The following sermon was preached by The Bishop of Winchester, The Right Reverend Michael Scott-Joynt at a service or commissioning and welcome for the Bishop of Basingstoke in the Cathedral on May 11th 2002 at 5pm

“We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God”. (1 Cor. 2:12)

You must by now, Trevor, be glad that all this business of welcoming you, Consecrating you, Commissioning and Installing you is nearly done, and that tomorrow you can at last begin to get on with the job!

But we do welcome you very warmly, and with great pleasure and anticipation, and Margaret and Elizabeth with you;  it will be another good moment when they too can move down from Durham so that you can start to live normally as a family among us. And I’m glad that it has been possible for this Service to follow so soon after Wednesday’s marvellous occasion in Southwark, and that quite a number of us have been able to share in both with you, so that they  can be two parts, with your participation in today’s Synod making a third,  of a single beginning of your ministry as a Bishop in the Church.

In the next weeks particularly, but then through the coming years, you will often wonder who you are, and what you’re for! Lots of other people will be wondering that too; and a good many of them, if my experience is anything to go by, will ask you those questions – more, or occasionally  less, politely!   Or you’ll just feel them in peoples’ eyes and looks and minds as you go about your calling. These questions will not be new to you; but some of the things that you’ll do as a bishop– let alone some of the things that you’ll wear! – will particularly provoke them!  

Because any question has to be answered in  language that makes sense to the questioner, and perhaps still more because I want to be alongside people and because I shy away from being thought odd, I find I’m constantly tempted not only to respond to these questions, but even to think of myself and of what I’m called to be and to do, in terms of the culture that surrounds us and  of its values.   So if I’m not careful it can become my practice as a bishop, our practice as clergy, our practice as the Church and as Christians, to accept views of all sorts with hardly a question, and to hang back from saying anything unequivocally Christian, because people have a right to their opinions, or because we want above all to be thought accepting – we might say “pastoral” – sympathetically attuned to peoples’ thinking and attitudes around us.

The second chapter of First Corinthians was chosen for us this afternoon by the Church’s cycle of Readings, not by me or Canon Stewart; for you, Trevor,  and for our Church in the Diocese and more widely,  it seems to me just what we need to have said to us. For here is St Paul encouraging his Corinthian fellow-Christians to be Christians first and consistently, and a lot less concerned to be Corinthians! And while I’m speaking this afternoon to us all, I’m speaking especially, Trevor, to you as I welcome you among us as a Bishop, as one charged, as I understand the particular ministry committed to us, to attend to and to encourage the Church’s faithfulness to Christ, its focussedness, its effectiveness as a witness to his claim upon every person’s love and obedience. So I want to point you especially to the verse with which I began, while also noting that the first person plural, the “we” with which Paul begins, includes us all:           

“We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God”. (1 Cor. 2:12).

" We have received..” includes every one of us, and refers to the day of our baptism and confirmation; you, Trevor, will be baptising and confirming among the church in Eastrop in Basingstoke tomorrow morning, ministering “the Spirit that is from God” . For those of us who are ordained it refers, too, to our ordination – for you, Trevor, it speaks  most recently of last Wednesday in Southwark. You, we all, have received what Paul in a similar passage calls a spirit “not of timidity, of hanging back, but of power and of love and of self-discipline”.

“..so that we may understand, recognise as real, the gifts bestowed on us by God”. He means by this the  belief, the  trust, that God is  present among us, powerful to change and renew and develop us into the character, and the following and the effectiveness of Jesus; he means  worship, and praying; and the Scriptures, the Sacraments and that  “being-together-with-Christ”  that is the Church;  he means the Christ-like life of holiness and  service, of suffering and of joy; he means new Christians, and people of all ages returning to a living faith – and in this Diocese, for our “understanding” all this how wonderfully our Partner Dioceses are  among  “the gifts bestowed on us by God”.

St Paul ends what was read tonight with an astounding statement, but one that follows naturally from what he has just been saying: “We have the mind of Christ”; because we have “received the Spirit that is from God”, and as we constantly, expectantly, trustingly seek to return to him in worship and in obedience. You are among us, Trevor, as one commissioned to encourage and to challenge us to this above all, that God’s world may return to him.

To whom be the glory and the praise. Amen.