SATURDAY 21 JUNE 2008
CARITAS 08 – BUILDING BRIDGES OF HOPE
The Brighton Centre, Kings Road, Brighton
The Procession:
Press release: Caritas 08 media release
Monday 23rd June 2008
The Church of England in Sussex had a ‘sold out’ booking for Brighton Centre on Saturday.
A biblical feeding of the 5000 occurred as the Bishop of Chichester presided at a diocesan Eucharist. Most of the 500 parish churches in Sussex were represented at the day which ended with a grand procession [photo above] to Hove’s Peace Statue for the blessing, a truly crowd-stopping sight.
Main speakers in a crowded Brighton Centre were John Sentamu, Archbishop of York and Graham James, Bishop of Norwich. Archbishop Sentamu spoke, just across from Brighton beach, on the immense tide of God’s love with its waves bringing renewal, reconciliation and righteousness. Bishop James spoke of prayer as essential to church growth. He ended by inviting parish representatives to bring their Mission Action Plans forward to the Chichester diocesan bishops.
Scott Melluish (31), a new Christian, came on stage to share how God had made himself known to him when he attended a Eucharist on Easter Day in Durrington. Scott had been baptised only three weeks before Caritas 08.
Participants were invited to join Scott in sharing their faith stories through a website launched on the day by the Diocese of Chichester in conjunction with Premier Christian Radio. www.face2faith.co.uk is for church members to help build, share and answer for their faith.
As part of the day a film was shown of church revitalisation among Anglicans in Sussex as they share God’s word and celebrate the sacraments. Another visual presentation was of churches’ future aspirations and mission plans. Some examples were: St. Bartholomew, Brighton who said their mission is ‘to the poor and poor in Spirit and all who seek solace’ in visits to Brighton’s largest church; Wivelsfield Church aiming ‘to keep the shoots of love in Wivelsfield Green’. Coombes aiming ‘to re-roof the chancel to open again as a place of Christian worship and godly peace’. Shipley aiming ‘to break down the culture of isolation in a rural community and extend the kingdom of God’.
Other churches reaffirmed their spiritual priorities: ‘ we seek to love more, pray more, give more’, ‘to grow in God’, ‘’to become a more holy people’
Among visitors and friends present at Caritas 08 were local leaders of other Christian churches and members of the Buddhist and Bahai faith. The day ended with a flourish as led by flag bearers, drummers and 21 deanery banners 5000 Anglicans processed along Brighton’s promenade with good humour and courtesy for a final blessing from Bishop John Hind atop the local Hope08 double-decker bus.
Caritas 08 organiser The Revd John Twisleton saw the effect of the day as being two fold. ‘We’ve now got a greater sense of togetherness as a diocese and hundreds of mission action plans poised for execution. This was a day to remember, a day we trust that will change Sussex for good and for God’.
Many more photographs can be viewed at theimagefile.com here
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Archbishop of York's Address:
Bible Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:17 – 6:2
Prayer:
May I speak in the Name of the Son, in the Power of the Holy Spirit, to the Glory of God the Father. Amen
As the song goes, ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside.’ Don’t you?
Archbishop John Sentamu
There is something about the water’s edge that is so exciting. It is the place where two worlds meet. One – the familiar world, where you have your feet on the ground, and where you are sure – at least you think you are sure – of your footing.
The other is the great deep – the unknown, ‘the wide, immeasurable sea’. We look upon it with wonder.
At the water’s edge some will just come to watch, others will dare to roll up their trousers and paddle in the shallows, while others will run in headlong and take the plunge, revelling in the waves.
Today is an opportunity to do just that – an invitation to launch out into the deep and to leave the familiar and assured certainty as well as the shallows. Yes – allow yourself to be led by the Holy Spirit into the depths of God’s eternal love, ever so full.
Of course compared to the waters off the North Yorkshire coast, these waters of Brighton are semi-tropical. I have to say Global Warming has had no noticeable effect as far as the bathers of Bridlington and Scarborough are concerned. But I guess here, as there, when you have run down the beach, thrown your towel down on the sand, and kept running till the water is deep enough to swim, and you are afloat – and your friends are with you, and the sun is shining, and it’s absolutely freezing…… what do you do first?
You shout. Wow! This is great! FANTASTIC!
It’s like this when you have summoned up the courage to take the plunge with God.
A bit like the leap of faith I took the other day for the Afghanistan Trust – there in the plane one second – praying Psalm 23 ….. I find the psalms come in handy at moments like this – then the next moment – we’re skydiving – floating freely at a speed of 120 miles an hour. What exilaration!
Let me tell you, God is good. We have a great, glorious, gigantically generous God. And he is here with us today. Wawhoo! Alleluia!
As St Paul says at the end of the reading we just heard:
‘I tell you, now is the time of God’s favour, now is the day of salvation.’
Before anything else I want to invite you to take the plunge, to risk the thrills and spills of the adventure of faith in Christ.
These beaches in the UK are amazing. In Uganda growing up I didn’t know about beaches. Our biggest expanse of water, Lake Victoria, was a less attractive prospect for swimming. As far as I know a Crocodile has never been seen on Brighton beach. But here you have something we don’t – you have tides. And tides are amazing.
One moment the sea is here……..you look next time – and it is there? How does this happen? Now you see it, now you don’t! And they say its all because of the moon? Well!
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But the tide teaches us a lesson about the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. You see at times we are like those amazing sea creatures you see in rockpools. The tide goes out, and they are stranded. Life must be pretty depressing for a shellfish. Their memory doesn’t serve them well – like some people I know – so when the tide is out they think like this –
Oh dear me! Oh dear me! Is this all there is? This rock pool, with these other creatures here, and the only thing that happens is monsters come every now and then with nets and buckets and take us away one by one. Oh no! The world is not as it should be!
They are stuck, landlocked, fish out of water. Their natural habitat is water.
I believe human beings’ natural habitat, by God’s grace, is the KINGDOM OF GOD of which Jesus spoke. But we have got landlocked, we have got stranded in this altogether meaningless humdrum world, a ‘disenchanted’ world where ‘what you see is what you get’ and no more.
But wait Mr Shellfish. And just you wait, my brothers and sisters - Watch what happens at high tide – when the sea sweeps forward over the beach. The fresh flow of water immediately brings new life, and a new start to all the stranded cockles and mussels and crabs and lobsters – the water comes in and what do they say? Yay! Alleluia!
I am reminded of the story of an eight year old girl who was picking up stranded starfish which had been stranded when the tide went out - and throwing them back into the sea. An old fisherman came by and couldn’t understand what the little girl was doing. So he asked, “Why are you doing that?” She said, “They are stranded. If I don’t throw them back into the water they will die.” The fisherman said, “Little girl, do you realise that the beach goes on for miles and thousands of starfish are stranded? You can’t hope to make a difference.”
Holding one starfish in her hand she said “It makes a difference for this one.” And she threw it into the water.
Jesus in the gospel said:
‘Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ St John explains – ‘By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.’
May we sense that surge of living, life-giving water here today. May we receive the Spirit of God, more and more and more and more – like the waves on Brighton beach – and as the waters cover the sea.
From this reading from 2 Corinthians let us think of three lifegiving waves, three surges of the Spirit.
The First is the tide of new creation that has come about and is coming about because of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead.
If anyone is in Christ he – or she – is new creation. The past is forgotten and passed away. A new being altogether begins, transforming God’s people and the whole creation. When Jesus gets on board in a person’s life things change absolutely. There’s nobody for whom just a few minor adjustments will do. If you have been living without the benefit of Jesus’ presence, and then you welcome him into your life – then you will notice the difference. It’s a bit like when a long awaited child is born into a family. First of all there’s the wonder of it – all the tears and laughter and flowers and people coming to visit – and you think – this is a dream – it’s not real – but it is, and as time goes by you notice a lot more changes. Less sleep, and you have to learn a new language to communicate with this new person in your life – suddenly everything has a new focus. This little person has come and taken over. But in spite of the sleepless nights, and the end of your social life as you knew it, and all the work and expense that goes with it – there’s no doubt – you wouldn’t have it any other way!
When Jesus comes along things are a bit like this – to begin with there is the wonder, and the joy of sharing this news with other people. Then somehow things have to settle into a new routine of worship and praise and service – but a lot of this is quite down to earth. My mother put a notice above the kitchen sink for us children – ‘Divine Service offered here three times a day’ It had to be: 13 children, a husband and a very large extended family. Jesus calls for tough love, a love that’s willing, to sacrifice security and the easy life for daring acts of commitment.
Like becoming street pastors – those amazing people who go out on the streets helping those in trouble after a night out on the town – there to pick up the pieces – there in the name of Christ.
If anyone is in Christ he or she is new creation – there is a whole new world’. Life in Christ is the new sphere of existence, a totally transformed way of looking at life and the world, into which one enters through trusting in Christ.
When Jesus was raised from the dead that first Easter day God released a power that could transform not only individual lives but the whole creation. So nothing is beyond the scope of God’s power to change. This means we can live in hope – not despair. Even with climate change and global warming - we just have to take responsibility and act in the power and wisdom of the Spirit of God. We certainly don’t limit God’s concerns to the individual, to the private. In Christ there is a whole new world.
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So there is a surging tide of new life, of new creation. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us – a power to renew the whole of creation.
Do you know how the Spirit of God works in us ?
Look at this glove. It’s a good glove – no holes in it – so it looks as though it would be warm and comfortable and useful. But what can it actually do?
I can ask it to pick up this book, or order it to – but it just lies there limply. I can show it how to do it – look I’m lifting up this book, now you try. But it can’t do it. How is the glove going to do anything? The only way the glove can do anything at all is if I fill it with my hand. Now it can pick up the book, it can do all the things I want it to.
The Father has told us what to do, the Son has shown us, but we can’t do it until we are filled with the Holy Spirit.
In the same way, for centuries birds have shown us how to fly. We have watched them and studied them and longed to do the same. But it wasn’t until the invention of aeroplanes which could carry us, that we too were able to fly.
The power of the Holy Spirit is given to help Jesus Christ’s invited guests live life in all its fullness.
The next wave, the next tidal surge – is one the world is crying out for. A tide of reconciliation. A chain reaction of love. Quite the opposite of what Topol in Fiddler on the Roof described when he said, ‘An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind; and a tooth for a tooth will make the whole world toothless’.
Jesus is the reconciler, and he teaches us to pray, ‘forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ For St Paul this is a glorious, royal commission. It makes us, all of us who are given this task, ambassadors for Christ.
As George Herbert, the poet and teacher, has said, “He who can’t forgive others breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.” The Christian Gospel creates a forgiven community and is a forgiving movement. God took the initiative in reconciling the world to himself, by placing the wholly obedient Jesus under the power of sin so that through him sinful human beings might come into right relationship with God. And thereby become the very expression of God’s righteousness. God’s way of making his enemies his friends. As Abraham Lincoln said, “The best way to defeat your enemy is to turn them into a friend.”
I am not someone who likes to blame people who get things wrong. I am not someone who likes to point the finger at others. As my dear mother used to say, “Remember when you point a finger, three others are pointing back at you.
In the East African Revival we did not learn to be judgmental, or moralistic – instead we learned to ‘walk in the light.’……… God knows our weakness, God knows our sins.
God knows just how much of a mixture of good and bad we are. Instead of coming down on us like a ton of bricks he chooses to send his son to offer his life and his love for us.
– So Jesus came to be the one who would at one stroke both expose the seriousness of human wrongdoing - and declare sin defeated for ever. Stretching out his hands on the cross he bridges the gap – he embraces us as his own, and welcomes us saying as he said of his killers – ‘father, forgive them they know not what they do.’
When we realize what it cost Jesus to lead us out of the darkness of our shame and guilt into the light of God’s love and forgiveness, then we discover the power of this chain reaction of love, the reconciliation by God for sinful humanity in Christ.
At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa a woman was at the hearing about her son’s murder. The police officer who had ordered the brutal killing was there, shamefacedly hearing read out the details of what he and his colleagues had done. At the end the room was quiet. The chair of the commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, asked the woman if she had anything to say to the man who had killed her son.
“I am very full of sorrow. So I am asking you now – come with me to the place where he died, pick up in your hands some of the dust of the place where his body lay, and feel in your soul what it is to have lost so much.
And then I will ask you one thing more. When you have felt my sadness, I want you to do this. I have so much love, and without my son that love has nowhere to go. So I am asking you – from now on you be my son, and I will love you in his place.”
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She went on to say –
“I can say this – I can only do this, because Jesus loved me and gave himself for me.”
Jesus is able to change this ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ world into a ‘lion lying down with the lamb’ world.
Counter-cultural though it may be, following Christ the reconciler commits us to be peacemakers. Today child soldiers carry and use AK45s. Arms manufacturers make millions out of others’ misery. And computer games simulate hideous violence on screen to give young people the thrills of violence supposedly without its spills. “If only”, Jesus cried over the city of Jerusalem, “if only these people knew the way to real peace!”
We have an amazing message – the message of forgiveness, of reconciliation. It is not an easy one – as they can tell you in South Africa, or in Congo, or in Northern Ireland. But it works.
“Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us”. “Forgiveness of sins is at the heart of the Gospel. For God’s greatest miracle in us is his constant forgiveness.” Forgiveness for past sins, new life in the present, and hope for the future.
Should we not in the Anglican Communion, and in our Church of England, be especially praying for a fresh wave of reconciliation, and should we not seek to demonstrate it in our life together?
The third wave, the third surge of the Spirit into the world, into the church, is God’s gift of Righteousness. What is this righteousness?
It is from God, it is God’s righteousness given to us when we accept that we cab do no good thing on our own.
It is not just ‘being good’. A mother might call down the street after her son on his way to school ‘ Keep out of trouble today won’t you’. That’s not righteousness. Righteousness is way more dynamic and creative than that. It is personal – it is about living with a wild generosity and magnanimity towards others. And it is social – it is about justice; it is bold, about breaking down barriers and letting wonderful things come into being. It is desiring the best for others and bending one’s energies to make it happen.
This City of Brighton and Hove - Yes we mustn’t forget Hove – are you here you HOVITES? - This city is famous for its alternative lifestyles. I want to commend ‘righteousness’ as the most radical alternative of all. There have been some fantastic waves of righteousness. Take the fair trade movement. It is only just beginning – but it has come a long way since it began with campaign coffee at the back of church! Now most supermarkets are having to take notice – you can even by Fairtrade underpants at Tescos!
Social and moral values do have their seasons. Now, and perhaps particularly in this city, many people have adopted a very free and easy pattern of relationships. This is not all bad – but in a typically postmodern way we all think we have the right to choose a lifestyle above all to suit our wants. That is where there is a problem.
Righteousness commits us to considering the effects of our actions and choices upon other people – especially the vulnerable poor, the women, and the children. I want to ask – what effect are the choices we are making having today upon the children growing up in our towns and cities? I can see a wave coming – a wave of righteousness from God, bringing hope and a sense of human dignity and purpose. I can see a rediscovery in Christ of human freedom and the dignity of human responsibility. We are called to be, and in Gods’ strength can be, a people of righteousness.
Hosea says:
Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love. (Hos 10.12)
St Paul urges the Philippians to be
Filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God. (Phil. 1.11)
The tide is turning. It’s already begun. It is now.
I want to remind you of what Dr Martin Luther King Jr called ‘the fierce urgency of now’
For him the powerful dream was about the end of segregation and racism. Thanks be to God – and to King and others we have seen some great progress in recent history there – in the USA, in South Africa.
Now the challenge is every bit as great. We have a world grown weary of righteousness. A nation which has forgotten its spiritual roots. There is a fierce urgency about now – and it is an urgency that beckons you and me.
Jesus invites us all to come to him, to be refreshed, and to drink the fresh water of his Spirit, to strengthen us to live the new life he gives.
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Are you ready for the new creation
Ready to be an ambassador for Christ?
Ready for righteousness?
Look – out there is the sea – the deep blue sea. It stands today for God’s tide of grace. Will you take the plunge? Will you?
As Antoine de Saint-Exupery has said,
“If you want to build a boat,
Don’t summon people to buy wood,
Prepare tools,
Distribute jobs
And organize the work;
Rather inspire in them a yearning for the wide boundless ocean.”
God in Christ inspires in us a yearning for the wide boundless ocean of God’s new creation, reconciliation, and his way of living with his creation. And he says, “Come and follow me and freely drink.”
Let us do it and let us do it now.
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Address by The Bishop of Norwich, The Rt Revd Graham James:
‘Jesus said “out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water”. Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive’. (John 7.38, 39).
In the distant past a group of theological students (your preacher among them) helped to make a programme for Radio Oxford. It was thirty-five years ago in the earliest days of local radio. They must have been desperate in those days to ask us. Whit Sunday was approaching. That’s what we then called Pentecost. Some of our number took the easy option and went out on the streets to do what they call a vox pop. People were asked what Whitsun was all about. It’s a strange sort of comfort to recall that thirty-five years ago nearly everyone in Oxford had no idea. But people knew Whitsun was a holiday and had something to do with the Church. Eventually one elderly lady said in a wonderful Oxfordshire accent she thought it was to do with the “coming of the Holy Ghost”. What more did she know? After concentrating hard she exclaimed “he came with a rushing mighty wind”. Overcome with embarrassment she then burst into fits of laughter. She had no reason to be embarrassed. She’d remembered one of the most striking features of the day of Pentecost. The coming of the Holy Spirit was dramatic, instant and unmistakable.
I’ve never forgotten that little excursion into vox pop. People knew next to nothing about the birthday of the Christian Church. Yet Pentecost was the day when the first believers in Christ’s resurrection were blown about, fired up and propelled into God’s mission. It was from the day of Pentecost that people with no remarkable natural gifts began to speak with a new authority. It was from then on that these same people created a community marked by such mutual love that others remarked upon it. It was from then on that Peter and others who seemed to be timid or cowardly were given new courage and power. In our own day we are called to receive the spirit of God afresh in our lives. The life of the Church today depends still upon the power of the spirit of God. But we’ve got to be willing to be fired up and blown about. That’s why we’re here – to be made new and to ask God to let us make others new in our parishes.
St. Paul says to the Christians in Corinth that if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation. We’re part of the re-creation of God’s world which will one day conclude with the establishment of a new Heaven and a new Earth. And the Cross is at the centre. There could be no gift of the Spirit if God in Christ hadn’t reconciled us to himself.
It’s not the teachings or example of Jesus, wonderful though they are, which lie at the very heart of our mission. It’s the death and resurrection of Christ. Proclaiming Christ's reconciling grace was Paul’s mission. It’s ours still. We are ambassadors for Christ. We work on his behalf. We have no gospel of our own. We are God’s servants for Jesus’ sake.
Sometime ago I was asked who had taught me most about faith. I owe a huge amount to my parents, to my theological teachers, and to Christian friends at university who influenced me at a crucial time in my life. But there’s one person whose sheer enthusiasm for the gospel still humbles me. Everyone should have an Auntie Betty. Mine is nearly 95 years old. She lives alone between Redruth and Camborne in Cornwall. She has moved only once in her life to her present house 100 yards from the one in which she was born. She still goes to the same Methodist chapel where she was baptised ninety-four years ago. She looks after herself. Until recently she was still teaching the children in Sunday school and helping ‘the old people’ where she lived, most of whom are twenty or thirty years younger than she is.
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We always speak quite late on Sunday evenings. I find out what she has thought of the local preacher’s sermon that morning. I’m glad she’s not here to assess this one. Last year I well remember her asking me one Sunday what I was doing on the following Thursday. She knew it was Ascension Day. Since she’s had a bishop for a nephew she’s become quite a High Church Methodist, more familiar with the Church’s year than most Anglicans. I told her I was doing a confirmation in a Norfolk village that evening. There were eight candidates. I had their names in front of me on my study desk. She asked for them and wrote their names down. She then said she’d pray for them that night when they were being confirmed. So a rather surprised group of confirmation candidates at a village called Horsford were told by their bishop that there was a Cornish Methodist in her 90s praying for them by name as they were being confirmed. She would be praying that they remain faithful to Christ and that God’s Spirit would live in them. I also had to tell them that Auntie Betty wouldn’t start praying until 8.00 p.m. when EastEnders had finished. She’s a very practical person.
The glory of this is that Auntie Betty is so committed to the growth of Christ’s church in her tenth decade that she’s keen to pray for those growing in the faith whom she will never meet or see or know. But they are part of the same body of Christ. Hers is the spirit that makes the Church grow. This is the Holy Spirit who inspires. This is the Holy Spirit which blows us about and fires us up so that the world and the Church look more glorious than we can ever imagine. This is all about the drive towards transformation in Christ which changes the world. I hope your Mission Action Plans are grounded in this sort of passionate prayer. Auntie Betty may have left school at 14 over 80 years ago but she knows about the Body of Christ belonging together across space and time – what we call the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. She’s no plaster saint. She’s got plenty of faults. But she’s received the Spirit.
The Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria lived at roughly the same time that Jesus was ministering in Galilee. We reckon Philo was born around 20 BC and died in AD50. He was a philosopher. He believed that a breath of divine spirit lived in everybody. It’s what we would now call our inner conscience. He also believed that some people got a second wind from God which might fill them with divine ecstasy. But, said Philo, this was only given to people of exceptional gifts, intelligence and goodness.
Pentecost turned Philo’s teaching on its head.
The Holy Spirit of God is not given just to those who scale the heights of human goodness. How could it be when you think how those disciples and apostles so often failed Jesus and ran away? No, God’s spirit is given to all who respond to the goodness of God and do not trust in their own. The gift of the Spirit was a new source of love and joy, given so that God might draw all humanity to himself.
The Holy Spirit opens our eyes to the glory of God in ordinary, daily experiences in the created order around us. That’s why we build beautiful churches. That’s why we read the scriptures, the inspired word of God. That’s why we celebrate the sacraments, through which God gives us the means of grace. We see life differently and we grow. And others grow with us. The poet Walt Whitman once wrote
“I know nothing else but miracles..... to me every hour of night and day is a miracle”.
We cannot live this new life in Christ simply through our own efforts. St. Paul said that the good things he wanted to do he didn’t do and the bad things he tried not to do were the ones he ended up doing. We say things which hurt other people. We easily turn our back rather than turn the other cheek. We need God to help us live differently. It’s God’s Holy Spirit who can make our dull moral world fizz and sparkle with new life. There was a moving example of this just over a month ago.
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Many of you will have heard about a teenager murdered in a bakery in south London. It wasn’t in the tough inner city but in a respectable suburb. The young man was just 16 years old and called Jimmy Mizen. He’d only gone with his brother to buy some sausage rolls. He was threatened for no reason. He refused to fight. He was killed by a broken bottle.
Jimmy was a Catholic who served regularly at Mass in his local church. Instinctively he followed the teaching of the Lord of the Eucharist. He’d absorbed what it meant to love your enemies. He didn’t fight so he lost his life. But what impressed me enormously was the reaction of Jimmy’s mother. She didn’t demand summary punishment for the killer. She said there was too much hate, anger and bitterness in the world. She and Jimmy’s family didn’t want to add to it. She said she felt sorry for the parents and the family of the young who had killed Jimmy. “They’ve got to live with what’s gone wrong in him”, she said “whereas we can cherish the memory of a wonderful son”.
How I wish this remarkable witness had achieved front page headlines everywhere. What a difference it would make to a society that grows angrier by the day and where politicians, because of our fallen nature, have to compete to show how tough they are on crime. What I do know is that Jimmy’s family responded as they did because the Holy Spirit of God was at work within them. If you heard Jimmy’s parents on the BBC Sunday programme last week you would have been moved. Somehow our public life is now so shot through with resentment and conflict that we cannot hear the good news. That’s why we need the renewing power of the Holy Spirit more than ever.
Witnesses like the Mizen family to the transforming power of the gospel in human life have been nurtured in ordinary local churches. Sometimes we look at the disordered state of our world and think that what we get up to in church seems trivial, small scale and lacking impact. Don’t believe it. Your worship can and should be transformative. Even that poorly attended bible study, that weekday Eucharist where only two or three gather, that youth event with disappointing numbers, that mother and toddler club that’s difficult to sustain – these are the places where the gospel can also be heard and where God’s spirit received just as much as in the mega church with the celebrity speaker. What your mission action plans are intended to do is not to make everyone try harder and so increase guilt when success is elusive. No, they’re intended to stimulate the parishes here to think of the language and means we use in God’s mission and outreach. How can people in our own day hear and respond to the gospel?
God’s spirit finds a language that’s right for each of us. Some people are brought to God through music whereas others are tone deaf. Some people connect immediately with the word of God in scripture whereas others of equal faith find reading the bible a duty rather than a delight. Some find the sacraments of the Church not just a means of grace but revealing the hope of glory, while others appear to be left cold by the symbols God uses. Art and architecture, poetry and the natural world – there seem to be a host of languages which Christians use to praise God and tell of his name. And when God breaks through, His spirit makes all these other things come alive too. The scriptures begin to speak; the sacraments have new depth. The natural world in all its colour and exuberance seems to be a hymn of praise; the Holy Spirit who brings us together into the body of Christ addresses us personally. God will find the right language for you, for me, for everyone. Let’s have the imagination to recognise the host of languages through which the Holy Spirit speaks.
I’ve always loved the old story about a young Welsh girl who came to work for a family in London. She was a sort of au pair in the days before they’d invented the term. She travelled across London each Sunday to worship at the Welsh church. Her family only spoke Welsh at home.
She was soon greatly appreciated by the family for whom she worked. They went to their local parish church. One day they invited her to join them. It would save her such a long journey. “No” she said “I’d rather worship God in the language I love”. “But” her employer said gently, “Jesus wasn’t a Welshman you know”. “I know that” she replied, “but it’s in Welsh he speaks to me”.
Your mission action plans are intended to ensure that in the parishes of this diocese God’s faithful people hear and speak the language of God’s transforming grace. We long for a transformed world. We want God to change people and our society. Our churches, despite all the failures and mistakes we make within them, are communities of transformation. There’s nowhere else like them. Treasure them, these storehouses of grace and nurseries of forgiveness. And so I invite each parish to bring their mission action plan to your bishops. May these plans be presented before God, and dedicated to him as pledges of our response to his love.
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