Sermon: Installation of Rosalind Brown

‘Let us also go,’ said Thomas, ‘so that we may die with him.’ St Thomas has moved around the calendar, and Canon Rosalind Brown and I have moved with him. I did wonder whether the decision to move him from December 21 to July 3 was to give him, like the Queen, an official birthday during warmer weather; but Rosalind and I were both ordained on the old, wintry feast of St Thomas, and as I was consecrated two years ago today, on the summer one, so today we celebrate this splendid occasion and allow her and Thomas to keep pace with one another.

Keeping pace with one another, and together keeping pace with the King, is the theme of our two readings – which, as so often on a saint’s day, are struggling to find enough relevant lectionary passages to cover the various services. Thomas had his real moment of glory this morning, of course. As his namesake you would expect me to say that I regret the normal epithet, Doubting Thomas; that matchless narrative in John 20 ends with the most glorious affirmation of faith expressed by anyone throughout John’s gospel, and John has clearly put it in that position, right at the end of the original ending of the gospel, to highlight this faith, ‘My Lord and my God’. This, he says, is the faith which his whole gospel is intended to evoke: ‘these things are written that you may believe and find life.’

This afternoon’s passage might seem altogether darker, but within it we glimpse something of the same character. Jesus has announced that he’s going back to Judaea to wake up Lazarus. The disciples object; last time he was in Judaea, the Judaeans were trying to stone him. And it falls to Thomas to say the words which, under certain circumstances, express the very core of Christian faith: Let’s go with him, so that we may die with him. Those words, though they seem gloomy and almost shoulder-shrugging, are words we can imagine being spoken by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Janani Luwum, or Oscar Romero. If Jesus is walking ahead into a place of danger, the only thing to do is to follow him. In fact, they correspond quite closely to what Peter says at the end of John 6, when most of Jesus’ hearers are falling away and losing heart: ‘Master, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ Thomas may for the moment only be able to see death – John Calvin describes Thomas, bless him, as ‘a loyal but dull disciple’ – but the key thing is that he knows he’s got to stick with Jesus, whatever the cost.

This, of course, is why that otherwise rather odd lesson from 2 Samuel comes in this evening. Ittai the Gittite, one of David’s most loyal friends, is determined to stick with the King for good or ill. ‘As YHWH lives, and as my lord the king lives, wherever my lord the king may be, whether for death or for life, there also your servant will be.’ That is not fatalism; it is faith, faith that looks at the person and can imagine itself being with that person come what may, and indeed cannot imagine a future that does not include being with that person. And so Thomas’s dogged and loyal devotion, which cannot imagine a future other than following Jesus even if it means death, prepares the ground for his eventual leap of faith, to imagine what to that point none of the others had dared to voice: that in Jesus the living God has become human, the word has become flesh, and that in Jesus’ defeat of death itself there is revealed at last the truth which lights up the whole cosmos. ‘My Lord and my God!’

And so it is this afternoon that we come to celebrate the new ministry of Rosalind Brown in this lovely place, a place full of memory, faith and imagination; and in welcoming Rosalind we are welcoming precisely one in whose life, ministry and work faith and imagination have come to fresh and creative expression and will, we trust, continue to do so. One of the key tasks of the church as it faces the puzzling postmodern world is to re-express, to re-imagine our faith, using all the resources of music, literature and the other arts to help us do so. That was the theme of our Diocesan Conference after Easter this year. And we celebrate Rosalind’s arrival, and pray for her in her new ministry in this place, because we know that she will be an effective sign of our determination to maintain Durham Cathedral as what it is, and what it is called to be: a place where the Christian faith puts down roots deep into history precisely in order to put forth fresh shoots that will bud and blossom and bring forth fruit, a place of celebration and imagination, of welcome and learning, a place where the joy of the world is caught up within the joy of God, where the truth of the world is glimpsed as part of the truth of God, and where pain of the world can resonate with the pain of God, with all being held together in prayer and silence and music and sacrament. Rosalind will be at the centre of all of that; and, Rosalind, whether the question of the day demands the leap of faith and the shout of ‘My Lord and my God!’, or whether the question of the day demands the answer, Let us go with Jesus even if only into the darkness, we shall look to you to help us, in faith and imagination, to say both the one and the other. So today we honour Thomas, and welcome Rosalind, and in thanking God for them both we pledge ourselves afresh with faithful imagination and imaginative faith to hail Jesus as our Lord and our God and to follow him wherever he leads.