A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on June 22, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: John 6: 5, 8-13
A school is a community of teaching and learning. But it’s much more than that. It’s a forum for transformation, discovery, wonder, and companionship. From earliest times, churches have invested in schools because education, alongside health, is the most tangible place where change happens for good. If hospitals are places where miracles happen every day to the body and heart, a school is a place where miracles happen every day to the mind and soul.
So the closure of a school isn’t simply the end of an era. It feels like a shaking of our foundations. Because St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls has been a community of stability, security, belonging, growth, hope, adventure, friendship, and love for many thousands of people, and for those of us who’ve given a large helping of our lives to it, today marks a day when all eight of those qualities seem somehow more fragile than they did before.
We have two questions today. Those questions are, What happened? And What happens now? I want to look with you at the story of Jesus feeding the 5000, because I believe this story gives us answers to our two questions. The story comes in five scenes. The first four scenes address the first question, and the last scene the second question.
In scene one the people are hungry. In 1699 when Thomas Tenison founded this school, girls were hungry. No one had seriously thought of investing in the education of females. Women existed to make men’s lives easier. In Scene Two Jesus challenges the disciples to search out what food they already have. What a good pedagogical method: he begins with what the class already knows, what resources are to hand. Just imagine if right now I were to ask the wisdom in this church: what a Niagara Falls of insight and anecdote would pour forth. Then in Scene Three Jesus does what only he can do: he turns our paltry scarcity into his glorious abundance. That’s what the Holy Spirit does through a school: turns information into knowledge, aptitude into skill, enthusiasm into expertise. It’s a miracle. In Scene Four the disciples ensure everyone is fed. That’s the journey this school has made over the last 325 years. It began with a few local girls. It became a successful school, then a selective school, then a comprehensive school so no one was excluded, and finally an academy. All a journey seeking to ensure everyone was fed.
I’d like you to think of those four scenes as summing up the last 325 years. Jesus sees our hunger and longs for us to flourish. He challenges us to start with what we have, and bring it to the table. Then he does miracles, turning the ordinariness of what we are into the wonder of what he is. Then he commissions us to make sure everyone benefits. Those are the four things we’ve come to honour and celebrate today. They answer the question, What’s happened?
As to our second question, What now?, I think we get our answer in the last scene of the story. In Scene Five, Jesus says, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ Those first four things were so good, so glorious, for so long, we’re all bewildered they’re coming to an end. We know our fragile human lives come to an end: we want our institutions to transcend our mortality and last forever. When they don’t, it’s like the weight of our human loss comes down on us twice as hard. But institutions are human too, and they don’t last forever. Coming to an end doesn’t take away one iota of what our school stood for.
So what we do now is to gather the fragments so that nothing be wasted. Gather the fragments of joy, gather the fragments of truth, gather the fragments of friendship, gather the fragments of working together, gather the fragments of achievement, gather the fragments of discovery, gather the fragments of adventure, gather the fragments of hope, gather the fragments of faith, gather the fragments of love. Make sure nothing is lost.
Why? Because this is how the Holy Spirit responds to death and decay. The Holy Spirit gathers the fragments of our lives, our societies, our world, that nothing be lost, and turns grief into hope, sadness into faith, and loss into love. For all who attended the school, your whole lives have been turning the fragments of what you gained there into food for your journey. This is how God works. In God, nothing is finally lost. Nothing is ultimately wasted. All finds an unexpected place as a blessing. That’s what we call resurrection.
