Delivered on Friday 03 February 2012 in St George's Chapel

Acts 3:1-10

This is a busy week of anniversaries. Tomorrow sees the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen's accession and Tuesday the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The Dean is to preach tomorrow and will specifically address the theme of accession. Later in the year there is to be a sermon theologically analysing Dickens' literary contribution. So I find myself in a strange place: we face two major anniversaries, both to be addressed at a later time, and yet neither can be ignored. I have, as a consequence, set myself the task of acknowledging - briefly - both anniversaries while also remaining faithful to the set New Testament text for the day.

Somewhat oddly I began my thinking in the company of George Orwell. Orwell died in 1950, two years before Queen Elizabeth the Second would accede to the throne. He was born in 1903, well after Dickens had died. He is therefore suitably well displaced from either anniversary; and yet he is interestingly connected to both. The Dickens of the Sketches, those early essays, wrote under a pseudonym: Boz. Eric Blair chose to write his books and essays also under a pseudonym: George Orwell. We think of Orwell as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four. He is perhaps less well known as an essayist and yet it is here that he excels. In fact he wrote one detailed and fine account of the works of subject of one Charles Dickens. He wrote several on Britain. Among my favourites are his My Country Right or Left, England your England, and Politics and the English Language. Orwell is a complicated character, often misjudged, and while open to severe criticism on a number of points he seems to me such a nuanced writer that he can offer us an insight into Dickens and another into an aspect of patriotism.

First to Dickens. This week by e-shot I received some blurb from a well-known bookseller about the power of Dickens. They claimed Dickens was the best of the Victorian writers, covering, as he did, every area of Victorian life. Had Orwell received the same blurb he would have certainly have disagreed - and rightly so. Putting aside the question of who may or may not have been the best Victorian author it is simply not true that Dickens wrote about Victorian life in all its various guises. He was not, for example, particularly interested in the aristocracy. Of dowagers who have set themselves up in mews in Mayfair there are countless examples but save for Sir Leicester Dedlock (and but a few others) Dickens seems distinctly disinterested in the great aristocracy. Surprisingly he is also not much taken with the proletarian characters. The Plornishes in Little Dorrit are an undoubted exception but otherwise when you try to think of developed characters you keep coming back to Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife, these are hardly a representative cross-section of that great populace that formed the engine room of the Victorian labour market.

In fact Dickens' real interest appears to lie with those who people London's commercial world: lawyers, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsmen, servants. His heroes all have soft hands; think of Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John Harmon. Even Oliver Twist speaks with Received Pronunciation and the Rachel of Hard Times has barely a trace of Lancashire accent. This is not to say that Dickens has an intimate knowledge of the assembly of trades and professions alluded to in his novels. Far from it. Clennam has unspecified business in China. Chuzzlewit is an architect, designing we know not what. We are never told what gets made in Gradgrind's factories, or how Podsnap made his money, or indeed exactly how Merdle worked his swindles. In the hands of Trollope we would have known every detail, intimately. Dickens, however, is not interested in the commercial detail because he has another point to make. To quote Orwell: 'His whole message is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: 'If men would behave decently the world would be decent''.

His novels are brim-full of this recurrent character: the good rich man. He is typically a merchant with a trait - perhaps more lately discovered - of enormous kindness. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, even Scrooge are all good rich men who hand out guineas. The later novels possess the same characters in a somewhat developed form; thus we have Meagles in Little Dorrit, Jarndyce in Bleak House and maybe even Betsy Trotwood in David Copperfield. It is these good rich men that make all the difference to society; they are the architects of a stable society. Dickens has little time for kings, priests, soldiers, scholars and peasants - they represent people governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned to the past. The future is in the hands of the professional and commercial folk and it is their moral responsibility to behave decently. His novels, taken together, form a long intricate exhortation, imploring people in authority to behave decently.

Let us just store that thought for a moment while we take a brief look at Orwell and patriotism. Orwell draws a very clear but careful distinction between patriotism and nationalism. He think nationalism a negative force, being no more than the accretion of power at the expense of others. Patriotism by contrast is a love of one's country. It is a love born of habit and culture and is not held at the expense of other nations. He thinks that it a positive force, claiming that 'Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison'.
Orwell does not look at England through rose tinted spectacles. Indeed he can sometimes be scathing enough as he is in these words:

Labour-saving flats or council house, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centering around tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetos and in complete ignorance of the Bible.

With only a few modest changes, to bring the technology up to date, these words might still be apposite. But for all that, Orwell, a child of the empire, a man of journeys, can be sure that:

There are indeed many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer make with veritable hops.

He has many such passages in his writing but being Orwell there is a sting in the tale. In the passage I've just quoted, he mentions all these things that make you glad and ends by writing 'If you can pay for them'. Patriotism remains a positive force only in so far as the population can feel they have a share in what makes 'England, your England'. We could surmise - although Orwell himself would not have been so-minded - that the possibility of patriotism, as Orwell describes it, remains open only when people in authority, as Dickens describes it, behave decently.

The question of 'authority' is also found in the New Testament. In the reading we heard this morning from the Acts of the Apostles, we have Peter and John, about to enter the temple, were accosted by a man who had been lame from birth. He asked them specifically for money. Peter said to him 'I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth stand up and walk'. And taking him by the hand he raised the man up. Off he went, walking and leaping and praising God. All the people who saw him recognised him as the one who used to sit begging at the gate of the Temple and they were amazed at what had happened to him.

As Acts goes, this is not an untypical story and yet it is part of trend. You will know, of course, that the Acts of the Apostles was written by Luke, the same person who wrote the Gospel. You might say that he wrote a two-part work or maybe even a sequel. In the Gospel he establishes just who Jesus is. In fact, the story we hear about the lame man in the reading today, finds its echo in another story in the gospel. In that story Jesus heals a paralysed man and the crowd are amazed. There are those witnesses who ask themselves: on what authority does this man perform these miracles? That is the key question for the gospel writer. From whence does Jesus get his authority? The answer, clearly, is from God.

With that fact established, the same question is then turned on the disciples. In this case, it is Peter and John, later it will be Paul: on what authority do you perform healing or preach or teach? Peter is unambiguous when he speaks to the lame man. He says 'in the name of Jesus Christ' stand up and walk. The authority he has comes from the same source as that vested in Christ. Authority is central to the New Testament witness. From the point of view of the New Testament we are both, created by God and disciples of Jesus Christ. Whatever authority we have, it comes from God.

This truth applies not only to us but also to the Sovereign. The collect for the Accession Service begins 'O God, who providest for thy people by thy power, and rulest over them in love'; it is God who rules in love. Yet in his mercy and wisdom he raises up a monarch whom he has 'set over us by 'his' grace and providence to be our Queen'. We are grateful to Almighty God for providing a monarch of such distinction, a monarch who has understood the responsibility of authority and the duty of the office.

For our part, we need something of the same understanding. In particular we need to acknowledge that whatever authority we may have, it is a gift to us from God. As such we are to use any authority wisely, and especially so in the midst of a harsh economic crisis. If we are to encourage Orwell's kind of patriotism and not fall foul of soulless nationalism, we will need to follow Dickens' path: we will need to behave decently. Such decency will mean ensuring that the poorer members of this society do not bear an excessive burden through any measure of austerity. We must be mindful that the habits of credit were not created by the poor, instead they were lured into a web of loan and counter loan by a banking and economic system that misunderstood itself to be omnipotent. Yet, whatever the circumstances are responsibility and duty is to make sure that we do not beat down; instead, like Peter, we are instructed to take people by the hand and raise them up. For in raising up, we acknowledge that we nothing more and nothing less than creatures of God.