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Archbishop of Canterbury - Cross is a challenge to the world

Posted On : April 4, 2010 11:41 PM | Posted By : Webmaster
ACNS: http://www.aco.org/acns/news.cfm/2010/4/4/ACNS4697
Related Categories: Lambeth

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has used his Easter
sermon to urge Christians to keep a proper sense of proportion when they
feel they are experiencing opposition to their faith and remember both
the physical suffering of Christian minorities in other countries and
call to mind what exactly the Cross stands for in their faith.

In his Easter sermon delivered at Canterbury Cathedral he says that
'bureaucratic silliness' over displaying religious symbols should not be
mistaken for physical persecution:

'It is not the case that Christians are at risk of their lives or
liberties in this country simply for being Christians. Whenever you hear
overheated language about this remember those many, many places where
persecution is real and Christians are being killed regularly and
mercilessly or imprisoned and harassed for their resistance to
injustice."

"Remember our brothers and sisters in Nigeria and in Iraq, the Christian
communities of southern Sudan ... the Christian minorities in the Holy
Land ... or our own Anglican friends in Zimbabwe; ... we need to keep a
sense of perspective, and to redouble our prayers and concrete support."

He says that the climate of intellectual opposition to Christianity -
what he called 'the strange mixture of contempt and fear towards the
Christian faith', regarding it as both irrelevant and a threat - is
largely unjustified:

"... on many of the major moral questions of the day, the Christian
Church still speaks for a substantial percentage of the country - not to
mention speaking with the same concerns as people of other faiths. On
burning questions like the rightness of assisted suicide, it is far from
the case that the Christian view is only that of a tiny religious
minority; and the debate is still very much alive."

He challenges intellectual critics of religion and Christianity to come
and see the difference that Christians are making in their communities

"... at local level, the Church's continuing contribution to tackling
the human problems no-one else is prepared to take on is one of the
great untold stories of our time. I think of the work of a parish I
visited in Cleethorpes a few weeks ago and the work they sponsor and
organize with teenagers excluded from school in an area of high
deprivation. I should be more impressed with secularist assaults if
there were more sign of grass roots volunteer work of this intensity
done by non-religious or anti-religious groups."

"There are things to be properly afraid of in religious history,
Christian and non-Christian; there are contemporary religious
philosophies of the Taleban variety which we rightly want to resist as
firmly as we can. But we do need to say to some of our critics that a
visit to projects like the one I have mentioned ought to make it plain
enough that the last thing in view is some kind of religious tyranny.
And if any of the Church's vocal critics would care to accompany me on
such a visit, I should be delighted to oblige."

But he says the Cross is an object that ought to be feared as well as
respected because what it stands for is nothing less than the
uncomfortable reality about ourselves and the world we live in:

... we must acknowledge our own share in what the cross is and
represents; we must learn to see ourselves as caught up in a world where
the innocent are scapegoated and killed and where we are all unwilling,
to a greater or lesser degree, to face unwelcome truths about ourselves.
We must learn to see that we cannot by our own wisdom and strength cut
ourselves loose from the tangle of injustice, resentment, fear and
prejudice that traps the human family in conflict and misery."

And the hope that it represents is no less challenging, he says;

"If you want it to be invisible because it's too upsetting to people's
security, I can well understand that; but let's have it out in the open.
Is the God we see in the cross, the God who lives through and beyond
terrible dereliction and death and still promises mercy, renewal, life -
is that God too much of a menace to be mentioned or shown in the public
life and the human interactions of society?"

> ENDS

The full text of the Archbishop's Easter sermon is below:

'God has appointed him to judge everyone, alive or dead' (Acts 10.41).

With a bit of a sigh, we read about yet another legal wrangle over the
right to wear a cross in public while engaged in professional duties;
one more small but significant mark of what many Christians feel is a
sustained effort to discriminate against them and render their faith
invisible and impotent in the public sphere. One more mark of the
curious contemporary belief that Christians are both too unimportant for
their convictions to be worth bothering with and too dangerous for them
to be allowed to manifest those convictions...

Now it is quite likely that this latest folly, like others, is less a
sign of deep anti-Christian feeling as such than the result of
wooden-headed bureaucratic silliness combined with a well-meaning and
completely misplaced anxiety about giving offence to non-Christians.
But, while the legal issues are being fought over and the exact scope of
religious freedom in the terms of human rights legislation is debated,
we might step back a pace or two and think about the larger picture.

It is not the case that Christians are at risk of their lives or
liberties in this country simply for being Christians. Whenever you hear
overheated language about this, remember those many, many places where
persecution is real and Christians are being killed regularly and
mercilessly or imprisoned and harassed for their resistance to
injustice. Remember our brothers and sisters in Nigeria and in Iraq, the
Christian communities of southern Sudan fearing the outbreak of another
civil war, the Christian minorities in the Holy Land facing the
extinction of their two-thousand year old presence there; or our own
Anglican friends in Zimbabwe, still - as I reminded this Cathedral
congregation at Christmas - subject to routine attack from the security
forces and locked out of their churches. That's not our situation, thank
God, and we need to keep a sense of perspective, and to redouble our
prayers and concrete support.

But we have a problem all right and it needs reflection. Why this
strange mixture of contempt and fear towards the Christian faith? If you
think of all the high-profile attacks on Christianity that have been
published in recent years, you may wonder why those who shout most
loudly about the irreversible decline of Christianity campaign so
ferociously against something which, on their own account, is withering
away.

Some would answer that Christianity - in the shape of the Church of
England anyway - still has a social and moral influence way beyond what
its numbers justify; hence the campaigning. They see the Church as a
retrograde force constantly seeking to impose alien standards on
society, yet commanding very little grass roots support.

This doesn't quite wash. On many of the major moral questions of the
day, the Christian Church still speaks for a substantial percentage of
the country - not to mention speaking with the same concerns as people
of other faiths. On burning questions like the rightness of assisted
suicide, it is far from the case that the Christian view is only that of
a tiny religious minority; and the debate is still very much alive. More
important still is the very large number of the population who believe
that Christian perspectives should have a place in public discussion and
decision-making - a belief that has been rather strengthened than
otherwise by the realization in the last eighteen months that the value-
free climate of much of our financial and public life has poisoned and
wounded our society more deeply than we knew. And at local level, the
Church's continuing contribution to tackling the human problems no-one
else is prepared to take on is one of the great untold stories of our
time. I think of the work of a parish I visited in Cleethorpes a few
weeks ago and the work they sponsor and organize with teenagers excluded
from school in an area of high deprivation. I should be more impressed
with secularist assaults if there were more sign of grass roots
volunteer work of this intensity done by non-religious or anti-religious
groups.

So yes, it's possible to understand the fear that religious people will
automatically want to put the clock back to an age when the Church
simply decided the fate of everyone and blandly appealed to supernatural
authority when challenged. No-one, to coin a phrase, expects the Spanish
Inquisition. There are things to be properly afraid of in religious
history, Christian and non-Christian; there are contemporary religious
philosophies of the Taleban variety which we rightly want to resist as
firmly as we can. But we do need to say to some of our critics that a
visit to projects like the one I have mentioned ought to make it plain
enough that the last thing in view is some kind of religious tyranny.
And if any of the Church's vocal critics would care to accompany me on
such a visit, I should be delighted to oblige.

But the New Testament suggests there may be something more at work when
people fear the gospel and the cross. Our second reading today hints at
this. As so often in these early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles,
St Peter underlines the fact that the resurrection of Jesus means that
the one who was so decisively, annihilatingly, dismissed by the
religious and political establishment of the time is the one who will
decide the destiny of every human being. We shall all be judged by our
response to him, to the divine and human person who has carried the cost
of our mindless violence, our pride and self-satisfaction, our
reluctance to face the truth. The court of final appeal in all human
affairs is Christ; how we define ourselves in relation to him is a
matter of life or death.

This is not about some fussy insistence on saying the right words and
joining the right organization, as if St Peter were simply recruiting
members for the Christian club. Jesus himself reminds us starkly in the
gospel that we may be seeing him where we think we can't see him or
don't know him - and that we may be failing to see him when we're making
all the right noises about him. One day we are all going to discover in
the presence of God who we are and how we stand with God, whether we can
bear the presence of God for eternity; and in that moment of discovery,
what will be crucial is how we have reacted to and understood the gift
of God in the life and death of a man rejected and tortured to death.

The preaching of Peter and Paul and all the witnesses of the Risen Jesus
says that two basic things are demanded of us. First: we must
acknowledge our own share in what the cross is and represents; we must
learn to see ourselves as caught up in a world where the innocent are
scapegoated and killed and where we are all unwilling, to a greater or
lesser degree, to face unwelcome truths about ourselves. We must learn
to see that we cannot by our own wisdom and strength cut ourselves loose
from the tangle of injustice, resentment, fear and prejudice that traps
the human family in conflict and misery.

And second: we must learn to trust that love and justice are not
defeated by our failure; that God has provided from his own strength and
resourcefulness a way to freedom, once we have become able to recognise
in the face of the suffering Jesus his own divine promise of mercy and
life. The resurrection is the manifesting to the world of the triumph of
a love that uses no coercion or manipulation but is simply itself - an
indestructible love. The challenge of Easter is to believe that God is
not defeated by the most extreme rejection imaginable.

Good news? Emphatically yes. But not easy news. To recognise God in the
crucified Jesus alters so much: it alters what we think about God, and
it alters where we look for God in the human world. It suggests
uncomfortably that God is likeliest to be found among those we have,
like the religious and political establishment of Jesus' day, dismissed
or shut out; it suggests that our models of success and failure have to
be turned upside down; it suggests that our eternal future is bound up
with whether we are able to turn to those we have hurt and seek
forgiveness.

And so much else. Put like that, it is not surprising that the gospel
and the cross could provoke fear and an unwillingness to allow such
thoughts to become part of the current of public discussion. And perhaps
it is not surprising either that we who call ourselves Christians may
secretly be happier treating the cross just as a 'religious symbol' than
letting ourselves be shaken and unmade and remade by it.

I don't imagine for a moment that much, if any, of this is going on in
the mind of some hyper-conscientious administrative officer rebuking an
employee for wearing a cross to work or even saying a prayer with a
colleague. But perhaps we should take the opportunity of saying, 'This
is what the cross actually means. If you want it to be invisible because
it's too upsetting to people's security, I can well understand that; but
let's have it out in the open. Is the God we see in the cross, the God
who lives through and beyond terrible dereliction and death and still
promises mercy, renewal, life - is that God too much of a menace to be
mentioned or shown in the public life and the human interactions of
society?'

For Christians, making the cross invisible is dangerously close to
making both ultimate tragedy and undefeated love invisible. If we fear
what these petty bureaucratic assaults mean, it should not be because we
fear for ourselves or our faith or our God, who is amply able to look
after himself. It should be because we fear for a society that cannot
cope with the realities of unspeakable human tragedy and cannot cope
either with the hope of ultimate healing and reconciliation; a society
that shrinks into its comfort zones when challenged. At the most extreme
points, the defence of those comfort zones can and often has meant the
violent rejection of Christian faith; we have lately been recalling the
martyrdom thirty years ago of Archbishop Oscar Romero for his fearless
rebukes to a murderous and corrupt government in El Salvador. As I've
said, we must not dramatise our own situation unduly when we see how
serious the rejection of the cross can be in circumstances like that.
But there are connections - because the word of the cross, as St Paul
said, is a nonsense and a shock for all who want to decide right and
wrong, life and death, only in terms of their own security.

So at least the petty annoyances of our context may give us a chance to
explain both why you would be right to be afraid of the word of the
cross and why you need to hear the Risen Jesus saying, 'Don't be
afraid!' The human condition is more serious and more terribly damaged
than anyone wants to hear; but the resource of God's self-emptying love
is greater than we have words to express. We are to be judged by our
relation with the crucified; yet once we have accepted what that means,
we are also released and absolved.   If that is indeed the promise of
the cross, it's well worth being obstinate about the freedom to show it
to the world - so long as we ourselves are ready to show it in lives
that look for Christ in the outcast, that examine their own failures in
truthfulness and that constantly seek to share forgiveness and hope.

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