All Saints’ Compton 
Centenary Celebrations 1 May 2005

“Be strong, take courage, begin the work; for I am with you”, says the Lord of Hosts, “and my Spirit is present among you. Do not be afraid.” (Haggai 2:4).

It is a great pleasure to be with you this evening at the start of your programme, which will run through until All Saints-tide in November, to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the developments to this Church of All Saints that were completed in 1905.

It would be fascinating to know with what thoughts our predecessors 100 years ago, close to the start of their new century, set in hand those improvements – to know what they imagined themselves having to do and to face in the years to come! The century since then certainly justifies the choice for us tonight, looking to the present century, of those Scripture Readings – and especially that from Haggai:
“Be strong, take courage, begin the work; for I am with you”, says the Lord of Hosts, “and my Spirit is present among you. Do not be afraid.”!

For Haggai, at one of so many critical moments in Israel’s history and experience, expending money and effort upon the rebuilding of the Temple, giving priority to it, signified preparedness to give priority to God, to worship and to living out God’s will, preparedness to have God’s values dominant in society and in public as well as in private life. And the words that he uses are classic in the Hebrew Scriptures; think, for instance, of God’s charge to Joshua after the death of Moses (Joshua 1:9): “Be strong, be resolute; do not be fearful or dismayed; for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go”.

As I have prepared to be with you this evening, two elements of these last weeks have been constantly at the forefront of my mind; taken together, they have made those words of Haggai ring urgently and powerfully for you and for me this evening. I think of the current Election campaign; and the first days of the ministry as Supreme Pastor of Benedict XVI.

The campaign seems to me to reveal a deplorable picture of our country; and our political leaders appear to have a depressingly low opinion of the electorate - of us. They take the great majority of us to be concerned only with “What are you going to do for me?”; they judge that we have no interest in anything beyond our immediate needs and experience; they are not brave enough to seek to educate us in the realities of the contemporary world with which they – and we - will have to deal once we have elected them to Office. 

Of course Education, Health, Pensions, Transport, the threat of terrorism – all are important questions, and proper matters for debate and disagreement. But if our political leaders, and we, are serious about the character of our society, Prisons, Climate Change, the growing gulf between rich and poor in this country are important questions too; and so is the condition of Marriage in our society, with its ever growing rate of divorce and of relationship breakdown and the huge personal and financial cost of these – but the “M-word” does not figure once in the two (of the three) major-party manifestos that I have managed to see. 

And then, “Foreign Affairs”! Our would-be leaders owe it to us, I believe, to work to counter whatever lack of interest there may be in “foreign affairs” – because there are some issues that will continue to affect this country, and each of us, profoundly. But there has been no significant, first-on-the-day’s-agenda attention to the future of Israel-Palestine; or to the character of our participation in the European Union; or to what the parties hope to do (as opposed to what they did do) with regard to Iraq; or to Africa, which Mr Blair called “a scar on the conscience of the world” – what will each party, if elected, aim to achieve at the G8 Summit in July, and when Chairman of the EU in the second half of the year?

Running though this collusion with what appears to be the selfishness and small-mindedness of most of us, and this wholesale shirking of their responsibilities, by our leading politicians have been the extraordinary, and extraordinarily revealing, events in Rome these past weeks: the dying, the death and the funeral of Pope John Paul II; and the election and the early addresses of his successor – and his choice of name, Benedict. 

Benedict is the greatest figure in European monasticism; his Rule arguably contributed uniquely to the Christianising and civilising of Europe, and it is still a remarkable document; for the Roman Catholic Church Benedict is the Patron Saint of Europe. For the new Pope, Benedict stands as “a fundamental point of reference for the unity of Europe, and a strong call to the inalienable Christian roots of its culture and civilisation”. And not only Roman Catholics, but others like our own Archbishop Rowan, have welcomed in his choice of name a renewed commitment to pray and work with other Christians for a more effective witness to Christ’s Lordship in the ever increasingly secular Europe – and secular Britain within it – that our Election campaign further reveals.

Here is the resonance, for me and, I pray, for you this evening, and in these next months and years, of Haggai’s words, “Be strong, take courage, for I am with you”, says the Lord of Hosts, “and my Spirit is present among you. Do not be afraid.” Here is the critical importance, and more widely than for this benefice, of the admirably conceived “Campaign for Spiritual and Physical Fitness” upon which you have embarked. Let me illustrate what I mean, and end, with statements made by Archbishop Rowan, and by Cardinal Cormac, at a press conference last Monday after our Archbishop had met the new Pope accompanied by Anglican leaders from other parts of the world.

Thinking about today’s secular Europe, Archbishop Rowan spoke of “a general trend or drift in public discourse which, by assuming that Christianity is intellectually contemptible or oppressive, limits our possibilities. We reply to it not with an aggressive strategy, but with a constant, stubborn, reasoned presentation of the vision in the public square...”. And the Cardinal, saying that the challenge in Britain was for Christians, and especially Christian leaders to be more up front in facing questions that concern life and meaning and hope, went on, for himself and for Archbishop Rowan: “We would both believe that what needs to be said needs to be said because it is true, not just true for Christians.”

This is the business of every one of us, for which it is so good that this church is freshly seeing itself as a training-ground. So

“Be strong, take courage, begin the work; for I am with you”, says the Lord of Hosts, “and my Spirit is present among you. Do not be afraid.”