So the schools are now back after the long summer holidays. Children who have been mostly in the care of their parents and other carers are now mostly in the hands of their teachers. The regimes are different but one thing that trained teachers and competent loving parents have in common is this. They seek to turn the children in their care into self-confident individuals, building their self-esteem and affirming them. This is high on the list of priorities of parents and teachers alike. Those of you (not me!) who are Archers fans have been listening in horrified fascination the story of a young woman who was systematically undermined by a controlling and manipulative husband with disastrous consequences. In a human being, self-confidence is essential to flourishing. Too much and you can have a megalomaniac – too little and you have an individual who withers and does not flourish, who is unable to achieve their potential.
What I’d like to talk about today is self-confidence in both individuals and in societies and to see what it’s got to do with the Kingdom of God. And it’s an issue of enormous topical importance.
So that you can quickly see my point, compare these two stories:
First, the story of King Cyrus the Great which we heard in our OT lesson this evening (Ezra 1). Cyrus was an astonishingly successful King and over his 30 year reign he conquered three kingdoms, becoming ruler of the largest empire the world had ever seen, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Indus River in the east. He is well attested in secular history and in the amazing Cyrus Cylinder which you can see on display at the British Museum just 25 miles from here he modestly describes himself as “Cyrus, king of the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world.” To say the very least, he had enormous self-confidence. Was that necessarily a bad thing? Well, one effect of his great self-confidence is recorded in our OT reading today. His conquest of the Babylonian empire had brought the Israelites in exile under his control. For 70 years the educated and artisan classes of Israel had been under a kind of house arrest in Babylon following the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. They (or at least many of them) yearned for their homeland. Cyrus, no doubt for a whole host of motives, is sufficiently self-confident – sufficiently comfortable in his own skin and unafraid of the Israelites – that he feels able to free those who wish to go home. What’s more, he finances the rebuilding of the Temple and returns huge quantities of plundered treasure which had been sitting in the Babylonian coffers for 70 years. His self-confidence is so great that this foreign religion holds no fears for him and great magnanimity is possible. Incidentally, Judaism repays these gestures by describing this pagan king (Isaiah 45: 1) as a “messiah”.
Second story. A terrorist drives a lorry into dozens of innocent people on a seafront in Nice in the South of France. The trauma is deep and terrible. Individuals are emotionally scarred and so are the communities in which they live. Security is understandably and I would say rightly tightened up. But the corporate loss of self-confidence goes far beyond increased security. Mayors of a number of traumatised communities seek to introduce restrictions on beachware hoping to ban the so called burkini. Although it’s not particularly in their sights, such laws would require a nun to strip off on the beach as well. Within days, photographs circulate around the globe showing policemen, for men they were, ordering a Moslem woman sitting quietly on a beach either to remove her clothes in order to reveal bare flesh or to leave the beach. Result: huge hurt and bitter division heaped on top of the deep trauma still raw from the original terrorist outrage.
The comparison between these two stories (the edict of Cyrus and the edicts of the French Mayors) is, I think, clear and revealing. Self-confident societies can afford to be liberal in outlook and tolerant of religion and they frequently are. Societies which lack self-confidence fear diversity of religion and invariably suppress it to some extent and sometimes to a very large extent.
And the fact is, British society is not as self-confident as it was. It remains to be seen what the impact of Brexit negotiations will be on our national self-confidence. But we are told by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner that when it comes to terrorist attacks on our country, it is a matter of when and not if. In our society as much as in France, a loss of self-confidence is likely to follow from terrorist attacks and religious freedom is likely to pay a price.
So that’s all about the self-confidence of societies. That’s all well and good, you might say, but what are we supposed to do about it? It’s surely far beyond the ability of those of us sitting here this evening to influence the mood of nations.
Well, yes, to a point. But of course, the mood of a society comes from the mood of the people within it. The starting point is to ask how self-confident are we as individuals – how comfortable are we in our own skins as Christians? How secure are we in acknowledging Christ as the way, the truth and the life? That, it seems to me, is where the self-confidence that I am talking about essentially springs from. If we are steadfast in our faith – confident that we rest in God’s loving arms and that in all respects that matter, we are cared for, then a woman wearing a burkini on the beach hold no fears for us.
And the fact is, people all around us are thirsty for self-confidence of that kind. People we work with, our neighbours, people we come into contact with day by day. They are thirsty for meaning in their lives and for the self-confidence which faith can bring to them. My home group this week considered how we might approach making new disciples. We were informed by an improbable mixture of a papal encyclical on evangelisation and a business tool used to enhance corporate brands. I think our conclusions were that, at least for us, making new disciples is not about thrusting religious tracts into the hands of startled people. For us, we concluded, it is to be about four things:
First, letting slip to all that we are Christians, so that everyone we come into contact with knows where we stand and they know that we are ready to share our faith with them if they want us to.
Secondly, being attractive. By which I mean letting our joy in faith and our love for each other be visible and infectious.
Thirdly, walking alongside them, or as the Pope puts it, making sure we “smell like the sheep” in our interactions with all. We are not remote from their lives, their challenges, their temptations. What we offer in faith speaks to them because we are one of them.
And fourthly, being ready to share our faith when their interest is piqued or some life event makes them spot an emptiness in their lives, offering a simple and compelling account of our faith prepared for sharing.
These four steps, it seemed to our home group this week, are a realistic approach to evangelising for us, confident that the Holy Spirit will do the rest. That way, when we pray “thy kingdom come” we will have done what we can to make that happen.
And how will we know it is happening? We will see it as our society becomes more comfortable in its skin – more self-confident and more mature. An edict by a Pagan king, Cyrus, was hugely important in the life of God’s people in earlier times. And paradoxically, perhaps a sign that Jesus’ kingdom of self-confident joy in faith is growing nearer will be the sight of birkini clad women on French beaches sitting undisturbed by police officers.
Who is our neighbour post-Brexit?
We woke up on Friday morning to a seismic shift in our polity. A vote to leave the European Union, a Prime Ministerial resignation and turmoil in the leadership of HM Opposition. We will spend the next few years working out what the consequences of Brexit will be for our country, for the world and for ourselves, but the emotional impact was deep and immediate. I had breakfast sitting outside a café in the City of London and listened to an American banker at the next door table trying to explain what it might mean to colleagues sitting around a table in New York at 3.00 am their time, his voice breaking with emotion. I joined a group of young lawyers at 9.00 am and found them all in shock and some in tears.
Whatever is going on here? These are highly qualified, gifted professional people who will personally thrive in pretty well any environment, and they know it. Exploring the emotion with the lawyers (I had no opportunity to ask the banker at breakfast – that would have been a bit weird!) the reasons became clear. A sense among a group of people who have been brought up in an international and multi-cultural environment that we have opted for insularity – for separation from the stranger.
Of course, this is absolutely not what the leaders of the official Brexit campaign say they want. But it was palpably the deep and emotionally expressed sense of those I met that morning.
Our reading from Deuteronomy this morning describes a model for relationships between a peoples and strangers. Those under the law may lend money, but every seven years they must remit the debts of other members of their community. They must be benevolent and generous to needy neighbours, but no remission need be accorded to strangers, however needy.
Under the new covenant, the meaning of “neighbour” is explained by Jesus in our NT reading today, in the well-known words of the summary of the law followed by the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Jesus approves the lawyer’s distillation of the law – ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ But that still leaves a question of definition – “who is my neighbour” for these purposes – that is to say for the purpose of seeing who we should love as we love ourselves?
From the law in Deuteronomy, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is a matter of separating ‘us’ from ‘them’; in that case the ‘us’ being the Jews and the ‘them’ being everyone else. But under the new covenant, everything has changed. As St Paul puts it, (Galatians 3: 28) “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In the parable, the neighbour of the injured Jew is the Samaritan – a foreigner from a country which the Jews looked down on.
In any case, today’s reading from Deuteronomy does not exhaustively describe even the OT self/ neighbour/ stranger model. A little earlier in Deuteronomy (Deut 10: 17-19), we read “[T]he LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them with food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Love for stranger is mandated by the Old as well as the New Testament. The change is not in scope but in intensity, because under the new covenant, we must, challengingly, love our neighbour as ourselves.
The years to come will test our love of neighbour. For perfectly good reasons of negotiation tactics, our Brexit negotiators will take a tough stance with the EU negotiators and they will be met with a tough stance in return. It will be politically expedient for our politicians to blame EU negotiators for set-backs and, of course, our politicians have a louder voice back home than do EU officials. Some part of those who voted for Brexit will assert an entitlement to a Brexit dividend of reduced immigration and a proportion of those will look for expulsions. Some newspapers will beat a jingoistic drum and inevitably the climate will sour.
In such a clamour Christians will find it difficult to get ‘love your neighbour’ heard. But we will need to be brave enough to shout it, for the whole law requires us to love God and neighbour. And our friends in Europe are our neighbours today as much as they were yesterday.
The death of Jo Cox MP
A young woman, Jo Cox, was stabbed and shot to death on Thursday in Birstall in West Yorkshire outside the public library where she helped her parliamentary constituents with their problems. The public grief at her death is deep and I can’t ever remember such heartfelt and genuine affection in the tributes which we’ve heard over the past few days. The word ‘unbearable’ was used several times by those who knew her and ‘senseless’ has been repeated time after time. Why the grief is so deep is easy to see: a genuinely lovely, caring, hard-working, happy, approachable woman, a mother of two young children, brutally killed while doing her job helping others. Each of those words: ‘unbearable’ and ‘senseless’ seem accurately to describe aspects of this tragedy.
I’d just like to stick with ‘senseless’ because, I think, it’s a natural instinct to try to make sense of a loss; to account for it: to organise it into a category in order to be able to cope with it. In the hours after Jo Cox was killed I know I was straining to hear some explanation. Eventually it transpired that the killer may have spoken some words of political allegiance and this seemed at first to help with this categorisation. But of course it doesn’t. It doesn’t even begin to make sense of the deliberate death of a young mother that the killer might hold different political views to hers. Nowhere near. We need to look elsewhere in our attempts to organise this into some kind of category.
Now I’m a regular commuter and those of you who do the same will be familiar with the regular announcement to the hundreds of peak time travellers on platform 3 at St Albans station telling them that the train they are expecting is just about to arrive on platform 1. Result, hundreds of people sprinting or struggling with luggage the length of the platform, up the steps, over the bridge and back down in a frantic attempt to catch the train they arrived early for.
Reactions vary in temperature. The mildest reaction is irritation and that’s where I generally am. The next is quiet anger, the third is vocal anger and the fourth is aggressive anger. Like all stations, ours has notices saying that station staff are entitled to work without fear of violence and it’s in incidents like this that you can understand why the train company feels the need to say that. If ever I’m experiencing reaction 1, I can be sure that there will be people on the station showing worrying signs of reactions 3 and 4.
What do these trivial irritations have to do with Thursday’s tragedy in Birstall? Two points:
First is the one which has repeatedly been made since the killing. If we tolerate in our political discourse a disrespect for each other – for it to be acceptable to use inflammatory language and to play the man and not the ball – then the climate which it creates will generate reactions in all four of the grades which I’ve just described. You say something which, were it to have been said to you, would have provoked a mild level one reaction (irritation) then you can be absolutely sure that in some others it will provoke reactions in each of the other grades. In the febrile atmosphere of the referendum debate, we’ve lost sight of that and as many people have said over the past few days, we must draw back. We must stop our disrespect for each other. That’s especially true when discussing immigration, as the Archbishop of Canterbury commented weeks ago.
The second point is a more theological one. Why do human beings resort to violence in thought, word or deed? Why do we fail to treat each other with respect? Why do we just shout at each other and, in extreme cases, physically attack each other? The answer is that, in differing degrees, we are all in need of healing. That’s the nature of the human condition and that’s what our Gospel reading is about today.
Jesus has made his only recorded visit to the lands of the Decapolis, a largely non-Jewish area spanning the River Jordan. He is immediately met by a man who doctors would, these days, diagnose as suffering from mental illness: naked, violent and living in a graveyard and chained up to prevent him damaging himself and others. Jesus heals the man and as a result of his healing, the man wants to become a disciple. Usually Jesus tells people whom he has cured to keep it secret (perhaps because Jesus doesn’t yet want the Jewish authorities to take action against him – his time had not yet come), but on his occasion Jesus tells the man to return to one of the Greek cities of the Decapolis and to spread the word, which he does.
The story is, of course, given enormous further interest by the way in which the healing is accounted for by the first century Gospel writers – as an expulsion of demons who escape into a flock of pigs who then stampede into the sea. Since Gesara is 40 miles from the Sea of Galilee some bible translations say that the place was Gadara instead, but that town’s 6 miles from the sea itself. So one looks for some explanation for these striking details. Our Dean, Dr Jeffrey John (The Meaning in the Miracles, pp 84-97), has convincingly traced the Old Testament patterns for a man living among the tombs to Isaiah and the Psalms (Isa 65: 1-4, Ps 65: 7 and Ps 68: 6) and these patterns are woven into the story. And when Mark and Luke were writing this account, Gerasa had recently been the site of a slaughter of 1000 Jews by the Roman army, so the expulsion of the ‘Legion’ via pigs into the sea seems to have distinctly political overtones. But these details are not really the point for today’s purposes – it’s the healing.
Humankind – each and every one us – is in need of healing and that is what Jesus does. He offered healing to the naked man and the result of his cure was that he became a follower of Christ. The man spread the good news and that extended the cure to others.
The terrible and senseless death of Jo Cox, which has so moved people that hardly anyone is able to discuss it without tears in their eyes, is a symptom of a broken world: a broken system of political discourse, a broken sense of togetherness and a failure of respect for each other. And so are the notices at train stations telling us not to abuse staff symptoms of a broken world. Society needs to be cured, to be healed, and it is the meek who will inherit the earth. Jesus is able to heal us and the God who loves us yearns for it. His Kingdom on Earth will not be complete until it happens.
Christian Unity
“Assemble yourselves and come together, draw near, you survivors of the nations!”. So speaks Isaiah in Isaiah 45: 20. Isaiah is speaking of the return of the Israelites from Babylonian exile following the remarkable decree issued by Cyrus. But, of course, the Israelites didn’t find it easy to assemble and draw together. Some had found prosperity in exile and preferred to stay. Others returned but found life uncongenial. Always there was dissent and fracturing. That is the way of the children of God. Unity is required of us and yet unity is spectacularly hard to achieve.
The reason why it is required of us is explained by Christ. Just before he was betrayed, Jesus prayed for his disciples and their successors in these terms: ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17: 20-23)
So unity is required of us as a sign to the world – as a way of conveying the Gospel to the people. And it is modelled by the unity of the Father and the Son. Yet we struggle with it.
This week, the Archbishop of Canterbury has convened a conference of primates of the Anglican Communion to discuss a way out of the deep rift caused largely by incompatible attitudes held in the liberal American church as compared with the conservative African churches. It seems that one possible solution is that the diverse churches of the Anglican Communion may cease to have communion with each other, but will instead each retain a bilateral communion with Canterbury. But even this outcome may be difficult to achieve if some primates are unwilling to meet with some others.
Plainly other schisms have been deeper and more significant. In 1054 the Patriarch of Constantinople was excommunicated by legates of the Pope and the churches of the East and the West separated. The process of separation between the Church of Rome and the Church in England began with the Reformation Parliament in 1529 and was completed by the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy in 1559. In comparison with these tragic divisions, the reorganisation of the Anglican Communion seems relatively modest.
If the Anglican Communion is to change its character, one might ask what that character is? What indeed is Anglicanism? It’s a word first coined in the mid 1800s to describe the commonality of the Church of England and the Episcopal Churches of Scotland and America and which received an institutional recognition by the first Lambeth Conference in 1867. But is there really an ‘ism’ here? If the ‘ism’ is thought to imply a distinct set of doctrines or beliefs, then really there is no ‘ism’ here at all. The essential doctrine of the Church of England is that it has no essential doctrine different from that of the universal church of which it is a local part. The opening words of the Declaration of Assent to which all ordained persons must subscribe sets that out very clearly:
The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church worshipping the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation.
As Bishop Stephen Neill said, “There are no special Anglican doctrines, there is no particular Anglican theology. The Church of England is the Catholic Church in England.
If this is so, and assuming it is so of the other churches within the Anglican Communion, a reorganisation of the kind which Archbishop Welby seems to be considering can truly be seen as an organisational matter and not one going to the heart of faith.
That said, at best is a sideways move and not a step forward in unity. So how, one may ask, is unity within the one Holy and Catholic church to be achieved? Perhaps the answer to that is to be found in the words of John Owen, puritan minister and one time chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, who put it this way:
“I do verily believe that when God shall accomplish [unity], it will be the effect of love, and not the cause of love. It will proceed from love, before it brings forth love.”
I don’t suppose that John Owen was an easily lovable man, but surely in these words lies the truth of the matter.
Migration Crisis
There is no question about it – the humanitarian crisis as people flee from war and poverty – is testing our sense of shared values. As far as I can tell, no-one knows how to solve this problem. Absolutely no-one, whether in politics, in the UN, in the NGOs, in the universities or in the church. Of course, if we can bring peace to areas from which people escape war and if we can improve the economic conditions in places from which people flee poverty there is a long-term solution.
Peace and social justice are what we pray for week by week and we must pray with confidence that the world will come to change. But no-one has a plan for dealing with these root causes of mass migration in a time frame which helps the 60 million people currently displaced and on the move. So human beings are stumped. We are also divided. Take any two people, each seeking a reasonable response in good faith, and they’ll disagree profoundly.
This, it seems to me, is an area of public discourse in which the church has a key voice. And our leaders haven’t remained silent.
“The response has to start with compassion and the human being”
Said the Archbishop of Canterbury on Friday.
“Just the dignity of the human being, which has been Christian teaching, the foundation of our value system, forever.”
Understandably, in a TV interview the Archbishop doesn’t go into detail of the scriptural basis for this foundational idea. But as St Paul said to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3: 28. We were, after all, all created in the image of God. Every single one of us. (1 John 3: 17).
So the dignity of the human being is the teaching of the Bible. But could a sceptic reasonably say that this is just words – that it offers no practical solution to these terrible problems?
In trying to puzzle out how we should act in an impossible situation, I believe Archbishop Welby’s insight (The response has to start with compassion and the human being) does offer a distinctive and practical way of breaking into the problem. It’s distinctive because this is a problem which could be broken into at a variety of points. For instance, you could start your thinking about this with the subject of security. Or you could start with the idea of the preservation of the wealth of those lucky enough to have it. Or you could start with the subject of the integrity of national borders. These starting points can all be heard in public discourse at the moment, and they all lead to different solutions. If your starting point is the importance of national borders, then you naturally start by putting up razor wire. What our Archbishop says is that we must start working out the solution by treating the dignity of the human being as the first consideration.
Our sceptic might question whether Christians are entitled to claim that something based on the Christian scriptures is foundational in a world populated by many who are not Christians? Well, I don’t believe that we need to be defensive about that, or even that we necessarily need to justify it. But actually, there is very broad consensus across the world, cutting across all religions, that human dignity is foundational. The opening words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are these stirring and crucially relevant words in this context: “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
If the European and other world leaders who are obviously and understandably stumped by this unique and terrible crisis can do as the Archbishop says and start at this point, I believe that we can move towards practical solutions. But start at some different point, and history will judge us very harshly. For “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of [us] are one in Christ Jesus.”
Human Rights and Christianity
The iconic statue of justice Justitia, the Roman goddess of Justice, or the Greek goddesses Themis is usually shown holding a sword in her right hand, scales in her left and wearing a blindfold. The symbolism is pretty clear. The sword is the power of judicial authority, the scales symbolise the weighing of justice and the blindfold indicates impartiality. In fact, the most famous Justitia in England, on top of the Old Bailey, has no blindfold (which is said to symbolise the close analysis of evidence), but it’s that traditional blindfold that I’m interested in today.
This week three professional legal bodies, the Law Society, the Bar Council and the Institute of Legal Executives, issued guidance on how lawyers should behave when they have a litigant in person on the “the other side”. This is a state of affairs which is becoming ever more common. The withdrawal of legal aid means that an increasing number of litigants in the civil courts simply can’t afford to pay for a lawyer – so they have to do it themselves. The guidance deals with many practical matters and, at least in some cases, suggests that lawyers should help the party on the other side of where their lack of legal knowledge could result in unfairness. This is at least an attempt to achieve something like equality before the law: that everyone should receive equal access to justice, whatever their status. An attempt to put the blindfold back on the statue.
Christians are used to thinking about judicial impartiality too. Just over nine weeks ago, on Good Friday, we were reflecting on a trial in which there was no equality before the law. The judge, Pilate, had the power of life and death over Jesus and he decided to give the mob what they wanted despite his belief that Jesus was innocent. The Acts of the Apostles contains another example of a lack of equality before the law in Acts 22: 22 – 23:11, though there is a twist this time, because it worked to the advantage of the accused. Paul has returned to Jerusalem with the alms that he has collected on his travels. He’s besieged by the mob and a Roman official, the Tribune, has taken him into custody. He is about to administer torture to extract evidence from Paul when he discovers that he is a Roman citizen. Instantly everything changes. Paul is unbound and he is now accorded due process as befits his status as a Roman citizen. You’ll remember that this leads Paul to a further hearing before the Governor in Caesarea and eventually to his final journey to Rome. This reflected the stark contrast in Roman law between the status of a Roman citizen on the one hand and non-citizens on the other. The Roman citizen enjoyed a right to a fair trial which was not available to others.
These days, we tend to understand the notion of a fair trial for all in terms of human rights. It is a right secured by Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights which currently has the force of law in the United Kingdom.
Although Christians have the judicial encounters of Jesus and Paul in front of them, the relationship between Christian ethics and human rights has actually been a fraught one. The Roman Catholic Church set its face against the recognition of human rights in the 18th and 19th centuries and it wasn’t until the papal encyclical, Pacem in terris issued by Pope John 23 in 1963 that the Roman Catholic Church came fully to support the concept of human rights. Protestant thought took a very different course. From an early date, Protestants linked the duties to be found in the Torah (the Ten Commandments, for instance) with corresponding rights. My duty to love you as my neighbour creates your right to be loved by me, etc. Moses took his duties as a judge very seriously (Exodus 18: 14) – even handed treatment was not just for the people of Israel but was required in the treatment of aliens also (Exodus 22: 21). In the Protestant way of thinking, those judicial duties create corresponding rights – a right to a fair trial.
So human rights and Christian ethics are not independent spheres with no point of contact. As Christians we are deeply concerned about human rights, including the right to the fair trial which Paul claimed and which Jesus was denied. The time will soon come when Christians will need to look at proposals to recast human rights in this country, and we’ll need to satisfy ourselves that the blindfold remains secure on the eyes of Justitia.
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