Advent Sunday: anniversary of the Cathedral's Consecration in 1991 'Singing and walking about in patterns'

Advent Sunday brings in a new Church Year. This year it also marks a significant anniversary in the life of our cathedral - and other anniversaries too that fall on this date.

It was on 30th November 1991 that the Cathedral was consecrated at a great service after the reordering and the new west end was completed - led by its then Provost David Stancliffe, who is with us today with Sarah. So Advent 1991 marked a new beginning in the life of this cathedral. By 1992, however, David had been stolen away to the Diocese of Salisbury, and was to be consecrated as Bishop - on November 30th in 1992.

Advent Sunday today is also the 25th anniversary of the first publication of Common Worship in the year 2000 – the orders of service that are widely used across the Church of England and that we use in this and many other services here. And perhaps it is no surprise to know that David Stancliffe was Chair of the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission which put together the whole range of Common Worship services.

Sparing his blushes, suffice it to say that Bishop David has helped the Church of England as well as this cathedral to understand why worshipping together matters so much to our formation as Christian people. For Christianity is not just about what we believe in private or whether we say our prayers, or about our personal moral values – there is a dimension to our Common Worship which shapes us and forms us as Christians.

In 2003 Bishop David produced a book with the title God’s Pattern. It begins by recounting an observation made by a small child of about four year old who was watching a service from a cathedral on television. This four-year old came out with something very strange and very profound. The child said, ‘Now I know why the churches are true.

The people in them enjoy singing and walking about in patterns.’

Well we still do plenty of singing and walking about in patterns here. Servers and ministers, choir and congregation, making your way here, finding a place, then singing and listening as others are moving, turning, processing, reading; then getting out of your seat, if you can to listen to the Gospel reading, saying the Creed together, and of course coming forward for communion. To walk about in patterns represents what we do when we try to follow Jesus. It represents our response to the call of Jesus: ‘Come, follow me…’, as St Andrew did – (we will keep his day tomorrow though it actually falls today).

Growing in the Christian faith means taking on a pattern of life: a pattern of prayer, a pattern of believing, and trusting and learning to respond to the world about us with faith, hope and charity. What we do in Church each Sunday is an expression of that commitment.

As Advent brings in a new Church year, it shows how this theme of ‘pattern’ orders our time - through the year and through life itself, with seasons and festivals, fasting and feasting, repentance and celebration.

‘Advent tells us Christ is near, Christmas tells us Christ is here…’ as an old hymn for children used to go. The Church year follows the life of Christ and encourages us to realise the part we can play in God’s purposes.

We encounter God in worship each time we open the scriptures and break and share bread. No encounter with the living God leaves us unchanged – one of Bishop David’s key principles, looking back to the disciples who found themselves in the company of Christ on the road to Emmaus - and found their hearts burning within them. The whole Church of England has been helped to recognise how we encounter God in worship: each opening of the scriptures, each breaking of the bread has the potential to set our hearts burning within us.

Advent is a time for new beginnings. The pattern begins again to reshape us as we recall God’s promises, as we remember to watch and wait for God’s presence. We relearn how to look for glimpses of God’s glory beyond what we try to predict or plan for ourselves. We express our longing for justice, our concern for our troubled world and its future, our recognition that we don’t have all the answers and our hope that the God of surprises will surprise us once again.

From today for the whole of this church year, the Sunday gospel readings at the Eucharist will be from St Matthew. Matthew is the gospel writer who most often uses phrases like ‘this took place in order to fulfil what was written in the scriptures’. He gives us the strongest sense that God’s interaction with the world through Jesus is being patterned: first the prophecy, then its fulfilment; first the promise, then the reality. As God promised and foretold through the patriarchs and prophets, so God brings his purposes to fulfilment through Christ; through Christ, and through us also, who are his brothers and sisters. But we must be alert and ready, the Gospel tells us, ‘for the Son of Man is coming at an hour we do not expect.’ Now being ready for the unexpected sounds like a bit of a contradiction, a contrast to learning to live in patterns. But as we know from good habits, it is the patient shaping of ourselves over time which enables us to respond to the unexpected.

The passage we heard from Paul’s letter to the Romans and which forms the basis of today’s Collect had an unexpected but decisive part in the conversion of one of the Church’s greatest theologians and philosophers, Augustine of Hippo. Having agonised about what he believed for years, he happened to overhear the voice of a child calling out in a nearby garden the Latin words ‘Tolle, lege, tolle lege’ – ‘‘Take it and read it’. And he picked up once more the copy of the scriptures he had laid aside - to find, as he read this passage, that his heart now burned within him and he recognised Jesus for the first time as the Word truly made flesh. The pattern made human. Flesh neither selfish or indulgent, but loving, forgiving and with the vulnerabilty both of Bethlehem and Golgotha.

So in Advent, we wait, shaped by prayer and scripture, by the space here and stillness too and by singing and walking about in patterns… This cathedral has shaped many lives as a house of prayer, where many find instruction in the law of the Lord and learn to walk in the his paths. From the most recently-completed West End, to the oldest and historic East End here, this whole Cathedral symbolises a journey of faith that points us forward into God’s future for each one of us. In the words of the 1991 Consecration service: ‘Thanking God for the past, enjoying him in the present, trusting in his grace for all that lies ahead, we go from here into the world as living witnesses to his dwelling among us in Christ.’

This Advent, once again, we rededicate ourselves in this place, to the sovereign God, to whom this Cathedral was consecrated and set apart: ‘the universal Lord of the ages, who draws all time into his hands, all people into his embrace, and reigns through all eternity.’