Sermon: Patronal Festival - Pentecost 2011

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 12th June 2011
Service:: Eucharist

Except on Good Friday, when no priest presides over the Eucharist, Holy Communion has been celebrated in this Cathedral Church of the Holy Spirit every day for fifty years. Every day in the Lady Chapel or the Regimental Chapel, in the Children’s Chapel, at the nave altar or at the High Altar, people here have prayed, ‘Grant that by the power of your Holy Spirit and according to your holy will, these gifts of bread and wine may be to us the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Fifty years of prayer transforming the bread and wine brought to the altar, and fifty years of prayer, asking the Holy Spirit to make human lives new, not in the abstract, but in the particular. From Provost Boulton and Bishop Clarkson, and Tony Bridge and Alex Wedderspoon, from Bishop Reindorp, who consecrated this Cathedral, to Christopher, our Bishop, and the prayer that calls down God’s Holy Spirit on the bread and wine today, this has been a place of transformation, transformation by the Holy Spirit’s power.

There’s the stage scenery, of course. Queen Mary, in her Minnie Mouse shoes and toque, and long astrakhan-collared coat, ‘assisting’ at the driving in of the piles of the Cathedral, to her granddaughter, our present Sovereign lady, distributing the Royal Maundy five years’ ago. Faithful Guides and Stewards, Sunday School teachers, secretaries, receptionists and bell-ringers, Servers and Administrators, Canons and Virgers – a cast of thousands - coming up this hill in order to bring bread and wine and place it here on the altar that God’s Holy Spirit may be called down to transfigure and transform. There’s much machinery too: stage-lighting, arranging of sets, ironing of altar cloths, putting out of vestments, cleaning and mending, for this transformation to take place. Those of you who know the Russian and Greek liturgies may have glimpsed behind the iconostasis, that towering screen of icons that both divide and reveal, a priest with a kettle, for at the epiclesis in the Orthodox liturgy, a little boiling water is added to the chalice. Behind the scene it’s like this!

If you work behind the scenes – Administrator, Treasurer, Chairman of the Finance Committee, member of the Community Committee, baker of cake or maker of marmalade, Chairman of the Patrons Board or distributor of flyers for the Fair outside Tesco’s - it is just possible to be so busy as to miss the point. This is a place of transformative power, but not our power, not from us - it is God’s place.

As we turn into our next fifty years, we are committed to our Stewardship of this Cathedral in order to pass it on by making it more widely available and more accessible to those who ask (and believe it or not they do),‘Do you have services at the Cathedral?’ and even more sadly, ‘Is anyone allowed in?’ That’s why we have an Events Director, that’s why we have a Patrons’ Board, that’s why we have Christian Stewardship, that’s why through Fair yesterday or Rave in the Nave later, or banquet or ball, through concert and lecture, discussion and teaching, plays and music, we urgently seek to draw people in to this place where every day for fifty years, except on Good Friday when no priest presides, bread and wine is brought to one of our altars, and the Holy Spirit is invoked.

‘Accept our praises, Heavenly Father, through your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, and as we follow his example and obey his command, grant that by the power of your Holy Spirit these gifts of bread and wine may be to us his Body and his Blood’.

Last Sunday we celebrated the 350^th anniversary of the founding of the Queen’s Regiment, and reading the archival material was instructive and moving, for that regimental archive is a record of self-giving sacrifice. So, in a less dramatic way, the archival material of this Cathedral Church is the moving record of self-giving in order that this Cathedral may stand at the heart of that Christian family we call the Diocese, where our Bishop presides over the offering of the bread and the wine, brought up by the people, blessed and broken by the priest, and given in Communion, a kind of extraordinary exchange, where passing beyond what we eat and drink, to become what we eat and drink.

‘Pour out your Holy Spirit as we bring before you these gifts of your Creation; may they be for us the Body and Blood of your dear Son’.

It’s why we’re here, it’s why we have our first fifty years of history and why we look with humble confidence to the future, that this may be a place of transformative power, changing ordinary lives, my life and your life, into lives so attractive to God that those we touch may glimpse something of Him.

‘Remember, Lord, your Church in every land. Reveal her unity, guard her faith and preserve her in peace. Bring us at the last with Mary and all the Saints the vision of that eternal splendour for which you created us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with whom and in whom, with all who stand before you in earth and heaven, we worship you, Father Almighty, with songs of everlasting praise.’