Sermon preached at Farm Street Church for Christian Unity Week (Third Sunday in Ordinary Time)
The following sermon was preached by the Revd. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff from the Grosvenor Chapel.
In the words of today’s Psalm:
May the spoken words of my mouth, the thoughts of my heart,
win favour in your sight, O Lord, AMEN
It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that Ecumenism is in crisis.
This can be said despite the welcome facts that we celebrate ecumenism each year with no less than an entire week of prayer for Christian unity and that this practice continues to be very widely and politely observed.
It is, it must be admitted, a rather quiet crisis, for it is in fact the fruit of earlier success. Thankfully, the fierce intensity of past divisions between denominations has lost much of its heat. Merely to set foot inside a church of a different tradition is unlikely to be thought to risk eternal damnation. No one nowadays, when obliged to be present at a wedding or a funeral in another denomination, thinks it best to turn their back at points, so as to evidence their repudiation of certain of the beliefs implied, or discernment of an ontologically defective clergy.
Indeed, it is surely the consequent and well-established pattern of coziness now prevailing, together with its attendant ease of mutual interaction, that has led to our present complacency--- as we all settle back agreeably between our occasional ecumenical forays--- into the familiar patterns of our own ways of doing things and of thinking. Such ease can invite us to wonder if there is really a need to attempt anything more.
In wider society, there are many among our sympathetic but unbelieving ‘cultured admirers’, in their cloud of non-specific spirituality, who suppose that all religious roads lead at least to Nirvana if no longer to Rome. And even the more zealous among us can be tempted to say to ourselves quietly -- amidst the amity-- that “You worship God in your way and I in His” ---yet think too that we need not worry about it since– theological differences have so much lost their edge and seem “cost free”.
To be sure, there is much that is very good in our cordiality that is rightly to be celebrated, standing as it does in sharp contrast to earlier times of hard conflict and atrocious bloodshed between Christians. This is a vast improvement, for which we have much cause to give thanks. Yet this should not mask such confusions as thinking that truth no longer really matters, or that religion does not make truth claims about what is actually the case. Nor does it mean we can duck the challenges of addressing incompatible claims.
It does also need to be noticed that, in contrast with only thirty or forty years ago, there now seems to be little or no expectation that ecumenism will have very much practical impact on the regular operation and structures of our churches, or the daily practice of our faith.
This represents a very real lowering of ecumenical ambition.
The earlier and original goal of “full visible unity” is hardly even mentioned, as befits our having pushed it long ago into the longest of long grass. In one sense, we may have achieved an effective operational unity, that could even be described as Augustinian, but it is hardly positive, insofar as we effectively seem to be praying for unity but, “not yet”.
Indeed, an external ecumenical status quo may feel all the more welcome when far more active and heated disagreements can be found within the ranks of our own denominations, often upon such matters as the style and the language of our worship, and perhaps most of all in areas of ethical debate and on issues of human sexuality, which remain explosive.
Sadly, there is no lack of evidence for such strains upon unity among we Anglicans. To be blunt, we are at risk of taking our traditional tendency to diversity and breadth to the point of threatening our overall cohesion and continued theological (as distinct from mere legal) identity. Such strains do indeed suggest that sometimes intra-mural ecumenism may be more urgent than the traditional extra-mural form, or to put it another way – it may behoove us to mend our own glass house before throwing any stones at others!
But perhaps, amidst the growing challenges to internal unity on the one hand, and the seeming stasis in much traditional ecumenism on the other, this may be a time when it could be useful to reframe our perspective.
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Consider a dark episode that occurred in 2015. Picture if you will, a wide expanse of sea shore and a rather fine beach in bright sunshine. You may even be able to think of the sound of the waves gently breaking on the sand.
Now, in the carefully made video of this scene, for that is what I am considering here –and you are right if you are apprehensive that it is about to take a sinister turn –the camera next moves to show a line of 21 kneeling figures. Behind each there stands another figure and after a short shouted explanation knives are wielded and all of the kneeling figures are beheaded.
The video ends, with the sea again, but now running red….
The atrocity happened in Libya almost exactly seven years ago in February 20151 and responsibility was claimed by the so-called Islamic State’s “Tripoli Province”. It was expressly addressed to “the nation of the cross”. The men killed were labelled as “people of the cross, followers of the hostile Coptic Church” of Egypt. The victims were further called “Coptic crusaders” though they were in fact merely migrant workers kidnapped in Sirte a few days earlier.
The justification offered for this horrific slaughter was a strange claim that the Coptic church in Egypt had been oppressing and converting Muslims and was linked in particular to a much-disputed alleged conversion of two women in Egypt to Islam in 2010 who later seem to have returned to Christianity, in a saga that caused widespread interest and unrest in Egypt2.
But key, amidst this theatre of horror was intent on the part of ISIS to label all Christians in the middle East as Crusaders a category clearly designed to place them as part of a wider and older framing, intended to make them by definition oppressors of Muslims, regardless of their qualities as individuals. This, in turn, was intended to place all Christians at risk of being attacked and thus, in the end, likely to flee their historic heartland in the Middle East.
(And it is worth noting, peripherally, how much this shows the dangers in allowing the ever wider use of group identity to transcend both our individuality and also our shared humanity – something we see again and again in the so-called politics of identity and Critical theory.)
Almost immediately after the attack, Pope Francis in a letter3 expressed his “profound sorrow” and, referring to the victims beheaded, wrote that
their only words were: ‘Jesus, help me!’. They were killed simply for the fact that they were Christians….. The blood of our Christian brothers and sisters is a testimony which cries out to be heard. It makes no difference whether they be Catholics, Orthodox, Copts or Protestants. They are Christians! Their blood is one and the same. Their blood confesses Christ. As we recall these brothers who died only because they confessed Christ, I ask that we encourage each other to go forward with this ecumenism which is giving us strength, the ecumenism of blood. The martyrs belong to all Christians. (Libreria Editrice Vaticana 2015) 4
Again, in November 2015, while visiting the Protestant Faculty in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, Pope Francis further expounded this form of ecumenism in the face of suffering and persecution, saying:
God makes no distinctions between those who suffer. I have often called this the ecumenism of blood. All our communities suffer indiscriminately as a result of injustice and the blind hatred unleashed by the devil…. In these difficult circumstances, the Lord keeps asking us to demonstrate to everyone his tenderness, compassion and mercy. This shared suffering and shared mission are a providential opportunity for us to advance together on the path of unity; they are also an indispensable spiritual aid. How could the Father refuse the grace of unity, albeit still imperfect, to his children who suffer together and, in different situations, join in serving their brothers and sisters?5 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana.)
Thus, do we see one particular avenue whereby something uniquely positive and highly ecumenical can emerge from an otherwise deeply negative context. A deep sense of unity can be forged and strengthened in the face of shared suffering and adversity that transcends division.6
Though there is one further dynamic to note here (from the interfaith perspective). For there is the danger of falling into a trap that the extremists of ISIS have tried hard to create – which is to allow them to drive a wedge between people of different faiths. To do that could be to succumb to the divisive ideology of group identity, which (paradoxically) would grant to the attackers the power to define those whom they attack. This could all too easily inflame rather than diminish tensions between different faith communities. Hence, it is important to see here the shared identity, forged by the suffering and the response of witness to higher truth in the face of it, as well as the unity forged by a shared Christian vision for the possibility of a world redeemed by Christ. This is a vision of the possible and the ideal which we can also invite all to share, since it is nothing other than a world made perfect, and that by definition must be a vision (of the summum bonum) to which all can aspire.
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This brings me, lastly, to one other frontier where deeper ecumenism can, not merely be advanced but is actively needed, and where, once again, its positive value in “widening the tents” of Christianity can be made evident. I speak here of the shared challenge posed to all Christians by our wider and ever more secular culture, where – to echo the words of Peter Berger7 the sacred canopy has been dismantled and the very possibility of the supernatural is denied.
Religion is now widely deemed by the administrative classes to partake, necessarily, of the irrational. In consequence, it is being almost reduced to the status of a private vice – except insofar as it can demonstrate utility as an agent of social change. Thus, do we see faith being widely instrumentalized, not so much as an opioid of the masses, but as a means of nudging them along, to do whatever is in fashion, as constitutive of the general good8.
Light pantheism and sun worship are so “very now”, after all, as we seek to save the Amazon, coral reefs and whales on the one hand, and promote solar power on the other…. (all very laudable it should be stressed), but not immediately what comes to mind after reciting the Nicene Creed and not goals to which the truth and value of Christianity can be entirely reduced.
Again, from personal experience I can attest that there is still an appetite, on the international stage, to see if religious leaders can be persuaded to parade en masse in colourful garb, ideally with some form of folk music and perhaps even the occasional little dance, to promote approved global causes. Intergovernmental and international organizations when they hold assemblies thus adorned, can look a little like a marketing poster for Switzerland. But beyond the cow bells and occasional yodelling, the legacy of Emmanuel Kant can be discerned. The danger here comes when there is only public space for religion within the limits sustainable development goals alone. When so reduced, by such framing, there is in the end no room for the transcendent and that which might take us beyond merely human perfection, no room for true transformation (metanoia) and still less for divine redemptive love (agape).
All this throws into sharp relief the deeply serious challenge posed to all Christians, neatly focused by Charles Taylor, for whom ‘a secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable’ and where this closure ‘falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people’. This bleakness goes beyond a work of global disenchantment, for even superficially accommodationist secularism offers, in the end, only a narrative of subtraction. This is the price it extracts from religion for any place in the public square which it presumes to control.
Here surely, is a further frontier for ecumenical challenge.
Christianity, if it is to remain authentic to its historic self-understanding, must surely mobilise collectively to resist such an impoverished and merely horizontal vision for humanity – a vision devoid of transcendent hope.
In the prescient words of Peter Berger,9 “The most obvious fact about the contemporary world is not so much secularity, but rather its great hunger for redemption and transcendence” Indeed, we may even expand upon the point made by the French sociologist Hervieu-Léger, that while ‘modernity has historically been built on the ruins of religion’10, it has ‘never managed to emancipate itself from these remains’11
This is not merely a matter contingency we must argue, but rather of metaphysical necessity. Reductionist mutilation that would betray our beliefs and the Christianity that has so shaped our wider cultural heritage and civilization is not a choice we have to accept. We do not have to cut ourselves loose from our own heritage. To quote Taylor again, ‘the dilemma of mutilation is in a sense our greatest spiritual challenge, not an iron fate’ and ‘do we have to choose between various kinds of spiritual lobotomy and self-inflicted wounds?’12
Rather there is the alternative of finding “a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life” (Ibid, 437) Is there not here a deserving and urgent project around which to convene an ecumenical consensus and campaign, which moreover must be intensely positive, as well authentically Christian in its specificity?
Faced with such a challenging mission –in the words of our first reading
“Do not be sad: the joy of the Lord is your stronghold”
Knowing moreover, that – in the words of Isaiah
“Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;”
(Isaiah 58:12).
Here is a vocation around which all Christians can unite as part of the body of Christ which is the church of the ages and within which the words of today’s Gospel are so powerfully true:
“the parts are many but the body is one”. AMEN