Sermon: Pentecost 2010

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 23rd May 2010
Service:: Eucharist
Readings:: John 16

‘I have yet many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now’. Thus the discourse on the Spirit in the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel: ‘I have yet many things to say to you’. We overhear these words when the New Testament is read to us like overhearing a conversation that’s difficult to attend to because we’re doing something else.

On the evening when Mr Cameron became Prime Minister I was a guest of a group of men from St Saviour’s and their friends called the St Saviour’s Curry Club – they meet in each other’s houses on the first Tuesday of the month. We were meeting in Shamley Green, the television was on and I was supposed to be speaking to the men, but out of the corner of my eye our British political drama was unfolding. Mr Brown, emerging from that shiny black front door of No 10, the door we know so well, walking to the lectern, telling us he’d spoken to the Queen’s Private Secretary, and then he was off. In that simple cavalcade; one car, followed by only one other for the Protection Officers, off through Whitehall and down the Mall to the Palace. The conversation went on round the table at the Curry Club, but out of the corner of my eye, a bit later on, I could see Mr Cameron’s car being driven to the Palace. It was rather frustrating because I wanted to hear the end of the story and be totally attentive as the great drama unfolded, but no, I was doing something else, or supposed to be, talking to the St Saviour’s Curry Club.

Here, in the sixteenth chapter of John, we overhear, as it were, John’s Christ speaking: ‘I have yet many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now’. We’re listening in to a process of revelation, which continues, ‘When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’. It’s difficult for us to be properly attentive to the New Testament, not because the television is on, but because many of us have heard it all before. How many times have you been here on Pentecost for the Patronal Festival of the Cathedral Church dedicated to this Spirit of Truth. The long season of Pentecost unfolds now, those Sundays after Trinity as we call them in England. Then it will be Advent and the great doctrine of the Incarnation, and on through the Epiphany and Candlemas, into another Lent, and so to Easter, and the next Pentecost in 2011. 2011 years of Christian history, but the first 50 years for Guildford Cathedral.

‘I have yet many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now’. Part of the tender providence of God is that we are drawn carefully, and as we’re able to be drawn, towards the truth. But our story has only just begun, and I’ve often been encouraged by that marvellous title of one of Michael Ramsey’s books, Great Christian Centuries to Come.

We’ve seen an extraordinary political realignment in our country. Some of those attached to past ways of doing things feel uncomfortable in each of the political parties. Because we’re in uncharted territory, two imaginative political leaders, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, have broken the mould, and seized together an opportunity to do politics in a different way, neither claiming the monopoly of truth, both desiring to work together for the common good. There’s something warmingly human about this, reassuring and refreshing. It’s possible to do things together. The Christ of St John’s Gospel invites us to leave our certainties behind and to move out into the uncharted waters of the great Christian centuries to come. For although the truth has in some measure been given to us, we’re shielded from its full reality by the divine mercy.

A few days before the new Government was formed, some of us from the Cathedral were with the people of St Nicolas and the people of All Saints at the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. Fr Andrew Norman conducted a meditation on the Saturday afternoon on that encouraging woman, Julian of Norwich, a woman whose name we don’t even know – the fourteenth century mystic is simply named because the room in which she lived was attached to a church called St Julian. Fr Norman gave us each a hazelnut. We were asked to hold it in the palm of our hand, and he taught us, what some of us, of course, thought we already knew, something with which we were familiar. It had been revealed to Julian that the hazelnut represented all that was made. She marvelled how it could last, it being so little. ‘It lasted and ever shall’, she was answered in her understanding. ‘It lasted and ever shall because God loveth it’. I’ve kept the hazelnut. It’s on my desk, because a new truth, something I hadn’t thought of before, was then given us by Fr Norman. He said, ‘After the Big Bang, at the very beginning of our universe, physicists have revealed that everything was the size of the hazelnut – the whole unimaginably vast universe was contained within something so small. The pilgrims from Guildford Cathedral, St Nicolas and All Saints, Onlow Village, could hold all that was made in the palm of their hands.

‘I have yet many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now’. When we hear Scripture, try to pray, listen to sermons, receive the Holy Communion, we all of us, most of the time, are in the same situation as a person who’s supposed to be having a conversation but is really keeping one eye on the television screen. That’s how it is in this world. To be truly attentive, focused and centred is the work of a lifetime. We don’t know everything and we don’t know the whole story, neither how the political coalition will work out, or what will happen to British politics, any more than we know when the world shall end. But the Christ of St John encourages and reassures. ‘When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on this own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak and he will declare to you the things that are to come’.

How wonderful to be part of the family of a Cathedral built in honour of the Holy Spirit of Truth, whose conversation overheard in the Church and in the world is the very voice of God, a voice, as we can learn to be attentive to it that invites us now to step out into the great Christian centuries to come.