Getting our Foundations right

A sermon preached on Whitgift Founder’s Day, 21^st March 2025

 

Proverbs 3.1-12 My child, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments.

Matthew 7.24-29 He taught them as one having authority

 

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Build your house on rock, not on sand.

 

That seems pretty good advice if you’re building a house.

 

And it prompts us, as Jesus intends, to consider the foundations on which our own lives are built.

 

And, today, we reflect on what foundations Archbishop John Whitgift’s life was built, and the Foundation that exists bearing his name and seeking faithfully to carry out his legacy in our times.

 

I think it would be hard not to say that John Whitgift made the foundations of his life some of the principles outlined in our first reading from the Book of Proverbs - loyalty, faithfulness, trust and honour.

 

Today we might call them ‘values’.

 

John Whitgift clearly valued them, but more than that they shaped him in how he sought to live his life as a Christian.

 

John Whitgift had clear foundations in his life – what we might call a ‘Christian social vision’ - and his was a life that had to bear considerable turbulence and challenge, both political and ecclesiastical.

 

Whitgift was born in a time of great flux and change in England and Europe.

 

Does that sound familiar?

 

He was born around the year 1530.

 

Henry VIII was king and the social, political and religious upheavals of the Reformation of the Church were getting more and more powerful.

 

Henry VIII exploited the church and declared himself sovereign over it.

 

Henry’s son, Edward VI, pursued an undiluted Protestant agenda; Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary I, changed direction into restoring Catholicism; and Henry’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, came to the throne seeking to bridge the extremes, not peering into men’s souls, but also making sure people were loyal to the Church as she understood it.

 

It was a bloody time: otherwise good people, on both sides of the divide, killed and were killed.

 

In that time young John had been growing up in Grimsby but, as Edward came to the throne in 1547, the gifted John was studying in Cambridge and soon became a Fellow of Peterhouse at the beginning of a stellar academic career.

 

The universities in those days, like today, were not immune from politics and John had to navigate the politics of his day, politics which could cost lives, not just reputations.

 

In 1560, with Elizabeth now on the throne, John was ordained into the Church.

 

In Elizabeth’s time the Church of England was split three ways, between those who thought reform had gone too far, and those who thought it hadn’t gone far enough, and those somewhere in between.

 

Elizabeth needed Bishop and Archbishops who could hold it all together, and she found that in John. He became Bishop of Worcester and later became Archbishop of Canterbury and helped shaped the Church and what is known as ‘the Elizabethan Settlement’ which, on the whole, brought people together and which John enforced.

 

The times he lived through saw seismic changes as the tectonic plates of church and society shifted.

 

And when tectonic plates shift, as all good students of our schools know, there are earthquakes, things shudder.

 

I sometimes find myself peering into building sites and it’s amazing to see just how deep foundations have to be dug. And the taller the building the deeper the foundations go.

 

So it must be hard to build foundations in places where there literally are earthquakes.

 

So as I was considering the seismic changes in John Whitgift’s lifetime, and those we all face, I also thought about how you build foundations in earthquake zones.

 

I am no engineer, so, I did a bit of research - academics close your ears - I went onto Wikipedia!

 

There I read about building in Japan which is hugely prone to earthquakes.

 

One of the key features of Japanese buildings is the use of ‘seismic isolation bearings’.

 

These bearings allow the building to move horizontally during an earthquake, reducing the stress on the structure and minimizing damage.

 

So today, as we remember and give thanks for our Founder, we have a chance to ask what our lives are built on: being built on rock, not on sand; with foundations that are deep and resilient, absorbing tumult and shock in a fast-changing world with old challenges presenting in new ways.

 

Economic shocks, social and political change would all be recognisable to John Whitgift.

 

And those challenges didn’t go away after his time: after all, Croydon, and the Whitgift Foundation, has faced the English Civil War, the Blitz, and the 1960s.

 

How we handle change and threat is the measure of our fidelity to the values of the passage of Proverbs I referred to earlier: loyalty, faithfulness, trust and honour.

 

It is with valuing those virtues that we face: the sadness that this is the last year that Old Palace School is part of this Foundation; the new challenges of how best to support carers as provision in the borough moves on to a new chapter; that Whitgift and Trinity have to handle the introduction of VAT on school fees; that residents face the challenges of longer lives with all that brings in financial, health and social care concerns.

 

And in all those adversities loyalty, faithfulness, trust and honour root us into the core of the Foundation, and John Whitgift’s vision, that of education for the young and care for older people.

 

It is remarkable in many ways that, with all John Whitgift’s preoccupation with exalted matters of church and state, he still sought to give the place - Croydon – that he had fallen in love with a legacy that sustains people here today.

 

I wonder, then, in the foundations on which you build your life, what will your legacy be?

 

I wouldn’t mind betting, ultimately, that if John Whitgift were in this pulpit today, not lying in his tomb over there, that he would say to us that the foundation of his life was his conviction that Jesus Christ was, and is, the authority in his life. He would remind us that with Christ nothing is impossible. He would say, I suspect, that whilst he was a bit ostentatious with his wealth in his life, care of the poor is more rewarding.

 

And as we look at his Christian, virtuous example, more words of Proverbs echo as we face the future:

Honour the Lord with your substance

   and with the first fruits of all your produce;

then your barns will be filled with plenty,

   and your vats will be bursting with wine.

 

May God bless us and this Foundation abundantly. May we continue to be inspired by our Founder’s legacy, as a man who built his life on the foundation of the rock that is Jesus Christ, his Lord and ours.