The Rector has given permission
for us to print the sermon which she delivered at the Service.
Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2007
“Unity.
What does it mean to be united?
I am reminded of an elderly
couple I met when I was a curate. They were just coming up to their 70th
wedding anniversary.
I said to them, gosh, what’s 70? I know that 50 years is golden wedding and 60 is
diamond wedding, but what is 70?
The man turned to me and said:
It’s a very long time (although
actually he substituted a rather stronger word for very!).
There is a world of difference
between being united in name and joyously working together. The question is how
does one progress from one state to the other?
In any
relationship, whether between husband and wife, or parent and child, or between
one church member and another, or between one church and another, there is a
delicate balance that needs to be maintained. Admonition can so easily
become nagging, or judgemental. Patience can tip over into laissé
faire (anything goes). It takes time and effort to understand differences. It
takes courage and honesty to challenge and enormous humility to accept being
challenged. None of these things can ever happen unless there is active
relationship, active communication, and a sense of shared purpose and activity.
The church hierarchies may and
often do work hard to find ways around the differences in interpretation over
authority of the bible, or infant baptism or any one of countless issues that
have either now or in the past created division in the church. But for the most
part, it is not these issues that prevent either individual Christians or
individual churches from working together. No, it is lack of relationship.
We become like an old couple who
share the same space but never talk, never share their feelings, never do
things together, each occupying their own world. Now, it is true that our own
world may be rich, we may have busy fulfilled lives,
so that we feel that there may not be room for anyone or anything else. But we follow a God who has taught us that
love, love for all people, is the most important thing
we can do.
In this service we have been
given some action pointers about core issues – care for God’s creation through
our attitude to the environment, and care for God’s people through our
attitudes to justice and peace and straightforward hospitality.
It is stuff we know; these are
things that we are well aware that we ought to be doing. And, for the most
part, the things we can promise to do are individual actions. So where does
unity come into all this?
Look again at that reading from
the letter to the church in Thessalonica – admonish, encourage, help, be
patient.
That is why we need each other.
We need people who love us who
will admonish us when we are full of apathy.
William Whitelaw once famously
complained about Harold Wilson's attempt to win the 1970 election by boring the
voters: "They are going up and down the country, stirring up apathy."
A remark that at first sounds ridiculous, but when one considers the effects of
political apathy, one realizes just how damning was his judgment.
We know about global warming, we
know that we need to reduce carbon emissions, but we don’t act upon that
knowledge. We know that in our community there are elderly people living lives
of isolation and despair, but we don’t act upon that knowledge, we choose not
to get involved, largely because the cost of involvement would be tough on our
time.
Such apathy is endemic in our
society. To combat it requires that people accept that we should love our
neighbour, be they young or old, black or white, Muslim or Hindu. It is not
essential to believe in God to have these values, but it should be impossible
to believe in God and not to have those values. Christianity puts upon
us a duty of care, or more than care, of love.
Paul wrote extensively to the
emerging churches, and some of those letters have been handed down to us. These
letters were hard. They criticised in a spirit of love, they encouraged good
practice. Paul also visited the churches, and created a network of people who
could act as support. He expected the Christian communities to support each
other.
We cannot be Christians on our
own. We need to belong to a community who can pray for us, encourage us, keep
us going when faith wears thin and our prayer life has turned to dust. And
churches need other churches in exactly the same way. No church community can
tackle everything at once. There are times in every church when there is a lack
of volunteers, or the youth work seems to fall to pieces, or we become too
inward looking and fail to see how we can have an appropriate response to
global issues, when we are tempted to reduce our outward giving or our
outreach. At those times we can support each other, encourage each other, help
each other, and, if necessary, remind each other that we are losing our way, that
we are not doing all that we should. Accepting such criticism is very hard
indeed, but made considerably easier if the relationships are good.
There is so much work to be done.
God’s will is not being done, his kingdom seems as far
from us as it ever has been.
There is a cost to working for
the kingdom. To tread the path of the cross is to walk on a way that invites no
gratitude, no fame, no respect. It is the path of
humility. A hard path. If we are really
committed to reducing global warming, our lifestyle must change. If we really
want to see an end to discrimination and injustice, our fundamental attitudes
to people must change.
This is not about expiation of
guilt, but about selfless love in relationship. What is the point of giving
money to Christian Aid if we ignore, or worse still fear, the person selling
the Big Issue or sitting on the bench somewhere with his can of cider?
How can we love without
relationship?
Jesus shared in the suffering of
humanity. If we are to work towards the kingdom, we too have to share each
other’s pain and suffering. So yes, we must do what we can, giving money and
time as compassion moves us, accepting without guilt that we cannot alleviate
all the suffering of the world, but also accepting that our main work, our priority
must be the building of community where there are no outcasts, no second class
citizens, no desecration of creation.
This is not work that can be done
quickly or on our own. But it is work that is in our power to do if, if, we
support each other, encourage each other, and occasionally, dare I say it,
admonish each other. For a church that believes itself to be above criticism
has lost its way.
May God give us grace to walk this path together. Amen”.
Rev’d Mary Bide