Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2025

Tessa Bosworth comes to Westminster Abbey to be installed as a Minor Canon.  The Abbey community gathers, family and friends are here.  We rejoice.  It is a service that falls on Battle of Britain Sunday, so there were medals, ribbons and stars and a fly past this morning - a Lancaster bomber.  Surely, the day could hardly be more auspicious, it could hardly be grander, or more dramatic.  Yet the lectionary, our set cycle of bible readings has served up a surprise.  It gave us the beginning of the Book of Ezra.  We were taken back more than two thousand five hundred years.  Cyrus the Persian has passed through the blue tiled gates of Babylon in triumph.  There was a prophecy that he would cast a shadow over Asia.  The moment has come.  He is a good man, but he knows his worth.

I am Cyrus, king of all, the great king, the mighty king… king of the four corners of the earth.

The beginning of the book of Ezra is all trumpets and drums.  This great king frees captive Israel; from beside the waters of Babylon they can finally go home.  And, better still, they can rebuild their Temple and restore their worship.  So todays’ reading tells us,

Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: … rebuild the house of the LORD, the God of Israel…  Ezra 1:2-3 

When I was installed as Dean, the lectionary told the congregation they would need to learn meekness and patience.  When Tessa arrives, newly responsible for the worship of this house, suddenly we are going to rebuild the house of the Lord.  Never mind a fly-past, today there should be timbrels and dances, elephants and flights of angels.  Tessa Bosworth comes to Westminster and we rebuild the house of the Lord.

There was, of course, another reading tonight, from John’s gospel.  Put the two readings together and there is something interesting going on.  In the second reading, from John, Jesus was in Jerusalem, teaching in the Temple.  His teaching was challenging, provocative even and his enemies want him silenced.  But, we were told,

they tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come. John 7:30 

In the Book of Ezra we were in an opportune time, the right moment and God’s righteousness and glory was being worked out before our eyes.  Cyrus could act.  In John’s gospel it is not the right time.  Jesus’ hour has not yet come, we are not ready for Judas and the pieces of silver, nor for the denial of Peter and the cockcrow, we are not ready for darkness at noon.  There is a big, biblical idea here and it is called Kairos.   Kairos is a particular time, the right time. 

You see there is time in general, the relentless, meaningless drumbeat of stuff happening.  There is that kind of time, that goes tick tock, tick tock, without any plot, and does not stop. Historians, at their conferences,  call it ‘one damn thing after another’.  There is tick tock, tick tock, and then there is Kairos.  Kairos is the kind of time when you can feel a story moving around you.  It is a time to think about beginnings and endings, about things making sense and coming to a conclusion.  Kairos is a moment of significance.  Kairos is when time has a meaning.  Your birthday might be a little moment of Kairos.  A coronation is Kairos.  Cyrus the king decreeing that the Temple should be rebuilt is definitely Kairos, so is the crucifixion and so is Easter.  Tuck that away please, Kairos, the moment of significance, the moment we begin to see where we came from and where we are going.  We ae not done with Kairos and Kairos is very definitely not done with us.

But let us turn to Tessa for a moment.  Tessa comes to the West Minster.  She comes from St Paul’s, the East Minster.  So, she comes to us from a diocese and its cathedral.  She comes to us from Cheapside, Stationers’ Hall, and Bread Street, from the world of trade and craft, the world of business and commerce.  Ministry has a time, there for a while, here for a time, it also has a place.  The gospel is for everyone, everywhere and forever, but ministry is all about speaking to these people in this place, now.  Ministry must find a language that fits a time and a place.  Tessa comes out of the deep civic and diocesan loyalties to the east.  St Paul’s was fashioned for a kingdom of east Saxons and shaped by the city around it.  Now she is in the collegiate church of St Peter in Westminster, a royal peculiar, a house of memory, a shrine, a place of coronation, a church of nations and Commonwealth.

It is London still.  She is pleased about that, she thinks of herself as a Londoner, a woman of the city accustomed to the push and pull, the opinion and argument, the rubbing elbows.  When she applied, she told us she is a team worker.  Everyone says that.  Most clergy are actually pirate kings and queens, they believe in teams, they just think it is everyone else.  Tessa though meant what she said.  Her priesthood is self-aware, she is not tempted to get in the way.  She is a musician, a liturgist, she has a background on books and reading.  She makes connections, works in different registers.   We are pleased she is here.  We are enjoying her company.

And she is here to live amongst different loyalties on this holy ground, the crown and the nations, the Commonwealth, the memory that this place holds.  She will choose her words a little differently.  She comes with her voice, but she will use our language and she will help us refine that language.  She is here to choose her words, our words, carefully.  In this place, in our time.

And then there is that business of Kairos, the time when the spirit stirs and we can remember our beginnings and have a sense of an ending.  As Tessa’s ministry begins, we must have an eye to Kairos time.  We must think about beginnings and endings.  The beginnings and endings are actually easy.  In the Abbey, it all begins in God and it ends in God.  From God we came, to God we go.  You cannot understand the Abbey unless you understand that we know this is the gift of God and understand that everything it is and everything it does is given back to God in thanksgiving.   If you find any glory in Westminster Abbey it is glory given by and offered back in praise. 

Put simply God is holy and God is love.  This God exists in glory and what glory does is demand a response.  When you see glory. you acknowledge it.  So, God is glory and we glorify God.  It is that simple.  To know God is to worship God.  Tessa has come here to share in that responsibility.  She is here to lead and shape our worship.  She is here to glorify the God of glory.  Ask her about the Abbey and her life here after the service.  I hope she is happy.  I know she is busy.  She will perhaps tell you about the pace of life here the churn of events and special services, the steady pulse of morning and evening prayer and daily eucharists.  But, she knows that the point of the place is not being busy.  The point is glorifying the God of glory.  That is what all of this is for.  All our activity, all our words, all our energy should tend towards worship and praise.  We are in Kairos time when the Abby shoes us glory and we offer it back.

It is a privilege to share that responsibility with Tessa.  It is a delight to have her company.  She knows that worship is not an activity, it is a school.  She knows worship is never a performance, instead it how we are formed.  Here is glory shaping us for glory.  And that is how you rebuild the Temple of the Lord.