Welcome Sermon

The Rt Revd Paul Bayes - 25th September 2010

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A bishop visits a vicarage and the Vicar goes to make the tea. The Vicar's child says, "Bishop, can you tell me something my Daddy can't understand?"

The bishop says, "Of course. Of course. What is it your Daddy can't understand?"

The kid says, "My Daddy can't understand how you ever became a bishop."

Well, it is a puzzle sometimes. Like all puzzles it will have a key, though in my case you'll have to ask the Bishop of St Albans if you need that key, if there's something you can't understand!

Puzzles have a key, and for some today it's tempting to see the whole universe as a puzzle and to look for the key. That tends to make people who think they’ve found the key cross and insecure and scratchy and shrill.

But when the Psalmist wrote, "As the hart, the deer, longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you O God", he wasn't talking about a puzzle. He was pointing to a mystery. And exploring that mystery, the mystery of God, tends to make people gentle and confident and hospitable and still.

A puzzle is a door with a key. You find the key and you go through the door and leave it behind. But a mystery is more like a house. You go into it and you live in it, all your life you live in it, and it has many mansions. The life of faith is a life of mystery, and as I begin to be here with you I will see us as friends, as companions, who share in a mystery.

The mystery starts with feeling hunted, and thirsting, like the hart. Hunted by the way the world is, with all its glory and all its pain. Thirsty for a way of living that will make sense of things. Thirst for God who will make sense of things.

In this season our diocese is not called to solve a puzzle but to live God's love; to enter more deeply into that mystery. To transform our thirsty communities with the gift of God. To make new disciples and invite them into the house.

How we live God's love is a mystery indeed, and the diocese will be exploring it together in the future, but it is our purpose. We explore that purpose, we inhabit it, we grow into it and make ourselves at home there, and so we become the Church.

What Church do we become?

Sometimes it goes wrong and we just look like the Church of Church. The Church of Church treats church like a puzzle and is forever trying to fix it. It produces people whose sole concern is the Church, that it should be traditional, that it should be relevant, that it should be true to the full gospel, that it should be open to new insights, that we should solve its puzzles, throw out those who don’t agree with us, church, church, church, nothing but church, the Church of Church. That self-obsessed church, that Church without the mystery of God, is a club not worth joining. And it’s a club quite hard to join, as it insists that everyone who comes should think, and act, and even dress and look, the same.

But I don't want to give the Church of Church too much room in my mind. I was baptised and confirmed and ordained and now consecrated into the Church of God, and into the Church of England. God and England are the poles of my life as a Christian bishop here. God in Christ, the mystery of love, a fabulous tent with many mansions, and England, where that tent has been pitched for us.

God as God is in Jesus - that amazingly attractive mystery of love and relationship for which we thirst and long to give our lives. And England as England is - with its amazing diversity and richness and welcome and its social exclusion and its xenophobia, with its traditions of art and beauty and vulgarity and ugliness, with its high culture and its yob culture and its celebrity culture and its 60 million thirsty people, this extraordinary field within which we are called to witness and to minister.

Because we are the Church for England our church is very specific. Sometimes we might wish that we could dissolve England and elect another one, but God has said that He loves the world, so He must love the England we have. And He calls us to serve it and to lay our treasures at its feet , even if that means our treasures are kicked around a bit - though in fact they're not kicked around half as much as the Church of Church might fear. Research done in my last job with the national Weddings project shows that there’s a spiritual seriousness in this nation that should delight us.

We share the thirst for God, with very many people. This week confirms that, as the Office of National Statistics reports that seven out of ten people in the UK identify themselves as Christians. They are serious about their lives and they’re serious about God, even though they may not yet be worshipping, ministering members of the Christian Church.

Believe me, thirst for God is widespread, though we have to work hard to understand the language that England uses when it speaks of God, and I make it my life’s business to try to understand what language England uses to express its thirst. We need to make sure things don’t get lost in translation. Because the memory of Christ is fading from England, but the longing for God is very much alive.

Because we’re the Church of England we’re specific. But because we are the Church of God we're wide. In the consecration service on Tuesday the Archbishop’s introduction said "…formed into a single communion of faith and love, the Church in each place and time is united with the Church in every place and time.” Bishop Alan repeated these words earlier in this service today.

We’re called to live God’s love and to live with a sympathy as wide as God’s love. We belong to a community in every place and time, and we inhabit God’s mystery alongside people whose languages are hard to understand and whose thoughts are sometimes almost incomprehensible to us, as ours are to them. That will teach us to listen and speak to England, which so often speaks a language we don’t understand, too. To be real, we have to be local. But to be real, we have to be global too.

Sometimes in the Church of Church people have wanted to ignore all this, and to shrink the church until it becomes a community of the like-minded, whatever mind that is. In the Church of England and in the Anglican Communion we did not learn Christ that way. And so I want to end today by making that visible.

Firstly by reaching back in time to connect with Lancelot Andrewes, a much bigger bishop than I, whose life and ministry we remember today. Like us he inhabited the mystery of God’s longing in Jesus Christ, and he wrote about it and preached about it using the language of the hunted hart as Lauryn will read, what it cost Jesus and how we respond. You’ll find the text inside the back cover of your service sheet; it’s the second half of the excerpt there. Thank you, Lauryn.

Reading: An extract from Sermon preached upon Good-Friday, by Lancelot Andrewes

…It is well known that Christ and His cross were never parted, but that all His life long was a continual cross. At the very cratch, His cross began. Then Herod sought to do that which Pilate did, even to end His life before it began …

He was in the psalm of the Passion, the twenty-second, in the very front or inscription of it, He is set forth unto us under the term of a hart, cervus matutinus, 'a morning hart,' that is, He a hart roused early in the morning; as from His birth He was by Herod, and hunted and chased all His life long, as at this day brought to an end, and as the poor deer, stricken and wounded to the heart …

So let us even run to Him; and running not faint, but so constantly run, that we fail not finally to attain the happy fruition of Himself, and of the joy and glory of His blessed throne…

Preached before the King's Majesty, at Greenwich, on the Twenty-sixth of March, A.D. MDCV, being Good Friday.

Secondly to reach across space to central Africa and to the people and the church of Rwanda; a nation whose experience seems far further from me that the centuries that separate me from Lancelot Andrewes. My son Samuel and I visited Rwanda at the turn of the century, just a couple of years after the genocide there in 1994. We found a Church whose attitudes and ideas were very different from our own, but which in that unimaginable suffering was seeking to live God’s love and to praise Him. So this sermon will end as together we sing a simple song in Kinyarwanda and in English – the words are on your order of service – and then as we hear the sound of the world’s church through the skins of Joop’s and Rachel’s drums, I invite you to commit yourself to a mystery and a sympathy as wide as God’s love. We’ll sing, and then we’ll listen to the drums, and then we’ll pray as my brother Richard leads us. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Shim’Imana, halelujah; shim’Imana, amen (Praise God, alleluia; praise God, amen)