Sermon: Cathedral Eucharist - 6 Nov 2011

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 6th November 2011
Service:: Eucharist
Readings:: Thessalonians 4: 13-18

‘We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope … For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven’.

Those who know these things, the New Testament scholars who work away at the manuscripts, tell us that this letter of St Paul is the very earliest thing in the New Testament, written before the earliest Gospel. What does this letter show us? It shows us that the Church was not worrying about protesters outside St Paul’s or the cruel choices facing Anglican clergy at the beginning of the 21^st century in the United Kingdom’s capital city, because those first Christians were waiting to be caught up with the Lord in the air. Paul thought the world was about to end, and it hadn’t occurred to him at this time that there was going to be all that business to worry about at Corinth about the nature of the Church, because the Church was merely temporary. In a trice, everything would be over and the Christian dead would be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. ‘Encourage one another’, he says in this letter, ‘encourage one another with these words’.

But it didn’t happen and here we are. Those who know about these things know what the Dean of St Paul’s should have done, what the City Corporation should have done, what the protesters should have done, but as the Archbishop of Canterbury says in his masterly article in the Financial Times, ‘There will be plenty of post mortems, no doubt, but before we indulge too quickly in yet more satisfying indignation, we should keep two things in mind. The Church of England is a place where the unfinished business and unspoken anxieties of society can often find a voice for good and ill. The second is that we are at risk, in all the excitement of personal crises and dramas, of forgetting the substantive questions that prompted the protest in the first place’. Hence, the Archbishop’s call for a tax on the banks, borrowing from the work of the Vatican in the Pontifical Council the so-called “Tobin Tax”, ‘a comparatively small rate of tax (0.05%) being levied on share, bond and currency transactions and their derivatives, the resulting funds being designated for investment and development in the “real” economy, domestic and internationally. The modest rate of taxation conceals the high levels of return that could be expected (some $410 billion globally on one estimate)’.

There’s been a predictable reaction from some of the richest people in the City - how dare the Archbishop of Canterbury interfere in their world! But the trouble with this response is that their world, the world of the bankers, interferes with everybody else’s, and whilst the lowly paid lose their jobs in an international financial recession, and the poor get poorer, somehow you don’t see much evidence of that in the King’s Road or in Sloane Square or in Bond Street. Just take a walk down Bond Street, as I did the other day, and look in the windows of the jewellers’ shops and ask yourself if there’s really an international financial crisis. Well, there is, but it’s not borne by the rich.

So, what are we to learn from all this at St Paul’s Cathedral. We’re to learn that a great institution like St Paul’s can be wrong-footed by the arrival of a few people in a few put-up tents. As Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Andrew Bishop wittily pointed out, St Paul’s has little tents, we here at the moment have a marquee, but we are Surrey. The Archbishop also makes the point in his FT article that we’re not always going to get things right. I quote, ‘If the Church cannot find ways through, that is not an index of the unique incompetence of the Church, so much as the extreme sensitivity of the matters in hand, and of the fact that they touch us deeply in ways that can’t be solved, even by the ablest and wisest, in short order’.

And that’s the story of salvation, isn’t it? Original sin, that intrinsic alienation from the right and the good, from the God who loves us, with which we seem, all human beings, to be deeply affected, isn’t put right by a lightning strike. The babe at Bethlehem and the warm feelings of Christmas are not sufficient – no, the baby at Bethlehem grows into the man, the young Rabbi who teaches by puzzling parable and who meets his end, still as a young man, at the hands of the powerful, religious and political establishment of his day. The baby of Bethlehem grows into the Saviour, whose own sacrifice alone takes the world’s sin away. But that’s not the end, either. For two thousand years now we’ve re-enacted this journey and entered into this sacrifice in every offering of the Holy Eucharist, and in all the agonised, puzzling over of what we mean by God, the God displayed in Bethlehem and Calvary.

Those who know these things, the New Testament scholars, tell us that the first letter to the Thessalonians is the oldest piece of writing in the New Testament, and those who know these things, what the Dean of St Paul’s should have done, can easily find fault with what happened the other day in our national cathedral. Those of us with a bit more humility and a bit more realism, especially those of us in the religious business, and particularly where we have responsibility for cathedrals, know all too well how easy it is to make mistakes, but, as I said in a sermon at a funeral this week, making mistakes does not matter, it’s not half as damaging as not trying at all.

Dr Giles Fraser and Dean Graeme Knowles, and Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury are trying to build a bridge between protest and power, and frankly that’s not something the City of London has been very good at. ‘Sweep them away, hose them out, just get rid of them and we can go on as before’. But that won’t do. Power didn’t have the last word with the young Rabbi from Nazareth, for though power killed him, God raised him up. Our hope is in fact the same hope as those first Christians who received that letter from Paul at Thessalonica: ‘For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever.’ Encourage one another then in all the perplexities, demands and mistakes of our own human experience. ‘Encourage one another then with these words’.

The Archbishop proposes as a ground for conversation an examination of the Vatican’s statement backing the proposal for the financial transaction tax, and Bill Gates supports this, and we heard him support it again on the BBC News on Wednesday evening, All Souls Day. I believe once again our excellent Archbishop is right. Let him have the last word this morning, ‘The best outcome from the unhappy controversies in the City of London’s cathedral will be if the sort of issues raised by the Pontifical Council can focus a concerted effort to move the debate on and effect credible and hopeful change in the financial world. If religious leaders and commentators in the United Kingdom and elsewhere could agree on these proposals, not as a fixed agenda but as a common ground on which to start serious discussion, the struggles and questionings alike of protesters and clergy of St Paul’s will not have been wasted’.