St Matthew's Day - Very Rev'd Mark Oakley

Can I first say how wonderful it is to back here at St Matthew’s? Fr Philip, after a glass or two, will probably tell you later that he has known me since I was in shorts. What he doesn’t say, rather worryingly, is what period of my life that actually was. So, let me get in quick. I have known Philip for exactly 40 years from when I was at school and he was the local curate in Shrewsbury. Life brought us together again when he was my Chaplain when I studied at King’s College London, and then again later, when we were both parish priests in this Deanery. In those 40 years I haven’t always seen as much of him as I’d like but just to know that he is there, or rather, here, and here for so many years, here as a pool of sanity, committed to the Church but with a wide love of life, a person of questioning joy and reflective faith, able to laugh, throw parties, and model for so many a priesthood that is authentic, attractive and faithful – well, I can hardly think about that word ‘retirement’. It’s not a word that I associate in any way with Philip, not the retiring type. But before I offer a reflection, I wanted to say a deep and heartfelt ‘thank you’ to him  and for him. The shorts are long gone. But we have travelled life together, we’ve giggled, prayed together, and got annoyed about the same things usually, and my life has been better for it as, I know, has yours. Thank you, Philip.

So, I come from Southwark Cathedral and in that Cathedral on 18^th October 1908, a priest called Frank Weston was consecrated a bishop. Later in the same day he came here to this church to confirm a man who said he wanted to serve the mission in Zanzibar where Frank Weston was about to travel to be enthroned in the Cathedral there as their bishop. Weston, as many of you will know, knew this church because he had served here for a couple of years as curate. It must have moved him to come here on the day he was made bishop.

Weston was quite a character. Later in life he excommunicated the Bishop of Hereford and charged the Bishops of Mombasa and Uganda with heresy and schism. Vilified as the “Zanzibarbarian” by his critics, he was, to their surprise, mentioned in dispatches and appointed OBE for his military service in the First World War. In 1964, he was declared a saint by the diocese of Zanzibar. He devoted much of his episcopate to promoting and supporting the establishment of a genuinely African ministry that eschewed the Europeanisation of Africans in favour of an African form of Anglicanism that would genuinely meet the spiritual, moral, and pastoral needs of the indigenous population in his vast diocese.

To achieve this, he introduced an Africanised training programme for ordinands, insisted on his white missionaries adopting African traditions in their ministries, and introduced a Swahili Liturgy and Prayer Book based on a modification of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer! By the time of his death in 1924, African clergy had come to outnumber the white missionaries. Weston was, as it were, a decolonising colonial bishop.

Weston was also a Catholic Christian to his very core, and when he got very wound up by what he called a “Pan-Protestantism’ threatening the foundations of the Church of England, he wrote an open letter, in 1913, entitled: “Ecclesia Anglicana: For What Does She Stand?”

That question is still very much with us and I just want to take one element of Weston’s remarkable ministry as a guide as to how we might answer it in our own times. As an Anglican in the Catholic tradition, Weston believed that spirituality is not simply a preparation for good pastoral care and good priesthood, a technique for doing some job better. It is the inner reality of priesthood and pastorate, it is the integrated and lived theology of holiness and liberation, the heart of sacramental action, the flesh and blood of the pastoral life. And because of this, his orthodoxy was subversive, it ruptured the pale versions of the polite middle class Christian life with the demands of the gospel and of the one who, as we just heard, gave out the invitation of ‘follow me’ and then immediately started talking about mercy. The two are inseparable.

Many of you will know Bishop Weston’s famous concluding speech at the Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1923. The theme was ‘The Gospel of God’ and, typically, Weston was forthright. He called his address ‘Our Present Duty’ and it ended:

‘There then, as I conceive it, is your present duty; and I beg you, brethren, as you love the Lord Jesus, consider that it is at least possible that this is the new light that the Congress was to bring to us. You have got your Mass, you have got your Altar, you have begun to get your Tabernacle. Now go out into the highways and hedges where not even the Bishops will try to hinder you. Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet’.

Weston knew that the commandment of Jesus to wash feet was as clear as that to break bread. Imagine, though, if the Church had decided to centre the Sunday and daily services around the washing of feet command instead of the bread and wine command. Just imagine what we would have made of it. We would be having arguments over which foot should be washed, right or left (and there would be the Church of the Left Footers and the Communion of Right Footers) we would have synods on whether the water should be cold or hot or, if Anglican, probably lukewarm, we’d be fighting over whether women can wash the feet, whether gay people can have their feet washed, and we would wonder how to behave to those who’d never had a foot washed, should they attend a podiatrist first? We have a clever knack in the Church for concentrating on what doesn’t matter to hide what does, taking, small opportunities to be mean instead of large opportunities to be generous. In that upper room, the contrast, the clarity is potentially life changing. By this love you have for one another, people will know that you are my disciples.

Weston believed in a church that took the disciplines of the inner life seriously – prayer, confession, mass, spiritual reading. He believed that the Church should be sacramental and that it should be just. He believed that that the Church should have a barefaced integrity, an authenticity rooted in the transcendent love and beauty of God. In this 21^st century, people are looking for that authenticity in life and they know that a Church that runs itself as some bad imitation of Toyota will never meet their hunger. The only interesting thing about religion is God, and it is God who is the harbour of the soul. The Church should be immersed in this reality and reveal the liberation of pursuing it. The Church will then be, with towel in hand, a school for loving better, your neighbour, the unloved parts of yourself, your creator.

But, finally, it is the prophetic that I want to be inspired about by Weston in our times. Prophet is a word we tend to use when we are angry but just being angry doesn’t make you a prophet. On Weston’s memorial in this church it movingly says of him that ‘he was gifted with a vision of what might be’. This is the gift we must pray for as a Church, clear in vision to ourselves as what we might yet be for after all, though often describing itself in terms of the past, the Church is proved by what we do next. We need prophets to speak to the Church at the moment to makes us agents of re-enchantment, a welcome wisdom in the public square. But, my goodness, we need them too in our world right now, a time when we have never had so many words but never been so disinclined to believe them, a time when the boundaries between facts and opinions and lies, are publicly disappearing, a time when there is in the world’s leaders heightened self-promotion coupled with a low self-awareness, and with the result that children are being slaughtered every day.

But every day Bishop Weston said or sang Mary’s Magnificat. It is said every day in the Church to check we are still Christian. The way to know is if God revolutionizes the way we think, the way we act, the way we live - as a Christian the ego, the rich, the proud, the mighty – they shouldn’t shape you, your thinking, your money, your life. The hungry, the poor, the forgotten, the weak – well, they should. The Magnificat is a daily postcard from Mary dropped into the Church to keep us Christian in times that may be demanding other ways of thinking, behaving, and speaking, from us but which would, if we did, remove the Christian heart and replace it with the populist’s boot that kicks those who are down to make themselves mighty – exactly the opposite of the God of the Magnificat. Just what is your life magnifying, it asks? And how’s that going to work out for you, and for the world we share?

There are people with microphones at the moment who’s like we have seen before. A friend of mind saw a peaceful Asian family having a picnic in Hyde Park the other day get descended on by a crowd of men who poured out their wine bottle, intimidated the children, tore up their rug and kicked all their food in the grass. This shocks us. But does it surprise us when the language being used so readily about anyone who is not white (and how Bishop Weston hated that sin), words being used about someone who is Muslim, or who is seeking safety, implying they are criminals or at worst animals, non-human and, dear God, not British. Does the authoritarian behaviour of political leaders, the erasure of hard won human rights, the talk of a Christian country when advocating views that, according to Mary and her son in the gospels, have nothing to do with them, wake us up again to the gospel we just heard and those words ‘don’t follow that, Follow Me? We are heading into dangerous territory and, if we stay Christian, many will turn on the Church too. We heard Mr Tice telling the Archbishop of York the other week to keep to his remit and not concern himself with issues outside the Church, as if God is only interested in General Synod and village fetes. No. God created and loves this world and all his people he has made, all of them, and asks us to be a postcard of protest when the dignity he has placed in every human life is killed without care, and we watch it happen every night on the news, or when human dignity is made cheap, dispensable, is laughed at, criminalised or just ignored, and we see that very close to home now.

I end by reminding you of Mr Muste, a life-long pacifist who, during the Vietnam War, stood in front of the White House night after night, for years, holding a lighted candle.

A one person protest, conducted near the end of his life.

One very rainy night, a reporter asked him, “Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?”

“Oh,” Muste replied, “I don’t do it to change the country, I do it so the country won’t change me.”

Catholic Christians musn’t be gloomy. Weston wasn’t. African children remembered him by saying he was always laughing. And later on that other prophet, Martin Luther King Jr never said ‘I have a nightmare’. We have a faith that demands of us a gift to give to the world, a vision of what might yet be. “Ecclesia Anglicana: For What Does She Stand?” We must seek the energy of God to offer this gift of inviting people into the promised land and begin the song of life re-seen, refreshed, redeemed, starting here, right now, because, as Evelyn Waugh once said, the saddest words in the English language are, ‘too late’.