wfn.org | ACNS3449 Sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Brazil

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ACNS 3449	     |		 THE PRIMATES MEETING

    |		 25 MAY 2003	

Sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Brazil

The following is the text of the sermon preached by the Archbishop of
Canterbury at a Celebration for the Unity of the People of God, which was
held in Gramado, Brazil, on Saturday 24 May: 

What is it that Jesus Christ gives us? And what is it that we are to give to
the world? Jesus answers us in today's gospel, in the clearest possible way.
He gives us glory; and what we are given, we must share. Certainly, he gives
us forgiveness, life, confidence, the promise of eternal rest in God - but in
this passage from John's gospel, he sums it all up in the word 'glory',
because what he longs to give us is ultimately just what the Father gives
him. It isn't a very easy word to translate or understand for many people
these days. We associate glory with fame or success - and Jesus on his way to
a humiliating and dreadful death is obviously not someone who possesses that
kind of glory. Instead, he speaks, a few verses later, of a glory given by
the Father before the world was made. And the picture conjured up for us is
of a radiant light streaming from the Father, reflected without any loss or
inequality in the face of the Son. The Son, who becomes human for us in
Jesus,!
 never turns from the Father, and so never loses that radiant light; Jesus in
his life on earth never loses it - though it is only for a moment, at the
Transfiguration, that his face literally shows this eternal light. And if we
keep ourselves turned to Jesus, then that same light is reflected in our
faces, and it lights up the world around. 

The relationship between Jesus and God his Father is the foundation for this
radiance; and so, obviously, the relation between Jesus and us is what makes
the light travel still further. But what is important in this gospel passage
is that it is also the relationship between us as Christians that makes the
light shine that causes the glory to radiate. When we are turned to Jesus,
glory is reflected - St Paul says just this in II Corinthians. But when we
are turned to each other the same is true. The glory given by Jesus is given
so that we may become one; and this implies that it is when we are one with
each other that the glory shines out for others. 

To turn to Christ is in practice always to turn to each other. Conversion is
always conversion to one another if it is truly and fully conversion to
Jesus. And when we are 'turned around' like this, glory becomes visible. The
Church is a place of glory when we see each other face to face and give
thanks - like Jacob meeting Esau in the Genesis story: Esau welcomes and
forgives his brother, and Jacob says, 'Truly, your face is like the face of
God to me'. One of the great joys of belonging to a worldwide communion is
that we can always encounter fresh and challenging contexts in which the
Christian and Anglican tradition has come alive, and we find the glory of God
in the face of the stranger. We have experienced it in our meeting as
Primates; we experience it as we receive your welcome, dear friends. We trust
that in these meetings and welcomes, glory will appear: the world will see
how our faithful gazing at each other in gratitude and delight makes room for
God's own light!
 to be reflected. 

When that light is reflected, the landscape changes. Isaiah's prophecy speaks
of the desert bursting into flower; the glory of the Lord appears in the
glory of the actual physical surroundings - not difficult to understand in
our surroundings here. When God's light shines on our world, it becomes
infinitely more precious; we cannot in such a light believe that the world is
there to exploit and ruin. This great country has had its share of tragedy in
the exploitation both of the natural world and of human beings - sometimes
both together as in the ravaging of the rain forests which has put so much
life, human and non-human, at risk. And when God's light shines on the human
faces around us, we cannot treat them as having no interest for us; wherever
the light falls, there we see the possibility of a life reflecting God. So
there we see yet another face which we must look at with gratitude and hope.
This is the foundation of all the work done with those whom the world wants
to !
forget; and it is a real proclamation of the gospel when we hear of the work
done by your local churches with the forgotten and those without voices, the
indigenous peoples and those who live in the favelas. The Brazilian Church ,
as we have learned, is one that has given to the poor a degree of loving
support out of all proportion to its size, and we wish you every strength and
blessing in this work. We pray that glory may dwell in this land, as the
eighty fifth psalm puts it. 

 

But we must return to what we do together as a communion, as Primates and
people together. Jesus tells us in the gospel reading why our unity matters.
Unless we are looking gladly and faithfully at each other, the glory we are
given will fail to appear. That does not mean that we don't sometimes have
the responsibility of calling each other to turn back to Jesus when it is
difficult to see that the brother or sister is turning, to face the Lord, as
fully as could be. And this is a service we must ask of each other: tell me
when you see me turning from Jesus, when the glory that comes from looking at
him has become invisible. Yet, even when we argue, rebuke and find ourselves
in deep and painful division, the basic responsibility remains: to keep
looking, to refuse to be turned away from the brother or sister for whom
Christ died; to look in hope, until the radiance begins again to appear. 

Our Christian calling is to renew the face of the earth, by the Spirit's
power. By looking in love at the world and one another, we somehow allow
glory to come to light - so that the non-believer may find their own
awareness of the world mysteriously changed by the way the Christian
neighbour looks at it. 'How can I learn to see what you see?' the neighbour
asks, if we are living and looking as we should. God calls us to be at every
level the agents of transformation - in a ruined and exploited natural
environment, of deep divisions and much poverty, and in a Church whose
communion can be undermined by fear or suspicion. 

You cannot spend half a day in this country without realising that here the
guitar is inseparable from the human voice! So I think of the poem by the
American writer Wallace Stevens, about 'The Man with the Blue Guitar'- 

They said, You have a blue guitar, 
You do not play things as they are. 

The man replied, Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar. 

Things as they are, with human beings left to themselves, so often seem
shadowed by death and cruelty. But we have been given another song to sing,
we, the ransomed of the Lord returning to Zion with singing. As we sing what
we have learned from Jesus, things as they are changed. Glory dwells in our
land, the glory that the Son shares with the Father in the Holy Spirit.  

Amen. 

For version in Portuguese please visit:
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/34/25/acns3449po.html
<http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/34/25/acns3449po.html> 

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