Sermon: Farewell Eucharist for Canon Frost

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 26th September 2010
Service:: Eucharist

‘The worldly are more astute than the other-worldly in dealing with their own kind’ Not an encouraging text with which to wish Jonathan Frost bon voyage, but it’s what Holy Church has given us this morning!

Well, one of the ways of understanding this morning’s Gospel, in which a whole heap of tradition comes together, is that the steward is called dishonest because of his previous mismanagement of the estate, but there was nothing fraudulent about his negotiations with his master’s debtors, and it was the landlord who commended him for the ingenuity with which he extracted himself from his predicament. This all depends on the intricacies of the Jewish law of usury, for in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy we read that the law of Moses forbade the taking of interest from Jews on loans of any kind … but - well that was then.

In the time of Jesus the Pharisees had large financial, commercial concerns and found a way of evading the intention of law without transgressing its letter. They argued that the purpose of the law was to protect the destitute from exploitation, not to prevent the lending of money for the mutual profit of lender and borrower, and there were some situations in which a loan could be regarded as a business partnership and interest was the fair sharing of the profits of a joint enterprise. They therefore laid down the rule that if a man already possessed some of the commodity he wished to borrow, he wasn’t destitute, and taking a profit by his creditor was not serious. However poor a man might be, he was likely to have a little wheat left in his bin and a little oil in his lamp. These were therefore the two commodities most commonly chosen for the working of this particular form of legal fiction. The two debtors mentioned in the parable had received large loans from the steward out of his master’s estate. It matters not how their debts were incurred nor what form the loan took, what matters is that for legal purposes the loans were expressed in terms of wheat and oil, and were therefore free, by the law of man though not by the law of God, from the taint of usury. Religious experts once again had got round the difficulty and here in the parable they’re commended for getting round the difficulties. In this complex piece of Luke 16 there are a whole heap of problems, and I’ve just given you one example from one interpretation of one of them.

The trouble is we need people to look up to, all of us. That’s why we say when something isn’t quite honest, it’s not cricket, or at least we have said that in this country for quite a long time, which is why we’re so shocked by allegations of bribery and dishonesty in a game we’d thought of as honest. We’d have to really give away a lot if we had to stop using ‘it’s not cricket’ as an expression of fair play. Well, becoming a Bishop is a whole heap of things. He is a man or woman, to whom we can look up, who can exemplify the Christ life for us, show us what it’s like to be like Jesus.

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of speaking to the House of Bishops meeting in Oxford, not only some of the Bishops in the Church of England, but some of the Bishops from the Church of Ireland, the Church of Wales and the Episcopal Church in Scotland. I worried an enormous amount about this. What could I do that wasn’t just self-indulgent bad temper or a little snide preaching, having miraculously got the Bishops in my power? I decided to talk to them about displacement, the way in which we project onto public figures, and in the Church we do this especially to Bishops, all sorts of hopes, desires and needs they can’t possibly fulfil.

The Archbishop of Canterbury had invited Jonathan Frost to this meeting, which was very kind of him, as he’s not yet a Bishop, and Jonathan was suitably flattered and pleased to be invited until he discovered I was speaking at it. ‘You will be good?’ he said anxiously, and then answered his own question, ‘Oh no, you won’t be, will you’. Well, Jonathan can tell you about it, if you’re interested afterwards. I did tease him about cricket. You all know that at one time Jonathan may have become a professional cricketer. He’s still, I’m told by other people who play, quite good at the game. And I said, of course, cricket was an honourable profession, or had been until recently.

If you look, even cursorily, at the history of the last few thousand years, the Episcopal life has sometimes been heroic, sometimes quiet and unnoticed, sometimes a subject of obloquy and scorn. There have been some extraordinary Bishops, not all edifying, but those who have done good and whose good therefore remains, have tried to be like Jesus, which is what I told the Bishops at Oxford last week they should aim at. Not fiddling the books as it were, keeping the letter of the law but not the spirit, as the Pharisees in the parable, but trying to be transparent, honest, human and risk-taking in their teaching and leading. For what is a Bishop’s chair for? It is not the throne of a ruler, but the chair of a teacher, which is why in the early days it was never fixed. A cathedral is wherever a Bishop put his cathedra down, a folding stool on which he could rest as he taught those assembled round him. How lovely it is for us that a member of our foundation has been called to Episcopal office, and with what fervent prayer and deep affection we surround Jonathan Frost and his family as Jonathan and they set off on this journey of exploration and discovery of what Jonathan would call ‘promise and possibility’.

When I looked at the Bishops the other day in Oxford I thought some of them looked really nice. Most of them looked ordinary and straight-forward, some a little too ordinary and too straight-forward, and I hope, Jonathan, you will resist the temptation to conform to the image of the safe bank manager, for bank managers are important and have their place, but that’s not the role of the Bishop. It’ll be hard, especially as a suffragan learning the ropes, not to buy into the Episcopal culture. It’s almost impossible for baptised Christian men and women not to buy into the culture of the world and just be like everybody else. But the way forward is to be like Jesus, who knew his own culture and was a man of his own time, but who led life slightly aslant, going about with unsuitable people, making some extremely dodgy friendships, and in human terms, not in fact lasting very long. But in divine terms he has lasted and ever shall, because God’s love is embodied in him and in Jesus God Himself draws near.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the other Bishops lay their hands on Jonathan on St Andrew’s Day he will join the Apostolic band of those commissioned to teach, to set up their cathedra wherever we need to be taught, and a whole heap of tradition comes together. Because and only because he is called to be a man of deep and costly prayer, not making deals with ‘the Mammon of unrighteousness’, hedging his bets or keeping the letter of the law instead of the spirit, but by grace being fierce and brave in his emulation of Jesus, whose short life in an obscure outpost of the Roman Empire changed the world.