wfn.org | Anglican Consultative Council Opening 14 September 1999

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ACNS 1873 · 13 September 1999 · Dundee [ACC-11/8]
ACC-11 OPENING SERVICE
St Andrew's Cathedral, Aberdeen
Tuesday 14th September 1999
Sermon by the Most Revd Richard Holloway
Bishop of Edinburgh, Primus
"The Burning Mystery"
At the midnight service on Christmas Eve a couple of years ago I began my
sermon in the cathedral in Edinburgh by pointing out that an ancient
manuscript had recently been discovered, dated by scholars to about 7OAD. I
explained that, while they disagreed about its authenticity, all agreed that
it was a remarkable and interesting document. It appeared to be an
autobiographical meditation, written as an old man, by Jonathan the son of
Simon, innkeeper at Bethlehem at the beginning of the first century. An
American scholar, Professor Capote, I went on, had made a translation of the
document and, instead of a sermon, I was planning to read his version of the
document. It started like this: 'I, Jonathan son of Simon, of Bethlehem in
Judaea, wish to set down my memory of events that are now being spoken of
and written about, most recently in a strange text called, The Good News,
according to Luke a physician, which has recently come to my attention'. The
sermon I preached that night was published in a newspaper a few days later,
and I was soon getting letters from people, asking how they could acquire
copies of this ancient document. There was, of course, no ancient document.
I was following an ancient tradition, by making up a story in order to put
over a message. I had even planted a clue about what I was doing in the text
of my sermon. I gave the name Capote to the scholar who had translated the
document, because Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffany's, had
pioneered modern versions of this ancient technique in his book, In Cold
Blood, about a multiple murder in a Kansan farmhouse. That book was neither
fiction nor pure documentary, so the commentators dubbed it faction. He used
the form of fictional narrative, including imaginative reconstructions of
lengthy, unrecorded conversations, to get inside the complexity of a hideous
event. In a modest way, my Christmas sermon in 1993 was a similar exercise.
The Hebrew word for this technique is midrash, from a verb meaning to search
out, to seek, to enquire. All religious traditions develop a literature of
imaginative responses to their sacred canon. C.S.Lewis' Screwtape Letters is
a good example. This book, one of the most famous Lewis wrote, purports to
be letters from a junior demon to his supervisor, about his work of tempting
a hapless human. A person, unaware of such literary conventions, might
believe that the letters were authentic; and maybe C.S.Lewis got letters
from some of his readers, asking for copies of the originals. There is a lot
of midrash, or imaginative construction of this sort, in the New Testament.
If we want to understand the bible properly, we have to read it within its
own literary conventions. For example, most scholars believe today that the
whole of John's Gospel is midrash, an imaginative theological construction
that is the fruit of years of meditating on the meaning of Jesus.
One way of interpreting the story of the birth of the Church in the 2nd
chapter of the Acts of Apostles is to see it as belonging to this same kind
of literature. It is an extended exercise in theological code, and you only
get the message if you know the background, just as my Christmas sermon only
made sense to people who already knew the Gospel of Luke. One of the
favourite midrash techniques used by the New Testament writers is to take
great events from the Old Testament and repeat or echo them in a different
context, in order to show that Jesus had assumed the role that was
previously filled by one of the great heroes of the Hebrew scriptures, such
as Moses. The reading from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we
have just heard echoes and develops several themes from the Old Testament.
The great, foundational event in the life of Israel was the exodus from
bondage in Egypt. The early Christians described the resurrection of Jesus
as his exodus from the bondage of death. Fifty days after the exodus from
Egypt the children of Israel arrived at Mount Sinai, where, in the midst of
thunder and lightning, God made a contract with Israel, establishing them as
his own people. According to one Jewish writer, quoted by Fr Raymond Brown
in his exposition of this passage, angels took the news of the bargain
struck between Moses and God on Mount Sinai and carried it on tongues to the
people of Israel camped out on the plain below. So, fifty days after Easter,
our exodus, something like the same process is repeated at the feast of
Pentecost, our Mount Sinai, when the followers of Jesus are established as
the nucleus of a new people of God, commissioned to take the good news of
Jesus to the whole world.
So the important thing to understand about this complex story is that it is
making a simple claim: since that first Pentecost, it has been through the
Church that the meaning and message of Jesus has been shared with the world.
Unfortunately, that claim is easier said than demonstrated, because there is
something about Jesus and organised institutions that do not marry well. Let
me explain.
Whenever any new vision or idea is born, it requires a process to carry it
through history. The process is invented to mediate the vision, to carry it
through time. The great sociologist Weber called this process, "the
routinisation of charisma". The great, gifted, given thing, the charism, has
to be embodied in a routine, whether it is a political party or a church.
Two related and unavoidable things happen in this process. By definition,
charisms cannot be perfectly routinised or institutionalised, so the very
process that gives them continuing life, also begins to kill them. That is
bad enough; what amplifies this process of corruption is that the people who
are brought in to supervise the routine are usually more interested in the
process than in the purpose or vision it is meant to serve. The process
itself becomes fascinating, takes over, and you get Church for Church's
sake; so the protection and maintenance of the institution becomes the
institution's primary purpose. This happens to all institutions, but it is
deeper and more tragic in the case of the Church than of other institutional
compromises. The Church has the impossible task of being an organisation,
with an unavoidable power structure, that exists to preserve the memory of
one whose mission was to oppose the processes and sacrifices of power,
because they are almost always exercised at the cost of the individual, and
it was individuals he was interested in, especially those who had been
beaten up by the world's power systems. He expressed God's absolute love for
those outside the great institutional enclosures, with their ethic of
survival and power. It was the victims of institutional power he went after.
He lived among them, and died as one of them, because, as Caiaphas pointed
out, with impeccable institutional logic, it was expedient that one man die
rather than that the whole people perish. That is always the way systems
work. Jesus did the precise opposite. He always went after the lost, the
ones outside all the systems, the broken ones. Yet, and this is one of the
most heart-breakingly beautiful things about him, he understood the
corrupting compromises institutions and their leaders have to make; he had
compassion on their need to follow the ethic of expediency and even forgave
them the necessity of his own crucifixion. Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do. It is this uncompromising unconditionality of Jesus
that is so breath-taking. The pain of being Church comes from recognising
that we are supposed to express that same unconditionality and acceptance of
all; while knowing that the system we have invented to do the job is not up
to it, because it is run by us, not by Jesus. So, in trying to embody the
absoluteness of God's love, we cannot help but contradict it. No wonder Paul
said that the Church was an impostor through whom the truth was spoken. But
the really extraordinary thing about this institution we call Church, whose
ambiguous reality we express here today, is that without it we would know
nothing about the Jesus whose message it so consistently compromises. I
would not be beating my breast about the failings of the Church today and my
part in those failures, if the Church had not introduced me to that
mysterious, unavoidable man from Nazareth. So the truth of God's
unconditional love does get through the Church, in spite of its own
compromising timidity. That is why, week after week in the Church's liturgy,
I am still able to stand and say, I believe in one holy, catholic and
apostolic Church. In spite of all our compromises and confusions; in spite
of the uncertainty of our love and the way we disfigure his image, the
memory of the man of Nazareth is kept alive in history. Mysteriously, but
certainly, he win be encountered in our meetings as the Anglican
Consultative Council this week, as we struggle to be faithful to the mind of
Christ, knowing full well that we all encounter it in different ways. He
will be mysteriously present as we struggle in our weakness and fallibilty
to respond to the challenge of his burning love. No one can say why or how
it happens, only that it does. He will meet us, as he met by the lake side
those of old. No one has expressed the mystery of this encounter better than
Albert Schweitzer in his classic study, The Quest of the Historical Jesus,
which ends with these mysterious but captivating words: He comes to us as
One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the 1ake-side, He came to those
men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and
sets us to the tasks, which He has to fulfil for our time. He command. And
to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal
Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass
through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in
their own experience Who He Is.