New Reformations? Wisdom and the Church

Introduction

This is the final address in this year’s Lenten series at Warwick, New Reformations? Tonight our theme is “wisdom”. But please don’t assume that because this sermon brings the series to an end, somehow wisdom is going to supply a summing up, a full-stop. Far from reaching watertight conclusions, it’s more in the nature of biblical wisdom to identify and ask the right questions, and model good ways of asking them. This is all I can try to do tonight.

But how important that task is! It goes to the heart of our Church of England’s identity that owes so much to the Reformation. I am not simply thinking of the questions about authority, church polity and sacramental theology that dared to be asked five hundred years ago. We must ask the questions of today as a church that is constantly in search of reformation in every generation. The legacy of our history is not simply to have been reformed but to be constantly in a process of being reformed, or as they said in the sixteenth century, reformata atque semper reformanda.

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Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible

Let me begin by asking what it means to be wise according to the scriptures. I then want to raise some of the challenges facing our church today where I believe wisdom is very much needed. In our reading from the book of Proverbs, the characteristics of the wise man or woman are set out. To be wise is to respond to the invitation of a gracious lady whom the text calls Lady Wisdom. She walks the street, calls out from the heights, stands at the crossroads, takes up her position at the town gate. She is in every public place, where men and women go in and out, where choices are made about which way to go, where leaders gather to transact business, where the young congregate to learn and shape their lives. “To you O people I call. Learn prudence, acquire intelligence; hear, for I shall speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right.” She goes on to describe the treasures she has to offer to those who listen: “wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you desire cannot compare with her. Riches and honour are with me, enduring wealth and prosperity.”

If we look into these first nine chapters of Proverbs, we glimpse what wisdom means. It has many levels. We learn how to manage our household well (what we call oikonomia from which we get the word economy). We learn about shrewdness, common sense, speaking well, having good judgment, being prudent with our resources. We learn the virtues of hard work, careful speech, living purposefully, finding fulfilment in being diligent, becoming aware of other people and the environment we live in. We learn how to know ourselves better, understand the ambiguities and contradictions of our flawed human nature. We learn where to find happiness and how to avoid misery. We learn about our own creatureliness, how we live in a morally ordered universe where creation can teach us and where destinies are set. And we learn that wisdom is fundamentally a religious quality whose source and end are God himself: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and to know the Holy One is insight”.

In all this, there is one overriding message, that the goal of the wise man or woman is to become a human being who is aware emotionally, spiritually, physically, practically and theologically. We could call this the quality of being present to God, to one another, to the world and to ourselves. When the church father Irenaeus said that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, I think this is what he meant. To be wise, to be aware, to be “intelligent” in all these dimensions of living, to practise “mindfulness” as we say nowadays – all these are synonyms for the God-given wisdom that, says Proverbs, makes us fully alive, fully human. As the New Testament says, Jesus himself is the embodiment, the very incarnation, the perfect realisation of divine wisdom.

There is a special emphasis on leadership in the wisdom literature. Some scholars conjecture that books like Proverbs were compiled precisely to contribute to the education of future leaders, especially young men in the royal court – witness repeated phrases like “listen my child” throughout the book. In our own day, leadership training in the church and in secular institutions of many kinds has enthusiastically taken up the phrase “reflective practitioner” to characterise what it means to lead well. The thinking is that people, communities and institutions need more than anything to become self-aware, conscious of who and what they are, and how they need to be in wholesome relationships both personally and collectively. And you only create healthy communities by leading them in healthy ways.

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Wisdom in the Church: Three Case Studies

This is where I come to the second part of my address. For if the church is to become intelligent, reflective, generous, engaged, self-aware, compassionate, prudent, virtuous and wise, if indeed it is going to reflect the character of the God who is all these things, then it must be led by people who are formed in these ways too. I am not saying that no institution is better than its leaders. But the values by which leaders live are profoundly influential in shaping the communities they are responsible for. In the church, the ordinal spells this out carefully, reminding clergy that to be responsible under God for the household of faith is an awesome vocation indeed. These were some of the themes I explored ten years ago in my book Wisdom and Ministry. I can’t recall a time when the leadership of our church was under so much public scrutiny. We feel for the House of Bishops who need the wisdom of Solomon in responding to the challenges they are faced with.

But scrutiny is good for us. It reminds us of our accountability. I am going to come to two of these matters shortly. But let me first say something about my own situation as a recently retired priest, and how it has made me think about the Church of England’s role in the modern world. I retired eighteen months ago after nearly thirty years in full-time cathedral ministry, first as Canon Precentor here at Coventry followed by twenty years as Dean first of Sheffield and then Durham. I loved cathedral ministry and owe a great deal to Coventry for having taught me something of the craft of it. It was at Coventry that I learned how far-reaching in society and public life the mission of a cathedral can be, and how cathedrals, through their architecture and art, their music, their liturgy and preaching, yes and the life of their communities are powerful magnets that increasingly draw worshippers, pilgrims, visitors and those who are curious about faith from far and wide.

(1) The Church and Decline
We landed in retirement in a rural Northumberland village. The parish church is across the road and is served by an able young priest. He is at the same stage in his ministry as I was when I served my first incumbency in the same diocese. But that was over thirty years ago. Now, as we re-enter parish life and contribute what we can, we realise how the churches have declined in the decades we were away. The church everywhere, apart from the suburbs and market towns, is facing real threats to its long-term survival. I’m not only thinking about dwindling congregations, the buildings they have to maintain and the lack of resources with which to do it. I’m also wondering where the next generation of lay leaders is going to come from when multi-parish benefices become ever larger and clergy time is increasingly stretched. When our silver-haired generation dies out, where are tomorrow’s churchwardens, treasurers, PCC members, worship leaders and musicians going to come from? How long will the present model of parish ministry be sustainable?

Those who have analysed historical trends over the last half century tell us that organised religion is in decline in secularised western Europe. It is a fact on the ground. It is not due to the church’s faulty strategy or lack of vision or evangelistic effort or social engagement. But the institution finds it extraordinarily hard to admit to decline publicly. Bishops and dioceses devise slogans that relentlessly accentuate the positive. The word growth is usually in there somewhere, linked to Renewal and Reform. You won’t find ads at the back of the Church Times that begin: “we are a declining church, but we are learning to grow smaller gracefully. We aim to be wise in this generation, and we do not lose heart”.

How does wisdom speak into this situation? I think she would say a number of things. First of all, speak the truth and don’t massage the facts. And if the truth is frightening (which I think it is), don’t panic. Do everything you can to understand it and help others understand it, bringing to these difficult questions the critical, analytical tools with which reason has endowed you. Expect to find a great deal of complexity in what you discover that will not be susceptible to the usual solutions, for example programmes of evangelism, certainty in theology, throwing money at dwindling congregations. Wisdom says: ask yourselves where you detect the work of God in the events and processes of our time. The scriptures are, I think, less concerned with organised religion and congregational life than we may think, more outward-focused in bearing Christ to the world in word and work, more concerned with truth, justice and the weightier matters of the law. Above all, keep hope alive among those who continue to bear witness to God’s presence in times of suffering and joy. And in everything, don’t be afraid. Be of good cheer. In his death and resurrection, Christ the Lord has overcome the world.

(2) The Church and Brexit
Next, let me turn to a matter that has been much on all our minds in the past year, and indeed, in the past week. Last Saturday the European Union celebrated its sixtieth birthday. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister triggered the Article 50 process by which this country will leave the European Union.

I may as well own up to my feelings of profound sadness here. My mother was a German-Jewish war refugee and I was brought up to think of continental Europe as my home, with Britain as an essential part of it. My mother died just after the referendum, scarcely able to take in the realisation that the country that had given her a home, protected her from harm and befriended her in 1937 could now walk away from its cultural, historical and spiritual roots. But we are where we are, and in or out of the EU, we need to continue to be good Europeans, good allies, neighbours and friends across the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the English Channel.

However, my question tonight is about wisdom and how the Church of England contributed to the debate about our nation’s future. I was disappointed. We knew after the 2015 election that a referendum would soon be called and that we would be required to make the biggest political decision of our lifetimes. Some of us begged the Church of England to debate it at its February meeting last year, just as the referendum campaign began. But there was silence, no collective voice from the national church that could help bring Christian wisdom to the momentous decision we were being asked to make. You would think that the future of the nation was a matter of indifference to the Church of England. Even if the church was never going to take a view (though the other national church in Britain did, the Church of Scotland), not to have anything to say, not to help shine a Christian light on these extraordinarily difficult matters strikes me as a real failure of leadership. It’s true that an emergency debate was allowed at the July Synod. But by then it was too late. On Brexit Day last week, England’s national church had nothing officially to say about the future of the nation, no reflection to offer, no prayers to say. I felt ashamed of our silence just when we needed Christian voices to speak into a vital and contentious debate.

What is the learning here? What we find in the wisdom literature is that it is not afraid of complexity. Books like Job and Ecclesiastes do not pretend there are easy answers to the fundamental questions of human existence such as the problems of suffering and of meaning. So the national church could have warned us against the perils of binary choices, those fatal either-ors that trap us into thinking that everything must be black or white. The Church could have said: beware of thinking that all right (or all wrong) are on the side of either Remain or Leave. Even though we have to vote this way or that, listen to the case made by the other side; weigh up the evidence, assess the arguments, come to an informed conclusion. The word for this is discernment. The Church is supposed to be good at it. If only it had placed its long spiritual experience of wise discernment at the service of the nation when we needed it so much.

(3) The Church and Same-Sex Relationships
Finally I want to say something about the matter that is said to “threaten to tear the Church apart”, human sexuality and in particular, same-sex relationships. As we all know, the recent February General Synod decided not to “take note” of the House of Bishops’ report. If I had still been a member of the Synod, I would have voted with the House of Clergy not to “take note”: the report simply didn’t do justice to the complexity of human sexuality in the light not only of Christian teaching but also how to interpret that teaching knowing what we now know from science and social science about our sexualities. It seemed to bear no relation to the careful “listening process” that had been set up in every diocese to enable us to hear one another’s experience and speak frankly about sexuality. And given that a majority of lay people in the Church now support the view that committed same-sex love is as God-given as heterosexual love and that the state was right to legislate for gay marriage, the report was not just questionable as theology but bad politics too.

I watched the whole of the Synod debate. It seemed to me to be mostly well-informed, emotionally intelligent and respectful. As in the debate about women in the episcopate, the Synod can show a remarkable capacity to engage in contentious matters without sacrificing courtesy: given the wisdom literature’s strong emphasis on listening and using words with care, we can be proud of the example our representatives have set. But now the Bishops must find a way of bringing back to the Church a way forward in its understanding of sexuality that will command consent. And this calls for wisdom of the highest order because as we know, there is a real threat to the unity of the Anglican Communion should the Church of England depart (as it would be seen) from the traditional moral disciplines of the Church.

I need to tread carefully here. But as with the debate about the European Union, I may as well come clean. My belief is that whatever the complexities in the decisions we are called upon to make, we must always try to “do the right thing” without fear of the consequences, however hard they may be to face. In other words, we cannot let consequentialism dictate the way we make ethical choices; we must not allow the ends to justify or control the means.

This calls for real moral courage. I am in no doubt about what a decision to endorse same-sex marriage and to solemnise or bless it in church would mean for many Anglicans in Africa, Asia and South America. I’m also in no doubt about how hard this would be for many in our own churches to accept. At the same time, it cannot be right for our Church to retain any vestige of discrimination in the way we think, speak and act, whether it is inequalities endured by those of colour, women or gay people. So when I speak about acting courageously, I mean with the integrity that is informed by wisdom, and with consciences that have been educated by long immersion in the faith of the scriptures nurtured by the sacraments supported by the prayers of the faithful. Wisdom’s presumption is that in our decision-making, we do not look for easy ways out, nor do we crumple under pressure, nor do we take the pragmatic, politically expedient option. We behave with principle and seek to follow the way of justice and truth. I am not saying this is ever easy. But I am saying that anything less is not to act out of Christian wisdom. It comes back to wise and holy discernment. 

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Cruciform Wisdom
I believe these three examples show how inescapable the task is of seeking wisdom for and in our church. While we live in times of bewildering complexity, I hesitate to say that previous generations would have found the task of interpreting scriptural wisdom any easier. A church that is semper reformanda can never say to itself that this work is finished. Wisdom ought to make us curious and sharpen our questions. We should expect new light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word as we make read the ancient text out of our contemporary experience of faith.

But let me end by reminding us of the way wisdom is configured in the New Testament. St Paul tells us that “wisdom” by itself is not enough. What matters is to cultivate a cross-shaped wisdom that eschews human cleverness and instead looks to the crucified Jesus as both the power of God and the wisdom of God. Paul says that what we must do is to “have the mind of Christ”. So it’s never a bad idea to ask the question, when faced with hard choices, “what would Jesus do?” It is always easier to ask than to answer, of course. But to begin to frame the question in that way is to affirm how important it is always to ask our questions and do our discernment Christianly. For if Christ is no less than the incarnate wisdom of God himself, and God’s power and wisdom are found not, in the end, in human knowledge or achievement but in Christ crucified, where else can we possibly go? Especially as we prepare to celebrate his passion and resurrection in the Holy Week of our salvation that will soon be upon us?

St Mary’s Warwick, 2 April 2017
Proverbs 8.1-21   

Storm, Stress and Salvation: the gospel of Paul in a turbulent world

I doubt if St Paul envisaged archdeacons in his ecclesiology though I guess that to do the job well you need pretty much the entire panoply of spiritual gifts he lists in his letters. I worked closely with archdeacons on two bishop’s staffs for twenty years, as well as benefitting from archdeacons on the Cathedral chapters I served as Dean. I hope you will hear it not as flattery but as real appreciation when I say that I hugely admire what you do. Everything I have heard during this absorbing conference underlines that. You are profoundly committed, visionary, people, but prudent and practical too, and unlike some bishops and deans, good at the detail, a combination of gifts that make you the gyroscopes that keep our dioceses upright. On behalf of the national church, I want to thank you. 

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. I always think of Caravaggio’s great painting of that story, with the poor man, blinded by the great light that has assaulted him, spread-eagled on the ground while his huge horse rears up above. Chiaroscuro, we call Caravaggio’s technique, exploiting the dramatic interplay of light and shadow in art. Your conference theme Open to God in a Turbulent World captures the light-and-shadow aspects of the human journey and the path we walk as the people of God. A Damascus Road it is not for most of the time in our public ministry. Yet when I read the story of Paul and how he was prised apart on that road, I recall the late great Leonard Cohen’s immortal lines about the chiaroscuro of every life-changing encounter: 

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

At last Paul’s long-repressed inner turbulence is exposed for all to see. Torn between passionate love & violent hatred, something in him must have longed to still the tectonic plates colliding within him. Is this what Caravaggio is getting at? I see his painting telling us something not only about Paul himself but the storm and stress that surrounded him. Caravaggio’s day was the same. So is ours. In today’s epistle Paul sets out a catalogue of his trials and ordeals, the turbulence he has endured for the sake of the gospel. I doubt any historical era is immune from turbulence, whatever nostalgia colours the way we speak about the past. But I don’t think anyone will deny that our own times are seeing more than their fair share of it, and this is mirrored in the church too.

It’s been a privilege to overhear you entering into this theme during these past days. Our speakers, all of them first rate and some of them profoundly moving have between them created a remarkably coherent exploration of how we need to be "open to God in a turbulent world". One thing that has struck me is the difficult tension between trying to control turbulence and doing the risky thing of stepping into its flow to see where it takes us. What if turbulence, for all its discomforts, were not always an enemy to be feared, but, sometimes at least, opened up new channels of flow that might reshape our history in better ways? "Rivers do not flow in straight lines." 

We wouldn't be human if we weren't shaken by these "fightings and fears within, without". We are living in times when people of faith have to hope against hope in order to keep hope alive. I see that as a central task of the church today when good people find their spirits crushed by events spinning out of their control, and succumb to resignation, despondency and even despair. It's been refreshing to come to a conference that has genuinely tried to address how we should contemplate a world in which the lights seem to be going out in so many places. I'd thought I would hear much more than I have about Renewal and Reform, the tension between strategic development funding and resourcing parish ministry, mission action plans needing to be diligently worked up and applied to save the church from terminal collapse. What a relief! Instead, what we have been doing is the more difficult but even more important task of pondering how best we can respond to the turbulences of our time, whether in church, society or global politics.

Let me speak into our specific role as senior leaders in the church. After thirty years in three cathedrals, I'm now learning how to be a superannuated villager in the Northumberland countryside close to Hadrian's Wall. It's eye-opening to see what challenges the rural benefice is facing. It's partly about resources, but more, I think, about the ageing and declining pool of lay people who are confident and willing enough to participate in the leadership of the local church. My wife and I sit in the congregation each Sunday and contribute as lay Christians. I go across to church on weekday mornings to say matins with the Vicar, a young and able priest who is the same age as I was in my first incumbency (but who is making rather fewer mistakes than I did at that point in my ministry). I admire and fear for younger clergy because it would be so easy for their vitality to be sapped by the sheer scale of the turbulence they are facing. It's not that there is any sign of this now. But ten years down the line: who knows? So I'm glad about the investment being made across the church in mentoring, consultancy, spiritual guidance and other forms of close, intentional support, and I'm also glad to play a small part in the networks in our diocese that are there to help clergy so that they do not lose heart.

In a fascinating Bible reading, we heard insights from Esther about how to be responsive to God in a world of chance and change. In turbulent times, we are easily driven by the sneak of danger to seek security in some imagined status quo that is familiar to us. Or if we feel the need to do something, we go on the offensive and throw what we can at the crisis. But both those ways feel more reactive than responsive. And reaction is driven not by an open unafraid engagement but by panic, anxiety and fear. To apply this to the church we serve, reaction seems to characterise the rhetoric we hear from some church leaders who are unwilling to ask the question, where is God in the turbulence itself, where do we glimpse his presence and hear his voice even in our institutional decline? And what might this point to in the reshaping of our life together? But if this conference has taught me anything, it is always to go back to the question, what is God doing in the storm and stress? The Elijah story tells us that we need to be as present to the earthquake, wind and fire as the still small voice. 

In the desert tradition that owes so much to Elijah, discernment or diakrisis is one of the spiritual gifts most to be coveted by spiritual leaders. At its heart lie the twin tasks of listening and interpreting. We've heard a lot about them in this conference: how we discern God's activity so that we can join in, whether it's among the poorest of our world whom Christian Aid serves so wonderfully, or in the theatres of conflict like Afghanistan where the pity of war draws out our empathy both with those who suffer and those who serve; or nearer to home where we want to bear good witness to the gospel in our cities and countryside, suburbs and estates. On the first evening we learned how the novelist has to sit still, look hard and listen intently if he or she is going to be a truth-seeker - but by extension that means each of us because story is at the heart of who we are and how we tell of the mighty acts of God. So to reflect yesterday afternoon on how we sustain the life of the spirit in was an essential aspect of responding well: "praying, sleeping, dreaming, looking, smiling". It isn't too much to claim that all of wisdom comes down to these avenues of discernment, for in the spiritual tradition, these are the gifts of God that lead us on the path of insight and illumination. In the gospel reading, Jesus thanks God for revealing the mysteries of the kingdom not to the imagined wise and intelligent but to infants, a theme developed at length by St Paul in his Corinthian letters. 

We started out on the first afternoon reflecting on mission. Whenever that word comes up I think of the title of a great book written more than a century ago, Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods – St Paul’s or Ours? The Feast of St Paul is a day to pull that book off the shelf. When I was a curate in the 1970s, my much-loved training incumbent Bob Jeffery, once a member of this conference who died this past Christmas, insisted that I read it. “We’ve got it all wrong” he would mutter crossly. “We don’t listen to the voices of the indigenous, the local and the least privileged and powerful. We don’t hear what the context is telling us let alone bother with the hard work of interpreting it to the biblical text and the text to it. We don't learn how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land, and we don’t trust the Holy Spirit to nurture and grow disciples. If we did, how different the Church of England would look.” Diakrisis. 

Whom am I to tell you this? You work with the reality day after day. But here’s what’s distinctive about archdeacons. You do these things in minute particulars. Bishops (and even deans) can climb clear of what are disparagingly called “operations” and get away with painting big pictures in very broad brush strokes. It can all get a bit excitable. But not archdeacons. When I chaired the DAC, I saw how invaluable archdeacons were at reminding the committee that its decisions were not just about conservation and development, but were in the service of mission. "There is nothing too ample for you to overflow, nothing too small that your workmanship is not revealed" we heard R S Thomas say yesterday. 

When I was about to become a dean, I looked for books to read on leadership. This was before the days of strategic leadership programmes and mini MBAs.  My wife suggested the Hornblower books. I read through the entire series and found them highly illuminating. Here’s one example. “In the ships of the line in which he had served there had only been minutes of battle for every week at sea, and he had gradually become fixed in the idea that seamanship was the one requisite for a naval officer.  To be master of the countless details of managing a wooden sailing ship; not only to be able to handle her under sail, but to be conversant with all the petty but important trifles regarding cordage and cables, pumps and salt pork, dry rot and the Articles of War; that was what was necessary. But he knew now of other qualities equally necessary: a bold yet thoughtful initiative, moral as well as physical courage, tactful handling of both superiors and subordinates, ingenuity and quickness of thought.” (C.S. Forester, Lieutenant Hornblower)

Something like that could do as a role-description for an archdeacon. That passage to me encapsulated all the arts of leadership from understanding the detail (because you are at heart a practitioner) to the high moral qualities that make a man or a woman stand out: imagination, intelligence, fortitude, responsiveness, emotional awareness, self-understanding, good judgment and the determination to collaborate. And all this, placed within a theological and spiritual frame, lays the best possible foundation for being leaders in mission not out of anxious reaction to storm and stress but because it is right in itself. These are the marks of intelligent, far-sighted leadership because they emerge out of careful discernment. This is what we must cultivate if we are to have the spirit of St Paul.

I am currently reading a remarkable book A Different Path: an emotional autobiography by Neville Symington, a psychoanalyst and ex-Catholic priest. He speaks about the two pillars of a healthy life. "Friendship and wisdom are the most precious fruits of civilisation" he says. So I’d like to commend to you as a model for an archdeacon the "wise friend". More than any other role in the church, yours invites you to be both the source of insight and discernment, not dispensed from a distant centre but in that all-important place that is very close to the parish clergy and the people they serve. In a turbulent world, they, we, need your wisdom and your close friendship in equal measure. 

In our conference, in one way or another, every address, every workshop, every act of worship and a lot of the table talk has been about recovering this vision of life and our involvement in it. To be open to God in a turbulent world tests our spiritual resilience in ways that unsettle and disturb us. Like the disciples in the boat on storm-tossed Gennesaret, we cry, “help, Lord”. And we are heard. "Thou art my rock, thou art my rest" says George Herbert in words quoted to us on Monday. 

Turbulence can obscure our sight by unbalancing us or hurling dust into our eyes or towing us into maelstroms from which we can't pull ourselves out. Symington tells how he "went into the Church so that, identified with a savage God, I would not see these dark forces of unreason within me." The analyst and the spiritual guide both know that we must get to know and befriend the demons lurking in the shadow, whether in the institution or in our own selves. If we don't, they will never be stilled and we shall never see clearly. But like Elijah’s earthquake, wind and fire, like the ordeals that St Paul writes about, turbulence that is faced with courage and equanimity can purify our vision of God and how he is present to us when we are most disorientated and afraid. It takes great faith to read things that way, yet how can we read them any other way as we hear St Paul's magnificent words on this his feast day: "as dying, and see, we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything"?

So as we make Eucharist and say our farewells, it's with the resolve to be newly open to God in a turbulent world, to be cheerful and courageous, filled with hope and poised to be wise friends to all for the sake of the gospel. This Eucharist invites us to participate in Love's great work in the world, God's project of reconciliation and redemption and the making new of all things. Maybe, one day, we shall look back and know why we were here as part of it, doing what we did for God through change and chance and providence. And, just maybe, we shall understand how all of it was "for just such a time as this".

At the National Archdeacons' Conference, Swanwick, on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 2017

2 Corinthians 6.1-10; Luke 10.17-24

A Church Anniversary

Jeremiah was living through the last days of the kingdom of Judah.  The Babylonians were at the gate; but the people of Jerusalem could not believe that God would abandon them.  Had not God pledged to David and Solomon that God would always defend Zion, would always be present in his holy temple, would always hear the prayer of his people?  And then along comes Jeremiah and says: ‘do not trust in these deceptive words: “this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord”’.  The temple cannot save you, he says.  Its sacrifices and ceremonies and rituals, what are they worth if you oppress the alien, the orphan, the widow, if you shed innocent blood, if you go after idols?  But amend your ways and act justly with one another: then I will dwell with you in this place. And only then.  It’s a stark oracle: this church may be 125 years old, our Cathedral may be a thousand, but they will not save us from ourselves.  We cherish our church buildings but we need to ponder Jesus’ reply when the disciples drew his attention to the temple: ‘Look, Lord, what wonderful stones, and wonderful buildings’.  And Jesus says that the days are coming when not one stone will be left standing on top of another.  Even the best of what human hands can build will not last for ever; and if we build while harbouring pride and injustice in our hearts, they will be our judgment all the sooner.

The New Testament reading is tough too in how it demands of us that we let go the pride and injustice Jeremiah speaks of. Zacchaeus, the little man we used to sing about at Sunday school, wants to see Jesus as he passes by. His strategy of both gaining height but also hiding away in the copious branches of a sycamore tree only partly succeeds. There is no escape from the man who sees into every human heart. Back home they go, ignoring the grumbling of the self-righteous crowd that thinks Jesus should know better than to accept the hospitality of a sinner. And then occurs one of those marvellous transformations in human life that Luke is so good at noticing and recounting. Zacchaeus resolves, without any prompting from the Lord, to give half his possessions to the poor and to repay four times over anyone he has defrauded as a tax collector. Here is a rich young man who, unlike the other in the gospel, is not held back by his great wealth. And there is rejoicing among the angels of God over this sinner who repents. ‘Today salvation has come to this house; for the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.’  I said it was a tough reading.  So it is, because the price of this repentance is a complete turning round of a man’s life. Metanoia never costs less than everything.

How do we reflect on this great church building and the life of this parish in the light of these sobering thoughts? Perhaps they concentrate the mind on what is truly of God.  ‘You are God’s temple, and God’s spirit dwells in you’ says Paul in the text that the Bishop of Newcastle preached from at the dedication service here on 17 October 1888.  He said that reverence we pay a house of God is not for anything in the building, its dramatic architecture, its stained glass, its mosaics, however beautiful these all are; nor for the beauty of the ceremonial this church was built for. It is all for the sake of the beauty of God the Indweller, so that the eye travels from the house to its owner. You could say that a church built in the arts and crafts tradition would always speak of a God whose artistry and craftsmanship are what we see all round us in the fabric of the world. But like Jeremiah, the bishop issued a warning.  He said that if Christ welcomes those who come to this temple with integrity, beware those who come carelessly or in profanity of spirit. The house of prayer belongs together with truth and justice, never to be put asunder.

Today we tell the story of a church that has stood here for 125 years, its campanile a sign for miles around of the spiritual and human values of Christian faith.  In that time there will have been many events to celebrate, and perhaps a few to lament: the story of any human institution is always a mixture of light and shadow and it is important that we tell the truth about it. But in the next century, we shall all face challenges and threats our forebears could not have dreamed of in that radiantly confident when Queen Victoria had just celebrated her golden jubilee and it seemed that the sun would never set on the empire. Now, church attendances are in steady decline in most areas, and we know that this diocese is not immune from the eroding effects of secularisation.  With slender resources in both people and money, it matters all the more that we harness them all the more carefully.  This calls for what spiritual guides call discernment.  How do we keep the message of your campanile fresh and vivid in a society that finds itself distanced from religion? An anniversary should mean taking the time to reflect, think, ponder and pray in the light of the question that haunts us in that psalm of exile: how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  Our land is increasingly strange to the church, and the church a stranger to it.   How then do we sing this song with confidence and hope?  How do we live as a church in the generous, life-changing way of Zacchaeus, little in stature but who walked tall in the company of Jesus Christ?

No-one pretends that the tasks of mission are easy in our era.  They never were, though we tend to look back nostalgically to the days when St George’s was built when organised religion was powerful, respected and rich. But we should remind ourselves of the world this church found itself in within a generation of its beginning.  Next year, we shall remember how Europe was suddenly engulfed in a war no-one predicted.  Many young men from this parish and this city had their future taken away from them.  In the aftermath of war came the great depression, huge unemployment here on Tyneside, and then war once again.  The cost to families and communities was beyond imagining.  This church ministered faithfully and well during those decades; it will have called for great vision, courage and skill on the part of both clergy and laity.

What about now?  It’s hard to imagine that life is getting easier for most people especially the disadvantaged, the elderly and the chronically sick. Economically, the lights are only fitfully going on again across Europe; the effects of our collective mismanagement of money, our greed like the temple-goers of Jeremiah’s day, like tax collecting Zacchaeus always to acquire at someone else’s expense will continue will be felt across the North East.  If this is true, it calls for the same degree of vision, courage and skill on the part of people of faith.  We wouldn’t be human if we did not at times feel our spirits sinking, wondering if decline can ever be turned round, and ask, with Paul, ‘who is sufficient for these things?’ Well, his answer is not to lose heart; to go on trusting God to do much through the little that we bring.  ‘We have this treasure in earthen vessels’ he says ‘so that it may be known that this extraordinary power belongs to God and not to us’ he says.  Who can say what story will be told 125 years from now as our descendants here at St George’s gather to celebrate a quarter of a millennium?  In our time, what matters is to be faithful in looking for the kingdom of God, and giving an answer for the hope that is within us. We shall have fought the fight, finished the race, and kept the faith.  We shall have done what we can to be obedient disciples of Jesus. All God needs to know is that we are willing and ready and glad to follow.

St George’s Jesmond 125th anniversary service, 13 October 2013
Jeremiah 7.1-11; Luke 19.1-10