Bishop Adam, dear brothers and sisters in Christ – and above all, you, who this day will be ordained into the priesthood of this Church.

Before I say anything else, let me say who I am, because it matters for what follows. I am a Catholic. I stand in this pulpit as a guest, and as a friend – which is itself a small parable of what I want to talk about this morning: that the walls we are called to rebuild are not only the walls of our own house, but the walls of the whole city. That an Anglican congregation would invite a Catholic to preach at an ordination is, I think, a rather wonderful sign of the times in its own right. And since I am also French, you will forgive me if I note that a Frenchman preaching in an English church is its own small entente cordiale – proof that old rivals can become fellow labourers on the same wall.

Because today is a joy. Today is a beginning. You have spent years in formation, in study, in discernment, in waiting – and today the Church says to you: begin. So before anything sobering, let me simply say: congratulations. This is a wonderful day, and heaven is glad in it.

But every beginning needs a direction. And our readings today give us two pictures – one of a man who acts, and one of a people who fail to see.

Turn first to Nehemiah. He hears that Jerusalem’s walls are broken and its gates burned. He does not run to Jerusalem immediately. He weeps. He fasts. He prays for months. And when he finally arrives, before he says a single word to anyone, he goes out by night, quietly, and surveys the ruins. He looks. He listens to the shape of the damage before he proposes a solution.

Only then does he speak – and it’s our text: “You see the trouble we are in… Come, let us rebuild.” And the people’s reply is the whole gospel of community organising in six words: “Let us start rebuilding.” Not “let Nehemiah rebuild.” Not “let the governor sort it out.” Let us. Nehemiah doesn’t hand out a blueprint. He hands each family, each priest, each guild, a section of wall – their own stretch, their own responsibility, built alongside their neighbours.

That is the pattern of every act of justice I have ever seen work: someone listens first, long and humbly, before they ever open their mouth to propose anything.

Now turn to Matthew. The Pharisees and Sadducees come demanding a sign from heaven – something dramatic, something unmistakable. And Jesus’s answer is almost weary: you can read the evening sky and tell me if tomorrow will be fair or stormy – so why can you not read the signs of the times? You are experts in weather. You are illiterate in now.

That is a warning worth carrying into any priesthood. It is entirely possible to be fluent in scripture, fluent in liturgy, fluent in doctrine – and still be unable to read what God is doing in the actual street outside your church door. The sign you are being asked to read is not in the clouds. It is in the food bank queue, the zero-hours contract, the family choosing between heating and eating, the young person who cannot imagine a future in the town they grew up in.

I want to put these two readings together, because I think they are the same instruction. Nehemiah could only rebuild because he first learned to read the ruins. The Pharisees could not read the times because they had stopped walking among the people. Reading the signs of the times is the listening that makes rebuilding possible.

This is not theory to me. In east London, Christian congregations – Anglican, Catholic, Free Church – have stood shoulder to shoulder with mosques, synagogues, and trade unions, and simply asked banks and major employers one question: can a family live in dignity on what you pay? That question, asked together, patiently, publicly, is a large part of why the Living Wage exists in this country today, and why hundreds of thousands of families take home more because of it.

The same alliance, working with neighbours of every faith and none, asked a second question of the banks: what gives you the right to charge our poorest neighbours the most for borrowing? And that sustained, cross-faith pressure helped bring about a legal cap on the cost of credit – so that people trying to get through to payday are no longer bled dry by the price of poverty.

Neither of those campaigns began with a policy paper. They began exactly where Nehemiah began: with someone walking the ruins at night, listening to families describe their trouble, before a single demand was ever made.

And east London is only where this particular story started. The same pattern – churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras and trade unions, refusing to work in isolation – has taken root in towns and cities right across this country, a long tradition of alliances standing with those on the margins and daring to believe that change is not only possible but prophetic. In several of those cities, it has been young people themselves – sixth-formers and college students, often backed and encouraged by their own parish priests – who have organised and won caps on bus fares, so that hundreds of thousands of young people can now afford to get to college, to work, to see their friends, without a fare being the thing that decides whether they go. And in neighbourhood after neighbourhood, the same alliances have organised to build genuinely affordable homes on the sites developers said couldn’t work – homes that let people go on living in the streets and parishes they call home, proof that the market, too, can be tamed by people who organise.

Pope Leo XIV, in his recent letter Magnifica Humanitas, returns to this very image of Nehemiah. He sets it against the story of Babel – a single tower, a single voice, built by people who stopped listening to one another and tried to reach heaven by their own power alone. Nehemiah’s Jerusalem, by contrast, is rebuilt by many hands, each with their own stretch of wall, each heard, each necessary. Leo’s phrase for it is the choice between “constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem” – between power that dominates, and a people who work together in God’s presence.

That is my charge to you today, new priests. Do not build towers. Build walls, together with the people you are sent to. Go and listen – properly listen, the way Nehemiah listened, the way a good organiser listens – to the elderly woman in your pew, yes, but also to the shopkeeper, the nurse coming off a night shift, the teenager who has never set foot in your church and may never do so, unless you first cross the road to hear what trouble they are in. Let them tell you where the walls are broken. And then – this is the hard part – hand them a stretch of the wall. Don’t rebuild Jerusalem for your parish. Rebuild it with your parish, as Nehemiah did, as our sisters and brothers in east London still do.

I want to leave you with one more line from Pope Leo, because I think it is the truest thing I can say to you on your ordination day. Reflecting on the Church’s long history of standing with working people, he writes that there is no authentic evangelisation “that does not also affect the structures of human society.”

Hear that as your vocation, not as an addition to it. You are being ordained not simply to comfort souls but to disturb structures – gently, patiently, prayerfully, but really. Every wage negotiation, every housing campaign, every interest-rate cap, every act of listening that becomes an act of justice: that is evangelisation. That is the gospel, refusing to stay indoors.

So: go from this place today as builders, not tower-makers. Go and read the signs of the times in the streets God has given you. Go and listen before you speak, as Nehemiah did. And when your people say to you, as the exiles said to him, “let us start rebuilding” – say yes, and hand them their stretch of the wall.

Congratulations. God bless you all, and God bless the good work you begin today.

Amen.