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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Undated notes of a sermon by Bishop Richard Chartres (? around 2010)
"If we just remain amongst ourselves, a spiritual in-crowd, we shall shrink. We must build bridges outward to others.
It is no good running around ever more frenetically like bluebottles in a jar. We must pray. Everything that lasts comes out of prayer.
Prayer is the enemy of the illusion that we can change the world without changing ourselves. We can't.
God is not a construct we can hold in our intelligence. Prayer is attention to God. If we want to serve at a deep level we must let our service come out of prayer. In prayer we open ourselves to God, and the prayer is ever more simple and ever costlier.
Our opportunities to serve one another are immense. Our opportunities to pray for one another are immense. We must find some way to show the love of God that we receive in prayer, out to the world. We must also serve people with deeds."
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From the Bishop of London's, Bishop Richard Chartres', article on the back page of Link magazine, Easter 2003
".....The impact on the planet, our common home, of the project of growth without limit with no end in view beyond the process itself cannot be ignored any longer.
...the Christian faith promises new life to those who open themselves up to God, who pass through the way of the Cross, emptying themselves, so that they can be filled with life that flows from the Godhead.
....Lent is a time for opening ourselves up to God by reducing the over-stimulation and the daily bombardment of images from which so many of us suffer.
We reduce the stimuli by not reading so much, watching so much or consuming so much in order to attain a transparency through which God's light can shine.
We reduce our intake and throw some ballast over the side so that we can climb more easily into the atmosphere of God.
We live more frugally and simply in order to tighten the drum-skin so that God's beat can be heard more clearly in our lives.
We cultivate emptiness so that we can be filled. We come to God especially in the second half of life by subtraction rather than addition.
...Fasting with prayer is the fresh and ancient discipline of the Church, which is being rediscovered in our own day. Fasting with prayer can make us more profoundly aware of food as a gift from divine love rather than fuel for insatiable craving. Joy and a greater sense of freedom should be among the fruits that follow.
......Lent is the time for fasting and prayer especially on Wednesdays and Fridays, in solidarity with the whole Christian community, living and departed. This communal effort saves us from thinking of our own ascetic heroism.
We also fast not only for ourselves but so that the love and light of God can more profoundly penetrate the world of which we are an infinitesimally yet infinitely precious part."
(ends)
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A sermon by Bishop Richard Chartres at a service for the late Fr Bill Scott
"As Richard Hooker said, the Eucharist properly celebrated is 2performative and not merely illustrative". The Eucharist builds the Church .......... It is the way appointed by Christ in which the world itself is re-membered through the growth of his body.
...................... The Church should be a restorative cell capable of neutralising the cancers that are gnawing at our society but as we know the reality is often so depressingly anaemic. But demolition is no answer.
Jesus said, 'I am the living bread which came down from heaven: .....' ...... We miss [Fr Bill Scott's] presence and friendship but we rejoice in his intercessions for us now and our future communion with him in the life of the world to come ...."
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From an undated notes of a homily by Bishop Richard Chartres, so my recollection of his words:-
"If we just remain amongst ourselves, a spiritual in-crowd, we shall shrink. We must build bridges outwards to others.
It is no good running around ever more frenetically, like bluebottles in a jar. We must pray. Everything that lasts comes out of prayer.
Prayer is the enemy of the illusion that we can change the world without changing ourselves. We can't.
God is not a construct we can hold in our intelligence. Prayer is attention to God. If we want to serve at a deep level we must let our service come out of prayer. In prayer we open ourselves to God, and the prayer is ever more simple and ever costlier.
Our opportunities to serve one another are immense. Our opportunities to pray for one another are immense.
We must find some way to show the love of God that we receive in prayer out to the world. We must also serve people with deeds."
(ends)
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The Bishop of Stepney's address (Bishop Richard Chartres) May 1992
The new bishop of Stepney, Richard Chartres, gave an address at a service early in his episcopal ministry, that included the exhortation, that if you had wounds, if someone had hurt you, then rejoice. He said this boldly. He explained that it is through your wounds that the Holy Spirit can enter into your life to change and heal you.
And in another sermon (?date) Bishop Richard Chartres said the following:-
"Today, in the world, process is masquerading as an end, progress is masquerading as an end.
...the Church is concerned with depths, not with surfaces. It is concerned with the formation of Christ in us, so that Christ's plan for the world will be brought into being. This is the end we work for.
..We must, by prayer, worship and the Eucharist, and by study of Scriptures and following Christ's teaching, bring about the formation of Christ within us. This has to be a slow and gradual process. By forming Christ within us, we bring into being the future around us.
All the peoples throughout the globe grow in brotherhood and concord as each forms Christ within them.
Christ told us, "I am with you always, even to the end of time." "
************************* (end of Bishop Richard's sermon) ****************
Some time after this I happened to read the novel, "What's Bred in the Bone" by Robertson Davies. On page 12 the following passage, which echoes the highlighted words in Bishop Chartres' sermon.
"....What we call luck is the inner man externalised. We make things happen to us. I know that sounds horrible and cruel, considering what happens to a lot of people, and it can't be the whole explanation. But it's a considerable part of it."
And the author Ben Okri, in his novel "Songs of Enchantment", is writing out similar ideas in this passage on page 290 :-
"...He saw the hidden realities of our thoughts and actions, and their immediate consequences which lurked besides us, waiting for the confluences of time when they would become real and irrevocable. He saw how we created our lives with our thoughts, how our thoughts created our realities, and how we carry around with us the great invisible weight of all our thoughts and actions and secrets. He saw a world co-existent with ours where all our secret selves were real and visible."
In a 1992 radio interview an octogenarian female traveller (didn't record her name) said, "You become what you think."
In Radio 4's 'Thought for the Day' (15/04/2021) Henri Nouwen's "Thinking doesn't make new living; living makes new thinking", was quoted.
Aristotle wrote that the way to make a 'just' man, is to do 'just' acts; and likewise, a 'temperate' man, to do 'temperate' acts.
However, William Studdert Kennedy, an Anglican front line chaplain during the First World War, wrote that, "It is what you worship, rather than what you will, that makes you what you are."
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