May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
In one of the countless boxes arriving in St Albans with our move last month was an orange tin which, since my childhood, has stored a few random mementoes. Among these is a small brown envelope. Actually, it’s my first pay packet from a farm shop near Sawbridgeworth: £12, I believe, full of badges issued each year at the St Albans Easter Monday Pilgrimage. Here it is. I found the envelope where it has been for the past 40 years.
Now this, for those of you not from these parts, is an annual walk that’s taken place here every Easter Monday since, I think, 1946. And I remember young people from across the Diocese converging on this cathedral, starting from where they were, some camping overnight in church halls. As we entered the city, each group would join the gathering banners in Verulamium Park, up the hill, through these great west doors, picking up your badge on the way in, as the organ swelled and a great sea of people would raise this ancient roof with their praises.
I’ve never forgotten the thrill of these occasions, with a collective faith far greater than my small seed. And indeed, these badges became for me like a packet of seeds, for each year they planted something within me that took root and grew — namely, a Christianity that was alive. After all these centuries, despite everything we’d done to it and still do, despite our appalling blunders, there was a kernel in this seed that was indisputably alive, it seemed to me.
And surprisingly stronger and more alive than the challenges I was facing. Here were seeds. Here was soil in which my life might fruitfully be planted.
And so I didn’t care — most of the time, at least — how terminally uncool it was to be a believer.
But those Easter Mondays told a different story. And our Bible readings for this service are those set by the Church for today, the 19th of September. Both passages invite us to imagine life like seeds and soil; as a culture, in other words. In the first, a passage often read at funerals, St Paul uses this as an image of Easter, exploring resurrection as something both akin to the natural cycle of life and growth and death, yet at the same time, mind-bendingly different.
Not a life cycle at all, more a life transplant: one that’s subject to death, like all natural things, but somehow rising through it, above it. “What is sown is perishable,” Paul writes. “What is raised is imperishable.”
And then our second reading from Luke’s Gospel, the Parable of the Sower, in which the seed is the living Word of God, tightly packed with promise. And the soil is the kind of life in which this can take root. The seed is good, but it’s vulnerable. Depending on the sower, it might fall anywhere: hard, thorny, resistant.
It might grow there for a while. But for true and lasting fruit, it needs good soil, receptive lives.
And I hear in this parable a challenge to consider well the ground of our life, personally and together. Have we? Are we the kind of soil in which these words of life can flourish, or are we not? Can we grow the kind of fruit that will last? And the Bible says that there are ultimately only three varieties: faith, hope, and charity — or faith, hope, and love.
The stakes are high, I suggest, for we appear to be living in stony and thin-soiled times, of which our long drought summer has been quite a parable, has it not? Times that find each little cluster of plants or people competing ever more fiercely for their own patch of earth. Times in which the precious harvest of human knowledge and creativity is being reaped at such reckless and fearful speed that the words of Jesus ring true across history.
What does it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?
In days like these, friends, I suggest we need to do as he did, which is to imagine the world differently. Actually, the world is far too big to comprehend. Imagine your bit of the world differently.
And like Jesus, tell stories of the place to come, and the kind of people we must be in order to get there.
And thus inspired, to live as it were in that other world, that other kingdom, as if it had already burst into the present. For it has, he said.
This is where a different future begins. Otherwise, we will be just engines of brilliant activity heading nowhere.
Along with other dog-walkers nearby, I’ve been amazed to see what can grow again through the scorched grass: to find what was still alive beneath the surface. And it’s reminded me of the extraordinary resilience of the local church, which I love with all my heart, and I still believe to be the hope-bearer for humanity, notwithstanding all that is sown in our weakness. For it tells of a life like a seed settling in the dead earth, surrendering to all that can only corrupt and decay, and despite all appearances to the contrary, rising out and up to transform the arid fields and push back, defiantly green. Jesus Christ, God’s resistance movement against all that is deadly, who stands in the hopeless place and proclaims, “No! Life wins. All things will be made new.”
And how good to do that here, dear friends, where the message of Christ was first sown in our land. And here in Herts, Beds and Barnet, where this saving grace is as vital, as packed full of promise, as when St Alban first proclaimed it over 1,700 years ago. And the task before our church of preparing the place to come is one that will need both fresh planting and tenacious old roots.
But goodness me, do we have them.
Thank you, Diocese of St Albans, for being such good soil. And however small or thankless you may feel your contribution to the church to be, please know it has immense value and potential. It is a growing, fruitful thing. And inheriting such fertile ground, I’m indebted to my predecessor, Alan, to my fine colleagues Jane and Richard, Bishop of Bedford, who as Acting Bishop has cared for you so well during the vacancy.
This may be a little niche, but as a lover of history, it is for me a happy alignment that the Church remembers in its calendar today Theodore of Tarsus, who I hardly need to remind you was Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690 AD.
Now Theodore is often credited with establishing the arrangement of parish and diocese that laid the ground for England’s unification as one nation, not just warring tribes.
And this was agreed just a few miles up the road at the Council of Hertford in 673. That gathering grew the cultural soil that made national unity possible by seeing the English as one people, even though they emphatically did not see themselves in that way at the time. It imagined a different future for us, and then it lived that out, rehearsed it.
And wherever you land with all of this, whether today feels familiar or deeply unfamiliar territory — and I appreciate it may all be quite weird — be assured that each of us can start from where we are, as on the Easter Monday pilgrimage.
Perhaps you too have some memento of childhood faith which could now be taken from its tin. That would be somewhere to begin. We — you — don’t have to be any better or holier, any more or less religious than we are. But the hour is at hand in our land and in our lives, and we must get going.
My 1979 pilgrim’s badge, which I’ve had on my desk since March, is titled “We’re on our way”. Here it is. And so we are. It will be the honour of my life to join you from here, along the way of Christ, the way of life. Amen.