Sermon: Inauguration of The Bishop of Guildford

Preacher:

Andrew Watson

Date:

Saturday 28th February 2015

Venue:

Guildford Cathedral

Service:

The Inauguration of the Episcopal Ministry of The Right Reverend Andrew Watson as Tenth Bishop of Guildford

Readings:

Ezekiel 47: 1-12

John 7: 37-39

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 3.8M)

Good morning, and I’d like to thank you all so much for coming to this special service, and for the tremendous welcome that you have given Beverly and me, ever since that announcement day in late September, complete with whistle-stop tour of my new Diocese, and culminating with Evensong here in this great Cathedral church.

Since then we have been inundated with cards and letters; our beautiful new home has been redecorated from top to bottom; a thoughtful clergy couple has donated all 7 series of ‘The West Wing’, that’s 116 hours of compulsive viewing, which have kept me going during these long, dark winter evenings; and the fact that Beverly has not been able to move with me until Lydia finishes her GCSEs – together with my canny decision to keep quiet about the fact that I’m really quite a competent cook - has paid off in terms of dinner invitations and delicious meals being regularly dropped off on my doorstep. Particular highlights have been Katherine Heather’s Hungarian Goulash, Sally Beake’s Chocolate Fridgecake and Jane Hulme’s ginger nuts, together with the Archdeacon of Surrey’s signature dish, a moussaka to die for!

And so to an excellent question first put to me by a rather shy Year 7 at the Priory School, Dorking during that whistle-stop tour in late September: ‘What does it feel like to be you today?’ And the answer is this: it feels exciting, humbling, and not a little scary. I guess many of us have a love-hate relationship with responsibility. Most of us can’t live without it, and yet it’s quite possible to have too much of a good thing. Perhaps that explains our mixed feelings about growing up. And finding yourself as Bishop of Guildford suddenly feels very grown-up indeed: for in the realistic but unsettling words of our Lord Himself:  ‘From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded’.

What does it feel like to be you today?’ If you’d asked that question of the prophet Ezekiel and his fellow Jews around 587 BC, their answers would have been robust in the extreme. For this wasn’t a time for cards and congratulations, for ginger nuts and goulashes. This was a time for sitting by the Rivers of Babylon, hundreds of miles from home, and mourning the destruction of your city, the death of your friends, and the loss of your home, your family and your church – that great Temple of Jerusalem, that meeting place between God and Humankind, which had been so shockingly burnt to the ground by King Nebuchadrezzar and his Babylonian forces. 

Some had followed the advice of the prophet Jeremiah, who’d encouraged them to make the best of a bad job, to build homes in Babylon and settle down, even to pray for the shalom, the peace and prosperity, of the place of their exile. Others sat there in mute disbelief, hanging up their harps on the willow trees and dreaming dark dreams of revenge – of taking Babylonian babies, and to put it colloquially, bashing their heads in. And meanwhile Ezekiel sat beside them, but his were dreams of a different kind: dreams of dry bones coming to life again; of hearts of stone transformed into hearts of flesh; of a glorious new Temple arising from the ashes of the old; of a tiny spring of water bubbling up from the south side of the altar.

This stream trickled its way through the city of Jerusalem, and every now and then, Ezekiel’s companion measured the depth of the water: ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist deep, deep enough to swim in. Within a short distance, great trees were growing by the side of the river; some way further down, it entered the Judean desert. And as all this fresh, life-giving water flowed through the desert and into the toxic waters of the Dead Sea, the stream from the Temple turned the salty water fresh.

Imagine fishing in the Dead Sea. The only living thing you’d be likely to catch is a floating tourist – complete, perhaps, with a soggy copy of the Times! But in Ezekiel’s dream, fishermen were standing along the shores, spreading out their nets and bringing in a great haul not of tourists, but of fish of every kind. Imagine planting fruit trees by the Dead Sea. They’d be dead in a week. But in Ezekiel’s dream, the trees were bearing fruit every month – fruit for food, the prophet was told, and leaves for healing.

Here was an astonishing vision, coming just when the people needed it most. Here was Paradise Regained, a return to the Garden of Eden. But was thisfalse comfort, Ezekiel’s contemporaries must have wondered? Was it just naïve, wishful thinking? They knew that trees don’t grow fruit every month; that when fresh and salty water meet, the salty water always wins out; and that’s the way of the world isn’t it? Sickness is contagious, not health; bad apples rot good apples, corrupt people innocent people, not the other way round; the power of hatred is stronger than the power of love; the arrogant inherit the earth; life always ends in death not death in life.

Well, perhaps that was the way of the world, but then Jesus came along: this infant, this carpenter-turned-preacher, this tiniest of trickles from the south side of the altar: Jesus who described his body as the new Temple, the meeting place between God and Humankind; Jesus who stood in the Temple and loudly proclaimed, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me and drink’. When Jesus laid his hands on sick people, he didn’t get sick – they got well. When Jesus mixed with corrupt people, he wasn’t corrupted - they were inspired. When Jesus prayed for his enemies, it was he, not they, who came across as stronger, love that overcame hatred, the meek who inherited the earth; when Jesus was brutally executed, it was life that won out over death.

Many of Jesus’ contemporaries had settled down under Roman occupation, making the most of a bad job. Others dreamt darkly of revenge, of taking Romans, maybe even Roman babies, and dashing them against the rock. But Jesus dreamt of the Kingdom of God, then prayed and worked for that dream to become a reality: a tiny trickle of water, to begin with, whose very power and purity would bring joy, reconciliation, healing, salvation even into the most desperate and toxic of environments. ‘There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God’, writes the Psalmist: and here it is: the river of God’s grace, God’s Spirit, whose power to transform lives, relationships and whole communities is what keeps us going, as those called to live and proclaim the mission of Jesus today.

So why choose this ancient reading for today’s inauguration? Why this story of exile as I start my ministry here in the Home Counties? Is there perhaps some subliminal message here? Is your brash new bishop even describing the Diocese of Guildford as, quote, the Dead Sea?

Not at all: this is a See that is alive and kicking! No, I’ve chosen this reading because I love it and I’ve seen it in action, as the Holy Spirit of God has brought hope into the most humanly hopeless of situations; and I’ve chosen this reading too because it lies at the very heart of what we’re doing every time we pray ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, then work to make that prayer a reality.

I have here an old etching which shows two towns built on hills. The little rows of houses are similar in both pictures, and the skyline in each is punctuated by trees and the odd church spire. Under the top picture we read ‘View of Birmingham in Warwickshire’; under the bottom ‘View of Guildford in Surrey’. And two things surprise me about this picture: one is that I can’t imagine why a single etching should include pictures of Birmingham and Guildford – they seem a rather unlikely pair; and the other is that the two towns look almost identical.

The tale of these towns has diverged massively since the days of the Industrial Revolution, of course. And both have become the centre of new dioceses, one carved out of Lichfield, the other out of Winchester. And on the surface the two communities could hardly be more different, as I move from a diocese with the most deprivation in the country to a diocese with the least. And yet at heart, towns are towns and people are people. And in towns and among people everywhere, there is much that is good and life-giving, but there is also loneliness, sickness and sadness, frustration, exhaustion, debt, substance abuse, domestic violence; and there are the purpose questions too, the sense of ‘what’s it all for?’, especially when redundancy looms or depression takes a hold or children go off the rails or we face up to the cold, hard reality of death. And being poor, and dependent on food banks, of which there are now more than 40 in the Guildford diocese, is sometimes more difficult, more humiliating when our neighbours are doing quite well for themselves (and thank you for asking), than when we’re all in the same boat.

And so to those realistic but unsettling words of our Lord once again, but now in a broader context: ‘From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded’. As a Diocese, as a Region, we have been given much. Despite those 40 food banks, our resources in terms of ready finance, gifted people, relatively high levels of churchgoing, are considerable. Church of England plc. can probably keep going in this diocese for longer than almost anywhere else.

Yet Ezekiel’s dream – the River of Grace, the Kingdom of God – is a vision so much greater than that of Church of England plc, let alone Diocese of Guildford plc. It’s a vision that starts not from an armchair, but from an altar: hence those powerful words of St Paul, ‘I beseech you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God’. It’s a vision that grows from a trickle into a tiny stream: in those words of Jesus, ‘If anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will… not lose their reward’; and that’s just the beginning, as men, women, young people and children start to hear the call to ‘follow me’, and joyfully respond – a white-robed multitude, in that vision from the Book of Revelation, from every nation, tribe, people and language crying out in a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’

And so from glorious Biblical visions to a snippet of Greek mythology… Because in Homer’s epic The Odyssey we read of the sirens – the femmes fatales of the ancient world - whose song was so beautiful, so ravishing, that many a boat was shipwrecked on their shores. Odysseus was keen to hear the song himself, but was naturally anxious to avoid a shipwreck: so he ordered his men to tie him to the mast of the boat and them to put wax in their ears - so that he could hear the song and they could steer the ship to safety.

In another classical text, though, the Argonautica, we are told of a different approach to the seduction of the sirens: the strategy of Jason, who was fortunate enough to have Orpheus as one of his passengers, the most famous musician and poet of ancient times. As the ship approached the island, Jason didn’t reach for the wax or the rope. Instead he asked Orpheus to take up his harp, and to sing a still more beautiful, more ravishing song than the song of the sirens; and so the boat passed safely through.

And that is our challenge today. The songs of the sirens – the murderous songs of religious extremism - the mocking songs of the new atheists – the songs that promise fulfilment through fame or constant accumulation, through sexual promiscuity or the lure of the bottle - are deeply seductive songs. They also lead to shipwreck after shipwreck. But the Christian calling is not to fill our ears with wax, nor to tie ourselves (or others) to the mast. It is rather to pick up our harps and sing a more beautiful, life-giving song, the song of the One who laid hands on sick people and made them well, who mixed with bad people and made them good, who turned mourning into dancing, death into life: the song of the One in whose service we find perfect freedom.

Some words from Desmond Tutu:

‘Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death; victory is ours through him who loved us’

And Lord, wherever we are in our faith journey today, help us to drink of that living water and to sing that better song for the blessing of the people of this region, and the blessing of the world outside.

Amen.