The way to unity is through diversity

Here's the sermon I shared in the 8.00 am service at St Mary Magdalene, Great Burstead, this morning:

In the culture of Jesus’ day, those with disabilities were often excluded from their community because of their disability. We see this in the Gospels in references to disabled people living outside villages and towns and being beggars on the streets. Those who were Jews, were excluded from worship at the Temple because of their disability. Jesus’ acts of healing were, therefore, acts of inclusion because, as a result, those healed were reintegrated into their community. For those who were Jews, we often read of these people being sent to authorities after their healing in other that they can return to their communities.

Despite this, as the theologian John Hull has noted, many disabled people rightly ‘claim the Bible and Christian faith are not so much part of the answer but part of the problem.’ He notes that ‘many Christians still persist with a literal concept of miracle, and the imitation of Christ is sometimes thought to involve healing miracles for disabled people.’ In addition, ‘the Bible itself depicts many disabilities in a negative way.’ ‘He gives blindness as one example, due to his personal experience of this condition, which ‘is frequently used as a metaphor for sin and unbelief.’ This is a metaphor taken from the world of sighted people and used to marginalise and demean the world of blind people. The result of these negative features of the [Christian] tradition’, John Hull says, ‘is that disabled people usually find better things to do on a Sunday morning than go to church’ (https://faithinhealth.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/theology-of-disability-health-and-healing-conference.pdf and http://www.johnmhull.biz/A%20Spirituality%20of%20Disability1.htm).

That situation is the reverse of Jesus’ intent when he healed. He intended to include disabled people in the community, culture and worship of his day but some aspects of the Christian tradition which he began have resulted in disabled people experiencing exclusion. As John Hull has said, ‘The true miracle … is when disabled people are fully integrated into Church life and accepted exactly as they are’ (http://www.johnmhull.biz/ChurchTimesInterview3rdMay2013.doc).

This is why it is vital that we address access issues as a church. We inhabit buildings which visual treasure chests, particularly here at Great Burstead with your medieval wall paintings. We rightly value the wonderful architecture and the beauty of our churches. However, if those who are blind are unable to also appreciate what we see in our churches and those with mobility impairments cannot access the spaces in order to see while those who can access and see the glories of these spaces accept that others cannot, we are actually a places and communities of exclusion. Instead, we need to creatively imagine how we can include those who are currently excluded.

Jesus, in order to communicate with the man in our Gospel story (Mark 7. 31 – 37), uses touch and gesture. There are several different theories as to why Jesus acts in ways that seem very strange to us; putting his fingers in the man’s ears, spitting before putting his fingers on the man’s tongue and looking up to heaven. The simplest explanation would seem to be that touch and gesture were the ways in which communication could take place. The starting point for inclusion for us, as for Jesus, is to enter to some extent the world of the other person, in this case the man who was deaf and who had a speech impediment.

It can only be as we connect with the different world that others inhabit that understanding can come from which inclusion can develop. John Hull says: ‘The major disabilities create a distinctive world of experience, so different from the world in which the majority live as to constitute different human worlds. The powerful majority often create a world which is assumed to be the only world. Those who do not share this world are regarded as being without a world and are pitied or patronised. This idea of multiple worlds is of great political and social significance. If you do not understand my world, how can we relate to each other with mutual respect? If we rush too soon to a single world, we create an exclusive domination. The only way to create a unity of the human species is to go through multiplicity. The way to unity is through diversity … We must also include the different human worlds of experience, such as the disabled worlds we have been thinking about. Just as the Church can’t be holy or catholic without the equal ministry of women with men, so it cannot be holy or catholic without the equal prophetic and sacramental ministry of disabled people with the able-bodied.’

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Carleen Anderson - Let It Last.

Tearing down, raising up, at the heart, on the edge

Here is my sermon from this morning's Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Picture a massive road building project cutting through hills and valleys to create a new straight, level road. The vision from Isaiah that John the Baptist quotes in our Gospel reading (Luke 3: 1 – 6) is one that seems to require bulldozers. It reads like the specification for a new motorway or by-pass. “Get the road ready … make a straight path for travel.” “Every valley must be filled up” and “every hill and mountain levelled off.” It doesn’t sound very environmentally friendly but, like the current project on the A14, may result in major archaeological finds.

John the Baptist uses this image to describe his role in preparing for the coming of Jesus. His aim is for the whole human race to see God’s coming salvation. The idea is that everything that would obscure or obstruct sight of God’s salvation would be torn down or raised up so that throughout the entire world there would be no obstacle able to prevent people from seeing God’s salvation. Everyone should be able to see Jesus because there would be nothing impeding our view; no mountains blocking our vision and no valleys from within which we would be unable to look out. The purpose of John the Baptist’s ministry was that everyone should clearly see who God is and what God does. Picture a vast flat expanse across which the light of Christ can be seen from wherever you stand and you will get the intended idea.

By quoting from Isaiah, John is making clear that he is recovering the original vision for God’s people to be a light to the nations. When Abraham was called by God he was told that he would become a great and mighty nation and that all the nations of the earth would be blessed in him. The nation founded through his obedience to God’s call was to be a blessing to all nations. The people of Israel were reminded periodically of this call, as in Isaiah 49:6 where we read:

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

The prophecies collected together in Isaiah also show the kind of place that Jerusalem was intended to become; a place to which all nations could come to hear from God:

“Many nations will come streaming to it, and their people will say,
‘Let us go to up the hill of the Lord, to the Temple of Israel’s God.
He will teach us what he wants us to do;
we will walk in the paths he has chosen.
For the Lord’s teaching comes from Jerusalem;
from Zion he speaks to his people.” (Isaiah 2. 2b & 3a)

Instead of that vision coming to pass, by the time of Jesus, the Temple had become a symbol of Jewish identity with all sorts of people excluded from worship unless they conformed to the detailed requirements of the Mosaic Law. The Temple and the worship in it prevented the free access to God that God wished to see for people of all nations.

In Jesus’ ministry, crucifixion and post-resurrection commission to his disciples, we see him tearing down barriers that prevented sight of God and raising up those whose position in society excluded them from worship. In his ministry Jesus expressly went to those who were excluded from Temple worship, including them both by accepting them (and teaching that they will enter the kingdom of God ahead of the religious leaders) and by healing them so they could actively return to the Temple worship. When he died the curtain separating people from the most holy place in the Temple was torn in two, showing that access to God was now open to all. Jesus also prophesied that the Temple itself would be destroyed and that when this happened his disciples should take his message of love to all nations.

As an Iona Community liturgy puts it, Jesus was ‘Lover of the unlovable, toucher of the untouchable, forgiver of the unforgivable, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, writing heaven’s pardon over earth’s mistakes. The Word became flesh. He lived among us, He was one of us.’ As Christ’s followers today, we inherit the task of putting into practice what Jesus has achieved through his life, death and resurrection. We are the people today who are called to work towards that Isaianic vision of nations streaming to learn what Israel’s God wants them to do, settling disputes among the great nations, hammering swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, and never again preparing to go to war. To do that we follow the up and down vision of Isaiah and John the Baptist; taking down barriers and raising up those who have been brought low.

As was the case for Jesus hearing John the Baptist quote the vision of Isaiah, we too stand at a point in history when the need of a broad and challenging vision for change is placed before us. Our Vicar Sam Wells has suggested that we live in a world that is pervaded by beauty, goodness, energy, creativity, trust, gentleness, joy and love but which is poisoned by violence, hatred, cruelty and fear. What our world needs most of all are communities of trust and support and love that show the kind of life that is possible when we believe that God is with us and rest in the hope that God’s ways will finally prevail.

We don’t have to invent these communities because God has already done so – in the call of Abraham and Jacob to be God’s people Israel, and when the Holy Spirit was sent on the dispirited apostles on the day of Pentecost. We’ve been given thousands of them all round the country and millions all round the world. We’ve been given the church. Yet we also live at a time and in a society where the church is getting smaller; and the church is getting narrower. Those who regularly attend worship are much fewer; and the church’s reputation and energy are becoming associated with initiatives that are introverted and often lack the full breadth of the gospel.

The vision that John the Baptist shared with Jesus in his time was an up and down vision of tearing down and raising up. That vision was necessary preparation for seeing Jesus but when we see Jesus we gain a different vision; an in and out vision, a vision of centre and circumference, of being at the heart and on the edge. By being in the godhead, Jesus was in the heart of God but chose to be on the edge by becoming a human being. Although he remained in the centre of God’s will by being the embodiment of the very heart of God, that led him to place himself on the edge as he took onto his shoulders the weight of the world’s sorrows and found himself temporarily separated from God. Jesus gives us a vision of being both at the heart and on the edge.

We have claimed that vision for ourselves here at St Martin’s seeing ourselves as being at the heart of London, the nation, and the church, while also seeing our calling as to be alongside those on the edge through being excluded, ignored or oppressed by society or church. We have then created in HeartEdge, our ecumenical network of churches, a means of sharing that vision more widely by fostering, catalysing and facilitating renewal on a national scale.

HeartEdge seeks to catalyse kingdom communities – i.e. it aims to foster, not to impose; it sees the kingdom as God’s gift to renew the church, rather than as a mission-field to be conformed to the church’s image; and it sees churches as lively and dynamic communities, rather than defensive and narrow congregations. At over 50 churches, HeartEdge is already big enough for communities to mentor one another, to offer consultancy days to one another, and for larger gatherings to offer an exchange of ideas, encouragement and challenge. We aspire for it not to create clones of St Martin’s, but to become the national embodiment of those committed to the vision to be ‘At the heart. On the edge.’

HeartEdge seeks to share the vision that the heart of the gospel is that God is most often made known among those on the edge and that the church is at its best when it speaks to the heart but takes risks on the edge. This vision not only renews the church but, through that renewal, speaks into the ways in which our world is poisoned by violence, hatred, cruelty and fear offering renewal of society more widely.

The visions of taking down and raising up and of being at the heart and on the edge are Advent visions; visions that that enable us to see Christ’s coming. Isaiah and John the Baptist tell us that God is seen when barriers that exclude are taken down and those who have been brought low are raised up. Jesus’ revelation of God shows that those at the centre can be alongside those on the edge and will be changed as a result.

So, God is seen through an up and down vision that has a vertical axis and also an in and out vision which has a horizontal axis. Pushing these analogies as far as possible the vertical axis equates to the north-south axis on a compass while the horizontal axis equates to the east-west axis, meaning that all the points on the compass are encompassed by these visions. As Isaiah prophesised, all people will see God’s salvation, or, as John Oxenham has it, ‘In Christ there is no east or west, / in him no south or north; / but one great fellowship of love / throughout the whole wide world.’ May that vision become reality for us. Amen.

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Christ's Hospital Choir - How Shall I Sing That Majesty.

Healing and wholeness: Dismantling the barriers to belonging

I was involved in a fascinating session on Healing, Wholeness and Holiness at the wonderful Parish Away Day for St Martin-in-the-Fields held last Saturday.

We were able to organise this session on the basis that St Martin’s has many people involved in health and wholeness in its broadest sense. The session drew on that rich diversity of experiences and perspectives to explore the holistic nature of healing ministry and how its many ‘branches’ connect to one vine. It was a rich opportunity to learn more about God and about one another, and our hope is that it will continue to grow the understanding of healing and wholeness that has been developing at St Martin’s. 

I contributed the following brief reflection and shared material on social prescribing as an approach which can encompass the range of healing that we were speaking about in the session and as another way of moving beyond the medical model of disability:
In the culture of Jesus’ time, disabled people - those with physical, sensory or mental health conditions, learning disability or neurodiversity - were actively excluded from the wider community and from worship at the Temple. Jesus’ healing ministry had the effect of re-including those who had been excluded in the wider community and in worship.

The key issue, however, was a culture which excluded others and which Jesus sought to address through his teaching about the Kingdom of God. Today, the best way to achieve this same aim within our society is by understanding and utilising the social model of disability, which recognises and seeks to dismantle the barriers to belonging that our society throws up through environment, structures and attitudes.

I see this branch of ministry connecting to the vine because when we explore and address these barriers in church and society – as we seek to do through our Disability Advisory Group and our annual conference on disability and Church together with Inclusive Church – we are doing what Jesus sought to do through his healing ministry.

Welcoming God, enable us to identify and remove the barriers to belonging which confront disabled people to ensure that all people can fully and wholly contribute to church and society. Amen.

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Van Morrison - The Healing Game.

Greyfriars Kirk

I had an inspiring HeartEdge visit to Greyfriars Kirk last Wednesday to meet the Minister Revd. Dr. Richard E Frazer and the Associate Minister Revd. Lezley Stewart. 

Greyfriars is a worshipping congregation of the Church of Scotland in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town where a church has stood since 1620. The Kirk seeks to be a welcoming, inclusive community and to respond to local needs in a variety of ways. Worship takes place during the week as well as on Sundays in English and Gaelic.

The Kirk is a major venue for the arts, a tourist destination and through the Grassmarket Community Project supports many vulnerable citizens. Greyfriars community outreach takes many forms but is primarily focused around their centre in the Kirkhouse on Candlemaker Row. The project is now managed by Grassmarket Community Project Ltd. - a partnership between Greyfriars Kirk and Grassmarket Mission.

Throughout the week the Grassmarket Community Project offers a variety of workshops aimed at developing people’s self worth, social networks and skills.

Craft, art and community are all central themes in their work. Participants have the opportunity to join in with GRoW wood workshop, the Plough to Plate cookery and gardening program, the Grassroots Textiles workshop, Greyfriars Herb Garden or one of their many arts and education activities.

Although primarily aimed at individuals facing deep social exclusion, the Grassmarket Community Project encourages members of the local community to join in and work side by side with participants from all walks of life.

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Ricky Ross - Trouble Came Looking.

Statements on the EU Referendum result

On the St Martin-in-the-Fields website, Sam Wells states:

'We now face a new future grateful to be in a democracy where the people’s voice speaks – even when it says what many experience as horrifying. The decision means the nation will leave the EU; it doesn’t automatically mean a war on immigration or economic catastrophe; it must not be allowed to bring about a rise in intolerance and exclusion. It’s up to the whole country now to show that what we have in common is greater than what divides us.'

Angus Ritchie asks some apposite questions of those of us who voted to remain and view the prospect of Brexit as horrifying:

'By far the best piece I have read on the referendum is John Harris's extended essay in The Guardian. Harris, who voted to Remain, warns at the "deep anger and seething worry" which has gripped so much of the country, outside the economic powerhouse of London ...

Harris demands that we listen to a world beyond the metropolitan and middle-class. It is easy to denounce the "bigotry" of the Leave campaign without acknowledging one's own social and economic location. Remainers need to be careful not to fall into our own Pharasaism, for we have sins which require repentance. We speak of social solidarity now, but how much has it inspired us to action on behalf of those in our own land who have been left behind by capitalism? And, when we have acted, have we been motivated by a genuine desire for change or by a shallow self-righteousness - more interested in signalling our virtue than in achieving genuine change?

It is tempting to respond to this week's vote with shrill denunciations, flattering ourselves that this counts as a "prophetic" response. But Harris's essay suggests a more appropriate reaction. We need, first of all, to listen - and to listen in particular from the Nazareths of England and Wales; the unglamorous, left-behind places, which modern capitalism does not value.

For, as these areas will soon discover, the triumph of the Leave campaign is unlikely to address their plight. The challenge for Christians (however we voted in the referendum) is to listen to their genuine and justified grievances, and to help them organise for justice - making common cause with the migrant communities which the worst of the Leave campaign encouraged them to scapegoat.'

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Beth Rowley - Nobody's Fault But Mine.

The way to unity is through diversity

Here is my sermon from yesterday's lunchtime Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook (the sermon can be heard at the London Internet Church website):

In the culture of Jesus’ day, those with disabilities were often excluded from their community because of their disability. We see this in the Gospels in references to disabled people living outside villages and towns and being beggars on the streets. Those who were Jews, were excluded from worship at the Temple because of their disability. Jesus’ acts of healing were, therefore, acts of inclusion because, as a result, those healed were reintegrated into their community. For those who were Jews, we often read of these people being sent to authorities after their healing in other that they can return to their communities.

Despite this, as the theologian John Hull has noted, many disabled people rightly ‘claim the Bible and Christian faith are not so much part of the answer but part of the problem.’ He notes that ‘many Christians still persist with a literal concept of miracle, and the imitation of Christ is sometimes thought to involve healing miracles for disabled people.’ In addition, ‘the Bible itself depicts many disabilities in a negative way.’ ‘He gives blindness as one example, due to his personal experience of this condition, which ‘is frequently used as a metaphor for sin and unbelief.’ This is a metaphor taken from the world of sighted people and used to marginalise and demean the world of blind people. The result of these negative features of the [Christian] tradition’, John Hull says, ‘is that disabled people usually find better things to do on a Sunday morning than go to church’.

That situation is the reverse of Jesus’ intent when he healed. He intended to include disabled people in the community, culture and worship of his day but some aspects of the Christian tradition which he began have resulted in disabled people experiencing exclusion. As John Hull has said, ‘The true miracle … is when disabled people are fully integrated into Church life and accepted exactly as they are’.

At St Stephen Walbrook we inhabit a space which is a visual treasure chest. We rightly value Wren’s masterpiece as ‘the pride of English architecture’ (John Summerson) and because the sensitive mirroring of Wren’s dome with Henry Moore’s altar and Patrick Heron’s kneelers creates harmonious space. However, those who are blind cannot see what we see in this space and those with mobility impairments cannot access the space in order to see. All the while that those of us who can access and see the glories of this space, accept that others cannot, we are actually a space and community of exclusion. As a community whose mission statement says we seek to provide, without prejudice or expectation, a safe and welcoming place, we need to creatively imagine how we can include those who are currently excluded.

Jesus, in order to communicate with the man in our Gospel story (Mark 7. 31 - 37), uses touch and gesture. There are several different theories as to why Jesus acts in ways that seem very strange to us; putting his fingers in the man’s ears, spitting before putting his fingers on the man’s tongue and looking up to heaven. The simplest explanation would seem to be that touch and gesture were the ways in which communication could take place. The starting point for inclusion for us, as for Jesus, is to enter to some extent the world of the other person, in this case the man who was deaf and who had a speech impediment.

It can only be as we connect with the different world that others inhabit that understanding can come from which inclusion can develop. John Hull says: ‘The major disabilities create a distinctive world of experience, so different from the world in which the majority live as to constitute different human worlds. The powerful majority often create a world which is assumed to be the only world. Those who do not share this world are regarded as being without a world and are pitied or patronised. This idea of multiple worlds is of great political and social significance. If you do not understand my world, how can we relate to each other with mutual respect? If we rush too soon to a single world, we create an exclusive domination. The only way to create a unity of the human species is to go through multiplicity. The way to unity is through diversity … We must also include the different human worlds of experience, such as the disabled worlds we have been thinking about. Just as the Church can’t be holy or catholic without the equal ministry of women with men, so it cannot be holy or catholic without the equal prophetic and sacramental ministry of disabled people with the able-bodied.’

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Stevie Wonder - Visions.

The flip-side of consumerism

I thought Suzanne Moore made some telling points about the flipside of consumerism in her Guardian comment piece today reflecting on the August riots:
"... the eruption of mass shoplifting in public surely must tell us something about the closing down of political space.

Young people were perversely doing what we are all told to do. Get stuff. Stuff that is the meaning of life. They queued in the wasteland of retail parks for a bigger TV set. This is zombie shopping that made people feel alive.

I am not defending the mindless looting and burning but we cannot have it both ways: if all these people are criminals, why do they not do it more often and why did it stop? Yes, the police showed up eventually, but what about next time? If this is simply the flip-side of consumerism, as we sink into recession, are we to expect more unrest?

...  However disenfranchised they are, they are unable to escape the cultural bombardment that is consumerism. I can have whatever I want, not because work sets us free, but "because I am worth it". The sadness of those five days was also surely about how worthless someone feels, if worth can be achieved by mere branded goods or something nicked from Poundland.

... Now we have more important things to think about. We are too busy feeling our own pain to care about that of these opportunistic idiots. Not to take the opportunity to look at our own values in the face of riots or recession is ridiculous. We cannot have growth or endless stuff. We cannot permanently exclude the already excluded and expect no reaction.

If our only purchase into society is what we purchase, then looting is simply a shortcut in the grotesque spectacle. For five days in summer, some helped themselves and wrought havoc. The answer to this mass eruption of criminality is seen to be police, CCTV and prison."

Her conclusion bears repeating: "Not to take the opportunity to look at our own values in the face of riots or recession is ridiculous. We cannot have growth or endless stuff. We cannot permanently exclude the already excluded and expect no reaction."

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The Jam - In The Crowd.