St Paul's Cathedral - 20/03/08

I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty.

This is the time of year when we are asked as Christian ministers – What is your Easter message? In the search to be brief, to be understood and not to put off people who may have little patience for god-talk, it is tempting to say something like - Easter is the springing up of hope in the winter waste which we have made of the world. Such a “message” would not be entirely wrong but it would be a mistake.

Easter is not some dramatic presentation of a universal truth. It is an event which transformed the world, created a language of word and symbol and gave birth to the community of believers. Easter created a people.

The present life of our community carries the DNA of that first Easter, from the last meal shared by Jesus and his friends on the night in which he was betrayed to the discovery of the empty tomb.

I am proud to be a member of the Church in London. Being a bishop gives you the privilege of visiting Christian communities in every part of this world-in-a- city.

I think of some of my recent encounters. In Southall I saw in the heart of the curry houses and smells of the Indian sub continent, a church of spirit filled Christians, many of them with an Asian cultural inheritance. The clergy were united and joyful although hard pressed with the challenges of witnessing to Christ in such a setting.

Michael Ainsworth has reminded us of the cost of living in the midst the communities we serve.

The challenges of Trafalgar Square are also considerable. The energy of the community at St Martin’s is astonishing. The renewal of their work to improve the facilities of the social care unit, to provide a better base for the Chinese church, to enlarge Christian educational opportunities, to develop St Martin’s as an arts venue alongside the repristination of the church is vivid evidence in the world square of the energy of the Lord who was and is and is to come.

Then Palm Sunday in Tottenham with an equally diverse yet very different community this time with a predominantly African or Afro-Caribbean inheritance. Inspired by the energetic missionary work of the Victorian church, they are making plans to be present for Christ’s sake in the great new housing development planned for that part of the Lea valley.

There is similar good news from all around the Diocese but we are astonishingly efficient at keeping it to ourselves. Mind you if anything is described as strictly confidential that almost certainly secures its wide dissemination – perhaps that was the communication strategy behind the Messianic secret.

The creation of londoninternetchurch.com and the improvement of our web site and internal communications is just the beginning of an intensive effort to rectify this deficiency. When one Area Dean who had always described the “London Link” diocesan newspaper as Pravda was heard lamenting its disappearance, I knew that something had to be done.

The Church is a community brought into being by the communication of God. It remains a net of communication. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have beheld his glory. He has taught us to see and celebrate the glory in one another. We are to communicate his glory by being more and more like him in our life together and by incorporating new people in his community.

We can only do this if we speak and practice the language that he taught us – the language of forgiveness, self sacrifice and disinterested love and if we recall his life and presence among us.

Extinction is one of the subterranean themes of our time. It may be why people are so fascinated by dinosaurs. The extinction of species and the loss of bio -diversity is certainly one of the challenges we shall face in the 21st century.

We even have cause to ponder our own extinction as a race. On a visit to Berlin as part of our link with the Diocese of Berlin Brandenburg, I was shown the private meditation room used by German members of the Reichstag. The walls are hung with six oblong panels. The first is simply earth coloured with protuberant flints. In the second panel there is a scattering of white painted nails on the same background. It was explained top us that the nail were the first human beings. By the third panel the nails had been arranged in the pattern of religious symbols – crescent, cross, star and the like. By the fourth panel the nails covered the entire surface. By the fifth something had happened and the nails had receded and formed one or two scattered groups. In the sixth panel the earth and the protuberant flints had reasserted their dominance but if you looked carefully you could see a stratum within the flints of fossilised nails.

The series is crying out for a seventh panel – new creation, resurrection - but it is missing. Will Europe hear the news from us and see the glory in our life together?

Let us come closer to home. My great predecessor at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mandell Creighton, whose statue is in the Dean’s aisle devoted many of his addresses to the vocation of the National Church. That was before he was worried to death by ritualists.

It is not a description of our church I hear very frequently now and it right that we have moved on to thinking in pan Christian rather than in denominational terms. But we can still be inspired by the vision of a church without a sectarian gene that is determined to embrace all those who live in the parish and this England irrespective of whether or not they are electoral role members.

The Government clearly sees national identity as problematical – hence the Goldsmith proposals. Paradoxically the one thing that seems to unite us is derision at any attempts to provide unifying rituals.

There is much to love and cherish in the old story of Churchill’s Britain as well as episodes for which there should be proper penitence but we are serving a London, a world in a city, in which the students at one of our Church Secondary Schools the Greig Academy in Haringey speak 70 mother tongues from Albanian to Zulu. Identity and cohesion are real questions in such a context.

One part of the extinction theme which I find especially elegiac is the extinction of human languages. Canon Lucy Winket told me the sad story of the last two speakers of some indigenous tribal language who fell out, they argued acrimoniously and finally did not speak to one another years before they both died and their language passed into oblivion.

Our identity as a people has been decisively shaped by the words and the gestures of Jesus Christ in those last hours before he was lifted up upon the cross. His story was able to relate Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. His story made a people.

We are called in our own time to practice the language he taught us and to assemble to re-member his story - not in the weak sense that we remember an event of long ago and far away but to be fed by him and to re-member his body in the present. Too many people seem to be intent on dismembering. If we continue in this way, then we shall mince ourselves into atoms and our part of the language of God will be lost. The words of Christ can never be destroyed nor the community in which they are spoken but the church in particular places can lose the capacity to speak the language in a convincing way.

This occasion every year is very important. Thank you for being present to practice the language of speech and gesture that we have received from Christ through the apostles gathered at that table of the Last Supper. I know that there are some priests, deacons and readers in the Diocese who do not see this annual gathering as their cup of tea and complain about its inconvenient timing but I would urge you to encourage them to participate. We are incomplete without them – no one is dispensable.

We live at a time when there is an attempt to revise and develop the story that makes us a people by editing out the past and substituting exhortations to ethical fraternity, to tolerance and respect for diversity. These are not ignoble themes but experience suggests that such abstract generalisations have no energy and power to bind a people together and to be transforming until they are embedded in a narrative, embodied in a community and incarnated in lives. Easter is an event informed by the narrative of the Old Testament which established a new covenant and created a people.

The English Church was brought to birth before the unified English state and however the story of the people who live in these islands develops if it is to endure and have a transforming power for good then at the heart of the new community will be found those who practice the language of God the word made flesh and meet together to tell his story.
I believe that despite the religion of official optimism there is decay and confusion beneath the glitter and this is the time to which we have been called. Through us I believe and through our Church, Christ has the power to out-narrate the stories that are passing from the world and the rather pallid substitutes that are being proposed.

Together I believe as members of his body we shall be given the power to confront the challenge of the extinction of much that is good and true and beautiful in the world and be formed as the living quick of some new global order which is as yet hidden in the providence of God.

In Jesus Christ we can see God’s vision for the future of the human race. We can see in his passion, in the events of this week, the resistances which have to be overcome when perfect love comes into the world as it is presently constituted. We are invited to share in the glory but only of course after we have shared in the pain.

Glory be to the God who is in our midst, who was and who is to come.