Sermon: Evensong - 27 June 2010

 

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford Photograph of Victor Stock

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 27th June 2010
Service:
Evensong

Dr Nicholas Thistlethwaite, the Sub Dean and Precentor, thinks we shouldn’t have sermons at Evensong and the Dean thinks we should have Evensong in the middle of the afternoon, so that we can have the evenings free like Salisbury, and they don’t have a sermon at Evensong either.  So this sets the scene for a very short sermon.

Thank you, Sponsors, for supporting the Choristers (one family have clubbed together and given £1,500 a year for five years and West Byfleet raise money from coffee mornings to support their Chorister).  Thank you for taking the message about the Choristers to your friends and by encouraging other people to support the Choristers.  Thank you to the Master of the Choristers herself, and her assistant, and the Organ Scholar, and those who teach voice and instrument, and do all the work, as I saw the other Thursday morning at Lanesborough, where our Boy Choristers are taught music before the school day begins.

Eight years ago, when the Dean first arrived at Guildford, he received a letter from a woman that said, ‘I returned to the Cathedral after a gap of twenty-two years and was horrified to find the nave full of children, laughing and singing in the Lord’s House’.  It went on in similar vein.  I constructed a reply that went something like this, ‘Dear Madam, how encouraging it would have been for the Dean to receive a letter saying, “after an absence of twenty-two years I was thrilled to return to the Lord’s House and find it full of children singing, thus finding our Lord’s command fulfilled to the letter, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not’”'.

The boys you sponsor are learning something.  They don’t always like the same music we do.  I asked one of the boys the other day what he didn’t like.  ‘Psalms’, he said, ‘especially when they’re long’.  But later on, because of your encouragement, that little boy’s life will be transformed.  If you look at the lives of great and important people who’ve really changed things for the better for others, they often start off in a Cathedral choir, because a choir teaches discipline, preparedness, hard work, application, skill, and skill of a high degree.

So, this short opportunity to say thank you is sincerely meant.  It’s rare indeed to be quite so unhappy as the woman who wrote the cross letter about the children’s workshop.  The fact is that anybody who’s half human at all coming through the door and hearing children singing and seeing children being happy will be made wholly human in a moment and lifted up to that mysterious reality we call God.  Incidentally, the best way to support the Choir is by coming to Evensong on a weekday – why don’t you?