The sermon preached by the Dean of Southwark on Sunday 7 September 2025

When I was a young curate there was an elderly lady in the parish who was a fun and feisty old thing. She once told me that she was so old she had had ‘to pre-order the Bible’, but then also once reminded me never to underestimate the elderly, saying, as she pointed to her white hair, ‘just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean the fire’s gone out’. Today I want to tell you about a man and his wife whose fire never went out and who’s fire needs rekindling.

Their story is told in Vincent Perez’s film called Alone in Berlin.

It’s 1940 in Berlin, and a working-class couple Otto and Anna Quangel receive news that their only son has been killed in action. At the same time, an elderly Jewish neighbour of theirs is suffering lawless behaviour against her which results in her throwing herself to her death from a window. Impelled by these events, the couple start writing postcards to urge people to stand against Hitler and the Nazis and they furtively place these cards in public places, mainly apartment blocks where ordinary people come across them as they come home. Although their marriage at first appears to have hot a hard time, being unable to console each other for the loss of their son, their shared commitment to resistance, writing and delivering cards, brings them back to one another, love for their son and each other being their energy.

The police inspector charged with finding the source of all these postcards has professional pride but is no convinced Nazi and over three years, trying to trace the culprits, he develops a sort of respect for whoever is doing this.

One day some of the cards accidentally fall out of Otto’s pocket while at work and he is arrested. He tries in vain to convince the police that it was only him writing the cards and not his wife but they both end up in court, briefly managing to hold hands and telling each other that they know their fate and it doesn’t matter. They know that the love, so bereaved in their son’s loss, has done all that it could do and that is enough. As Otto is led to his cell the officer asks if he can get him anything – a card and a pen, he replies. Otto and Anna are both executed.

Back at the station, the police officer gathers up all the subversive cards he has collected over the years, nearly 300 of them, and scatters them out of the window into the street for all to read, before ending his own life. As the cards swirl in the wind you feel Otto and Anna have a moral victory beyond the grave. Then, at the end of the film a tribute appears on the screen, dedicating the film to Otto and Elise Hampel, the two real people in wartime Berlin on whom the story is based and who left cards all over the Berlin, in stairwells and mailboxes, urging people to refuse to cooperate with the Nazis, to refrain from donating money, to refuse military service, and to overthrow Hitler. They were both beheaded in 1943.

On this day in which we give thanks for blessed Mary our Patron of the Cathedral, we heard in the gospel her song which is known as the Magnificat. It is said or sung in here every day of the year at evening prayer, as is the tradition of the Church. Why? Because it is, as it were, a postcard from Mary sent to the Christian community, in every time and place, to remind us of the God we believe in and of the consequences of that belief. My soul magnifies the Lord, she sings. Magnify is not a word we use much, but to magnify means to make bigger, and Mary sings her song to make God bigger in your life, in my life, in the Church, in our world. The song that Mary sings is no sentimental ballad. Biblical scholars often call it revolutionary, upturning the standards of ‘business as usual’. If the Church always needs the leaven of discontent, then we have it here, a continual reminder of the priorities of God, his first love of the poor and marginalised and downtrodden. The Magnificat is said every day to check we are still Christian in here. The way to know is if God revolutionizes the way we think, the way we act, the way we live - as a Christian the ego, the rich, the proud, the mighty – they shouldn’t shape you, your thinking, your money, your life. The hungry, the poor, the forgotten, the weak – well, they should. The Magnificat is a daily postcard from Mary dropped into the Church to keep us Christian in times that may be demanding other ways of thinking, behaving, and speaking, from us but which would, if we did, remove the Christian heart and replace it with the populist’s boot that kicks those who are down to make themselves mighty – exactly the opposite of the God of the Magnificat. Just what is your life magnifying, it asks? And how’s that going to work out for you, and for the world we share?

We live in different times to the Hampels, but there are people with microphones at the moment who’s like we have seen before. A friend of mind saw a peaceful Asian family having a picnic in Hyde Park the other day get descended on by a crowd of men who poured out their wine bottle, intimidated the children, tore up their rug and kicked all their food in the grass. This shocks us. But does it surprise us when the language being used so readily about anyone who is not white, or who is Muslim, or who is seeking safety, implies they are criminals or at worst animals, non-human and, dear God, not British. Does the authoritarian behaviour of political leaders, the erasure of hard won human rights, the talk of a Christian country when advocating views that are, according to Mary and her son, have nothing to do with them, wake us up again to the gospel we just heard? We are heading into dangerous territory and, if we stay Christian, many will turn on the Church too. We heard Mr Tice telling the Archbishop of York this week to keep to his remit and not concern himself with issues outside the Church, as if God is only interested in General Synod and village fetes. No. God created and loves this world and all his people he has made, all of them, and asks us to be a postcard of protest when the dignity he has placed in every human life is killed without care, and we watch it happen every night on the news, or when human dignity is made cheap, dispensable, is laughed at, criminalised or just ignored, and we see that very close to home now. If Mary is our patron, our brief and our mission is clear. We magnify the Lord and pray and work for the day when it will be on earth as it is in heaven, the place which multiplies the good in all of us.

Otto and Elise Hampel took simple messages into people’s homes to subvert the powers of the day that were insisting on obedience and fear. They, in their simple way, sought to undermine tyranny and call people back to their humanity, to reacquaint themselves with their values and their will power to stand against evil. Jesus did the same. He took his vision of the kingdom of God into homes and human hearts in order to subvert the rules by which we so unthinkingly and ordinarily live by. When the Hampels took their cards into the housing blocks they, in their brave way, were reflecting Christ who challenges the world’s relishing of darkness and division in order to reclaim God’s better path of peace and compassion, thereby, like his mother, and our patron, magnifying the Lord who exalts the humble and meek. Perhaps it is time to buy some card and to pick up our pens.