There is a choice at the heart of the reading from John that we heard from the Bible, and it is a choice that Deryck made – to believe in the name of Jesus Christ, to receive his life and the power to be reborn into God’s family: ‘to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the power to become children of God.’

It’s a decision that means we need have no fear about God’s judgement on Deryck’s life and his place now in his Father’s house, where – as we are reminded in John’s Gospel – there are many mansions. But Deryck’s death is a sad loss to us also, so as we thank God for all that he meant to us and his many qualities – his kindness, sincerity and genuineness.

Deryck first came into the Cathedral’s life at Sunday Evensong. He came with his friend Christine, and we discovered that Deryck had been close friends with both Chris and her husband Crispin. After Crispin’s death that friendship had come to mean even more to them both. Sundays was a time to trip down from Surrey to enjoy worship, sometimes the 11am Eucharist, followed by lunch, with perhaps some reading in the afternoon, and tea at the Refectory after Evensong – a lovely and edifying day out, filled with companionship and nourishment for both  body and soul.

Deryck loved music and in his teaching he aimed above all things to pass on that lifetime love to others. He had taught the violin at various schools after a career in orchestral playing. In schools in Shropshire in 1970’s he came across Naomi Davidson, who after a break of 35years he re-met here at the Cathedral. In those days they used to give informal performances to children, with Naomi at the piano.

At Aldro School, Deryck was Director of Music. He joined the staff in the early 1980’s and remained 23 years. Here he sensed in the school a presence, which we again we heard about in our reading – ‘all things we made through him; in him was life’ – a Word waiting to be spoken into his heart. The ethos of the school cultivated by its Christian Headmaster, Crispin Hill, offered this gift to Derek.

As we know, Deryck was a thoughtful man, and he certainly didn’t fall into faith. His search continued many years, until a colleague recommended CS Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’. Reading this made all the difference, and on June 29th in 2002, in a tiny church on the Downs, Deryck made the decision to commit himself to Jesus Christ and to accept him as Lord and Saviour. This gave a whole new dimension to every aspect of his life.

It was no accident that Deryck took C S Lewis as the subject of his dissertation when he undertook a BA in Religion and Theology at Oxford Brookes University, to add to another BA he already had. His two professors remember him fondly: Prof Bill Gibson said that the teaching team ‘always looked forward to tutorial with Deryck because he was so thoughtful, and discussions were always gentle but intellectually challenging’; the other, Martin Jones, said that they were all charmed by his enthusiasm.

Having been awarded a first class degree in January this year Deryck was looking forward to starting a PhD on Edwardian Christianity in pursuit of a deeper understanding of his faith. Deryck was fascinated by the academic, but he also wanted to try to use his learning for the benefit of others. He was a member of the Cathedral’s Education and Spirituality Group and a Visitor Chaplain on Saturdays, keen to help others on their journey of faith also.

Deryck’s zest for life was evident in many other ways. He retained a mischievous sense of humour, which included a penchant for schoolboy jokes. He loved driving into the countryside – Cheesefoot Head was his favourite spot. He had a lovely baritone voice and was a member of the Occam singers and the Guildford Choral Society. Every year he sang the Christus on Good Friday at the church in Singleton, which was a special act of devotion for him. He still taught violin for two days a week at the Rikkyo School in Horsham. He was a staunch friend who always saw the good in others and seemed always smiling and contented. He knew life in all its fullness.

And I believe that this sense we had of this deep contentment sprung from him being at home. He died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in what had been his mother’s home in Hindhead. Sadly, his parents had divorced in his childhood, which had had a deep effect on him; he had no brothers or sisters; but in finding the love of Christ he found an eternal home and an abiding and unbreakable love in which he was able to explore the truth and joy of faith in safety.

Deryck, I’m told, was able to make the violin sing, but many of us also witnessed how God’s grace was able to take the instrument of Deryck’s kind and cheerful nature and make this also sing. He will be missed, but we know that the presence he first felt all those years ago at Aldro School will never let him down, but rather claim him as his own, a child of eternal, resurrection life.

As St John assures us, ‘to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the power to become children of God.’

Several years ago, when my son and daughter left for university, which in both instances involved a drive from Oxford to Durham with a carload of personal possessions, I remember my sincere but perhaps not most effective attempts at giving them some advice for this very significant new step in their lives; knowing full well that the last thing they would probably be open to at that stage would be to listen to their dad telling them about the virtue of temperance. And as a parent you also know deep in your heart; you have either been able – over the previous twenty years or so- to instil in them the values that you hold high or you have simply failed; one admonishment at this late stage wouldn’t make the difference.

At Christian Aid whenever we send staff to trouble spots or particularly challenging assignments I usually insist on a pre-departure session with them: “remember the security guidelines”, “do not forget to consult so-and-so” and “when in doubt do not hesitate to contact me directly”; you want to make sure that people taking on a particular task or challenge are ready for it and understand the expectations.

It is a natural and human thing that we all want loved ones or people for whom we have a responsibility to be prepared for the journey ahead.

And what a journey ahead Jesus had in mind for his disciples!

Today’s gospel reading is a cry from the heart; Jesus pours out his heart; his mission is almost complete; what follows is his arrest, his suffering and his death and it is as if he provides accountability for what he has achieved while at the same time giving a clear message to his followers: I have shown you the right path; now follow it. His prayer is an urgent appeal for unity.

But hold on; while this is a beautiful exhortation, as a text for today’s service it seems a bit out of place! We are at the 7^th Sunday of Easter and just a week away from the celebration of the Pentecost but we are brought back to the eve of Jesus’ arrest. What is going on here?

Re-reading the text one comes to realise that Jesus was speaking in the knowledge that his task on earth was almost finished but that the work of the disciples was yet to begin in earnest. From this moment onwards Jesus’ mission on earth would be fulfilled but the disciples could not have known that at the time. In his fervent prayer to the Father he lays out the task ahead. This is the only moment they will have together before the events in the run-up to Easter take over. These were words for the journey that would start after Golgotha and as we heard from the reading from Luke’s account from the Acts of the Apostles, that journey – in our church calendar – has just begun in earnest.

And Jesus’ words-for-the-journey; his ‘marching orders’ are still relevant in 2013.

This week is Christian Aid Week; an annual reminder of how we as followers of Christ can bear witness to his command “that the world may know that you sent me and that you love them as you love me”.

Christian Aid is a practical expression of the churches’ vision of a transformed world; the world that Jesus called the Kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God sounds a bit nebulous so if you’d like a more specific image, just imagine a world where every girl and boy can grow to reach their full potential where everyone can go to sleep with a full stomach.

Over the past 20 or 30 years educational enrolment worldwide has increased significantly and child survival rates have improved in all but a few countries. Millions, particularly in East Asia have been lifted out of poverty – so it is not uniquely a story of gloom and doom- but even today 2 billion people do not have access to clean water, 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty and out of those 800 million women, men and children today will go to bed hungry.

We were not taught to pray “give me today my daily bread”, but we were taught to pray “give us today our daily bread” and for those 800 million who are hungry that is a daily cry from the heart. This cannot be the way that God intended it to be! In the words of Oscar Romero: “it is not the will of God for some to have everything and others to have nothing. This cannot be God”.

This year for Christian Aid Week we have chosen the theme of “Bite Back at Hunger” because we believe that together with many other agencies, with governments, companies and many people of good will, we can make a difference.

Your support over the years has enabled us to work to tackle hunger in very practical ways:

 I’ve seen green gardens in the bone-dry Sahel, where we have helped local people to capture the rainwater so that there is enough to grow healthy crops of vegetables, which provide essential nutrition but which also generate cash for buying grains when the main field crops fail, as they do almost every other year. 

I’ve met with spirited grandmothers in drought prone Matabeleland in Zimbabwe; one of them was looking after half a dozen of Aids orphans and she proudly showed me how she was able to feed them all with the simple technology of what is called conservation-farming, introduced by our local partner agency.

We’ve supported the struggles of tribal and Dalit farmers in India for the recognition of their land rights, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people now being able to produce food without the risk of it being taken away at harvest time as was often the case when their land rights were not yet recognised.

In short this is our interpretation of Jesus’ marching orders “that the world may know that you sent me and that you love them as you love me.”

If the gospel reading sets out a challenge, the reading from Acts tells us a bit about how the first disciples were getting on with it. The story of Paul and Silas in Philippi – the first missionary venture into Europe- offers us a very interesting insight and still holds some valuable lessons for us today.

It actually is a story full of complications and apparent contradictions. The disciples had come to the conclusion that the good news was not uniquely aimed at the Jews and they were reaching out to the gentiles; still, the Jews who were found all over the Roman empire were often the starting point for spreading the good news. In that sense Paul acted with immense caution he even went as far as to personally circumcising his young helper Timothy in order to gain acceptance from the Jewish communities!

Paul and Silas preach the good news in Philippi and are followed around by a spirit-possessed fortune-telling young slave girl, a true money-spinner for her owners, who keeps following them around and actually recognises the disciples for what they are; messengers of the true God, until the moment that Paul has had enough of it and drives out the spirit. The slave girl may be cured but she is now useless for her owners, her money earning potential is gone and that sets off a riot: Paul and Silas are tortured and imprisoned with their legs in wooden stocks. An earthquake causes all prison doors to open but the prisoners don’t run away, instead they save the life of the prison guard and convert him to the way of Christ. Wounds are washed and water is used to baptise the prison guard and his family.

If this were a film-script the critics might say that the producer was at risk of overdoing it; so much action and change of fortune in such a short period of time!

What struck me though was that apparently Paul and Silas were largely left alone when they were going about their business of preaching. Perhaps the free market of beliefs in first century Philippi was used to many prophets and gurus. Religion in the Greco-Roman world was probably a good investment: a god for every day of the week, an idol for any cure. To that point Paul and Silas were probably tolerated and blended in the pantheist supermarket. It is only when they upset the status quo that they were suddenly a threat. The act of driving out the evil spirit (and not the physical liberation of the slave girl as one might perhaps expect) had economic implications and that was a direct affront to the status quo!

That rings a bell: following Jesus’ command to proclaim good news to the poor often has political implications! God’s kingdom will not come about without upsetting vested interests! In our campaign we highlight the role of land being taken out of food production to fuel engines instead, we talk about land being forcibly taken away from those who have tilled it for many generations, we talk about transparency of decision-making, about corruption and about the inability of countries of the developing world to raise their own income through fair taxation.

This is not the place and the time to go into much detail but we know that many of these things challenge the status quo. I can sum it up in quoting the late Brazilian bishop Dom Helder Camara who famously said: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist.”

Proclaiming God’s kingdom; following Jesus’ marching orders is not a walk in the park! It is full of risks and may get us into trouble. On the 25^th of January of this year Cicero Guedes dos Santos, a worker of Christian Aid partner MST (the landless movement) in Brazil was killed because of his successful efforts in securing land rights for his fellow landless farmers. Unfortunately there are still too many Ciceros and we owe it to his five children and the countless other victims of injustice and unjust systems that we continue to support those that proclaim the good news to the poor. Do we have a choice?

And what about the singing in prison, the earthquake, the washing of the wounds and the baptism of the prison guard and his family? Those situations are part of the journey too! As many of our partners can testify; there are the unexpected outcomes, the stories of personal liberation; the shocks to the system.  Just last month I met a traditional midwife in conservative rural Egypt who after a life of practicing female circumcision is now leading the fight against the evil practice. The liberated manual scavengers of India now leading a dignified life; the new life-enhancing extended families pieced together from the orphans, widows and widowers of the Haiti earthquake. All of that is made possible when we heed that call, if we remember the task laid out, if we follow that example set for us 2000 years ago.

Thank you for your continued support; we can only continue our work because people like you support us!

This week Christian Aid counts on you again to join us; join us to give, act and pray that in our own imperfect way we may bring God’s kingdom a little closer to realisation.

Amen

SCF is a celebration of services, concerts and fellowship, shared between Chichester, Salisbury and Winchester Cathedrals, and is hosted by them in turn in July each year. In 2014, SCF comes to Winchester and details will be available here in due course.

In the meantime you can see details and download the brochure for Chichester 2013 from www.southerncathedralsfestival.org.uk.

The sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young: even thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.

In the evening of Monday 15^th April, Barbara’s daughter Clare was out in the garden of her brother’s house in Stanhope, County Durham. She saw a swallow. The next morning she went in and said to her mother, I’ve just seen a swallow. Spring is here.

Barbara replied, Spring is here.

That evening she died, full of years; and our hearts go out to the family, to David and Sarah, to Martin and his Sara, and to Clare, and all Barbara’s five grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.

We feel for them in their loss of one who must have begun to seem to them immortal. But it wasn’t quite like that.

Those chest problems, which had dogged Barbara here in damp old Wessex, receded when she went to live in the more bracing air of Pickering in North Yorkshire. 

Barbara was still in excellent form up to her 98^th birthday in October. On the telephone everything was so clear – her mind, her voice.  Her birthday treat was to be taken the twenty-five miles to the cathedral in Durham for a recital by The Sixteen. It was a last exposure to the church music which had always been for her, ‘Steps up to heaven’.

At Christmas she was gravely ill, once more attacked by a severe chest infection. But she rallied just for a few weeks.

We mourn the death of a great woman, a great character and a strong one, a great and loyal friend, an assiduous correspondent, her letters often laced with drops of Wodehousian phraseology.

This congregation to-day shows the affection in which we held her, her influence over us never diminished.

St Paul said, To live is Christ, and to die is gain.  Phil 1 v. 21

Surely, to die in Eastertide is greater gain, as the church looks to springtime for images of the risen Christ, the time when

The green blade riseth

And when

The flowers appear upon the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land. -

For Barbara, wonderful words, enhanced by Henry Purcell’s anthem ‘My beloved spake’, which I see is being sung at Evensong later this afternoon.

The risen Christ spoke to Barbara through mainly church music, just as he sustained her through this sacrament, not less than twice a week when she was Dean’s wife.  Hers was a serene faith; not for her the doubts and questionings which trouble us lesser folk, still less that baring of souls and exposure of intimate, personal vulnerabilities relished in cell groups and the like. During the Pickering years a slight acquaintance of mine invited Barbara to a Prayer Breakfast: she was having none of that; better breakfast with the Independent, The Times having been forsaken because it was ‘so money-biassed’.

No, for Barbara the faith, Church of England style, was a given all her life. She was born, the youngest of three girls, into the house of a distinguished clergyman, Tissington Tatlow and his wife Emily, whose watercolours used to adorn the walls of the Prior’s Hall.  Tissington had been a major player before the first world war in the SCM, the Student Christian Movement, also its historian. A friend of William Temple’s, he  refused the bishoprics of Sheffield and Jerusalem, but held for thirty years the Honorary Canonry of Canterbury which was bestowed on him by Archbishop Randall Davidson.

At St Paul’s Girls’ School Barbara became really proficient on the violin, qualifying later for the Jacques Orchestra; she was picked for the school teams for hockey and netball; but most of all came under the influence of her music master, Gustav Holst. On Sundays the school choir would go out to Thaxted in Essex and experience what the late Lord Runcie called the ‘mass and maypole’ school of thought. The incumbent was the once-famous Conrad Noel. On offer were extreme anglo-catholicism and left-wing socialism.

Barbara was drawn to neither, not to high churchery, nor to socialism.  

What was influential about Thaxted was the music which the choir took with them, the masses of Byrd, Palestrina and Lassus. On these she became hooked.  Music of this kind became the strength and stay of her life.  Christianity couldn’t be a sham or a mirage if Byrd’s four-part Agnus Dei was here to support it. 

Later her tastes expanded. She could have an ecstasy over a Weelkes Nunc dimittis, and she came to adore the Bach Passions and Church Cantatas.

Barbara would never say the Bach Passions obscured the meaning of Good Friday. For her the opposite was true. The Passions clarified and enhanced the meaning of Good Friday.

There was less enthusiasm for music of later periods but as a soprano in the Waynflete Singers she would definitely have enjoyed Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.

A talk in the Prior’s Hall on Rachmaninoff went down well with Michael and Barbara, especially a love-song for voice and piano, beginning

‘Are you hiccupping, Natasha?’.

So I am not suggesting any narrowness, just potent preferences.

Michael and Barbara made a strong team. They were married in1940 by Eric Abbot, later to be the Dean of Westminster when Michael was a canon there. Theirs was a union founded on a shared faith, the growing family and very similar tastes in music and reading matter.

Music had actually brought them together in Oxford, somewhere between Michael at Trinity and Barbara at Lady Margaret Hall. She helped Michael with the music editorship of Cherwell, the undergraduate newspaper, for which they wrote music reviews together, signing them with their initials, BM. Oxford was a time of liberation for Barbara, not least because she had found a young man with a motor car boasting a green light.

But to get to Oxford had not been easy for Barbara. As she neared the end of her time at St Paul’s School, she decided that what she wanted to do was to read Greats at Oxford, which involved studying Greek philosophy in the original language. But she knew no Greek. She therefore spent a year at Westfield College, London University, learning Greek. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for Greece and its culture.

Unusually for those days, they were married just after Michael’s ordination as a priest. His early ministry was set in country parishes in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.  Life must have changed dramatically when in 1949 Michael was appointed Chaplain of Westminster School.  They moved to a village outside Dorking. Barbara would have had her hands full with two small boys and a toddler to look after, as Michael became a commuter. But she had a keen enjoyment of the beauty of the countryside, and she allowed herself to be talked into teaching Latin part-time at the school Clare attended.

In 1957 Michael was appointed to a Canonry of Westminster and with it went a lovely house in Dean’s Yard. (Imagine Barbara’s chagrin when later it was converted into grandiose offices for an important lay official!) The move to London brought its compensations, such as singing with the Bach Choir. At Westminster Abbey, she was the moving spirit in the decision of the wives to work kneelers for Westminster Abbey’s 900th celebrations – a work which drew in contributors from all over the country and beyond. The Westminster years were a great time for Barbara. She found almost limitless stimulus and entertainment in the surrounding world of London, of the Abbey, the House of Commons (where Michael was Speaker’s Chaplain) and of Westminster School.

Michael was appointed Dean of Winchester in 1969. He was here until his retirement in 1986, by which time he wasn’t at all well. During those years Barbara joined in the work of the Voluntary Helpers as a Holy Duster, responsible for the Dean’s Stall in the Quire and others nearby.

There was lots of entertaining. 

There was the enormous garden.

She gave 101% support to Martin Neary and the choir; attended every choral Evensong, travelling with the choir on all the three North American tours of that era.  In her last year Ray Godfrey, then Head Verger and Custos, recorded night by night all the evening psalms for later use in Pickering, where a new Queen’s Room was created upstairs for quiet devotion and minimal watching of the television.

Barbara could certainly have made a career for herself in teaching, but it conflicted with the needs to give hospitality at Westminster. Instead she put Michael’s and the family’s needs first, concentrate on home-building and the family. Modesty forbade her ever to glow with the achievements of her children, although there was plenty to glow about.

Those long holidays in Greece have become legendary.  Barbara did all the driving, in Telemachus, a motor car filled with holiday reading and beds and, for cooking, a mini gas appliance. This car could let them down in the heat of the Po valley. They slept under the stars, boiled eggs camping-wise for breakfast and visited a local taverna for supper.

In the day-time they would seek out ancient churches, hidden Byzantine gems. They would look for orchids.  These would be photographed by Michael and made up into the annual slide shows for the Cathedral Fellowship. One year he electrified us all by saying, Barbara drove us seven miles with a Naked Man on the back seat.

It is such a shame that Michael’s death robbed them of a shared retirement. But having made the move, Barbara lived alone in the big house in Pickering until she was 94. Michael and Barbara made such a good team. If Michael was retiring and introvert, Barbara was the opposite. She could be pugnacious, pantherish, if for example there seemed to be a threat to the integrity of the deanery garden. She might deliver a rocket even to quite senior persons at the cathedral.

I was once in receipt of a bit of an explosion over the choice of a hymn: ‘Our blest Redeemer ere he breathed…’ for the eve of Whitsunday. It was sentimental, mawkish, using that word in its 1702 sense of ‘lacking in robustness’. Her favourite hymns, like those in this service, are definitely robust.

I must pay tribute to the devoted way in which Clare and the two Sarahs looked after Barbara increasingly throughout those long retirement years: in Salisbury, in York, in Durham, and at the last in Stanhope, County Durham. And the holidays continued – in Italy, and occasionally Greece or even further affield.

For Barbara the ‘lines fell in pleasant places’. She was lucky. She made her own luck, as when she drove herself to learn classical Greek.

Only one of our Poets Laureate has written a poem about a clergy widow: Betjeman’s ‘House of Rest’ is the one. The first part is not a propos at all. It portrays a woman in straitened circumstances living in a bed sitting-room.  But then there are parallels, as so many of her family and contemporaries had already died. 

  Now when the bells for Eucharist

        Sound in the Market Square,

  With sunshine struggling through the mist

        And Sunday in the air,

  The veil between her and her dead

       Dissolves and shows them clear,

  The Consecration Prayer is said

        And all of them are near.

May we be near to Barbara and all the faithful departed in this eucharist, and may she rest in peace.

Easily within living memory, much of public reaction to dramatic events, whatever form they take, once required days or even months of waiting for news. During the same period, stories could become embellished and the effect of bad news, often sweetened. Nowerdays, things are markedly different. News is not only immediate and visible, sometimes it is easy to feel directly involved, even with a sense of participation.

It is one reason that our regular monthly act of remembrance for the fallen, with regiments who look to this place as home taking part, have significantly grown in attendance. Those coming on Remembrance Sunday is more than double what it was just a few years ago, with many more families and children being in church. There are far fewer people in the armed forces, but the effect of what is happening day by day is immediate and in our faces. The standard of teaching about such issues is far better researched and delivered that it used to be.

To take Syria, to name but one, it is covered in the papers and is the focus of media attention in every detail. We know that, as I speak, the numbers of refugees is counted in the millions, the suffering endured is horrendous and President Obama spoke recently of “crossing the red line”. Our own Prime Minister referred to evidence that very recent gas attacks had poisoned another 105 people, as “war crimes”.

But suffering is always suffering. It could be found in the slaughter in the trenches at the Somme, with people drowning, existing among so many corpses and human excrement. It could also be among the deserted thousands of children in Syria, starving and abused. For the people directly involved, and their love ones, who have to watch and wait, crying and helpless, it is the same.

For Daniel too, well over two thousand years ago, there is nothing romantic about dicing with death, nothing but despair when coming face to face with the cruel beasts who show no mercy, who would soon devour whole families. But God had the last say. He intervened and saved his servant.

When all the evidence seems to point towards a complete lack of hope, God is victorious, however much all the cards are stacked against him. His final victory is why the Church is here. Whatever the complexities or disappointments of our lives, what we believe is founded on truth. Otherwise, why are we here at all?

When Mary Magdalen and the other two women arrived at the tomb to anoint the body of their dead leader, they too were filled with a sense of failure, and maybe let down. They certainly felt lost. But they heard “Do not be alarmed, you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised … Go, tell his disciples.” In other words, even if you feel everything was in vane, God is victorious.

However gloomy the news appears to be, whether life is a struggle or even apparently hopeless, we do have to face up to our pain realistically and acknowledge that it does matter, but God is victorious. He will have the last say. Be the Easter people in this Easter Palace, and live the risen life with Jesus.

“The Jesuits are responsible for all these wars.”

Not my words, I assure you, but those of a girl-friend in Northern Ireland.

“Really?” I said, “What about the Second World War?”

“Absolutely.  The Jesuits planned it.  Hitler’s regime was financed by the Vatican to conquer the world for Roman Catholicism.”

I tried to think of something harder.  “What about the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir?”

But apparently this was the work of Jesuit missionaries, retaliating for the expulsion of their brothers from Kashmir in 1745.  I didn’t believe a word of it, and I am sure that you don’t either.  But she did.  She didn’t stay my girl-friend very long, so I don’t know if she ever changed her mind, but there are plenty who still think as she did.  And, even if people don’t blame the Jesuits for everything, they may well blame the Jews, or militant Islam, or China, or world capitalism.  I don’t believe that either.

It’s sad how readily people will believe weird theories, whether they relate to world-domination or the faking of moon landings.  It’s sad, because truth is precious and beautiful, and we lose something of ourselves, something that makes us human, when we willing let go of it…  But what really concerns me is when people want to believe that their enemies, or even just those who they do not like, are worse than they actually are.

My girl-friend, as you will have guessed, held robust protestant views.  Like many others, she “knew” that Roman Catholics were wrong, and that the Jesuits were the worst of them.  Those who felt like her welcomed everything they heard that discredited them.  It reassured them to learn that their opponents were as bad as they thought, even more when stories suggested that they were worse than they had previously imagined.

And that position is not unique to the more extreme Northern Ireland Protestants.  In times of war, tales of atrocities committed by the other side horrify us, but we like to think that they are worse than us, to justify our own feelings, and the acts that our side in turn commit.

It is not only in wartime.  Imagine that you are in a long standing dispute with your neighbour, Jim.  It doesn’t matter what about, but it’s been dragging on for years.  You can’t remember when you were last on speaking terms.  You detest the roar of his twin exhausts as he pulls out of the drive; you hate the fact that he leaves his bins out all week, and helps himself to space in yours if his are full; you can’t bear the sound of Radio 1 coming from his back garden in the summer.  You get the picture.

Now imagine that your neighbour’s neighbour, Mike, on the other side, tells you how kind Jim has been to him, how he dropped everything to look after the kids when Mike’s wife was taken suddenly ill, how he drove them to school the next day, and has been babysitting since then, so that Mike can visit his wife in hospital.

Do you believe it?  Do you even want to believe it?  If you do believe it, do you want to know what Jim is up to, what ulterior motive he might have had?  What I am asking is: Would you rather hold on to your image of Jim as bad, than accept that he might not be as bad as your thought?  Would you rather believe that Jim is bad, than be forced to consider that some of your own actions might need to be examined?

And now delete the name Jim, and substitute those individuals and groups that make you feel uncomfortable – whether that is Jesuits, Jews or Gays or Gypsies, Muslims or Upper Class Toffs.  If thinking the worst of someone, anyone, makes you happy, then you are not seeing the world through God’s eyes. 

I am not saying that you have to wear rose tinted glasses, that you have to pretend that people are nice when they are not, but God’s will is always for people to be better than they are.  If, deep down, it gives you pleasure to believe, or to discover, that someone you dislike is worse than you had thought, then in that pleasure you would have moved away from God.

“Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” But I replied, “By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” But a second time the voice answered from heaven, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” 

It’s hard to express what a revolutionary idea that would have been to a first century Jew.  At the very beginning God separates the light from the darkness, the waters under the earth from those over the earth, the seas from the dry land, the days of work from the day of rest.  He separates clean animals that may be eaten from unclean which may not.  The Children of Israel are his special people, separated from all the other nations of the earth to enter into covenanted relationship with him. 

The idea that God would open that covenant to all people wasn’t a natural development, it wasn’t a progressive step forward.  It was a radical change, splitting the young church off from the synagogue, and creating ruptures even in the church itself.  It revealed deep and hidden truths about the nature of God and about human beings.  

Unexpected, unwelcomed even, the Holy Spirit of God grabs Peter, shakes him, transforms his way of understanding God, changes him.

The power of the resurrection is not that it enables us to be a bit more tolerant, a bit more understanding.  Its effect on the disciples was not to make them a bit more brave, a bit more mission-minded.  If we let the resurrection take hold of us, if we enter into the reality of God and humanity reconciled, if we believe that barriers have been torn down, then we are a transformed people, open to see the presence of the Spirit of God in everyone. 

There is no-one whom we can call unclean, rejected by God, simply because of who they are.  We all need to repent.  And we can all be forgiven.

The question is not who do you or I consider clean or unclean, but who does God?  I cannot see into anyone else’s heart, but I can see into mine, and I know that when I do, there is much that falls short of what God would want for me and of me.  Before God, we are all unclean.  And yet, because of what God has done for us in Christ Jesus, he calls us clean, he makes us clean, he renews us and restores us.  He loves us.

Because he loves, we are able and required to love our neighbour, including the neighbour who is not like us – the stranger – as we love ourselves: that is the second great commandment.  And beyond that; we are to love our enemies.

Perhaps I should leave this sermon there.  But…  in this morning’s gospel, when Christ’s earthly ministry is heading  towards its climax, when he has broken bread with his disciples, and washed their feet, his focus narrows.  “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Jesus isn’t talking to a crowd, but to his closest disciples, his friends.  This is where it starts, God’s love for us, revealed in Christ Jesus, flows out from us to our fellow Christians, to the person sitting beside you.  We practice loving our neighbours and then our enemies, by beginning with loving the people that God has put around us. 

And that is often far from easy.  We can only do it if we see each other as individuals made in the image of God, loved by God, redeemed by God.  

Learn to look for the best in the people closest to you, so that you can begin to see the best in everyone.  Look for the presence and action of God’s Spirit in the people around you, so that you can come to see God’s Spirit in those who do not share your outlook, your orientation, or your faith.  Act for their good, speak well of those beside you, so that you can act and speak for the good of those who are not like you, those of whom society is fearful.

Christ calls you as friends, as brothers and sisters, to gather around this table, and receive the gifts of his empowering, accepting love.  Receive his gift of renewing grace, freely given, and be strengthened to love your brother and sister in Christ; and grounded in that love,

learn to love your neighbour,

and loving your neighbour, love the stranger,

and loving the stranger, love your enemy,

as you love yourself,

as Christ loves you, with sacrificial love, that longs for reconciliation and fullness of life.

12 – 18 May is Christian Aid week, an opportunity to champion the work that they do, highlight the issues that they tackle, and to raise money on their behalf. There will be a display board in the Cathedral with more information so please do take time to look and help in whatever way you can. Envelopes will also be available for people to use if they do not receive one through their door.

Paul Valentin the associate director international of Christian Aid will be speaking at the Eucharist on 12 May and there is also a service at the United Church at 6.30pm at which all are welcome.

As mentioned in last month’s newsletter, 14 May 11am to 4pm sees Bite Back At Hunger, an event arranged by the University of Winchester bringing together street performers, musicians, speakers and more to the High street and the Cathedral Close to highlight the IF Food and Hunger campaign endorsed by Christian Aid.

Please do come along and get involved.

Perhaps you have not lain awake recently worrying about the difference between an outcome and an impact. At a conference on fundraising I attended last week, the difference was explained carefully:  an outcome is the immediate effect of an action. The ball is kicked into the net (an action) and a goal is scored (an outcome). The impact of that outcome is the longer-term effect: the goal may mean a place in European football next year, which may in turn mean that a certain manager (let’s call him Jose) agrees to take over at the club.

The impact of events is impossible to predict, but if you’re into fundraising it’s never been so important to polish up your crystal ball and have a go. With the State giving fewer direct grants to the not-for-profit sector, more weight is falling on philanthropists and businesses to play their part in funding them. And these people will only invest in organizations that know what they are driving to achieve and which have the capability and resilience to achieve it.

The resurrection is the event with the biggest impact in history, and one which is still unfolding. In theological terms the resurrection of the One crucified, dead and buried brings new life to the world; it reveals and enacts God’s judgement on sin and death and ushers in a new age of freedom, in which God’s people can live for God in his service.

Could we hope for a better example of this impact than the raising of Tabitha, in Greek Dorcas, from the dead? The name means gazelle, a lovely symbol of vitality. Dorcas was a prominent member of the Christian community at Joppa. We’re told that she was ‘devoted to good works and acts of charity’, but sadly she had died – bad things happen to good people.

The impact of her death was considerable. Not just because they’d lost a loved member, but because the social services in the community had been disrupted. Still, when death comes there’s nothing more to be done than lament and move on – in a world without resurrection, that is.

This story comes from Luke-Acts. Its author, Luke, first describes in his gospel the ministry of Jesus, and then in Acts, after the disciples have been clothed with power from on high, the mission of the apostolic church. The apostles end up doing just what Jesus had done before them.

It’s no surprise then, to hear that just as Jesus raised the son of a widow from the dead in Part 1, the Gospel, Peter his disciple should choose to raise someone who herself was probably a widow in Part 2, the book of Acts.

What resurrection means is not just restoration of life, but God’s justice for the poor, the little people, the ones at the bottom of the social pile.  It means the end of disruption to the moral order, so that the good get what they deserve.

Obviously the bombing in Boston has been very much on all our minds. The picture is now becoming clearer: two brothers, originally from Chechnya, using homemade bombs succeeded in killing three people and injuring numerous others  in the crowd waiting at the end of the Boston marathon. One father died just after his young son came to hug him to congratulate him for finishing the race.

Many of us have been moved to hear the witness account of the man who said that on that day he had witnessed the worst and the best of human behaviour, the cowardice of the bombers and the courage of the first responders.

We hold it normal for the created good order of this world to be disrupted, but we do not in our heart of hearts think it right. We want to understand how it happened, how two fresh-faced young men could be motivated to perpetrate such a deed; how the security could have failed, and so on; and we are relieved to see the forces of justice closing in to restore good order and to see a President bringing consolation to his people.

The apostle Peter raising Dorcas from the dead is the definitive challenge to the incursion of chaos and evil. Bad things happen to good people, but that sentence does not end with a full-stop; it ends with a semi-colon. After every triumph of evil we should put a semi-colon and expect more: in the new age a disruption for good is finally breaking in.

This is what resurrection can do for us. It is an assault on narrow thinking or vague optimism. It is the content of our hope. The resurrection happened to the body of Jesus, scarred and mangled by execution. The body of Jesus was raised – glorified by God – and that makes our own scarred and mangled situations different ever afterwards. Resurrection faith should make us profoundly affirming of what is right and good and its power to change the world.

But we need to be honest about the negative impact of resurrection, too. It certainly doesn’t give us false hope, but it can give us false certainty and a hardness to what is always breaking in from an unexpected direction.

There is a note in the gospel reading which betrays this. At the time of its writing, there was a rivalry between two religious groups, both heirs to the same tradition, the one recognizing Jesus as sent by God, recognizing him as the only begotten Son of the Father; the other, for whatever reason, not.

So when the Jesus of John’s gospel says, ‘My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me …No one will snatch them out of my hand’, you can hear the way in which the opposition is being cast, as the snatchers, the deaf, who refuse God’s true call.

Just like the rancour between Sunni and Shia in Islam or Catholic and Protestant in later Christianity, this early split in Judaism magnified the differences and hostility between two branches of the same tree.

When we as modern Christians think of the impact of resurrection, therefore, let us be mindful never to attempt to make it a badge we wear to demonstrate that our vision of God is more powerful and successful than others. Ironically, we ourselves would then be terribly blind to the truth.

Real resurrection is always breaking in, in life-giving ways, upsetting an order where evil and bigotry seemed to have triumphed. Its unexpectedness is the very sign of its authenticity, for as we know the resurrection is brought to us by the breath of God’s Spirit.

It is deeply ironic that an event that broke open the tribal structure of religious tradition, allowing Gentiles to the party of God’s kingdom, itself became a tribe, with its own and better forms of oppression and death.

That is why today we must put aside our settled understandings of resurrection and let the impact of the Christ’s bursting from the tomb impinge on us afresh, upending our tired thoughts and hopes about how things are and have to be.

So we pray that we ourselves may know the truth of resurrection, just as much as those who claim to disbelieve it. The impact of the resurrection on the created order is immense and entirely positive. Let us pray that the same may be said of those who believe in it and live by its power.

Lead us from death to life, from falsehood to truth.

Lead us from despair to hope, from fear to trust;

Lead us from hate to love, from war to peace.

Let peace fill our hearts, our world, and our universe. Amen.

In Chad it’s 48.69; in Monaco 89.68, and between 220^th and 1^st place lies the UK at 30^th at 80.17. I am talking about longevity.

At an average of 80 years or so, we do pretty well. Next Tuesday I’ll be taking the funeral for a family friend who’s just died at the age of 106. She was born on the last day of the year of the San Francisco earthquake, and she lived in her own home to the week before she died, still able, with help, to get about the house and go shopping.

It’s become a cliché to say that death is taboo in our society, but actually the issue is subtler than that: images and reports of death are rife in the media; what’s happened is that we have become alienated from death. We no longer know where to place it. ‘In the midst of life we are in death’ went the old Latin antiphon, but as far as we’re concerned, in the midst of life we are busy ‘living’, making the most of our span of years.

If we don’t talk about death it’s because we don’t make space for death (that’s one of the most counter-cultural things about this environment, where death is everywhere). You often hear people say, life is not a dress rehearsal. There is so much to cram in and experience before we eventually die. Our bucket lists are long.

So hear a word that speaks into all our strategies to avoid death, which include keeping busy and entertained:  life can only be found through death -after death; without dying we cannot live. That’s hard  to hear in a culture where we aim to defer death for as long as possible and to dissolve its impact. Death comes first, then life!

Consider Hezekiah, whose hymn we heard in our first reading. The background comes just before the passage we heard. The king is sick and at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah tells him that he is going to die and he should set his house in order. But in his grief Hezekiah prays to the Lord to spare him.

And God hears his prayer. He tells Isaiah that he will grant Hezekiah 15 years more of life. The hymn we heard is Hezekiah’s response to this reprieve from the jaws of death. It celebrates how was drawn back from the pit of destruction and given the time to thank God and to tell of God’s goodness to the next generation.

Now you will be wondering how this story speaks of life after death. King Hezekiah didn’t actually die; and in fact the people of his time didn’t believe that much came after death – just the dull echo of a life once lived, a Pit of unknowing.

Yet Hezekiah’s brush with death brought an onrush of life. This is something we all recognize in our experience. We are never happier than when the tide suddenly turns and what we have felt to be disaster, darkness and defeat turns suddenly to triumph. It’s that sense of negating the negative which brings the joy and freedom for which we thirst – which we recognize as being fully alive.

Christian faith also knows this. It starts with death to sin. There is nothing positive about sin; it’s all that holds us back from being fully human and fully alive. It’s the stain on our human condition.  If this blot could be lifted from our image, what would life be like?

Well,  in baptism the stain is indeed washed away; the old existence is drowned and dies; and everlasting life begins with and through God, so that when physical death happens becomes irrelevant.

Now you’ll be able to understand the apparent heartlessness of Jesus in the second lesson. When he hears that his friend Lazarus has died he does absolutely nothing about it. In fact he stays away deliberately because he has something to teach his disciples about God’s glory.

Once the body is ripe and obviously beyond resuscitation he does visit the grieving sisters, who are angry that they have them down by not coming earlier. If he had come before Jesus died he would have been able to help, they think.

Jesus sees things differently. If he had come earlier he would not have glorified God; now when hope has been lost he can give an unequivocal message that death is just a sleep. ‘Lazarus come out’! he cries; and so he does come out of the grave, and is unbound to live longer, just a Hezekiah was granted more time to live.

St John drives home the message we need to hear. Physical death is not the be-all and end-all. What matters is that we find life through believing in Jesus and that involves dying to a life without God. What matters to God is that we are unbound, that our chains are smashed and tumble to our feet.

We must die to our old selves before we can live – the same gospel applies to individuals and organizations, so let me start with the latter: one of the most haunting images left by a former dean of this cathedral in his diaries was that leading this cathedral was like driving a Rolls Royce with the handbrake on. It’s a great metaphor, summoning the glory and admitting the frustration of this place at one and the same time.

But last Friday a small group of us, led by our intrepid Receiver General, went up to the Lottery Fund Headquarters in Sloane Square to hand in a plastic box filled with a series of very smart documents, our Stage II bid. These were the death warrant for the old order, and the Dean had signed each set; they will destroy many of the old ways of doing things.

We wouldn’t get a penny for keeping things the same, but we might be awarded £10m for dying to what we were, so that new people will come here and say, ‘Wow! This place helps me to see God’s glory in the power of kings and bishops; God in the creativity of artists and craftsmen; God in his word beautified in the Winchester Bible’.

Winchester Cathedral fully alive, without the handbrake on, will be a place where people come and wonder and marvel at all that has been done in this place in God’s name. And it’s going to involve at least three years of upheaval. But I assure you, one day the story of these exciting times will be in our guidebooks, as surely as was the destruction of the old caused by Bishop de Lucy or William Wykeham.

Death before life – it applies to individuals just as much as to institutions. ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die’, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously in his book The Cost of Discipleship.  For him this meant giving up his life to try to bring an end to Nazi terror, but each one of us is faced daily with the question of how to take up our own cross.

The resurrection doesn’t make the cross of Christ go away; rather, it shows the cross to be the way to life. What would it be like, I wonder, if we abandoned the notion of consumption as the key to being alive and put death in its place? No life before death; no life before giving up whatever we recognize, however dimly, as destructive to our human nature and relationships, or even before giving up things which once held life for us but are now routine and dull.

The fullness of life which we seek, sometimes so frantically, lies beyond the Pit of unknowing; beyond the deep waters of baptism and the grave of the old self. He is not here, trapped in the former ways, he is risen!

The Deans’ Conference is always in the week following Low Sunday.  I am, therefore, freshly back from the 2013 Conference which was hosted by Westminster Abbey and its hospitable Dean.  We were given an insight into the Church at the heart of the British establishment.  For many of us it was the red double decker Route Master, delivering us to various destinations, which was the highlight of the Conference!  It boldly proclaimed ‘Deans’ Conference’ as its destination.  Each day began with an address by the Abbot of the Church of the Dormition in Jerusalem, and we could not escape a business session.    While being hosted at the Abbey we were given not only a first-hand insight into its life and worship, but also visited the hallowed ground of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and the Supreme Court. 

At Parliament we were greeted by the Lord Speaker (who is a lady!), by various MPs and the Lady-Chaplain to Mr Speaker.  There was some discussion about the challenge of the alignment of the Church with Parliament at a time of changing social attitudes.  The one that seemed to pre-occupy them was the appointment of Bishops to the legislature when they are restricted to males.  The vote on women-Bishops has a serious knock-on effect constitutionally.  Parliament has core values as well as the Church: at the moment there is something of a strain.

We visited Buckingham Palace, and like the many visitors attracted to the Palace in the summer, we toured the State Rooms and were given an introduction from their Keeper to the significant Royal Collection of pictures and artefacts.  The Lord Chamberlain then addressed us.  He had five points, but most of the Deans by that stage in the Conference were hard put to remember more than three afterwards!  One of them I do remember and shall come back to it in a moment.  The Lord Chamberlain is one of three Roman Catholics we encountered who are guardians of the British establishment but nonetheless insist how important it is to the balance of our national life that the Monarch is Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

At the Supreme Court we were addressed by the Chairman, Lord Neuberger, and another of the twelve Judges, Lord Sumption.  The latter is an Anglican, but made it clear that he leaves his faith at the door when he comes to work.  His task is strictly to interpret the law with no special pleading.  The Judges admitted that the development of case law was affected by changes in society and the public mood.  The Deans pushed at the question as to whether everything was simply relative or whether there needed to be some absolute or sense of higher good.  For me one of the most interesting aspects of that visit turned out to be the quotations inscribed on the glass balustrade in the library.  There are eleven of them chosen by the original Justices.  One is from Plato:

‘He who commits injustice is evermore wretched than he who suffers it’. 

And another one is from Martin Luther King:

‘Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.  We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality….’ 

It was there that I really sensed the altar to an unknown God.

It was pointed out to us that, with a new Supreme Court located in the old Middlesex County Court, that Parliament Square represents the four sides of the Public Square.  That is, the Legislature, the Civil Service (in Whitehall), the Judiciary and the Church in the iconic form of the Abbey.  At the Conference discussions, the question kept arising ‘what of the future?’  For the moment it is the UK and not France: faith is part of the public square.  All sides of the public square are embedded in the Crown. 

It was the Lord Chamberlain who quoted the words of the Queen spoken at Lambeth Palace at the opening of her Jubilee Year.  They remind us of the Church’s part in this covenant of responsibility.  Her Majesty said:

The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated.  Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions.  Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.  

It certainly provides an identity and spiritual dimension for its own many adherents.  But also, gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely.  Woven into the fabric of this country, the Church has helped to build a better society – more and more in active co-operation for the common good with those of other faiths.

The Legislature, the Judiciary, the Civil Service and the Church, all held in the Crown, constitute a remarkable equilibrium of the British constitution.  The Church of England has the responsibility of being the host religion and witnessing to the significance of faith for a healthy world.  There is need for something beyond sheer relativity and the public mood.  Human beings need a sense of the greater good and a higher accountability.

For the Christian Church faith is sustained by the nudge of God in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Amongst the grounds for faith remains the evidence of the shy God on Easter Day.  We are gently nudged by the divine from our slumbers and selfishness.  It is a nudge, not an apocalyptic event that rocks the mountains.  It is a firm nudge which reverses human values in the cross-and-resurrection.  It sets in train the transformation of the world.  As St Paul so beautifully puts it in a Christian hymn that he hands on:

            Awake sleeper, and rise from the dead,

            and Christ shall shine upon you.

            (Ephesians 5:14)

AMEN