Sermon preached at Evensong on the feast of the Dedication of Westminster Abbey 2025

So, we gather here. The London Mayors come to Westminster Abbey. We are not meeting at a Palace Garden Party, where courtesies are exchanged and we find our place in the hierarchies of nation and city. We are not at the Albert Hall for performance, to wave flags and parade loyalties. We are not even in the broad, serene space of St Paul’s to breathe civic air. We are here, in the medieval Abbey, where the walls are cluttered and clustered with memorial. 

This is narrow, restless, animated space. This wonderful building embraces you, holds you in place. It has things to say, a point to make, then a riposte, and then a rejoinder to the riposte. It is busy with opinion and argument. The Abbey trails its patched and darned coat before us. Just over there David Garrick, the darling of Drury Lane, parts the curtains to take a final bow. And, to my right, those old foes Gladstone and Disraeli refuse, forever, to catch the other’s eye. Pitt the Elder stands in the full flow of speech. And then, over there, are other Londoners Chaucer and Johnson buried but not silenced, William Blake, born in Soho, died in the Strand, gazes out in a terrifying sculpture by Epstein. We have London’s politics here and London’s imagination. It is whispering to us now. It speaks of London, our great city. What shall we say about it? What city is this?

If you have read, or even just started, Peter Ackroyd’s big and brilliant book London the Biography, you will know there are no end of ways to talk about London. In the seventeenth century, the surgeon, William Harvey thought the city was like a body and that the fire engines spouted water like blood from an artery. Daniel Defoe agreed—London the body that ‘circulates all, exports all, and at last pays for all’. Is that right? The body of London? What shall we say about this city? What city is this?

In the rocks beneath us though. are fossils that tell us this was once, fifty million years ago, all this was sea. Not streets and stations, buses and buildings, but restless water. Shelley and others have called London a sea ‘full of gusts, fearful-dangerous shelves and rocks’. London sea? Is that right? What shall we say about this city? What city is this?

Just a few days ago I was on leave and looking at a picture I had never seen before. It called itself The coronation procession of Edward VI. It was a big image with the Thames in the background and then crowded London streets. Galleries were shown, put up so crowds could better see. A huge procession people on foot, people on horses, leaving a slightly dainty looking Tower of London. A lot of the action was on Cheapside with goldsmiths’ shops and a lot of London hustle and bustle. It was grand and it was dramatic. There were hundreds or even thousands in this procession, outfits and uniforms, it was brash and it was loud. We have, most of us, just seen a coronation and a procession. We know about this; we know the look and feel of it. The King, in London, on his way to Westminster Abbey. 

Except, in fact we don’t. There was more to see in that picture of Edward VI riding to the Abbey. More than the Tower and Cheapside and liverymen and the distant Thames. There had another story running that day in 1547. The people there knew that. They knew they were watching the King riding into Jerusalem. This was, after all, history and destiny and the day the Lord had made. This was God’s doing, this was a glimpse of heaven. This was truth and holiness and providence. We don’t have time in a sermon, but there are books and sermons and even pictures where Edward VI is one of the great kings of Israel and in which he rides into Jerusalem holy city. That is what they thought they were doing. What shall we say about this city? What city is this? This, they said, is Jerusalem.

So, I was looking at a picture of the story we have just heard read. It is the moment Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem and the crowds come in their colour and their noise. This is the day in which the present turns into the future. That wild, hopeful day in Jerusalem the crowd were swept away with a new ambition. They knew what they expected, they were waiting for the one who would drive out the Romans and restore the Kingdom to God’s faithful people. It was a madcap day in a difficult and divided city. Jerusalem was a city where you took sides and knew who you hated. It might be Herod the puppet king or it might be the Roman Governor, it might be one of the sects—The Pharisees perhaps, or the Sadducees. It might be the rich, it might be the poor. Whoever it was, you hated them. There was loathing and violence on the streets. A divided, angry, and suspicious stew. These people looked to the future, but they only wanted their future, the one in they did well and got they wanted. What shall we say about this city? What city is this? Selfish, ambitious, greedy.

And that is why we suddenly hear the sound of a man weeping. It is Christ, with tears on his face for this sorry, bitter, ruptured city. Only in Luke’s gospel do we hear this—and it is shocking, amid all the cheering, Jesus suddenly weeps

when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it

He weeps and grieves over the fact that this city, Jerusalem, is not at peace,

If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace

It was irony. You see the name of this city, Jerusalem, has a meaning. The word Jerusalem means city of peace. Jesus weeps because that peace left on a desert road shaking its head long ago. Jesus wept because the city is not what the city should be. What shall we say about this city? What city is this? It is a lie. It is fake.

I am preaching to Mayors. I am preaching to the first citizens of city and borough. I am preaching in Westminster Abbey where the very walls whisper to us the old story of the holy city where we gather in joy and thanksgiving. It is the job of the abbey to speak if nation and city and what they might. It is our job here to dream and hope and proclaim the city of God. Mayors it is your job too to hope for the city. It is your job to and mine to say that it does not need to be division and hate. It does not need to be a lie. What shall we say about this city? What city is this?

There are so many versions of city. There is—all too evident—the life of a city that threw wide the gates to Jesus on his donkey—the bitter, divided city with the private ambitions and the public hatreds. There are imagined cities that look like a body or a sea, the stories we can tell, the pictures in our heads. And then there is the steady graft you put in, in conversations and committees. In all those days of Any Other Business and Matters Arising, in civic occasions and the extraordinary visits of the Mayoral year in which you see the charities and volunteer groups, the schools and clubs that keep rebuilding the communities as quickly as they fall apart. All that effort to inch closer to living within our hope. What shall we say about this city? What city is this? What city do you see? Can we, and will we, keep speaking of it and keep working towards it?

On behalf of this great city of London, on behalf of the community in this Abbey church, I thank you for your service to the common good and—above all—for your belief in city and citizenship. I ask you here, in Westminster Abbey, to think about what city you believe in, what city you hope to see? Can you see the glory and the hope that is at the heart of the Abbey’s faith, in which heaven itself is a city, a place of people and their conversation, the place of lives lived up close, but suddenly and forever at peace, in deep peace? Can you see that? Can you believe that? It is not a trick of imagination and it is not a daydream. It is the slow business of daily grace and God’s gift working out our hope. That is what will bring us, at last to that city.

And then, at last, Jesus will weep no more.