If you come into Southwark Cathedral at the moment you may wonder why, when you look east, you're confronted with a lot of corrugated foil, three large panels of which hang down and partly obscure the beautiful medieval screen. Beneath it a jumbled collection of wood and more corrugated metal clutter what is normally a very ordered sanctuary. What you see is corrodere, this year's Lent art installation.
For the last five years Southwark Cathedral has hosted an installation for the season of Lent, from Ash Wednesday until Holy Saturday. Each year very different pieces of art have challenged visitors and worshipers to think in new ways about aspects of the season, whether that be about the Passion or about wilderness or ourselves in relation to God. The artists we've chosen have not necessarily approached the commission from a Christian perspective but all know that their work will have a significant impact on the way in which we celebrate the most dramatic and significant weeks in the Christian year.
This year's artist, Liz Harrison, has taken a version of the most ubiquitous of building materials, corrugated iron, and has created something which sets us thinking about impermanence and fragility as part of many people's experience of home.
Last year's Olympic Games in Rio managed to gloss over the fact that beyond the glitz and the medals lay some of the worst shanty towns around. Visitors to many outwardly prosperous countries will encounter the outlying district where the excluded have made a home, often a fragile hold in the exercise in which we all engage in putting down roots. Much closer to home the existence of the Jungle Camp in Calais and its final destruction last year with the consequent scattering and unhousing of the community of migrants and refugees who had created this city outside the city has been and continues to be a national challenge. We watched those events from Southwark Cathedral. As the camp had grown and a church was established a group had gone with our bishop to take copies of the Bible in the first languages of some of the groups of Christians who had built a house for God in the midst of the shacks and shelters.
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews thought it significant that the climax of the Passion for Jesus happened outside the city.
'Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come' (Hebrews 13.12-14).
In speaking like this we're taken back into the Old Testament to the rules and regulations by which some would be excluded from the city, through disease, or ethnicity, or unacceptability. The God we know in Jesus enters that liminal space and encounters people at their most fragile in the most fragile places of the community – a widow on her way to bury her son, lepers seeking healing, a demoniac sheltering amongst the tombs. Jesus walked the equivalent of the shanty, the Son of Man who 'has nowhere to lay his head' (Matthew 8.20).
Liz Harrison's installation, like a shanty erected in the sanctuary, the outside brought to the very heart, the impermanent set amid the historic and permanent, invites us to step outside the city and encounter Jesus, the excluded one, and in meeting him, meeting those with whom he dwells, the excluded of our own day, the unacceptable and disputed, the ones excluded by the church as much as the ones excluded by society. It's a challenge, but whenever I spend time with Jesus I find that it is always challenging.
Lord Jesus,
you were led outside the city wall
to the waste heap
where they crucified you.
May I see you
amongst the dispossessed
the homeless
the outcasts
and dare to journey with you
to the harsh place.
Amen.
Very Rev Andrew Nunn is Dean of Southwark.
