BUILDING UP THE ANCIENT RUINS

Bishop Geoffrey, who was consecrated as Bishop of Basingstoke in 1994, was asked back to Winchester Diocese and invited to preach at the installation of the new Mayor, the sermon preached on that occasion may be of wider interest.

BUILDING UP THE ANCIENT RUINS
CHORAL MATTINS, WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL, ATTENDED BY THE MAYOR OF WINCHESTER AND MEMBERS OF THE CITY COUNCIL
SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION DAY, 24th MAY, 2009

In 1841 Sir Robert Peel, the Member of Parliament for Tamworth, and later in the year to become Prime Minister for a second time, opened a reading room in his constituency. Reading rooms were good things. They increased knowledge in somewhat the same way as the internet can do today. Peel gave a speech in which he praised those who had made the reading room possible and spoke eloquently of the knowledge that it would foster and the better citizens it would nourish in consequence. It was a good speech and was published as a pamphlet – education, education, education – a good thing and we will all be improved by it. The editor of The Times, John Walter, had a son at Oxford, also called John Walter, and he, like many impressionable young men of that time, had been captivated by the preaching and teaching of the then Vicar of the University Church, the Revd John Henry Newman (who was, though few would have guessed it then, to end his life as a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church). What the young John Walter had learnt from Newman was that there was something lacking and distorting in the bland praise of knowledge that was the central plank of Peel’s speech. He prodded his father to get Newman to write a series of letters in The Times taking Peel to pieces. His father agreed, and so did Newman, and seven letters appeared under a psuedonym in the paper – a powerful polemic against useful knowledge being all that human beings need to lead a virtuous and moral life. The Tamworth reading room had excluded works of religion from its shelves, for religion was divisive. High-minded useful knowledge would avoid that tricky area.

Newman was a great educationalist. His work, The Idea of a University, remains one of the classic expositions of higher education and what it is about, but he was passionately concerned that there should not be some kind of dotted line drawn which hived off questions of religion and morality - questions which deal with who we are, and what is the good, and what is the source of truth and beauty, questions relating to God - from the many different disciplines of science, art and medicine, all of which are to be celebrated and pursued with rigour. But, as Newman wrote in his second letter ‘secular knowledge is not a principle of moral improvement.’ As we have been reminded recently, you need more than keeping within the rules to have moral integrity. Peel was quite wrong, he thought to say simply that ‘in becoming wiser a man will become better.’ Moral growth does not flow from drenching the mind with physics, ‘because to know is one thing, to do is another.’ ‘Science, knowledge, and whatever other fine names we us’, wrote Newman,’never healed a wounded heart, nor changed a sinful one.’ For that we must look elsewhere. ‘Deductions have no power of persuasion. The heart is commonly reached not through the reason, but through the imagination…if we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.’

Faith is so often presented as opposed to reason, Sometimes, in the use of the language that is common currency today, governments speak of ‘faith communities’ as though faith was some unusual character or quality that some people have and the majority do not, a particular kind of vaccination. But faith, Newman reminds us, is part and parcel of every human life. We are not just reasoning animals, but seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animals; we are called not just to know but to do. The great philosopher of science, the late Michael Polanyi, in his book Personal Knowledge, demonstrates that faith plays its part in scientific advance, because you have to do the experiments in order to show that the hypothesis in which you have faith might be true. When I visited the great accelerator at CERN outside Geneva with the scientist-priest, John Polkinghorne, the whole of the huge and vastly expensive accelerator that we saw buried deep in the earth, was in one sense a venture of faith. Set up aright it would enable elusive fundamental particles to be detected and understood. All human beings live by faith, because we are acting, doing beings, and, as Newman said, ‘to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.’ Paul Tillich, a great Christian thinker of the last century, liked to say, ‘tell me what your ultimate concern is, and I will tell you what is the god in whom you believe,’ even if that ultimate concern is not named as ‘God’.

Politics involves, at one level or another. a faith in what is for the well being of the polis, the city. We are asked to vote because we have choices as to what will, in a whole range of areas, work for the well-being of the city – or indeed the county or country, or Europe. Politics, a Christian moral theologian once said, is the nearest to theology, because both are concerned with the human will.

Since I have been Bishop in Europe, after having learnt about being a bishop in the Church of God here in my native Hampshire, I have been privileged to spend time with ambassadors, who, if they are doing their job, are not just promoting British trade, but contributing to the things that belong to peace. The mission statement of the Foreign Office is ‘peace with justic and security’ and, as I told a determinedly unbelieveing ambassador, ‘that is not far from the kingdom of God.’ In Brussels where with a group of bishops I was discussing the critical issue of climate change with a number of members of the European Commission, we were told that this is the major moral challenge of our day, it is a challenge in which ‘we need your help, because you know about changing hearts and minds.’  It is not, as one of the Prayer Book collects puts it, knowing the things we ought to do, but also having grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same. Of course we have to ask what is the right, and how society is to be ordered, or, as Archbishop Rowan asked in Brussels, ‘what is the moral compass of Europe?’ But in all of this we can only act by faith, there is no other way.

On this Sunday it is traditional that the new mayor, elected to the oldest mayoralty after London in this country, comes here with the councillors to this cathedral, which has been at the heart of Winchester for so many centuries. You come to a place which is deeply rooted in the long history of this city and community, a history which has seen many changes and chances over time. But throughout those changes and chances what this building has been about, and the worship which goes on it has been about, is a pointing beyond the immediate and the transient to things which endure. It is a place of prayer, of asking, of longing; a place of forgiveness for frailty and failure; a place of grace and renewal and encouragement.

The reading from the prophet Isaiah spoke – and the words come from a time of exile and despair -  of the servant of God who acted to bring healing to the broken-hearted, and liberty to captives, or a service of justice and of restoring ruined cities, a work of building, both physically, and the community of men and women. But Isaiah, as Jesus after him, knew that what was need for this was grace, the free gift of the transforming life and love of God.

Thursday was Ascension Day – the day on which the church celebrates the Lord’s being taken up into glory. In the great cathedral of Monreale in Sicily the dome in the apse of the cathedral, brilliant with the gold of heaven, has at its centre Christos Pantocrator – Christ the Ruler of all, the one victorious in love. That love went to the uttermost in a life lived from the cave of Bethlehem to the cross of Calvary, a love that came down to the lowest part of our need. A fellow bishop recently asked a sixth form where was Jesus between Good Friday and Easter, and had the amazing response from a teenage girl, ‘I think he was in deepest hell looking for his friend, Judas.’ It is that all-embracing love which reigns, which Ascension Day celebrates, and which is the reality to which the great mosaic of Monreale points. It is that same love which is the source of grace and life whose blessing and strength we ask may fill the life of this city, and the hearts and minds of those with responsibility to renew and to sustain it, whether in council chamber or in night shelter, in school or in sport, in need or in celebration. It is by that grace, as we prayed in our bidding prayer, that ‘all who are involved in public life may be imbued with the spirit of service, justice and compassion.’ To act in that way, we must assume, and that assumption is faith in the God whose very being is love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be all might, majest, dominion and power, now and for evermore. Amen.