Fr Stephen’s All Saints Sunday Sermon
November 4, 2011
You can read Father Stephen Young’s sermon for All Saints Sunday here.
Fr Richard’s Farewell Sermon
January 17, 2011
You can see Fr Richard Coles Farewell Sermon preached on 16th January 2011 here: PDF
Sermon 21 Mar 2010
March 21, 2010
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (Passion Sunday), 21st March 2010
Fr Richard Coles
From the prophecy of Isaiah: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Tell it not in Gath, but we are short-staffed in the Deanery of Westminster St Margaret at the moment, and although short-staffed in central London is nothing like short-staffed in rural Lincolnshire, you may have seen less of the clergy than you’re used to. Enjoy it while you can.
One of the churches we’re helping to look after, as it awaits a new Vicar, is St Mary Le Strand, which despite its distinction as one of London’s finest churches – Gibbs’ masterpiece, according to those who know about such things – is little-visited. If you’ve ever tried, you’ll know why. It stands in the middle of one of London’s busiest streets, the Strand, not on a generously proportioned island accessed by zebra crossings, adorned with statues of the heroes of Bomber Command, like St Clement Danes; but slap bang in the middle of two lanes of unyielding traffic, King’s College London to the south, the BBC World Service to the north.
As an alumnus of both I suppose it is fitting that I should find myself celebrating the Eucharist in the church that stands between them; but it is not that which diverts my attention when I should be concentrating on what I’m there to do. It is the view west.
Most people in churches look east, towards the pulpit and the altar. The priest, however, looks west, at the crowd, and that in itself can be most distracting. But at St Mary le Strand you can look out beyond the congregation into the street, to see the two files of traffic passing by on either side. Thus it ever was: please note this morning’s cover picture, by George Sydney Shepherd, showing St Mary Le Strand thronged, in 1836, with landaus, barouches, phaetons and gigs. Today it is cabs and couriers and trishaws and London buses, Leyland Titans on their way to unfashionable postcodes in south London, Routemasters on the heritage trail, like scarlet dowagers disappearing into the distance.
Standing there, not paying attention to what I was doing, watching the world literally go by, struck me as a potent symbol for Lent, or rather, my Lent, which this year has been notably disappointing. On Ash Wednesday, the cross still smudgy on my forehead, I resolved to give certain things up and to take certain things on. In the former category I’ve done OK, giving up smoking, and apart from a single and in my view forgivable lapse outside the Royal Geographical Society on the centenary of Edward King, bishop of Lincoln, I’ve stuck to it. I’ve been less successful in moderating my diet, and find myself embarrassingly fatter in Passiontide than Epiphanytide, but that’s giving up fags for you.
I have been less successful, however, in taking things on. In the past I’ve been pretty diligent, saying more prayers, earlier, and more earnestly, than in the impenitent weeks of Ordinary Time; reading sermons by the Greek and Latin fathers; re-reading Paradise Lost (even years) The Divine Comedy (odd years); and giving, with grudgingly relaxed parsimony, to charity. This year it hasn’t really happened. Early in the morning, when I should have been in church and on my knees, I’ve been in Hyde Park watching Daisy frolic amid the nodding jonquils and half-eaten KFCs. This year I’ve eschewed the Homilies of St Basil of Caesarea in favour of Nordic crime fiction; and my surplus, paltry as it is, seems to have been diverted from the rattling poor box into Belgravia’s chiming tills.
So all my good intentions, or most of them, cannot rise, they are extinguished, they are quenched like a wick. I don’t really know why. I’m busier, which makes it harder to find the time to make the effort; and busier with extra-curricular activity, which takes me into a world which barely notices, if it all, the Church’s calendar. Perhaps trying to maintain the disciplines of Lent has left me feeling a bit like St Mary le Strand, stuck in the middle of the road, going nowhere, while everyone else passes by.
I’m not being nostalgic for an age when Lent was more widely observed – I don’t really remember such an age. When I was growing up I think my mother gave up Noilly Prat and badminton, but she grew up in Presbyterian Scotland in the forties and was susceptible to Calvinist enthusiasms. My father took Lent in his stride, shall we say, and apart from the shops shutting on Good Friday and Hot Cross buns for tea I don’t think it intruded much into our family life. Even for an older generation than my parents’ the disciplines have faded. I remember in my last parish spotting one of the oldest and crustiest members of the congregation in Costa’s on Good Friday when he should have been out with us on the Churches Together Walk of Witness. As he enjoyed a pain au chocolat and a cappuccino we were processing round the precinct, taking it in turns to carry the cross, while the Salvation Army band played hymns about penal substitutionary atonement. One shopper, I remember, seemed particularly moved, and came over for a word: Can we have Away in a Manger?, she asked, which perhaps tells you how little of Lent survives in our secular world.
In the monastic world, at Mirfield, where I trained for the priesthood, Lent endured. No meat, no fish, no sherry, BCP Holy Communion on Fridays, poverty lunch, and the silent retreat. In Holy Week, the brethren went away to preach missions in parishes (you had one here not so long ago) and the College took over the running of the monastic church and the forty-six services that took place between Palm Sunday and Easter. There was the Watch of Maundy Thursday, which lasted all night, a three a.m. start for the Vigil, and most burdensome of all, an obligatory fancy-dress party on Easter Day, which went on well into the small hours, followed by Silent Prayer and Mattins at six thirty the following morning. How very virtuous we all felt after that.
Maybe that tells you something, congratulating ourselves for our spiritual heroics. Just when I’m most pleased with myself I think of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple. The former, like the Pharisee Paul, or Saul as he was then, is proper and diligent and righteous, and thanks God for not being like the latter; the latter simply beats his breast and asks God for mercy. The tax-collector, not the Pharisee, goes home justified before God.
So if your Lent, like mine, would be marked could do better, don’t worry about it too much. Perhaps in acknowledging our failures we’re closer to God than when we’re congratulating ourselves for our piety.
Passiontide, which begins today, brings this into sharper focus. The austerities of Lent are more marked, with the veiling of statues and a liturgical paring-down; and as Jesus approaches Jerusalem and the climactic events which are to take place there, our part in his story also begins to take on shape, and body and pattern.
We are not willing participants in this – who wants shame and humiliation and failure and worse? – a human reality the Gospel unflinchingly tells. Jesus, in agony in the garden, is abandoned; Peter, the rock upon which Christ build his church, betrays him; and Judas, quibbling over the cost of perfume, finds a way to generate extra revenue – thirty pieces of silver.
Even Jesus himself, in his humanity, is agonised by the approach of his inescapable destiny. Let this cup pass from me, he pleads, in flesh anticipating the nails, the thorns, the spear, the cross. If you look round the chancel you’ll see carved onto shields in the frieze an odd collection of, well, hardware – a ladder, a hammer, a sponge, a pair of dice – as peculiar and arbitrary a collection of curios as the thimble, the wheelbarrow and the iron in a Monopoly set. But these are the Instruments of the Passion, the ladder which will stand against the Cross, the hammer which will drive in its nails, the sponge, filled with gall, that will be pressed to Jesus’ lips, and the dice his executioners will roll to divide up his clothing.
It’s as if the full horror of what is to happen can’t be confronted, in its totality, not yet, not ever. So we’re offered these bits of kit, tokens of Christ’s Passion, not as aides-memoire, but as nudges, goads, keeping us going along the Way of the Cross, towards the New Thing, in all its terror and wonder, that God in his infinite mercy and fathomless grace has prepared for us.
We’re like those buses and cabs, indifferent traffic, breaking and reforming around St Mary Le Strand in the middle of the road, with places to go, people to see, not even beginning to understand the disruption to our journey.
Sermon 28th February 2010 Lent II
February 28, 2010
Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent (with Baptism), 28th February 2010
Fr Richard Coles
From the letter to the Philippians: for many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
A week or two ago on Ash Wednesday we met here in church to mark the beginning of Lent. Before the service we burned last year’s Palm Crosses, distributed and blessed on Palm Sunday, in last year’s Lent, and with the ash the priest made the sign of the cross on our foreheads with the words, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. We left in silence, out into the street bearing the sign of the cross, turned the corner, wiped the ashy smudge from the foreheads, and went out to dinner.
It is the Anglican way, partly reflecting, I guess, a reluctance to make a show of one’s faith, to look silly, or the odd one out; for many live as enemies of the Cross of Christ.
It is, after all, an instrument of torture and death, and Lent reminds us that on the Cross our Lord and Saviour suffered and died. Do we need reminding? Just look around this church and count how many depictions of the Crucified Christ we offer for your consideration.
And yet, over the centuries, and in the course of our lives, the Cross has become familiar, domesticated; indeed, for many people it’s become a sign of its opposite, something anodyne, even cosy. So to be called to reflect again on its purpose as the instrument of Christ’s death makes us uncomfortable. Especially when we’ve gathered here not only to share the bread and wine of the Eucharist but to welcome India, at the beginning of her life, into the family of the Church?
Well, we don’t often have baptisms in Lent, and perhaps that’s because we sense that the mood of the season is out of tune with the mood of the sacrament; widow’s weeds clash with christening robes. But when we look at the baptism service it seems to have more in common with Ash Wednesday than we might at first expect.
In a moment, as deacon of the mass, I will mark the sign of the cross on India’s forehead, not in ash, but in oil, holy oil, blessed by the bishop in the cathedral on Maundy Thursday, the eve of the commemoration of Christ’s death on the Cross. And I will say Christ claims you for his own, receive the sign of the Cross. Is it, then, a badge, a mark of membership? Yes, but it is more than that, more than a statement of affiliation, like the Tufty Club; or even of belief, like the pound sign for Eurosceptics. It is a sign that we share in Christ’s death.
Uncomfortable again? Is it that same discomfort we’ll feel in a moment when we we’re gathered at the font and the celebrant prays, We thank thee, Father, for the water of baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death: a cold wind blows across the water’s surface – Ash Wednesday.
A bit of editing called for perhaps? We’ve edited the marriage service, after all, which used to speak of men’s carnal lusts and appetites, compared the ushers to brute beasts that have no understanding, and recommended itself as a means of avoiding fornication; you could almost see the orange blossom wilting.
In the new, edited, marriage service that’s all gone; instead we’re obliged to speak of ‘the delight and tenderness of sexual union’, which I find no less embarrassing, and usually pretend to cough at that bit and move on.
Well there are worse things than a Curate’s embarrassment – selling a baptism short for example – which we would if we lost sight, at the beginning of our lives, of their end.
Perhaps it is not just the character of the baptismal service, the christening of a child, that makes those reminders of mortality feel so jarring; it is also because as a culture we are no longer on terms with death. Twenty five per cent of my grandmother’s twelve brothers and sisters didn’t make it to adulthood – Spanish flu, ruptured appendix, failure to thrive – and every household in her childhood had a drawer full of black crepe (well-used). Death was not something awaiting us, finally, in the antiseptic impersonal environment of a hospital, but was a regular knocker at the door. She grew up with all the elaborate Victorian paraphernalia of death, full-mourning, half-mourning, black bombazine, weeping willows, and in her lifetime it all but disappeared, in proportion with the rise in life expectancy, enduring today only in Undertakers’ Parlours and the East End of London. Even the word ‘death’ seems to have become unsayable – have you noticed how more and more people prefer the euphemism ‘passed away’, an expression oddly resurrected from Victorian piety for use in world which grows every day more secular.
For us, as individuals and for our culture, death may have been banished to the edges of our experience, but sooner or later, inevitably, we will become expert in it, through the loss of others, and finally the loss of ourselves. If, as Benjamin Franklin observed, it is the only inevitable thing (along with taxes), don’t we, at the very least, need to come to terms with it (for it will certainly come to terms with us)? And I don’t mean by this a sort of golden sunset – angel’s feathers falling to the sound of Dvorak’s New World symphony – or a melodrama – black-cowled figures wielding scythes – or an evasion – I have just gone into the next room. I mean the blunt fact of death, so difficult to face with equanimity, no matter how theologically well-equipped, how pious, how serenely composed we like to think we may be. Not existing is literally unthinkable, and like all living, feeling creatures, we dread extinction; it’s hardwired into our brains, a fundamental strategy for survival, the selfish gene being its selfish self.
And yet this selfish gene, which provides us with our dread of death, is also, paradoxically, death’s executor. Last week there were a number of reports in the papers about breakthroughs in our understanding of how this works, how we age and die. It’s the focus of intense research and debate at the moment, and according to one school of thought, it’s pre-programmed, part of the design.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA – hence the cover image on the service booklet this morning – like the cross it is a more than a symbol, for in its double helix our fortune and fate is written. Who we will be, our virtues and vices, the curl of our hair, and the rate of its loss; the loss of our teeth, our marbles, and our lives. It’s a bit like built-in obsolescence in a washing machine, the future failure of the spin cycle engineered in so we’ll have to go and buy replacements and keep the world economy, or at least Peter Jones, in business.
The difference between your Zanussi and your DNA is that no-one knows why our obsolescence is built in. We know how we age, we don’t know why we age, and before we get too beguiled by the promise of the former, maybe we should reflect a bit on the latter.
Gene therapy, we are told, promises greatly extended life-expectancy, already double that of our not too distant ancestors (and not too distant neighbours) thanks to healthier lifestyles and cleverer medicine (for those, of course, who can afford them). You and I may reasonably expect to be playing golf into our nineties – India, however, and her peers, may get well into triple figures before the accumulation of cellular wear and tear annuls their club membership.
The prospect of a hundred and fifty candles on a birthday cake fills some with relief; but others, I suspect, dread it. Not because the thought of getting through more hips than a centipede is unappealing – if these therapies work then our cells will continue to renew themselves – but because the sheer weight of a hundred and fifty years of life could so easily be more burden than bonus. Janacek, the greatest composer of the twentieth century… arguably… Janacek’s opera The Makropoulos Case dramatises such a fate, of a woman, Emilia Marty, living beyond her span thanks to a life-extending potion: but it is a life of dreary uniformity, without risk or savour or pleasure. We love parties, she discovers, because they end.
We know how we die, we don’t know why we die? But our lives are not our own, we are not the authors of our own stories, deciding our beginnings and our ends. What we really are is beyond us utterly, created by God in the fathomless mystery of his image, redeemed in the fathomless grace of his love; our futures and our fates not a matter of genetic snakes and ladders, but signed with his cross, transforming the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.
Sermon 14th February 2010
February 14, 2010
Sermon for the Sunday next before Lent, 14th February 2010
Fr Nick Mercer
Glory, Postmodernity & Transfiguration
“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32
It was a residential Board of Trustees meeting in midsummer, and my first mistake was to suggest that we held the after lunch session out on the lawn.
My second mistake was deciding not just to sit on the grass, but to lie down on the grass. And the third was when I thought ‘I’ll just close my eyes, but I’ll still be able to concentrate’.
I might just have got away with this had I not: one – been Chairman of the Board; and two - started snoring.
We’ve all had those situations where we are desperately struggling to stay awake – I’ve been with some of you at Glyndebourne after the dinner interval!
We would not have had this account of the Transfiguration of our Lord in the Gospels, if the disciples had succumbed to sleep.
And as they reflected on it after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, they realised what they had seen
· They saw Moses the lawgiver and Christ as the fulfilment of the Law.
· They saw Elijah the chief of prophets and Christ as the One to whom all the prophets pointed.
· They heard the voice of Almighty God, reiterating Christ’s Baptismal affirmation that this was his beloved Son and that they should listen to him.
· And they saw the Shekinah cloud, a theophany of the God of glory, and the reflection of that glory in the face of their teacher, Jesus the Messiah.
There’s a little Jewish joke here as well - a sort of pun. Blink and you miss it.
The Hebrew word for ‘glory’, ‘kabod’, was the word for weight, heaviness, gravitas. Here the disciples are weighed down with sleep, Luke tells us, but they remained awake and so were weighed down with glory.
One of my fellow students at theological college was good at everything. And he knew it. So nobody liked him very much. So there was much Schadenfreude when he was rusticated for a term for driving a mini car through the front doors of the college.
He was good at Hebrew of course as well, so someone pinned a large notice above his door with the single word in Hebrew: Ichabod - the glory has departed.
It was the name given to Eli’s grandson Ichabod, who was born just after a particularly crushing defeat by the Philistines who also stole the Ark of the Covenant which represented the glory of God – atheme running through all the readings and prayers today.
[In fact it’s a rather tragic story that the Jewish writer turns into another little joke at the end.
“And it came to pass, when the messenger made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy.” (I Sam 4)
So the grandson, born at the same time is called Ichabod, the glory has departed - the Ark of the Covenant has been carried off. But it could mean, the heavy one has departed - the fat man has died!]
Ichabod might be a suitable epitaph for the last 25 years: postmodernity as we are coming to call this period of history.
There’s much spiritual interest but little spiritual depth or weight. Believe but don’t belong. (70% of people claim to be Church of England – they believe, but they don’t belong to our congregations in any meaningful sense.)
Postmodernity describes, not so much a movement, as a mood in contemporary society. It is image with attitude; inner emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. Retail therapy doesn’t give meaning, but it makes me feel better!
The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex, alcohol and other drugs; and lots of idle humour.Veni, vidi, velcro - I came, I saw, I stuck around. Try and think of an advert that doesn’t use humour.
And one of the characteristics of postmodernity, is that it denies transcendence. So there is little focus to all that spirituality around, and indeed often a denial that there is any objective ‘other’ - the transcendent God of Glory. Spirituality is seen as something purely internal, subjective and personal.
Because of this absent substantiator in postmodern society; an absence of the One who gives weight to human existence, there is a lack of solidness in society, of glory, of weight.
We are in danger of becoming all surface and image.
Let’s go back to our Gospel – the transfiguration of Jesus.
As Jesus goes down the mountain with the disciples, he speaks to them of his impending suffering and of his resurrection. And he has already told them, although they do not understand, that his Passion will be the greatest display of God’s glory. That’s why we read this Gospel passage always on the last Sunday before Lent.
We celebrate this Mass to the Glory of God. As we bring the gifts of the world at the offertory - our bread and wine and money - so we celebrate God’s glory in all he has given to us.
And as we lift up our Lord’s broken body, so we celebrate his victory over death and the glorious hope he has given us.
It is hard to celebrate the glory of God when we are suffering, in body mind or spirit; or watching those whom we love suffer. Yet as we look at the suffering of God in Christ, and remember that we will share in his resurrection glory, then even suffering and death become part of the path to glory.
The Westminster Catechism reminds us that “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.”
Secular drowsiness, the stupor and busyness of 21st century life, must not rob us of seeing God’s glory and delighting in his creation. Part of the reason for the disciplines of Lent is to keep ourselves spiritually awake and alert.
And here at the mass, as Christ is present in another Transfiguration, not with Moses and Elijah, but with bread and wine; here is weight and depth in an increasingly light and shallow culture. Let us be awake to the presence of the Glory of God.
“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32
Sermon 7th September 2008
September 7, 2008
Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 7th September, 2008
Fr Richard Coles, Curate
(Matthew 18: 15-20)
Having grown up in the analogue age I was a bit bewildered when I found that my new digital television had Freeview built in: press the menu button and you suddenly feel like you’re standing in front of the departures board at Heathrow on a busy Bank Holiday weekend. But in spite of having dozens and dozens of channels to choose from, what kind of choice is it when there’s nothing you want to watch on any of them?
So I thought, until I discovered endlessly looped repeats of The World At War. That familiar title sequence, to theme music by Carl Davis, with Laurence Olivier’s voiceover and Jeremy Isaacs’ producer credit, heralds one of the most ambitious television projects ever undertaken, and it as fascinating now – if not more fascinating – as it was when it first aired thirty years ago.
It is big – twenty-six hour-long episodes, from Hitler’s rise to Hirohito’s fall; it takes its audience seriously – detailed, unsparing, not afraid to be difficult; it is properly funded – with a then-unequalled million pound budget. For me, watching now, two things really stand out.
First, the footage; the programme makers, mindful of the first rule of television – show don’t tell – let the pictures do the talking; and how eloquent they are. Not so much the official images, edited for newsreels, rousing scenes from the great battles at El Alamein and Monte Cassino and the Medway. It is the material not intended for release, the off-duty moments, filmed in the gaps between the great set-pieces that lodges in the memory. Courtesies observed among the ruins of a bombed city, Italian POWs literally crestfallen in daft dressy uniforms, children at a train station innocently playing with their gas masks.
Second, the interviews; not so much the retired statesmen and generals, but the tail end Charlies, the secretaries, the stokers, who never thought themselves worth interviewing, and whose witness is all the more interesting for it.
One interviewee in particular was fascinating. He was a merchant seaman who had served on the North Atlantic convoys. Speaking thirty years or so after the event, he was matter of fact as he described a fortnight’s voyage from Iceland to Russia on a converted trawler, accompanying a convoy that was constantly under attack, from German warships, from U Boats, from the Luftwaffe, from drift ice, from storms. Out of thirty-six ships that left harbour eleven made it to Murmansk, and he described how his shipmates were shot, blown up, drowned, frostbitten, burned alive.
His thoughtfulness and clarity about terrible circumstances was very impressive, but even more impressive was his recollection of coming home. The war was won; he was demobbed, and returned to wife and children in a town much like any town. Bunting, kisses, lock-in down the pub; and he stood there, surrounded by family and friends, in a warm snug, feeling completely and irrevocably alone. At that moment, and for a long time afterwards, he was unable to communicate with anyone, as if he’d returned to home and hearth and found it occupied by strangers with whom he shared no language.
You don’t have to have survived a war to know something of what that feels like. It’s commonly experienced by people caught up in all kinds of conflicts – in political disagreements, in office politics, in church life, and simply, and most frequently, when they fall out.
When I was at theological college we were visited by clergy on retreat and I was surprised by the amount of time and effort they put into dealing with people who had fallen out. Everyone finds this demanding, but for clergy it can be especially so, because people at odds with each other so frequently come our way, because of the nature of the job, because of the obligations of priesthood, because of the unrestricted welcome we are expected to offer. And so slots are found in timetables to train ordinands in conflict resolution, in facilitating dialogue, in finding and opening up space in deadlocked situations, the kinds of techniques that other professionals involved in the care of people employ. This morning’s gospel shows that this is no recent innovation. Two thousand years ago the first Christian communities were developing guidelines. If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church… You wonder what Parish Lunch debacle or Flower Rota catastrophe lay behind it. These techniques, to be sure, have proved to be immensely useful and, in skilled hands, extremely effective.
Except when they haven’t: in those situations when in spite of our best intentions, full disclosure, due process, things have just ineluctably fallen apart. An Austrian archduke is shot, clumsily, by an anarchist in a Balkan backwater – unfortunate, but not the first time that had happened – and yet, after an almost casual diplomatic row, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and within a week, Germany, France, Russia, Britain and their Empires had toppled into war. Four years and twenty million deaths later those left standing looked back and thought, how did that happen?
Haven’t we all, in incomprehensibly lesser ways, looked back over the warzones of our own lives and thought, how did that happen? How did we let things slip away from us, lose our restraint and poise, and find ourselves, like that merchant seaman in The World At War a stranger in a once familiar world, suddenly and unexpectedly no longer able to communicate? I’m sure we all know that sinking feeling when you say your carefully rehearsed set piece to the person who has caused you offence only for it to be met with utter incomprehension, an incomprehension doubled when they come back at you with an equally well-rehearsed set piece that might as well be Martian for all the sense it makes. How can they have got it so wrong? How can they not see what is plain for everyone else to see, we think (even as everyone else makes a bee-line for the door)?
Sometimes these failures to understand one another are obvious: the arguments in the Anglican Communion about sexuality and gender are so intractable and potentially destructive not because the issues themselves are too difficult to resolve but because they express fundamentally different experiences of the world. How can we understand what it is like to lead an African church out of an era of subservience to our colonial enterprise into an era of political independence, a process which necessarily involves the reckoning of a century of domination and submission? How, in turn, can our efforts to locate ourselves within the fast-changing configurations of post-modernity be understood by cultures in which the fast-changing configurations of post-modernity look like facile indulgence? At the level of our personal lives that incomprehensibility can be more obscure if only because our expectation is of greater transparency. But there is nothing more mysterious than another person: how can we have got them so wrong?
And right in the middle of this unpredictable, disorienting, volatile mess stands Jesus Christ: “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Not to facilitate discussion, nor test arguments, nor negotiate agreements, but simply to be in our midst. God is with us, in his unfathomable grace and unlimited power, in flesh and blood like ours, caught up in our dramas and confusions, but God.
There he is in our midst: I’ve sometimes thought of Jesus as a kind of friendly ghost, intervening mysteriously in our lives to turn the steering wheel away from disaster, to nudge us along the right path instead of the wrong, to speak to us in accents clear and still. But I find the Jesus in the midst of us is nothing like that, not the servant of our anxieties and passions, to be press-ganged into our strategies for self-promotion and prestige – he’s just there, and all our expectations break around him like waves around rocks. For me, this is not the Jesus of extravagant Victorian piety, but the Jesus we see looking out at us from a blistered, scarred panel discovered by accident near Zvenigorod in 1918, reproduced on the cover of the service booklet this morning. It was painted by Andrei Rublev in the 1420s and lost for five hundred years until it turned up in an old woodshed in the aftermath of war and revolution; not a familiar Jesus, lamp in hand, knocking at the door, but a Jesus who can return the gaze of the victims of war and revolution for he is himself the victim of war and revolution.
An icon is not a likeness; it is a window, not a picture, inviting us into the reality it sets before us. The Jesus who stands in our midst today, in the midst of our own confusions and arguments, and failure to understand or to make ourselves understood, invites us into his reality.
Sometimes we’re asked why we place so much emphasis on the Eucharist here at St Paul’s. What about prayer, bible study, pastoral care, parish events, and all the other things that make up the life of St Paul’s Knightsbridge? They’re all important; and they’re important because they flow out from the Eucharistic life at our centre -Christ in our midst - his body and his blood given for us in broken bread and outpoured wine, healing our wounds, restoring sight to the blind and speech to the incomprehensible, restoring each one of us to his likeness.