Sermon by Lord Runcie at the General Convention
Episcopal News Service. June 25, 1991 [91170]
"If we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his."
Among the memories of this week, these seven days of creation in convention, I will treasure for ever that Sunday baptism of Benjamin Thomas at San Pablo. We crowded into the mission church. Hispanic songs, Native American dress made a glorious mingling. Solidarity brought honored veterans from Mexico and Nicaragua.
Old friends signaled encouragement to me. A gentle lobby gingerly raised their banner and slipped into the official procession.
Un solo senor, una solafe, un solo baurismo. They responded to my Spanish with forgiving smiles -- though I was delighted to be told subsequently that an eight-year-old bilingual child had been heard to whisper, "Mom, he speaks Spanish better than English."
It would be hard to imagine any cause that could win the unanimous vote of such a crowd -- yet here we were, drawn together by God's gift of baptism. And there, in the midst, undaunted by this invasion, the proud local family beamed on their Benjamin Thomas. Biblical names to be sure for a blessing and the beginning of a pilgrimage of faith.
Tonight we pause in the hectic days of final amendments... to amendments to amendments to amendments... to be renewed in the blessing of our baptism and to be reconciled for our common pilgrimage of faith.
"If we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his."
Baptism into the death of Christ sounds strange to the world but for us it is profoundly encouraging. More encouraging because less limited than the "happy family" image. The promise that Christ will take us through the manifold deaths of the world is deeper. Death to egotism, self-interest, self-indulgence -- through the distortions, put-downs and failures of human exchange -- and at the end through physical death itself.
The Christian religion is unique for it is centered on the cross, because the richest experiences in life arise not from neat harmonies but where there is something askew and what is askew is faced and transformed and something richer emerges. Our hope is in the God who brings life out of death.
Nor can we forget that faith in the God of Jesus Christ means that we begin from a point of weakness and not from a position of strength -- a vulnerable baby; a wandering teacher and his ramshackle group of quarreling, self-preoccupied friends; a betrayal and a scattering of the company; an excruciating death; and, like the borrowed manger at the beginning, so a borrowed tomb at the end. And yet out of the bits and pieces of his incarnate life he wove a garment of salvation so that we may say, "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ."
In these fragments, in these crumbs from the table, we learn the hard lessons of faith. And so, to the Bethlehems of your rural communities, take back eyes of expectation. In the turmoil of lives lived with racism or AIDS or discrimination or poverty, sound the voice of determination. In the congregations of the prosperous, push out the limits of neighborliness. And on the barren Calvary of the inner city, sow seeds of hope. For our God is not the God of the dead but of the living.
Strong then in this faith we ought to give thanks for one another. What in fact makes the big world manageable for little people like most of us are the bonds of affection and interdependence that connect and reconcile us with each other and unite us in the body of Christ.
We all know in one way or another the isolation that often accompanies the preaching of the gospel of truth, and it makes our daily thanksgiving for each other our duty and our joy.
There is no part of the Anglican Communion that has invested more generosity and imagination than you have done into the building of bridges and the targeting of tasks for our common life in that Communion. I speak here of what I know. Among the architects of the Communion I venerate Stephen Bayne, who once wrote, "Our unity lies not in our thinking alike, but in our acting together".
All over the United States I am conscious of the way in which you have supported my envoy, Terry Waite, during these difficult years. His family have been steadied and upheld. And that is a visible answer to your prayers which will surely one day bear the fruit that we all long for in the return of the hostages and the end of the injustices which continue to scar what we call the Holy Lands and of which Bishop Samir Kafity has spoken so movingly.
No communion that has produced bishops like Trevor Huddleston and Desmond Tutu; or faithful servants like Florence Tim Oi Li; or martyrs like Janani Luwum and Jonathan Daniels; or evangelists like Festo Kivengere can be said to be lacking the full grace of God and the fruits of his spirit.
Yet we are incomplete, and need the discipline and order, the charismatic word, and selfless compassion which often put us to shame in many other traditions. Above all, we need to reflect the reconciliation we are called to proclaim.
We were all warned that Phoenix would be hot in more senses than one. We have not been disappointed. But the Holy Spirit leads us into truth, as in everything else, through relationship, by our staying in discourse with those whose views may appall us, without rubbishing their spiritual integrity.
The spirit of truth is also the spirit of love. That was St. Paul's remarkable insight. The spirit of truth is also the spirit of love, the one who rescues faith from being turned into the poison of bigotry.
Three things that I long for in your church and mine.
- That we shall presume our opponent's reasoning has something to do with his or her desire to be loyal to the same Christ we want to serve ourselves.
- We shall recognize that what is and is not a matter of fundamental loyalty to Christ can not always be made clear in a generation, let alone in a short meeting. The tension between the responsibility to be holy and apostolic and the responsibility to be one and catholic, open to all, seems to be inescapable and to demand heroic patience. We are called to maintain our honesty in following the Lord, not simply to prosecute successful campaigns.
- In both our churches I could wish that there was not so strong a fashion to tie things up in legislation which does not allow any give for pastoral application. St. Paul had strong convictions and a hot temper but he is quite unqualified in condemning inter-Christian litigation. "It is a defect in you at the best of times," he says, that there should be quarrels among you. He says, "Why do you not prefer to put up with wrong, or suffer loss?... Let your forbearance be known to all people."
Well, there! I have said my interfering words. But they come from the heart of someone who longs to defend your church with all its tremendous gifts from the dangerous effects of fierce but narrow loyalties.
Now we who give thanks to God for our faith and for each other will give thanks finally for the whole creation that God has called us to serve. Our commitments to a world in all its brokenness and in all its beauty we shall proclaim in a few minutes as representatives of each diocese bring to the altar the United Thank Offering -- itself a thanksgiving for blessings received as well as a sign of a vocation to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bind up the wounded. The world is also Christ's gift to us -- we are not called to fear it or shun it, to dominate it or romanticize it.
"We have only one world. Is it not worth our love?"
To love it in all its complexities we need to attend to the ecological threat, or to the use of new powers placed in human hands by biological development -- without rushing into superficial and final judgments.
There is a "liberalism" -- a vague word, much debated -- there is a liberalism which is brash and concerned to accommodate faith to contemporary fashions of thought. But there is also a "liberalism" which, to use T.S. Eliot's phrase, is "continent in affirmation," because there is a mystery at the heart of all things calling for reverence and awe rather than shallow and slick predictions.
The truth about our world -- like the truth about ourselves -- is sometimes hard to bear. And yet here and there the tenacity of the faith of a few solves a burning question, or takes a small step towards justice, or wins a victory over prejudice. And the life of the resurrection breaks into a world that drags the chains of death.
Jesus wept, for public things like Jerusalem, and for private things like the death of his friend Lazarus. And like Jeremiah he was "filled with indignation" as he encountered human outrage perpetrated in the name of religion.
The world continues to weep and so shall we. Yet even in this weeping there is the sign of the victory of God. The promise to us is not that we shall not weep; the promise is that God will at last wipe away every tear from our eyes.
My closing words should come from someone who has in spirit played a large part in this convention and that is Martin Luther King. In another time, at another place, at the end of a long march for freedom, King spoke as he often did of his conviction in the present moment and of his hope for the future. They remain for us, whatever the cause we have at heart and which we brought with us to this convention, words we need to heed for patient realism in the present as well as bright hopes of the future.
"I know you are asking today 'How long will it take?' I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again.
"'How long?' Not long, because no lie can live for ever.
"'How long?' Not long, because you still reap what you sow.
"'How long?' Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is lung, but it bends toward justice.
"'How long?' Not long, because my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
There too may our eyes always be turned, to that same Lord of earth and heaven, Jesus
Christ, in whom by water and the Spirit we have died and been raised anew to a living hope and to whom be given all praise, honor and thanksgiving, now and through all the ages. Amen.