Maundy Thursday 2004 |
St Paul’s Cathedral Maundy Thursday 2004.
I always look forward to this occasion, being encouraged by the presence of other priests and ministers as we prepare together to re-member the events which created our community and transformed the world.
This year I have been reflecting on the way we have come over the past 1400 years since Mellitus, member of a Christian community on the outskirts of Rome climbed Ludgate Hill and re-enacted the events of the night in which Jesus was betrayed. I was trying to visualise what Mellitus must have looked like when I was startled to find on my front doorstep last week a visitor, a member of a Christian community near Rome. He had come from the Fraternita di Gesu to see whether our community in London would welcome an alliance. Peter was his name, but he was not in origin a Latin still less a Galilean but born in Tottenham.
He had obviously found his spiritual home and was full of un-oppressive enthusiasm. Then, yesterday I found the Archdeacon of Hackney on my doorstep clutching some freshly made Buffalo-milk Cheese. He had just been to visit the self same Fraternita di Gesu and he was bubbling. This new, largely lay community has grown rapidly in the last few years – sometimes to the chagrin of older groups. Their community life is founded on daily engagement with the Scriptures, systematically chewing over a different passage each day, morning and evening, and working together – hence the cheese. The dynamic created has led them beyond the bounds of their community to work especially with those possessed by drugs. In the Fraternita di Gesu there seems to be real bonding, biblically based and bridging. In the power of the spirit it even brings a spring to the step of Archdeacons
This has helped me to reflect on our life and ministry. When I began to be a parish priest in this Diocese, the Mission Shaped Church was barely a wrinkle on Graham Cray’s brow. People were still coming to present their children for baptism. I suppose that I was operating, not very consciously, on the assumption that people came to us for various services and my duty was to maintain the accustomed round. Because that round contained daily prayer and engagement with the Bible, good things happened. But I think that I would have been a better parish priest if I had acquired a sharper focus on what we needed to be and do as a community in a part of London that was changing rapidly. My admiration for those among you who have developed a clearer vision is informed and deep.
Surveying the past 1400 years of the way we have come, can help. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Church has in fact organised its life in many different forms. This can give us room for manoeuvre and an awareness of the choices that have to be made if we are not to be exhausted trying to preserve everything we have inherited. But there are also some perennial themes.
Bonding. Baptism and the Supper, established by that visitor from Italy on this hill in 604, created a new community. Sometimes in the past the Church has been required to baptise and consecrate communities that already existed by virtue of common work or common membership of some city or nation. Now our vocation is different. The bonds of natural families and shared political loyalties are weaker. We live in a very compartmentalised city, socially, and in consequence despite all the entertainment and distraction, there is much secret desperation – brought home to me in the past two weeks by the tragedy of two middle aged women taking their own lives.
As priests serving in baptism, the way into the community and eucharist, the way in which the body is nourished and equipped for the journey into the new dimension of the Kingdom, we have a vital role in the transformation of aggregations into congregations.
Mere bonding of course is not enough. Like associating with like in a cricket club can generate very agreeable bonding but it can be very intimidating to those of us who fail the cricket test. Our bonding must be biblically based. Here is a great task for many of us who were trained in the archaeological school of the higher criticism which illuminated a great deal of the background to the scriptures but sometimes did not help us to explore the foreground.
All renewal in the Church is accompanied by genuine ressourcement, a return to the wellsprings. We need to harvest what has been uncovered in the past two hundred years of Biblical research but participate now, with spiritual and intellectual integrity in the fresh engagement with the Bible, which is exemplified in the work of people like Paul Ricoeur. His recent work Thinking Biblically, for example, is a re-reading of the crucial stories in the Hebrew Scriptures from the standpoint of what he calls the “second naivety”.
The Fraternita di Gesu and many communities in this Diocese have discovered that revelation does not proceed by winnowing out a set of abstract principles from the Bible, as if the Christian faith was merely a local edition of some universal spiritual truisms. Rather revelation is ignited and becomes life transforming when we enter into the narrative of God’s conversation with human beings above all in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; when our life and story becomes illuminated and associated with His. We see this in a very direct way today as He confides his future in the world to his friends, to us and gives to us the new commandment to love one another as he has loved.
Bonding, biblically based must lead to bridging. But there is no bridging, just exhaustion and disappointment, without the renewal and reality of the community. That is why the opposition of maintenance and mission is a somewhat facile way of presenting the task before us.
I was very struck by one statistic from the Cray report. In 1900 55% of all the children of England were enrolled in some kind of Christian Sunday school quite apart from the opportunity offered by religious instruction in schools. In 2000 the figure was 4% and clearly everyone of us could tell stories illustrating the editing out of the Christian story from popular consciousness. As communicators of Christian faith with a special vocation as bridge builders, we all need to be involved in finding new ways of singing the Lord’s song in this strange land. Alpha, Emmaus and other invitations to consider the Christian way have borne much fruit and thank God for them. As well as invitation, however, we need to refresh our ways of incorporating people in the Easter Mystery. It was very good on Palm Sunday to be confirming adults who had passed through the experience of the revived Catechumenate.
At the same time as priests and ministers in this world city we need to reflect the face of contemporary London. We have gifted London Korean, Chinese, Nigerian, Mauritian, Indian and priests from many other London communities already – we need more until the Petertide ordination photograph adequately reflects the London we serve.
Bridging of course challenges us and makes our bonding healthy and outward looking in the spirit of Jesus. Our bonding and bridging must be biblically based and this gives a new urgency and excitement to our engagement with Scripture.
I could not think of better friends in whose company to do this work of re-imagining the church. There are many springs of hope visible to those who are not simply praying for institutional survival. This is the day when we offer ourselves once more to be the body of Jesus, who facing the trial of his life gave thanks and entrusted his future in the world to his friends. May we in the power of the Holy Spirit be enabled to make this offering of ourselves, together, in simplicity of heart. Amen.
