Isaiah 44:6-8

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

This morning’s service is a celebration for sure, a celebration for me of twenty years as Vicar of the Isle of Dogs and nearly four decades of Christian ministry. But I don’t want it to stop at that, I want it to be a celebration just as much of you and the communities you represent in Hertfordshire, in Birmingham, In East London and Berlin, and the contexts where your faith is active in higher education, in industry and in the armed forces. It has been an honour to serve God alongside you in all these places and contexts - to have been the Church together with you, and to see God’s kingdom come, more and more.

Today’s readings are all about waiting, it seems to me, what we do and what happens while we wait, wait for the kingdom of God to be revealed. That has always been an issue for me. Pinned to my wall in the Vicarage here, for the last twenty years, often taken down and thought about, has been a prayer based on a passage in the Old Testament book of Habbukuk.

The vision will be fulfilled

in its own time.

If it seems slow in coming,

wait for it,

for it will surely come.

And as we await,

may all things work together for good,

may we be blessed

with wisdom and discernment

determination and patience,

may we take the time

to grow in grace

day by day. Amen

For the Gospel this morning we have heard Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, the valuable harvest and the weeds that threaten it. It’s in the nature of parables to be a bit black and white. Here Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God coming as a positive experience for the blessed, but it being muddled up with other experiences which are negative, sinful and frustrating. The two carry on, side by side, in God’s way of working, until the very end, when the righteous get rewarded and the unrighteous are removed and destroyed. It’s very binary, like Jesus’s other parable of the sheep and the goats, but it does the job Jesus sets out to do, to explain the great mystery of freewill, that God doesn’t force us to be righteous. It has to be a choice we make. We will live alongside other people in this life who have made a different choice, and we will have to make the best of it and wait until the end of the story for God to sort it all out.

St Paul’s take on waiting is more nuanced, and more interesting. For him the waiting is the frustrating experience of every scrap of God’s creation from the beginning of time. It’s not that the good comes good and the bad goes bad, but everything is put on hold, and doesn’t make sense, until the final piece of the puzzle falls into place, and the children of God, the Kingdom of God, in other words, is revealed and becomes a reality. In the meantime, while we wait for the kingdom to come, there is so much to do. For the parish priest there isn’t just the care of people’s souls to concentrate on, there’s administration and safeguarding, there’s finances, buildings to care for, projects to drive forward, schools to oversee, hospital visits to do, weddings and funerals to take. The list goes on and on, and none of it is bad, most of it is good and positive. When you do it well, still more stuff is lobbed into the mix by people who care just as much as you do about God’s Kingdom coming, and that’s positive too, but  it is overwhelming. St Paul talks about us groaning, and that’s probably fair, we are not always as patient as we should be, but it isn’t just us that’s groaning - this is a shared experience of a busy world, with intractable puzzles to cope with of poverty, warfare and inequality. What will make the difference ultimately is the shaping of a new reality, a new community of hope. That’s what the Church is, in my experience, and I’ve been proud to have played my part in building, and defending that hope.

Where did it begin? For me the first moment of religious experience I can put my finger on was my reaction to the death of my father when I was eight. It was the summer , and I was staying with my grandparents. When I heard the news I went and sat in a den I had built in the garden and acted out a funeral for my father. My sense that God was a personal force in my life came when I was eleven and I was being prepared for confirmation. At that point I could sense that what the priest teaching the class was doing was what God wanted me to do in his time. I am deeply grateful for wise guides through my life like that priest Fr. Paul Lyons, my choirmaster Anthony Burns Cox and later my training incumbent Clifford Offer. And I’m grateful to Durham where I did my first degree. Durham allowed my sense of vocation to develop and introduced me to Sue, my wife, who has been so important in this ministry. I could not have done it without her.

In the summer of 1989 I was ordained in St Alban’s Abbey, and went to Hitchin for five years of curacy. It was a time of gradually coming to know other people’s families inside and outside through funerals, weddings and baptisms. It was also a time when we celebrated 1200 years of Christianity in the town, and I led a crew of volunteers to put on an exhibition that filled the church. So much of what I do now, I have done since then. Our son Henry was born in Hitchin.If you are here from Hitchin, thank you for starting my development as a priest.

We moved to Birmingham where I was a university chaplain and then parish priest of St Paul’s in the  Jewellery Quarter, and industrial missioner to the Jewellery industry, in all its fascinating detail. If you listen to me speak you’ll often hear me referring to my ‘last parish’ even though I’m talking about twenty years ago now. It’s a bit of a bad habit. Forgive me. St Paul’s was a beautiful church, set in a large Georgian square. The church and the community seemed to respond to love and care, and we did so much there together, saving the timbers of the church from dry rot, installing a ring of bells in the tower, entering and winning Britain in Bloom, year after year. Our daughter Emily was born in Birmingham. If you are here from Birmingham, thank you for helping me discover what it means to lead a church and a parish.

On the way from Birmingham to London I got involved in ministry to the Armed Forces, and though I gave this up in 2024, I revelled in the opportunities it gave. It wasn’t just the ships and the travel, though both were good, but the chance to serve alongside a completely different bunch of people from those in parish life. Young, professional, developing in their civilian and military careers. Naval chaplaincy gave me the opportunity to direct and facilitate other people’s ministry as the senior reservist chaplain nationally. If you are here as one of my ship mates, thank you, it has been an honour to serve alongside you.

And then finally to the Isle of Dogs where we have been as a family and where I have been as Vicar for almost, almost exactly twenty years. These were  turbulent years, of highs and lows, first the low of the financial crisis and the continuing war in Afghanistan, then the high of the Olympics in East London, then the very British crisis of Brexit and then the international shared experience of the COVID pandemic. During this time we have faithfully kept up the Parish’s drumbeat of worship, pastoral care, summer and winter social events, good governance, Christian adult education, church music and involvement in St Luke’s Primary School. At the same time we have built St Luke’s church in Millwall, laid a new floor and resurfaced the old one at Christ Church, replaced its inadequate lighting, swapped pews for stackable chairs and finally introduced a proper AV system without spoiling the church’s good looks. I think the most important thing we have done is to construct an environment where everyone feels that they can play their part, children, young people, adults and older people. Though the numbers in church have dropped from time to time, we are now growing steadily as a church family. Throughout the years my office door has been open, and I’ve chatted with visitors from all over the world who have gravitated to Christ Church. This openness is also reflected in the make-up of the congregation, with so many languages and cultures represented at every service. If you are here from Christ Church or from St Luke’s or from the wider Isle of Dogs community I want to say thank you for helping me to use my accumulated skills and experience to lead you and serve you. I’m also deeply grateful, and so should you be, for the very able leadership team that will carefully and skillfully guide you through the vacancy to the point where you have a new priest. One last thought from me on that process. It was not an accident that I came here. I believe it was God’s plan. If God provided for you once like that, I think it’s reasonable to assume that he will do the same again this time. May God bless you all, and again, thank you for letting me be your parish priest for these last twenty years. Amen