INSTITUTION OF JOHN OWEN AT ALL SAINTS STEEP

THURSDAY 5^TH MARCH 2009

7.30 pm

Readings:

Romans 12 : 9-17

Matthew 7 : 7-12

I want to talk tonight about God.  Not God in the Church – that would be too obvious.  Nor God in theology – some of it is fairly impenetrable (especially when people like me are writing it!).  But God in the most unexpected and ordinary places.  And the example I want to use is a rather off beat one, occasioned by the death earlier this year of the author-playwright John Mortimer.  He was no religious figure, and he had some very obvious weaknesses – though drinking champagne through the day wouldn’t, in my view, necessarily be one of them!  But in the obituaries that followed his death, and the articles written about him since, the central character that he created has kept recurring – Horace Rumpole, barrister at law, known to his friends as ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’.  I have to admit that he’s one of my favourites, and those books of his exploits I keep going back to, laughing at the same old jokes, and enjoying the way in which each story reaches some kind of resolution, not always a successful one.  It is said that Mortimer created this character from a number of real-life people, his father and himself included.  And like all fiction of this kind, there is an element of caricature and exaggeration.  But once we dig behind the façade, there are three important aspects  that open up wider issues.

The first is the relentless cross-examiner.  Here, Mortimer himself was more charming and far more subtle than his hero Rumpole, who was equally relentless, but could be brutally aggressive.  Yet the role of the cross-examiner is not confined to the law courts.  We cross-examine each other.  I’m frequently cross-examined, and I know when I’ve given a satisfactory reply, just as I also know when I’ve failed, and the temptation to turn up the volume in reply has been almost irresistible.  Cross-examining is a way of getting at the truth, exposing the veils of innuendo and evasion that we often put in each other’s ways.  But it’s also an important tool  for the pursuit of Christian truths.  Why do we believe what we believe?  Is there a connection between what we believe and how we behave towards one another?  We can’t stop being a very human community in the Church, but it’s how we handle that humanity that is so important.  I contemplate early retirement,  I begin to look back on 36 years of ordained ministry in the Church of England.  It makes me wonder sometimes how far we spend our energies in the pursuit of truth - the questions that people have today about how we connect our faith in the wonders of God with how we try day by day to put that faith into practice.  The relentless cross-examiner must be part of that process.  New challenges are not always dealt with by old answers.

Secondly, there’s a tough but cautious optimism about Mortimer, in the work of his barrister-creation.  He’s prepared to champion the underdog, the forgotten, the ignored, at every single opportunity.  He believes more in the individual than in the structures of society.  And here again the transfer into the Christian faith isn’t hard to make: I have to ask myself as a Bishop how far the parish and diocesan systems (both of them, not just the diocesan) actually liberate people in their Christian witness, and help them to live within structures of an institution that assist, rather than hinder.  And, more to the point, people in leadership keep needing to be reminded that God, like a good jury, is ready to acquit, even if the law has been broken.

And thirdly, there are some obvious vulnerabilities about both Mortimer and his Old Bailey hero.  For all his brilliance, Rumpole could get it wrong. He could lose his temper flagrantly with a judge, however provoked by  sheer pomposity. He could set up unnecessary barriers between himself and his wife, a coping mechanism that enables him to withdraw into himself more and more.  We all have different vulnerabilities, I remember a young priest commenting about a vicar in a parish outside this diocese with the words: ‘he’s so slick and managerial and clever, that there are no rough edges, to show a congregation the real human being that they can get hold of.’  And we can go further still.   Suffering can toughen us up, in order to keep going. But it can also confront us with our own frail humanity and help us to be more sympathetic and tolerant towards the vulnerabilities of others.  I wish we were a less brittle Church, trying to impress each other with our strength and efficiency – instead of starting at the baseline of being forgiven sinners, loved by God, living thankful lives. 

When John Owen wrote to me about how he saw his future ministry in these parishes (something I always ask  from every incoming priest) he wrote about the seventeenth century priest-poet, George Herbert, author of the hymns ‘Teach me my God and King’, and ‘King of glory, King of peace’, which we’ve just sung tonight.  The genius of Herbert, in his poems and other writings, lies in his ability to see God in the ordinary and the unexpected.  And it was through his wide powers of observation that Herbert was able to redefine the role of the priest in his time, just as we in our day need to redefine how ministry is delivered in a very different world, which is a recurring issue all over the diocese.  Well, Paul’s warning in tonight’s first reading that love should be genuine strike the right note.  And when Jesus, in that gospel-passage,  tells us to ask, seek, and knock, we’re faced with a  vivid but very ordinary picture:  the human voice asking, the human face seeking, and the human hand knocking.  Here is the whole human personality, vulnerabilities and all; and God is there, in his world, ready to be given to hose who ask, ready to be found by those who seek, ready to be revealed to those who knock.  This is our calling – and nothing else matters.

+Kenneth Portsmouth