Thanksgiving Eucharist

Preached by the Dean of Guildford, the Very Rev'd Victor Stock

26 Nov 2009

In his introduction to Home to Roost and Other Peckings by Deborah Devonshire, Alan Bennett writes, 'I knew the minute the call came from Derbyshire that there would be no escape - I've been here before, it was Miss Shepherd all over again. This might seem unkind, the resemblance between a smelly, deranged and filthily rain-coated vagrant and Chatsworth's fragrant chatelaine emeritus, not immediately obvious, but they are the same; both strong willed, single-minded women wanting something out of me. Miss Shepherd, a haven for her van, the Dowager Duchess a foreword for her book. "Can I bend you to my will?" sister Nancy used to say. Quite.'

A little while ago I was preaching in Derby Cathedral in the presence of the very same Dowager at the 400th anniversary of the burial of Bess of Hardwick. The preacher 400 years previously had been the Archbishop of York. They'd asked his successor, but he was out, saving Africa. The Archbishop of Canterbury was busy saving the Anglican Communion, and, as I said in my sermon, the next dignitary in the Church of England was obviously the Dean of Guildford. None of us can remember why I was asked. Thus it was with this invitation and the answer is probably that Fr Michael Fuller hasn't got many friends and doesn't know many clergy. When pausing in the street last April he asked me whether I'd conme and do this, and in a moment of folly and thinking it a very long way in the distance, I said yes.

A parish priest spends a great deal of time helping people to say yes. 'If you were to ask', Fr Michael said, 'what would my thought be on fifteen years, it would be simple: it's been fun, bloody hard work, but rewarding'. Well, I've got a nose for these things as a dignitary of the Church of England. When I'd been Dean of Guildford for a few month a Surrey lady stopped me and said, 'You must remember you are now a dignitary', so I do try. The priest is always trying to help people to say yes, to turn towards a God who says yes to us, which is, of course, a flat contradiction of what the man in the pub thinks religion is about. You've only got to go into the public bar for people to stop swearing. 1 might tell you a story about that afterwards over the champers - not suitable during the service.

There is a general misapprehension that religion is about saying no, helped of course by the fact that a lot of misguided religious people do say no - to women, to Gay people, to other Christians, to members of other faiths - most people really. But the Church of England parish priest knows this will not do. We're not an exclusive kind of church, members of the Church of England - we're as inclusive as possible. We try to say yes, and that's what Michael has been doing for fifteen years - saying yes, on your behalf in the offering of the Holy Eucharist, which can degenerate into routine, into the saying of prayers for you, which can be a hard slog and degenerate into routine, in preparing and preaching sermons, which can be perplexing and puzzling for the preacher - frankly, a bit of a routine.

But if Michael's ministry has been anything like that of other priests, the way forward has always been to turn towards others in their need and to listen. Not providing answers but helping people sometimes ask the right questions, and then to face the fact that some of the most important questions in life don't have any answers, or as the Dominican theologian so famously said, 'Perhaps God is the question rather than the answer'.

But there's a human personality here, a real man, and that real man has made the priesthood come alive for so many of you, and has secured a place for St George's where people are encouraged by Michael's example to turn towards God, even when, in our fumbling and Anglican way we don't know always what that means. In a couple of weeks" time the scientist Brian Cox and the comedian, Robin Incc, have invited me to take part in a series of science programmes using comedy to get their position across - scientists have suddenly realised that they are inclined to be over-serious, like old-fashioned and unattractive religious people. I was invited to fly out to CliRN (at the BBC's expense, I'm glad to say) to give my comments on the great Atlas Collider and have therefore become a bit of an authority on particle physics. Well, these scientists have invited me to take part in this series because they were amused when I answered the question, 'Did I ever have doubts?' by saying the Christian life is a life of doubt, shot through with moments of faith.

Fr Michael's life will be like that as most of yours will be, for the priestly life is demanding, tiring, sometimes disappointing, often exhausting - it demands something Christ-like we venture to say, it demands standing alongside others in their pain and in their need, bearing them in our hearts before God, which is what prayer is. How lovely that you've turned up here tonight to give thanks for St George's for a special fifteen years of ministry in Campden Hill. What's been nurtured and encouraged in Campden Hill will have borne fruit in places far away, in lives enriched and changed, in a word of encouragement, a shared joke there, a shoulder to cry on here, a hand held. Incidents and moments, places and people every priest forgets, but people, places and incidents not forgotten by God.

So, the preacher's job is to articulate what you all feel and to say thank you to Michael, and I would add my own thank you to a congregation that exemplifies what it is to be Anglican - not to be sure, not to be always certain, not to be the only people who are right, but to be people daring from time to time, with a good priest's encouragement, to turn towards God. In the order of service for this Eucharist there's a telling little rubric. It's just before the Gospel on page 5 - 'We turn to face the reader who sings, "Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St John"'.
Actually, it's not the reader we turn towards, it's the Gospel, the Euangelion, the Good News that makes it worth stepping aside on a wintry night from Campden Hill Square in St George's, that makes it worthwhile coming to be with others to say thank you because God has turned to us, and the priest, in a special way, embodies that God-ward movement, bringing God to you and standing at the altar with you in his heart before God. Of course, this isn't without COST for priest or people, and because we know this, we're here tonight to say thank you.

We began with two living legends. Debo Devonshire and Alan Bennett, let's end with two from the misty beginnings of Christianity. Wednesday was the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, one of those ubiquitous 4 century virgins that are not very interesting, except in the way they died. She was bound to a wheel, but as Divine Providence would have it, it flew to bits, killing nearly all her executioners, so she stepped free, only to be despatched by a surviving executioner who relied on a sword rather than the Catherine wheel. She reminded me of St Margaret of Antioch, another legendary figure (St Margaret's Westminster is named after her) who was consumed by a dragon, but the dragon finding her indigestible, burst asunder and she stepped forth unscathed, only to be, yes, you've guessed it, beheaded. So, they might have saved those Catherine wheels and those dragons, and gone straight to beheading.

That's often what it's like for the parish priest, so much of ministry feels like experiencing a series of bungled executions - awful, disappointing, painful suffering, and though endured, ends in disappointment anyway. I say this by way of ending to bring us down to earth, because we're not here to fantasise about Michael, to make him into something he isn't, or to say that the priestly life is all showers of roses. Michael knows, as we know, that it's simply about turning to God, difficult as that is, but in the very act of turning, we find God has already turned towards us. He's there, in the fire.