Farewell to St Chad's: the Rector's Last Supper

This is my last Rector's Feast after eight years in this office. It's a time for farewells and above all, for saying thank you.

 

What I want to say comes from the heart. You've made me so welcome here in this wonderful college community. As Rector, I've wanted to be a good friend and champion of St Chad's in the University, the city, the church and beyond. It's been a huge privilege. But more than that, it's been enormous fun. As I often say, in this honorary role you get all the nice bits to do while the Principal, governors and staff bear the burden and the heart of the day. They deserve our recognition.

Jenny and I have loved being part of the College for almost the whole of our time in Durham, first as Visitor, then as Rector and, to my surprise when Joe Cassidy thrust a college hood over my head on his last College Day, as a Fellow. I'm so grateful that the green St Chad's hood means that I can continue to enjoy this precious relationship with St Chad's after today when I become superannuated.

Being a friend means sharing dark times as well as light. All of us who knew and loved Father Joe still miss his loss very keenly. It was Joe who invited me to become the College's first Rector. He gave everything he had to this college that he loved. He was to all of us an inspiration, a truly transformative leader who took the long view and worked incredibly hard to make it a reality. We could not have wished for a better successor in Dr Margaret Masson who prized the aims and values for which St Chad's has stood in recent times, but who has put her own imprint on them as we move into the future. I loved working with Joe and I've loved working with Margaret. I've loved working with their colleagues, both staff and governors, people of exceptional ability and calibre.

And I've loved getting to know students too. Sadly, not enough of you, and not as deeply as I'd have wanted, though I was always heartened to get many a cheery wave when we passed one another in the Bailey. This college has always emphasised the importance of being a good community that prizes friendship. I've always felt that I was among friends in this college, and that means more than I can say. Your excellence not only academically but also in the arts, sport, volunteering and promoting social justice in the wider community has been truly inspiring. Durham University is rightly proud of you. We all are.

I'd like to wish Dean Andrew Tremlett well as he follows me in this role. It's good to know that as my successor at Durham Cathedral, he now has his feet well installed under the table with so many exciting developments to celebrate, not least the completion of the cloister project Open Treasure which I hope you will visit when the treasures of St Cuthbert are installed in their final resting place next month. I hope Andrew enjoys being Rector of St Chad's as much as I have.

So I shall follow the fortunes of the College from across the hills, in the Tyne Valley where we now live. It goes without saying that we shall miss our regular trips to Durham. However, we shall be back from time to time, knowing that behind the green front door on the Bailey, there is warmth and friendship and the stimulus of good conversation and a generosity of spirit that has no equal in Durham. Thank you for all of it.

Finally, let me anticipate and congratulate you on the dazzling results I'm sure St Chad's will have achieved** in final exams this year. Indeed, congratulations on all the success you have enjoyed as members of this college. If you are coming back in October, or your work is keeping you here, have a very good summer. And if this summer is a time for farewells, well, you and I have that much in common. There's no denying that it's poignant to say goodbye. So go with my very best wishes and prayers for the future, wherever it will take you. You and I know that we shall always prize the fact that we belong to the St Chad's family.

 

This isn't the parting of friends, but an opportunity to discover how friendship enters a new dimension; not adieu but au revoir. Thank you again. God bless you. God bless St Chad's.

**Abundantly fulfilled when the results were published the following week, the best ever for St Chad's.

Farewell at Durham: the Dean responds

First, and most important of all, a big thank you from Jenny and me for so much kindness and generosity: not just gifts to treasure, but for being at this service today. There are people here from all the places where we have lived and I have served in ministry, going back even to student and school days. I want tonight to pay tribute to all the places I have served as a priest: Oxford, Salisbury, Alnwick, Coventry, Sheffield and Durham. You have given so much friendship and encouragement and when I have needed it, forgiveness.

 

When you retire you hear a lot about ‘legacy’. ‘What are you most proud of from your time in Durham?’ I’m asked. I am proud of many things, but not for myself: it’s all the colleagues past and present who have brought energy and flair for us to do so much together. It’s not ‘I’ but ‘we’ in the plural.

 

For example. I am proud that we have nearly completed our great project ‘Open Treasure’ which will open next year. The exhibitions are a celebration of our North East Christian heritage, but they’re much more. By opening our doors to more visitors, and by telling our story, we are doing a serious piece of Christian mission and outreach. I am very proud that we admitted girls to the Cathedral choir in 2009. I am proud of arts projects like the Transfiguration Window which, like the music, enrich our spirituality so profoundly. I am proud that with the University and the County, we brought the Lindisfarne Gospels back to Durham in 2013. I am proud of Lumière, Durham’s great winter light festival in which the Cathedral plays a large part. I’m proud of the day to day ministry of this Cathedral in its worship, music and preaching, this community and its welcome to guests, its intellectual and spiritual contribution to this region.

 

I’ve also been asked: ‘what will you miss most?’ How do I begin to answer that in this place of gifts? This amazing building, our Deanery that has been such a happy home, the saints both living and departed who have been companions in faith and prayer. County Durham people are so warm, genuine and hospitable. And at the heart of it all is the Benedictine rhythm of prayer day in, day out. How shall I live without evensong, the psalms of the day, the evening canticles, the rhythms and cadences of the liturgy?

 

I have some particular thanks tonight:

the four diocesan Bishops I have worked with, two suffragans, their senior colleagues and to clergy and lay people across the diocese for their generous invitation to contribute to the life of this great diocese;

the Cathedral Chapter who have held to the highest standards in the oversight and leadership of this Cathedral and have been wonderful travelling companions;

our magnificent staff, committee members, volunteers and the Cathedral community itself who all love this place and give so much to it;

colleagues in the University and at St Chad’s where it has been a privilege to contribute to the academic life and governance of this great institution;

the Lords Lieutenant of our two counties (and for the honour of serving as a DL in this one), to civic leaders, and those in all sectors for so much friendship, encouragement and support;

those who support us through their financial giving;  without you we could never undertake what we aspire to do and to become;

the Chorister School where I’ve chaired the governors and have always been warmly welcome in that lovely community;

those who in personal and intimate ways have been there for us. You have enriched our lives and added to our happiness more that you know;

and my family. Jenny has travelled the whole journey with me; our children joined us on the way. I couldn’t have got to today without them.

Someone once said that cathedrals are ‘asylums for amiable gentlemen with indistinct convictions’. If that was ever true, it isn’t now. They stand for lively Christian faith in its profoundest aspects, lived out on the thresholds of church and world where disciples are made. These great places are flagships of worship and mission. You feel the force of religion here. I’ve learned in three cathedrals how vital it is that Cathedral and Diocese are in partnership as we bear witness to the kingdom of God. When the synergy is good, the opportunities are endless.   

 

Hensley Henson was Dean here one hundred years ago during the Great War. When he arrived at the station to leave Durham, as he thought for good, the station master recognised him and said goodbye ‘with much feeling’, says his diary. That Dean, a complex man beset by self-doubt, was moved by this show of affection and wondered if it was sincere. This Dean, not a stranger to self-doubt, is in no doubt at all about the love and affection we have found here. It has been outstanding, unforgettable. Thank you to Isaac, Lilian, Margaret and the Bishop for putting it into words that have touched us.

 

So: you are in our hearts as we cross the Tyne and go back to Northumberland. We’re still in North East England: far enough not to haunt the Cathedral; near enough to stay in touch. If you can’t stay in a medieval Deanery, the next best place to live is within sight of a level crossing with its comforting sound of trains. You know where we are. Thank you again. God be with you.

All in the End is Harvest: a farewell sermon

‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost’ says Jesus to his disciples after he has fed the crowd. That seems like an apt theme as my time in Durham draws to an end, indeed, as I venture into the pulpit one last time after forty years of public ministry. ‘Five barley loaves and two fish – but what are they among so many?’ Ordained ministry can feel like that at times. Yet out of such meagre resources is shaped this demonstration of God’s generosity and goodness. The fragments scattered on the hillside are its memory. And because this is God’s doing, nothing must be lost. In one of her poems Edith Sitwell concludes: ‘Nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest’.

Perhaps in St John, the gathered fragments in the fields are meant to echo harvest-time. We know from the next chapter that this was the season of one of the three great Jewish pilgrim feasts, Sukkot: Booths or Tabernacles. It marks the end of summer, the gathering-in of the harvest, the celebration of the year’s abundance. Tonight there is a big harvest moon, and a total eclipse to go with it. Tomorrow the Jewish community from which I come will keep the first day of their harvest festival and today they are preparing for it. We heard the Torah’s instructions in the first reading. The people are to make booths out of branches of willow and palm and live in them out in the open for a week. Here, exposed to the elements, to the creation, to one another and to themselves, they are to ‘rejoice before the Lord your God’.

There is a rich symbolism here: touching the earth and living close to the soil that has yielded this harvest; putting aside the securities human beings surround themselves with and learning a deeper dependence on God; and as the text says, reliving the memory of the past ‘so that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt’. For the Hebrews had themselves been a pilgrim people, a migrant community looking for a home. Therefore, as so many passages in the Torah tell us, Israel must never forget the homeless, the migrants, the displaced, to whom they must be as compassionate and merciful as God himself.

I see this theme of going out, leaving our securities behind as a metaphor of saying farewell today. I don’t simply mean leaving this Cathedral where we have been so happy for a dozen years. I am also recalling the places that have shaped these forty years of ministry: St Andrew’s Headington in Oxford where I was ordained deacon, and Balliol College where I was ordained priest, Sarum College and the Cathedral at Salisbury, the parish of Alnwick, Coventry Cathedral, Sheffield Cathedral and Durham. These communities have welcomed us, made us feel at home, offered friendship and forgiveness, cared for us, taught me everything I know about the art and the craft of ordained ministry. They have yielded a harvest for which I want to give thanks. In the passion Jesus says: ‘of those whom you have given me I have lost not one’. All these places have been given us to treasure and keep safe in the memory. ‘Gather the fragments so that nothing is lost.’

The themes of harvest, this time of Booths, can help us see what life should mean for us as people of faith. Thankfulness to God because to praise Almighty God, to practise gratitude, eucharistia, is the first principle of religion and the foundation of all it means to be human. Dependence on God because it is as we turn back to him and acknowledge his reign over us that we understand how he made us for himself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in him. Living close to the earth because reverence for life, treating the world with courtesy and charity is to discover our true place in God’s creation. Remembering where we came from because the story of the great acts of God is the foundation of all Christian life, mission and the pursuit of truth and justice. And solidarity with the poor and needy such as the desperate and voiceless, the refugees and asylum-seekers, because as the sanctuary knocker on the Cathedral door announces, God’s household is a place of refuge, safety and care.

For twelve years, St Cuthbert has been a travelling companion. I was installed as dean on his day in 2003. I have often pondered that mighty stone slab in the shrine that has his name etched into it and been moved. The letters are rough and crude, in contrast to the finely wrought architecture of this cathedral where he would be amazed to find himself lying more than thirteen centuries later. When you are dean a cathedral that is loved all over the world, it could go to your head. You could become grand, think of yourself as Someone, whereas Jesus teaches us that his kingdom is for the nobodies of this world, the poor in spirit, the mourners and the meek, all who know their brokenness, their frailty, their need for mercy.

Cuthbert has recalled me to the essential simplicity of Christian ministry, helped me get my values back into perspective. Thankfulness, dependence on God, living close to the earth, remembering where we come from, solidarity with the poor: these were the qualities that were remembered in him. Perhaps the memory of the saints here in North East England is a particular gift to us who seek holiness and look for models to inspire us on the path of discipleship, for Cuthbert was only one of many in his fierce love of God and burning desire to serve the human family. Aidan, Oswald, Hild, Bede and many others: you find these visionary yet humane qualities in them all. We are all called to emulate them, live not out of the risk-free securities we crave but out on the dangerous edge of things where trust and faith in God are everything, as if indeed we were going out into the open air to live a perpetual feast of Booths.  

This is how Jesus himself was and is for us. In his cross and resurrection the broken pieces of our lives are gathered up. ‘Nothing is lost and all in the end is harvest.’ In these fragments, like the bread scattered on the hillside are the abiding traces of God’s generosity in which the seeds of promised glory are enfolded. I mean nothing less than the transformation we call the kingdom of God whose coming we long for, his great project of love that is always moving out to all creation. I have tried for 40 years to give an answer for the hope that is within us, our reason for being alive. In such ways, for all their flaws and brokenness, we bear witness to the story that is both God’s and ours: the tender mercy out of which God reaches out to the world in Christ, finds us and gathers us in as the harvest of his love.

So trusting in that hope, we cast our bread upon the waters and wait to see what God will do. We cannot know what lies ahead for us, what fragments will be for us or others to gather up. But our hope in God is enough to sustain us in the days that are to come. ‘All in the end is harvest’. ‘Gather the fragments, so that nothing is lost.’  

Durham Cathedral, 27 September 2015
(Leviticus 23.39-end, John 6.1-15)