County Service
St Mary’s, Lutterworth, 13 October 2013
“Never pay back evil for evil. Let your aims be such as all count honourable.”
It is, as always a great privilege to be invited to preach at the County Service, and especially
so in one of the historic parish churches of Leicestershire. John Wycliffe was parish priest
here for ten years before his death in 1384 shortly after saying mass in this church. He would
probably have felt at home on an occasion like this. He entered the politics of his day with his
great work De civili domino – concerning the power of the state. In it he discussed the ideas
by which a good parliament was governed, and argued passionately for the Church to give up
its worldly power. That power of course was exercised in pre Reformation times by the Pope.
So unsurprisingly Wycliffe’s strong and powerfully expressed views got him into trouble with
the Curia and he was accused of blasphemy, scandal, pride and heresy. But his life’s work
continued, repeatedly getting him into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities. Indeed he
would have wished to replace the bishops with poor priests, living in poverty and preaching
the Gospel to the people. This is not a precedent which I hope the present incumbent
proposes to follow! In spite of Wycliffe’s troubled and tested public life his great gift to the
Church has been of course the first full translation of the New Testament into English –
leading to the accusation of his opponents: “The jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the
laity”.
Wycliffe lived in an age of intense debate and struggle about the nature of faith and about the
place of the Church in public life. 43 years after his death he was declared a heretic, his body
was exhumed and his remains destroyed. Yet the arguments and debates of his lifetime were
to continue for 3 centuries, and the echoes of them can still be heard in some of the
discussions about the disposal of Richard III’s remains in our day.
We too live in times of rapid, unpredictable change. Indeed the new Archbishop put it more
strongly than that when he said to the General Synod in July: “We live in a time of many
revolutions in this country”. “The economic context and position of our country has changed
dramatically. With all parties committed to austerity for the foreseeable future, we have to
recognise that the profound challenges of social need, food banks, credit unions, gross
differentiation of income, pressure on all forms of State provision and spending. All these are
here to stay.”
And he spoke too of a cultural and political revolution, describing the overwhelming votes in
Parliament on the Equal Marriage Bill as a “massive change in our cultural hinterland”.
We are all too familiar with this speed and scale of change being faced now by every level of
government local and national; by every public institution, by every sector of commercial and
industrial life, by our voluntary organisations and faith communities. We feel carried along on
a flood tide where personal and organisational survival occupies all our energy and vision,
and the space to ask larger questions or to see the longer term is constantly eroded.
But surely an historic parish church and a county gathering which brings together our civic
leadership offers a moment to face those larger questions: so that these occasions can be a
proper celebration of an emerging vision for the common good of the people of our county. St
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Paul in the letter to the Christian Churches in Rome takes up that question of the common
good. He writes to communities under persecution living at the very heart of the Roman
Empire. He exhorts them to show the wider community what the good society looks like – to
practise hospitality, to contribute to the needs of the poor, to avoid unnecessary conflict and
above all, he writes, “Let your aims be such as all count honourable”. Paul assumes that
phrase means something – that he is writing to those who would understand the concept of
honour: of virtuous living: of a clear distinction between what is legal and what is right. And
he recognised too that in the wider society of Roman imperial values no such agreed
standards of virtue existed. There could be no understanding of a just society at the heart of
an empire governed by extreme shows of force and where the penalty for being a dissident
was crucifixion. So Paul sets before his readers a prospectus for practical living as the
outworking in their daily lives of their faith in Jesus Christ. He doesn’t advocate rebellion or
sedition, far from it, but he is specific about the standards required of those who would model
communities of human flourishing under pressure.
It raises for us the questions – what would the good society look like under the pressure of
our times? What kind of community do we want to live in? Do we have no choice but to
accept the increasing alienation and isolation of the elderly by marketised care services?
Must we face another winter of extreme testing of our hospitals’ emergency services? Do we
want to live indefinitely in a community where hundreds are dependent of food parcels every
day? Where those on benefits will have to choose between heating and eating this winter?
Where hundreds of destitute and near starving asylum seekers attend the premises of
churches and temples for food and shelter?
All of us would earnestly wish that these things were not so. All of us would want to be part of
a world in which the poorest and most vulnerable experience enough support and resource to
make independent living possible.
Yet these and many other questions are the daily diet of many of you in local government and
the public sector They are a challenge to ensure that increasing collaboration continues
between the NHS and local government; between city and county and indeed between all
who have the well being of our citizens at heart. They are practical questions for Parliament
now as the Social Care Bill and the Banking Standards Bill make their way through the House
of Lords this week.
And in spite of these challenges, we have so much to thank God for. Our freedoms, our
public services, our schools – so brilliantly represented by Lutterworth College and
Lutterworth High School and John Wycliffe Primary School today – give us profound hope for
the future in spite of today’s challenges.
But above all, this great church and this occasion act as reminders of where our true hope for
the future lies. It lies in the embodiment of Christ-shaped love as a practical political
expression of what the good society looks like. John Wycliffe would have recognised that as
the whole purpose of the encounter between Church and State and that it provides the
ultimate answer to all the follies and false trails of our day. It is essentially good news for all
of us – good news for the rich and the poor, for the homeless and the drug addicts, for the
religious and the sceptical.
My hope and prayer Madam Chairman is that it will be good news for you and four our county
in the year ahead.
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