Readers’ Admission Service
Saturday 3rd September, 2005, 11.00 a.m.
Portsmouth Cathedral
Readings: I Thess 2:3-8, Mk 10:42-45
Once upon a time…..there was a missionary who arrived in this country. He was not an altogether willing or obvious figure, and in worldly terms, he didn’t get very far. In fact, he was supposed to reach the main city, but had to make do with a provincial capital, the base of a local king, what we now call Canterbury. He had a tough task in front of him, as the old Celtic Christian base was shrinking fast; it was being pushed westwards by pagan Anglo-Saxons; and the scattered Roman settlements from the (now defunct) empire counted for little; and just to complicate things further, the king in Canterbury, though a pagan himself, had a French wife, who was surrounded by a group of Frankish clergy, who had their own funny ways.
The name of the missionary was Augustine, and the man who sent him was Pope Gregory, whose feast-day is today. You will know that I like preaching about the saints. It is not just because I love history. It is about far more than that. History can never be determinative for what we are about now. But the saints are not ideas from the past. They are people, ordinary human beings in whom God dwelt, as he does in each one of us. There is nothing spectacular about Augustine – he tried to get out of coming to this country, and delayed his journey through France as long as he could. And in a sense, Gregory was just as unwilling to take on the top job in Rome: he wanted to stay in his monastery. But the wider community pushed him forward.
One of the fascinating features of our life together in Christ is our relationships with one another. Gregory the reluctant Pope knew what it was like to want to hold back from what God was calling him to do, and so with that inside knowledge of what I suppose we might call ‘lack of self-confidence’, he kept encouraging Augustine. Keep going, keep going, get to your destination, even if it is not exactly what we’re all (from the outside) expecting from you. Canterbury, not London, became his base, and life could be very tough.
But to arrive at a less than satisfactory, glossy, over-achievement base is one thing. To face out what meets you on arrival is another. I have already mentioned the different, fragmented Christian groups. Augustine wanted to come down heavy on them, and use his mandate from on high to bring them into line, and also destroy all those pagan temples. But Gregory knew better – and his advice we could well ponder ourselves. With fragile Christian diversity, don’t push your luck too far: put up with practices that vary, provided, that is, that the gospel and Christian unity are not compromised. And what about those pagan temples? Don’t destroy them – only destroy the idols inside them.
Both these themes have been going through my mind in recent months again and again as I ponder the KAIROS process in the diocese. We are indeed faced with fragile Christian diversity, as we are with the pagan temples, the secular human constructs of the culture in which we are set. It would be very tempting for me to go for a favourite avenue along the road of diversity in the Church and say, that’s what I want – though I doubt it would achieve very much! It would be equally tempting for me to encourage you all to build a cosy, ecclesiastical ghetto, where we all said and sang the same things to each other, carefully excluding any dissident voices – in order to scream at the rest of the world, in its pagan values, and tired secularism. But I would not be doing my job very well if I did; and I certainly would not be paying much attention to the subtle inter-action between Gregory the Great and Augustine of Canterbury way back in the late 590’s.
The fact of the matter is that Christian diversity is not an invention of the contemporary Church – it is a recurring factor of history. And the pagan temples, whether they are the onslaughts of the media or the spiritual bleeding of an age that seems able only to see itself in isolation from everything else, tradition included – these are outward signs of a culture that needs to be addressed constructively. Yes, there is much greed and pushiness around – but the Church can be just as bad as the rest of society: how many times do I read an e-mail that ends, ‘I look forward to hearing from you soon’, as if the whole world is going to collapse if that particular example of ecclesiastical consumerism isn’t fed by yesterday!
I exaggerate in order to make two simple points. First, the perfect, slick, well-organised Church, which has somehow ‘got its act together organisationally’ simply does not exist, and if it ever does, I will be among the first to seek pastures new. Secondly, the world is the arena of the gospel, with all its faults and its strengths. Christian diversity faces us with many challenges, and it seems that these are often about sex and gender. But diversity will never be faced if we remain on the surface, and fail to seek God in the conflicts that this brings. And those pagan temples are about far more. Yes, get rid of the idols inside, of greed, assertiveness, intolerance, lack of trust in our institutions, ungenerous attitudes, perhaps even a parochial attitude that says ‘my local base is all that matters’: all these are part of our culture already. But the temples themselves, the buildings, the thought-patterns, the finest attitudes that want to make poverty history, that champion the cause of the aged, that succour damaged children, and that want to align themselves with new techniques, like how to help pre-school cerebral palsey children learn to use under-used parts of their brain to make up for what they don’t have and the rest of us do have – these are kingdom-building signs of God speaking often right outside the sometimes narrow confines of our church meetings.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall of Gregory’s study when he read the latest worrying letter from Augustine, and I would love to have seen Augustine’s face when he received the latest firm but encouraging reply. Those two men clearly understood each other, and in their friendly openness, thankfully failed to observe the depressing recourse of the modern person when in difficulty – what are my rights in law? All of us, whether bishop, presbyter, deacon, reader, churchwarden, treasurer, secretary, church school teacher, altar-server – we could all attend to this kind of trustful, questing interaction. And we could, also, take heart that the result, in the short-term, was a tetchy time, with people struggling to get on, as well as the slow rebirth of the Christian base not through monolithic strategies, but through a gradual process that could spot the difference between the social or mental construct of the pagan temple, that had to be taken seriously, and the negative, self-absorbed, greed-orientated idol inside it, that was utterly unacceptable.
Gregory’s great gift to the Christian Church was a realistic sense of mission. It is to him that we owe the story of seeing young, fair-haired slaves in the Roman market, and on being told they were ‘angles’ he replied, ‘not angles but angels’ – an encounter that apparently gave rise to his determination to send someone out there quick. It is to him also that we owe the two essential ingredients to mission – singing and praying. ‘Gregorian Chant’, seldom heard in our Churches but ironically popular as a ‘chill-out’ CD in many shops (are we missing something perhaps?) is what he helped to codify, arrange, and develop, so that it ceased to be wooden, but could meet new needs. And the ‘Gregorian Sacramentary’, or book of prayers for the sacraments and other services, laid the foundation for a living tradition of public worship that fed on the old tradition of improvising along set norms (rather making it up as you go along), in a way that would also meet new needs. And like KAIROS, none of this emerged from an ivory tower. In words taken from this morning’s epistle, Gregory spoke ‘to please the God who tests our hearts’ (I Thess 2:4), and, in the gospel, in the name of the one who ‘came not to be served, but to serve, and to give up his life as a ransom for many’ (Mk 10:45).
Like Augustine, those who are commissioned as readers are being sent out on a new stage of a missionary journey, which is part of every Christian’s discipleship. But Readers have the special role of articulating publicly the voice of the Church and the proclamation of the Gospel – not forgetting that the art of good public speaking is both about knowing what to say and when not to say anything, and to let others do so (and that applies to bishops as well!). My prayer for Readers is for wisdom and discernment, that they may listen and speak, and be prepared, like Augustine, to wait for answers from both familiar and unexpected sources, which is part of the holy interaction, the holy fellowship, of God’s creative love, working in all people, in all times, and in all places.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
