St Peter's, Eaton Square - 18/01/07

1 Peter 5.1-4; St Matthew 16.13-19

“This parish is one of those that God has placed in the front of that metropolis which is the centre of the civilised world. The influence of London is felt for good or evil to the uttermost parts of the earth. On the congregation of St Peter’s, God has bestowed opportunities of influencing London for which thousands yearn in vain.”

Who said that? They are the words of your second Vicar George Howard Wilkinson who arrived in 1869 after the 42 year ministry of your first Vicar.

Today we welcome Nick, Heather, Barnaby and Theodora after Desmond’s 32 year stint here. On your 160th Anniversary St Peter’s burnt down and those who remember that dreadful event (and I was the Vicar of a neighbouring parish) know that we would not be standing here had it not been for the leadership and energy of Fr. Desmond. We salute his ministry at St Peter’s at the beginning of a new chapter, in this your 180th Anniversary year.

It has been good to work with the lay leaders of the community in identifying your new parish priest and I am also grateful for the work Vicky and other members of the St Peter’s team have done during the vacancy. There is huge promise in this new partnership.

London, as George Wilkinson declared, is still a global crossroads at a point in its story where we seem to be entering a post secular era. There will be no return in our lifetime to huge congregations of the 19th century at St Peter’s in which Members of Parliament were so thick in the galleries that it was said “they were of no more account than silver in the time of King Solomon”- but the contemporary soul curing business is buoyant. Nearly every parish has reported larger Christmas congregations and the most recent research suggests that in the Greater London Area in an ordinary week there about 630,000 Christians worshipping in more than 4,000 churches.

Another sign is that the enlightened are up in arms, conscious that God has become once more un-ignorable. Richard Dawkins – “The God Delusion” is said to have been a Christmas best seller – although I have my doubts about the statistics. Terry Eagleton’s review in the London Review of Books begins “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

The secular phalanx, rather like religious fundamentalists, is blinded by a certainty which conceals anxiety. The process of modernisation in the rest of the world is not following the pattern established in NW Europe. We are the exception and we are beginning to understand for example how the ecological challenge we face is a function of a way of being in the world which is arrogant and lacks reverence and awareness; and which arises from a false estimate of ourselves as masters and possessors of the earth rather than its stewards.
Yet there is no cause for religious people to be triumphalistic and try to outdo the God-deniers in shrillness. Suddenly it has also become urgent to distinguish in our country between healthful and lethal religion and to find the way to initiate the young into the former rather than the latter.

Lethal religion is one version of the idolatry which the prophets spend so much time denouncing. It is the manufacture of gods out of our own rage and impotence. A bruised ego finds a surreptitious way to re-ascend by making a god in its own image. This is a problem for all religions. When we are so sure that we have the right idea about God and want to clone or condemn all the others, then we are like the god deniers almost certainly on the wrong track. As the poet said of God, “You have such a quiet manner of existence that those who name you with a loud insistence show that they’ve forgotten your proximity.”

Appropriately for this church and this new beginning, this is the festival of the Confession of Peter. The Scriptures remind us that God is opaque to the arrogant and reveals himself to those who are humble, close to the humus, to people like Peter who was by turns over confident and then fallible, precipitated into betrayal by the barbed question of a serving wench and then forgiven by Jesus Christ. Christian faith is not reducible to ideas which we hold abut God who dwells as St Paul says in “inaccessible light” but faith springs from recognising God’s human face in Jesus Christ and walking with him. “Thou art the Christ”, says Peter, “the Son of the Living God” – the only time this phrase is used in the New Testament. Christian living consists in following him.

Our lives are to become the site where his presence is held and where his love can transform us, a presence and a love which convinces us even through the doubts, which in a life of faith often serve to winkle us out of immature diminished understandings of God and thrust us into his real mystery.

What are the implications of all this for the new partnership which begins this evening? Nick, you and the community of St Peter have a rich inheritance. You have resources in this splendidly restored church with a substantial income. Even more important there are huge resources in the seekers and worshippers of all ages who come here. This is a time for godly ambition founded on following Jesus out of our comfort zone into all the world with a confidence in the Son of the Living God which informs all our hopes and plans. What would we hope to see developing here in five years time?

Let us begin with the children. St Peter’s is blessed in its partnership with St Peter’s School, one of the finest schools in the heart of London. The experience of wonder, love and security in childhood is the kind of foundation all parents would want to see for their children. But as we know parents are often distracted by a work/life imbalance while young minds are subject to lavishly financed commercial pressures. “Dayspring mishandled cometh not again” but while we are rightly more and more concerned to protect the bodies of our children, there seems to be an astonishing insouciance about what forms their outlook on life and goes into their minds.

Part of the St Peter’s tradition from the 3 pm service instituted by John Storrs before the First World War to the existing 9.30 is a passion for work with the children of this community. The hope must be that this church becomes a beacon of excellence and experiment in its children’s work and a place which can share its good practice with others.

Then there is a talented but often fully committed congregation. St Peter’s has a tradition of fine music and liturgical excellence. As we cherish the bio-diversity of church life in London it is vital that the Catholic tradition is re-imagined in a rich and vivid way for the many people for whom occasional church attendance is a lifeline at certain points in their spiritual journey.

But in addition for those who are being called to deeper commitment at a time when faith and reason are being realigned in a wired up world of great promise and great peril, there must be personal and individual opportunities to proceed from alpha through to the omega of initiation.

In particular I hope that you will respond to the London Challenge which is the expression of what we have discerned together as a Church in London to be the contemporary call of Jesus Christ. We have together pledged ourselves to recruit and train 2012 new ambassadors for Jesus Christ who will be under 35 by the Olympic Year. I hope that St Peter’s will prove that it is not only the marvellously energetic evangelical churches of the Diocese who can rise to godly ambition based on the confidence which comes from recognising Christ as the Son of the Living God and following his way of love.

The history of St Peter’s – a great church planting community in its day - please God it will be again – has always demonstrated the connection between healthy faith and looking beyond parochial boundaries. You have the link with the important work done at the Passage Day Centre for the homeless and there is the Tanzania connection. In the past St Peter’s has been very active in the mission field most notably perhaps in North China.

One of Wilkinson’s favourite texts echoed by Desmond in his final report to the parish is “Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward”. If we linger in our comfort zone rather than hearing the call to leave our household gods and journey forward to the Promised Land, then we shall shrink. In five years time it would be good to celebrate the St Peter’s contribution to ALMA, the link between our Diocese and the church in two of the poorest countries in the world Mozambique and Angola.

Nick you come here with golden opinions from those who have worked with you in Salisbury. You and the family are eagerly awaited here. May Jesus Christ the Son of the Living God bless all that you undertake in his name. Amen.