Portsmouth Festivities 2009: Cathedral Eucharist, Sunday 21^st June

Readings: Job 38:1-11/2 Cor 6:1-13/Mk 4:35-end

 It is well-nigh impossible to impersonate the Dean of Westminster in his absence, especially as he has broken a leg and is therefore unable to be with us this morning. So here we are, inaugurating the annual ‘Portsmouth Festivities’ in the Cathedral. And the overall theme is Henry VIII, who was crowned King of England five hundred years ago this week.

The best known fact about Henry is that he had six wives; and the next best known is that he put on a lot of weight as he got older. Well, some of us are blessed with a reverse process; and in this diet-conscious age, I am sure that the television celebrity chefs would disapprove of what made up Henry’s daily intake of food. But there are other things that need to be said about him. He secured the break of the Church of England with Rome, and significant though that clearly is, there had been tensions between the medieval English Church and Rome traceable right back to the old Celtic and British traditions. It is important, therefore, to place him in a wider context. This is particularly true at a time when some journalists and popular historians are apt to cast Catholicism invariably in the role of the victim, and anything that openly challenged it at the Reformation as hopelessly misguided or duped by power-politics. Perhaps I exaggerate. But I would not be here without what Henry achieved. And what he set in motion can be summarised in three ways.

The first concerns the relationship between Church and State. If there is to be one at all, as Henry clearly believed, then it has to be about localising the Church, so that it has in its DNA a conviction about being geographically based, national without being nationalistic, and not universal in an unrealistic sense, nor gathered from here and there into an eclectic group. But it is never a straightforward business. This Cathedral is dedicated to St Thomas à Becket, the late twelfth century Archbishop who dared to stand up to his monarch, and who paid the price for it with his own life. There are, therefore, good reasons why we cannot ignore that frequent but necessary friction today. It has, after all, been part of the Christian story from the very start. It persists in our own time: Church leaders are regularly told by politicians to mind their own business – whatever that is supposed to mean.

Secondly, there is Henry’s achievement in the Reformation itself. He was initially tentative about having an English Bible - a new piece of technology altogether - in every parish church. All this resulted, after his reign, in a Church that worshipped in the language of the people, something in which he was a bit of a pioneer. He took a detailed interest in what was to all intents and purposes the first official translation of the Lord’s Prayer into English, and insisted on an old variant – ‘suffer us not to be led into temptation’. This was replaced on his death by the more mainstream ‘lead us not into temptation’ – what his Archbishop had wanted all along. Perhaps Henry had special insights into this area of human experience, though I would not myself favour Archbishops always having the last word over liturgy.

Then, thirdly, the Reformation was in many respects a lay movement, the result of the new learning of the Renaissance, as well as the new theological ideas boiling up in many parts of Europe which were a real pressure on Henry. The laity were to take an active part in all acts of worship, and also in the governance of the Church – in those days through Parliament, nowadays through local and national synods. The term ‘lay clerks’, often applied to choirmen in our Cathedrals, is an example of this emphasis.

Of course Henry was as turbulent as the times he lived in, and the kind of violence by which some of all this happened is repellent to us. But as this morning’s gospel about the stilling of the storm reminds us, the Church has to live with unpredictable dangers of all kinds. Yet we are still on our way to eternity, however turbulent and stormy the journey, however crass, idiotic and absurd the Church’s behaviour can be – and it often is. No doubt future ages will judge us in ways that would surprise us. But that is the risk of going on the voyage of faith - in any age.

+ Kenneth Portsmouth