Excerpts from Dr Rowan Williams’ sermon, delivered on 27 February 2003, the day of his enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury

<...> It’s the really hungry who can smell fresh bread a mile away. For those who know their need, God is immediate – not an idea, not a theory, but life, food, air for the stifled spirit and the beaten, despised, exploited body. But what is this food, this life? Here’s the deeper secret. To Jesus is given the freedom to give God’s own life and love; and that life and love is bound up with knowing God the source of all as one who in giving life to his children holds nothing back, whose life is poured out into the willing heart of Jesus so that Jesus can give it to the world. “All things have been handed over to me by my Father”.

So wherever he is, God is active, pouring out his gift, inviting our response. And this means we can’t know fully who God is and what God gives unless we are willing to stand in the same place as Jesus, in the full flood of the divine life poured out in mercy and renewal.

It’s only in the water that you can begin to swim. We learn painfully quickly that we cannot hold our own there by our own strength; it is Jesus’s gift in life and death and resurrection that makes it possible for us to stand with him, breathing his breath, his Spirit. Without the gift of the Spirit, we couldn’t survive the presence of that absolute Truth, that unfading light which is God. But if we’re not seeking to stand where Jesus is, all our talk about God remains on the level of theory; nothing has changed.

On the Day of Judgment, says Jesus, looking back at the towns where he ministered, the people who are in trouble are those who have seen everything and grasped nothing; who know everything about bread except that you’re meant to eat it. The one great purpose of the Church’s existence is to share that bread of life; to hold open in its words and actions a place where we can be with Jesus and be channels for his free, unanxious, utterly demanding, grown-up love.

The Church exists to pass on the promise of Jesus – “You can live in the presence of God without fear; you can receive from his fullness and set others free from fear and guilt”. And, as with all secrets, people will react with a mixture of that fascination and alarm we began with. Here is the secret of our true identity – we are made to be God’s children and to find our most profound freedom in surrender to him. <...>

If all we have to offer is a Jesus who makes sense to me and people like me, we have no saving truth to give. But the truth is that we are given the joy of speaking about one who is the secret of all hearts, the hidden centre of everything – and so one who comes to us always, yes, as a stranger, “as one unknown”, in Albert Schweitzer’s words, but also as the one that each person can recognise as “more intimate to me than I myself”.

This is why the Christian will engage with passion in the world of our society and politics – out of a real hunger and thirst to see God’s image, the destiny of human beings to become God’s sons and daughters come to light – and, it must be said, out of a real grief and fear of what the human future will be if this does not come to light. <...>

The Church of the future, I believe, will do both its prophetic and its pastoral work effectively only if it is concerned first with gratitude and joy; orthodoxy flows from this, not the other way around, and we don’t solve our deepest problems just by better discipline but by better discipleship, a fuller entry into the intimate joy of Jesus’s life. When we have become more honest about our hunger and our loss, we shall have a fuller awareness of what that joy is; and as that joy matures, we shall have a fuller sense of the depth of our need. And so it goes on, the spiral of discovery, moving deeper into the radiant mystery of Christ.

About twelve years ago, I was visiting an Orthodox monastery, and was taken to see one of the smaller and older chapels. It was a place intensely full of the memory and reality of prayer. The monk showing me around pulled the curtain from in front of the sanctuary, and inside was a plain altar and one simple picture of Jesus, darkened and rather undistinguished. But for some reason at that moment it was as if the veil of the temple was torn in two: I saw as I had never seen the simple fact of Jesus at the heart of all our words and worship, behind the curtain of our anxieties and our theories, our struggles and our suspicion.

Simply there; nothing anyone can do about it, there he is as he has promised to be till the world’s end. Nothing of value happens in the Church that does not start from seeing him simply there in our midst, suffering and transforming our human disaster.

And he says to us: “If you don’t know why this matters, look for someone who does – the child, the poor, the forgotten. Learn from them, and you will learn from me. You will find a life’s work; and you will find rest for your souls; you will come home; you will sit and eat.”