Bishop Helen-Ann’s Chrism Eucharist Sermon 2025

Published April 2025

On Maundy Thursday, the day preceding Good Friday, the Rt Revd Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, Bishop of Newcastle, delivered the following sermon during the Chrism Eucharist, where clergy and lay ministers from across the Diocese of Newcastle gather for their annual rededication to their calling.

Road like the surface of the moon
A Detroit neighbourhood left to ruin
Girl at the wheel showing me the sight
Of this crumbling empire

Following suit in the Atlantic mirror
Under the Byker Bridge, they shiver
It’s one for me, and one for the dead
And one for the crumbling empire

I’m not preaching, I’m just talking
I don’t wear the shoes I used to walk in
But I can’t help thinking where they’d take me
In this crumbling empire

Thus speaks (or rather, sings) ‘Geordie Springsteen’ Sam Fender in a track from his latest album, ‘People Watching’. Prompted by a stateside car journey along a pot-holed road, Fender laments cracks within the community, drawing parallels with his northeast urban origins. People working hard to tick all the boxes but still getting left behind by the system.

Fender’s recognition that the life he now leads as a successful musician means that he doesn’t now wear the shoes he used to walk in. If you hold these lyrics up as a mirror to the prophetic cry of Isaiah, you get pretty much a contemporary framework within which we journey through this Holy Week. God’s love of justice is the cry of the weak and broken-hearted, the vulnerable and marginalised that heralds the constant breaking in of a Kingdom devoid of the privileges of power and deference. A Kingdom of God where Isaiah’s scroll is the clothing of righteousness. It is not without challenge or risk, but it is held in God’s infinite wisdom, love and mercy.

The old empire crumbles and gives way to valleys of refreshment and peace. This is not some naïve hope. It is the sometimes-mustard seed-sized glimmers of light and hope that illuminate the path before us, even when we struggle to see the proverbial wood from the trees. None of us wears the shoes we used to walk in because living life as a disciple of Jesus means that our lives are constantly being formed and reformed in God’s likeness.

Above: The Blessing of the Oils during this morning’s Chrism Eucharist.

If I am being brutally honest with you, and perhaps you can relate to this in your own way, I long for a day free from anxiety about some issue or another. But the hard reality is that the stuff we carry is part and parcel of being human, and that’s why our reading from the letter of James* provides some hopeful reassurance for our lives and ministries. If anything, it underlines a reflection Dr Kelly Brown Douglas shared with us during her recent visit that the self-emptying of Jesus doesn’t offer us a model of giving and giving until we are spent, rather it demands of us that we rid ourselves of prejudices and assumptions that can cause us knowingly or unknowingly to reinforce barriers rather than break them down.

In his comments on the letter of James, scholar and translator Nick King says, “it is impossible to recreate with any confidence the original purpose of this letter, but many scholars think that its author may have been that ‘James, the brother of the Lord’ who became such an important figure in the early Church, and who was martyred in AD 61”. Nick King points out that “we may notice a certain Christian audacity in the claim that we should rejoice when afflicted by temptations, and the downgrading of the status of the rich, which is so much a feature of Christian teaching”.

‘Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise,’ James writes. The author recognises that there is a strength to living in Christian community, but that in doing so, we inevitably have effects on each other (and these aren’t always positive). James’ words feel remarkably contemporary.

In this year of attention to seeking through being open to God’s transforming love, so too, as a result of this, we are compelled to live lives of sharing through being generous with God’s transforming gifts. It is then that we enter into the dynamic of sending through being engaged in God’s transforming work in the world. This isn’t a future hope. It is a present reality and is lived out in our lives and the many different communities and contexts we represent and are part of. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus rolls up the scroll. Gives it back to the attendant and sits down. Eyes are fixed on him, and Jesus says, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.

Today.

Now.

Is fulfilled.

As you listen.

In scripture, each detail matters; even the word ‘today’ is filled with significance for Luke. It is used in the annunciation to the shepherds, in the story of Zacchaeus, and we will hear it used in the coming days in the story of the thief on the cross. It’s a word that both marks time and creates the space within which we encounter God in the present.

In recent weeks I have been struck by a number of unexpected moments of grace in encounters, from taking part in a ‘church in the pub’ in Whitley Bay and the lively discussion and wisdom shared around the table, to my time with hospital chaplains in the Freeman Hospital and responding to a pastoral need amongst staff on a busy ward. I was actually very grateful to the chaplains for discerning that it’s fine for the bishop to visit, but even better to gain some work experience. I was undoubtedly the better for it, and my experience on the hospital ward brought home to me the particular blessings and demands of pastoral ministry exercised by those in chaplaincy settings.

Above: The gathering in St Nicholas’ Square after the Chrism Eucharist.

I dare say that Jesus’ first disciples may have come to realise as time went on and most acutely in the journey to the cross and beyond through the resurrection that there reached a point of consciousness that they no longer wore the shoes (or sandals, before anyone points this out to me afterwards) they used to walk in. Perhaps we are all being encouraged to put our feet on the ground, even to remain still, feeling the earth beneath our feet or even extending that to how we encounter our world, God’s creation. Its vulnerability and beauty, its distress and horror, its celebration and joy, its despair, its hope. To be a people of reconciliation is not to say that we are without accountability, and there will be occasions when we have to make hard decisions for the sake of the last, the lost and the least. We must not lose ourselves in this, however, for as we seek God, so God seeks us. We aren’t the Church (institutionally) that we were a year ago, nor will we be by the time we gather, God-willing, next year.

Our call is to be faithful, as the God who calls us is faithful. If we do even just that (and maybe that’s all we can do at times), we will reflect the light and joy of the resurrection that awaits us in these days as we embrace the journey of Holy Week once more and recommit ourselves to a life of prayer, service and, as Sam Fender would say, people watching once more. Noticing where God is at work and getting stuck in.

Amen.

* New Testament Reading given during the Chrism Eucharist
A reading from the letter of James.

Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.

James 5: 13-16a