The Bishop of London's Sermon (Bishop Richard Chartres) at St Paul's Bow Common 50th anniversary, 29/04/2010
"I am the ghost of Christmas past. Tomorrow Duncan (Fr Duncan Ross, parish priest of St Paul's, Bow Common, in 2010) is the ghost of Christmas present but you are the spirits of the Christmases to come.
St Paul's was dedicated in 1960. There were stirring events internationally. Harold Macmillan made his Winds of Change speech in Africa. It was also the year of the Sharpville massacre in South Africa. Then the population of Africa as a whole was a mere half of the population of Europe. The situation today is that there are about a billion Africans and 738 million Europeans.
In the UK with the assistance of the Bishop John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, Lady Chatterley's Lover was rehabilitated and sold 200.000 copies on day 1 of publication.
The first three women priests were ordained in the Church of Sweden. Archbishop Fisher visited the Pope, the first such contact for 500 years.
Gresham Kirkby was a part of this ferment. He researched the emerging expressions of the liturgical movement in Europe and came back unimpressed. Then in partnership with some gifted artists and architects {and how good it is to have the message from Bob Maguire and the presence of Charles Lutyens} he created this church to serve the needs of this parish but also to be a sign of a greater transformation than that wrought by post war redevelopment; the breaking in of the Kingdom of God. "This is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven." (These words are inscribed around the entrance door of St Paul's.)
St Paul's opened its doors however at the beginning of a forty year period of institutional introversion when with some honourable exceptions the Church lost its nerve; was fidgeting with its structures and internal business and was getting used to operating at the margins of the public square exclusively for those who had religious tastes and needs.
Drawing on a well of corybantic Cornish defiance {was he really the last survivor of the Helston Floral Dance of 1924}, prayer, discipline, music and a positively Tolkeinesque and deeply unfashionable use of pipe tobacco, Gresham laboured with great integrity to do justice to the sense that the Kingdom has already broken through in the work and teaching of Jesus Christ; that Jesus calls us to a transformation of the world and not merely a spiritualised description of it or an elaborate mythology; that the Lord's prayer is intended to pray down the Kingdom into the present; that we are in a zone of struggle and sacrifice with the principalities and powers still in possession of the surfaces and spaces of our world; that there will be a profound transformation which will be consummated in a renewal of creation. "To me", (Fr Gresham) said, "the Kingdom of Heaven is the great existing reality which is to renew the earth."
The Bishop of London, Montgomery Campbell didn't like it and when he came here fifty years ago he said, "We come here not to criticise but to perform a duty".
I come in humility and gratitude to recognise and celebrate an authentic vision. Much that was created and expressed in the 1960's has not stood the test of time. Love divorced from sacrifice has been unmasked as mere sentiment. Many of the buildings of the decade are already being torn down to all but universal rejoicing.
St Paul's and the life it has incubated is an exception. It was a genuinely radical vision which went beyond fashion.
Famously the design for this church sprang from the question, "What will Christian worship be like in the year 2000?"
Keith Murray and Robert Maguire used industrial materials. There is the concrete and copper font. St Paul's speaks of the everyday. It speaks of the provisional. This is a tent for a pilgrim people who have no abiding city here. But at the very heart there is the seed of new social/spiritual order. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ brings us into a new relationship with God and with one another. The blood of Jesus Christ enables us to live like family although we are not blood relations.
The sacrifice takes us to the heart of the spiritual life. By going beyond ourselves in Christ we become more truly ourselves. By losing ourselves with him we find ourselves. The City of God has its foundations in the blood given, the blood of Jesus Christ and those who participate in his sacrifice. All are equal and participate of their own freewill which is why there is no squire's pew here and no heirarchical arrangement of the furniture.
Well, the year 2000 has arrived and it cannot be said that we have realised the vision but St Paul's not only survives but continues to disturb and inspire. Under Duncan Ross and the community that worships here now the gate of heaven has been thrown open in ways that would have been hard to predict in 1960. I remember vividly Sharmiana (an exhibition of Asian tapestries in St Paul's) and studying the preparations for the new Mission Action Plan. I see from your proper spiritual ambition that you are worthy inheritors of the vision.
In much of what has been written about the past the accent has been on the horizontal relationships which the church and its liturgy have revealed. Now at the end of the first decade of the 21st century it is time to recognise the way in which St Paul's does justice to the vertical; to the ascent to God which draws the fragments and atoms of this earth and its people together.
Recently, Lord May, a former President of the Royal Society and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government, a self-proclaimed atheist who says that he experienced an "inverse epiphany" at the age of 11, suggested that "God" might be needed to evoke an appropriate response to the various challenges currently facing humanity.
If the reference to God is edited out of our perspective then the world simply becomes a theatre of human willing. We come regard ourselves as gods and our wills as sovereign. We no longer experience ourselves as participants in an animated universe but as detached exploiters of mere matter. Dominance is substituted for connectedness in our relations with the world around us. Choice becomes the highest good and not what we choose.
Jesus Christ "the icon of God"; and the corner stone upon which the spiritual temple is built, came in the form of a servant to convey the truth that the first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god - the theme of that marvellous chant from the letter of St Paul to the Philippians.
St Paul invites us to a great humility which must embrace a care for the frail and the poor of the earth and a detestation of every form of slavery and oppression. Genuine conversion to the way of Jesus Christ consists in turning away from the deifying of our own will; turning away from life as a consumer of the world and turning towards being a communicant; a citizen and a contemplative.
Will the Church in these new circumstances be enabled to become what it was intended to be - a school of relating in which God meets us and draws us into a communion with him and with one another and revises our understanding of what is valuable in life through his human expression Jesus Christ? Will the Church become a foretaste of a new way of being in the world in which we become increasingly aware that loving our neighbour today involves a care for the Creation and a care for vulnerable communities of those least able to adapt to the economic and environmental changes that are occurring?
It is undeniable there has been a certain loss of nerve in the Church, even an excessive desire to entertain rather than insist on a radically different way of life. But this church is one of the places where we can with seriousness explore the consequences of the great crisis of the 21st century: an interlocking crisis in which denying God; despoiling the earth and diminishing humanity are an anti-trinity which we are called upon to unmask and against which we are called together to struggle, as members of the body of Christ. The dance goes on. The vision is renewed and we can see in a new way "how awesome is this place; this is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven."
The Rt. Revd.& Rt. Hon. Dr. Richard Chartres KCVO
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