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This morning, I’d like to tell you about six words that changed my life. Before I start, I realized after I’d written this, that it’s a moment that’s lived in my head, for 20 years, which I’ve never shared with anyone – but I share it with you, now. Once upon a time, I lived and worked in London. I commuted each day on the Central Line: that flat-lining red on the underground map that pierces the city’s smokey heart before bouncing a guilty getaway towards Essex. I’d survive my cramped and sweaty tube journeys with all the usual tricks: reading a book with my face in someone’s armpit; guessing what kind of a day the person next to me had, based on the state of their work clothes; and challenging myself, on the way home, to a game of nap-gamble: could I sleep for exactly long enough that I’d wake up in time not to miss my stop? It was high-stakes: my stop, Ealing Broadway, was the end of the line: missing it meant waking in a cold sweat to find that the train was already taking me back to work. One such ordinary journey home took place in the hot heights of Summer. I’d spent a very sweaty 45 minutes trying to read my book whilst squished unthinkably close to a man whose shirt – creased, untucked, and flecked with specks of broccoli and chocolate pot pudding – told of a particularly unfortunate day at the office canteen. At Ealing Broadway, the train expunged us all – apart from that day’s nap-gamble losers – and I emerged into the night with hundreds of others. Then my day changed. Flooding through the ticket barriers, I saw a man at the entrance to the station. He stood out immediately because he was boldly facing commuter deluge head on, like a fish swimming up-river. He was evidently hungry, homeless and begging for small change. I’d always been taught that the best way to help the homeless was not to give money directly, but to give to relevant charities – so I just looked at the man, slightly sheepishly, and said “sorry mate”. In a sudden, quiet, gently smiling blaze, his eyes fixed on mine as he said those six words : “At least you spoke to me.” At those words, something shifted in my head; I glimpsed in a flash how it might feel to be rejected by society; to be in the country’s busiest, most iconic city, yet washed over by a wave of a thousand commuters who look right past you. “At least you spoke to me”. Now I need to be clear here: I was a young adult, in my twenties, and I’m not suggesting you start speaking to strangers on the street: as young people, you should actively avoid doing this. But there’s a powerful principle here: to reach out to the vulnerable; to validate those on the edge; to show compassion to those others overlook – this you can do in all sorts of ways. Jesus was the master of it. Did you spot the odd details in our reading, as he meets the woman at the well? Collecting water in the Middle East 2000 years ago was done by women – but usually early in the morning (before it got too hot) and usually in groups, because it was a social high point of the day. But this woman is there at noon – blazing heat o’clock – and she’s alone. Why? If we read on, we’d find out: she’s an outcast, shunned by her community: “cancelled”, we might say today. Worse, she’s from a community that itself was excluded: Jesus’ community and this woman’s community were arch enemies. This conversation should never have happened. And yet here’s Jesus, reaching out to this outcast woman with six words of his own – “ Will you give me a drink?” The conversation changed her life. It’s not a one-off. We don’t have time for the full stories of Jesus reaching out to Zaccheus – the hated tax collector who Jesus went to tea with; or the countless times Jesus healed those whose medical conditions tragically made them outcasts; or the time a shunned woman crashed a party to pour perfume on Jesus’ feet, to be rebuked by the hosts, but welcomed by Jesus. Jesus never waited for any of them to be socially acceptable enough, or cool enough, or clever enough, or talented enough... Reaching out to the lost, the unseen, the excluded, exactly as they were, was Jesus’ whole mission, right up to what happened on the Cross. Romans 6:8: “For God showed his love for us in this: whilst we were still sinners, Christ died for us”; or 1 John 4:10: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” Jesus’ loving kindness is grace : not kindness that needs to be earned or qualified for; not “kindness because” – but “kindness anyway”. So what about you, today? You can choose your point of reflection – from Jesus’ loving grace in this Bible reading, to the moments in our friendship groups where we really annoy each other and it might be time for a bit of “kindness anyway”. Some of you might head for a lifetime of leadership and service where your career sees you reach across boundaries to care for the excluded who society chooses not to see and finds it hard to love. I hope so. But there’s something you can do today , too; and at the very least it will show you that I’ve been listening in recent assemblies. What would happen to our school if we took the “quiet leadership” that Rosie spoke of on Trafalgar Day, or the “bold compassion” that Ben spoke to us of on Wednesday, and multiplied them by the accumulation of marginal gains that Dr Clark endorsed week before? What would our doorways and corridors, our classrooms and study spaces, our changing rooms and practice rooms and our pitches and our palace, be like, if adorned with a thousand tiny daily expressions of “kindness anyway”? A thousand “at least you spoke to me” moments? That’s just one or two each, by the way. I see so much of this here already – but what if we all did it? What would happen then?  Well: let’s see, shall we? Because let me remind you where I started: I didn’t tell you, grandly and nobly, as I emerged from that stuffy train dabbing the sweat from my forehead, that I changed a man’s life at Ealing Broadway that day. No: I told you that he changed mine.

You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48) Our assemblies this week have had a bit of a theme. As well as marking Armistice Day on Tuesday, we have had some Remembrance hymns, and we heard Dr Boutemy telling us about a member of her family who was displaced and relocated around Europe during wartime. I want to round off this week with a thought about the Bible passage we’ve just heard, where Jesus told his listeners to ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ Because during Remembrance, after the fighting and the fallen have been remembered, people of faith have one further thing to think about – forgiveness. I want to mention three memorials to the idea of Loving Your Enemies that you can find in and around this cathedral. The first is the most famous. If you were to head all the way down to the East End of the cathedral, into the military chapel of St Saviour’s and through a door on the right, you would arrive outside at the grave of Edith Cavell. Many of you will know that she was a nurse in the First World War; you may also know that, according to her Christian principles, she treated wounded soldiers whatever side they were on. She was eventually sentenced to death for helping Allied Troops escape occupied Belgium. The words she said to a visiting chaplain on the night before her execution have become famous: “Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” Edith Cavell was a Norfolk girl who became a famous Englishwoman, but in the end she saw herself as a member of the human family. That’s the cathedral’s first example of someone who forgave her enemies. The second example is much closer. If you look on the pillar wall just down here where the prefects are standing, you can see a plaque in memory of Alan Webster. He was the forward-thinking dean of Norwich Cathedral in the 1970s, and he introduced a number of things that we now take for granted – for instance, the idea of having toilets in the cathedral and opening up Riverside Walk. In many different ways he made Cathedral Close more welcoming. After Norwich he was made the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, which meant that at the end of the Falklands War in 1982, he was the person organising the service to mark the occasion. He was not content to make it a one-sided victory parade; instead he wanted to include prayers for the defeated Argentinians and he proposed having the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish as a gesture of reconciliation. At the time a lot of people disagreed with these ideas, but they came from his determination to love the enemy. The third example comes from the person I think you’re least likely to have heard of. If you were to go through that archway under the organ, you would find a small chapel with a small altar. And on that altar, the cathedral keeps copies (for visitors to take away) of a prayer found written on a scrap of paper in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp in Germany. It was written by prisoner number 31,795. It is a prayer of extraordinary grace, and it goes like this: O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted upon us; remember the fruits we have borne thanks to this suffering – our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this. And when they come to the judgement, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness. Amen. This prisoner prays – quite counterintuitively – for the people who are treating her with cruelty. She doesn’t just forgive them in this life; she prays for them to be forgiven in the life to come, because the suffering of the prisoners has, in one way, been positive; it has allowed them to grow in character and spirit.  I don’t quite know how these three people – Edith Cavell, Alan Webster and a less famous wartime prisoner – were able to show love to people it would be much easier to hate. And I also wonder how much difference it will make to us the next time we are annoyed, injured or inconvenienced by someone – and that will be probably be today. But I do know that when we’re in here, we are in a place that takes seriously the ambition to love our enemies.