Posted Thursday 11 June 2009 | 7:56am
The 2009 General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church got underway with the opening Eucharist during which the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Most Rev Dr Idris Jones, delivered his Charge to Synod.
Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
It was the Dean of Glasgow and Galloway who taught me that there are many good sermon texts to be found in Broadway musicals. One that he may have overlooked comes from South Pacific.
‘Happy talking talking happy talk – talk about things you like to do.
You’ve got to have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true.’
If we sought a Biblical text in the way that we are taught not to do it might be the off quoted ‘Where there is no vision the people perish’ and if some other authoritative source then Robert Browning’s ‘Andrea Del Sarto’: ‘Ah! But a man’s reach should exceed his grasp - or what’s a heaven for’.
Earlier this year I was working alongside a Vestry during a vacancy .We were discussing their profile and I was pushing for some imagination about the next few years. ‘That’s all very well Bishop’ they said, ‘we’ll tell you what our vision is if you will tell us what yours is.’ It seemed like a fair deal to me so without much thought I set out my stall.
Every church in the Diocese full each Sunday; every congregation with a stipendiary priest; our own schools and our own social work department with special emphasis on rehabilitation for those suffering from addiction of any sort.
They were too polite to tell me to ‘dream on’, but of course although it was what I felt I would like to happen I was fully aware that it was not going to happen and this was no lack of faith so much as being in touch with what is real. Growth is possible, indeed if there is no growth the alternative is death, but our expectations must be realistic and achievable.
We need to be stretched however and at several points of our practice we are. How about ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.’
It is a tall order in the world of today; it is aspirational, but by God’s grace it is sometimes achievable. It expands the horizon of the humanly possible and remains something to strive for. Or how about ‘Fill them with the joy of your presence. Increase in them the fruit of your Spirit - wisdom understanding love patience and gentleness, wonder and true holiness.’ If we did not believe it possible then we should not invite people into it. Christian discipleship is about the desire and commitment to live as Christ our Lord lived and to strive to do it assisted by God’s grace.
On further thought my vision for the church would be better expressed as to see a church and all its members living a life in conformity to the life of Christ. Each congregation living out its witness to the love of God and each member of Christ a faithful disciple.
‘Happy talking - you gotta have a dream.’ We have been deprived of the opportunity to meet as a Provincial Conference but in this Synod the Mission and Ministry Board is giving us an opportunity for some happy and fruitful talk about the Mission of the Scottish Episcopal Church. I pray that we can use that opportunity to enter into a serious dialog about how we are to serve our Lord in the years ahead and what we need to do to equip ourselves to get on with it.
I have been asked in my capacity as President of Synod – at least for the next 36 hours that is – to give a sense of what we are about. It seems to me that this Synod is unlikely to be described as ground-breaking; but it will certainly be ground clearing. It is a Synod that is going to prepare the ground for work that will come in the next few years. Part of that preparation will be the election of a new Primus. This is not a work of Synod, but the Bishops will carry out that task inviting members of Synod as witnesses and inviting the prayers of Synod on that new ministry.
The Standing Committee will place before you a number of suggestions about closing off out-standing agendas in order to clear the way for new and it may be more significant items. Synod may choose to reject those suggestions which is your right, but they are not coming to you as unthoughtful or unformed proposals but as what we see as necessary in order to address the task of mission with a clear field.
There are serious items to be considered concerning finance among them the fall in investment income caused by the debt crisis and the recovery plan for the pension fund. I shall not pre-empt these matters and no doubt there are many members of Synod who feel strongly about these issues and who will wish to share their concerns. What I want to do here is to set those discussions in a wider context by using words from a paper given by the Bishop of Clogher at the recent Porvoo consultation on Diaconal ministry.
‘The Millennium Development Goals ... could be innovative in equipping people to tithe their time in missional service to local communities where today there are more and more people starved of love and grace. Were there to be no headlines daily in our newspapers of recession and redundancies, there is still the need for a tremendously centripetal church to be much more centrifugal. We need to break out rather than collapse in on top of ourselves if we are to be properly apostolic.’ We need to break out.
I think that these words although addressed in a different context are important to bear in mind when we come to consider mission and how we shall address that mission of God with the resources that we do have for the mission that the church seeks to fulfill cannot allow itself to be strangled by financial constraint. We are called to be a church that is strong in faith and hope and in love.
It would be impossible not to address the national atmosphere in which we meet however reluctantly I do so. Public service is carried out by some of those who are elected to office with honesty and integrity and with the intention of serving the common good – it is not true that all politicians have betrayed their trust; but sadly the case that many have. As we are bombarded with details about the venality of some it is easy to succumb to that sense of abandonment that the psalmist expresses with the words ‘there is not one godly man left, no not one.’
What we need to do is to offer encouragement and support to people of honour and to urge the higher human values – Christian values -on all who serve in public life. Over the recent decades we have lived in a climate in which it is increasingly allowed to go unchallenged that the powerful shall inherit the earth and the weak shall go to the wall. The successful take all and the rest be left to do whatever they can with what is left.
Under pressure from the Government local authorities are looking to make provision for the homeless with a reduced budget. Care provision will be made on the basis of what costs the least amount. So the effects of greed and mismanagement will be felt by those who are the most vulnerable in society across the United Kingdom.
The example of Christ and of his kingdom is a direct contradiction of this kind of view and the call to the Christian community is to witness to this fact by the norms of our own common life. But, we have learnt gradually that such a witness does not come by being quick to point the finger so much as by absorbing the meaning of the response ‘Let the one among you without sin cast the first stone.’
A church which is characterized as only able to condemn something has surely slipped into a mode from which Jesus himself explicitly distanced himself and his experience of God the Father and our calling is to live what we proclaim accepting the cost involved.
Salt and light for the world – living it, being it, is the one thing that we can offer in a positive and constructive way. The incarnation and self emptying of Christ invites us not to withdraw but to engage with the mess and find through it an opportunity to serve God and to forward his purposes of love what we need therefore is not Christians to withdraw from involvement to form their own little group so much as for those who are overtly Christian and who have the abilities that qualify them to do so to join political parties across the spectrum.
I have already quoted from the Christian Initiation Rite of 1998, let me end with words from it.
‘As the seed grows secretly in the earth, As the yeast rises in the dough
May the power of God be at work in us.
Like a city on a hill
Like a lamp in the darkness
May we witness to the glory of the kingdom.’
