Delivered on Sunday 17 June 2007 in St George's Chapel

Commending the Church

In 1947 an undergraduate by the name of Humphrey Berkeley, amused himself by writing hoax letters to distinguished headmasters of British schools. He dreamt up a fictitious school, Selhurst, and set himself in place as Headmaster, taking the name H. Rochester Sneath. Each of his letters was faintly peculiar and slightly insulting, and nearly all of them caught the recipient entirely unawares. So fooled were some headmasters that, under certain circumstances, they recommended Selhurst to unsuspecting parents. One such parent was the hapless Mrs Worsley. She wrote a charming letter of inquiry to the principal of Selhurst; this was the reply:

My dear Mrs Worsley, ... I am interested though not entirely surprised to hear that such-and-such a school is unsuitable for your second boy. At Selhurst we endeavour, and I think with some success, to provide a truer and nobler concept of education. My staff is recruited from a very wide cross section of talent and includes a Doctor of Philosophy from Munich and ... my brother, the Rev Wotan Sneath, the School Chaplain, has had a career of unusual distinction. He was considered for a fellowship of his college and then was received into the orders of the Roman Catholic Church where he reached the dignity of a minor prelate. Troubled by intellectual doubts he left the Roman fold and became a Congregationalist Minister and in 1929 was Moderator of the Free Church Council. Believing that the unity of the Christian Churches was essential he subsequently took Anglican orders and his promotion has been so rapid that he is now on nodding terms with a Colonial Bishop and numbers among his friends a rural dean and a Canon of the Church of Ireland. He is, as you will appreciate, fully qualified to minister to boys of no less than three religious persuasions. Should we have a vacancy for your boy he will find Selhurst a vigorous and expanding School. We now have 275 boys and our School clubs include a Communist Club and an affiliated branch of the Housewives League. You will see therefore that he will have ample opportunity for debate. Dear Lady, it was delightful to hear from you and I am wondering whether your late husband was the 'Foxy' Worsley that I used to know many years ago. I could tell you a few things about him!
Yours very sincerely,
H. Rochester Sneath
Headmaster.

I wonder what poor Mrs Worsley made of this letter commending Selhurst school. The reason I read you this letter of commendation is because today as part of the Solemnity of St George - we are asked to think about this place: this Chapel and what we call the College of St George. In other words, we are asked to think how we would commend the College. I want to remain faithful to that requirement but go about things in a roundabout kind of way. As I see it the notion of College or even Chapel is bound up entirely in the notion of Church. The concepts 'College' and 'Chapel' take their meaning and reason for existence from the greater concept 'Church'. So rather than asking what makes any particular place of worship good, I want to ask, what there is to commend 'Church'? What is there about 'Church' that is worthwhile and of value?

Answering that question is not as simple as it sounds. There are a number of possibilities open to us. You might think of the Church as institution and of course it is, but thought of in this way we encourage hierarchy and personal status. You might think of the Church as sacrament of salvation and of course it is, but thought of in this way and we tend to get caught up in the fussy details of how best to take services or a preoccupation with what goes on inside the Church, leaving no time to the concerns of the wider world. You might think of the Church as herald of good news and of course it is, but thought of in this way and we promote teaching but not learning, speaking but not listening, domination and not service. So, if I'm not happy with Church as institution, sacrament, or herald - all traditionally sound answers - how am I going to answer my question: what is there to commend the Church?

I am going to suggest that the Church is profitably understood as a window. For a long time now people have asked about the meaning of life. For the past couple of hundred years some of these people have concluded that life is meaningless, a futile enterprise. In contemporary terms this meaningless is seen in the kind of relativism that permits us to hold that we can believe what we like, think what we like, behave as we like. There is, as they say, no such thing as truth. The Church stands against such a bleak vision. In the Church through preaching, through sacrament, through coming together, we look at the world and see there some kind of sense. I'm not saying that there is only one way to look at the world - far from it - but I do want to say that our way of looking at the world must be governed by a kind of grammar, a way of speaking. That way, that grammar, is most easily found in the ancient creeds. Our window, our way of looking at the world, involves belief in God the Father who created the world, God the Son who saved the world, and God the Holy Spirit who makes the world holy.

The Church, then, is window - a way of looking so that meaning is restored. A way of looking at the world that springs from a belief in the existence and creativity of God. As members of a church we mirror existence and creativity in our own lives by the use of the grammar I was speaking about and the use of our imaginative skill. This window stills allows for the possibility that different people will look through and see things in rather different ways. And so it is that the Church offers latitude - it offers room for the individual to express their gifts and their understanding while nonetheless holding firm to the grammar of faith. If I were to use a musical analogy I would say that this is akin to jazz musicians. There is a central musical theme to which each musician adds his or her own contribution: personal but bound up with all the others. Seen in this way the Church is a gathering of individuals who insist on the meaningfulness of life, who come together to acknowledge that that meaningfulness springs from God, who want to participate in the reconciling love they see in the gospels, who delight in the creativity and imagination of others while enjoying the explicit encouragement and support necessary for their own journey and for the journey of the community as a whole. Where the Church is so expressed it is an oasis of hope, a sign of and a light to the world.

I commend to you the Church as a window.