Winchester Cathedral            The Liturgy of the Foundation                 July 20^th 2003

“Then I ate the scroll; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.........” (Ezek. 3:3)

Today’s occasion, this “Liturgy of the Foundation”, is quite a recent institution; but it has its roots in a fundamental element of the structures, the relationships, the roles of this place. For in our Saxon monastic origins, the Bishop was the Abbot; he remained so, in title at any rate, even when his ministry became increasingly diocesan and political, and when he therefore moved his living quarters and his staff out of the monastic enclosure - first a short distance to the west, and then a little over a thousand years ago (in the 960s) a little further to the then marshy Wolvesey. Six centuries later the last Prior became the first Dean, and the Bishop’s Abbacy was formalised into the role of Visitor. Four and a half centuries later still, and within the provisions of the Cathedrals’ Measure 1999, I sense more than a ghost of  the Abbot in the Chapter House, as the Bishop fulfils this particular role in the Cathedral’s life today!

Let me first say the warmest and most appreciative   “Thank you”  to all of you who are, and who represent, the Foundation of this place:  “Thank you”  for all you that you give and do, for all the love and time and devotion and friendship, and for all the skills and professionalisms and experience, and all the tiredness too at times, that you offer here, and with which you make possible the ministry and witness of this Cathedral.

In a few minutes I shall give you, with three quite solemn, formal questions,  the opportunity to commit yourselves freshly, before God and claiming God’s assistance, to your part in the Cathedral’s life. Before I do so, here is a riddle to draw your attention to something that they do not mention, something without which we shall not properly fulfil God’s calling to us, something that I understand to be as basic for us as Christians  as the air we breathe.

“In what are the stones of this building steeped, pickled (even though I doubt if there is any physical evidence of this “pickledness” for John Crook and his colleagues to find!)? And in what do you and I need to be equally steeped and pickled?”

The stones are steeped, pickled, in Scripture. The stones have heard, have had seep into them, through every day for so many centuries, the monastic Offices and then the Offices of the Book of Common Prayer, both formed almost entirely from the Bible. The succession of Eucharistic Liturgies also constantly echoes and alludes to Scripture. So, right down to this morning’s service, do our hymns and anthems.

This constant, trusting, expectant use goes right back into Scripture itself, as today’s readings demonstrate – and they are helpfully printed in the Service Order.

The scroll that Ezekiel sees God offering to him contains God’s message to his people and to himself of “lamentation and mourning and woe”; yet Ezekiel is obedient; he receives it into his very being and life; “and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey”.

Timothy has known “the sacred writings” from childhood through the devotion of his mother and his grandmother, and then as he has travelled with Paul and watched his Christian way; “all scripture is inspired by God..........so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work”.

And by what other means can we “abide in the Vine ”, draw our life out of the Risen life of Christ, than through Scripture, and this Sacrament of the Eucharist, in the community of the church – the Scriptures that St. Benedict called “the truest guide for human life”?

Perhaps you’re thinking: “But today we are too sophisticated; we know too much, including too much about how the books of the Bible came to be, to read them regularly, daily, expecting to be formed and led and changed by God through them!” But people have said this kind of thing in every generation, right back to the earliest centuries. Nor are we the first people to think that we are too busy; still less the first  to shrink from the risk of discovering that God may call us to be, to do or to say things that will shock us, and shock or astonish our contemporaries –  “all who want to lead a godly life in Christ Jesus”, we heard Canon Flora read to us from St. Paul, “will be persecuted”.

Or perhaps you’re thinking, because people say it so often: “How can the Bible, written all those centuries ago, offer us guidance with the particular questions of today’s very different world?” But how many of those who speak or write like this with such contemporary confidence, how many know what they are talking about because they are really trying, submissively and expectantly, to use the Holy Scriptures within the church as God has given them to be used? Remember that today millions of Christians in this country, people of every age, background and education and members of every kind of church, and many millions like them throughout the world, wonderingly know themselves to be “trained in righteousness ” by God through faithful, daily  use of the Bible.

I suggest that the Cathedral has a double opportunity, a double responsibility, in these next years, that arises directly both out of our history and our “stones steeped in Scripture” and out of its position within the Diocese.

The opportunity, that is there for every church and for all those called to lead churches, freshly to encourage and to teach all who regularly worship here to read the Bible more, more regularly and more expectantly – and there is so much good material today to help you to do so. And the opportunity, through the Education Department and for the Diocese as well as for the congregation, to contribute to the debate that is intensifying about the place and use of Scripture for Christians and in and for the church – but to do the latter only as you are committed to the former!

“Then I ate the scroll”, said Ezekiel, “and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.........”  

The stones around us, and the saints around us of this place, are steeped in Scripture; so what about you, and me?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.