wfn.org | Anglican Diocese of London Celebrates 1400 Years

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ACNS 3833     |     ENGLAND	|     24 MAY 2004

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http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/38/00/acns3833.cfm

Diocese of London celebrates 1400 years

Sermon of the Most Revd Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at
a Eucharist marking the 1400th anniversary of the re-organisation of the
Diocese of London.

St Paul's Cathedral
Saturday 22 May 2004

'After this, I will return and rebuild David's fallen tent. Its ruins I
will rebuild and I will restore it...says the Lord' (Acts 15.16-17).

You have an archbishop who finds himself in a very paradoxical position.
I have spent years explaining to anyone who would listen that of course
St Augustine was a latecomer to the Christian scene in these islands,
where brave missionary Celts had been doing all the hard work for a long
time. A slightly selective version, I realise, given that the Welsh of
that era were determined not to convert any English if they could
possibly help it, but it's a good story...And now here I am in
Augustine's seat, trying hard to be a missionary Celt, but suspecting
that the hard work is again being done by someone else.

And the history of the great church of London, where plenty of hard work
is unmistakably going on now, is an intriguing part of that complicated
story of our Christian beginnings in this land. I shall be inviting you
to celebrate not only the arrival of Mellitus and the Roman mission, but
a history that goes back a bit further. For we first meet the Diocese of
London in 314. Bishop Restitutus signed in at the Council of Arles in
that year, along with the bishops of York and somewhere else - possibly
Lincoln, possibly (as I of course believe) Caerleon - and joined in the
discussions of the date of Easter, the rebaptising of heretics, the
evils of priests and bishops moving from one job to another,
unauthorised celebrations of the Eucharist by people not ordained
priest, the remarriage of divorcees, and suchlike remote issues. They
agreed about the excommunication of practising charioteers and strolling
players, and warned magistrates of the spiritual dangers of their
office.

Restitutus must have come home to his church (possibly somewhere around
Fenchurch Street) feeling satisfied that things were looking up for the
Church. The most savage persecution yet known had just finished, and had
claimed a martyr in London itself, probably Restitutus's predecessor;
but now the emperor was friendly, the Church was respectable, and it was
possible to begin to sort out the chaos of disciplinary problems that
had grown up in the hard years of violence and danger. Did he, I wonder,
think how providential his own name was - a name that suggests he or his
father or grandfather was a freed slave? Restituo, says the Latin
dictionary, 'replace, restore, rebuild, renew, give back, return (to a
condition)'; Restitutus's church was a church restored and renewed, and
he surely believed, as did so many in that age, that Constantine had
brought the Kingdom of God very close.

Nearly a hundred years later, in 410, Restitutus's successor watched,
incredulous and desperate, as the legions marched towards their ships
and deserted the colony. He will have known, like all the citizens of
London, that this was the end of Christian civilisation. The barbarian
pirates were on their way and, beyond a makeshift Home Guard, as
ineffective as Dad's Army, nothing stood between the city and disaster.
If there was a bishop in London by 514, he will have lived in a tiny hut
in the middle of vast ruins, ministering to a few villagers, while the
warbands from the North Sea pushed past on their way to the inland
kingdoms. It was all over: he had no clergy to whom to pass on the
succession, and the people were leaving as and when they could to flee
westwards.

We don't know what followed; when Mellitus arrived, there seems to have
been no relic of Christian presence. But once again, there will have
been the feeling of a 'restitution', a new start and a new hope; and
once again this was bitterly disappointed with the coming of a new
regime and the expulsion of the bishop. Like Restitutus, Mellitus made
the journey to France - but not to take part in a confident and
businesslike council, simply to wait for better times, for a call to
replace, restore, rebuild. Bishops of London have always needed to be
both tough and patient.

And so it has gone on. Nicholas Ridley, at the end of Edward VI's reign,
ordering his senior associates off to refuge on the Continent while he
sat and waited for Queen Mary to unmake his life's work and destroy him;
William Juxon, after attending Charles I to his death, sitting out the
long years of the Commonwealth to emerge as a reluctant archbishop in
1660. The work to restore and beautify this great church of St Paul in
honour of the Restoration destroyed by the Fire; and then the unexpected
and revolutionary splendour of Wren's creation. The drab, even
disgraceful, services of the early and mid nineteenth century - when the
young Frederick Temple, future archbishop, was told by a verger to go
home when he wanted to stay for Holy Communion, so that the Canon in
Residence should be spared the bother of having to celebrate; and then
Bishop Blomfield's whirlwind energy (sometimes, it is true, more
enthusiastic than judicious) planting churches throughout the vast
metropolitan area, and later still the crowds flocking to hear Liddon
and Scott Holland expound doctrine and prayer and social vision at the
biggest popular services the cathedral has ever seen. The stately
dullness of Dean Inge's regime; and the Blitz, when St Paul's stood as a
true icon of the gospel's stability in the middle of terror, and the
post-war restoration of the cathedral to its true - and continuing -
place as a beacon of prayer and Christian reflection. The famous
photographs of the Dome in wartime might well do for an illustration of
the motto of the Carthusian monks who were once such a significant
presence in this part of London - 'The cross stands still while the
world turns'. And then the abundance and profusion of twentieth century
development, with all the variety of the Anglican tradition more and
more visible in the great churches of central London, from Margaret
Street to Brompton; and the courageous willingness in recent years to
tackle and counter decline and to engage with the new social realities
like the transformation of the Docklands.

Replace, restore, rebuild, renew; restituo. The history of the Church of
London is the history of the Church of God. There is no straight line of
comfortable development, no smooth plot with a happy ending. The
Church's real history, the Church's spiritual history, is always and
only one thing - or rather one thing seen from two angles. Humanly it is
a story of failure or sin and recovery, of the utter unpredictability of
events; God does not promise that we shall be protected from events,
that we shall be in control, he only tells us that his own presence and
promise are never touched or changed by events. And we have to learn
this day by day and century by century. But this begins to show us the
story from another perspective - not just as a story of failure and
recovery but as a story of cross and resurrection. We cannot tell just
how human sin will interrupt the work of God; because God does not force
his gospel on anyone, and because human rebellion against God and human
fear of other humans constantly unravels communion. But equally we
cannot tell just where and how resurrection comes. In the darkness of
failure and sin, Christ's cross is planted; he shares the dark, he
carries the cost, he absorbs in his infinite compassion all that our
rebellion means. And so there is always a divine action never exhausted
working away in the very heart of darkness, and we can't tell when the
light will come but we know that no darkness can extinguish it.

When we have put our own history, whether as individuals or as a church,
into the context of God's action in the cross and the resurrection, we
know that what is humanly speaking dark or light, disastrous or
successful, hopeful or hopeless, is only the surface; these things come
and go. When there is growth and conviction, we thank God and pray for
it to continue; but when there is threat and failure, we turn gratefully
to the same God, recognising that he is not destroyed by this. The true
story beyond the surface level is that of God's endless reaching into
darkness, God's life living its way into every moment of loss, guilt or
pain, and drawing everything homewards to him.

And this means that the Church is always losing and recovering.
Restitutus may have thought that the great recovery had happened and
that history was drawing to a triumphant close; but his successors go on
learning the deeper truth that there is no moment when we cease to be
involved in 'restitution' - replacing restoring, rebuilding, renewing.
God's love is always new, new every morning as the prophet tells us; so
the Church is always new. To look at the Church's past is not to search
for a golden age but to see precisely this truth of the unending renewal
that comes from the unending presence of the crucified and risen One. In
the words of the old creed, we do not believe in the Church in the sense
in which we believe in God and his Son; we do not put our life's trust
in the Church. We believe the Church, we trust what the Church says by
its words and its history. We believe what is shown us in the constant
and chaotic alternations of darkness and light, where sin is always at
work but Christ is yet more deeply at work.

So when our church flourishes, praise God for his good gifts; when our
church struggles and flounders, praise God for his faithfulness to us in
our failure. And when, as so often, we see both together, we shall know
that our heart must be with the God who is greater than both human
success and human failure, who is simply there, given to us for ever in
Christ and his Spirit of promise. Much of our perplexity as Anglicans
these days comes from the mixed messages we receive - great growth and
confidence, new initiatives, here and elsewhere; and also the fears of
confusion and division, a bewilderment about where to look for true
unity. But if we can keep our minds on God's fidelity, a fidelity amply
shown in the history we celebrate today, we shall have something to say
and share that is far more than our story, our achievement or lack of
it. We are authorised and commanded to speak of a God who replaces,
restores, rebuilds and renews because he never abandons. We have no
choice but to announce this, as Restitutus and Mellitus and Ridley and
Juxon and Blomfield and all the others did; we are under orders to
repeat the promise of God to restore the tabernacle of his anointed. We
know that in his hands, as we say at the Easter Vigil, are all times and
ages; in his hands, our past and our future. He will restore all things.

(c) Rowan Williams 2004

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