The Bishop gave an address at the St Alban’s Cathedral Dedication Service.

900th Anniversary and Dedication of the Martyrs
St Albans Abbey

As the city of Verulamium in the valley below us decayed the curtain fell on Roman Britain. Much was forgotten, but such is the power of martyrdom that the story of Alban is one of the very few memories to be communicated from beyond the veil to us in the 21st century.

As the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral sings “the blood of thy martyrs and saints shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places”. The memory of Alban the martyr was potent enough to inspire the building a great church here and a new hope was fashioned out of the debris of a ruined Empire. 900 years ago in 1115, in the 12th century renaissance, in the mediaeval warm period when temperatures were on average 2 degrees higher than they are now, this great shrine for the martyr was consecrated. My predecessor, also Richard was present. He was the first Richard to be Bishop of London. I am Richard XV. Martyr in Greek means a witness and for Christians a martyr is a witness to what Christ is like, which of course to be convincing must speak in contemporary terms to successive generations.

The hallowing of these representations of seven martyrs whose stories are still eloquent is a very appropriate way to celebrate your 900th anniversary. There are countless empty niches up and down the country yearning to be similarly filled. Hats off to the skill of Rory Young, the generosity of Richard and Canon Susan Walduck and everyone who has been involved in bringing this project to a triumphant conclusion.

The three 20th century martyrs Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant cover the ecumenical spectrum just at a time when Britain is moving into the new possibilities of a post denominational future. The example of Oscar Romero has been especially significant in my own life since his murder took place in 1980 shortly before Robert Runcie, former Bishop of St Albans was enthroned at Canterbury. As his chaplain at the time, I remember what a sobering and inspiring impact the Archbishop’s martyrdom had as Bishop Robert prepared for his ministry in the place where Thomas Becket also fell a martyr to politically motivated violence.

But perhaps the most eloquent testimony to what we are doing today is contributed by another of your 20th century martyrs Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was exactly seventy years ago that he was hastily tried under the cover of night, before being hanged at dawn on the eighth day after the festival of the Resurrection.

Bonhoeffer wrote, “The thing that keeps coming back to me is, What is Christianity, and indeed who is Christ for us today?” This is the question which martyr-witnesses address.

Bonhoeffer was acutely conscious of the displacement of God from the culture of Europe and the relegation of God to the suburbs of our interest. “One may ask”, he said, “whether ever before in human history there have been people with so little ground under their feet.”

There has been a decisive shift from human dependence to independence in respect of God, who if He is retained at all is commonly seen as one of our assets, a lifestyle choice with only private implications.

Bonhoeffer protested against any attempt to evade the reality of the state of western culture in his day. He protested against any tendency to treat God as a supplement to reality or an escape from it. “Jesus Christ came to initiate us not into a new religion but into life” – life in all its fullness. In the incarnation, God took upon him our flesh and dwelt among us, he was not a “drop out” God.

But of course the worldliness of God is to be distinguished from what
Bonhoeffer described as “the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy the comfortable or the lascivious”. Instead he argued that for God as we see him in Jesus Christ there was a “profound this worldliness, characterised by discipline and the constant knowledge of death and resurrection.”

We have as a civilisation passed from dependence on supernatural forces to independence, to freedom from the will of the One World Ruler. This may be irreversible but unless we find the way from the independence of possessive individualism to using our freedom to build mutual interdependence, the consequences could prove lethal. By living in the world without God we are tempted to become little gods ourselves, claiming the right to exploit and dominate the creation of which we are in truth a part. Nature bears the scars of this delusion which could prove fatal to human life on this planet.

The lesson of the incarnation in which Jesus Christ did not snatch at equality with God but came in the form of a servant, is that the first step in becoming a mature human being is to refuse to be a little god.

His spirit was and is making a new world, a world in which human beings are knit together without being depersonalised or robbed of their individuality. In the Spirit of the Holy Trinity we see him putting the centre of his love and attention in his friends in a way that challenges our self-concern and our efforts to make something of ourselves. Instead we are to follow him, living with the suffering God in the midst of daily reality and in going beyond ourselves we discover our true self in our neighbour.

It is the truth that as we diminish in ego in company with God in the world, we grow in soul and our full spiritual beauty is revealed. In him we know that the deadliest heresy of our time proclaimed by the prophets of darkness is this “I do not need you to be myself.”

Christ is the way to a world renewed in the image of God who has led us from dependence to independence, from slavery to idols to freedom, in order to invite us to use our freedom to commit ourselves to one another, to mutual interdependence, to communion, to the suffering love and self-giving which makes all things new.

The Church is meant to be reality restructured in Christ. Christ exists among us in the form of community. These are enduring themes in Bonhoeffer’s writings. The Church is the place and space where the world is formed in Christ and where Christ is formed in the world. As members of the Church we are called to love one another as he loved us.

Like you of course I know that the Church is so often paralysed, isolated and unreal. We must all together accept responsibility for this situation and recognise that by associating ourselves more profoundly, in prayer, in discipline and action, with the martyrs, we are all accepting a call not to make something of ourselves but to remake the world in Christ’s image. We shall taste the reality of his death and be caught up in the reality of his resurrection. Bonhoeffer is placed here not principally because of his writings but because in his living and dying, in his life in community and in his political action he was an authentic martyr, a witness to what Christ is like in our own day. He calls us from this screen to live centred on Christ, humble and realistic, generous and quick to make friends – make Christ your icon, keep humble, be generous, make friends.

His last words, after he knew that he had been condemned to death included a message to Bishop Bell of Chichester, “This is the end – for me the beginning of life. [Tell the bishop] that I believe with him in the principle of our universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests and that our victory is certain.”

Let us return to the Murder in the Cathedral – “the blood of thy martyrs and saints shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places. For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ, there is holy ground and the sanctity shall not depart from it though armies trample over it, though sightseers come with guide-books looking over it; from where the Western seas gnaw at the coast of Iona, to the death in the desert, the prayer in forgotten places by the broken imperial column, from such ground springs that which forever renews the earth though it is forever denied.”