Sermon: The Worshipful Company of Carpenters

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Thursday 26th May 2011
Venue:: St Mary's Dunsfold

Guildford Cathedral is celebrating its Golden Jubilee – fifty years since the Consecration on 17 May in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen. As Her Majesty said, when she came to preside over the Royal Maundy and we spoke of her presence in 1961, ‘That was a very long time ago’. But for cathedrals fifty years is but the twinkling of an eye. As I have been known to say, somewhat ruefully, to the Deans of Westminster, St Paul’s, Salisbury, Exeter or Winchester, ‘None of you have people in the congregation who were present as the Oils of Consecration were drying on the walls’.

Guildford Cathedral is a particularly interesting monument to mid-twentieth century art. It stands on the cusp, the threshold of architectural and liturgical change, and is sometimes described as ‘the last gasp of the English Gothic’. Immediately after the Consecration in 1961, the Roman Catholic Church recovered through the Second Vatican Council a sense of congregational participation in worship, commonplace in the early Church, but obscured during the Middle Ages, and practically extinguished at the Counter Reformation with the imposition of the Tridentine Mass said solo by the priest.

Thus, Guildford Cathedral was designed as a vast tunnel leading to a distant High Altar, and lo and behold, immediately after all was in place, along came the Vatican Council, the culmination of much work, not only within the Roman Catholic Communion, but also of a process within the Church of England, to recover a more participatory, and a in proper sense, primitive form of eucharistic, congregational worship. Hence, new cathedrals were designed with altars in the midst, and the place of the table became the subject of the learned debate and argument. Nor is the debate over. There’s a strong current running through Roman Catholicism in the early 21^st century for the restoration of the Tridentine Mass, and this has more to do with doctrine and ideas than it has with language.

In all this there’s the place of furniture. After a few years at Guildford Cathedral it was felt the high altar was too remote and an altar was provided at the top of the Quire steps, behind which the celebrant could stand facing the people. It was a temporary altar, made of polystyrene, looking like stone, but a fake. Not very nice when it was new and much less nice as the years went by and it got chipped and knocked about. On 17 May 2011 a new altar was consecrated, designed by Charles Gurrey, the sculptor who made the series of saints from the mystical tradition of the Universal Church and from the personal history of Surrey that adorn the West Front. With Holy Oil, Holy Water and incense the new table was set apart, and very beautiful it is. Nor is this the only new table in the Cathedral. For the Carpenters Company helped us with a new table, beautifully designed by Waywood Furniture as our Chapter table, round which the Chapter sits for its monthly meetings and where the College of Canons, including your own Canon Paul Jenkins, sit in their appointed stalls.

The reading you’ve chosen today is so well-known as to almost pass us by. It’s really about keeping our eyes open, but I noticed, looking it up, something I’d never thought about before. In the very first verse, Matthew Chapter 25 verse 31, ‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit in state on his throne’. The stage scenery of judgement, that’s a throne the Carpenters’ Company would like to be involved with. But of course this is poetry, not a planning brief. At the heart of religion there is judgement, and judgement not deferred to some remote astronomical age but present now. Thus the Carpenters’ table in the Chapter House is more than a table, it’s a place that enables serious and important conversation, where we gather with each other together around sometimes perplexing and often demanding subjects that are important for our community life. Then, above all, there is the altar around which the whole Christian community gathers for the re-enactment of that great sacrifice on the Cross that shows us what it costs God to be God.

So the points of these remarks today is simply this. It’s easy to read off things at the wrong levels; either not to notice how the thirty-first verse of the twenty-eighty chapter of Matthew contains a throne, but not to give time to think what that might mean or signify. Furniture is more than furniture, it’s for a purpose. So artist, designer, craftsman, apprentice, livery company, Dean and Chapter, all touch on holy ground when they think on these things. For if we don’t pay attention to them, take them seriously and strive to make things beautiful, we may miss the point and find ourselves crying out, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison and did nothing for you’. A great livery company, like a great cathedral, helps us to see where reality lies and to whom one day we must all give account.