The Great Martyr: Sermon on Low Sunday and the Feast of St George, Parish Church of St George, Hanover Square, London W1, 24th April 2022

Christ is risen!

So little is known of St George that in the 1960s his feast was downgraded in the Calendar of the Roman Church and it was even suspected that he may have been legendary. But surely that is the point of our following Jesus Christ, that it is not for our achievements and significance that we are remembered, but simply for taking up our Cross after him, faithful unto death. So it is for this that he is venerated in the Christian East, as one of those known as the Great Martyrs on account of their exceptional witness to Christ, in the face of exceptional barbarity.

This was a career-soldier of such great skill, integrity and loyalty that he served in the elite guards of the Emperor Diocletian in the late third century. Diocletian was an able ruler and military leader, bringing peace and stability to the vast empire under tensions within and from without. Yet economic and political problems shadowed the image of an all-competent autocrat, and it was convenient to blame religious minorities for supposedly undermining the imperial administration. You can imagine George’s pride in his part in restoring law and order in the Empire, and the despatch of its external enemies under Diocletian’s generalship. George would have been a man set for great things, as his service record extended with further honours and rising prospects for promotion in the Praetorian Guard. Except, that he was a Christian. Previously his problematic religion may have been tolerated; but now it was to blame for poor government performance, according to those who spin popular opinion. It seems that George had earlier come to Diocletian’s favourable attention, since, after the official exclusion of Christians had begun in earnest in 302, followed by outright persecution in 303, Diocletian and his officials may have sought to retain him, while others were put to the sword. Privations and tortures in mounting severity were meant to deter him from his Christianity; easing them an incentive to embrace the official Roman religion and its cult of the Emperor. You may imagine his protest of unimpeachable loyalty, and his appeal to his exemplary service record. There is even a story of the Empress Alexandra, and how the brutality led her first to admire the dignity and loyalty of the soldier who had done nothing to deserve such dishonour, and then to recognise the power of his faith in Christ as her own.

Not more than a few hundred yards from this Church is the road along which Christian martyrs were carted for many decades from Newgate prison at the City of London to their cruel dismemberment and execution at Tyburn, protesting their loyalty to England and to Queen Elizabeth I, but rejected as traitors for being Catholics and priests, such as I am. We know from contemporary accounts how many of them were loved as pastors and holy people by the wider population, not just the Catholic community. We also know that these martyrdoms, whatever the exuberance of some elements in the crowds, were also observed with silence and grave respect by others. I should recall that the executions of Protestants under Queen Mary were no less ill-advised and repellent to humane Catholics, who no more sought for the Reformation Protestants the violent repression that their co-religionists had endured under Henry VIII and Edward VI and would again endure under Elizabeth. By the time St George’s was built, England had exhausted itself of religious blood-letting and civil war. St George’s was to provide a new sacred space of godly learning and glorious music, especially that of Händel, that has been part of the shaping of our nation’s culture and Christian civilisation. Even while penal restrictions on Catholic Christians persisted, another nearby sanctuary of God’s adoration and freedom in the Holy Spirit arose for Catholics, at the Church of the Assumption and St Gregory on Warwick Street. Today we address our differences with the honest reconciliation of memory, and the practice of ecumenism and friendship, as well as in united service of those in need. We realise that we do not defend separate sides but are heirs to a history held in common. We are able to love, because we have been all been brought to our knees by the suffering of those who went before us, whose lives were called out of their bodies for being faithful to Christ, and because the hardness of heart in all of us has been melted by beauty and forgiveness, in worship and its music.

Both St George’s and the Assumption quietly stand in monumental witness to what has been sacrificed for faith in the past, and what is held in store for those who hope and trust. As St James has reminded us this morning, “The trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire” (James 1. 3-4). St George was certainly patient in his faith sorely tried in 303. His remains are venerated to this day in the Holy Land, and the crown of a life made perfect and entire is his. In his company are the martyrs whose relics are enshrined at Tyburn Convent, St John Southworth at Westminster Cathedral, and those Reformers whose memorials stand close to Smithfield at St James’s, Clerkenwell.

Yet these are not remembrances of death, but of life. The feast of St George that we celebrate today has fallen in the Octave of Easter; and he and they are witnesses that all who have been baptized into Christ, were “baptized into his death, thus buried in order to be raised with Him from the dead through the glory of the Father, and walk in newness of life” (Romans 6. 3-4). The remains of St George at Lod and of the saints in all kinds of other shrines, together with all the Churches raised in their honour, are not memorials to a life that receded into the past, but they are, so to speak, relics of Christ’s act of resurrection and edifices of the Kingdom that is now and for ever. For “every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit” (John 15.2). Our holy and honoured martyrs and heroes were not destroyed, but made fruitful for more vigorous growth and enduring life: life that is not mere survival in this world, but the fulness of life in eternal heaven lived now upon temporary earth.

Today in our Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, owing to ancient calendrical calculations by which we and the West over time fell out of step, it is Pascha, Easter Day. We sing, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs giving life.” We are singing this dozens of times today because yesterday we sang, “Today the Abyss sighed and cried out, My power has been destroyed. For I received a dead Man as one of their dead, but I could not hold Him. Then I also lost with Him all those who were under His power. From the beginning I held the dead, but now this One raises them. Glory to Your Cross and resurrection, O Lord.”

I cannot fail to recall those people who are our fellow Christians in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Reformed Baptist Church, Ukrainian Jews and Muslims, and other Ukrainian people, all of whom have done nothing wrong and provoked nothing, but only served and lived, like St George, with faithful love, integrity, and loyal virtue. This week we have heard of horrific sexual attacks inflicted upon children, women and even young soldiers taken captive. Several of our churches around the world have been desecrated, and a priest managed to save his children with only moments to spare after his wife was woken and saw an intruder light petrol poured through their door while they slept. At the beginning of Lent, a priest was confronted at gunpoint by a soldier pretending to be a monk ordering him to abandon his Catholic faith by either becoming Russian Orthodox or a pagan, saying, “It makes no difference”. And at the end of Lent on Good Friday, a car was driven at speed right into our cathedral at Ternopil, destroying the Cross and the Shroud of Christ that we lay out for the people who pour out their love and devotion before them.

We have no argument with our Russian and Russian Orthodox friends - our people wish they had no argument with us. What we cannot understand is why Christian hearts, after the receding past of enmity and estrangement, should abandon the dialogue of love and instead turn on other Christians, harming the innocent on the days of Christ’s own trials, even on the feast when He brings nothing but life and peace - and not destruction, but salvation and his own divine beauty. St George’s is a haven of this beauty that saves the world, a potent symbol of faithful discipleship in the footsteps of Christ, and the beacon of St George its patron who followed Him as far as death and into the kingdom of life that is everlasting. So may St George, who is also the patron of this our beloved homeland, as well as patron of the City of Moscow, by his patient endurance, by the perfection with which he was crowned, pray for those entrusted to his intercession, break the hearts of those who have chosen to be evil, and share with them the gift he himself has received – peace and resurrection, and the life of a Kingdom that is not of this world but which we pray every day will come on earth as it is in heaven.

St George the Great Martyr, pray for us. Glory to England. Glory to Ukraine. Glory to Jesus Christ. Glory for ever. Christ is risen.

Homily for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Tone 4): Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, 9th July 2017

At university, we were amused by a much older student, who wanted to be known not as a Christian of one kind or another but as “The Seeker”. No explanation of belief or experience, or even any demonstration of fact, was satisfactory to her. We liked her a lot, although we naughtily teased her; she was ever so serious. But it struck me that she was, after all, never interested in finding what she said she was seeking. To her kind and interested spirit, it was in the quest that she felt safe, not at any point of arrival. Decision was to be resisted; it was taking a risk you could not back out from.

I admired the integrity of The Seeker. I hope she found something - or at least found out what it is that Christians are talking about, when they say that they are following Christ. After all, we Christians realise that it is not we who follow Christ, but He Who has been following us around all along. So much for thinking that being His disciple is all down to our own intellectual and moral efforts! It is He who dogs our every step away from His own. Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven tells our familiar story:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days
I hid from Him …
From those strong Feet that … followed after
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy …


Not that the lady Seeker was evading Christ. It simply had not dawned on her that, wherever her heart and her thinking took her, He was attached to her. She had not noticed that wherever she went and found nothing, she took Him with her. Perhaps one day she happened to turn round and saw Someone keeping up with her step by step. Perhaps one day she asked the right question at the time of the right answer, and cried out, “Rabboni!”

Contrast this virtuous, honest lady’s search with others, who say they are open-minded, liberal-hearted, vigorous in pursuit of human rights and values, and zealous about the truth, but who really want to deflect the light from their deeds and motives, and close humanity and its freedom down. They know full well that Christ our Light follows their every move; yet (as in Thompson’s poem) they call to the dawn, and say,

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!


All through the enervating news in recent days, there has loomed a crisis that sums up what is currently amiss. It is the case of Charlie Gard at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and the rights of his parents to find healing for his life and to protect him until the day he dies. An experimental new means of treatment offers a ray of hope; but Great Ormond Street’s medical professionals, scientists and ethicists have dragged the family through to the European Court of Human Rights to seek to ensure that their expert opinion will prevail, and that Charlie’s life-support and sustenance be turned off, causing him to die. The justices of the United Kingdom and of the European Human Rights Court – which was established expressly to prevent the power of the state to deny Europe’s citizens their right to life and freedom - have declared that he is incurable; so, to prolong his life, or to attempt the treatment only available in America, is futile. Their thinking is chilling: not to bring about his death would cause him greater harm than causing him to die.

Lord Winston, Britain’s avuncular clinician, has pronounced that Pope Francis’ offer of care at his hospital in Rome, Bambino Gesù, may be well intentioned; but (he says) it has no scientific expertise in the child’s condition, and so the intervention of the Catholic Church in this field is cruel to Charlie. In this double-think it is "cruel" for Christians to offer the chance of treatment or, if it does not work, loving palliative care; yet it is not cruel for medics to induce the death of an infant patient against its parents’ will. Our jocular Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, weighs in to say that it would be illegal to move Charlie to Rome for treatment or care, because the courts have agreed with the hospital and, therefore, Charlie must be subject to its expert ethical and medical determination. This is not that Charlie be allowed to die - surrounded with our best love and protection, if the right to search for a possible cure is forbidden to the parents - but that his life be hastened to a close. Pope St John Paul declared that it is evil to deny the sick and dying the means of sustenance for life. Instead, this Catholic morality, which honours the sacredness of humanity - in which Christ Himself shared and suffered thirst and pain alike - must not be allowed to take precedence over the thinking of contemporary medical and scientific ethicists: supposedly objective, but actually relativist without roots in the principles of Christian civilisation, as it balances the fluctuating weights of conflicting medical knowledge and research, theories of care and wellbeing, political and economic expediency and public opinion. In the midst of all this, the Christian ethic that is needed cannot be tolerated, because it points to absolute truth. Thus respect for life is said to inspire and shape other considerations, but only as one belief among others that people are no less freely entitled to profess, and that states are democratically entitled to impose.

Now, hearing today’s Gospel (Matthew 8.28-9.1), most people think of the Gadarene swine throwing themselves into the sea of Galilee. But the point is about the two men who emerged from the tombs and encountered the uncomfortable light and truth of Jesus. They could not bear the sight or sound of it. Likewise, Lord Winston said that the Holy Father is cruel, and Boris Johnson says the Vatican’s request to care for Charlie is illegal interference. Likewise, Canada’s camera-loving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, revelling in his rock-star treatment around the world, has appointed a Foreign Minister who confronts all objectors, including Canada’s Catholic bishops, by saying that women’s rights to abort children in the womb is at the forefront of his government’s furtherance of human rights. The demoniacs said much the same: “It has got nothing to do with You. As Son of God, You have nothing to do with us.” Thus we are not welcome to talk of human rights, when those who pretend to be its promoters want the unmoderated power to facilitate the death of children, the sick and the elderly. Thus our protests about the right to life are scorned, while real abuses to minorities, religions and whole populations on political and ideological grounds go unchecked. Thus we are presented as the enemy of women’s freedom and wellbeing by those who hide behind those noble aims, in order to un-restrict the destruction of the unborn. Thus we are presented as lacking compassion, while our carers in disguise, affronted that someone else may offer more effective treatment, decide what values they - not we - deem acceptable, and set their limitations on who is allowed to live on what conditions.

The interesting detail in today’s Gospel is that, whereas everywhere else in Galilee people flock to Jesus, when He comes to Gadara-Gerasa town, they plead with Him to go away. He has come from the cemetery and brought unclean contact with those who are dead from the inside. The men appeared to come out of the tombs, but they were not risen from the dead. They appeared to have come to life but they were dark - no light on. Today we sang, “Death has been plundered” and we understand that it has nothing in its vast domains to offer or detain us. My friend the Seeker looked everywhere. She could not find Christ among the dead to bring Him up, or cut down out of heaven and bring Him here below (see today’s Epistle, Romans 10.1-10). For He comes to us, not from out of death, but towards the Kingdom of heaven. His life all along is upon us, behind us, behind, within ahead. It is our own vital sign, sacrosanct. This is why Charlie has “everything to do” with us, as does the fate of so many in the world, where privilege, vested-interest expertise and power trump the right to life, and the wellbeing of the created order. It is not just that all life is sacred in the Name of its Maker, and the Redeemer Who died for its sake. It is because all humanity is destined towards, and even now endowed with, the blazing fact of life that is the Resurrection, and the restoration of all things in Christ. We may never harm and destroy what is on its way to glorification. We must love our own who are in the world to the end (cf. John 13.1). This we cannot turn away from; we cannot tell the Lord this time to go. For if we do, it is our own life, and our resurrection that we turn away, as Love unperturbed pursues us “down the nights and down the days” – with “unhurrying chase … His majestic instancy”. I turn and see: "Rabboni!"

Seek first the Kingdom of God: Homily for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London, 10 July 2016

Seek first the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6.34). These words insistently return to the mind in the midst of the constitutional and moral crisis in which the United Kingdom is now embroiled following the referendum, after a majority of those voting approved by a narrow margin withdrawal from the European Union.

In the weeks and months before this fateful vote, unlike at General Elections, there was no collective guidance from the Catholic Bishops on the issues at stake in terms of Catholic social teaching, or indeed the interests of the Holy See and the Catholic Church in this country. This is doubtless because there was an honest case from the point of various Catholic Christians’ faith for either choice. The Church stands above the political fray, since its wisdom applies to this world from the Kingdom of heaven. But, after the result was known, it was clear that great bitterness and resentment was unleashed, with some terrible mutual recriminations – young versus old, north versus south, Scot versus English, British verse foreigners, even white versus those of other colours. Cardinal Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Bishops’ Conference, immediately called for calm, “respect and civility”, appealing to our better nature as a country, and to its implicitly Christian civilisation when it comes to a generous “welcome for the stranger and shelter for the needy”.

Let us now set the referendum decision and its aftermath explicitly in the context of Christian faith and discipleship. Since we as Catholics strive for the communion of all in Christ in the Catholic faith, and by leading truly a spiritual life in union with Him, it is important that we look forward to the next year, with its undoubted upheavals ahead, with our eyes fixed firmly on Jesus Christ our pioneer on the life we pass through in this world (Hebrews 12.2).

This last week, I have heard of a Spanish restaurant in south London vandalised with offensive graffiti, and we all know of the similar attack on a Polish centre in north London. I also learned of a British charity for the needy, which has built up considerable work in other European countries, now considering a new office in Germany to protect its work across borders; and a Belgian colleague speaking Flemish to relatives on the phone on a bus, was confronted in public with a threat that her job was shortly to come to an end. Among us we know of numerous other incidents of physical and verbal assault, ranging from the xenophobic to the unvarnished racist.

To this we say that the Kingdoms of the World have become the Kingdom of the Lord and of His Christ (Apocalypse 11.15), and that the Kingdom of God transcends all our ideas of patriotism, nationality, nationalism, state-interest. “Here,” says St Paul, “we have no abiding city... for our true homeland is in heaven”. (Hebrews 13.14 & Philippians 3.20) And the Lord Himself says to "seek first the Kingdom of God" (Matthew 6.34). At Vatican II, the Church taught that the authority of the Church and of civil society are not subject one to the other, but are free to achieve their highest aims as they operate in their respective spheres. This does not mean that the Gospel and the authority of the Church to proclaim it fail to apply to the world, and that the Church must refrain from interfering in the affairs of society. On the contrary, it is the teaching of the Church that the objective of both Church and State, Religion and Society, is to serve the realisation of God’s Kingdom on earth. It is thus the Church’s prophetic duty to call the world, its leaders, its governments, its cultures, its societies and each individual member to constant repentance, to return again and again to the principles of the Beatitudes, to strain repeatedly to ‘hear the Angels sing’ of glory to God on high and peace on earth to those of good will, and thus to orient the entire world toward the blessed state that is ours by virtue of our creation in God’s own image.

Secondly, it is vital to recall that, in the beginning, what has now become the European Union (whatever you think of it) was established largely by Catholic Christians intent on realising this Kingdom of God in the hands of the remaining people of good will, transcending states and languages and divisions, so that the resources of Europe could never again be used for making war, or for oppressing the free dignity of human beings to live to the full before God, in faith and hope and love. No more Fascism and Nazism; no more atheist materialist communism. Everywhere confidence in truth, in goodness and justice.

What has emerged in the last few weeks has clearly been lying under the surface for years and now feels unbound and empowered to assert itself. Perhaps it is a catharsis that will soon be over as the poison is dissipated. Perhaps we face a more lasting darker outlook, recalling that such attitudes were once commonly assumed and potently pursued before the Second World War in this country as elsewhere. So we must remember that the Lord Who said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God,” went on to say, “and His righteousness.” It must therefore be the heartfelt duty of every Christian, who believes above all else in the Universal Reign of Jesus Christ over all peoples and nations, to withstand all thoughts, words and deeds that contradict His design for humanity’s perfect liberty in Him, and that contradict the dignity of all human beings, regardless of colour, race, religion, age, sex, or language, or outlook. It must be that Christians who “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness” declare unrighteous, unChristian, all that stands against Christ’s will for us all, both to be one in His own single humanity and to thrive as He has appointed us in His single creation with all our differences and backgrounds and origins. For we see that by the Holy Spirit He has both been penetrating our societies so that they may providentially become more like His Kingdom, and is even now redeeming from them all their ills, oppressions, cruelties and acts of spiteful pride and wickedness, by the power of His holy Cross.

I fear that this will require of us great strengths in the time ahead as we make a new history. Perhaps we are in an unreal calm before a coming storm, or perhaps, as we hope with the Cardinal, we will prove after all to be good neighbours. Perhaps, though, when we insist as we must upon Christ’s bearing on the world, it will involve the further vilification of the Church. Perhaps to exalt the Kingdom of God and righteousness will involve profound sacrifices for the sake of the truth, of justice and the love of God. But the evil at work will not prevail. It must bow. For “the earth is the Lord’s with all that is in it” (Psalm 23.1) and “the Lord alone … will be King” (Zechariah 14.9); and “He will reign for ever” (Apocalypse 11.15). Him alone do we serve (cf. Matthew 4.8 & 10).

 

Homily for the Nativity of Christ, 25th December 2015, Church of the Most Precious Blood, The Borough, Southwark

It is easy to forget in London, one of the greatest cities of the Western world, as we celebrate the birth of God the Son come among us as a human being, that he was born, lived and died and rose again in the East. We find it difficult to imagine, even though the Church he founded has spread to Europe and India, the Americas, across Africa, the far stretches of Asia and across the Pacific from Australia to Alaska, that in the East, in the lands where Jesus Himself walked, there are Christians to this day. Some of them speak Aramaic, the language that He spoke. They continue to worship by the Jordan where He was baptised. They live, as they always have, in the cities where Peter, Thomas, James, Bartholomew, Mark, Andrew, Simon and Jude took the Gospel and founded the first churches. Up in the mountains are the monasteries where some of the saints that we still remember each year wrote their hymns, some of which we sing to this day across the world in English. On the plains and plateaux are the villages and towns, where bishops famous from the great Councils of the Church’s first centuries - whose faith we still proclaim - were pastors to their people then, like their successors are today, in long unbroken line.

They do not have a Mass quite like this, but it is the same Eucharist of the Lord, with music and words, colour and ceremony going back on the same spot to the earliest days of the Christian religion - that is, the religion of those who knew Jesus Christ personally and, in His footsteps on the land of the East, planted their own, as their families and descendants, father and mother to son and daughter, have been doing for twenty centuries.

You have heard in the news that these ancient communities of Eastern Christians - Catholic and Orthodox; Arab, Armenian, Assyrian; with all the rich variety that makes the Church both all-encompassing and One – are under the direst threat they have ever faced. After nearly 1500 years of living side by side with Muslims, despite the persecution of successive empires, with bonds of charity and peace as children of the same land and peoples, now a ruthless band of killers has been going from village to village, town to town, monastery to monastery, destroying the Churches, forcing the faithful from their homes, kidnapping them along with their priests and monks and nuns, sometimes executing them, burning the ancient books that tell our Christian faith in the words of our forebears from the dawning days of the Church itself, tearing down the images of the Cross on which our Lord suffered for the sake of our redemption, and desecrating the altars and the images of Our Lord and the Mother of God. In Syria alone, the north of our Holy Land, forty-five churches and monasteries have been desecrated since the present surge of ISIS began; and a hundred more churches, orphanages, residential care homes, schools, and social or medical centres, provided by the Church for the benefit of all alike, have been damaged or ruined. There are similar stories from Iraq. But the worst of it all is that every day hundreds more Christians leave the Middle East. Ancient Churches in Palestine too, within a few miles of Bethlehem, face desertion as Christians are pressured out by Israel and Palestinian Muslims alike. Christ was born and cradled in Bethlehem, but Syria and the Middle East cradled Christianity, so it is emergency that affects us, as the whole region is stripped of its Christians, as a whole way of life and culture has part of its history and identity shorn off, so that all that remains is the gap where the memory used to be. A few of our fellow Christians from the Middle East will come to northern Europe, especially Sweden where they have been welcomed; more will go to North America; still more will find new homes in South America and Australia. Far away in the future their children will forget their Arab life and culture, as they become like us who live in the West. In time the language of Christ will be spoken no more. In time, you have to wonder, will they forget the Christ their families have followed for twenty centuries, since He first stepped beside the shore of Galilee and went up to their mountains to speak of God’s eternal life, or since Paul went to Damascus and was converted? Today the Archbishop of Canterbury describes the murderers as modern Herods, seeking out all the children of God in order to attack Christ, forcing new Holy Families to flee.

St Paul told us that the Cross of Christ would be a scandal (I Corinthians 1.23) to those who cannot bear to look on it, and tear it down. Our Lord himself told us, “Blessed are you when people persecute you and speak all kinds of evil against you on account of Me. Rejoice and be glad for great is your reward in heaven, because they treated the same way the Prophets before you.” (Matthew 5.11) He goes on to say – “You are the salt of the earth”, “you are the light of the world,” whose trials are seasoning to bring out the flavour of the world and to preserve it for the future; whose sufferings are the illumination that shines the way to God the Father.

So the message from the leader of Syria’s Catholic Christians, head of a Church founded by St Peter years before he reached Rome, Patriarch Gregorios III of Antioch, that he has written to all his people is one of joy. It is a message he shares with the whole Church, because in the midst of the crisis, when all around is sadness and destitution, not only for the Christians but many others too, the distinguishing marks of Christians are love and joy for the very fact the God has sent His Son into the world. So there is no room for despair, no bare cupboard where once we kept our hopes in storage.

You might say, he is being brave. As Patriarch to his people, he is trying to rally people round, and encourage them to hold fast and hang on for a brighter day. You might say he is shoring up their inner faith while outside things fall to pieces. This is perhaps half the story .

But the whole truth is this. He is reminding us all that, whatever the appearances around us – and in our country it is the rough rejection of Christ and Christianity in public life and personal living – whatever it is that people do with guns and swords, with the abuse of power and money, it does not change the fact that 2,015 years ago, God caused Himself to be born a human being so that He could be God with us, not away in the distance. It does not change the fact that He taught us, when we think of heaven, not to imagine a land far off in the future, but here and now, “on earth as it is in heaven”, as we pray every day. It does not change the fact that He too was murdered on a Cross because of human wickedness and resentment of God’s goodness and beauty, yet died exhausting evil of everything it could through against Him. It does not change the fact that, thirty-three year after His birth, on the Third Day he rose again from the dead and destroyed its power and victory over us, not its victim but over it the Victor. Our pride and joy in Christ is therefore not just that He is the person who inspires us, or the One Who leads us in our hearts and imagination. It is not just that Christianity is our personal spirituality, our private belief; or that Jesus is our personal Lord, the God for me. He is Lord of all. If He is not Lord of all, if He is not the King whose power authority is above all other powers and people, if He is not the One that turned inside out the very way that life and the universe operate when He rose from the dead, then He is not Lord at all, and no Lord for me. Yet this is the Lord of all that is, this small infant we worship today. He fills the universe, this child in the farm animals’ manger. He is not only the delight of Christians today, but the enduring hope of all the world.

One of the beautiful icons you often see in an Eastern Christian church, painted up in the apse over the altar, shows the Mother of God with her hands extended, and seated on her womb is the young Lord Christ, also holding his hands out in blessing, pointing the way onwards with authority. The picture is called “The Mother of God, she who is wider than the heavens”. She is the Mother who in her own body contains the uncontainable. The sheer vastness of what we are celebrating today is this: that “the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay”, is the very expression of the Word of God Who creates and rules the universe. He became flesh not only to be with us, but to die on the Cross in our flesh, to take away all the power of sin, and evil’s power over us, and then to vanquish death, using our flesh as His means, by rising from the dead. This is how we live the life on earth that is lived in heaven. Nothing can destroy it, nothing can take it away; for it is the life of the One Whom the universe cannot contained. It means that - to the eye of the Christian - Jesus Christ is the light who has come into the world, that nothing in the world can outshine. No one can put His light into a box, hide it, or extinguish it. It outshines all other lights. Not just me, all of us, whoever we are, whether we believe or not, have neither sufficient light, nor darkness, to cover it. This is the light that shines more brightly than Britain, than Syria, than the ISIS murderers, than everything the world can do to tear down the Cross and its power of liberation and rejoicing.

A number of you have brought today your little images of the Christchild for a blessing, so that you can take them home and put them in your cribs with joy and happiness that the presence of Christ shines like a light in your homes, families and loved ones near and far this Christmas. You will all be hoping that it shines through you, for we are all sinners and imperfect vessels of the light we are carrying. But try not to think of it as a little ornament, a small token of faith and love. When you look on the Christchild in the Crib here in this Church or at home, remember that here portrayed is the Lord Who fills the universe, in the embrace of her who has become wider than the heavens to contain the uncontainable. Try and imagine that you, too, in your own hands and your own heart and your own body, are containers for the uncontainable as you bring Him close to the world. Try and imagine that for a moment you, too, are wider than the heavens as you hold the hope of the whole world – not just for you personally – the very life of God Who has come into the world to bring peace, and liberty from evil, and joy.

Remember that this is the faith of the Christians of the Middle East who stand to lose everything, yet still have confidence in Christ, the Word made flesh, the Word of God from God, the Light from Light that can never be outshone, the Lord whose Kingdom prevails, on earth as it is in heaven.

Homily for the Feast of Holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, London, December 11 2015

When we hear St John pointing to Jesus and saying He is the Lamb, what comes into our minds is vulnerability, weakness, an innocent on its way to the slaughter. Perhaps we think of springtime, and a new life at its beginning.

To be honest with you, I do not think that was uppermost in John’s mind. Nor do I think that was the imagery that caused such an impact on St Andrew that he left John’s side to be with Jesus instead, convincing his brother Peter to follow Him too.

John the Baptist was a hard, brave, bold and uncompromising man. He came from a priestly family in Jerusalem, but he would have nothing to do with the discredited kingdom of Herod, or the cult in the Temple Herod had built. Instead he went into the desert as an exile, waiting for a true King to enter the Land of Promise, to restore true worship, and to recover for the people a guaranteed means to life in union with God. Thus might heaven’s glory once again be seen on earth, and the Lord beheld dwelling among His people. He went into the desert; he lived on the edge. Those who came to seek him out were other bold men, who shared his longing for the People and the Land to change their ways. Their very existence was a standing rebuke to all: from the foreign King serving the supposedly divine Roman emperor and the spiritually and financially corrupt Temple, to the sinful ways of the people, from the top down. They lived on a knife-edge of being arrested and executed because of their call for everything to change, because of their effrontery in accusing the whole world of sin. In the Temple, sin could be dealt with by a donation, a sacrifice and an action performed. If your sacrifice came from love and desire to return and be near to God, it counted for everything: we remember the stories of the widow’s mite and the tax-collector praying for mercy so well. But if you thought your sacrifice was some kind of transaction with God, a deal, then to these people John shouted, “Stop going through these motions. Stop trying to strike a bargain. You need to change your minds, not just your money. Alter your thinking. Repent. Turn round. Face the way that the Lord is coming to you. He is coming in fire and glory as once before. Turn round and face His Kingdom, because He is bringing the Holy Spirit.”

This talk cost John his life with the authorities; but it was stirring stuff to honest people who, whatever else was going on in the country and throughout the known world, pored over the Scriptures, loved God, believed His promises and hoped for a new day. So Andrew starts to follow John. He sees John take all the people that follow him out across the hills to the Jordan river. He hears him tell everyone that the change they are looking for will involve coming into the Land of Promise all over again. Only then can there be a fresh start, and only then can the change of heart and thinking be permanent. He sees as, one by one, John’s followers step out of the Holy Land into the river through which their forebears once entered it. He sees them immersed in its flow, and he sees them all coming back on a new footing, new as people. He sees that one of the people John has baptised is singled out. John declares Him to be the Lamb of God, come to ”take away the sins of the world.”

To Andrew, this Lamb is not looking vulnerable or sounding uncertain. He does not speak out like John; but here, like John, is a figure of purpose and inner strength, imperturbable on His way. Soon John calls Jesus not only the Lamb of God, but the Son of God. Immediately, Andrew understands. He recalls the story of Abraham, so devoted to the Lord that he is prepared to give up and offer his own Son, to demonstrate his devotion and obedience. But the Lord desires not the death in a sacrifice, but the life and love in its offering. He Himself provides a lamb to stand for this complete oblation of living adoration. Andrew grasps that the Lord, Who once sent a lamb to fulfil an earthly father’s vow to God, now sends His Son to fulfil the heavenly Father’s promise to God’s People. In an instant, Andrew sees that for the sacrifices for sin, the Temple worship, the prayers of repentance, the heartfelt desires for everything to change in the world, the pouring out of hearts in faith, to have any effect, the one to bring them about is not a passive victim, but someone actively in control of all around Him, and of His own destiny.

Yes, He will be wounded. Yes, He will be brought down and weakened. Yes, He is innocent, and the shedding of His blood will take all human life and strength from Him. Yes, it is our sin that will destroy Him. But it is by His strength that He makes Himself vulnerable to us. It is by His innocence that He exhausts and outlasts our offences. It is by His courting and grasping defeat as a victim, that He dares to proceed as victor. It may be that as a Lamb He is led to the slaughter to bring the Kingdom of God about; but He will be none other than the Son of God, the King coming into His reign. No wonder people who lived on the edge, with little to lose and full of hopes that seemed never to be realised, left everything to follow Him.

In the last week, a self-appointed Commission on Religion and Belief has issued a report recommending that Church schools in the United Kingdom be stopped from admitting children on the basis of their families’ religious faith, and that at our civic ceremonies and in all areas of public life, Christianity should give way to other faiths. One of the Commissioners is a retired Anglican bishop who has called for the Koran to be read in Church at the traditional services each year when the judges pray for Divine Wisdom in their momentous task. The other Commissioners have called for religious education in our country to include teaching about secularism and atheism.

Secularist atheists are trying to have it both ways. First, they claim that there is a basic, neutral moral consensus that does not need God; therefore no religion making an exclusive claim to the Truth should claim any privilege in education, or public affairs. Then they say their beliefs should be recognised in education as a religion, since they are free to promote them and gain converts to them like other viewpoints. Yet to Christians it seems that secularism is already everywhere, judging from how we have allowed and encouraged our commercial and business worlds to become mercenary and exploitative, seeing how the materialism of the market replaces the value placed on God and our love of others, especially the poor. Propagating the working assumptions of secularism is also prevalent on TV and Radio, from documentaries to quiz shows. Yet our religious education consensus in this country has been wisely crafted over the last 150 years to ensure young minds receive two things. First is an understanding of the beliefs and values of Christianity as the force that has shaped and defined our entire civilisation; secondly is not the imposition of religion but education about it, borne out of a hard-won history of learning tolerance and reconciliation, so that we can know how to live together with respect and humanity. Yet the countries which have no such tradition of religious education, the places where only one faith, or secularism, or atheism, is imposed, appear now to be incapable of making sense of the world of faith and how important it is to people’s identities, their sense of where and how they belong in the world, and their aspirations. To impose secularism in the hope that it will bring about harmony is a dangerous fantasy, just as much as imposing Islam is in the Middle East, and just as imposing one form of Christianity was in Spain, or Russia, or England in the past.

So, what is needed? St Andrew followed St John the Baptist because he saw all that was wrong in the world and wanted it to change. He turned to follow Christ because he understood that the Kingdom of the Lord would return not by force of arms, or the impositions of authority, but strength of goodness (something we used to call virtue) and out of love, a love so strong and inexhaustible that it could win through and withstand anything, even death itself. As St Paul puts it, “When the day of evil comes, put on the full armour of God, so you can stand your ground, and having done all, still stand.” (Ephesians 6.13)

The way St Andrew saw this was that it was not just matter for him to respond to personally, but a concern that faced the whole of his nation. He observes Jesus as the one to take away the sins of a whole world, and this conviction spread to his brother Peter, then to Philip and then to Nathanael, as we have heard (John 1.35-51). Nathanael recognises Jesus not just as Lamb of God, and Son of God, but also as King of Israel. Jesus replies that this insight gives a vision of how heaven itself comes down to earth all the time, as earth  rises up to go into heaven. This is what we celebrate as the true reality to things in our Liturgy.

So it has to be that we see both the world and our faith in the Lord not as two separate things, keeping faith in God out of one box, and keeping our dealings in the world in a separate one from our religious observances. The Lord is the Lord of all, or he is no Lord at all and all of this is irrelevant. And so, it is for us to say that we do not wish the world merely to tolerate us, or to allow us space. We say, “You must change. You must face the coming of the Kingdom. What you see as a weakling Lamb, a disposable commodity, a sentimental story of adversity overcome, and just the cycle of life, is none other than the Son of God in all His power.

“As, of old, Saint Andrew heard it

by the Galilean lake,
turned from home and toil and kindred,
leaving all for His dear sake;

Jesus calls us from the worship

Of the vain world’s golden store:
From each idol that would keep us,
saying, Christian, love me more.”  C F Alexander

Commission on Religion and Belief Report: No help to pluralism, but surrender to the objectives of organised secularism

I am so dismayed by today's report from the Woolf Institute's Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life. A great deal to digest and clearly some of the reflections and proposals are constructive. But....

I did a hurried first read through this morning. In parts it buys into a liberal-secularist view that religion is private and the public square is neutral. Thus the default is 'no religion' and 'shared values' in which secularism can proselytise with state sanction, behaving like a religion but claiming it's not. But it's inconsistent: "non-faith worldviews" and religious worldviews ought to be studied as alternates - so are they religions or not? If one or each religion should be relativised in the public square and in education, why provide the secular-humanist religion or worldview the position of "working assumption" in all the areas and school subjects from which religion is not allowed to have any bearing? (I write with some experience of working with those who wrote cross-curricular RE resources that cut both ways, so that study of religion - a legal requirement now more important than ever - was not siloed or confined to one denomination).

Then, surprise, surprise: the proposal directed against Catholic schools as if they were divisive, when the history with its aftermath is of Catholics being the ones to be excluded. This will ensure that all children go to schools in which teachers and governors promote secular humanism as the basic position against which to interpret religion. What will be the point of the Church of England's schools having no relation to church worshipping life, or the bringing to bear of its values on wider society through its historic positive task of the formation of young citizens; and, in a worrying repeat of history in which Catholics are once again threatened with the restriction of their liberty to play a full part in civic life and public services, what will be the point of Catholic schools that are prevented from providing education and upbringing for their own children as well as welcoming children of other faiths and none (which they do)?

Perhaps the commissioners would like to add up the purchase price of the Anglican and Catholic bought and owned premises of all the schools receiving state funds for providing education just like any other, and then compute if they can afford to buy the Churches out. No? I thought not.

Three other observations:

1. Once again there's Bishop Harries' hoary old proposal that at traditional civic services, other religions can celebrate elements of their worship in Christian Churches. He earlier proposed that the Koran be read in Bristol Cathedral before the judges' service. I don't see the New Testament being read out in mosques. There's a question of mutual respect and integrity here. It is unacceptable that Islamic claims, which cannot be extricated from the inherent assertion that Islam is senior to Christianity having surpassed it, have a place for public proclamation in churches. The Christians in other parts of the world having their lives and homes, churches, towns, hospitals, schools and monasteries wrested from them would find this incomprehensible.

2. The coronation service with its central rite of anointing is derived from the inaugural rites of the reign of the Byzantine Christian emperor, with other elements derived from the ritual for making a king in ancient Israel. By nature it cannot be an interfaith service: it is a rite of consecration to God after the pattern of Christ the King. By all means have a non-religious inauguration (we already have: it's called an Accession Council followed by Proclamation of the new Sovereign, the day following the demise of the Crown) - we could have swearing in at Westminster Hall too, but why would that need any religious elements? Leave the anointing and crowning to be what it is (incidentally the last of its kind left).

3. Have people forgotten that 5 years ago, Pope Benedict XVI gave two stunning addresses on (a) Christianity and other faiths in their shared responsibility to society to faith leaders at St Mary's University, Twickenham, and (b) the vital need for the mutual conversation and bearing upon each other of faith and reason, religion and society to civil leaders at Westminster Hall? One of the authors of the commission's report, one Rowan Williams, was present as Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, and seemed to welcome it. Yet - unless I am doing an injustice - it does not seem to have been taken into account or cited in the text or appendices. This is a glaring omission as it has been the most high-profile and widely covered treatment of religion in society in the UK in the last decade. Indeed the Pope was saying and magnifying what the Anglican bishops were saying at that moment, and were not being heeded on. Yesterday's news is tomorrow's kindling, it seems.

Finally, I cannot see how the place of people's personal religion and identity, or that of entire large bodies of various kinds of believers, or the rights of secularists or humanists as identifiable minority organised constituencies, are strengthened by the weakening of others. Even if people don't go to Church much, or don't believe in Christ and his sacrifice like they once did in this country, Christianity is the defining shaper of its history and identity for 1500 years at least. Only 60 years ago, Winston Churchill described our "finest hour" as the defence of Christian civilisation against the malevolent forces of pagan and atheist Nazism and Fascism. Now the great and the good want to dismantle everything that once defined us. This will not help Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or non-Anglicans to have a greater stake in civil society: it will hand all the say to the secularist thought police who have been dominating our education system, trades unions and local government institutions for decades, forbidding Christian practice behind the pretence that it 'might offend' someone.

Of course, they haven't addressed at all one of the big problems in England for historically excluded Reformed (the Old Dissent) and Catholics (the Recusants) alike: the constitutional establishment bonding the Crown, the armed forces and the Church of England, in which other churches and religions are not permitted fully to participate. As much as I am in favour of the each one of these in their respective offices severally, this exclusive bond at the heart of the British constitution and society really needs addressing - but who would dare?

Homily on the Seventh Tone Resurrection Hymns, Heavenly Hundreds, the Justice of Christ and the Massacre in Paris, 14/15 November 2015

The Byzantine Divine Liturgy, in the view of many Western people, is ornate and richly complex. In fact, while the prayers are longer than those in the Latin tradition and an obvious difference is the cumulative and insistent effect of the numerous litanies, its basic shape is quite similar to those of the mass of the Latin rite, suggesting a common tradition in the Church’s early days in the Roman Empire. In the core of the service there is even less variation than at a Roman Catholic Mass. The prayers hardly ever vary; the Introit is always the same – The Trisagion which is the response to Psalm 79; the Great Entrance or Offertory is nearly always the Cherubic Hymn, being the refrain to Psalm 23; and set verses from Psalms 22, 56 and 113 are sung every time –  "Save Your people and bless You inheritance"; "Be exalted, O God above the heavens"; "Blessed be the Name of the Lord!" The Scripture readings and the psalms linked to them for the Sunday or Feast are almost all that changes. This is how it developed in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and this is the Liturgy that was shared across the Eastern Roman Empire and up into Eastern Europe, and now across the world.

Except to say that in the ninth century, a monastic renewal flowered in a monastery in the south-western corner of the vast City of Constantinople, the famous Stoudion, or the Studite monastery led by St Theodore, who with his collaborators gathered together all the Christian hymns from the Greek, Syrian, Jerusalem and Sinai desert monasteries and cathedrals they could find, including those of St Romanos the Melodist, St Ephrem Syrus and St John Damascene. They arranged them into great cycles of weekly, daily, festival and seasonal hymns, mostly to add rich variety to the unchanging psalms of the monastic offices, but also so that great Christian poetry could bring out the meaning of the Scriptures and canticles as they reflect upon Christ and teach reveal His power of redemption. Each Sunday, we notice that these hymns are grouped according to one of the eight tones of Byzantine liturgical musical theory. Today we use Tone 7, which is known as the Grave Tone on account of its sweet but sometimes plaintive tone. In the west, for instance, this is the scale used for the gentle melody that opens the Requiem Mass. But in the East, the eight sets of Sunday hymns, are always about the Resurrection; and they glorify Jesus Christ for being risen from the dead and being the conqueror even of our destruction. So it makes no difference if the Tone uses a musical scale that to our modern Western ears sounds major, or minor, subdued, exotic, plaintive or joyful – each mood is a lens through which to view the Resurrection. Each kind of “mood music” thus becomes yet another way for the Resurrection to approach us and make itself understood whatever our disposition, whatever our circumstances, whatever our personality.

So it is no surprise that the main chants for each Sunday, weekday and feast gained popularity among the faithful. They were borrowed from the services of the monks and added to the Divine Liturgy with the highest place of honour in their own right – the very last of the songs to be sung as the priest arrives at the Altar itself. Thus it has been for over a thousand years; thus we have sung them today. It is as if a different way of praising Christ sets us up each Sunday to hear His Word, to behold Him in His Mysteries, to welcome Him in His Temple, to receive Him Who is our God into our human lives - as He once took the flesh that he raised from the dead, and as He will more and more receive us who are humans into His own life, the very life of God the Trinity.

I cannot help but feel that the chants for this Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, a Sunday of the Seventh Tone, are so deeply poignant this weekend, as we pray in shock at the murder of 127 innocent people in Paris, with many other critically injured too, by cowardly members of a psychopathic death-cult pretending to follow God and the path of Islam. At the same time, we remember the millions displaced and degraded by false Muslims across the Middle East, including our own brothers and sisters who have been called upon to give their lives for others and for Christ.

So today’s Troparion speaks of lamentation, but also how the Cross of Christ destroys death.  Once death has done its worst, what is left is mercy, capable of opening the door of Paradise, just like the stone rolled away from the Tomb that shows to the mourners that God’s new reality for humanity has prevailed, and in the midst of lamentation there can be signs of hope and joy.

Likewise, the Kontakion realises that death has no hold over us. Christ too, it says, “went down”; but the collapse shattered the power that drags humanity down, and falls in on top of it.

Then the Theotokion, the hymn to the Mother of God, confronts the fact that, if all that is true, then it is not just something that happened to Jesus in ancient history, nor is it purely something that we have to look forward to after we have ended life here, and passed upon our way: it turns everything inside out now. For Mary is the treasury of Christ’s Resurrection from before she gave birth, through to this very moment and beyond. It was then that she brought us up from the pit, when our Salvation – not an idea or an act but a Person - was born; and it is now that we are saved as she pushes us out, by our own hope, from the depth, towards the Resurrection. And, again, the Resurrection is no mere idea, nor an act, but a Person. So He says to us, as our hope turns toward His voice, “Come forward – come to the Resurrection”.

The Catholic and Orthodox Churches of Ukraine are conscious of a special bond with “those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness”, by those who “insult… and utter every kind of evil word falsely” (Matthew 5), because less than two years ago 130 defenceless, civilian protesters in Kyiv, mostly Christians seeking a peaceful resolution to their society’s problems - and demonstrating for nothing more than you and I in Britain take for granted as our birth-rights of honesty, truth, freedom and democracy - were killed by the forces of a corrupted state. In Ukraine these innocent, brave and hope-filled people are revered as the Heavenly Hundred. So very many of them were Eastern Christians, Catholics and Orthodox, whose spiritual life was constantly animated by the rhythms, hymns and music of the Byzantine tradition of the Church’s worship. Every eight weeks they will have heard the same songs we have sung today and taken them to heart, living with the Cross, with Salvation, with the Resurrection as second nature - the simple truth of what it is to live in this world as in the next, on earth as it is in heaven, in my own skin as if in Christ’s, joyful in Christ’s life because on my own I can do nothing.

And now in France, as in Iraq and Syria, Egypt and Libya - and also as in London ten years ago and New York in 2001 - more people are being robbed of their lives and hopes, by the enemies of righteousness and the Kingdom of Heaven (The Beatitudes, Matthew 5, Third Antiphon). What does our confidence in Christ say to them and to the devastated friends and family who love them, as well as to the fear of the rest of us who wonder what more lies ahead? There is a message that not many will want to hear at the moment, but it is the message that dwelt in the heart of the Heavenly Hundred in Kyiv and richly with our fellow Christian Copts who, on the seashore of Libya moments before their martyrdom, calmly prayed, “Lord, have mercy.” It is the message of our salvation, the message of the Cross, the message of the Resurrection, the message of the Person who is our life, our hope. Here it is in the readings that, providentially, our Church has appointed for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost in uneven years:

"If you want the world to change and for the Kingdom of God to come:

-         Love your enemies and do good. Be children of the Most High who is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6. 35-36)

Why? Because you must never forget, even when you pray for the thorns in the flesh to be taken away:

-         My grace is sufficient for you. For my power is made perfect in weakness. (II Corinthians12. 8-9)

So, "blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. For theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." May this Kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven.

“O Mother of God, all-praised treasury of our Resurrection, we hope in you; bring us from the pit… for you have given birth to our Salvation.”

 

UK 2015 Election I - The real result? Britain is no democracy

"The Scottish Lion has roared" - Alex Salmond (SNP)

"We have a mandate" - George Osborne (Conservative)

 

A Dutch friend has asked me what I make of the result of the election, which has delivered a majority of seats to the Conservative Party, almost entirely composed of MPs returned to Parliament from English constituencies. For good or ill, what follows in this post is my response. The next post contains my convictions on what should be done about it.

Why the result is illegitimate

 

Alex Salmond says that the Scottish Lion has roared. To be precise, half of it roared. The Scottish Nationalist Party won all but three seats in Scotland (56/59), but not all of them were won outright with a 50% majority - the result required for an election or other major decision in a Trades Union, company board, trustee board in a charity, shareholders' meeting, or a membership organisation. Often this is conditional upon the numbers of those voting reaching a minimum proportion of the electorate to begin with. No such requirement applies to UK national or municipal elections. For instance, the institution of the London mayoralty followed an referendum for which the turnout was little more than 10% of the electorate. Yet on the basis of the approval of little more than 5% of the London electorate, a new political system was applied to the capital, and powers transferred from national and borough government, as well as other authorities, with no real mandate. It is not enough to say, "Qui tacet consentire videtur" (if you are silent, you are seen to agree). 50% of votes is outstanding and a deafening message; but it is not a majority, nor is it a mandate to overturn the referendum result on Scottish independence, not does it give the SNP the exclusive voice of people in Scotland. The SNP members of Parliament need to come to terms with how they represent the half of voters who did not support them to promote Scotland's interests or the United Kingdom's. Bear in mind that the SNP's 56 MPs represent 1.45 million voters, which 4.8% of the number who voted across the entire United Kingdom. By contrast, the repellent UK Independence Party 3.87 million votes, yet captured no more than a single seat. Whatever you think of UKIP or the SNP, this is not democracy.

 

George Osborne, seeing that the Conservative Party captured  329 seats in the House of Commons, the majority needed to govern without the support or consent of other parties, said that his party had a mandate from the British electorate. In fact, the Conservative Party received the support of no more than 36.9% of the electors - 11.29 million people, out of an electorate of approximately 45 million, of whom 66% turned out to vote (31.68 million). So the Conservative Party will govern Britain as if it has a democratic mandate from the voting people on the strength of securing a majority of the seats in the House of Commons. It will thus claim full executive powers - the powers of the British Sovereign and control over legislation, without achieving the support of a majority of those voting. Indeed most electors voted against the Conservative party. Thus the Conservative Party has not achieved the mandate it claims, even though it has more votes than the other parties.

Without expressing a view one way or the other on the politics of the different parties, I say that it is not democratic for one party to prevail and thus impose its policy without the support of the majority of those voting, not just across the country as a whole but in each constituency where an individual representative is returned to Parliament. Some members were elected outright with a majority of those voting and they are unquestionably legitimately returned. Others failed to achieve a majority and there should have been a run-off between them and their nearest rival. Without a majority of 50% of the voters behind them, they are not legitimately the representatives of the voters in their constituencies.

Critics of my view will say that, in our first-past-the-post system by which a winner is decided as in a horse race, there is general assent to the outcome and a high turnout of voters indicates positive engagement with and thus support for the present system. After all, they say, a change to the present system was rejected in a recent referendum. Whether or not that assent remains as robust as claimed, the figures demonstrate lack of support, and positive opposition from most of those who have voted. Seeing that in the last two decades under both Labour and Conservative Prime Ministers our armed forces have been deployed in the Mediterranean, Afghanistan and the Middle East to remove anti-democratic regimes in the hope of replacing them with according to various forms of democratic voting systems, Great Britain has little room to lecture the world about democracy for others, when its own system delivers sweeping and unassailable power for the next 5 years to a party that not only failed to achieve even 40% of the vote, but that won control of the House of Commons, and thus sovereign power, without

On this showing, Britain may be democratic; but it is not a democracy. It is a parliamentary monarchy in which the Prime Minister exercises all the powers that the Monarch possesses procedurally; there are elections but they currently do not reflect the will of the people by democratic majority consent. The last time there was government party achieved more than 50% of the votes to mandate its formation of a government was in 1931, when Stanley Baldwin took 55% (it can be done!), 470 of 615 seats, but as part of a National Government of six parties, addressing together the effects of the Great Depression. If Baldwin could do this, there is no need for a modern party to accept the dishonour of securing most of the seats on insufficient votes to justify them.

What was going on in the vote?

After the Scottish independence referendum was won by the unionists, it was the moment the union as we know it was lost. So it has proved, with a sufficient number of Scots rejecting the three unionist parties and their economic and social programmes, as well as the not yet materialised promises for much fuller autonomy for Scotland within the union.

Left-leaning Liberal Democrats, who in 2000 voted against Labour and who would never have taken their protest so far as to vote for the Conservatives, have been punished with annihilation for being in government with the Conservatives (10 Scottish seats in 2010 down to 1 in 2015). At the same time Scottish socialists and social liberals rejected Labour, because (a) they were exasperated by Scottish Labour MPs using their seats to get control of England and forgetting Scotland; and (b) even all the old Scottish Labour seats would never give enough leverage in Westminster to force the new UK Parliament to deliver , without further prevarication, on the promises made before the Referendum to ensure a defeat for the independence lobby. The 2015 election result is thus a massive protest at the Conservatives and Labour and Liberal Democratic parties' failure to sort things out after the referendum.

It seems to me that in Scotland the Scottish Nationalists are a competent party of government after a recent experience of dead hand control from a Labour establishment with a sense of entitlement to rule the major cities and the new Scottish national government. But they have been supported this time not because everyone wants independence, but because Scotland (which has proportionately more MPs in relation to the size of its population than in England) wanted to send a message not about the UK in the context of a shared economic crisis and responses to it, but of its own needs and views. Nowadays these are firmly anti-Conservative. 60 years ago Scotland was majority Conservative.

What happens now?

Here is my prediction. Mr Cameron (incidentally, his name shows he is patrilineally of Scottish descent; we in the UK are really entwined - I am half Irish, half English, and I have Scottish cousinage) is a pragmatist. He will move to ensure that the massive body of SNP members are not a constant sore in the new Parliament. He will give Scotland greater if not full economic autonomy within the UK, a bit like a German Land. It will inevitably mean a similar deal for Wales, Northern Ireland too. This latter will be essential in order to balance the deal for Scotland.

Already the Conservatives are talking about a different focus on the north of England. So we may sooner rather than later get a United Kingdom that ceases to be a unitary state and moves to become a federal union. Expect this major development to be hurried and bodged out of haggling on all sides for short term partisan interests.

On the other hand, there will be steady pressure from the wider Conservative Party MPs to govern without consideration of other interests, on the strength of its unjustified majority of seats. Ruling the UK on an exclusively English power base, to advance the exclusive interests of the Conservative minority will intensify both Scottish convictions that separation is necessary and other parties in England's efforts to qualify Conservative dominance within England. Unless this is handled with extreme tact and diplomacy, it will be the Conservatives who destroy the Union and not the Scottish Nationalists.

The second thing will be a deal between the SNP and Cameron to support a "Yes" vote on the now inevitable referendum on staying in the European Union or not, assuming the Prime Minister gets the deal from the EU Commission (Jean-Claude Juncker)  and other EU nations on reforms that will halt "ever closer union" in the EU, and the reduction in the sovereignty of individual nation members, something which very few in the UK want. We are an island nation and suspicious of continental empires, from Habsburg, to Napoleon, Prussia, the papacy, Hitler, the USSR, the EU and now Putin.

Third, Cameron will press ahead with reform to the boundaries and sizes of voting constituencies in England, which vary considerably and favour towns and cities, and thus Labour. In the last government, the Liberal Democrats prevented this change. If the proposed rules were used yesterday, we would now have a 20+ Conservative majority, rather than 8. This is likely to face considerable opposition from the other parties and in the House of Lords, but it will pass in the Commons and the constitutional convention that nothing specified in the manifesto of a sole party that forms the government in a new Parliament can be prevented by the Upper House. While the reform of constituency sizes to be more even appears to be more democratic, it is only half of what is needed: the other half is the establishment of the principle that no one gets elected without securing the support of 50% of those voting, either the first time round or, as in France, at a run off between the two candidates gaining the greatest support. Sadly, for short-term partisan advantage, I cannot see the Conservatives magnanimously providing this and now Labour has been shocked to discover that it has lost the power base across the UK that first-past-the-post once enabled it to overcome the built-in Conservative majority ensured in England. Had Labour supported a system change instead of assuming it too had a chance at power and a majority of seats without achieving a majority, they would not be so miserable now.

Fourth, I think there will now be gradual movement towards reform of the House of Lords, which is now getting to be as large as when it in theory populated by 1330 hereditary and appointed members. There are now 779 members: 26 bishops; 92 representatives of the hereditary peerage and the rest appointed. We can  expect quite a few more to be thus rewarded having lost their seats at the election.  Cameron wants a largely elected House of Lords, but this will give us even more politicians competing with each other and their parties, instead of embodying the thinking and intentions of the people. So I think Lords Reform will also be bodged for short term political advantage.

But, whatever the quick constitutional reforms effected to respond to the emergency of a Scottish Nationalist landslide, and the collapse of opposition to the Conservatives in England, the huge risk of  is that, even with a federal solution on offer to Scotland, it will have de facto independence. We are kidding ourselves if we think that an almost entirely Nationalist Scotland will not assume its own voice with relation to the EU and other European states. If the SNP is bold, there is nothing to stop it, with such a massive body of representatives for only one party, making a unilateral Declaration of Independence. In fact, Cameron would not resist because to do so would cause permanent English-Scottish enmity. The SNP's hand is thus very strong. With the sheer realism of the potential of such a threat, I do not think the SNP will be able to resist the temptation to press for and stage another independence referendum long ahead of the gap of a generation that everyone assumed just a matter of days ago. Hence my belief that de facto it is the end of the 300 year old union. It will be followed after the Queen has died with a vote for a republic in Scotland; and then will end the union of crowns. The end of the UK will have serious repercussions on the defence of England in more dangerous world, as one occupant of an island with two or even three nation states likely to be constituents of the EU, and its role or entitlement to a role in the UN's Security Council.

If Scotland goes independent, the SNP will have lost its purposes. It will disintegrate into its right wing liberal, socialist, centrist and progressive component parts, at the same time as the Scottish Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative (no longer Unionist) parties re-emerge and evolve, possible merge, in the new context.

This has been something of a revolution. It will go wrong badly if the "old boys" fail to realise that everything, including them, has to change.

With the imbalance of votes and representation, and thus the control of power, that we now have, my worries - apart from the dire social effects of promised economic policies - are primarily three:

1. new powers to the police and security services to monitor, know and control social media and electronic communications
2. the repeal of the Human Rights Act in favour of a more malleable 'British Bill of Rights'; and
3. the further politicisation of the police and the courts - first it was the 'streamlining' and modernisation of the so-called 'justice system' by the creation of HM Courts & Tribunal Service, giving levers of logistical control and operational pressure to a party political Minister of Justice in Whitehall instead of a Lord Chancellor sworn to maintain their pure freedom and independence; then it was elected Police & Crime Commissioners (think Commissioner Gordon from Batman) whose purpose was to deliver control and supervision of police operations and leadership (think The Wire) to a party-sponsored campaigning politician; next, as in Scotland, there will be the demolition of the Peelite principle that the Police Force is none other than the community (polis) policing itself. The pressure from Whitehall will be to take policing further and further away from the community that polices itself and solves its own problems locally, towards a more 'streamlined', 'efficient', 'fit for purpose', 'modern' police managed on regional and national lines, at a scale and level at which the levers of control can more easily be handled by the Home Secretary, representing a party of government unable to command the support of the majority of the electors, but unrestricted because of the preponderant number of parliamentary seats it can secure in the exercise of full executive power. Expect this more national police 'service' to become a gendarmerie - an armed force under the direction of the government.

Next I will post my views on what should be done to recover confidence in our politics.

 

Sermon for the Annual Feast of the Fraternity of Our Lady de Salve Regina, St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge

20 September 2014

In early twenty-first century England we think of the Queen as a person of immense public and international esteem, a lifelong servant of the people, a model and guardian of constitutional democracy, and the embodiment of the rule of law. We are proud that in this kingdom, we are the last on earth to anoint our sovereign, not just crowning her head for the supreme office of just government, but consecrating it, body, mind and soul, to the obedience of Christ and his Kingdom.

When Pope Benedict made his State Visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, in the Palace Yard at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, he paid tribute to our Christian constitution, personified in England and Scotland by Christian monarchs, givers of divine law and holy justice, sinners though they be, continuously for fourteen hundred years. Uniquely among other nations, in Britain the Christian Church has both an official standing and is entwined with the active role and symbolic purpose of the reigning monarch, giving the spiritual dimension not just the opportunity but the expectation to influence our civic discourse and public decisions. In his remarkable address to Parliament in Westminster Hall, Pope Benedict identified the vital importance of the gift we have in our hands in this country. In our common society, the Church people, the people of other religions, politicians and parliament, the worlds of finance and commerce, and the citizens as a whole can rely on the long crafted awareness that each has a rightful part to play and a duty to play its part. He pointed out that here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, faith and reason seen by faith’s light, religion and society can be related to each other, in the knowledge that they cannot do without each other and must remain engaged in a constant dialogue - if we are to make the decisions that answer the deepest questions that human beings face, and if we are to address the malaise in contemporary human living that has broken out in a fevered crisis in public and financial morality that still afflicts us.

In other words, the Church, the Lord’s own people, constantly says to the world’s rulers and hidden wielders of power, “Ecce Homo – Behold the Man.” “Who would you rather be released for you, this Man, or Barabbas?” We the Church are for ever asking the world, “Who is your King?” or, as the psalm puts it, “Who is the King of glory?” Many are the kings and leaders, even church leaders, who have been amazed at their own glory, only to see it slip their grasp because they forgot the reminder of the Franciscan friars who used to precede the Roman Pontiff on processions in the days of pomp, burning flax as they declared, “Sic transit Gloria mundi”; “Thus passes the glory of the world.”

The trouble is that the world has rather been allowed to think of our King as yet another leader whose time was up; thus too the influential public organisation that represents him, his Church. Perhaps it is our own fault for relying too heavily on imagery such as monarchy, because now it does not conjure up the distinct conviction of wide sway, commanding prestige and undeniable moral authority. If we were honest, I suspect even we, when we think of Christ the King and Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, picture a dignified and remote public servant, a constitutional monarch with no powers of their own and always acting on the advice of ministers. If we are even more honest with ourselves, we believe those ministers are us and Christ and His Mother are there, largely speaking, to be persuaded of what we tell them to do, however much we call it prayer.

The fresh-thinking young Australian writer, Matthew Tan has written a remarkable book to explain how we have got into this way of thinking and thus disempowered our own Church on earth. It is called Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, and describes how in the 1960s the Catholic Church at the Vatican Council decided that humanity had so grown up that it could be set free from the claims of the Church, Christ’s kingdom on earth, to rule it. Those who called for this new approach to the world saw it in terms of maturity and freedom, not compulsion, to choose the path of Christ. They assumed that with this spiritual liberty the human choice for God and the blessedness of the Kingdom, to which the Magnificat is a paean and which the Beatitudes map out, would be irresistible.

In the 50 years since, however, human society has opted not for the Kingdom of God but the market. Now instead of the “kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”, all our transactions and relations are determined, not so much by our own selfish preferences, by the demands of the market to capture them. Matthew Tan even says that everything is now relative to it and human society has converted itself into a place, where every idea, value or principle has to pitch for custom and reduced to a matter of ever poorer choices, or what we are prepared to afford for them. He is astonished by how quickly the Christians have bought into this thinking, almost without hope, accepting it as “realism”. So we have the garrulous old Archbishop of Canterbury (a man who bears the distinction of interfering in the affairs of not just one successor but two) calling for the legalisation of euthanasia on the ground of supposed mercy - such a short step from expediency - without any regard in his argument for the absolute binding nature of the revealed truth of God that life is sacred and may not be harmed. I was also surprised to hear Archbishop Justin reported as saying he sometimes doubts the existence of God. Doubtless what he was saying was that he has complete faith in Jesus Christ and it was all taken out of context; but the incident illustrates how we have got ourselves into a position where we have to imagine meeting the thinking of people in the world in terms of packaging a commodity that they will be prepared to buy because it suits their tastes, assumptions and interests on this day if not on that.

Matthew Tan calls time on this: we are not competitors in a market. If the world has taken its freedom from the Kingdom of God and chosen instead the market as the milieu for human society and relations, so be it. But it is a disaster for the world and for humanity: time now to set ourselves up as a completely different way of being human; time now to declare the Church to be an alternative society. Instead of vying in competition, hoping that people will buy our idea in a multitudinous world of options where we are just one of the choices on offer, it is time to say that we alone represent the universe as it is, the created order built on loving relationships, unreserved mutual self-giving, of complete and unreserved sacrifice that alone leads to resurrection and renewal, through the radical power of forgiveness, service and worship. For the created order is not its own end – it is Christ who is its Lord and all else follows from that and falls in place behind it. His existence does not depend on my decision to believe he exists or not, though to hear most people think you would think English people imagine him to be Peter Pan’s tutelary spirit, depending on audience applause for survival.

If we think of Christ and His Mother as kindly European-style monarchs benevolently overseeing everything, hoping it will all turn out nicely in the end, and not getting too much involved, then nothing will change, and there is no point in our being Christian or worshipping in church; that would be just to meet our own emotional needs and calling the spiritual because they looked religious. Instead, we bear in mind centrally what St Paul told us in his letter to the Ephesians, that Christ fills the universe, and he intends us all to come to the full knowledge of faith in him, to reach such a true maturity in him that we reach his own stature.

So I cannot see why we say to people that we have doubts about whether God and his vision of heaven for us really exists. The question that faces us is this: “Do you believe that Christ is Lord of the universe, of everything that there is, or do you not?” If you do, then there are consequences and it truly does mean a transformation of our proclamation of what the Church is, why we have been made to belong to it – to reach our true human maturity – and how it is to be the true pattern for civil society founded on the sacrificial love of Christ, and the very endless living of the Trinity of three persons in one God.

It is in this universe that Our Lady of the Salve Regina stands as the Queen who is in power. She is no constitutional monarch, acting on the advice of ministers, merely benign towards our pleas and prayers, influential upon us and others only in so far as we can press her to be reactive to our interests, thus ever being conformed by us to our world. Instead, the hearer of prayers is effectual, the worker of change in individuals, and whole movements in society’s truest manifestation – the People of God – in a universe of which Christ rules, the Lord who is to be heard and obeyed, and whom our states, our civil societies and our market must likewise in the end come to obey.

This may be a “vale of tears” and “exile” for humanity according to this understanding, but it is not exile from God or his Kingdom; nor is it beyond the reach of his sovereign work. The Salve Regina declares our faith that a Queen has been appointed the advocate of this humanity as it is truly intended to be - an advocate who will turn the attention of all on the Lord of that Kingdom. Pope Benedict told us prophetically that our society is well placed to have the conversation in which faith illuminates our world, so that its kingdoms will be the Kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ. If all of us in the Church who are the People of God were to reject the falsely “realistic” barking at us in the market and to exist in and for the “Kingdom not of this world”, the “most gracious advocate” sustains our attention on what people are truly for and why nothing other than Christ is all that is to be said of the entirety of humanity and human living.