Remarks at Synod farewell (sermon follows):
To borrow a phrase from John Waller on a similar occasion: who is this splendid stranger – I can’t wait to hear him speak.
And it’s so much more enjoyable than a memorial service.
I wanted this to be more than a personal farewell.
What you see in the displays represents a whole variety of living churches using their God-given talents in witness and service.
[The same applies to what you have heard and seen, for which we might show our appreciation ...]
It really is good to see so many friends, too many to single out any in particular. The refreshment break is long enough for you to have time to appreciate all that is represented here on the displays, as well as allowing old friends to meet and chat.
What I say myself can only be personal, of course. I am feeling thankful today.
In strict order of priority, then, public thanks to Sheila. In the year that I was irresistibly drawn towards Christian ministry I was irresistibly captivated by Sheila; a young man suddenly faced with the rest of his life. That I was so blessed remains a secret wonder after 45 years, for better for worse, even for richer for poorer. If I wanted proof that God is good, this is it.
And of course she had a life: it is Sheila who had afternoon tea in Buckingham Palace. I have only been to the garden party.
I have lived in four great cities, Birmingham for 8 years, Liverpool for 16, London for 10 and now Manchester-based for 7. Some great times, great colleagues, great moments in all four. I am just grateful that I was in on the action sometimes, as a minister of the United Reformed Church.
Celebrity matters less now, says our new Prime Minister, with whom incidentally I had breakfast a few times in the count-down to what became Make Poverty History – and he felt like a celebrity to me. As did Muhammed Ali or Yasser Arafat or indeed the Queen when I shook their hand – not to mention Kenny Dalgleish and the Liverpool team after Hillsborough. This apart from meeting so many church leaders and knowing some as friends.
Celebrity does not equate with achievement. But high-profile talent will always achieve, while the rest of us play our supporting roles.
What I am really thankful for is the patience people have had throughout my life. I am thinking of Elders in inner city Liverpool and colleagues in other places, including many of you in this Synod.
I often listen to the poems of T S Eliot during the hours of driving in this job. He has a dark passage in Little Gidding which begins: “Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age” and concludes:
“And last, the rending pain of re-enactment of all that you have done and been; the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done and done to others’ harm which once you took for exercise of virtue.” Pretty devastating.
So to all of you who took some of the previous kind words and exaggerations with a pinch of salt, please realise that I do so too.
Thankfulness should lead to a confidence to repent without which guilt just destroys you. John Newton puts it: “As grace once taught my heart to fear, so grace my fears relieved.”
As to recent colleagues, it has been good to work alongside you.
I can hardly name so many names, but we should never take for granted what the Synod and District officers and committee conveners do, unstinting in their time and effort. I will just mention Sue and Hazel and their superb efforts over these years in the Synod office.
I have learned a lot about ministry from our ministers, and a lot about our ministers as people apart from their work. I learned about their money problems, their sexual preferences, their family joys and griefs, their hyper-activity or laziness, their hobbies, their loneliness or their fantasies, their driving ability and their acting ability. But you can relax, I shall not spice up this talk with any of that – my publisher wouldn’t like it.
Finally, thanks again to you for this generosity. It really is exceptionally kind. The point of such gifts is not only the substance but the resonance. They function as mementos, for those times (forgivable because mostly just the two of us) when sentences begin ‘do you remember when’. I shall take a richly stocked memory into retirement which all of you have enhanced.
And incidentally, having spent my whole life talking, where better to go in retirement than Ex-mouth!
Another quote from Eliot which I used at Assembly:
“This is the use of memory, for liberation – not less of love but expanding of love beyond desire, and so liberation from the future as well as from the past.”
This is our calling as the United Reformed Church.
And what can work for the church can work for me too.
Even the liberation of retirement is not without hope.
So thank God. And thank you.
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Sermon at Synod farewell:
Let me announce my text: “Now you are the body of Christ”.
Your memories are already running onto the following phrase “and individually members of it”.
And you would be settling back, resigned to yet another sermon on unity and diversity in the church.
Diversity, unity, pluralism, koinonia, all very important, but let’s not go there today.
I have no wish on this occasion to indulge in my feelings of disappointment at the relative failure of the ecumenical movement during my 40 years of ministry, nor to lament the growth of sectarianism, within the United Reformed Church no less than elsewhere, as the eyes keep saying to the ears “I have no need of you” or vice versa.
No. I will take Paul’s metaphor of the body of Christ in a different direction. You would expect me to reflect with you on the nature and calling of the Christian church.
I remember being surprised to open Hans Kung’s mammoth volume ‘On being a Christian’ to find it was mostly about Jesus. Agreeably surprised as it turned out. And then I recalled my tutor George Caird’s comment that he would not be writing a book on New Testament theology because there was no such thing, only New Testament theologians. He then proceeded to offer wonderful characterisations of the writers of the New Testament, until you felt they were in the room. Each in their way had felt the need to explain in writing why it was that they felt they had to worship Jesus.
They were all Jewish monotheists, for whom the oneness of God was paramount; and they had come to recognise that somehow, as Paul put it, God was in Christ, or as John put it, the Word became flesh. They just had to worship.
Long before the dogmatic theologians got to work on what we now call the creeds, those apostolic writers were affirming the uniqueness of Jesus as the revelation of God in a human life, before whom they simply knelt in worship. This was the one who was to come – they need not look for another – this was the Christ, the anointed Messiah and so much more than the Messiah, the real presence of God, the embodiment of the truth, the personification of the Spirit. I think I believe this even more now than I did 45 years ago as a more conservative evangelical.
This is the definitive paradigm of God’s relating with us human beings, as a human being, such that in his voice we hear God calling “follow me”. So when Paul writes “you are the body of Christ” or when John writes about the vine and the branches, this is more than discipleship; this is incarnation. There is a double belonging which makes us citizens of heaven and earthly pilgrims at one and the same time. We are the church because, once upon a time and for all time, Jesus of Nazareth was the body of Christ.
And here comes that body of Christ, dancing through Galilee, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy of the coming of the Spirit in the anointed one, to preach good news, to set all free from their physical, mental or spiritual captivity. Once upon a time, for all time. Here he comes in joy, and so should we.
Here comes the body of Christ, wrestling with his destiny when it is clear that mere popularity will not do; healing hundreds and feeding thousands, tempted to do miracles for personal glory and resisting that temptation. Here he comes, and so should we.
See how this Jesus patiently teaches his few followers the prophetic meaning of the scriptures, sharing with them the paradox of being the promised Christ, the Messiah, explaining the pattern of God’s promises from the beginning. Good news then, good news now. Here he comes teaching, and so should we.
And here he comes again, facing down the powers, impatient with hypocrisy, breaking the rules, touching lepers, eating with quisling collaborators, working for good on the Sabbath, routing the corrupt money-changers, subverting the prejudice against Samaritans. Once upon a time, for all time. Here he comes impatiently, and so should we.
This is the body of Christ, given for you in humility and sacrifice, like a lamb slain from the foundation of the world, selfless to the last.
Good news then, good news for all time. Here he comes up the via dolorosa, and so should we.
And here comes the body of the Christ, alive beyond death, raised by God to demonstrate that the authentic body of Christ will outlive the death of Jesus, transformed into what Paul calls a spiritual body, no longer bound to distant years in Palestine. Once upon a time, for all time. His life our life.
This is where we come in. How shall we embody God’s good news? How shall we replicate the phenomenon of Jesus the Christ?
Are we known for the dancing, the praying, the teaching, the caring, the campaigning, the suffering, the self-sacrifice of the body of Christ?
I have often used over the years the saying of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “what you are shouts so loud, I can’t hear what you say”. No one could ever say that of Jesus the Christ. His integrity was absolute; which is probably what is meant when we say he was without sin.
There is a helpful phrase which has strayed into general use from its original context of psychology: body language.
This is how we live out most of our relationships whether casual or intimate, sensitive to the impact of other people’s attitudes and conscious of our own impact on them, quite apart from any words spoken or heard.
When someone looks beyond you during a conversation you know they have lost interest; when shoulders droop or conversely when they stiffen you know what is meant before anything is said; when the vehicle in front changes speed or direction you know what to expect before the brake lights come on.
Communication is a whole body thing, whether words are used or not.
Thus it is that the body of Christ demonstrates the gospel of God.
Once upon a time Jesus embodied God; Jesus was the body language of God.
Now it is the body language of the church which tells it all. Are we divided while speaking of love? Are we hesitant when speaking of God? Are we addicted to buildings when speaking of mission? Are we counting the cost when speaking of the cross?
It was my turn to write the Synod Moderators report to Assembly this year, so I need not ask permission to quote from it, as I reflected on the church I have known over these years.
As Moderators in our work we perceive the United Reformed Church at its worst as well as at its best. We sense the presence of God in the worship and meetings of some of our churches and Districts more than in others. This may be down to us and our own mood swings, but not so as to invalidate the point. In our own monthly discussions we return time and again to this quintessential hallmark of the authentic church; we did it again in the group-work preparing this report. And we agonise over what to do with churches where, to be blunt, we cannot discern God’s gracious leading.
All 13 of us have this experience, lest you should imagine I am being personal to this Synod. How is the church to be the Body of Christ? Can we discern the embodied spirit of God in the life and worship and programme of the church? Some people would go on asserting that we – meaning the URC but true of every denomination – that we have to go on treating all local churches exactly the same; others would argue that we are wasting resources - I mean ministers more than money - on sustaining the unsustainable when we could be backing those who are risking a lot on new forms of mission with no guarantees of success, whatever that means for the Body of Christ.
Given the experience of this job I am now in the latter camp: we must support disproportionately those churches which are dancing, praying, learning, caring, campaigning and risking pain to be the Body of Christ.
We all need to ask ourselves how far our life in our local church witnesses to the authentic presence of the Christ-like God in our life and for our community. And if the answer is ‘not much’, then remind yourselves that you need not be resigned to give the same answer in five years time, but rather “expect great things from God, attempt great things for God”, to quote William Carey, founder of the Baptist Missionary Society. That’s the dynamic mix of divine grace and human faith which is the hall-mark of our Reformed tradition.
John uses the image of the vine and the branches.
How often we miss his obvious point: we are all the vine if we are the branches. We are the Body of Christ for the world today. You and the person sitting next to you and me and Jesus – all in it together.
To whom, with God the Father in the unity of the Spirit, be all glory and praise, with thanksgiving, now and for ever. Amen.