Preaching for a new bishop

I preached at St Paul's Cathedral recently at the consecration of a very fine man and a good friend, Paul Williams, the new Bishop of Kensington. This is the text of what I said, in case you're interested:

Today is the day when the church around the world celebrates the Annunciation - the time when Mary was told she was to give birth to Jesus, the ‘Son of the Most High’. It may be that the gospel reading for today carried a certain resonance for you Paul, as you heard it. I don’t know whether the letter you received, inviting you to be the next Bishop of Kensington began “Greetings, favoured one, the Lord is with you!” But then no-one would be surprised if after reading its contents, you, like Mary, were “perplexed by these words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.”

The New Testament reminds us that taking on the role of a Bishop in the church is a ‘noble task’. I for one am delighted that Paul is willing to take on that task alongside Sarah his wife and Edward, Thomas and Joseph. I first knew Paul as a hugely popular youth worker in a church in Oxford, and then got to know him better while he was training at the theological college where I taught in that same city. He then moved here into the London diocese, doing his curacy in Muswell Hill. He was then Associate Vicar of Christ Church Clifton in Bristol, before becoming vicar of St James, Gerrards Cross, where he has been for the past 10 years. Those 10 years which have seen the church treble in size, with a mixture of worship styles, both contemporary and traditional. It has also seen the church become a significant presence in the local community, with involvement in the young in local schools, the elderly in residential homes and in many other ways. In Paul, we are getting a bishop who knows what it takes to grow a church in the C21st.

His one weakness is an attachment to Ipswich Town Football Club, popularly known of course as the Tractor Boys, so if you happen to see a Massey Ferguson 8600 parked outside your church on a Sunday morning, it is probably a sign that the new Bishop has come to pay a visit!

The story of the Annunciation, this dramatic appearance of the angel to the young girl Mary on an ordinary Nazareth day speaks powerfully into this moment. The background to this story is the experience of exile. The people of God are no longer in control of their land or their destiny, the voice of the great Old Testament prophets has fallen silent, and God has gone quiet on them. It is a time when the people long for the return of hope, of security, for God to do something to make a difference to their lives and their nation.

It has echoes of our time, where we no longer feel in control of our own destinies; we too are surrounded by anxiety, uncertainty for what the future might hold for us and for our society. And that is the first important thing to hear today: that we need to feel the pain of exile, the longing for things to change.

This is a city which is vibrant, alive, fascinating. It has almost every culture and language represented – a truly global city. Yet it is also a city where there is much anxiety and fear. Here in this part of it, the fear of economic depression is almost tangible. In our nation, unemployment has hit 2 million for the first time in 10 years, as families around the country fear for how they will make ends meet. 1989, the year the Berlin wall came down was the year in which the world realised that unbridled Communism was not the answer for building a society in which people could truly flourish. 2009, twenty years on, is perhaps the year in which we discover that unbridled Capitalism cannot do it either. The question is: what will we say in 2029? Is there ANY chance that the next 20 years will see the rediscovery of Christian faith as holding the secret of a good life, a framework for a society that can embrace difference and yet bring harmony and a coherent moral vision? Might this moment when our nation cries out for hope, see the rebirth of vibrant, fertile churches all over our land bringing life and hope to people in ever increasing numbers?

Well, this is a very good day to ask that question. March 25th is a very significant date in the Christian calendar. It was traditionally the date of the vernal equinox, the tipping point of the year between winter and spring. Because of that, it was considered in some parts of the early church as the date on which God created the world. It then became identified as the date of the Incarnation – the insemination of Mary, with Jesus’ actual birth taking place 9 months later on December 25th – Christmas Day. In other words, it was a day associated with the creation of something new. As Luke tells the story of the visit of the angel to Mary he emphasises exactly this point. The same Holy Spirit that brooded over creation at the start would “overshadow” her – the coming of Jesus is the beginning of a new world, the tipping point between the winter of the past, and the promise of the future. So this is a day to celebrate and ponder not just the miracle of Incarnation, but also the promise of new creation. This day shouts the promise that things will not always be like this. God will one day bring about a new heaven and a new earth, a new order where poverty, hunger, pain and death will not have the final word – Jesus Christ will – it will be the day on which his kingdom comes.

The message of the angel was that Mary would bear a Son ‘of whose kingdom there will be no end.” That message reminds us that the church does not exist for its own sake, as if just the preservation of the church as an institution is of any great value. Nor is there mainly to serve the society in which it lives, as if the church is simply the religious branch of the social services. The church exists for one reason only: for the Kingdom of Jesus, the kingdom that was announced on the day the angel met Mary in Nazareth. It exists to point people to the kingdom of God; to remind a broken world that God has not given up on it and will one day renew it; it exists to give people a taste of that coming kingdom, the new world people glimpsed when they met Jesus then, and when they meet him now. It exists is to remind people that there is another way of living, relating and thinking, and that it is possible to learn that way here and now in relation to God our Creator, becoming like Jesus his Son, through being filled with the Holy Spirit.

Your task, Paul, is to remind the church, and this city, by what you are, what you do and what you say of the kingdom of Jesus, the kingdom where work is fulfilling and fruitful, where lives are not spoilt by bad choices, where families are safe places of harmony and growth, where the hungry are fed, the homeless find shelter and the lonely find friendship. It is to remind the church that that is what it is here for – not just to get bigger and bigger, nor to make a fallen and rebellious world a slightly better place, but to point people to Jesus and his kingdom, to give people a taste of it here and now, to bring people into contact with the life-transforming power of God.

When she hears this call, Mary’s initial reaction is alarm. She is perplexed, distressed, troubled, as anyone would be with the size of the task and the weakness of the person charged with it. Yet she utters that remarkable expression of faith: “Here I am, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.” It is an important reminder to us, and to you Paul, that this new creation is something God does not us. It is not your job to renew the world. This is not your task or anyone else’s but God’s. We simply point to something that is beyond us, we offer hope that is not found in ourselves or even in the church in the coming kingdom of Jesus. Our task is to grow churches of all kinds, traditions and denominations that have the life of this kingdom at their heart, churches that can provide echoes of that new creation, signs of the future, communities where faith triumphs over distrust, where hope is stronger than despair, where love reigns.

If God can create a world and recreate that world beginning with the coming of Jesus, announced on this day, then he is fully capable of reviving the church so that it becomes a blessing to the neighbourhoods, and the city in which we live. Our vision has to be to refuse to manage the church’s slow and stately decline, but to invest and plan for its renewal as the heart of a healthy city.

This can only be done in the power of the Spirit. And so Paul and Sarah, our prayer for you today is that as happened to Mary, “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you”, and that you will be able to say “Here I am, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.”

AMEN.