A Tale of Two Deans

For me it seems to have been a month for re-discovering old truths. That’s because many of the Lectionary readings in September have taken us to the Epistle of James; a letter all about putting our faith into practice.

I used one of these texts at the first evening service of the new session and it made such an impression on me that I reworked the material for the following week’s All Age service entitling it ‘Walk the Talk’.  A week later I listened to a sermon from James on the website of Washington Cathedral.  The preacher was Dr Francis Wade, the Cathedral’s Interim Dean, (he’s my first Dean!) whose sermons I have grown to appreciate more and more.  He made the point that sometimes we only really discover our faith as we put it into practice.  Now I have to confess it’s taken me about a fortnight to digest this sermon; it needed some thinking through.

I was brought up on the idea that ‘faith came by hearing’, and that conversion is essentially a personal turning to Christ – I still believe that.  Yet over the years I’ve realised, as Dr Wade suggested from the Canterbury Pulpit in Washington Cathedral, that it’s been in the ‘living out’ of this Christian life that I’ve discovered so much more about the depth and meaning of faith.  There has to be a time when all the talking about what we believe is simply put into practice.

It’s often said that politicians campaign in poetry yet govern in prose.  That is it’s one thing to make a promise in a manifesto and quite another to keep it in government.  It’s tough, in any walk of life, to incarnate our ideals.  Yet when we try I suspect experience changes and deepens those aspirations.  I think it’s the same with faith.

I might sit in a housegroup and discuss the command to ‘turn the other cheek’ but I’ll only know what I really believe about that as I live it out in the daily challenge of a relationship.  In that process my understanding of Christ’s injunction will almost certainly change and deepen.

Nowhere more has that been the case than in the Cathedral community at Coventry.  When St Michael’s Cathedral was bombed on 14^th November 1940 Dean Howard’s first reaction towards those who had brought about such destruction was ‘Father Forgive’ (Dean Howard is my second Dean). Those words, uttered in the middle of a war, were initially neither popular nor understood.  Yet this was faith being put into practice, being deepened and even re-defined in the light of experience.  Today these words of Christ from the cross, uttered by the Dean the day after the Coventry Blitz are inscribed on the altar which stands as a permanent memorial to peace in the ruins of the old Coventry Cathedral.  What’s more ‘peace-making’ has been at the centre of the new St Michael’s life for the last sixty years.

So I’m grateful for James’ exhortation to put faith into practice – to live it out and discover more about it in the ‘doing’. 

For three friends at South Street this will be exactly the case this coming Sunday morning as they come for Christian Baptism.  We send to Les, Jacqui and Phil our prayerful best wishes as they prepare for the joy and challenge of this sacrament.

With best wishes,

 

ian