Sermon for Ely College of Canons & Commemoration of Benefactors of the Foundation
17th October 2011
I recently watched again the BBC rendition of Barchester Towers with Nigel Hawthorne and Donald Pleasance. It was a happy experience, booing Mrs Proudie and Mr Slope and cheering on Mr Harding. The Archdeacon is a more equivocal figure, battling for justice for his father-in-law, accepting that his love for his father is greater than wishing him dead because the ministry falls; but also being the person in the film version who exclaims that he cannot see what Jesus Christ has got to do with it. It is a slight worry that both bishops are cyphers, relying on sons and wives, neither of which I have. Trollope had plenty of material about cathedral canons to draw on. Archdeacon Grantley is exemplary for abiding in his parish, serving the bishop and taking a proper interest in the affairs of the cathedral. It was not always the case. It had been commonplace in the eighteenth century for deans only to be resident for three months in the year and canons only for the period of their canonical residence. Canon Wellesley of Durham, the brother of the Duke of Wellington, built himself a house in the Monk’s Dormitory and Library and lived in happy concubinage in London. A bishop was more likely to meet his dean taking the waters at Bath than in the Cathedral. Nathaniel Lord Crewe, Bishop of Durham, spent all of his old age at his ancestral home in Northamptonshire and sent the Bishop of London north by sea to conduct confirmations.
Yet I have recently written to eight clergy, two ecumenical friends and seven lay people to invite them to become part of this College of Canons and this Cathedral Foundation. I have described them and you as my familia, the Latin word translated in the Book of Common Prayer by Cranmer as ‘household’, in the light of today’s reading from I Peter 2, ‘a spiritual house…to make spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’ This is what we are called to be together as bishop, canons, scholars, choirs and other members of the Foundation which owes its origins under God to a set of remarkable seventh century sisters led by St Etheldraeda. Long before the Romans described what a familia was, the Greeks had made the ‘oikos’ or household, the foundation of their society. In both Athens and Rome it was much more than the base for close genetic ties; it was where every person found their place of belonging.
The occasion in the year when we commemorate great benefactors like the great builders among medieval bishops and the frighteningly energetic Dean Peacocke, our minds naturally turn back to past wisdom and passion for the gospel. We have come a long way from St Etheldraeda’s having planted her staff on this island of Ely. Of course, we rejoice that they have bequeathed to us this extraordinary statement of human awe and wonder in the face of God’s glory. As we celebrate this year the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, partly translated by Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Ely, the durability both of stones and of Bible translation remind us that the Word of God is just as alive and well in us as it was when it shaped St Ethedraeda or John of Wisbech.
In some desperate parts of the world, familia represents – as in Mexico at the moment – a highly organised and murderous drug cartel or, in Sicily, the Mafia who talk a lot about family but put no value on human life. It is my deep desire that this Foundation should be a spiritual house of living stones, sharing wisdom and a shared and outward-facing passion for the gospel. For St Dunstan, one of our benefactors, the household or familia of the monastery – like the Benedictine house here in Ely – was as far as you could get from the twelfth century equivalents of drug cartels or Mafia families. As Jesus enjoins in today’s gospel, the family/household of abbot or bishop was a beacon of Christ’s light in a dark and dispirited world. The household Dunstan inhabited may not have been the only place of friendship or culture in the world; but in this household was the guarantee, a living sign, of what it might be to inhabit a godly and just society, taking every member seriously and seeking true wisdom through the discipline and rigour of daily praise and prayer. I have chosen the new canons as my predecessors chose those of you in post already as people whose wisdom and commitment in their individual ministries make them people to whom I especially want to have access in helping me to serve the Diocese and the Cathedral wisely and justly.
Such a household has people who stay for long years and many who pass through. A bishop’s household until relatively recently has been a centre of learning. Lots of young people came to study before going out into the world. Sir Thomas More, for instance, was a clerk in the household of Archbishop Warham of Canterbury. Some people have suggested that I could have my own seminary on the top floor of Bishop’s House, the sort of thing that Bishop Westcott did in Durham. I am not going to do this, I assure you. However, we must be serious that the wisdom we seek is not just grey-headed. We rejoice in young King’s and Queen’s Scholars and choristers and what they have to teach us. We rejoice that we are all learners in the household of God, no matter what age we are, whether boys or girls, women or men. What we need to do is to build further on the educational and cultural mission of the Cathedral which springs out of our thirst for the science of faith, in such a way that the Cathedral goes on shining as a beacon of light for the churches of the Diocese and all the communities of our two counties that regard it as their own.
I also rely upon the Foundation to rest on the bedrock of a deep passion for the gospel which helps us look outward. I call us together as ‘oikos’ as a household made up of the whole priestly people of God. ‘Oikos’ is the root word for economy, for the ordering of the good of the household which has become the commercial and financial good of the whole community. Cathedrals and Canons still carry some weight in the wider community as a place and as people who give themselves to a wider vision of community.. We tend to think of cathedrals as mother churches in the middle of everything. Actually, cathedrals are on the edge of the Church’s outreach because they draw all these people beyond the boundaries of usual attendance which other churches do not. It makes them much more edgy places than the building would suggest, enabling conversations that would not happen in most parish churches. It is also the case that cathedrals sponsor services and celebrations which draw in thousands of people which other churches would not. Canons and choristers alike are there to keep the place real and to make the best use of the access to visitors. ‘Oikos’ is also the root word from which we derive ‘oicumene’ which has come to be associated with being ecumenical. The purpose of our being ecumenical in seeking the deeper unity of all Christian people comes from the primary meaning of ‘oicumene’ which is the flourishing of all creation. As a sign of this, I have invited two of our ecumenical colleagues to become fill a new category of ecumenical canons called the ‘Etheldraeda Canons’
As we live the meaning of those Greek words, so we learn how to sum up the language of household to mean that everything we are about is the promotion of the flourishing life which stems from the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. We may sometimes fail, but we are vehement in the praise of good people who lay aside their own interest, including their tribal, denominational shibboleths, to serve the mission of God as God reveals it.
All of us enjoy – or at least manage – multiple belongings, to school, parish and natural family as well as to this Foundation and the household of the bishop. All I ask of you is to take this household seriously and offer commitment to it, to be a family with me for the sake of the perfect family of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Bishop Stephen Conway, Bishop of Ely.