Sermon for the Cathedral Eucharist and Farewell to the Cowlings
The Revd Canon Dr Philip Hobday, Sub-Dean
Wakefield Cathedral, 6th July 2025, 10am
Readings: Isaiah 66.10-14; Galatians 6.1-16; Luke 10.1-11, 16-20
‘Bear one another’s burdens’, writes St Paul in our second reading, and ‘so fulfil the law of Christ.’
‘A homily not a eulogy,’ insisted our Dean with uncharacteristic sharpness, when discussing this morning’s sermon. As it happens, our readings don’t seem very promising for this service where we as a cathedral community say thank you and goodbye to Anne and Simon. The Old Testament reading is a promise of a peaceful and plentiful health, so even though it’s South Yorkshire and the Diocese of Sheffield, we do hope for Anne and Simon it is a land flowing with milk and honey. The gospel, though, is no help. Given how much Simon has come to love Wakefield, its buildings and culture and people, this is probably a bitter-sweet farewell rather than a moment to shake the dust off the feet. Unlike the Devil, he has never fallen like lightning from heaven, as a succession of Development Managers has discovered when trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade him to abseil down the tower. The New Testament reading is not, at first glance, any better, with its extensive discussion of, ahem, surgical procedures.
But then we read, ‘bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.’ Now this says something about what a church should be like, and what Simon has helped churches to be. Most people are carrying burdens, sometimes hidden, sometimes heavy; sometimes momentary, sometimes lifelong. The worshipper who is struggling with questions about whether God is there, the visitor who is adamant they don’t believe; the parent whose relationship with a child has gone badly wrong, the couple who mourn the child they never had; the ageing carer whose energy is drained by the person they love but no longer recognise, the young adult bowed down trauma they can’t quite articulate but clouds all they do.
‘Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.’
St Paul is writing to the Galatians, a tribe of Christians in what is now southern Turkey who probably had settled there after being hired as mercenaries and a long journey from the south of France via Greece. They were different because of their ethnicity (pagan Gallic, not native folk or Roman occupiers) and their occupation (soldiers for hire). In all the churches St Paul writes to – whether the retired Roman soldiers in Philippi, or the wealthy tradesfolk of Colossae, or the sophisticated merchants of Thessalonika – people are marked by occupation, social status, wealth, and so on; and people wanted to associate with others who shared the same identity, the same characteristics.
But for St Paul, crucially, this is not what should mark out a community. The church should welcome all equally, regardless of the boundaries and barriers which so often divide us. If it is working as it should – and, if were honest, it doesn’t always – the Christian community ought to be a place where everyone is welcomed whatever their background or identity or opinions, whatever their wealth or status or whether or not they are successful or popular or attractive or like us. After all, just a few verses earlier, an exasperated Paul has reminded the Galatians that the barriers we put up, the categories we impose, are much less important than the single thing all humans have in common. Gender, race, social or economic class, are not what make us what are and should not be the basis on which we treat each other. Rather, all are, equally, children of the living God. We exist only because of the same act of the one divine will which called things out of nothingness into existence and now calls us out of the darkness of our ignorance and failure into Christ’s marvellous light. It’s become a bit of a joke among the staff to work out how many times Simon will say ‘this is your cathedral’, at any event, to any audience; but actually it’s precisely the point: our God-given existence, our divinely-decreed humanity is chronologically and logically and theologically prior to anything else that can be said about us.
‘Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.’
Yet St Paul’s definition of the Christian community is not just about making people welcome, ‘inclusion’ in the popular but inadequate sense of not discriminating, not being prejudiced. It is much more significant, much more demanding than that. A church should not just be a place where we assert, passively, that people are welcome regardless of any aspect of their identity or any particular characteristic. More, it must be a place where we actively reach out across those divisions, real or imagined, to make each other feel not just okay to come into the building (though that’s really important) but to feel that they are as seen and as known as they wish to be. A place where we recognise enough about and in each other that we could, if we chose, share our burdens with another person. Where everyone knew, or at least knew they could find, someone else to talk to, and knew that their questions or problems were not going to be laughed at or brushed aside, where they might find the peace and compassion we all need, and spiritual guidance and prayer if they asked for it. To be open to the possibility that I might share my burdens with another, and they with me, is to begin to be in the place which St Paul is describing; and this a task for every Christian, all of us here.
‘Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.’
Nonetheless if this is the mark of the community as whole it must also be a particular task for those who lead it. Simon has given so much over so many years, here and in Bolton, Sheffield, Roundhay, Far Headingley, and Potternewton, to care for those in need, nurture their faith, and make those communities more like the place of welcome and mutual burden-sharing St Paul describes. We thank God today for seven years of burden-bearing work here, often unseen; and for nearly forty years of faithful, resilient, and fruitful public ministry. In turn, the burdens the leader bears are often borne by those closest to them; so as well as giving thanks for Simon’s ministry today, we also honour Felicity and Faith and Chad, and above all Anne, for all the burdens they have borne, mostly unknown to the rest of us. With deep gratitude and good wishes, we pray today for them all in this next phase of family life.
‘Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.’
The best thing we could do, then, as Anne and Simon leave us and we wait for the person God is calling to be our next Dean, is to go on with the work Simon has done here and in his previous parishes, of faithful prayer day by day, and openness to sharing and hearing the burdens of others, whoever and whatever they are, mindful always that they too are children of the living God, and that we follow a Lord who bore the ultimate burden of human suffering and death to heal us all and make us whole.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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