ST COLM’S REUNION AND RETREAT 9-11 JUNE 2006
‘FORTY YEARS ON – THE PAIN AND THE PLEASURE’
CELTIC SPELLBINDERS AND PROPHETIC HOLINESS
Murdoch MacKenzie
As it so happens it is 40 years since Anne and I, aged 28, arrived in India on 19th July 1966. Twelve years later at the age of 40 we returned to the western world, to the global North, to Scotland, to a dispirited secular society, to struggling churches, to the challenge of modernity, and thus we empathised with Ewing Smith’s sentiments that it was rather like having been in the Promised Land and returning to the wilderness. We returned, rightly or wrongly, because we felt that our call to MISSION was here rather than in India, and since then we have wrestled, like Jacob at Peniel, hoping to see the face of God and to receive God’s blessing. (Genesis 32:22-32) Such wrestling leaves its scars and we now limp along bearing in our bodies the slings and arrows of outrageous ecumenism. We believe that truth is personal, rather than propositional, and give thanks for the prophetic witness of St Colm’s in spite of all that the Church has tried to do to it. Not that we are against the Church. We take to heart each day the words of George Macleod as we meet Christ suddenly at the bend of the road and see his silent gaze so clearly saying: ‘You are the cause of the frailty of the church at home.’ Thus, with the Iona Community, we pray each day first for the Church and then for the Community as we say: ‘ we pray a like spirit to your church even at this present time. ‘ and then ‘further in all things the purpose of our Community… that new ways may be found to touch the hearts of all.’
Yesterday was St Columba’s Day so it’s a very appropriate weekend to be here in St Colm’s, to be in this lovely chapel, so dear to each of us, in whose foundations mingle the sands of Iona. We were here in 1965 in the days of Jean Fraser, Kenneth MacKenzie, Effie Gray and Charlotte Clunie, with whom we visited the laundry. In the November Ian Smith declared UDI and Kenneth MacKenzie was on radio and TV nearly every day. M.M. Thomas stayed in No 24 with us, while in Edinburgh to give the Duff Lectures, which he wrote night after night till the wee small hours in a shorthand notebook. Mrs Chellappa, widow of the late Bishop David Chellappa of Madras, was staying in college and Jean Fraser, instead of being last at breakfast, suddenly began appearing early, which was due to having Mrs Chellappa in the bedroom next door who kept her alarm clock set within a biscuit box. Bob Bone introduced us to the intricacies of car maintenance and Denys Saunders to the art of photography with the admonition not to shoot until you could see the whites of their eyes.
Here is the House Guild Newsletter for 1966 in which it says: ‘The Christmas Act of Worship (Deaconess Hospital, Simon Square and the Mound Centre again) was made even more meaningful as we all awaited the arrival of a baby. Ruth Elizabeth, daughter of Anne and Murdoch MacKenzie, was born on December 14th and, to our delight, was baptised in the College Chapel on June 4th.’ My uncle, Rev John Ross of St Catherines-Argyll church, conducted the baptism and over the years we have returned to this chapel with great thanksgiving in our hearts, not least today. Ruth, born in the Elsie Inglis Hospital where Anne had worked, on the last day of the St Colm’s Term in 1965, was years later an early protégé of Bobby Anderson on what was then known as the Scottish Churches Youth Exchange and spent a year at Kiserian near the Ngong Hills in Kenya where she returns regularly, and more recently has spent two years as a VSO with OXFAM training teachers in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and now, at the age of 40, she is returning to Vietnam for another two years this coming August – so her baptism doesn’t seem to have done her too much harm !
‘Forty Years On’ is not only a play by Alan Bennett but the Harrow School Song written by E.E. Bowen which begins:
‘Forty years on, when far and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today’
Some say: ‘Life begins at forty’, Edward Young in 1725 said: ‘Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.’ (Love of Fame:The Universal Passion) and in 1823 Sir Walter Scott, no less, spoke about being ‘fair, fat and forty.’ (St Ronan’s Well ch7). In the Bible the number forty is associated with almost each new development in the history of God’s mighty acts, especially of salvation, forty days of rain giving the waters of the great flood with Noah (Genesis 7), forty days on the mountain-top (Exodus 24:18) and forty years in the wilderness with Moses (Exodus 16:35, Deuteronomy 2:7), forty days in Canaan for the twelve spies sent to spy out the land (Numbers 13:25), forty days of defiance by Goliath of Gath (1 Samuel 17:16), forty years for each of the reigns of Saul (Acts 13:21), David (2 Samuel 5:4) and Solomon (1 Kings 11:42), forty days for Elijah’s journey to Horeb (1 Kings 19:8), 40 days lying on his right side for Ezekiel bearing the punishment for the sins of Judah (Ezekiel 4:6), forty days for Nineveh to repent through Jonah’s preaching (Jonah 3:4), forty days in the wilderness for Jesus (Matthew 4:2) and forty days for his resurrection appearances. (Acts 1:3)
So all this gives us cause for reflection forty years on, especially in what is sometimes called ‘retirement’. Perhaps some of you here are like me, as I sit by the shores of Loch Etive, and hear a voice, a word from the Lord, asking the question : ‘What are you doing here Elijah?’ (1 Kings 19:9) This was the voice which St Martin of Tours heard at the age of 40, in the year 356 AD, when he became a pacifist, left the army of Julian Caesar, as it went into battle with the barbarians near the city of Worms, and said to Caesar: ‘Hitherto I have served you as a soldier; allow me now to become a soldier to God;…I am the soldier of Christ; it is not lawful for me to fight… If this conduct of mine is ascribed to cowardice and not to faith, I will take my stand unarmed before the line of battle tomorrow, and in the name of the Lord Jesus, protected by the sign of the cross, and not by shield or helmet, I will safely penetrate the ranks of the enemy.’ In his ‘Life of St Martin’ Sulpitius Severus says: ‘On the following day the enemy sent ambassadors to treat about peace and surrendered both themselves and their possessions. In these circumstances who can doubt that this victory was due to the saintly man?’ So at the age of 40 Martin, the Father of the Celtic Church, left the army, and with his knapsack on his back, went to join Hilary at Poitiers. (See Christopher Donaldson, Martin of Tours pp39-40 Canterbury Press)
‘What are you doing here Elijah?’ This was the voice which Columba of Iona heard at the age of 40 as, for whatever reason, after the Battle of Cul Debrene in 561 AD he began to think of becoming one of the perigrini renouncing worldly attachments and affections and two years later, setting sail, with 12 companions, in May 563 AD eventually reaching Iona at Pentecost, on the 9th of June that year. Ancient tradition tells how in his youth he went to Tours and brought away the gospel book which lay on Martin’s breast and left it in Derry. (See E.A. Cooke’St Columba’ Simpkins Marshall 1888 pp 35+46) Though he never lost the attributes of the warrior aristocracy into which he had been born he, too, became a Miles Christi – a soldier of Christ, a peacemaker, and later became known as Columcille – the dove of the church.
‘What are you doing here Elijah?’ This was the voice which George MacLeod heard at the age of 40, ‘giving him some kind of a nudge’ as he passed the ruins of Iona and a year later he wrote: ‘Why do you shout so loud at me, you most uncomfortable ruins?’ Two years later in 1938, just like Columba at the age of 42, he began his work on Iona in earnest.Like both Martin and possibly Columba, he had been in the army and become a pacifist. In later years he wrote to a friend: ‘I don’t know why I went to Iona. God wanted it, and it was such a hell of a gamble that he could only find George MacLeod, who lost £40 (sic!) one night at poker when he was waiting to be demobbed from the Agile and Suffering Highlanders.’
St Colm’s Reunion and Retreat. I imagine, that Martin, Columba and George, would have been quite happy to join a reunion but I doubt if any of them would have warmed to the word ‘retreat’. Although they did seek solitude, of course, and that holiness which landed them in trouble. Each in his own way was a prophetic figure with a transparent holiness especially in their commitment to the poor and marginalised whether it be the beggars with St Martin, the sick and the dying with St Columba or the people of Govan and the Borstal boys with George MacLeod.
For ten years from 361 AD Martin lived as a hermit at Liguge until in 371, a hundred kilometres away at Tours, bishop Litorius died. A deputation of the people of Tours travelled to Liguge, surrounded Martin and abducted him to make him their bishop. The other bishops and the leading men of the city raised objections, especially to his appearance, his rough coat of goat’s hair and his haircut which they described as crinem deformem – ugly hair. They shouted vigorously non dignus but were shouted down by the mob of the common people who had him anointed and installed in the bishop’s house. He refused to live in such luxury and moved to a cave in Marmoutier on the north bank of the river Loire. In the great cathedral he refused to sit on the bishop’s throne, but preferred a small three-legged milking stool such as might have been found in any cowshed in Gaul. It became his symbol, a symbol of holiness, just as the spinning wheel was for Mahatma Gandhi.
Is it any wonder that Columba, who, in the words of Christopher Donaldson, was the very epitome of Martinian devotion, should have become a peregrinus? According to Ian Bradley: ‘If he had not opted for the monastic life, or had it chosen for him by his parents, Columba would almost certainly have been ruler of a tuath and might well have been high king of Ireland. ‘Instead he and his companions settled in a circle of beehive huts around a wooden church and refectory on Iona. Whilst Columba kept strong links with his aristocratic relatives he is depicted by Adomnan as spending days and nights fasting and praying in his small hut on Hinba, and by the Irish Life of Columba (c 1150) sleeping on the bare earth of his cell with a stone pillar as his pillow, chanting the 150 Psalms before sunrise on the seashore each morning, taking off the sandals of his fellow monks to wash their feet, whilst at his death the old white horse which used to carry the milk-pails lays its head in his bosom and weeps.
As for George MacLeod, though without milking-stool or white horse, at the age of 70 he was swimming in the Sound of Iona at seven o’clock in the morning. I can vouch for that! He was hardly the darling of the Kirk, being accused on the one hand of leading them to Moscow and on the other of leading them to Rome via the Statue of the Virgin Mary and the Rome Express. Accused of breaking the Sabbath by hanging out his washing on a Sunday, of wanting to ban the bomb and boost the bishops, on 22nd May 1957 as he stood as Moderator-elect outside the door of the General Assembly an objection was raised, the first time in the history of the united Church that such a thing had happened. His closing address to the Assembly was a classic tour de force ‘Bombs and Bishops’ but the thing which moved the members of the Assembly most, were his prayers at the beginning of each day. If you want to learn about holiness on this retreat, just read these prayers in the Galilean language.
St Martin, whose cross has stood for a thousand years outside the west door of Iona Abbey, St Columba whose mission spread the length and breadth of Scotland and far beyond, and George MacLeod who continues to inspire each of us to find new ways to touch the hearts of all, especially here in St Colm’s where we are called to be the prophets now. Each of them, like each of us, and indeed like all the people of The Book would not be who we are without Sarai our mother and Abram our father. The Irish Life of Columba written in the mid-twelfth century took the form of an extended meditation on God’s words to Abram as recorded in Genesis 12:1 ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land which I will show you.’
Most of us here have heard this call, the call to mission (which simply means being sent out), the call to prophetic holiness as exemplified in the lives of Martin, Columba and MacLeod. On 25th April 1965 I heard that call anew as I was Licensed to Preach the Gospel in Dumbarton Old Parish Church by the Presbyery of Dumbarton who presented me with this Bible. The preacher was Ian Pitt-Watson and his text was from the Book of Amos chapter 8 and verse 11. ‘ “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”’
Like Martin, Columba and George Macleod the prophet Amos was a disturbing person to have around. Like them he was a real prophet, not one of the ‘official’ prophets but a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees. But the Lord took him from following the flock and said: ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ It wasn’t the General Assembly, nor 121 George Street, nor the House of Bishops, nor even the Vatican that he had to deal with, but Amaziah the priest. This was the establishment figure whom he had to tackle and indeed to outwit. He was caught in the nexus of what J.L. Mays describes as the tension between charisma and institution in Israel’s religious life. (Amos SCM Press Ltd 1969 pg134) When the passion of the prophet comes up against the prejudice and vested (in more senses than one) interests of the priest, it is rather like when an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object which may result in meltdown.
Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, reported to Jereboam, king of Israel: ‘Amos is conspiring against you in Israel; the country cannot tolerate what he is saying.’ (Amos 7:10) Bethel was a very ancient shrine reputed to have been founded by Jacob. (Genesis 28:10-19) After the division of the Kingdom, Jeroboam I tried to establish it as a rival to Jerusalem and it became the principal sanctuary of the Northern Kingdom. The state religion of Israel, of which Amaziah was the servant, was an expression of its monarchy and an instrument of its politics. Amaziah’s treatment of Amos when he said: ‘ Be off, you seer! Off with you to Judah! You can earn your living and do your prophesying there.’ (Amos 7:12) bears all the marks of a bureaucrat serving a monarch, the maintenance of whose power is the real defining concern of the cult at Bethel. Amos confronts the politically and theologically motivated expediency of Amaziah’s prejudices by claiming a charismatic authority from Yahweh himself, and proceeds with even greater passion to denounce the transgressions of Israel.
Commenting on this in his Cambridge Bible Commentary, Henry McKeating says: ‘Any healthy society needs its critics and the prophets performed this function. In our own society the same function is fulfilled by the press, by the parliamentary opposition and by all sorts of consumer organisations and citizens’ councils. But the prophet is more than all of these. He is first and foremost a man of God. He is a religious visionary. His criticisms therefore were felt to have a force and authority with which we should not credit the criticisms of any modern functionary, and our society, therefore, offers no real parallel to his office.
It is also easy to see the prophet as an innovator, as an original thinker, impressing his own new moral insights on society and arriving at fresh ideas about religion. Whilst it would be a mistake to discount the originality of the prophets altogether, but assuredly this is not how they saw themselves. The prophet sees himself as the bearer of a tradition. He judges society by a set of standards received from the past. He is at once the most truly radical and the most truly conservative of men, for the most disturbing radicalism is that which demands that we take seriously the ancient beliefs which we already profess to hold, and put into practice the principles to which ostensibly we already adhere.
Anyone who does demand that society (or the church for that matter) take its professed beliefs with absolute seriousness, whether these beliefs be enshrined in the Sinai Covenant or the Sermon on the Mount, is apt to appear simplistic, and this is how the prophets often appear, prophets such as Amos, Martin, Columba or George MacLeod. Prophets such as Mahatma Gandhi with his spinning wheel. Prophets such as those in the Society of Friends who advocate pacifism, or those in the STOP THE WAR Campaign or those who would MAKE POVERTY HISTORY.
It is also how advocates of a full-bloodied ecumenical movement appear in our present ecclesiastical climate and it is that, that I wish to explore this afternoon.
ANOTHER STORY ?
I would now like us to think about things ecumenical and this evening we will dwell on some of the pain and tomorrow turn to the pleasure. Almost 40 years ago I was given this Bible on 30th April 1967 in St George’s Cathedral, Madras at the service in which I was ordained by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin and the Presbyters of the Diocese. Written in what Lesslie used to call his inimitable scrawl are words from the Bible. With the whole Bible to choose from what words would someone like Lesslie choose to give to such as me? They are from 1 Thessalonians 5:24 ‘He who calls you is faithful.’ These words have served me well over the years in my struggles, not only with myself, but also with Amaziah the priest. I was thus ordained into a black church and a united church.
In many ways I had been brought up ecumenically. Baptised in the Church of Scotland, received into full church membership in the Congregational Church in Birkenhead at the age of 14, for years daily attendance at Matins and Evensong in the Chapel of an Anglican school and later in an Oxford college chapel. At the end of my first year in Oxford I was asked in the same week if I would become the college rep for the OICCU on the one hand and for the SCM on the other. You can’t get much more ecumenical than that! Each Wednesday lunchtime I attended a group called SCARS in Christ Church Cathedral where we prayed for Christian Unity. I nearly went to Mansfield College but saw the light and came to New College where I became a Presbyterian again. I then joined the Iona Community which is somewhat ecumenical, studied at St Colm’s with the Irish and the rest of the world, went to study Marxism in Paris, where we worshipped in a Lutheran church, and then, of course to India for 12 years, the first six of which I worked in ex-Anglican churches and then for 6 years at the Scots Kirk. My colleagues were fully interchangeable whatever their previous denominational allegiance might have been.
On my return to Scotland I worked as a parish minister in a situation where my best friend was the local episcopal rector. He was greatly respected, canon of the cathedral, considerably older than I was, and he asked me occasionally to celebrate the eucharist in his church. I noticed he didn’t ask my Church of Scotland colleague whose church was just opposite his and so I queried this. I asked if he was inviting me because I had been ordained in the CSI, and said that if that was the case then I wouldn’t be coming again because I didn’t regard myself as being either more or less ordained than my Church of Scotland colleagues. To my surprise he just laughed and said: ‘It has nothing to do with the CSI. You have come to this town and you treat me like an equal! If the minister across the street ever gave me any reason to believe that I had any right to exist in his parish I would invite him immediately but so long as he treats me like an outcaste there is no way that I am going to invite him to conduct worship here.’ Now this was an Anglican speaking. Lesslie Newbigin used to say that every Anglican ordinand in England ought to be sent for a year to work in Scotland just to learn what it is like not to be the establishment. I wonder what Amos would have made of the establishment? But then that’s precisely what Amaziah was.
Of course, when I moved from there into a Local Ecumenical Partnership in Runcorn, things were very different, as the vicar and I were completely interchangeable. Yet we were surrounded by so-called evangelical clergy on the one hand, and many Anglican priests on the other for whom anything ecumenical was anathema. More recently in Milton Keynes I worked for seven years as Ecumenical Moderator on behalf of the Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, United Reformed, Salvation Army, Greek Orthodox and the Society of Friends. I have just edited a book about it of which you could have a copy for the modest sum of £6.75 which tells the remarkable story of the nearest thing to organic unity in the UK. You might also like to glance at this little document which spells out in detail what I was authorised to do on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church and others. But, unfortunately, Milton Keynes is different, and on the whole most of the Amaziahs whom I encounter in our local churches, theological colleges, ecumenical bodies and church bureaucracies seem to have no commitment whatsoever to organic unity but seek refuge behind the shibboleth of unity and diversity which can mean anything or nothing.
Here is a letter written on 9th May 2006 by Ron Beasley to the Living Spirituality Network of which I was Chair for seven years. ‘Sadly now, I am a disillusioned ecumeniac(!!) – and my sadness is fed by the current disarray in CTBI, and the fact that the churches, as such, only see the ecumenical quest as an optional extra. The Swanwick Declaration is dead, and in spite of economic hints, the denominations still cling to their individuality. It is very sad.’
Another letter in similar vein which sums up so much of the situation was sent to me by John Williamson, one of my gurus, and a former URC Provincial Moderator, who died recently. He writes: ‘It is great to sense your continuing passion in Ecumenical matters in spite of all the disappointments of recent years. In the South East the ecumenical structures that remain do “remain” for the most part, but cut little ice, their relevance and importance having departed after the departure of those who created them. So much depends on leadership and mutual commitment – at any rate, as far as shared worship and activity planning are concerned. The former rivalries and antipathies have largely died away, it is true and we can be thankful for that. But it is hard to find any ecumenical concern among church members.’
As far as that is concerned I am now the pastoral associate in a parish where our church is the only church in the village. It is an ideal situation in which to use the official Church of Scotland ‘Declaration of Ecumenical Welcome’. When I suggested this at a meeting, the Session Clerk, who is a very pleasant and committed Christian and a good friend of mine, went almost ballistic and said that he had been against things ecumenical all his life. When I explained that this was an official Church of Scotland document which had the approval of the General Assembly he simply declared that this was just one more sign of what was wrong with the Church of Scotland these days.
Or take the example of a young Methodist Minister from Ireland, a man with a PhD, who shared in an ecumenical week on Iona last September. Afterwards he wrote:
In Northern Ireland there is a deep suspicion of the ecumenical movement because there is a feeling that there is a hidden agenda to unite all churches in a single denomination. From my experience on Iona I have to say that there is some truth in this fear. While I am content to engage with ecumenism to the point of co-operation between different denominations, those in the movement do seem to have an underlying desire to see institutional unity.’
Or consider the recent obituary of Philip Morgan prepared for the Annual General Meeting of the Society for Ecumenical Studies held on 23rd May 2006. It ends with these words:
Although devoted to the BCC, Morgan was the first to see that other ways of working in the ecumenical movement were needed, and began discussion with church leaders, including the Roman Catholics, to explore ways of developing unity and setting up instruments to make it possible. The result was the Inter-Church Process of reflection, which, in 1990, ended in the setting up of new Ecumenical instruments for the Four Nations of the British Isles and the reconstitution of the BCC as the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland (CCBI). Much of its success was down to Morgan.
The obituary ends by saying:
If the moribund ecumenical life of the British Churches is to be revived, it needs a man or woman of Morgan’s energy and vision to bring it about.
So we have a problem, a problem which was summed up many years ago by Spurgeon when he supposedly wrote:
To dwell above with those we love
Ah that indeed is glory.
To dwell below with those we know
Is quite another story!
But we pray each day the words: ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, so there cannot be another story, otherwise it is blasphemy to mouth with our lips that which we will not practise in our lives, and in the life of our churches.
In 1948 at the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches the final Report said:
‘We have to learn afresh together to speak boldly in Christ’s name both to those in power and to the people, to oppose terror, cruelty and race discrimination, to stand by the outcast, the prisoner and the refugee. We have to make of the Church in every place a voice for those who have no voice and a home where everyone will be at home.’
This is what it means to be ecumenical. For me, being ecumenical is to be committed to justice and peace, within which commitment our reconciliation within the Body of Christ is but a part, but an important part, if the world is to believe, that the Church is any different from other human organisations and religions with their many splits, factions and power struggles.
In 1963, after attending the Faith and Order Conference of the World Council of Churches at Montreal, Oliver Tomkins, Anglican Bishop of Bristol, reported a feeling of ‘urgent intensity gripping everyone, an inability to keep up with the speed of Church progress and a sense of panting along in the rear of events’. In September the following year at the British Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Conference, presided over by Oliver Tomkins in Nottingham, this sense of urgency boiled over. On the final day of the conference the following resolution was passed:
United in our urgent desire for One Church Renewed for Mission, this Conference invites the member churches of the British Council of Churches, in appropriate groupings such as nations, to covenant together to work and pray for the inauguration of union by a date agreed amongst them. We dare to hope that this date should not be later than Easter Day 1980. We believe that we should offer obedience to God in a commitment as decisive as this.
Here in St Colm’s the 1965 House Guild Newsletter contained a letter written by Kenneth MacKenzie on a visit to Zambia. He wrote:
I thought you might be interested to hear some of the things which people said to me when I asked them about what kind of Church they would like to see in this new Republic.
Some said that just as they could now say: ‘This is our nation’, they would love to be able to say, in gratitude and humility: ‘This is our Church’. Not the Church of the missionaries – who are very welcome – the white mining communities or the African middle classes.
They also laid stress on the need for fuller unity, even after the foundation of the United Church of Zambia in January of this year… The motto of the new nation is: ‘One Zambia, One Nation.’ Can you have ‘One Zambia Many Churches’? Not until the other Christian groups, large and small, are in the same household with them and are seen to be with them, can they be a truly national Church in the serving sense.’
Yet here in Scotland I still hear Church of Scotland ministers speaking with a certain amount of conceit about the ‘National Church’ and thus marginalising other Christians who are just as Christian and just as much a part of Scotland as they are.
In the late 1960’s in a few places, such as Milton Keynes, the ecumenical ferment was taken seriously and the leaders of the five main churches – Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics and Congregationalists (to become the United Reformed Church five years later) agreed to accept the Lund Principle of 1952 that Churches should act together in all matters except where deep differences of conviction compelled them to act separately. As far as Scotland is concerned most of you know the story of what happened, or didn’t happen, better than I do. In England the English Covenant Proposals failed to obtain the required majority in the House of Clergy of the Anglican General Synod and the hopes raised at Nottingham all but vanished. But the Pope came and visited the four nations with words of encouragement declaring in Bellahouston Park that we were strangers no longer but pilgrims together on the way to the Kingdom. Soon new initiatives were being discussed which were to bear fruit in the Swanwick Conference of 1987 with the Swanwick Declaration stating:
It is our conviction that, as a matter of policy at all levels and in all places, our Churches must now move from co-operation to clear commitment to each other, in search of the unity for which Christ prayed, and in common evangelism and service of the world.
The Swanwick Report went on to encourage people…
To take ‘holy risks’ for the sake of the common mission. On every agenda the first question should be ‘Is this a priority?’ and the second ‘How can we do it together?’ Our task as the Body of Christ is to go out in love with the whole Gospel for the whole world.
Over the past 40 years I have had the privilege of sharing in much of this including the 1987 Swanwick Conference in which I led one of the small study groups. Those in the group signed some small book-marks which we took home with us. I have mine here and amongst others it contains the signatures of Lesley Macdonald and Bobby Anderson!
But since then things have gone so far agley that, to give but one example, Gordon Jamieson, the Kirk’s Director of Stewardship, in an article published in the February 2006 issue of ‘Life and Work’ entitled ‘ECUMENICAL and Evangelical’ had to argue that these two things were not incompatible. In a comment on this which was published in the April ‘Life and Work’ I quoted Lesslie Newbigin’s words written in Glasgow in 1933:
In so far as the Church is not truly and deeply one the world over, demonstrating to the world a unity which can transcend all sectional aims, however lofty, it is not merely failing to take account of the plain facts of the world as it is today, it is also to that extent denying its own true nature and contradicting its own true witness.
Years later in 1960 he wrote:
The connection between the movement for Christian reunion and the movement for world evangelisation is of the deepest possible character. The two things are the two outward signs of a return to the heart of the Gospel itself.
In 1984 in ‘God’s Reign and Our Unity’ much of which was written by Lesslie we read in Section 31:
Some affirm that concern for unity deflects attention from the more urgent business of evangelism, and they (correctly) point out that groups less interested in unity are often among the most successful in achieving numerical growth. To this end it must be replied that if the Church were an end in itself then it would follow that multiplication of numbers would be the criterion by which priorities should be judged, but if the Church is a sign and first-fruits of the reconciliation of all things in Christ, the fruit of evangelism should be communities reconciled to one another in Christ. If men and women are not being drawn into the one body, we must ask whether in fact their growth in Christ is not being stunted. ‘Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love’(Ephesians 4:15-16). The mere multiplication of cells, unrelated to the purpose of the body, is a sign not of life and health, but of cancer and death.
In my own comment in the letter to ‘Life and Work’ I wrote:
Organic unity is unity which grows organically from the grassroots at the local level. It is not only evangelical and ecumenical but economical, avoiding duplication, sharing resources and witnessing unambiguously to the love of Christ so that the world may believe. Surely it is a telling commentary on the eccentric state of the Church today when someone finds it strange that the words ‘ecumenical’ and ‘evangelical’ can be brought together.
My experience may be different from yours and I could of course be quite wrong. But it seems to me that many good people, in the Iona Community for example, and possibly here in St Colm’s, are so fed up with attempts to be ecumenical that they simply ignore the issue, get on with what they may well be right in considering as more important matters of justice and peace, and opt to live with a divided Church. I remember hearing Michael Taylor at a gathering at Swanwick berating Mary Tanner as to why she was wasting her time with Faith and Order matters when there were far more important things to be doing in the face of world poverty. As for our Church leaders, Moderators, Bishops, General Assemblies, theological college professors and even General Secretaries of ecumenical bodies, they tend to bury their various denominational heads, ostrich-like, in the sand of their ecclesiastical systems instead of raising a prophetic voice, calling us to return with Amos and the prophets to the ancient beliefs which we already profess to hold, and to put into practice the principles to which ostensibly we already adhere.
Could we not return to Mount Sinai and to the unity of the One who says: ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ not even those sacred cows (golden calves if you like) of your tribal and denominational allegiances. Could we not return to the Sermon on the Mount , not only to loving our neighbours but to loving our enemies, especially the doctrinal and theological ones? Could we return to Ephesians and hear the writer pleading with us to spare no effort to make fast with bonds of peace the unity which the Spirit gives? But not only Ephesians. In 1 Corinthians St Paul appeals by the name of the Lord Jesus Christ that they should all agree, that there should be no dissensions among them and that they be united in the same mind and the same judgement. And in the beautiful hymn in Philippians chapter 2 he pleads passionately that if there is any encouragement in Christ, any affection and sympathy, they should complete his joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.
F.F. Bruce once wrote: ‘The message of the Epistle to the Ephesians is that only through Christ, in the fellowship of His body can iron curtains, colour bars, class warfare and all other divisions of this kind be brought to an end. In his new community ‘there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all and in all’ (Colossians 3:11)’ But, of course, the temerity of our impassionate, so-called reconciled diversity, so popular in these islands, means that we can continue to have Methodists and Anglicans, Baptists and Roman Catholics, Presbyterians and Free Presbyterians to whom any eagerness to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace hardly seems to apply. No wonder an agnostic friend of mine in Edinburgh, lecturer at Heriot Watt University, when I mentioned to him that I was involved in the ecumenical movement, described it as the ‘ecucomical movement.’
As Rabbie Burns said long ago:
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
THESE ARE THE ONES WE SHOULD LOVE
By a wonderful coincidence St Barnabas’ Day and Trinity Sunday fall on the same date this year, which is today. As George MacLeod would say: ‘If you think that’s a coincidence I hope you have a dull life!’ You probably think you have had much too much of a dull life already with me moaning and groaning about the ecumenical lack of movement. But St Barnabas may come to the rescue for we now need some encouragement and the name Barnabas reflects the Aramaic which means ‘son of consolation’ or ‘pacification’. The root nb can also mean ‘to prophesy’ so that Barnabas might even be known as ‘the son of a prophet’. He was a man full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. His actual name was Joseph but because of the kind of person he was, he was surnamed Barnabas by the apostles. The actual word used in Greek is paraklesis the same word which is used for the Holy Spirit – the comforter, the advocate, the counsellor. The best prophets are not meant to be troublemakers, except for those who need to be troubled or disturbed. Like good preachers they are meant both to trouble the comfortable and to comfort the troubled. When he came to Antioch and saw the grace of God, Barnabas was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. (Acts 11:23-24)
He was an encourager. If you listened to ‘Prophet with Honour’ you will have heard Tony Benn say that the great thing about George MacLeod was that he was an encourager. And you probably feel that we need some encouragement now. Which leads us on to Trinity Sunday, for what better day could there be than this on which to think about the oikumene and things ecumenical. ‘God so loved the world’ and there is no more ecumenical statement than that. When I was a teenager we thought the Trinity had something to do with Mathematics and had endless discussions about three in one and one in three. We drew triangles and talked about the difficulty which Muslims had in accepting three gods when Allah was one and indivisible. Above the portico of St Andrew’s Kirk in Madras there is a huge triangle within which, in Hebrew, is the word YHWH and I remember the questions which that raised for some of the more astute youngsters there and other visitors.
In recent years the so-called ‘Forgotten Trinity’ has been recovered not least through the work of my closest friend, Colin Gunton, whose sudden death was a real tragedy for the Church in general and for the academic theological world in particular. In one of his books ‘The Promise of Trinitarian Theology’, which he gave me on Trinity Sunday 1991, Colin says:
‘There is only one God but this very oneness is not a mathematical oneness, as Arius and Greek theology had taught, but a oneness consisting in the inseparable relation of Father, Son and Spirit, the three hypostases’.
In other words the three persons. Colin goes on to say:
‘God is no more than what Father, Son and Spirit give to and receive from each other in the inseparable communion which is the outcome of their love.
He points out that one person is not the tool or extension of the other, otherwise each personhood would be violated. Personal relations are those which constitute the other person as other, as truly particular. He also points out that the idea of the triune God is what it is because it is a given – not a construct – which contains the clue to everything else and he quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge (of whom he was very fond) as he says ‘the Trinity contains the clue to everything else: ‘the Idea Idearum, the one substrative truth which is the form, manner, and involvement of all truths.’ This is also very clear in Bede Griffiths’ Hibbert Lecture about the relation of Christianity to Hinduism to which you may wish to listen in the time for reflection after this. Also, as we know, the Celtic understanding of the world is deeply Trinitarian. The one poem which scholars agree is most likely to have been actually written by Saint Columba is the Altus Prosator which begins:
The High Creator, Ancient of days and Unbegotten
was without origin of beginning and without end;
He is and shall be to infinite ages of ages
with Whom is Christ the only begotten
and the Holy Spirit,
coeternal in the everlasting glory of the Godhead.
We set forth not three gods,
but we say there is One God,
saving our faith in three most glorious persons.
(See Ian Bradley: Columba pg 57 Wild GoosePublications)
To put all this another way, in the words of Jurgen Moltmann:
…the Trinity corresponds to a community in which people are defined in their relations with one another and in their significance for one another, not in opposition to one another in terms of power and possession…The trinitarian principle replaces the principle of power by the principle of concord…I am free and feel myself to be truly free when I am respected and recognised by others and when I, for my part, respect and recognise them...then the other person is no longer the limitation of my freedom ;(s)he is an expansion of it. (J Moltmann – The Trinity and the Kingdom of God SCM 1981)
This leads me to the heart of what I had hoped to say this weekend and that is that truth is personal and not propositional or to put it in the words of Tom Colvin’s hymn, sadly and unbelievably omitted from CH4,
Jesu,Jesu,
fill us with your love,
show us how to serve,
the neighbours we have from you.
These are the ones we should serve,
these are the ones we should love.
All these are neighbours to us and you.
Over the past 40 years I have learned a little bit about the Christian Church especially from people, the sort of people we sometimes call in our arrogance, the ordinary church members. I have learned that the lives of these people are rather more important than the many documents, the many pieces of paper, which we produce. I used to say that above each of our doors we should place the slogan ‘People not Paper’. As Catherine the Great said to Diderot during their philosophical discussions: ‘It’s alright for you. You only have to work on paper. I have to work on the much more delicate surface of the human skin.’
As Ebenezer Elliott wrote in a hymn now rarely sung:
When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy when?
The people, Lord, the people!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
The tune by Josiah Booth was aptly named ‘Commonwealth’ and the words remind us of a theme contantly repeated in Scripture, not only by Amos and the prophets, but also in the Psalms which could be summed up in the well-known words of Psalm 28:9 ‘Save thy people and bless thine inheritance’. It was in 1973, the same year as the first hike in world oil prices, that Fritz Schumacher published his famous book ‘Small is Beautiful’ which was sub-titled: ‘A Study of Economics as if People Mattered’, my copy of which, as it so happens, was also given to me by Colin Gunton. In a similar way we must do our theology and organise our churches and our ecumenical bodies, as if people mattered and, in fact, rediscover with Ian Fraser and with John Drane that theology is the people’s work.
This is what Jesus did and the common people heard him gladly. Jesus – God with a human face – the Word made flesh, but, as someone once said: ‘The problem is that we have turned him into words again.’ He never wrote a book but lived a life. The only record we have of his writing anything was when he wrote in the sand (John 8:6) – a passage much loved by Australian aborigines, but no doubt the wind came and blew it away. Yet, we Christians have spent centuries endlessly filling theological libraries with books and papers, constitutions, canon laws, summa theologicae and annual reports.
Some people vividly remember the occasion when a commissioner to the Church of Scotland General Assembly waved the famous blue book of reports above his head and asked: ‘Moderator, what has all this to do with Jesus of Nazareth?’ The members of Anglican General Synods have their bags bulging with papers and the most recent book of canon law of the Latin Rite Catholic Church has 1752 canons.
When Pilate asked Jesus: ‘What is truth? (John 18:38) it wasn’t that Pilate didn’t stay for an answer, as suggested by Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon ‘Of Truth’). He had the answer standing in front of him in the person of Jesus of whom, shortly afterwards, he was to famously say: ‘Ecce Homo’ ‘Behold the man!’ Behold the man. Jesus could have given Pilate a propositional answer, a theological or philosophical treatise, in the form of an aphorism or creed but, instead, he was silent and simply presented himself. In UT UNUM SINT Pope John Paul II says: ‘Love for the truth is the deepest dimension of any authentic quest for full communion between Christians.’ (UT UNUM SINT Section 24 Catholic Truth Society 1995) But surely that truth is personal and not propositional.
St Thomas Aquinas summed up the personal nature of truth when he wrote:
What God’s Son has told me, take for true I do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.
On Trinity Sunday, if we believe in the freedom of the Spirit and that the wind blows where it wills (John 3:8) then ultimately that truth cannot be equated with the teaching of the Church but can only be equated with Christ himself as we meet him in bread and wine, in the beggar at our door, in our sisters and brothers of other denominations and in the teaching of the Church. Otherwise we will fall into the trap of which we are warned by Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he says:
He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all. (S. T. Coleridge ‘Aids to Reflection:Moral and Religious Aphorisms xxv’)
Even Jesus himself said: ‘Why do you call me good? No-one is good but God alone.’ (Mark 10:18 Luke 18:19) Significantly Matthew saw the problem with this and changed it to ‘ Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good.’ (Matthew 19:17) This moves things into a deeper or higher realm and it is at times like that that I like to remember that ‘He who calls you is faithful.’
So, in order to be really ecumenical, we would do well to remember the words of Cardinal Mercier, Archbishop of Malines-Brussels who said in 1926:
In order to unite with one another we must love one another; In order to love one another we must know one another; in order to know one another we must go and meet one another. (‘Called To Be One’ pg 31 CTE Publications 1996)
Looking back on the past 40 years I am sure all of us will rejoice in wonderful personal friendships and experiences which have given us much pleasure, broken down barriers and crossed the ecumenical divides. It is these which keep us going, these which ultimately matter, and these in which we rejoice. The whole experience of sharing in the life of other cultures and other churches, which most of us here will know all about, is a privilege which actually very few people have. Just last weekend we had the joy of having Andy Gaston, Alice Ngosi and Hippo Honde from Malawi staying with us and sharing at a fairly deep level. The week before last we were in Helsinki and met two Finnish Lutheran friends whom we first met in 1966 in Bangalore and with whom we keep in touch. I remember a visit to Milton Keynes of about a dozen people from the Swedish Lutheran Diocese of Vaxo together with their Bishop who wished to meet people of other faiths. Thus we sat cross-legged on the floor of the Buddhist temple, together with Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Baha’i, Buddhist and Christian friends, who all knew each other very well, and who answered the numerous questions which our guests were eager to ask.
Or to go back to 1987 and the most moving Ecumenical gathering at Swanwick where each of us received one of these pilgrim shells and where Cardinal Hume cut through various gordion knots in encouraging us to move from co-operation to commitment and from commitment to communion. I can remember the night of 30th October 2001, when after thirty-four years of sustained ecumenical work in Milton Keynes, the church structures were converged and the Mission Partnership came into being whereby the Anglican Deanery, Baptist Connection, Methodist Circuit and United Reformed District became a joint body and I’ll never forget the emotion in the voice of the URC Moderator, Malcolm Hanson, who incidentally stayed with us in Connel on Thursday this week, when he realised that his URC District was becoming more truly ecumenical.
When my Roman Catholic colleague, Leo McCartie, Bishop of Northampton celebrated a special Mass in Northampton Cathedral, on the 50th Anniversary of his Ordination as a priest, as I went forward for a blessing in the Mass he took me by the hand and said: ‘I want to thank you for all that you are doing for the unity of the Church’ – a moment which I will not easily forget. To preach at an Anglican ordination of new priests, to share in anointing a black Pentecostal pastor with what seemed like gallons of oil, to break the bread on a prayer walk with the evangelical – charismatic churches, to pronounce the Blessing with the Bishop of Oxford’s pastoral staff in hand – to do all of this and much more, which I hope you will tell us about from your own experiences, is what it really means to experience the joy and pleasure of being ecumenical.
(Those present will now be asked to share their own experiences)
Below is a short quotation from Ranjit Sondhi which sums up much of what I am trying to say in this talk but from another angle.
Murdoch MacKenzie
UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES OR HUMAN LIVES
Sondhi makes the following plea for Pragmatic Reasoning: " The question of pluralism does not sit easily with the children of the Enlightenment. The reason why some might find such a debate about diversity strangely disconcerting or even unacceptable is because one of the consequences of the attempt to define values in the Western world by rational procedures has been to drastically reduce the scope of moral reflection. Since the Enlightenment, moral philosophers have ceased to be interested in the eclectic range of values and goods which actually shape human lives, concentrating instead on the quest for universal principles of moral obligation. You might agree that this philosophical tunnel-vision has left the language of morality in a 'state of grave disorder' which in turn has tended to impede the emergence of genuinely multicultural societies. By emphasising the moral and ontological primacy of similarity among human beings, and privileging commonality over difference, modern moral philosophy has precluded any positive assessment of cultural plurality. The notion that there might be goods internal to other cultures, or ideals specific to particular communities, is never seriously entertained.
Perhaps we need to resurrect the Aristotelian concept of practical reasoning and assert that moral wisdom consists in the capacity to deliberate on multiple and diverse value commitments and translate them into practical moral action. Observation suggests that people have always occupied complex moral worlds, and are quite ready to explore the issues, tensions and conflicts which arise in their attempts to live a good life.
Attempts to constantly move towards the rational determination of universal ethical principles therefore rest on Enlightenment assumptions about the unlimited power of procedural reason and an associated conception of human nature as rational, uniform and socially transcendent. These assumptions have given rise to a much truncated view of the moral life and a strong anti-pluralist bias in modern moral philosophy. By contrast, the account of practical reasoning I am advocating affirms the fullness and complexity of 'the good life for man' and facilitates a positive assessment of cultural difference. When it is recognised that there are multiple and diverse goods within cultures, moral diversity between cultures need not be threatening. Far from presenting problems I would regard a multicultural society as an ideal context for the exploration of different visions of the good and the development of moral wisdom. "
Ranjit Sondhi ‘Ethnicity, Identity and Change’
As it so happens it is 40 years since Anne and I, aged 28, arrived in India on 19th July 1966. Twelve years later at the age of 40 we returned to the western world, to the global North, to Scotland, to a dispirited secular society, to struggling churches, to the challenge of modernity, and thus we empathised with Ewing Smith’s sentiments that it was rather like having been in the Promised Land and returning to the wilderness. We returned, rightly or wrongly, because we felt that our call to MISSION was here rather than in India, and since then we have wrestled, like Jacob at Peniel, hoping to see the face of God and to receive God’s blessing. (Genesis 32:22-32) Such wrestling leaves its scars and we now limp along bearing in our bodies the slings and arrows of outrageous ecumenism. We believe that truth is personal, rather than propositional, and give thanks for the prophetic witness of St Colm’s in spite of all that the Church has tried to do to it. Not that we are against the Church. We take to heart each day the words of George Macleod as we meet Christ suddenly at the bend of the road and see his silent gaze so clearly saying: ‘You are the cause of the frailty of the church at home.’ Thus, with the Iona Community, we pray each day first for the Church and then for the Community as we say: ‘ we pray a like spirit to your church even at this present time. ‘ and then ‘further in all things the purpose of our Community… that new ways may be found to touch the hearts of all.’
Yesterday was St Columba’s Day so it’s a very appropriate weekend to be here in St Colm’s, to be in this lovely chapel, so dear to each of us, in whose foundations mingle the sands of Iona. We were here in 1965 in the days of Jean Fraser, Kenneth MacKenzie, Effie Gray and Charlotte Clunie, with whom we visited the laundry. In the November Ian Smith declared UDI and Kenneth MacKenzie was on radio and TV nearly every day. M.M. Thomas stayed in No 24 with us, while in Edinburgh to give the Duff Lectures, which he wrote night after night till the wee small hours in a shorthand notebook. Mrs Chellappa, widow of the late Bishop David Chellappa of Madras, was staying in college and Jean Fraser, instead of being last at breakfast, suddenly began appearing early, which was due to having Mrs Chellappa in the bedroom next door who kept her alarm clock set within a biscuit box. Bob Bone introduced us to the intricacies of car maintenance and Denys Saunders to the art of photography with the admonition not to shoot until you could see the whites of their eyes.
Here is the House Guild Newsletter for 1966 in which it says: ‘The Christmas Act of Worship (Deaconess Hospital, Simon Square and the Mound Centre again) was made even more meaningful as we all awaited the arrival of a baby. Ruth Elizabeth, daughter of Anne and Murdoch MacKenzie, was born on December 14th and, to our delight, was baptised in the College Chapel on June 4th.’ My uncle, Rev John Ross of St Catherines-Argyll church, conducted the baptism and over the years we have returned to this chapel with great thanksgiving in our hearts, not least today. Ruth, born in the Elsie Inglis Hospital where Anne had worked, on the last day of the St Colm’s Term in 1965, was years later an early protégé of Bobby Anderson on what was then known as the Scottish Churches Youth Exchange and spent a year at Kiserian near the Ngong Hills in Kenya where she returns regularly, and more recently has spent two years as a VSO with OXFAM training teachers in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and now, at the age of 40, she is returning to Vietnam for another two years this coming August – so her baptism doesn’t seem to have done her too much harm !
‘Forty Years On’ is not only a play by Alan Bennett but the Harrow School Song written by E.E. Bowen which begins:
‘Forty years on, when far and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today’
Some say: ‘Life begins at forty’, Edward Young in 1725 said: ‘Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.’ (Love of Fame:The Universal Passion) and in 1823 Sir Walter Scott, no less, spoke about being ‘fair, fat and forty.’ (St Ronan’s Well ch7). In the Bible the number forty is associated with almost each new development in the history of God’s mighty acts, especially of salvation, forty days of rain giving the waters of the great flood with Noah (Genesis 7), forty days on the mountain-top (Exodus 24:18) and forty years in the wilderness with Moses (Exodus 16:35, Deuteronomy 2:7), forty days in Canaan for the twelve spies sent to spy out the land (Numbers 13:25), forty days of defiance by Goliath of Gath (1 Samuel 17:16), forty years for each of the reigns of Saul (Acts 13:21), David (2 Samuel 5:4) and Solomon (1 Kings 11:42), forty days for Elijah’s journey to Horeb (1 Kings 19:8), 40 days lying on his right side for Ezekiel bearing the punishment for the sins of Judah (Ezekiel 4:6), forty days for Nineveh to repent through Jonah’s preaching (Jonah 3:4), forty days in the wilderness for Jesus (Matthew 4:2) and forty days for his resurrection appearances. (Acts 1:3)
So all this gives us cause for reflection forty years on, especially in what is sometimes called ‘retirement’. Perhaps some of you here are like me, as I sit by the shores of Loch Etive, and hear a voice, a word from the Lord, asking the question : ‘What are you doing here Elijah?’ (1 Kings 19:9) This was the voice which St Martin of Tours heard at the age of 40, in the year 356 AD, when he became a pacifist, left the army of Julian Caesar, as it went into battle with the barbarians near the city of Worms, and said to Caesar: ‘Hitherto I have served you as a soldier; allow me now to become a soldier to God;…I am the soldier of Christ; it is not lawful for me to fight… If this conduct of mine is ascribed to cowardice and not to faith, I will take my stand unarmed before the line of battle tomorrow, and in the name of the Lord Jesus, protected by the sign of the cross, and not by shield or helmet, I will safely penetrate the ranks of the enemy.’ In his ‘Life of St Martin’ Sulpitius Severus says: ‘On the following day the enemy sent ambassadors to treat about peace and surrendered both themselves and their possessions. In these circumstances who can doubt that this victory was due to the saintly man?’ So at the age of 40 Martin, the Father of the Celtic Church, left the army, and with his knapsack on his back, went to join Hilary at Poitiers. (See Christopher Donaldson, Martin of Tours pp39-40 Canterbury Press)
‘What are you doing here Elijah?’ This was the voice which Columba of Iona heard at the age of 40 as, for whatever reason, after the Battle of Cul Debrene in 561 AD he began to think of becoming one of the perigrini renouncing worldly attachments and affections and two years later, setting sail, with 12 companions, in May 563 AD eventually reaching Iona at Pentecost, on the 9th of June that year. Ancient tradition tells how in his youth he went to Tours and brought away the gospel book which lay on Martin’s breast and left it in Derry. (See E.A. Cooke’St Columba’ Simpkins Marshall 1888 pp 35+46) Though he never lost the attributes of the warrior aristocracy into which he had been born he, too, became a Miles Christi – a soldier of Christ, a peacemaker, and later became known as Columcille – the dove of the church.
‘What are you doing here Elijah?’ This was the voice which George MacLeod heard at the age of 40, ‘giving him some kind of a nudge’ as he passed the ruins of Iona and a year later he wrote: ‘Why do you shout so loud at me, you most uncomfortable ruins?’ Two years later in 1938, just like Columba at the age of 42, he began his work on Iona in earnest.Like both Martin and possibly Columba, he had been in the army and become a pacifist. In later years he wrote to a friend: ‘I don’t know why I went to Iona. God wanted it, and it was such a hell of a gamble that he could only find George MacLeod, who lost £40 (sic!) one night at poker when he was waiting to be demobbed from the Agile and Suffering Highlanders.’
St Colm’s Reunion and Retreat. I imagine, that Martin, Columba and George, would have been quite happy to join a reunion but I doubt if any of them would have warmed to the word ‘retreat’. Although they did seek solitude, of course, and that holiness which landed them in trouble. Each in his own way was a prophetic figure with a transparent holiness especially in their commitment to the poor and marginalised whether it be the beggars with St Martin, the sick and the dying with St Columba or the people of Govan and the Borstal boys with George MacLeod.
For ten years from 361 AD Martin lived as a hermit at Liguge until in 371, a hundred kilometres away at Tours, bishop Litorius died. A deputation of the people of Tours travelled to Liguge, surrounded Martin and abducted him to make him their bishop. The other bishops and the leading men of the city raised objections, especially to his appearance, his rough coat of goat’s hair and his haircut which they described as crinem deformem – ugly hair. They shouted vigorously non dignus but were shouted down by the mob of the common people who had him anointed and installed in the bishop’s house. He refused to live in such luxury and moved to a cave in Marmoutier on the north bank of the river Loire. In the great cathedral he refused to sit on the bishop’s throne, but preferred a small three-legged milking stool such as might have been found in any cowshed in Gaul. It became his symbol, a symbol of holiness, just as the spinning wheel was for Mahatma Gandhi.
Is it any wonder that Columba, who, in the words of Christopher Donaldson, was the very epitome of Martinian devotion, should have become a peregrinus? According to Ian Bradley: ‘If he had not opted for the monastic life, or had it chosen for him by his parents, Columba would almost certainly have been ruler of a tuath and might well have been high king of Ireland. ‘Instead he and his companions settled in a circle of beehive huts around a wooden church and refectory on Iona. Whilst Columba kept strong links with his aristocratic relatives he is depicted by Adomnan as spending days and nights fasting and praying in his small hut on Hinba, and by the Irish Life of Columba (c 1150) sleeping on the bare earth of his cell with a stone pillar as his pillow, chanting the 150 Psalms before sunrise on the seashore each morning, taking off the sandals of his fellow monks to wash their feet, whilst at his death the old white horse which used to carry the milk-pails lays its head in his bosom and weeps.
As for George MacLeod, though without milking-stool or white horse, at the age of 70 he was swimming in the Sound of Iona at seven o’clock in the morning. I can vouch for that! He was hardly the darling of the Kirk, being accused on the one hand of leading them to Moscow and on the other of leading them to Rome via the Statue of the Virgin Mary and the Rome Express. Accused of breaking the Sabbath by hanging out his washing on a Sunday, of wanting to ban the bomb and boost the bishops, on 22nd May 1957 as he stood as Moderator-elect outside the door of the General Assembly an objection was raised, the first time in the history of the united Church that such a thing had happened. His closing address to the Assembly was a classic tour de force ‘Bombs and Bishops’ but the thing which moved the members of the Assembly most, were his prayers at the beginning of each day. If you want to learn about holiness on this retreat, just read these prayers in the Galilean language.
St Martin, whose cross has stood for a thousand years outside the west door of Iona Abbey, St Columba whose mission spread the length and breadth of Scotland and far beyond, and George MacLeod who continues to inspire each of us to find new ways to touch the hearts of all, especially here in St Colm’s where we are called to be the prophets now. Each of them, like each of us, and indeed like all the people of The Book would not be who we are without Sarai our mother and Abram our father. The Irish Life of Columba written in the mid-twelfth century took the form of an extended meditation on God’s words to Abram as recorded in Genesis 12:1 ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land which I will show you.’
Most of us here have heard this call, the call to mission (which simply means being sent out), the call to prophetic holiness as exemplified in the lives of Martin, Columba and MacLeod. On 25th April 1965 I heard that call anew as I was Licensed to Preach the Gospel in Dumbarton Old Parish Church by the Presbyery of Dumbarton who presented me with this Bible. The preacher was Ian Pitt-Watson and his text was from the Book of Amos chapter 8 and verse 11. ‘ “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”’
Like Martin, Columba and George Macleod the prophet Amos was a disturbing person to have around. Like them he was a real prophet, not one of the ‘official’ prophets but a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees. But the Lord took him from following the flock and said: ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ It wasn’t the General Assembly, nor 121 George Street, nor the House of Bishops, nor even the Vatican that he had to deal with, but Amaziah the priest. This was the establishment figure whom he had to tackle and indeed to outwit. He was caught in the nexus of what J.L. Mays describes as the tension between charisma and institution in Israel’s religious life. (Amos SCM Press Ltd 1969 pg134) When the passion of the prophet comes up against the prejudice and vested (in more senses than one) interests of the priest, it is rather like when an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object which may result in meltdown.
Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, reported to Jereboam, king of Israel: ‘Amos is conspiring against you in Israel; the country cannot tolerate what he is saying.’ (Amos 7:10) Bethel was a very ancient shrine reputed to have been founded by Jacob. (Genesis 28:10-19) After the division of the Kingdom, Jeroboam I tried to establish it as a rival to Jerusalem and it became the principal sanctuary of the Northern Kingdom. The state religion of Israel, of which Amaziah was the servant, was an expression of its monarchy and an instrument of its politics. Amaziah’s treatment of Amos when he said: ‘ Be off, you seer! Off with you to Judah! You can earn your living and do your prophesying there.’ (Amos 7:12) bears all the marks of a bureaucrat serving a monarch, the maintenance of whose power is the real defining concern of the cult at Bethel. Amos confronts the politically and theologically motivated expediency of Amaziah’s prejudices by claiming a charismatic authority from Yahweh himself, and proceeds with even greater passion to denounce the transgressions of Israel.
Commenting on this in his Cambridge Bible Commentary, Henry McKeating says: ‘Any healthy society needs its critics and the prophets performed this function. In our own society the same function is fulfilled by the press, by the parliamentary opposition and by all sorts of consumer organisations and citizens’ councils. But the prophet is more than all of these. He is first and foremost a man of God. He is a religious visionary. His criticisms therefore were felt to have a force and authority with which we should not credit the criticisms of any modern functionary, and our society, therefore, offers no real parallel to his office.
It is also easy to see the prophet as an innovator, as an original thinker, impressing his own new moral insights on society and arriving at fresh ideas about religion. Whilst it would be a mistake to discount the originality of the prophets altogether, but assuredly this is not how they saw themselves. The prophet sees himself as the bearer of a tradition. He judges society by a set of standards received from the past. He is at once the most truly radical and the most truly conservative of men, for the most disturbing radicalism is that which demands that we take seriously the ancient beliefs which we already profess to hold, and put into practice the principles to which ostensibly we already adhere.
Anyone who does demand that society (or the church for that matter) take its professed beliefs with absolute seriousness, whether these beliefs be enshrined in the Sinai Covenant or the Sermon on the Mount, is apt to appear simplistic, and this is how the prophets often appear, prophets such as Amos, Martin, Columba or George MacLeod. Prophets such as Mahatma Gandhi with his spinning wheel. Prophets such as those in the Society of Friends who advocate pacifism, or those in the STOP THE WAR Campaign or those who would MAKE POVERTY HISTORY.
It is also how advocates of a full-bloodied ecumenical movement appear in our present ecclesiastical climate and it is that, that I wish to explore this afternoon.
ANOTHER STORY ?
I would now like us to think about things ecumenical and this evening we will dwell on some of the pain and tomorrow turn to the pleasure. Almost 40 years ago I was given this Bible on 30th April 1967 in St George’s Cathedral, Madras at the service in which I was ordained by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin and the Presbyters of the Diocese. Written in what Lesslie used to call his inimitable scrawl are words from the Bible. With the whole Bible to choose from what words would someone like Lesslie choose to give to such as me? They are from 1 Thessalonians 5:24 ‘He who calls you is faithful.’ These words have served me well over the years in my struggles, not only with myself, but also with Amaziah the priest. I was thus ordained into a black church and a united church.
In many ways I had been brought up ecumenically. Baptised in the Church of Scotland, received into full church membership in the Congregational Church in Birkenhead at the age of 14, for years daily attendance at Matins and Evensong in the Chapel of an Anglican school and later in an Oxford college chapel. At the end of my first year in Oxford I was asked in the same week if I would become the college rep for the OICCU on the one hand and for the SCM on the other. You can’t get much more ecumenical than that! Each Wednesday lunchtime I attended a group called SCARS in Christ Church Cathedral where we prayed for Christian Unity. I nearly went to Mansfield College but saw the light and came to New College where I became a Presbyterian again. I then joined the Iona Community which is somewhat ecumenical, studied at St Colm’s with the Irish and the rest of the world, went to study Marxism in Paris, where we worshipped in a Lutheran church, and then, of course to India for 12 years, the first six of which I worked in ex-Anglican churches and then for 6 years at the Scots Kirk. My colleagues were fully interchangeable whatever their previous denominational allegiance might have been.
On my return to Scotland I worked as a parish minister in a situation where my best friend was the local episcopal rector. He was greatly respected, canon of the cathedral, considerably older than I was, and he asked me occasionally to celebrate the eucharist in his church. I noticed he didn’t ask my Church of Scotland colleague whose church was just opposite his and so I queried this. I asked if he was inviting me because I had been ordained in the CSI, and said that if that was the case then I wouldn’t be coming again because I didn’t regard myself as being either more or less ordained than my Church of Scotland colleagues. To my surprise he just laughed and said: ‘It has nothing to do with the CSI. You have come to this town and you treat me like an equal! If the minister across the street ever gave me any reason to believe that I had any right to exist in his parish I would invite him immediately but so long as he treats me like an outcaste there is no way that I am going to invite him to conduct worship here.’ Now this was an Anglican speaking. Lesslie Newbigin used to say that every Anglican ordinand in England ought to be sent for a year to work in Scotland just to learn what it is like not to be the establishment. I wonder what Amos would have made of the establishment? But then that’s precisely what Amaziah was.
Of course, when I moved from there into a Local Ecumenical Partnership in Runcorn, things were very different, as the vicar and I were completely interchangeable. Yet we were surrounded by so-called evangelical clergy on the one hand, and many Anglican priests on the other for whom anything ecumenical was anathema. More recently in Milton Keynes I worked for seven years as Ecumenical Moderator on behalf of the Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, United Reformed, Salvation Army, Greek Orthodox and the Society of Friends. I have just edited a book about it of which you could have a copy for the modest sum of £6.75 which tells the remarkable story of the nearest thing to organic unity in the UK. You might also like to glance at this little document which spells out in detail what I was authorised to do on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church and others. But, unfortunately, Milton Keynes is different, and on the whole most of the Amaziahs whom I encounter in our local churches, theological colleges, ecumenical bodies and church bureaucracies seem to have no commitment whatsoever to organic unity but seek refuge behind the shibboleth of unity and diversity which can mean anything or nothing.
Here is a letter written on 9th May 2006 by Ron Beasley to the Living Spirituality Network of which I was Chair for seven years. ‘Sadly now, I am a disillusioned ecumeniac(!!) – and my sadness is fed by the current disarray in CTBI, and the fact that the churches, as such, only see the ecumenical quest as an optional extra. The Swanwick Declaration is dead, and in spite of economic hints, the denominations still cling to their individuality. It is very sad.’
Another letter in similar vein which sums up so much of the situation was sent to me by John Williamson, one of my gurus, and a former URC Provincial Moderator, who died recently. He writes: ‘It is great to sense your continuing passion in Ecumenical matters in spite of all the disappointments of recent years. In the South East the ecumenical structures that remain do “remain” for the most part, but cut little ice, their relevance and importance having departed after the departure of those who created them. So much depends on leadership and mutual commitment – at any rate, as far as shared worship and activity planning are concerned. The former rivalries and antipathies have largely died away, it is true and we can be thankful for that. But it is hard to find any ecumenical concern among church members.’
As far as that is concerned I am now the pastoral associate in a parish where our church is the only church in the village. It is an ideal situation in which to use the official Church of Scotland ‘Declaration of Ecumenical Welcome’. When I suggested this at a meeting, the Session Clerk, who is a very pleasant and committed Christian and a good friend of mine, went almost ballistic and said that he had been against things ecumenical all his life. When I explained that this was an official Church of Scotland document which had the approval of the General Assembly he simply declared that this was just one more sign of what was wrong with the Church of Scotland these days.
Or take the example of a young Methodist Minister from Ireland, a man with a PhD, who shared in an ecumenical week on Iona last September. Afterwards he wrote:
In Northern Ireland there is a deep suspicion of the ecumenical movement because there is a feeling that there is a hidden agenda to unite all churches in a single denomination. From my experience on Iona I have to say that there is some truth in this fear. While I am content to engage with ecumenism to the point of co-operation between different denominations, those in the movement do seem to have an underlying desire to see institutional unity.’
Or consider the recent obituary of Philip Morgan prepared for the Annual General Meeting of the Society for Ecumenical Studies held on 23rd May 2006. It ends with these words:
Although devoted to the BCC, Morgan was the first to see that other ways of working in the ecumenical movement were needed, and began discussion with church leaders, including the Roman Catholics, to explore ways of developing unity and setting up instruments to make it possible. The result was the Inter-Church Process of reflection, which, in 1990, ended in the setting up of new Ecumenical instruments for the Four Nations of the British Isles and the reconstitution of the BCC as the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland (CCBI). Much of its success was down to Morgan.
The obituary ends by saying:
If the moribund ecumenical life of the British Churches is to be revived, it needs a man or woman of Morgan’s energy and vision to bring it about.
So we have a problem, a problem which was summed up many years ago by Spurgeon when he supposedly wrote:
To dwell above with those we love
Ah that indeed is glory.
To dwell below with those we know
Is quite another story!
But we pray each day the words: ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, so there cannot be another story, otherwise it is blasphemy to mouth with our lips that which we will not practise in our lives, and in the life of our churches.
In 1948 at the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches the final Report said:
‘We have to learn afresh together to speak boldly in Christ’s name both to those in power and to the people, to oppose terror, cruelty and race discrimination, to stand by the outcast, the prisoner and the refugee. We have to make of the Church in every place a voice for those who have no voice and a home where everyone will be at home.’
This is what it means to be ecumenical. For me, being ecumenical is to be committed to justice and peace, within which commitment our reconciliation within the Body of Christ is but a part, but an important part, if the world is to believe, that the Church is any different from other human organisations and religions with their many splits, factions and power struggles.
In 1963, after attending the Faith and Order Conference of the World Council of Churches at Montreal, Oliver Tomkins, Anglican Bishop of Bristol, reported a feeling of ‘urgent intensity gripping everyone, an inability to keep up with the speed of Church progress and a sense of panting along in the rear of events’. In September the following year at the British Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Conference, presided over by Oliver Tomkins in Nottingham, this sense of urgency boiled over. On the final day of the conference the following resolution was passed:
United in our urgent desire for One Church Renewed for Mission, this Conference invites the member churches of the British Council of Churches, in appropriate groupings such as nations, to covenant together to work and pray for the inauguration of union by a date agreed amongst them. We dare to hope that this date should not be later than Easter Day 1980. We believe that we should offer obedience to God in a commitment as decisive as this.
Here in St Colm’s the 1965 House Guild Newsletter contained a letter written by Kenneth MacKenzie on a visit to Zambia. He wrote:
I thought you might be interested to hear some of the things which people said to me when I asked them about what kind of Church they would like to see in this new Republic.
Some said that just as they could now say: ‘This is our nation’, they would love to be able to say, in gratitude and humility: ‘This is our Church’. Not the Church of the missionaries – who are very welcome – the white mining communities or the African middle classes.
They also laid stress on the need for fuller unity, even after the foundation of the United Church of Zambia in January of this year… The motto of the new nation is: ‘One Zambia, One Nation.’ Can you have ‘One Zambia Many Churches’? Not until the other Christian groups, large and small, are in the same household with them and are seen to be with them, can they be a truly national Church in the serving sense.’
Yet here in Scotland I still hear Church of Scotland ministers speaking with a certain amount of conceit about the ‘National Church’ and thus marginalising other Christians who are just as Christian and just as much a part of Scotland as they are.
In the late 1960’s in a few places, such as Milton Keynes, the ecumenical ferment was taken seriously and the leaders of the five main churches – Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics and Congregationalists (to become the United Reformed Church five years later) agreed to accept the Lund Principle of 1952 that Churches should act together in all matters except where deep differences of conviction compelled them to act separately. As far as Scotland is concerned most of you know the story of what happened, or didn’t happen, better than I do. In England the English Covenant Proposals failed to obtain the required majority in the House of Clergy of the Anglican General Synod and the hopes raised at Nottingham all but vanished. But the Pope came and visited the four nations with words of encouragement declaring in Bellahouston Park that we were strangers no longer but pilgrims together on the way to the Kingdom. Soon new initiatives were being discussed which were to bear fruit in the Swanwick Conference of 1987 with the Swanwick Declaration stating:
It is our conviction that, as a matter of policy at all levels and in all places, our Churches must now move from co-operation to clear commitment to each other, in search of the unity for which Christ prayed, and in common evangelism and service of the world.
The Swanwick Report went on to encourage people…
To take ‘holy risks’ for the sake of the common mission. On every agenda the first question should be ‘Is this a priority?’ and the second ‘How can we do it together?’ Our task as the Body of Christ is to go out in love with the whole Gospel for the whole world.
Over the past 40 years I have had the privilege of sharing in much of this including the 1987 Swanwick Conference in which I led one of the small study groups. Those in the group signed some small book-marks which we took home with us. I have mine here and amongst others it contains the signatures of Lesley Macdonald and Bobby Anderson!
But since then things have gone so far agley that, to give but one example, Gordon Jamieson, the Kirk’s Director of Stewardship, in an article published in the February 2006 issue of ‘Life and Work’ entitled ‘ECUMENICAL and Evangelical’ had to argue that these two things were not incompatible. In a comment on this which was published in the April ‘Life and Work’ I quoted Lesslie Newbigin’s words written in Glasgow in 1933:
In so far as the Church is not truly and deeply one the world over, demonstrating to the world a unity which can transcend all sectional aims, however lofty, it is not merely failing to take account of the plain facts of the world as it is today, it is also to that extent denying its own true nature and contradicting its own true witness.
Years later in 1960 he wrote:
The connection between the movement for Christian reunion and the movement for world evangelisation is of the deepest possible character. The two things are the two outward signs of a return to the heart of the Gospel itself.
In 1984 in ‘God’s Reign and Our Unity’ much of which was written by Lesslie we read in Section 31:
Some affirm that concern for unity deflects attention from the more urgent business of evangelism, and they (correctly) point out that groups less interested in unity are often among the most successful in achieving numerical growth. To this end it must be replied that if the Church were an end in itself then it would follow that multiplication of numbers would be the criterion by which priorities should be judged, but if the Church is a sign and first-fruits of the reconciliation of all things in Christ, the fruit of evangelism should be communities reconciled to one another in Christ. If men and women are not being drawn into the one body, we must ask whether in fact their growth in Christ is not being stunted. ‘Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love’(Ephesians 4:15-16). The mere multiplication of cells, unrelated to the purpose of the body, is a sign not of life and health, but of cancer and death.
In my own comment in the letter to ‘Life and Work’ I wrote:
Organic unity is unity which grows organically from the grassroots at the local level. It is not only evangelical and ecumenical but economical, avoiding duplication, sharing resources and witnessing unambiguously to the love of Christ so that the world may believe. Surely it is a telling commentary on the eccentric state of the Church today when someone finds it strange that the words ‘ecumenical’ and ‘evangelical’ can be brought together.
My experience may be different from yours and I could of course be quite wrong. But it seems to me that many good people, in the Iona Community for example, and possibly here in St Colm’s, are so fed up with attempts to be ecumenical that they simply ignore the issue, get on with what they may well be right in considering as more important matters of justice and peace, and opt to live with a divided Church. I remember hearing Michael Taylor at a gathering at Swanwick berating Mary Tanner as to why she was wasting her time with Faith and Order matters when there were far more important things to be doing in the face of world poverty. As for our Church leaders, Moderators, Bishops, General Assemblies, theological college professors and even General Secretaries of ecumenical bodies, they tend to bury their various denominational heads, ostrich-like, in the sand of their ecclesiastical systems instead of raising a prophetic voice, calling us to return with Amos and the prophets to the ancient beliefs which we already profess to hold, and to put into practice the principles to which ostensibly we already adhere.
Could we not return to Mount Sinai and to the unity of the One who says: ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ not even those sacred cows (golden calves if you like) of your tribal and denominational allegiances. Could we not return to the Sermon on the Mount , not only to loving our neighbours but to loving our enemies, especially the doctrinal and theological ones? Could we return to Ephesians and hear the writer pleading with us to spare no effort to make fast with bonds of peace the unity which the Spirit gives? But not only Ephesians. In 1 Corinthians St Paul appeals by the name of the Lord Jesus Christ that they should all agree, that there should be no dissensions among them and that they be united in the same mind and the same judgement. And in the beautiful hymn in Philippians chapter 2 he pleads passionately that if there is any encouragement in Christ, any affection and sympathy, they should complete his joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.
F.F. Bruce once wrote: ‘The message of the Epistle to the Ephesians is that only through Christ, in the fellowship of His body can iron curtains, colour bars, class warfare and all other divisions of this kind be brought to an end. In his new community ‘there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all and in all’ (Colossians 3:11)’ But, of course, the temerity of our impassionate, so-called reconciled diversity, so popular in these islands, means that we can continue to have Methodists and Anglicans, Baptists and Roman Catholics, Presbyterians and Free Presbyterians to whom any eagerness to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace hardly seems to apply. No wonder an agnostic friend of mine in Edinburgh, lecturer at Heriot Watt University, when I mentioned to him that I was involved in the ecumenical movement, described it as the ‘ecucomical movement.’
As Rabbie Burns said long ago:
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
THESE ARE THE ONES WE SHOULD LOVE
By a wonderful coincidence St Barnabas’ Day and Trinity Sunday fall on the same date this year, which is today. As George MacLeod would say: ‘If you think that’s a coincidence I hope you have a dull life!’ You probably think you have had much too much of a dull life already with me moaning and groaning about the ecumenical lack of movement. But St Barnabas may come to the rescue for we now need some encouragement and the name Barnabas reflects the Aramaic which means ‘son of consolation’ or ‘pacification’. The root nb can also mean ‘to prophesy’ so that Barnabas might even be known as ‘the son of a prophet’. He was a man full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. His actual name was Joseph but because of the kind of person he was, he was surnamed Barnabas by the apostles. The actual word used in Greek is paraklesis the same word which is used for the Holy Spirit – the comforter, the advocate, the counsellor. The best prophets are not meant to be troublemakers, except for those who need to be troubled or disturbed. Like good preachers they are meant both to trouble the comfortable and to comfort the troubled. When he came to Antioch and saw the grace of God, Barnabas was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. (Acts 11:23-24)
He was an encourager. If you listened to ‘Prophet with Honour’ you will have heard Tony Benn say that the great thing about George MacLeod was that he was an encourager. And you probably feel that we need some encouragement now. Which leads us on to Trinity Sunday, for what better day could there be than this on which to think about the oikumene and things ecumenical. ‘God so loved the world’ and there is no more ecumenical statement than that. When I was a teenager we thought the Trinity had something to do with Mathematics and had endless discussions about three in one and one in three. We drew triangles and talked about the difficulty which Muslims had in accepting three gods when Allah was one and indivisible. Above the portico of St Andrew’s Kirk in Madras there is a huge triangle within which, in Hebrew, is the word YHWH and I remember the questions which that raised for some of the more astute youngsters there and other visitors.
In recent years the so-called ‘Forgotten Trinity’ has been recovered not least through the work of my closest friend, Colin Gunton, whose sudden death was a real tragedy for the Church in general and for the academic theological world in particular. In one of his books ‘The Promise of Trinitarian Theology’, which he gave me on Trinity Sunday 1991, Colin says:
‘There is only one God but this very oneness is not a mathematical oneness, as Arius and Greek theology had taught, but a oneness consisting in the inseparable relation of Father, Son and Spirit, the three hypostases’.
In other words the three persons. Colin goes on to say:
‘God is no more than what Father, Son and Spirit give to and receive from each other in the inseparable communion which is the outcome of their love.
He points out that one person is not the tool or extension of the other, otherwise each personhood would be violated. Personal relations are those which constitute the other person as other, as truly particular. He also points out that the idea of the triune God is what it is because it is a given – not a construct – which contains the clue to everything else and he quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge (of whom he was very fond) as he says ‘the Trinity contains the clue to everything else: ‘the Idea Idearum, the one substrative truth which is the form, manner, and involvement of all truths.’ This is also very clear in Bede Griffiths’ Hibbert Lecture about the relation of Christianity to Hinduism to which you may wish to listen in the time for reflection after this. Also, as we know, the Celtic understanding of the world is deeply Trinitarian. The one poem which scholars agree is most likely to have been actually written by Saint Columba is the Altus Prosator which begins:
The High Creator, Ancient of days and Unbegotten
was without origin of beginning and without end;
He is and shall be to infinite ages of ages
with Whom is Christ the only begotten
and the Holy Spirit,
coeternal in the everlasting glory of the Godhead.
We set forth not three gods,
but we say there is One God,
saving our faith in three most glorious persons.
(See Ian Bradley: Columba pg 57 Wild GoosePublications)
To put all this another way, in the words of Jurgen Moltmann:
…the Trinity corresponds to a community in which people are defined in their relations with one another and in their significance for one another, not in opposition to one another in terms of power and possession…The trinitarian principle replaces the principle of power by the principle of concord…I am free and feel myself to be truly free when I am respected and recognised by others and when I, for my part, respect and recognise them...then the other person is no longer the limitation of my freedom ;(s)he is an expansion of it. (J Moltmann – The Trinity and the Kingdom of God SCM 1981)
This leads me to the heart of what I had hoped to say this weekend and that is that truth is personal and not propositional or to put it in the words of Tom Colvin’s hymn, sadly and unbelievably omitted from CH4,
Jesu,Jesu,
fill us with your love,
show us how to serve,
the neighbours we have from you.
These are the ones we should serve,
these are the ones we should love.
All these are neighbours to us and you.
Over the past 40 years I have learned a little bit about the Christian Church especially from people, the sort of people we sometimes call in our arrogance, the ordinary church members. I have learned that the lives of these people are rather more important than the many documents, the many pieces of paper, which we produce. I used to say that above each of our doors we should place the slogan ‘People not Paper’. As Catherine the Great said to Diderot during their philosophical discussions: ‘It’s alright for you. You only have to work on paper. I have to work on the much more delicate surface of the human skin.’
As Ebenezer Elliott wrote in a hymn now rarely sung:
When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy when?
The people, Lord, the people!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
The tune by Josiah Booth was aptly named ‘Commonwealth’ and the words remind us of a theme contantly repeated in Scripture, not only by Amos and the prophets, but also in the Psalms which could be summed up in the well-known words of Psalm 28:9 ‘Save thy people and bless thine inheritance’. It was in 1973, the same year as the first hike in world oil prices, that Fritz Schumacher published his famous book ‘Small is Beautiful’ which was sub-titled: ‘A Study of Economics as if People Mattered’, my copy of which, as it so happens, was also given to me by Colin Gunton. In a similar way we must do our theology and organise our churches and our ecumenical bodies, as if people mattered and, in fact, rediscover with Ian Fraser and with John Drane that theology is the people’s work.
This is what Jesus did and the common people heard him gladly. Jesus – God with a human face – the Word made flesh, but, as someone once said: ‘The problem is that we have turned him into words again.’ He never wrote a book but lived a life. The only record we have of his writing anything was when he wrote in the sand (John 8:6) – a passage much loved by Australian aborigines, but no doubt the wind came and blew it away. Yet, we Christians have spent centuries endlessly filling theological libraries with books and papers, constitutions, canon laws, summa theologicae and annual reports.
Some people vividly remember the occasion when a commissioner to the Church of Scotland General Assembly waved the famous blue book of reports above his head and asked: ‘Moderator, what has all this to do with Jesus of Nazareth?’ The members of Anglican General Synods have their bags bulging with papers and the most recent book of canon law of the Latin Rite Catholic Church has 1752 canons.
When Pilate asked Jesus: ‘What is truth? (John 18:38) it wasn’t that Pilate didn’t stay for an answer, as suggested by Francis Bacon (Francis Bacon ‘Of Truth’). He had the answer standing in front of him in the person of Jesus of whom, shortly afterwards, he was to famously say: ‘Ecce Homo’ ‘Behold the man!’ Behold the man. Jesus could have given Pilate a propositional answer, a theological or philosophical treatise, in the form of an aphorism or creed but, instead, he was silent and simply presented himself. In UT UNUM SINT Pope John Paul II says: ‘Love for the truth is the deepest dimension of any authentic quest for full communion between Christians.’ (UT UNUM SINT Section 24 Catholic Truth Society 1995) But surely that truth is personal and not propositional.
St Thomas Aquinas summed up the personal nature of truth when he wrote:
What God’s Son has told me, take for true I do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.
On Trinity Sunday, if we believe in the freedom of the Spirit and that the wind blows where it wills (John 3:8) then ultimately that truth cannot be equated with the teaching of the Church but can only be equated with Christ himself as we meet him in bread and wine, in the beggar at our door, in our sisters and brothers of other denominations and in the teaching of the Church. Otherwise we will fall into the trap of which we are warned by Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he says:
He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all. (S. T. Coleridge ‘Aids to Reflection:Moral and Religious Aphorisms xxv’)
Even Jesus himself said: ‘Why do you call me good? No-one is good but God alone.’ (Mark 10:18 Luke 18:19) Significantly Matthew saw the problem with this and changed it to ‘ Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good.’ (Matthew 19:17) This moves things into a deeper or higher realm and it is at times like that that I like to remember that ‘He who calls you is faithful.’
So, in order to be really ecumenical, we would do well to remember the words of Cardinal Mercier, Archbishop of Malines-Brussels who said in 1926:
In order to unite with one another we must love one another; In order to love one another we must know one another; in order to know one another we must go and meet one another. (‘Called To Be One’ pg 31 CTE Publications 1996)
Looking back on the past 40 years I am sure all of us will rejoice in wonderful personal friendships and experiences which have given us much pleasure, broken down barriers and crossed the ecumenical divides. It is these which keep us going, these which ultimately matter, and these in which we rejoice. The whole experience of sharing in the life of other cultures and other churches, which most of us here will know all about, is a privilege which actually very few people have. Just last weekend we had the joy of having Andy Gaston, Alice Ngosi and Hippo Honde from Malawi staying with us and sharing at a fairly deep level. The week before last we were in Helsinki and met two Finnish Lutheran friends whom we first met in 1966 in Bangalore and with whom we keep in touch. I remember a visit to Milton Keynes of about a dozen people from the Swedish Lutheran Diocese of Vaxo together with their Bishop who wished to meet people of other faiths. Thus we sat cross-legged on the floor of the Buddhist temple, together with Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Baha’i, Buddhist and Christian friends, who all knew each other very well, and who answered the numerous questions which our guests were eager to ask.
Or to go back to 1987 and the most moving Ecumenical gathering at Swanwick where each of us received one of these pilgrim shells and where Cardinal Hume cut through various gordion knots in encouraging us to move from co-operation to commitment and from commitment to communion. I can remember the night of 30th October 2001, when after thirty-four years of sustained ecumenical work in Milton Keynes, the church structures were converged and the Mission Partnership came into being whereby the Anglican Deanery, Baptist Connection, Methodist Circuit and United Reformed District became a joint body and I’ll never forget the emotion in the voice of the URC Moderator, Malcolm Hanson, who incidentally stayed with us in Connel on Thursday this week, when he realised that his URC District was becoming more truly ecumenical.
When my Roman Catholic colleague, Leo McCartie, Bishop of Northampton celebrated a special Mass in Northampton Cathedral, on the 50th Anniversary of his Ordination as a priest, as I went forward for a blessing in the Mass he took me by the hand and said: ‘I want to thank you for all that you are doing for the unity of the Church’ – a moment which I will not easily forget. To preach at an Anglican ordination of new priests, to share in anointing a black Pentecostal pastor with what seemed like gallons of oil, to break the bread on a prayer walk with the evangelical – charismatic churches, to pronounce the Blessing with the Bishop of Oxford’s pastoral staff in hand – to do all of this and much more, which I hope you will tell us about from your own experiences, is what it really means to experience the joy and pleasure of being ecumenical.
(Those present will now be asked to share their own experiences)
Below is a short quotation from Ranjit Sondhi which sums up much of what I am trying to say in this talk but from another angle.
Murdoch MacKenzie
UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES OR HUMAN LIVES
Sondhi makes the following plea for Pragmatic Reasoning: " The question of pluralism does not sit easily with the children of the Enlightenment. The reason why some might find such a debate about diversity strangely disconcerting or even unacceptable is because one of the consequences of the attempt to define values in the Western world by rational procedures has been to drastically reduce the scope of moral reflection. Since the Enlightenment, moral philosophers have ceased to be interested in the eclectic range of values and goods which actually shape human lives, concentrating instead on the quest for universal principles of moral obligation. You might agree that this philosophical tunnel-vision has left the language of morality in a 'state of grave disorder' which in turn has tended to impede the emergence of genuinely multicultural societies. By emphasising the moral and ontological primacy of similarity among human beings, and privileging commonality over difference, modern moral philosophy has precluded any positive assessment of cultural plurality. The notion that there might be goods internal to other cultures, or ideals specific to particular communities, is never seriously entertained.
Perhaps we need to resurrect the Aristotelian concept of practical reasoning and assert that moral wisdom consists in the capacity to deliberate on multiple and diverse value commitments and translate them into practical moral action. Observation suggests that people have always occupied complex moral worlds, and are quite ready to explore the issues, tensions and conflicts which arise in their attempts to live a good life.
Attempts to constantly move towards the rational determination of universal ethical principles therefore rest on Enlightenment assumptions about the unlimited power of procedural reason and an associated conception of human nature as rational, uniform and socially transcendent. These assumptions have given rise to a much truncated view of the moral life and a strong anti-pluralist bias in modern moral philosophy. By contrast, the account of practical reasoning I am advocating affirms the fullness and complexity of 'the good life for man' and facilitates a positive assessment of cultural difference. When it is recognised that there are multiple and diverse goods within cultures, moral diversity between cultures need not be threatening. Far from presenting problems I would regard a multicultural society as an ideal context for the exploration of different visions of the good and the development of moral wisdom. "
Ranjit Sondhi ‘Ethnicity, Identity and Change’
