicating believable good news to people who are open to the agenda of respect and common values.
John you were entrusted with a special ministry 40 years ago, thank you for not fainting, thank you for all you have done and will do to prepare the way for the return of the hidden God and for helping to make this place somewhere where we may see his glory, experience the compassion and the conviviality which Jesus showed at his supper with Matthew and respond to his invitation to be single minded in following him. To Christ be the glory in the place now and for ever.
