Mending Nets, Making Justice
The Chevin Sermon before the Mayor and Corporation of Cambridge[1]
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
3rd Sunday of Epiphany, 2026
Gospel: Matthew 4.12–23
Poor Annett…cast into the sea by Peter and Andrew.
Today’s Chevin Sermon, endowed in the will of Richard Chevin in 1589 along with other acts of charity (the dad joke at the start was free) was funded by bequeathing to the city the lease of a plot of land.
An immediate neighbour to that land was one Thomas Hobson.[2]
It is difficult to imagine that Chevin and Hobson did not, well, hobnob — Chevin a well-to-do burgess and baker, Hobson, a few years younger, a successful carrier and entrepreneur, prominent men of Cambridge with neighbouring holdings in Chesterton.
Hobson, however is the better known: the originator of Hobson’s Choice, and the Hobson of Hobson’s Conduit (more on that in a moment). Hobson’s portrait hangs in the Guilidhall, and he is buried here in chancel of St Bene’t’s, where he served for many years as a churchwarden. [3]
Hobson moved to this parish when his mother had purchased an inn from Corpus Christi, then known as Benet’s College.
The only college founded by Cambridge townsfolk, they were selling properties to raise money for building their own chapel instead of using St Bene’t’s.
Years later, Hobson was churchwarden here under an interesting set of clergy, including Richard Sterne, then a fellow at Corpus Christi later a rather infamous and avaricious archbishop of York, stern royalist, and sometime chaplain to Archbishop Laud.
It was in Sterne’s time, 400 years ago exactly, that Hobson gifted the church a first edition of the King James Bible, now kept for the parish by the Parker Library at Corpus Christi. (Perhaps a quatercentenary is called for this year?)
Locally, Hobson is best known as the eponymn for his Conduit, flowing from Vicar’s Brook at Nine Wells to the city centre. Now merely the bane of cyclists and unwary tourists, for two centuries Hobson’s Conduit provided clean, fresh, and free water to the residents of Cambridge, alleviating suffering and disease.
In my first Chevin sermon, in September, I preached about the Draining of the Fens but also on the miracle of bread and roses;[4] Hobson’s Conduit was generous bread indeed, a generous work of Justice flowing from Hobson’s Christian faith:
I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink
But here is something you might not have known about Hobson: Hobson didn’t build the conduit.
Authorities of Town and University collaborated with the Lord of the Manor in Trumpington to cause the conduit to be built. Hobson was merely a keen supporter and donor of this public, collective enterprise, built with no possibility of profit or shareholder value.
Hobson, however, did bequeath land — indeed, perhaps the land adjacent to Chevin’s gift to Cambridge 25 years earlier — to fund a trust for the maintenance and upkeep of the conduit.[5] This Conduit Trust was, and still is, known as Hobson’s Conduit Trust, with rights over the stream to maintain it in good order for the town and the University.
Of course in time Hobson’s Conduit Trust became Hobson’s Conduit Trust and so the stream became Hobson’s Conduit. [6]
There’s a moral to this story that is salutary for our elected officials here today — whether members of the Corporation of the City of Cambridge, or the Parochial Church Council of the Parish of St Benedict (myself included, though I had fewer electors):
It’s all very good to have a clever idea. But it’s better to plan for maintenance and upkeep.
Which brings us back to poor Anette, cast into the sea. Or rather, to Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John: these fisherfolk called by Jesus to be fishers of people.
My father was a fisherman; he put himself through University by working commercial salmon boats in Alaska, big purse seiners with nets measured in kilometres. I can tell you from my father’s stories that while the Sunday School illustration of fishermen is all about the romance of hauling in the big catch, most of the work of commercial fishery is the careful stewarding, maintenance and repair of nets and boats.
It’s the work of James and John, the sons of Zebedee: hours upon blistering hours of mending nets, scraping holds, plotting, scrubbing, tending, and above all, the waiting.
Discipleship isn’t just about bringing people to Christ. I rather think that’s ultimately the work of Grace and the Holy Spirit.
Discipleship is also about washing the coffee cups after worship, and setting out the chairs before.
It’s about walking with people — men and women, straight and gay, rich and poor — not just today, but through all the trials of life. It’s about waiting quietly in prayer, sitting with a dying friend, rejoicing in a stranger’s (or even an enemy’s) good news, listening to the story told by a homeless neighbour, and being comfortable in silence with Christ.
It’s all well and good to dig a ditch into town, but who will care for it for the generations to come?
It’s all well and good to throw your net into the sea, but only if you’ve ensured it won’t fall apart in the water.
It’s all very good to preach the Gospel, but only if you keep your eyes on the prize.
No good winning converts if you can’t work together to build community. No good building community, if you don’t know why.
Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. (Ps 127.1)
Which brings us from Hobson, to the fishermen, to the beginning of our Gospel:
Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. (Mt 14.12)
Herod, keen on making Judea Great Again, had no time for troublemakers like John the Baptist who preached unpatriotic things such as repentance. Herod, who divorced his wife to marry his sister-in-law, who betrayed friends and family, and went to territorial war over petty personal grievances, who would, in time, meet Jesus’ gospel of peace with violence and execution…
The arrest and later execution of John the Baptist was the inevitable response of the violence of Herod’s state;
It’s hard not to see echos in the the arrest of over one hundred clergy this Friday in Minnesota, and the ICE extra-judicial executions of Alex Pretti and Renne Good.
In the words of the American prayer book: Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way.
When John was arrested, Jesus withdrew to Galilee. Not outside of Herod’s tetrarchy, but away from the capital: up in the rural north, full of foreigners and gentiles — the Minnesota of Herod’s lands, if you will.
And it is here that Jesus calls his fishers, his disciples who will seek out the lost, the exiled, and the refugees.[7]
Jesus chooses men and women who are in it for the long-haul, who felt the call not to power and glamour, but to the careful labour of weaving nets and reading the wine-dark seas, reaching into the darkness below the waves because they are confident in their knots, and in God.
Disciples who know that the work of leadership is the work of service. Who know that the labour of fishing is the labour of long-term planning, care, and tending to the net.
Who know that to follow Christ is to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fearing no evil because we walk alongside the God of Love.
The 24/7 news cycle, the doom scrolling, the violence of wars and rumours of wars, partisan rhetoric, race-baiting and sabre-rattling….it is designed to wear you down, to undermine your resilience against the challenges to come.
So plan, and pray, like a fisherman. Like Chevin and Hobson, like Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John, Martha and Mary:
Look to the long term. Get the dishes done, mend the nets, care for the conduit, sit patiently in prayer with your Lord.
Trust that Hope is a posture of Prayer, and and that prayer is a labour of love founded on the inalienable endowment of God’s future.
He comes to break oppression, to set the captive free;
To take away transgression, and rule in equity.….
The tide of time shall never his covenant remove;
His name shall stand for ever; that name to us is Love.[8]
[1] Richard Chevin ‘s will of 1589 bequeathed a house to the city on condition that £6 of the income be given to the poor and that two sermons should be preached in his memory before ‘the Mayor and Corporation’ at Candlemas and Michaelmas. Latterly, the sermon has been given by the Mayor’s Chaplain (currently the Vicar of St Bene’t’s). The first Chevin Sermon of this year’s series was given by the Rev’d Devin on 5/10/25 at Great St Mary’s, Cambridge: https://9fc91ba2-1728-4e4d-ae52-08ff18e08c64.filesusr.com/ugd/d47106_3c16f91fd51d49fb98da53ce1698dd05.pdf
[2] https://calm.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=KCB%2f2%2fCL%2f17%2f3%2fPage+358
[3] A brief biography of Hobson, and his connection to St Bene’t’s, can be found at https://www.stbenetschurch.org/st-benets-a-history/thomas-hobson
[4] https://9fc91ba2-1728-4e4d-ae52-08ff18e08c64.filesusr.com/ugd/d47106_3c16f91fd51d49fb98da53ce1698dd05.pdf
[5] This is speculation on my part; please be in touch if you know more!
[6] The Trust still exists; you can learn more at https://hobsonsconduittrust.org/history/
[7] See Jeremiah 16:16. And also, https://abmcg.substack.com/p/galilee-of-the-gentiles-jesus-in
[8] ‘Hail to the Lord’s Anointed’, James Montgomery, v1,4 (New English Hymnal)