The Nation's Church: more than a postcard?

The Revd Sarah Eynstone, Chaplain and Minor Canon at St Paul's Cathedral in London, continued our Choral Evensong series on Faith and Public Life this past Sunday with an excellent sermon entitled 'The Nation's Church: more than a postcard?'

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Yesterday, just before the evening Eucharist, one of the Canons called me into the vestry and urged me, in excited tones, to look out of the window. Cycling past the Cathedral was a steady stream of some one thousand naked cyclists, all involved in a campaign to draw attention to the vulnerability cyclists face as road users. The canon and I then had a conversation along the lines of ‘would you ever do that?’. Both of us felt you needed to draw the line somewhere and we would draw the line a long way before we reached naked cycling. In short we felt that nudity belonged to the private sphere not the public one. I wonder how many of those naked cyclists, had they looked up to the vestry window to see two priests looking down at them, would have felt the same about us? That what were about to do, pray to and worship our God, is an activity that is more appropriate to the private, than the public sphere?

There is a lot of talk today of Britain being an increasingly secular society where the public discourse is one free of religious involvement or input. The reality of course is not so straightforward -as the intense media interest in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s commentary on the government during this last week illustrates.

Rowan Williams, preaching on faith and public life has said “I believe we are living in a society which is uncomfortably haunted by the memory of religion and doesn’t quite know what to do with it…”

The piles of flowers and toys which mourners leave on the site of a fatal road accident seem to suggest we are a society with a vague sense of the religious but an unclear idea of what to do about it. The mourner who is struggling with issues of loss and bereavement may have both genuine theological questions and a burning desire to mark publicly that someone they loved deeply is no longer alive, because of an accident which seems both cruel and banal.

Religion provides a space and a language to ask serious questions and says that these are legitimate, indeed crucial, questions to ask.  This is why a cathedral in the heart of the city is still the place where people of different faiths and of no faith gathered in the days following the 7/7 bombings.

Given both our unease and interest in questions of faith, buildings and places of worship like St Paul’s Cathedral might be seen to occupy an ambiguous place in this context; St Paul’s was built at a time when the Church of England was a dominant force in society and the best resources, the most able people, were used in the creation of this place of worship.

The size and grandeur of the building of St Paul’s means it automatically has a place on the public stage- it is a visible icon on the London skyline and can be seen nightly on television on the South East News. St Paul’s is also the location for services which commemorate or celebrate big events in the national psyche. Next year the Queen shall celebrate, God willing, the diamond jubilee of her Coronation by having a service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Westminster Abbey was of course the location for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – an event watched by billions of people throughout the world.

Winston Churchill dubbed St Paul’s the ‘Nation’s Church’ and his own state funeral took place there. In this way we could be seen to do public religion very well but because we currently live in a time when faith has come to mean so many different things to different people, we cannot reside in a false belief that we are seen as a sign of God’s presence in the world. Not for the first time, but now perhaps more than ever, we might also be seen as an English heritage site or the place where members of the Establishment go to dress up and find a sense of belonging and identity.

Today we rely on the income generated by tourism to continue as a place of worship. This means that the 20,000 people who come through our doors each week during the summer season will have a very different set of motivations for entering the building. Some will have travelled thousands of miles and St Paul’s will be one more venue on their list of places to go to in London to prove they’ve been there and done the English thing- they may be interested in the history of the city, the beauty of the architecture or St Paul’s as the church where Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married; the existence of St Paul’s as a place of daily worship might not even have occurred to them. They will go the cathedral shop and buy postcards and other St Paul’s memorabilia. This of course creates tension and unease for those of us who regard St Paul’s primarily as a place of worship, as a sign of God’s presence in the world- our desire is that people who enter the building as tourists might leave as pilgrims- that in some way they will be touched by the beauty or by symbols of the Christian faith and find something which connects with their own questions and stories and which points them to the God who creates and loves and redeems us.

The prophet Jeremiah was of course living in a culture where the place of faith in public life was a given. The temple was the place where God had chosen to reside and this gave the people who entered it immunity to misfortune or suffering- or so they had come to believe. Jeremiah, himself a priest in the temple, speaks out against the complacency to which this belief had given rise. The people are caught up in patterns of idolatry, worshipping themselves rather than God and Jeremiah warns them of the destruction that awaits them.

The gospel writer Luke has a very different instinct toward the temple- it is the honoured place for public worship. Luke’s gospel begins with Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, going about his duties in the temple; very early on we are introduced to Anna and Simeon who have been in the temple for years, waiting for the coming Messiah. In the reading we heard in today’s New Testament lesson, at the very end of Luke’s gospel, on Jesus’ instructions the disciples return to Jerusalem, to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit before they can live out his commissioning. They go to the temple- to the place of public worship, to await and pray for God’s power. We are not told they each go to their own homes- they gather together in a public space- it is in community  that they expect to encounter God.

Today the church celebrates Pentecost, to which this evening’s New Testament lesson points. The Holy Spirit comes to the disciples who have gathered in Jerusalem and empowers them to be witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and to be the agents of the forgiveness of sins offered to all nations. The Holy Spirit doesn’t come to the disciples privately but in the public square exploding onto the world stage in order to equip them and us to become the people God calls us to be.

A phrase I hear often, from people who perhaps feel uneasy in the presence of a priest is ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’. We have come to believe that spiritual and religious are distinct and different modes of being. We also, I think, tend to associate the spiritual with the private- I can be spiritual all on my own, when I have a sense of the presence of the divine or transcendental. Religion on the other hand is often regarded as something which muscles into the public world telling us what we should do or believe. For the disciples and for much of the church’s history, this would have been a meaningless distinction. The spiritual is located in other people and in the ways we practice our beliefs and sense of belonging to a community.

As Jeremiah argues so strongly, public religion does not guarantee us God’s blessing; rather, public religion is an invitation for believers and seekers to come together to encounter God in whatever way God chooses to reveal himself to us.

The Christian faith is permeated with a vision of different people, different cultures, coming together and finding their unity in God. God himself is both three Persons and one God- the very nature of God overcomes the distinction between public and private by being both one and three.

So let us pray that this community at Oriel College and the community at St Paul’s Cathedral might be true to the breadth and depth of this our great vocation; to find God revealed in the public sphere and our private lives. Amen