wfn.org | ACNS3752 Archbishop of Canterbury's Sermon at the Anglican

[Anglican Communion News Service <acnslist@anglicancommunion.org>]

ACNS 3752     |     MIDDLE EAST      |	   26 JANUARY 2004 

Archbishop of Canterbury's Sermon at the Anglican Church of the
Redeemer, Amman

Monday 26 January 2004

[ACNS source: Lambeth Palace]

'If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching'

Time and again the Christian life demands that we ask ourselves what it
is that we really love. When Jesus meets Peter again beside the Sea of
Galilee after his resurrection, he asks him three times, 'Do you love
me?' And the challenge of the risen Jesus is always to ask us this: is
it me that you love, he wants to know, or something else, perhaps
something masquerading as me?

St Augustine said that a community becomes a community when it is united
in love of the same thing. But that love of the same thing can be
lifegiving or deathdealing, depending on what it is that is loved. We
can find ourselves agreeing in the love of something that eats away at
the very roots of our humanity while we ignorantly suppose that it is
good and godly. At times in the past, Christians have reinforced their
sense of unity by cultivating a collective contempt or fear or hatred
for others - Jews and Muslims in particular. They have reinforced the
unity of their own brand of Christianity by agreeing to despise other
Christians. And when this happens, whether for one Christian
denomination or for the Christian world as a whole, we have to ask, 'Is
it the love of Christ that unites us? Or do we really love something
quite different?' 

Perhaps what we love is our security. We want to be utterly safe, safe
from strangers, safe from surprise. So we organise ourselves in such a
way that no-one can break through our boundaries and no-one ever is
allowed to challenge what we do. What this usually means is also that we
speak as if all that was corrupting and threatening came from outside,
so that the stranger, the other, was always evil. Literally or
metaphorically, we fight over territory. We are so interested in
defending the boundaries that we forget how to live day by day on our
own soil, the soil we are so eager to protect.

And this relates to another great danger. Perhaps we are in love with
our suffering. It sounds like a shocking idea, but we need to think hard
about it. We have a history of oppression, displacement, cruelty from
the hands of others, and our whole sense of who we are becomes bound up
with this. We know who we are because we all join to tell the same story
of how inhumanly we have been treated. It may be a true story, a
terrible story: the world does indeed run with innocent blood and the
history of any community will be shot through with the stuff of
nightmares. Reading Christian history should tell us as clearly as we
could wish that there is hardly any Church that has not been responsible
at some point for another Church's suffering. It is so hard to come to
the point where we are free to say, 'I must make something from my
suffering that will build bridges into the suffering of another'. How
much easier to say, 'My suffering is greater than yours; my needs must
override yours.' And so we never come to a place where justice for
everyone can be worked out because we want first of all to have the
justice that is ours alone, whatever the expense to anyone else.

And this means in turn that we can even be in love with our weakness. We
are so used to being victims that we cannot get used to acting for
ourselves. We react, we fail to plan and to create; and so we never have
to take real responsibility for what happens, because someone else
always has the initiative. We can take refuge in the dignity of not
having to risk decision and change.

And in all this, can we hear Christ saying, 'Do you love me?' Because
all of these different kinds of love are ways of shutting him out. We
believe that he and he alone is the one who can reconcile all things and
people, precisely because he delivers us from the traps and prisons we
have just been considering. He tells us that he is our security. When we
know that he accepts us as we are and that he will never let go of us in
the long work of transforming us into his likeness, we have a security
that goes deeper than any external defence. We are able at last to
recognise that evil is not somewhere out there in the stranger, the
enemy, but in our own hearts, in their fear and narrowness. We learn for
the first time that we must live on our soil, turning over what one of
the Syrian saints called 'the earth of the heart' and not pour out our
energy on keeping the stranger at bay.

It isn't that this guarantees safety in itself. It is still the longest
and most painful task imaginable to learn how to talk to the stranger,
the enemy, and find very slowly and cautiously how it might be possible
to share one world. And part of what makes that just a little more
possible is that Christ frees us from imprisonment in the memory of our
suffering. He doesn't take it away; but he helps us see how our
suffering is like that of others - even our enemy's - and so gives us a
language to speak with each other. And as he does this, he also frees us
from the weakness we love; he gives us strength to take decisions, to
think about the future. We readily forget that one of the gifts of the
Holy Spirit is intelligence, the capacity to see our situation
truthfully and act out of that vision, the capacity also to see what God
is asking and to do it, even if it is a tiny step of faithfulness or
love.

So we can indeed talk of a new creation in Christ. He confronts our
confused and enslaving loves and asks us to look harder and deeper. Do
we love him? Do we love the promise that we might be freed from the kind
of love that corrupts and destroys us, and that keeps us at enmity with
each other? In the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, all believers
examine themselves to see how they are kept from each other by the love
of security, the love of the sufferings of the past, the love of
weakness. Christians have begun to learn in recent years how to
celebrate the martyrs of each other's traditions, not only their own - a
great testimony to the way that Christ makes us live both in the heart
of our own territory, our own tradition, while taking away the fear of
others.

He gives us a ministry of reconciliation, says St Paul. And this surely
means that Christians who have learned from Christ how to grow beyond
the slavery of security and suffering and weakness have a unique role in
the world. They can ask the communities in which they find themselves,
'What do you love? Are you held together by things that corrupt your
life together and guarantee only that you will never grow out of fear?'
What questions could be more needful for the churches to ask in this
region? But if they are to ask them with effectiveness and integrity,
they must first sit patiently and quietly themselves before God and ask
about their own loves and their own failures in love. How do we bear
this - because it shows us all that we hate and fear in ourselves? Only
because he has promised that he and his Father will make their home with
us as we strive to open our lives to him; in this knowledge is our
peace, peace such as the world cannot give.

(c) Rowan Williams 2004

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