Sermon: Worrying Prophecy, Wonderful Grace

When a friend of mine became a Dean, several years ago, one of his more blunt friends asked, ‘What does a Dean actually do?' and then added, as a kind of afterthought, ‘apart from being Great and Good, of course.' Well, there are various answers that could be given to that. But the same sort of question is bound to be asked about Canons in general, and perhaps Lay Canons in particular. What are they for - other than simply being Great and Good around the place?

I suppose we ought to pause and at least comment that there's nothing wrong with being Great and Good in themselves, and that to have people around the place who have taught theology for thirty plus years, inspired generations of students, written books, edited journals, raised money for music and worked tirelessly as a volunteer for several projects including the Meissen Library - well, to have such people around at all is a great and good gift from God. But to have them give of their time, energy and accumulated as well as native wisdom and expertise to assist the Cathedral and its wider community in its multiple tasks of worship, mission, ministry and maintenance: this is beyond rubies. Ann Loades has done all that and much, much more, including serving as a Lay Member of Chapter for the last seven years. (In case this raises a further question, and I agree that the current terminology in the Church of England is highly confusing, the College of Canons - as opposed to the Canons who live in The College, you understand - is a larger, dispersed community serving God throughout the Diocese and beyond, but charged with a special responsibility for the life of this beloved place, and coming together from time to time to take counsel on its behalf and to advise the Chapter itself, led by the Dean and comprising the Canons Residentiary on the one hand (most of whom do live in the College) and the Lay Members of Chapter on the other, whose job is the day to day running of the Cathedral. That explanatory sentence was only 123 words, which is about 20 words shorter than the key explanatory sentence in the Archbishop's recent lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice; so I hope everything is now clear.) In Ann's own case, a measure of her greatness and goodness is that her entry in Who's Who shares its page with the Lloyd Webber brothers, Ken Loach and Sir Marcus Loane, former Primate of Australia. This is the kind of company we are tonight privileged to keep.

But, as we give thanks to God for Ann and for the gifts which he has given through her to church and academy in this place for many years, and as we commission her today to take that work forward in a new role, we should reflect on this work within the framework of the challenging biblical readings set for this evening. (I have come to think that the fact of our continuing with the lectionary for the day, even on a special and auspicious day such as this, is part of our enfolding of a new Canon within the ongoing uninterrupted flow of word and sacrament which makes this place what it is; and we should therefore relish the challenge that the day's readings provide.) Jeremiah, as so often, provides a word of almost unrelieved gloom - though I have to say that if the reading had not been truncated from the full length indicated by the lectionary there would have been at least a hint of mercy. Jeremiah's message of worrying judgment is addressed to a people who have been trundling along in their own ways for so long that they have no idea how far they have drifted from the centre of God's purposes. And Jeremiah has to use violent, dangerous, worrying language to get the message across. ‘Blow the trumpet! A lion has gone out! Put on sackcloth! YHWH's fierce anger has not turned away from us.' The prophetic word of judgment slices through the casual half-faith and half-devotion of a people who need to realise that they simply can't go on as they are.

And though I suspect that Jeremiah may not be Ann's favourite bedtime reading (I stand to be corrected), I have a sense that part of the gift she has brought to this community, and will continue to bring, is to slice through half-thought-out ideas and proposals and say, ‘No, that doesn't make sense; no, that's not going to work, and here's why', or perhaps, more positively, ‘Here's what we should do and you're silly if you can't see it.' In fact, I suspect there is more than one graduate student of this university who is eternally grateful that Professor Loades confronted her or him with this double-edged prophetic word on some draft chapter or thesis outline. And, more widely, this prophetic note has been characteristic of so much that Ann has written herself and has encouraged others to write: to glimpse wider visions of truth, to embrace more aspects of life - literature, music, the whole feminist movement, to name but three - within a theology which, if it is really the living God that we're talking about, must be well able to frame and profit from, and transform, them all. I opened at random, this afternoon, an issue of Theology from the time when Ann was in charge, and I came upon a sharp little editorial on the subject of Christian initiation, concluding with the words, which I can hear Ann saying and imagine it striking terror into the hearts of some: ‘May we hope for some clear theological understanding to emerge from the July Synod on this matter?' Fond hope, some might think; but that was and is the right prophetic question to be asking, and since it's a question which a Cathedral itself ought to be helping the rest of the church to ask, we may be particularly glad that Ann will continue to prod us all into both asking it and making it asked both locally and nationally, at Synods and Chapters and Councils and plenty of other places too. The prophetic note may not be as shrill or panic-stricken as Jeremiah - that's a matter for the Holy Spirit and situational discernment - but the Cathedral must be a place of worrying prophecy, and we rely not least on our Lay Canons to live at the borders between our internal life and the wider world and to be prepared to speak, as Ann has so often and so powerfully spoken, in both directions.

But if a Cathedral is a place of prophecy, sometimes worrying prophecy, it must also be a place of wonderful grace. Our second reading is one of those matchlessly simple passages in John's gospel of which Dorothy Sayers wrote in one of those short, pithy pieces some of which Ann collected and republished. As Sayers, with the fellow-feeling of the artist, saw so well, John is that rare bird, a born writer, who in nine verses captures an entire human drama, and more particularly an entire divine one, with no long words or complex ideas. The centurion begs Jesus to heal his son; Jesus tells him that his son will live; he believes, and it happens, and he discovers later that the moment when it happens is the moment when Jesus said it would. My friends, a cathedral is supposed to be the sort of place where that sort of meeting with the living Jesus happens. It may not be the instant healing of someone at death's door, though such things do happen and we shouldn't be shy of asking for them. But people come to this place, as the centurion came to Jesus, not always knowing exactly what they want to ask or how to ask for it, and the quiet, gentle but very powerful presence of the risen Lord in this place, to say nothing of his great servants who sleep at either end, again and again draws out of people, both the lifelong devout and the lifelong puzzled and drifting, that blurted-out prayer for the one thing they really want, to the one person who can really provide it. And, in a microcosm of the whole gospel story, Jesus takes into himself the sorrow and death that the world presents and gives back life. That lifegiving meeting is a central part of what a Cathedral is here for, and every Canon, clerical or lay, must know that for themselves and strive to help others know it too.

But it isn't just in the personal transactions - the anxious prayer for a sick relative, the sudden crisis of faith or hope or love, the urgent plea for guidance, whatever - that this pattern is lived out. The centurion stands for the entire larger culture - in that case, Roman, in our case, western civilization as we know it - which faces potential catastrophe or disaster, tricky philosophical or cultural, ethical or legal issues. And we can therefore hear his prayer to Jesus as a prayer arising out of the half-articulate swirlings of contemporary life and thought, politics and society, whose volatile mix of half-understood ideologies has been on such vivid display in the last couple of days. And it is the task of a Cathedral to be a place where that prayer, the cry of a culture in puzzlement and distress, can be heard, held, and answered in unexpected ways. And that, it seems to me as I look over the fence from my own academic discipline, is part at least of what Ann Loades has been able under God, to facilitate: the listening of the church to the questions of the world, of the culture, the taking of those questions into the praying life of Christ in this place, and the return with fresh answers, a fresh word of grace and hope. The worrying prophecies of judgment are matched with the wonderful power of grace, and this community and those who serve it are here to help make it happen, again and again.

And so as we celebrate the gift of God to this place of Ann and all that she has been and will be, we pray that through her continuing ministry here, and much more widely, God will continue to hear and answer the prayer of our hearts, of our culture, of our world. If this is what it means to be Great and Good, I think it also encompasses being Humble and Hopeful.