When Pope
Benedict came to Westminster Abbey in 2010, he called for unity between
Christians in their life and faith in the Risen Christ, so that we could give a
convincing account of the hope that lies within us. (I Peter 3.15)
In other
words, everyone expects there to be rival supermarkets, rival football teams; and
no one would stake their life on any claim their fans and advertisers make. But
religion is different. Everyone expects the Church to be one. Religion means “tied
up with God”, so people of religion are supposed to be people of peace and
goodness, people of love and unconditional forgiveness, people of brave hope.
Most of all they expect our prayers should get through to God, because God has
got through to us, and made us different as human beings. Not better, but
capable of seeming to look like the one Lord we worship, the Christ we
recommend as the truth and the hope of the world. They are telling us, ‘You
pray every day “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.
But on earth, you live in separate
heavens. You have your Anglo-Catholic heaven, your Roman Catholic heaven, your
Pentecostal heaven, your Evangelical heaven, your Orthodox heaven and many more.
Which is the true one? Where is this Kingdom come on earth? How do we find our
way to it?”
Pope Francis
has been very blunt about this. He has noticed that when the criminal gangs currently
posing as Muslims come to murder our Christian brothers and sisters in the
ancient Churches the Middle East, as well as in parts of Africa and Asia, they
never ask, “Are you Anglican?” , or “Are you Coptic?”; “Are you Orthodox?”; “Are
you Protestant, or Catholic?” They just ask, “Are you a Muslim, or a Nazarene?”
Pope Saint John Paul, Pope Benedict and Pope Francis have each said that what
unites us all is the martyrs for Christ’s Name. Following Christ to the end and
what He called “No greater love than to lay down your life for your friends”
(John 15.13) achieve complete communion in His own sacrifice, for the martyrs
first and the fruit is for us. Pope Francis calls it the “ecumenism of blood”. It
is true that it brings us very close in concern for each other, even thousands
of miles apart; it makes us realise that what counts before the world is the common
account we give, not of our rival institutions, but of one Church, our One
Lord, the One Faith, One Baptism and the One God and Father. (Ephesians 4.5)
In today’s
Epistle (I Corinthians 12. 12-30), Saint Paul imagines an argument between the
parts of the body in which the eye tells the hand, “I have no need for you”, and
the head says to the feet, “You are no use to me.” He says, “Instead, God put
all the separate parts into the body for a reason”. But we Christians behave as
if St Paul really said the opposite, “God put the body into separate parts for
a reason.” Yet, the night before Jesus died the Lord prayed, “Father, may they
all be one, as you and I, Father and Son are one, so that the world may believe
it was You that sent me.” (John 17.
21) He did not say, “May some of them be one”, but all. He did not say, “Anglicans
have no need of Catholics,” or tell anyone to believe that their institution was
the “one, true Church” to the exclusion of others. He told Saint Peter, out of
love for Him, to feed His sheep. (John 21.15). And He told the sheep, “Listen for My voice
and follow Me” (John 10.27) and thus “become one flock with one shepherd, for I
lay down My life, which is why the Father loves Me.” (John 10.17)
It is clear then
that, to Jesus, the unity of His disciples - the complete and obvious wholeness
of His Church - is not just a matter of obeying His words, however much it
costs us. It is about the laying down of His own life as the price He paid to
gather us into His Kingdom, and give all humanity a vision of its blessed
living that lies not in an after-life, but from here and now. The Catholic
Church has therefore set itself the task of putting back together again the
visible and organic unity of the Church as Christ intended, so that it could
really be a genuine picture of God’s own unity, Father, Son and Spirit; so that
the world might believe us when we talk about a new life this side of death, real
and physical, but also spiritual and already risen from the dead with Christ. Yet
even the Catholic Church feels deeply that divisions among Christians make it
difficult for her to attain in actual life what it is to be completely Catholic
in every way. (Unitatis Redintegratio 4, Vatican II, 1964). So what is to be done?
It all reminds
me of a book called Lilith, by George
Macdonald, the writer who inspired C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, where a horse and carriage
full of people, find themselves dead. A rich man and his wife behave with
cruelty to the coachman they employed; the coachman kicks the horse; the horse
refuses to move; the others argue, blaming each other in their terrible
predicament. As time drags by, they realise that every time they hit out at
each other, every time they do something nasty and selfish, a bit of their
bodies falls off. Finally, the coachman kicks the horse again and, both reduced
to bones, they collapse in a heap. But meanwhile, one of the party has noticed
that when there is a word of kindness, a shared difficulty, help and
compassion, somehow their sinews seem to grow stronger, the bones knit up, the
flesh becomes firm and faces regain their brightness. The selfish man and wife quickly
go back to their old ways and start to fall to pieces once more. But one re-learns
the lesson and, slowly, comes together again. The other, as the rest resume
their journey, is left behind, cursing from his heap on the ground. But what’s
this? As the coach moves off again, it too starts to fall to pieces and the
party realises that it cannot leave anyone behind. So they return and help the
one who is not ready, to find his new life and be put together again. Then, in
their resurrected new bodies, they move on from death into the Kingdom, no
longer dead but alive.
So it is
that the Church, feeling incapacitated in many ways by Christian disunity, urges
each body of Christians to be very close to one another, whatever our
disagreements, our past history together, our estrangement and such different styles
of living in Christ’s Church. Seeing the riches in each tradition, it desires
for them to be shared so that all may benefit, not locked up where the others
cannot reach them. It presses us to be indivisible in service of humanity in the
relief of poverty and the construction of peace and justice in a society that
is a manifestation of the Kingdom of heaven.
But, when
you look round the world and the Churches, you could be forgiven for thinking
that we are getting further apart, with our distinctions getting sharper, with our
unity, that once seemed so close we could touch it, now slipping further away
as we react to conditions in a fast changing world. But we should not allow
this. For there are signs that unity makes progress still. Look at the
concerted effort of the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church to confront
human trafficking and slave labour, especially of vulnerable women. Think of
the many ways in all our parishes and dioceses, Catholics, Anglicans and Free
Church people work together to be of service to the poor. A job of mine during
each week is to work with those who help prisoners to overcome their past. One of
the best things I know is a wonderful house in Streatham called Nehemiah, run
by an Evangelical group helping ex-prisoners to leave drugs and drink behind
and make a safe return to society free from the causes of their crime, so they
never reoffend. It is very successful at this. Most interestingly, it also
relies on a friendship and partnership with the Catholic community, who are
seeking to set up more of these wonderful, hopeful houses in other parts.
Another example is the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage which takes place every two
years going to Walsingham for a few days, and in the other years making a day pilgrimage to some other place of
pilgrimage. This year in May we will go to Marian Oxford, visiting Catholic,
Anglican, Orthodox and Methodist sites. Your own Father Philip Corbett and I, a Roman
Catholic priest, are fellow trustees of this pilgrimage; and it is amazing how,
despite everyone’s different Churches and beliefs, how close a spiritual bond
is formed, as we go deep together into the mystery of our One Lord’s Incarnation.
At the
present time, some of the Churches seem to be determined to set themselves
goals that surely cannot be reconciled with unity of faith and life together in
the one Universal Church. Your own Church has a famous history of dedication to
the Catholic faith, and of love for the good and future of the Church of
England, as you witness to the larger Church, the Universal dimension of Christ’s
Body, and as you seek to persuade your fellow Anglicans of the vital importance
of the communion of the whole Church with the successor of Peter, the Pope. I
know that differences within Anglicanism are potent forces seeking to persuade people
that is best to live apart from one another, let alone from other Christian
Churches. For the Catholic Church people, too, we wonder how union between our
Church and the Anglican Communion can ever be achieved. You feel this too, and
the same situation applies to the unity hopes of other Churches as well. But it
is at precisely such points, where all appears futile and impossible, that we
need to be closest to one another. Families disagree and relatives do the opposite
of each other all the time. But they are still related; they still love each
other; they still keep together. “Blood’s thicker than water”; and another
dimension of that ‘ecumenism of blood’ about which Pope Francis speaks means
that we are meant to cleave to each other the more we veer apart and seek only
our own company. For what Jesus prayed, he commanded: we are not allowed to be
separate. The world cannot see us making other plans. It cannot see us like
that. It needs to be convinced when we speak of one Christ and one heaven, one
Kingdom.
It is for God
to bring about His miracle of unity, for that is what it will take. But it is
for us to remove all obstacles, and to be as close as we can in love, service, faith
and honest hope. In this Anglican parish, part of the great historic Anglican Catholic
movement, you believe in the fullness of life in Christ given in the Catholic
faith, and, even though we cannot yet share the Eucharist of the Lord together,
it is a vital bond that unites us on the way. Fullness of communion is for God
to bring about; but in the meantime, as
St Paul reminds us, we cannot say we have no use for each other. We persevere
in our faith and witness, but never in a spirit of isolation. Even if it is a
lonely path at time, on our journey through this world towards the Kingdom, as
the coach and horses people realised, it is heartening that we are going
nowhere on our own.
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