Tag Archives: Archbishop of Canterbury

GLORIOUS THINGS SPOKEN

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GLORIOUS THINGS OF THEE ARE SPOKEN, O Lord our God; not least this week in St Peter’s Square in Rome, and in the Cathedral Church of Christ in Canterbury. Pour out most abundant blessing, we pray, upon your bishops Francis and Justin. Grant hope to each, that they may walk humbly with all your children, women and men, of every nation and faith tradition, in faith and in love.

Interviewed by the BBC on Tuesday, after the glorious Inauguration service in sunlit Rome, Professor Eamon Duffy said, “I’m not optimistic. But I am hopeful”. Interviewed today after the glorious Inauguration service in Canterbury, Canon Giles Fraser said, “I’m not optimistic. But I do have hope. And hope’s a good theological word”. Prophetic men, I think.

Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin alike have called the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, our Christ, to care for one another and to care, sacrificially and unafraid, for all our sisters and brothers in all creation.

Both bishops have called upon humankind to place its trust in God. And it’s the heart of God, the Anointed and anointing Fount and Source, and Mother and Father of all life, where any of us may best place our hope, for in the heart of God all the redeemed creation will dwell in love and mercy and peace. The lion shall down with the lamb. God redeems. God shows creation redemption, “the way home to ourselves”.

And that hope and faith and love in human hearts all around the world begins in this moment. This moment.

This morning I was delighted to preach on the “I AM” sayings of Jesus in our local Bramhall Methodist Church. The I AM we see in Jesus is the same I AM who brought hope and vision to the great leader Moses. I am Simon, an extension of I AM – in company with every other living thing – a member of the Anointed I AM who was, and is, and is to come. Therein lies my grounds for hope. Therein is my Eternal Christ – the Anointed, the Christ that can be accessed and adored by all humankind. The eternally Anointed and anointing God.

After the service this morning a dear member of the Methodist Church gave me a copy of a rather glorious poem, created by the hand and heart of a Jewish friend of hers, a poem about the prayer that God may grant “to us sinners eternal life”. I pray that neither Jean nor the poet will mind me sharing the gift more widely:

Eternity

… et nobis peccatoribus vitam aeternam

‘Give us eternal life’, you prayed.
‘What is Eternity?’ I asked.
‘Eternity is where there is
No time – where all events, all ages
Co-exist,’ you said.
‘If that is so, why need you pray
For what’s already here?’ I asked;
‘If all events that ever were
And ever will be co-exist,
‘Eternal’ means ‘Today’. ‘

Edward Lowbury

Thank you Professor Duffy, thank you Canon Fraser for your honesty. Thank you Pope Francis and thank you Archbishop Justin for your honesty and service. Better to place hope in the eternal God than to be merely optimistic - whether in Canterbury or Rome. None of us, if we’re honest, are very optimistic about ‘solutions’ being found quickly for some very major issues facing humanity at large, not just the Church. But hope, that’s quite another thing – indeed a properly theological word!

Let there be another Lenten ALLELUIA today for that glorious things have been spoken! And may every shade and hue of humanity pray to be eternally reconciled ‘Today’.

HOW SHALL I SING?

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Coe Fen from Salisbury

ONE OF OUR ORDINANDS has been longing to get up to Durham for Evensong in the Cathedral there for weeks. Rachael Elizabeth has described the experience (happily on St Cuthbert’s Day) as “cloaked in a golden embrace” – and was thrilled then, and will be again, by a hymn we’ll sing here on Sunday – John Mason’s How Shall I Sing That Majesty? sung to Ken Naylor’s Coe Fen. Huddersfield Choral Society have recorded the hymn and an mp3 is here. I play Winchester Cathedral’s version from Hymns and Psalms Volume 2 constantly. It’s available here.

It’s a question that’s on this parish priest’s heart every day. How shall we sing? How shall the Body of Christ in the 21st century be blessed with resources in hymnody that speak the Word of God for our day? Our theology is a living thing and God speaks “New every morning … our waking and uprising prove”. I’ve written before about some of the hackneyed old stuff – stuffed full of outdated theology – that I believe is positively dangerous in today’s searching and pluralistic society; I’ve written before too of the divisive repetition of carefully selected chunks of Scripture that are then misused to patronise, chastise and exclude. These things will only be replaced, though, when hearts are captured by something that better describes where the people of this contemporary world have got to in their journeying with God and with those many and diverse “others” who make up the one humankind.

The Church of God, like humanity herself, is in the hands of God and will therefore end only if and when God wills it. That’s wholly better news to my eyes and ears than the fulminating “evangelicalism” that bleats on and on about the certain destruction of a Church led by “non-Bible believing liberals”. Dear God help us! They’re not talking good news. There’s nothing truly evangelical  about their perpetually prophesying destruction – and wilfully abrogating the responsibility of all human beings for “salvation” by turns either to Jesus of Nazareth or Rowan of Canterbury. The Primate of All Nigeria, in a statement about Archbishop Rowan’s new appointment says

For us, the announcement does not present any opportunity for excitement. It is not good news here, until whoever comes as the next leader pulls back the Communion from the edge of total destruction. To this end, we commit our Church, the Church of Nigeria, (Anglican Communion) to serious fasting and prayers that God will do “a new thing”, in the Communion.

For 2000 years no single person has shown themselves capable of pulling back an entire communion from anything at all. For pity’s sake let’s not burden Rowan’s hapless-even-before-named successor with this pretence of an expectation – only to knock them down when they don’t meet the mark either. Can’t we stretch our imaginations a bit further? Could we stop looking for unique messiahs and archbishops “possessed of unique qualities”?  Could we stop insisting that our version of messiah – already come or still awaited – is the one and only – the unique possibility? Couldn’t we “apply our minds to Wisdom”? – recognising from henceforth that Divine Sophia is to be found in every atom and fibre of every created thing? “Consider the lilies of the field …”

Could we rewrite the myth (as it has been rewritten so many times before) so that instead of making scapegoats we shared responsibility, under God, every child, woman and man alive, for the “salvation” of our supremely beautiful but tired and aching world and her humankind?

Jesus has never given me the impression that he was or is chiefly interested in our recognising his personal “uniqueness” (apparently keener on being thought of as “son of man” – one of us – than as “Son of God”) ; never implied that (long after his lifetime) “Bible Believing Christians” and their myths and theologies should take precedence over the primacy of experience in the Life and Love of koinonia. The arms wide-open embrace of Jesus of Nazareth was surely an invitation to all humankind to offer similar self-emptying healing and hospitality – and especially, if an “especially” there was ever to be, for those hitherto consigned to the anguish of life’s margins.

So tonight’s music choosing meeting here in little Bramhall was heartening. 5 people engaged in some depth with a shedload of hymnbooks and tunes. We grappled with what the hymns were trying to say alongside what we believed needed to be said to elucidate the Lectionary and to inspire hearts and souls at worship in the next eight weeks. It’s a tough collaborative exercise. It takes time, effort and forbearance – even  choosing how to celebrate Resurrection relevantly, worshipfully and well – but there’s no avoiding the question – Christian people who are liberal and inclusive in heart, soul, mind, body and intention must continue to ask How Shall I Sing? For

Thou art a sea without a shore,
a sun without a sphere;
thy time is now and evermore,
thy place is everywhere.

A THICK SKIN?

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DEAR EDITH COX my late lamented doughty defender, protector, elderly Christian disciple and friend used, thirty years ago, to exclaim “eeh Father, you’ll just have to grow a thicker skin”. And every time she said it I was troubled by my apparent inability so to do. Edie eventually died in my arms, and just before she left this world she whispered “better that you live in your own skin, my love, better that you live in your own skin”.

Heaven knows that whoever succeeds Rowan Williams will need to be a person of almost inestimable strength of grace and character. That Archbishop Rowan should gently suggest that his successor will need “the skin of a rhinoceros” is entirely understandable. But honestly, watching this most gracious of men in the recent debate with Professor Richard Dawkins, much moved by the mutual respect and regard between them, I found myself profoundly grateful that Archbishop Rowan lives in his own skin. I wish for him and for his family all the well deserved joy and peace that Cambridge has to offer. The passing of time will most assuredly reveal the measure of the love Archbishop Rowan has quietly bestowed upon a noisy and fractious Church in a noisy and fractious world. Should Gabriel be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan will be no less thoroughly missed.

Edie Cox used also to assure me, “God is good my lad. God is good. And merciful. And kind.” Edie Cox was right.

ENOUGH NATTERING

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I KNOW I SUGGESTED only yesterday that I’m more than just a bit grateful for those who shoulder the responsibilities of General Synod membership, doubting my own ability and / or willingness so to do. (PCC’s about my synodical limit). And I know I smiled when I read Bishop Nick Baines’ Catch up the other day:

if it wasn’t clear before, it should be obvious now that some circles simply cannot be squared. I am not aware of anyone – of any persuasion – who is looking forward with unalloyed joy to this week’s debates.

But nonetheless I wish I’d been in London this morning to hear the ABC at the Synod Eucharist. And to thank God for him. No matter how despondent I sometimes feel about the quality of the life of the Church of England generally today I am never, never despondent about Archbishop Rowan. I feel that at heart he speaks for me from the praying heart of a priest; that he speaks to and for the hearts of countless “witterers” and that, in his own heart and experience, he really does understand something of the “churning around inside” that goes on in wittering lesser mortals like me. Doesn’t he hit the nail on the head here? …

… we ought to remember that of course this is God’s future we’re talking about. And God’s future is by no means the same as the future we try to create for ourselves, and imagine for ourselves. That’s the challenge of discernment in the Holy Spirit. We’re asking not for a foretaste of the future we would like, we are planning, we are working for; we ask for a foretaste of God’s future. And once we put it like that, we realise of course that sinful and stupid as we are, we haven’t got a clue about God’s future. And so we come in prayer to the Holy Spirit, very much with empty hands and longing hearts and relatively blank minds. We come in exactly that state of wittering, inarticulate confusion that St Paul so wonderfully describes as the state of Christian prayer. We do not know how to pray as we ought to. Our prayer is a bundle of distractions and longings, hopes and anxieties, churning around inside, and somehow, upheld, shot through, by the power of the Holy Spirit in us. Somehow the Holy Spirit is constantly winnowing out the nonsense from our longing and hopes, and pushing us towards that future, God’s future, of which we can have so little a picture.

And yet, having said we haven’t got a clue what God’s future looks like, as a matter of fact that’s not the case. What does God’s future look like? Well, one thing we can say is that it looks like Jesus. And that’s why what we wait for, what we long for – God’s future – is our redemption. We ourselves have had the first fruits of the spirit grow inwardly while we wait for adoption. The redemption of our bodies for in hope we were saved.

full homily text and video here © Rowan Williams 2012

The future looks like Jesus … so, the future will probably be heavily weighted towards affording women absolutely proper, necessary and equal status; would respect the dignity and untold worth of all shapes, sizes, colours, creeds and the many other temporal orientations of a wide-world’s-worth of human persons; would teach and preach with relevant simplicity and humility; wouldn’t be afraid of affection, children, emotion, failure, laughter, illness, intimacy, politicians, questioning, religious authorities, or sexuality; would have a ready empathy with – and a natural incination towards – friendship / colleagueship with outcasts and ordinary folks, little life celebrations, wholeness and holiness, and a gracious and compassionate leading out of “things now hidden in darkness” into God’s eternally new and creative light.

Thank God for Archbishop Rowan. I thank God that a future that looks like Jesus will be, notwithstanding the best efforts of contemporary religious nattering, inevitably and eternally bright. Transfigured. A lifting and a glorious revelation of the Divine beauty in all things – witterers and “others” included – beyond the present limits of our sight.

Thanks be to God that “God is”, as God’s Archbishop of Canterbury has it, “God’s future.”

THE WIND BLOWETH …

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SIGNS THAT THE SPIRIT listeth where she wills fill me with a real sense of hope. I pray that history will look upon the Bishop of London and the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s with a kindly eye. There can hardly be a priest, dean or bishop in the country that hasn’t privately sighed “there, but for the grace of God, go I”. We’ve all done a bit of volte face in our time. Truth to tell, and to pinch an oft used phrase of Bishop Michael Marshall’s: “the many are saved by the few and the few are saved by the one”. Wrong-footed wrath – or even just embarrassment – too quickly and too often demands a scapegoat … until we learn (and – thank God – some are learning) the ways of God a little more perfectly.

The Church in England has long been in need of a bit of a shake up.

I’m mortified every time I hear another weary “Christian” bleat about human sexuality – of whatever shade or hue; embarrassed by the continual twittering about women priests and bishops – there are thousands of women who, whilst waiting for consecration and call to a particular office have just got on and quietly exercised episcopal ministry anyway; irritated by the anonymous demands of “health and safety” – so often more to to do with giving someone a licence to pontificate than with actual health or actual safety;  too frequently angry about “personnel management” and “growth action plans” that give the impression that the only kind of growth that the Church is interested in is its bank balance and the number of seats filled in the nave (the expensive nave that “must” be preserved in every town and village whatever the cost – so the “growth” will preferably be made up of season ticket holders or pay monthly contracts). And God forbid that we should ever be asked to pray in a tent (or a local ecumenical project) … without a stained glass East window. It’s hard going firing slings and arrows at fat cats when you’re hoping against hope that no-one notices your own interest in preserving what you think is “rightfully mine”.

So where’s the sense of hope coming from? Let me name a few reasons:

1. St Paul’s changed its collective mind. You might say that St Paul’s repented. Turned around. Had a rethink. Looked at the situation from a changed perspective after Giles Fraser’s prophetic resignation. And the diocesan bishop Dr Chartres, writing for the Church Times has now said: “I believe that this is a moment in which St Paul’s, and the Church in general, has been shown how it can get away from an in-house ecclesiastical agenda, and its passion for elaborating defensive bureauocracy, in order to serve the agenda of the people of England at a critical moment in our history”. Amen. And hooray.

2. The Archbishop of Canterbury, having joined with 300+ other faith leaders at an interfaith –  :) – event in Assisi, organised by Pope Benedict XVI, said: “Lasting peace begins when we see the neighbour as another self, and so begin to to understand how and why we must love the neighbour as we love ourselves … human beings do not have to be strangers”. Here’s a man of God for our times. A man who can keep his head when all about him are either losing theirs, or becoming more entrenched in outdated religious conservatisms.

3. I visited the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield the other day. I quickly ordered up a core text I spotted on an ordinand’s bookshelf. How delighted I was to read in his introduction to Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Daniel Migliore’s “Authentic faith is no sedative for world-weary souls, no satchel full of ready answers to the deepest questions of life. Instead, faith in God revealed in Jesus Christ sets an inquiry in motion, fights the inclination to accept things as they are, and continually calls in question unexamined assumptions about God, our world, and ourselves … When faith no longer frees people to ask hard questions, it becomes inhuman and dangerous. Unquestioning faith soon slips into ideology, superstition, fanaticism, self-indulgence, and idolatry …” So there’ll be some good people shaping up at Mirfield then. Future priests with their eyes and ears wide open.

And the Spirit of God hovers over the abyss today as yesterday. Blessed be God.

PATCHES GOES TO LAMBETH

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Patches Chabala with Archbishop Rowan

PATCHES CHABALA wrote today:

I was invited as an international Student Representive at St John’s College to attend a gathering at Lambeth Palace. The theme of the gathering was The Communion We Share. It was great to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury and talk to him. He is a man of high learning but yet so humble and gracious. I have a lot to learn from him.

Patches, an ordinand from Zambia we grew to love quickly, will be preaching in Bramhall on the 2nd August at 10am. Godspeed for him in continuing preparation for ordination, and for his forthcoming marriage. Humility and graciousness are qualities many of us have seen in Patches. And I’m imagining a world, and imagining a Church where, humble and gracious, we were able to say of all we encounter – “I have a lot to learn from … “

FR RADCLIFFE WINS THE MICHAEL RAMSEY PRIZE

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THREE CHEERS FOR FR TIMOTHY RADCLIFFE’S “What’s the point of being a Christian?” … which, it was announced yesterday, has won the 2007 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing. The five authors I most wish to see in the hands of my fellow Christians today are Rowan Williams’ “Tokens of Trust”, Timothy Radcliffe’s “What’s the Point of Being a Christian?”, Maggi Dawn’s essay “Whose Text is it Anyway?” in “An Acceptable Sacrifice”, Alan Jones’ “Re-imagining Christianity” and Elizabeth Liddle’s “Pip and the Edge of Heaven”. Amongst the most inspirational Christian thinking I’ve read in the past 25 years, I’d hazard that readers of all five will believe they’ve just been to a banquet … and might look forward to attending The Banquet come Sunday.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

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PEACE AND JOY to you and yours this Christmas night. I’m happy to be at home. I read somewhere that Nigella Lawson “revels in the warmth and light of the house” on Christmas afternoons. Me too. And in bacon sandwiches – always my first reward after the late night and the morning’s Eucharistic worship. But I’m revelling, too, in calling to mind the good natured people I’ve met, in their hundreds, at church services, in the past month; revelling in the truth that in this part of the world there are hundreds of young people who are wonderfully proficient in the art of making music; hundreds who, in one way or another, whether in drama, story-telling, film or friendship, work or worship set out to share Christ’s call to build a peace-filled world.

And it’s a source of particular joy to me that Her Majesty the Queen’s Christmas Broadcast makes similar appeal … for “peace, tolerance and goodwill”. Pope Benedict asks “Let us love God and, starting from him, let us also love man, so that, starting from man, we can then rediscover God in a new way!”. Archbishop Rowan of Canterbury told today’s gathering at Canterbury Cathedral that “as he (Jesus) gives, he makes us grow, and sends us to make the same promise in his name to all, whatever the conflicts, whatever the guilt. To all he offers the authority to be children of God; from his fullness we may all receive, grace upon grace.”

Bishop Riah, the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem writes:

Astronaut Neil Armstrong, first human to step on the moon said: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I have always believed in small beginnings. I have a great dream which requires a small step to mushroom in the land. I called it “Integratsia”. I see children of the three Abrahamic faiths: Arab Christians, Moslems, and Jews gathered in the warmth of harmony in one educational center co-living and integrating as one. The iceberg that has been separating people on basis of race, color and religion, has got to melt down. Extend a hand. Make this dream come true.

I’ve met so many people this Christmas who share these dreams that tonight I, too, feel able to “revel in the warmth and light of the house”. May the vision pervade every day, every people and every nation in the coming year, the vision – God’s vision – of light and warmth and peace.

FOREVER FULL

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I’VE GROWN USED, here in Bramhall, to the nearby sound of trains rattling through the night. The sound of life trundling on is comforting and homely somehow. (Yes! – that would be it – 6 years old: Christmas morning: train track around the sofa …) And I’ve come to be able to recognise – by the sound of it, and the degree to which the house shakes – the length of a train, and whether it’s laden or empty. Empty goods trains rattle and grumble. Long after they’ve passed there’s a whispered memory. In my sleep I can still hear them muttering when they’re pulling into the yard up in Manchester. Whereas a fully laden goods train is very much quieter in the night. Much more purposeful. A quick swoooosh. Less invasive. On the way somewhere. A train to be waved to, with a smile. A train that someone might welcome or respond to. Purposeful trains don’t grumble on the line. They don’t rattle.

I like people who are carrying something, with a sense of purpose and a good intent. Last evening I had supper here with 30+ pastoral visitors. An exceptionally nice and gifted bunch of people, not a rattle or a grumble or a whisper amongst them. Synods and Conventions and empty words and journeys don’t feature much in their itineraries. Care of the housebound, care of their families, care in their community is very much more their thing. Here’s a goods train that’s carrying something, with a sense of purpose. Going somewhere. These are the Kingdom people. These are the people who spend less time dissecting the Word and more time living in Him. These are the people who pick ears of corn, on the Sabbath, with which to feed the hungry. Here’s … Immortal love, forever full, forever flowing free. Forever shared, forever whole, a never ebbing sea. For … Our outward lips confess the name all other names above: love only knoweth whence it came and comprehendeth love. (John Greenleaf Whittier). But it was a very substantial supper: so I’m off to the gym.

PS: Please see Fr Tony Clavier’s thoughtful article after Archbishop Rowan’s published Reflection this week …

LOOKING UPWARDS

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WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY? – my friend Bill would almost always interject … sometimes to the considerable chagrin of one or two of us … who were very probably articulating our current flight of fancy at the time. What would Jesus say?

And the painful answer often was, and is, that we’re not entirely sure! And this is sometimes the more acutely painful because our human conditioning makes of us a people who want to be sure what we’re about, what we’re doing, what we’re believing. And – to complicate matters further – there are some folk who, in addition, want to be sure what others are about, or are doing, or are believing. This is real human commerce! This is the stuff of what it means to be community … to live together.

Archbishop Rowan speaks words of counsel in his The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today: A Reflection for the Bishops, Clergy and Faithful of the Anglican Communion. (see Ruth Gledhill)

Meanwhile in parishes around the globe we chatter about “Fresh Expressions”, of “Looking Outwards”, of “Justice” and of “Peace”; of mission and of schism, of unity and of disunity; of straight and of gay. And in all of this, and more, I’m endlessly interrupted by Bill’s “What would Jesus say?”

And difficult though it be I know that I ought to have a better idea of what Jesus might say to the Church in our day. I ought to have a clearer idea of what Jesus is saying to me. And so, deep down, I know that I must spend less time looking backwards, forwards, outwards, inwards or sideways, and learn to look upwards.

I’ll come to a clearer understanding of Jesus’ view of things when I study the Scriptures and share in the Sacraments with that openness of mind and heart that is invoked by true “worship in Spirit and in truth” … and when I remember, amidst the clamour and the clatter of life in the Church and in the world that whatever Jesus would say, whatever Jesus is saying, HIS tone is a “still, small voice of calm”.

Let me then pay more attention to “looking upwards”: more to worship, and to prayerful listening, than to soapbox flights of fancy … or good old (bad old) religiosity …

What would, what does, JESUS say?