Ascension Sunday (Peter Howarth)

Ephesians 4:1-16  - The Stories that Shaped Us

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to SGTM Talks. We hope you find this encouraging and inspiring.

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So our reading this morning is from the book of Ephesians, and it's chapter four, verses one to sixteen. Paul is writing to his little church in Ephesus in what's now South Turkey. As a prisoner for the Lord, then I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient, be bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But to each one of us, grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. That's why it says, when he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people. What does he ascended mean except that he also descended to the lower earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all heavens in order to fill the whole universe. So Christ Himself gave the apostles and the prophets and the evangelists and the pastors and teachers to equip his people for works of service, so the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching, and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. A wise pastor once said to me on learning I was getting married, make friends with your fiancé's past. Make friends with your fiancé's past. When you get serious about something and about someone, you know you're making something new together. You're in love. Being in love repairs past hurts. It gives you that sense there could be a whole new way to be. It makes you feel as happy as you were when you were a child. And so naturally, new lovers want to be together all the time to make that new world between themselves. And naturally, your friends complain that they never see you anymore. The wisdom of my pastor, though, is to keep is to know that to keep growing in this love, you don't just need to get to know the person better, you need to know what made them them. You need to make friends with what made your beloved. You meet the school friends, you meet the family, of course. But it's great also to go to the places that made them, hear the stories, understand the family ways of doing things. You're making something new between you, of course you are, but the you comes with a background. You know, we're all a package deal, we're all a package deal. So you need to look at the baby photos, because the love that's being in pushed into that baby through the arms of mum and dad and auntie Sue and what have you is now being passed on to you 25, 30, 40, 50 years later. And you need to look at the passport photos because the migration journeys and the issue of where do I belong and what does success look like, all of that is already in the texture of your relationship. Make friends with your fiancé's past. The same is true of your church. You need to make friends with your church's past. Because in a church, too, you might well have experienced a kind of love you haven't before, a way of life that seems to make new sense, nicer kinds of people than you generally meet on the street. But if you're serious, you also need to make friends with your church's past. Now you may know that we're about to enter a major rebuild over the next um uh few years, and um for a portion of that time um we're gonna have to not be in here while they replace this ceiling, and then they're gonna do lots and lots more. But before we get to that bit, we've got our APCM on uh Sunday um the 20th, uh the 3rd of June, excuse me, Sunday, the 3rd of June. And that's where you'll be able to look at the full plans that the architects have and make your comments and and do do this. Is this where we gather together and say, okay, this is what we want to do in the future. But in order to get a sense of where the future is and what would be a good way to go, you need to have a stronger sense of of the past, what this what made this church. So I want you this morning to tell you some family stories. Some family stories about the people who have left their mark on this building and how I think they're shaping who we are here and now. And then, as you know, Jamie's been giving three manifesto sermons in on Ephesians. Um, and I want to continue that um with by looking at the fourth chapter of Ephesians. Ephesians is a chapter, is this is a letter which is all about God's plan to bring everything back together. Great. Chapters one to three are what God has done. God has made peace through Christ, a new way for people to live. Chapter four to six is all about how that cashes out, how that's how that means, what it means for us and between us. To be Christians, we're to be people of peace. Simon, under the talk slides, um, can you find the the first slide? Um should be a uh a picture of um, there we are, there we are, Queen Square. I'm coming to that picture in a moment. The first thing I'd like you to do is to turn away from the screen and lean back and look up. The ceiling you're looking at right now is by the famous architect, Nicholas Hawksmore, who was commissioned to build and beautify many London churches in the 1700s because London was changing. After the end of the English Civil War, prosperity was returning. London's domination as the centre of shipping insurance made it the place for foreign trade, and it had the world's best navy to protect it. Nevertheless, some of the money coming into the cities was all mixed up with exploitation and extraction through the East India Company and the slaveholding colonies of the Americas. Two of the East India Company's governors, Sir Strencham Master and Elihu Yale, they'd been governors of the company at Fort St. George in Madras. They now chose to come back to London as wealthy men, and they settled in the grand new houses in Queen's Square. It looks extraordinary, doesn't it? You can see St. George's is here, and you can actually see that it's open at the top end. That's Hampstead, the hills of it, because the top end of Queen Square has not yet been built. When they came to the nice new houses, they and the other wealthy residents clubbed together to build a chapel of ease in one corner. Fairly small and simple building for worship, so that families and invalids and children didn't have to walk a couple of miles down to St. Andrew's Church in Hoburn. The good news, this is the beginning of our church. The bad news. Some of the money given for it is probably derived from backhand deals involving traffic in forced labour. Because I'm afraid that's how the East India Company paid its governors then. The company took a slave-owning model from Barbados and reapplied it to Sumatra, and some of that traffic probably would have come through Fort St. George, and the governor would have collected some taxes on it. Slavery in British colonies would not be formally outlawed until 1838, 120 years later. And a good deal of that was also because of the actions of British Christians, including Zachary McCauley, who lived at number 48 Great Ormond Street, and is buried in St. George's Gardens, one of the original group of Christian abolitionists, and also Thomas Denman, who lived at number 4 Great Old Gloucester Street, and was the Attorney General of the 1830s, who finally hammered the nail into the coffin of slavery in Jamaica and the Caribbean. So good and bad. But to go back in time a little bit, by the 1720s, Great Ormond Street, Red Lion Square, Russell Square, they're being built up. More of them look like this. There are more people in the area. The little chapel needs an upgrade. And in 1723, Nicholas Hawkesmoor is paid to redo the ceiling. The ceiling. And also we think the font, and certainly somebody in his workshop, maybe even Grindling Gibbons, doing the Ten Commandments there. The church at this point originally faces that way, and the altar is there, and there's a door where there currently is, and there was a door there which has now been blocked up, but we have plans to reopen it. Okay. This is the moment that St. George's becomes a parish church, and that's quite a serious step. When you become a parish, you are responsible for the spiritual welfare of everyone in the area. All the marriages, all the baptisms, all the funerals come through the church. And you're also responsible for the education of children and the relief of suffering and illness. If you're a parish, you have the responsibility to organize charity and care for the sick, because it's the 1700s and there's no unemployment benefits and no NHS. Being a parish is also a theological statement. It says, we are the local church for everyone. It's different from being a Baptist or a Methodist or other churches that don't use parishes. It's a way of saying, wherever you are, in whatever state you're in, you are in reach. You are close to a church. God is not far away. But that also means responsibilities. So Hawkesmoor's grand ceiling here says this is now a serious church. It's his favourite circle in a square motif, which traditionally represents eternity in the circle, going round and round and round, within the four corners of the earth. It's a symbol of the being of God Himself, who is eternal, within the space and time of God's own creation, including human affairs. Hawkesmore's revamped building is spacious, taller, and full of light. It has got um it is for speaking and for hearing, for learning and for teaching. It's built with galleries round the side. It looks a little bit like a theatre inside. It's all about a church for the public. And with that came St. George's School, meeting where the Sunday school are right now. There's a school in the vestry and then in various houses nearby. And I say this just because taking care of kids is part of the package deal for this church. It's been that way since 1709. It's part of, it's not only in Sunday school, but in the parish school itself, St. George the Martyr, in Toddler Group, in Cheese Toasty Fridays, all of it. Whatever we do in the future, we have to look after all our local children. Quick plug: we're going to need a new governor for the school come September. Art Sue has been a faithful governor, but her term is up. If you care about children and would like to be a part of that, please come and talk to me afterwards. The second thing I'd like you to see, could we see the next slide, please, Simon? You may have noticed this during a moment of distraction in a service. The little plaque to James South, Memorial to Captain South and the chimney sweeps from 1830s. Fast forward a hundred years from this ceiling, Bloomsbury has changed. It's fully built up, but it's also a little bit of a failure, you might be surprised to hear. The developers wanted grand squares and posh people, and the posh people had come for a bit, but then the idea caught on and they built Kensington and Belgravia and other awful places like that. So the real money went west. And people had started to move out. But that hadn't mean that the demand had kept going up. The British Museum and the British Library is the world's internet, so everybody wants to come here, and there's university college, so people want to come and study. So instead of grand families, what you get are students and scholars and publishers, and the big houses are split up and made into bedsits and flats, as most of them still are today. And meanwhile, poorer and cheaper streets have been built to fill in all the gaps between them. Now, all those houses had to be coal heated, and to keep the smoke flowing, those chimneys had to be cleaned. And the quickest ways, easiest way to do that was get a sweep to sort it. But sweeps use children. Children sold or apprenticed to them by very poor families wanting one fewer mouth to feed. Yeah, we'll take care of it. Yeah, give us that that's fine, we'll take care of it. They were given no education, they weren't in St. George's school, and they were given little love. They were considered ragged, filthy, and dangerous. Street kids is what we'd now call them. Now the records show that from the 1820s, St. George's was involved in a campaign to make the use of child chimney sweeps illegal. But despite numerous acts of parliament, it just kept happening because it was just too convenient and it was cheaper. You've got a dirty problem. The sweep comes along and says, I'll fix it for you. And it's not your worry how he does that. So it keeps happening and it keeps happening and it keeps happening. Captain South gave a thousand pounds in shares to fund a Christmas dinner for sweeps. Now that sounds like fairly inadequate compensation. Here you are, lads, have one day a year with a decent meal and then back up your chimneys. But in fact, it was rather more than that. If we look at the next slide, Simon, I've dug out his will from this is from the National Archives. And in that will, completely illegible, it specifies not only the dinner, but you have to advertise it. You have to put adverts in the papers. Well, that's not for the climbing boys, because they can't read. That can only be because South wants this to be a publicity event. People, he wants people to see the children who are invisibly cleaning for them, and see them in public, and see them eating and be shamed. We know that the fun grew and grew over the next 30 years until Shaftesbury's bill banned Child Sweeps forever. So I suspect people went to this church, had thought twice about how their chimneys were being cleaned. I think it's an early example of social campaigning by getting people to change what they buy. Just in the same way as you might refuse to buy fast fashion or factory farmed meat. But that still has repercussions now because we're still burning things to heat our buildings, and as the birthday balloon from last week tells us, what goes up does not go away. We are still filling the skies with carbon. Global warming is creating chronic instability in the lives of what you might call the invisible poor. Families in marginal areas where floods and droughts mean they lose crops. Simon, could we next see the next slide? This slide is from a UNICEF report from 2019 about why global warming hits the poor hardest. And it's a little girl in Bangladesh walking in a flood to go to school. When we take off this ceiling and repair it and put it back, we're not just putting it back as it was, we're going to put some insulation in, proper insulation, and we're going to net zero the windows as well. And that means we can have a heat pump system, which means we don't need to keep burning things in order to keep this church warm. It's a tiny thing, I know it's a tiny thing, but as James South would have wanted, it is our part in not destroying the environment and actually in helping kids get back to school. Now I mentioned the chimney sweeps dinners. We have a record of those chimney sweeps dinners. It's from a lady called Louisa Twining. Could I have the next slide, please? There she is. That's her in old age in 1906. Louisa Twining was a daughter of the large Twining T family, and she came to live in the parish in 1860. And she said, this is what she said in her autobiography. Using sweeps used to make my heart ache with sad stories that haunted me, and in which it is marvellous that humane people so long acquiesced uncomplainingly. That these poor little creatures, truly our black slaves, were pitted, at least by some, is shown by a circumstance in my old parish of St. George the Martyr, where a Kai Nolan habitant, Captain South, bequeathed a sum of £800, the interest to be expended in providing an annual dinner to 100 climbing boys. And they used to meet at the church to hear an address from the rector. In 1860, some master sweeps claimed the money back. But the master of the rolls decided it was to be given to an application of the vestry for new schools. So the money went into St. George's School. By that time, the fund had risen to £1,500. A daughter of a rector remembers the scene well. Oh, the overpowering odour of soot, the clamour, the ill behaviour of the poor boys, and the vain efforts of the church wardens to control them. The children were not nice because the children were neglected. But it's the neglected ones where the need is greatest. South and the hapless church wardens were trying to counteract the parish church's temptation to do nice sounding things for nice people only. Real parish work includes the rawcous and the rough-edged. And Louisa Twining knew this. She was a really remarkable woman. She used to visit the homes of poor families in the parish, and from that she realized just how bad life really was. And then she used some twining money and twining contacts to do something about it. The new poor laws of the 1830s created the workhouse system so that if you ran out of money, you had to go and stay in the workhouse where you would receive board and lodging for labour. Twining visited the work, St. George's was given a workhouse on Mount Pleasant, the place where currently the homeless hostel still is. And she was horrified because she saw there the destitute and the old and the mad and the alcoholic and the children all lumped together, and the children especially given nothing. So she set up a thing called the Workhouse Visiting Society, organizing care and education and entertainment. And it was a publicity too, publicizing how awful these workhouses were, semi-prisons, and campaigning that they had to go. She had a large house just on the other side of the square, opposite the church, and she used the top floor of her large house as a kind of mini-convalescent ward for poor women who taking time to get better, free food, free care, free nursing. Nursing also from with help from her friend Florence Lees, who is commemorated in Mauriti's wonderful research over there. With her friend, the then rector of St. George's, John Back, she saw so many people addicted to drink that she organized a temperance society, or what we'd now call an addiction support group. Friends who would keep each other out of trouble and out of loneliness. Over the next slide, Simon. This building, you might have seen it, that's the front of Great Ormond Street Hospital through the alleyway. This is the alleyway, it's called Barbon Close. If you live in Tyball's estate, you know where this is. That building was originally built by John Back as St George's Community Hall. It had a roof, a pointy roof then that disappeared in the wall. It was built as a community hall and a cafe where people working in the workshops and garages behind it on the site of what's now Babington Court and Chancellor's Court, where they could get coffee and not have to go into the pub. Temperance feels like a work word from the past, but addiction is still very much with us. And why I'm glad we are putting on the recovery course. Now, Twining and Back's work in this parish is part of a great work of Christian social reform in the 1860s and 1870s. People were waking up to the fact that their prosperous, liberal, capitalist society really depended on a large underclass of exploited poor people at home and abroad. And it's the problem that became especially visible in the centres of old cities where rich and poor were side by side. In 1850, the Christian socialist F. D. Morris, who lived in Queen's Square, founded the Working Men's College, the first cross-class college of higher education on Great Ormond Street, where teachers included Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the fair trade designer William Morris, who had a shop on Queen Square. Could we have the next slide, please, Simon? Yeah, there's the there's there there's what was the Working Men's College. Very briefly, you'll be pleased to know the children had moved out of the school, which meant the vestry was free, and the Working Men's College used our vestry as their gym. They used it for exercise. Louisa Twining campaigned to set up a companion working women's college, which also had its first headquarters on Queen Square. Well, Twining's friend Florence Lees, that I've mentioned on Mauritia's board, was a pioneering nurse and she invented the idea of the community health visitor, nursing coming to you, nursing at home. She brought that into circulation and she tested some of its ideas in the parish. Now, these initiatives, led by strong women, have left a physical mark on our church too. John Back rebuilt St. George's Church next door's school next door because the number of children was growing, fuelled by immigration from Sicily, and he commissioned local architect Samuel Tulon to reorder St. George's again. Turning it round 90 degrees, giving it choir stalls, hadn't had a choir before because they wanted the worship to be something special, and putting in bigger windows and in these distinctive shapes. We're still researching why Tulon altered as he did. But we think he may have wanted to back bring into a classical style building the style of the old Romanesque churches and monasteries of North Germany. We know he'd been on a tour of North Germany. Those are the churches that are built about a thousand years ago, as centres of worship rather than war. Places of hospitality for travellers, places of cultural education, places of care for the old and the sick. His building remodel, we know, comes at the very same time that St. George's is actually trying to do a social remodel of the parish to make sure if you live here that you're not subject to the things that plague Victorian society in quite the same way. In common with many Christian churches of the time, St. George's is beginning to recognise the Victorian society, the most advanced civilization in the world, had become a monster. Industrialized, aggressive, stratified. A world where your productivity and your income and your gender set your value. Now that realization that it begins the rise of Anglo-Catholic churches in London and also evangelical missions. Both of them want to offer what theologian Stanley Howerwas has called the Church as Contrast Society. The Church as Contrast Society. The Church is not that just there to represent what is, it's there to be different. Different from the griminess of the streets, different from the indifference of the shops, different from what's on offer from politicians or from newspapers or social media looking for shock and attention. Howwas wrote a book at the time that Ronald Reagan came to power on the church as contrast society. Not fundamentally based, he says, different, not fundamentally based on individual rights, not fundamentally based on technocratic fixes, fundamentally different because changing the quality of people's relationships. The first task of the church, he says, is not to supply theories of government legitimacy or even to suggest strategies for social betterment. Strategies is the key word. The first task of the church is to exhibit in our common life the kind of community possible when trust, not fear, rules our lives. That trust, that faith, is rooted in what Christ has done for us. In Ephesians 4, Paul says this. Could we have the next slide, Simon? There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. Christians are united by being Christ's body. They are united not in a temporary alliance or a uniform mobile army. They are his way of continuing to be in the world. And continuing to be in the world and bring it back to God, who is over all and through all and in all. That's really important. We're bringing people back to the ground of their own being. We're not converting them to a cult. We're not separating them off. If God is over all and in all and through all, then you are bringing people back to what's already there. But all of that only comes because we have an authentic, loving, trusting relation to ourselves and to each other through Christ. From him, the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work. Grows. Grows not measured in numbers, but in love. Growing into the reality of the God who is love in his being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But if the living church is always growing, then it's always changing. There have been many ways to be loving in the parish that we are in, and St. George's has had to change many times to do it. Change because society's changed, changes too because of our own capacity. And to say we are the body of Christ is to admit that we are a body with wounds. Thursday this week was Ascension Day when we celebrate Jesus ascending to heaven, still with the scars of the nails on his hands and his feet. Ascension means God is not an indifferent God. He is the God who came in Jesus and whose wounds are taken back into the heart of God's heaven. In the 20th century, St. George's was a wounded church. It fell into decline because the parish did. Parts of it were a slum. Many people moved out to the suburbs. The country de-Christianized. In the war, the parish was bombed very hard. And this church building drifted into neglect. The windows were blown in and the roof was half off. It was declared a dangerous building. And there was even a council plan to demolish it. We almost had a church over a new church in on what's now the ITN building on Greys Inn Road. But Rector Mercer Wilson found the energy to organise with the help of Great Ormond Street and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and many other kind people. And he fundraised. And the church got its last major refit in 1953 when the electrics were repaired and the slates put back on, and this stained glass put back in honour of St. George. As a symbol of international reconciliation after the war, that window was put in by kind donations from churches dedicated to St. George all around the world. One of them was the Church of St. George in Barbados. Barbadian Christians, descendants of those colonized by the East India Company, helped us repair our church. What kindness, what forgiveness lie in that glass? Remember that when you see a St. George's flag. Your shopping is unaffordable, a secure home is out of reach. You know this. There are gangs taking over empty high streets, an addiction county lines follow in their wake. Opportunities are unavailable. Every second social media post tells you you're being scammed. People are anxious and they're not seeing leadership that makes them feel secure. They certainly see chaos merchants who profit from disruption. Now that climate of great anxiety has been reflected in the elections this week, but in truth it's been going on since 2008 and the crash and long before that. Social scientists call it the polycrisis. And at the heart of it is a profound distrust. And distrust is the opposite of faith. In a complacent society, churches can be radical by asking people to wake up. That's what James South did, that's what Louisa Twining was doing. Wake up, see the struggle around you, do something about it. But in a turbulent society, churches can be radical by being stable, radiating trust, faithfulness, comfort, steadfastness, and indifference to panic, a holding fast to what is good. And they do that through worship. Because our Eucharist, this and every Sunday for the last 320 years, has been, among other things, an act of trust making. Think about what we've just done and what we will do. We ask for forgiveness where we've broken faith with God and our neighbours. Soon we'll make the sign of the peace that Jesus brings between us, a commitment to live in peace. In bread and wine, we remember how God has not left us, but given himself to us, faithful unto death. And in this and in all our prayers, we ask him to work in us and between us to make us faithful people for a world of mistrust. And then we talk and we drink coffee and we reconnect and we hear stories and we swap phone numbers and we undo the isolation of the screens and their simulated emotions, and we pray for each other sometimes, and we touch base with reality. Call it trust, call it attachments, call it relationships. This is the stuff that human beings are made for and which we cannot live without. Christian faith is an intervention in your relationships, because it's those relationships that are your motive for living. The physical features of this building are only a sign of the countless faith-filled relationships that have made it week by week, year on year. That's why we need to rebuild, to preserve physically what is living in this church, and to make that relational, community, trust-making network in the parish stronger and wider and bigger again. So I'd like now to turn to prayer for the church and the parish and the world and ourselves within it. The prayers this morning are for Ascension Day, and they reflect the incredible truth that Jesus has risen to take our pains and our needs to God, and that Jesus prays for us. We don't only pray to him, but he is praying to us, to the Father. So when I say Lord hear us, will you say Lord graciously hear us? Lord Jesus Christ, great high priest, living forever to intercede for us. Pray for your church, your broken body in the world. Bring reconciliation, we pray. Between denominations. Bring strong leadership, particularly, we pray for Archbishop Sarah. Bring unity and cooperation in all the parishes and churches in this area and grant us faith and hope and love and money as we begin our rebuild in this parish. Lord, hear us. Lord, graciously hear us. Jesus Christ, King of righteousness, you are enthroned at the right hand of the Majesty on high. Pray for the world. Make it subject to your gentle rule. We pray for our nation. For the turmoil in government at the moment. We pray for the terrible standoffs and pressure points in Ukraine and Russia. In Iran, in Sudan. In Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Raise up people of peace, we pray. People made and communities made in your image. Lord hear us. Lord graciously hear us. Lord Jesus Christ, you draw humanity into the life of God. So pray for your brothers and sisters in need. Pray for those in the hospitals around us. Praying especially for John and Barbara. John had a major surgery in the national hospital this week and is facing a life a different life in the future. We pray for those who are lonely and those who struggle with their mental health. Lord hear us. Lord graciously hear us. Lord Jesus, you bring us to glory through your death and resurrection. Surround with your saints and angels those who have died trusting your promises. Lord, you see in our hearts the memory of someone we know who died in your faith. And at this time we think especially of Violet Mary Hall. Lord hear us. Lord graciously hear us. Lord Jesus, you ascended far above the heavens and filled the universe. Pray for us who receive the gifts you give us. Help us to hear what you call us to be. And give us the gifts that take us from the service of division to the service of trust. Lord, hear us. Lord graciously hear us. Lord Jesus Christ, keep your church in the unity of the Spirit and in the bond of peace, and bring the whole created order to worship at your feet. For you are alive and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

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