On the 9th February, Bishop Anderson delivered a powerful sermon at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Reflecting on the intersection of faith, change, and societal challenges, he offered profound insights into the role of the Church in a rapidly evolving world. The sermon, which engaged both the academic and spiritual communities, highlighted the dynamic nature of Christian life and the importance of continuity amidst transformation. If you wish to listen to the sermon you can do so by clicking this link.
Change and Transformation
Colossians 3:1-17
“It is remarkable and fascinating how ‘ordered love’ Ordo Amoris a theological idea has become so popular among some proponents of Christianity to legitimise new political ordering.
Last couple of weeks saw the unfolding of a new unhinged politics, that allows people’s homeland that was destroyed can be reimagined as a privately owned posh riviera or millions could be sent back via ‘mass deportation’. Any country or nation can be randomly penalised, taxed or even annexed! Climate change is a conspiracy and global warming is a myth. There is no moral obligation for foreign aid. Tech tyrants will fix our lives.
Well, the remixed version of brave new world order Pax Americana, which is conjured up in the mind of a real-estate leader of the democratic world has firmly taken over the news headlines.
This is nothing new, but lingering characteristics of empires and authoritarian regimes for centuries. Our church isn’t far behind in terms of crisis.
As we reflect on Change and transformation, reading the letter of Paul to Colossians in the shadow of imperial vestiges offers a fresh perspective for rethinking the characteristics of ekklesia, the church, both local and universal.
Paul writes to the fledgling Christian community in Colossae, a prominent city in the Roman empire. He outlines an emerging ecclesiology, built around Jesus Christ, a critical alternative to the dominant Roman worldview, a new understanding of community, renewed and restored.
What did it mean to be the body of Christ in the eternal Roman empire?
Firstly, The Roman empire was built on systemic centralisation of power, reinforced by socio-economic and military power. Religious myths legitimised it, which in turn shaped the imperial culture. In this backdrop Paul offers a subversive imagination to the early Christian communities in Colossae. We could hear Pauls saying strip away oneself of the marks of Roman empire, anger, wrath, malice, slander, abuse and lies. He then invites them to clothe oneself in Christ, with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, forgiveness, and patience. Paul’s idea was directly opposed to the Roman imperial politics of idolatry. A counter cultural way of living, which is rooted in a renewed knowledge and understanding of mutuality in Christ.
Secondly, the Roman worldview was formed around hierarchy and exclusion. In contrast, Paul proposes an expansive worldview: redemptive inclusion: “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all (3:11)”. Pauline notion of a capacious and inclusive community was fundamentally opposed to the segregated, graded, and excusive Roman society. With Christ at the centre, Paul urged Christians in Colossae to distinguish themselves from the Roman social and communal thinking. Paul urges them to hold each other accountable and responsible. By embodying Christian virtues as the marks of the church, Paul pleaded to the Christian community to pave the way for a new way of life in the Roman empire.
Thirdly, the church in Colossae, opposed to the empire was inevitably political. The Pauline conception of ‘the church’ was not simply a small group of desperate believers, but an imagination of humanity that had the potential to be the body of Christ, an alternative to the empire. The Pauline counter cultural community was seen as an embodiment of love and practical outworking of the virtues it embraced (i.e, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and forgiveness). The love mentioned in this epistle unifies, heals, and “binds everything together in perfect harmony” (3:14). In the marketplace of Roman empire, Paul resisted the commodification of love. In the midst of fragmentation and division, Paul’s idea of love actively sought to reconcile, not through transactional fudging of relationships, but through the pursuit of justice. For Paul love is the substance of justice. Life shaped by love rather than hatred, see the world through the eyes of Jesus.
Fourthly, the peace of Christ advocated in this letter was brought about by the pursuit of love and justice. Roman empire achieved peace through violence and raw military power. Fear, terror, and anxiety was fermenting under the surface. On the contrary, the Pauline pathway to peace was through love and justice. Paul intentionally contrasts the peace of Christ with the violence of the empire. Inclusion and fullness of life, in opposition to exclusion and extermination. Paul encourages gratitude and humility to direct the minds of Christians.
These Pauline exhortations of the body of Christ, the church, bears the core features of resistance to the empire, leading to renewal and transformation, both within the church and outside. Paul’s radicality of God offers a subversive relational ethic.
Is it possible to envision such a church that does not bow the knee to the empire and its idols?
Can the church embrace renewal that dares to imagine a world beyond its current brokenness?
How can the body of Christ break free and set the whole creation free from its bondage?
I think the answer is a resounding yes.
No doubt that our church and the society that we inhabit is broken, fractured, fragmented, and dismembered. They bear the marks of the empire. The violent empires may have faded but their legacies and obsessions linger on.
Our church is a victim of such imperial entitlement and privilege. It allowed abuse of the vulnerable. Continues to exclude people through its entrenched hierarchy. It perpetuates prejudice in the name of tradition and orthodoxy. Enforces loyalty through its network of beliefs and practices. We shouldn’t shy away from naming it.
I believe fragmentation of our beings often happens under the weight of disembodied tradition and misguided orthodoxy.
Like me, you may have been consumed by despair at the current state of affairs, that is, if we approach the Church simply as an organisation or institution that is broken to the core.
However, if we return to the organic imagery of the church as the body of Christ by Paul, a living and breathing body, there is hope.
It is not a coincidence that Paul holds up before us the abused, violated, and tortured body of a victim as a frame of reference for the church.
The risen body of Christ does not erase the scares of abuse and torture, but it is precisely through it the redemptive love of God shines. That’s why Paul returns to that idea again and again in his letters.
It is extraordinary how as a ‘church’ that worships and built around, a broken, tortured, and abused body of Christ, goes on to break, torture and abuse other vulnerable bodies in its fold.
Just like the frightened friends of Jesus living in the imperial shadows, healed back the loving community through carefully tending with love, we are called to carry out the God’s sacramental work of repairing the broken church.
To do that we ought to heed the Pauline call of stripping away the influences of the empire, which ignores the wretchedness and pain of innocent people, and embrace a new character, clothing oneself afresh with skills, virtues and practices of the subversive Christian community.
In this unpredictable and unstable world, the purpose of the church is to practice love that gathers and knits together a community that has been disembodied, dismembered and scattered by the machinery of social media.
As an alternative to the imperial polity, the body of Christ, ought to step into God’s imagination.
We are not just a small band of desperate believers, but a living breathing body of Christ, called to live in the light of God’s emerging future, God’s Now and Not Yet.
We have to fan the fickle flame of hope so that it might animate our faithful living rooted in the mind of Christ.
Dear sisters and brothers, we are called to embody the scandalous and subversive body of Christ, to resist destructive imperial tendencies, by out-imagining evil, holding before people an impossible possibility, thereby bringing healing and renewal to the broken world.
Let me finish with the prophetic words of Amanda Gorman, a young poet,
For there is always light,
If only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Amen.”
St. John’s College Chapel
9th February 2025