The Installation of Master Barber, The Hon. Virginia Lovell

Given the turmoil facing oil producing nations at the moment, perhaps the Master’s choice of ‘give me oil in my lamp’ is sound advice for the Company’s investment portfolio.

Although I don’t suppose Brent Crude is the oil they mean. Instead, perhaps it is a prayer, surprise, surprise. A prayer that we are all invited to pray at the beginning of her year that the Master will be given new stamina for meals and committees and everything else that she will need to meet with joy and peace and love (just as the hymn says) this year. Please pray for her, as we shall do every day here at St Giles’. As she offers herself and is sent (like the prophet Isaiah in today’s first lesson and spoken of again in the final hymn), sent to be a servant of the Lord of hosts as she is a servant of the Company, (both of those going together of course, in our Worshipful Company).

Ours is a long and rich story, told in the gowns and garlands and chains of office.

But, as the Master’s second hymn reminds us, this office - grand and privileged as it is - is really one of service. And that is always the case for Christians. The higher the office, the more it is about service. That is a universal principle. And we’re so steeped in that culture twenty centuries on from Christ that sometimes maybe we take that for granted. It is the case for us, but it ‘ain’t necessarily so’ (as the old song goes). Indeed this principle seems to be tested with terrifying regularity in politics and commerce and civil society today. The call to Christ-like servant leadership is one of the most powerful gifts that the Livery gives the world. And the world needs us to shout it from the roof tops and to walk the talk ourselves more than ever.

So it is good for us to be renewed in where this comes from today. It is because Jesus of Nazareth is the Servant King. The one who emptied Himself so that we might have a share in His eternal life (Philippians). He came, as he said, ‘not to be served, but to serve’ (S. John 13) One in whom the love and patience and goodness that St Paul writes of in today’s second lesson was manifest in perfection. That we, imperfect as we are, live for nonetheless.

And the Master will need patience and love (and all the rest) in her role, and she (like all masters will need our patience and love). In committees, in speeches, in all her endeavours. And she’ll need plenty of patience and love for the many people amongst whom she’ll be set when representing the Company. Not least the apparently increasingly full-time job that is being a part of the Masters’ year WhatsApp groups across the livery - all these masters with variable IT skills and understanding of WhatsApp etiquette! Apparently it is a minefield!

We clergy also have WhatsApp groups. Thank goodness they’re not public, is all I can say! And it won’t surprise you to know that the to and fro on clergy groups is mainly irreverent jokes about life and ministry.

Talking of the servant call of Christian leadership, there was the cover of a US Roman Catholic diocesan magazine printed a few years ago that went round the clergy WhatsApp world like wildfire. The diocese was receiving a new bishop, and they printed thousands of these magazines, distributed all over the midwest or wherever, and it was only long after trucks had borne them into every church and school and hospital that they realised that the front cover, filled with a nice big picture of said bishop in full regalia was festooned with the almost correct Gospel quotation (we’ve already heard) in big gold letters: ‘I have come not to serve, but to be served’. Oops.

My own favourite, closer to home, was the cathedral service (not at St Paul’s Cathedral I might add) that had ‘to be a pilgrim’ as the rousing final hymn. A thousand booklets printed and handed out, and only then did they realise that the autocorrect on someone’s computer had changed the last line of every verse from ‘to be a pilgrim’ to ‘to be a pilchard’… its the kind of thing that sends shivers down the spines of clergy and assistant clerks alike!

And all this silliness forms a very nice bridge between what I’ve been trying to say (and what the Master in her hymns and readings has been holding before us) about service and leadership. Service and duty that has been the Master’s life, her family life, her consort’s life for decades, for God and for the good of all… a bridge between service and a brief postscript (if you’ll forgive me) which is about: fun.

Fun? That sounds frivolous. Selfish, even. A rather low ideal. Well, friends, what if it is nothing of the sort?

What if the fun we have as companions in our company is not decorative but core, not a spoon full of sugar, but the medicine of the Gospel itself? Not indulgence but our vocation.

Let me briefly explain.

The wedding at Cana - Jesus’ first miracle in his ministry (St John’s Gospel). Having drunk the place dry already Jesus provides an additional 800 or so bottles worth of wine to keep the party going. Miracles are revelations of God’s purposes and God’s nature. And this - his first - is all about fun. Fun, then, not frivolous, but holy.

Jesus spends three years bumming around Palestine and the surrounding country with a gang of mates, chatting, camping out. And how could you do that and not have fun? He doesn’t take a break from ministry to hang out with His friends. Hanging out with His friends is a central occupation of these central years of God’s incarnate life on Earth. And at every possible opportunity, Jesus gathers new friends and moves from meal to meal, from sharing wine and breaking bread, friends around a table.

Jesus’ life, death and resurrection changed the universe forever, but His ministry must have also been great fun. I suggest to you, as a Worshipful Company and each of us as children of God, we should model our priorities after God’s. Fun, it turns out, is a deeply serious business.

Heaven itself is described in St John’s Book of Revelation as a wedding banquet, that of the Lamb. And if it is a wedding banquet that God is throwing for eternity then we already know his approach to the wine list, from the wedding at Cana. And if that’s what heaven is like, then we know that our Christian duty is to start living that way now, and to share that reality with the world.

Now, we all know how important hydration is in this weather. So I won’t delay us any longer from the vital hydration of the drinks reception - that image of heaven itself - that awaits us.

So Master, we give thanks for you. We will pray for you. We will serve together, you us, us you, and us the world together. Because service is the highest of callings. And we will also pray that you have fun, with us and with Jesus, and we promise you to have fun together. Thanks be to God.