Candlemas - 2 February 2012
Father Hugh’s sermon at his Institution to Saint Peter’s Caversham
Father Hugh Bowron, 2012At his Institution to Great St Mary’s, Cambridge Mervyn Stockwood preached off the King James Version of an unusual Isaiah text, "You may have bored men, but must you bore your God also?"I will endeavour to avoid doing that tonight, and on every other occasion, because this parish has enjoyed for the past 25 years a very high standard of preaching.
We live in a time when people are easily bored, and when words are thought to have lost their power to enchant. A Hollywood executive, speaking of the upcoming season of films due to come our way this year, reported with satisfaction that in the main they would have lots of action and minimal dialogue.
Though power point projectors and related technologies are now making their way in to our churches, Anglican clergy can never back away from the need to have something worthwhile to say in a winsome manner every week because they belong to a church that set itself a goal at the Reformation of having a theologically literate clergy preaching to a Scripturally literate laity. Few would be communicators in the modern world have the privilege of a captive audience, and clergy, whether they preach regularly to 10 or 100 people, should never forget that. As my Father, a somewhat middle of the road Anglican lay reader, used to say to us often, "It is a sin to bore people in public."
I was raised in a world of words. My parents met each other debating against one another in one of the major political parties of our country. They turned the family meal table into a kind of perpetual debating chamber, in which we were expected to hold our own, resourced from the many books that festooned the house. It was an apprenticeship in word smithing that money couldn’t buy.
But being fluent and articulate from the pulpit isn’t enough on its own. There must be content also. I discovered this at about the mid-point of my ministry when I realised how superficial much of what I had had to say really was. The people of God had a right to expect more from me than just some gleanings from the latest slick paperback I had read, or unusual movie I had been to. They had come expecting, hopefully, a deep immersion in the things of God, and I had better set about providing it. I also realised that the most perfect punishment that God could devise for clergy would be to make them listen to their own sermons for all eternity. Could I listen to my own offerings on a repeating basis without cringing with embarrassment, or wringing my hands with regret at opportunities missed, or at deep doctrinal error so blithely expressed?
I don’t underestimate for one minute the difficulties that unchurched people have in making their way into the bewildering culture of a Church whose customs were formed in the ancient world, and whose communitarian expectations are so utterly different to that of our atomised culture. But having braved their way in to our quaint little world shall we have something to say to them, something worth hearing, and something they can base their lives on? Will we have come to understand the deep things of God to such an extent that we can express them in an accessible, attractive and lucid way? This is the preacher’s challenge.
It concerns me that often the discussions about mission strategies that are so high on the agendas of churches today are in fact debates about tactics not strategy, about slick tricks to lure people in, with little thought about what to say to them, or what to do with them once they are there. Rather than accommodating ourselves to our surrounding culture we might instead glory in and major in the one distinctive thing we have to add to the lives of those around us, that no other institution or service provider can. What we offer that no one else can is to be in transformative union with the Triune God, to be in intimate relationship with the ground, source and goal of all that is. We proclaim that the arrival of Jesus Christ in our world was a restorative act designed for the reconstruction of a human nature that had fallen into existential decay as a result of its alienation from God. How easily these phrases slide off the tongue. How great and fascinating the challenge to unpack the meaning of them in the experience and the thinking of curious enquirers.
But what summons people to faith are not just words and explanations, but also an encounter with the numinous. Anglicans share with Catholics and Eastern Orthodox a liturgical tradition that sets up its meeting with God in a dramatic form, as a stately dance in classical style, where everyone knows the script and essential movements, and can therefore relax into their roles. But for this to work, to become a vehicle for God to transmit something of his wonder and mystery, it must be done well. St Peter’s Caversham believes that, and therefore expects its Vicars to have good table manners at the altar. Indeed, the Vicar-elect was invited to give a command performance as part of his selection process. But this isn’t just a matter of individual taste and high art aesthetics. When the liturgy degenerates into a shambles, and is celebrated without reverence and devotion, it loses its capacity to convey transcendent realities. For over a millennia the entire Christian world worshipped God within the liturgical tradition, and those who locate themselves within this primal matrix must keep faith with its expectations of excellence.
In the recent BBC series, "Churches: How to read them," Richard Taylor says that the Oxford movement pioneers believed that Anglo-Catholicism was Anglicanism come to its senses, in its right mind as it were. St Peter’s Caversham believes that, and therefore expects I guess its Vicar to be an ambassador of and evangelist for that ecclesial point of view. I am happy to do this, but in presenting Anglicanism as a variety of reformed Catholicism would want to do this without defensiveness or arrogance. It is surprising too where you find potential allies and locations of common cause. The Knox Ministry Centre Worship Course Book, for instance, is a liturgical statement of intent that I could in the main cheerfully sign up to. And concerned critics in the diocese of Christchurch thought that I was spending too much time consorting with Evangelicals, and hanging out at theology conferences at places like Carey Baptist and the Auckland Laidlaw College. But I will go wherever there is a serious discussion of the doctrine of God on offer, wanting to be informed as well as to offer my 10 cents worth. And I note with wry amusement that God, with his usual sense of humour, often creeps up on Protestantism unawares and provokes some of its most articulate ideologues to say some astonishingly catholic things. But enough of these high falutin agendas - my Father offered me a piece of advice just before I set off for theological college. "Just remember this Hugh – what people are looking for in a Parson is someone they can tell their troubles too, and someone who can preach a decent sermon." "How little that man understands of the lofty and complex demands of the clerical profession," I thought at the time. But as the years have rolled by I have come to see that he was more or less right.
The parish priest as confidant and consoler, as pastor who enjoys the quirkiness and human particularity of those committed to his charge - that is the note I want to end on. For someone as curious as I am about what makes people tick, this has been a wonderful vocation to be called into. Unlike therapists and counsellors, parish priests get to know how the story ends for those they work with. They accompany their people though all the life stages, and are with them, not just at dramatic high points, but also in the long stretches of ordinary living in which their lives quietly develop and flower in their growth to union with God.
For someone as drawn to the mystical side of religion as I am it has been a helpful discovery to find out that the point of an intimacy life with God is not glamorous supernatural experience, but rather the infused graces that enable us to deal with difficult people, that fortify us with common sense wisdom in the endless challenge of building Christian community, and that lead us to quietly enjoy the company of other Christians. God has pulled off a sociological miracle in drawing the company of believers together from such a wide variety of social, cultural and ethnic difference. In being connected to him we receive the inner resources to make the miracle work.
Not long after my ordination a friend and colleague mused, "Perhaps we have all got one great parish in us." I hope this will turn out to be mine.
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