Sermon: St Dunstan's Patronal Festival

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Saturday 22nd May 2010
Venue:: St Dunstan-in-the-West, London
Service:: Patronal Festival Eucharist

The Church of England is ‘a magnificent collision of traditions and styles’. ‘The Church looks traditionally neo-Gothic on the outside, yet! ... It narrowly escaped destruction by fire ... The Church did not escape danger, and was and is rebuilt by generosity’. Only slightly amending the history of St Dunstan’s at the beginning of your service paper gives us something of the flavour of the Church of England itself. Scarred, complex, ancient, sustained and handed on by generosity, and all this, here, in St Dunstan-in-the-West aided by the patronage of a saint – a real saint who’s left his mark on the Church in this land. A saint who was a true shepherd, a restorer, a faithful counsellor to those in authority, filled with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and craftsmanship for work in every craft. There is in St Dunstan-in-the-West the stamp of authenticity, this magnificent collision of traditions and styles, a church that looks traditionally Neo-Gothic on the outside, yet is octagonal inside, where Anglican pews march alongside a Romanian Orthodox iconastasis.

The other day I took part in a pilgrimage at Walsingham and re-read Colin Stephenson’s amusing biography of the restorer of the shrine, Alfred Hope Patten. He was terribly keen on relics and on one of his trips abroad discovered in a shop a piece of St Vincent. He wouldn’t accept it without a certificate of authentication, so the shop-keeper popped round to the local Roman Catholic Bishop, who wrote out a certificate of authentication and gave the relic his seal. Fr Hope Patten bore this bone triumphantly back to Norfolk, where it became central to the pilgrimage experience.

But, bones and shrouds do not the Gospel make. Aids to scepticism or aids to devotion, but not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter lies in our Christian faith and life, transitional, unexpected and colliding. Just think of your life and what has brought you here today. You remember in this season of political excitement that Mr MacMillan was asked what the most difficult challenges of a premiership were. ‘Events, dear boy, events’. And our own lives, yours and mine, are rich with events, triumphs and sometimes tragedies, opportunities seized and opportunities missed, answers given and calls refused, sin committed and grace received.

Human faith and life as lived is not all as in the 31^st chapter of Exodus being filled with ability and intelligence, knowledge and craftsmanship to devise and work and beautify, nor is it all as in the first letter to Timothy, when the Christian Church was in its infancy, the sense that Paul would be here any minute: ‘I hope to come to you soon, I’m writing these instructions so that if I’m delayed, you may know how one ought to behave’. No, Christian faith as lived is a daily turning towards God in silence and openness and questioning, to the God, who, such is the mystery of our religion, was ‘manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed in the world, taken up in glory’. Yes, trying to be a Christian is indeed living within a collision of traditions and styles, being open to God as we are, that God may make of us what he designs.

After all, as Matthew teaches in his Gospel, we are only required to be faithful, which I think means, in the teaching of the Dalai Lama, we are to practise our religion; to keep St Dunstan-in-the-West open by being open to God and faithfully coming here that others may come. For you encourage me by your presence, that without you there will be no St Dunstan-in-the-West, this meeting place where heaven touches earth, this busy thoroughfare that leads to heaven, just beyond the traffic, the Law Courts and the noise.

The complex history of this building speaks of the complex history of our own Christian experience. Its story, so long and so fascinating, is a place where our story also can be told, for it is above all an encouragement to remember that none of us know the day or hour of the Lord’s coming, except as that arrival is prefigured now in the Holy Eucharist: ‘as the Lord to earth descendeth, our full homage to demand’.

‘Grant that Dunstan’s prayers may aid us

As we tread the path he trod

Through temptation, trial and suffering

Pressing onwards up to God’.