Sermon by the Bishop of Gloucester at the Royal Society of St George
Service in Gloucester Cathedral on 23 April 2014
In the year 1095 the first crusade was preached by Peter the Hermit, a priest of
Amiens, with the result that Robert Duke of Normandy, who lies buried in this
cathedral, his effigy in the south ambulatory aisle (though once in front of the high
altar), led off the flower of the English and Norman chivalry to deliver Jerusalem
from the Saracens. It was at the first Battle of Doryloeum on 1 July 1097 that the
Crusaders, being hard pressed by the Saracens, saw visions of St Demetrius and St
George, “hastily approaching from the mountainous districts hurling darts against the
enemy”.
One of the knights there in the Holy Land was Baron William Belet, the vassal of the
Count of Eu. Returning home safely after the Crusade, Belet recorded the rescue by
Demetrius and George in a tympanum, a fine carving, over the entrance to his parish
church at Fordington, then a village, now part of the county town of Dorchester in
Dorset, a church dedicated to St George. It is the church in which I was baptised and
I walked in and out of that church as a boy hundreds of times and quite often I
noticed St George, rescuing the crusaders from the infidels, as they would have put
it. My affection for our nation’s patron saint goes back to those days.
George, of course, is a Christian martyr. We may, in the interests of historical
veracity, have to sit light to stories of maidens and dragons, but there is every reason
to believe that he suffered, as a genuine martyr, at Lydda (in modern Israel) before
the time of Constantine and perhaps during the persecution of the emperor
Diocletian, which started in the year 303. Like Demetrius, with whom his name was
often linked, as in the story of the Battle of Doryloeum, the strong tradition is that
he was a Roman soldier who died for his new-found faith in Jesus Christ.
George was a Christian. The Crusaders, of course, were Christians. They responded
to a call to defend the land of the Lord’s birth from the Saracens. Their motives may
have been very mixed (it is nearly always so in war), but, whatever drove them, they
went as Christians. The Saracens - who were they? The word Saracen was in
medieval times almost synonymous with Muslim. The Crusaders went to fight the
Muslims. The Muslims were, as far as the Christians were concerned, the “infidels”,
literally “the ones without faith”. Of course, if you were a Saracen, a Muslim, the
Christians were the infidels. They were the ones without faith. And you might be
surprised to know that just as Islam has a place for Jesus and for his mother Mary, so
also it has a place for George. In Islamic hagiography, George is given the honoured
title of “prophet”.
Now here is an extraordinary thing! Our multi-cultural England has as its patron
saint a Christian martyr George, honoured as a prophet by Muslims, who came into
prominence in English life and legend through the stories of returning crusaders,
eight hundred years after his death, after battles between Christians and Muslims,
each of whom regarded the other as an infidel. History is never straightforward and
we tend to suppress the parts of the story that do not suit our purposes.
The contemporary question is of course whether 21st century England is a Christian
country. Mr Cameron, more willing “to do God” than those around Mr Blair, though
Mr Blair himself certainly does God, has entered the fray of late and found himself in
trouble this week from a number of key figures in the liberal establishment for
speaking of England as a Christian country. Well is it? Well yes and no! It’s a huge
subject and I only want to make a small contribution tonight, leaving much of the
question still in the air for you to reflect on at other times. But, given that bit of
history I have shared, it is a really good question, perhaps a rather important one,
for St George’s Day?
Clearly this nation has a Christian heritage. The majority of our great historical
buildings are Christian houses of prayer; this one of them. Our legislation, though
our laws may deviate today from traditional Christian teaching, is clearly shaped by
the Christian tradition, albeit that the Christian tradition is itself shaped by the
Hebrew, the Jewish, scriptures. Much of our art is Christian. The majority of our
people, almost 70%, call themselves Christians. Our whole society emerges from a
Christian culture.
We are also said to have Christian values, sometimes distinctive Christian values. I’m
always a bit suspicious of that, for the values that I take seriously, and which for me
seems to emerge from the Christian faith, are values I see in other faiths and in
people of no faith. In fact I often admire people of no faith for the values and indeed
the moral principles that shape their lives, without a religious framework, in a way
that sometimes seems to put people of faith to shame. For me, among the values
that I treasure most, are love for neighbour, sometimes even love for enemy,
inclusion, reconciliation, sacrifice, humility, respect. For me these all relate to
Christian faith. But I suspect a Muslim finds them, or something very similar, in his or
her faith, a Jew in theirs, a Hindu in theirs, a man or woman without faith in their
philosophy of life. I think it is wonderful that we share these values. Despite all the
negative things in our culture, here are good shared values and I give thanks for them
and for the fact that for me they have come as part of a Christian inheritance and
faith.
Faith - now there’s a word! Remember how the Crusaders and the Saracens, the
Christians and the Muslims, regarded each other as the people without faith. It is
faith, not values, that the secularists want to banish from our national life and
discourse. But faith is what made this a Christian nation and it is faith that sustains us
today.
It is, of course, a nonsense to say that all faiths are the same. Each faith has come on
a different journey from its origins to the present day. Each has its own language
about reality. Each has its own distinctiveness. But what all the great religious
traditions have in common is a sense of the divine, of truth, of beauty, of reality, and
a belief that members of the human race are spiritual beings who can explore that
sense of the divine and be shaped and enriched by it. The three great Abraham
religions, with their common roots - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - can go
further together and acknowledge that at the heart of all things there is One whom
we call God. For them this sense of the divine leads them into personal relationship
with this One whom they call God, One who is the source of their life and makes
moral demands of them. Faith like that, shared across religious traditions, is a very
precious thing, and it is what separates people of faith from those who can make no
sense of that. Keeping faith like that alive in our society is, in my view, vital for the
health of the nation, the spiritual health of the nation, because it shapes both our
understanding of what it means to be a human being and also our picture of what
this world of ours is called to be.
Of course faith does not come easily to all. Their intellectual reasoning does not get
them there. Their experience of life with its traumas and setbacks can make faith
impossibly difficult. In our contemporary society we should not want faith, any faith,
to be imposed on people. But what we should want, and be willing to defend, is a
place for faith, an honouring of faith, an expectation that faith may play a part in
shaping our changing culture. Faith must not be pushed to the margins or entirely
privatised. It is part of our public life and discourse.
It is, of course, ironic that it was to Henry the Eighth that the Pope gave the title fidei
defensor, fid def or even f d on our coinage. Do you remember how some years ago
the Prince of Wales stirred up a little trouble when he declared that, when the time
comes, he would like to be “defender of faiths”, plural, rather “defender of the
faith”? I think he got it half right. Fidei defensor is better translated “defender of faith”
than “defender of the faith” now that we live in a multi-cultural society. But it isn’t
only the sovereign who needs to be the defender of faith. We need to look to all in
positions of power and influence, whether they be church-going Anglicans or
agnostic Jews or indeed Muslim clerics to be defenders of faith, defenders of the
place of faith in the public square.
But nobody can very profitably be a follower of an amorphous amalgam of faiths. In
the end we have to choose to which faith to attach our allegiance, which faith to
explore with commitment, which set of teachings to help shape our lives. For
George that faith was the Christian faith. He gave his allegiance to Jesus Christ. He
witnessed powerfully to that allegiance to the point of martyrdom, dying for his faith
in the resurrection, that central tenet of Christianity that we are celebrating this
week. He died believing the claim of Jesus to be “the resurrection and the life”. He
believed there would be an eternal life for him in heaven among a great company of
saints. He witnessed to it more powerfully by his martyr’s death than did the
Crusaders with their desire to exterminate those other men of faith, the Saracens.
For me, as a Christian priest, faith means following Jesus Christ. I see Jesus as the
clue to the character of God. Through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus I
am given a window into the nature of a God of welcome, compassion, forgiveness
and love. For me Easter celebrates a beautiful and powerful truth that I want to
shape my life and my attitudes. I deeply respect those whose understanding of God
comes by a different route. I honour those who live creative and unselfish lives
without the gift, if gift it be, of faith. But here in a Christian church as a Christian
priest celebrating the feast of a Christian saint I need to share with you my
understanding of faith, like George our martyr patron saint. Not just my values, but
my faith.
Each of needs to share our faith sensitively, with respect for other views. Each of us,
if we live with religious certainty of one kind or another, need to be humble in
offering our view point and equally humble in listening to what others say to us.
There needs to be a little of the doubting Thomas of the Easter story in each one of
us, recognising that doubt is not the opposite of faith, but an element of it and a part
of a process to reach it. But it is faith, in all its variety, faith exploratory, tentative or
firm, that we need as a nation, faith in something more than ourselves.
On this feast of St George, who followed Jesus Christ through death in the hope of
resurrection, a martyr for Christians, a prophet for Muslims, a defender of faith in a
land where people labelled one another as infidels, let us work for an England where
faith in public life has a secure place. Whatever our own personal convictions, let
each one of us be defenders of faith.
+Michael Gloucestr: