wfn.org | [ACNS] Archbishop of Canterbury - Church's Hope Only in Christ

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

    ACNS 4063	   |	 LAMBETH     |	   31 OCTOBER 2005

Archbishop Williams - church's hope 'only in Christ'

The Archbishop of Canterbury has told Anglican Church leaders from the
Global South that the only ground for unity in the church 'is to be found
in Christ'. Speaking at the 3rd Anglican Global South to South Encounter
meeting at Ain al Sukhna, some 80 miles south of Cairo, Dr Williams said
that the church had to be focussed on Christ:

"The church is one because Jesus Christ is one; the church is holy because
Jesus Christ is holy; the church is catholic because Jesus Christ is the
saviour of all; the church is apostolic because as the Father sent Jesus,
so Jesus sends us. In other words, if we are to understand the nature of
the church at all, we are to understand who Jesus Christ is and what he does."

"Someone said recently that the path to heaven doesn't lie necessarily
through Lambeth. I agree. The path to heaven lies solely through Jesus
Christ our Saviour and the unity he gives and the only use and integrity of
our instruments of unity comes when they serve that."

"Now I don't suggest that we can forget the practical questions that are
laid upon us at the moment in our Anglican fellowship. But I do say that we
shall never begin to answer them adequately unless our eyes, our minds and
our hearts are with Jesus, are where Jesus is.

The Archbishop said that one of the greatest challenges faced by Anglicans
was the development of authentically local voices in liturgy.

"In all sorts of ways the church over the centuries has lent itself to the
error, indeed the sin of trying to make cultural captives, whether it is
the mass export of Hymns Ancient and Modern to the remote parts of the
mission field ... the shadow of the British Empire that hangs over our own
Communion or the export of American values and styles to the whole world;
we are in a real difficulty here.... The question comes back again and
again; 'How do we encourage people to write liturgy, to write prayer books,
to write Eucharistic prayers, in their own language with the rhythm, the
association and resonance that your own language has for you and no other has."

He said that the church had to find its holiness 'under the cross'; where
people were in need of healing:
"... our holiness takes us where Jesus goes; our holiness takes us to those
Jesus died for; it takes us into the neighbourhood of those who are
forgotten, who have no voice, those who need healing and forgiveness. It
takes us into very strange places indeed and the holy person, as we all
know, is often found in very odd company."

Following the lecture, Dr Williams answered questions from the conference
on a number of areas.
On sexuality, he affirmed that the church had not been persuaded of the
acceptability of same sex unions. These questions, though, would not go away.

"Theologians will go on discussing this and it will not be possible to stop
them. For nearly a century, in the 4th century in this country of Egypt,
the conflict over the Trinity raged between theologians and bishops and was
not resolved overnight. I distinguish as clearly as I can a question a
theologian may ask and an action or determination a church may take or a
bishop may take. I think this is a necessary distinction for the life and
health of the church. It would be a tragedy if the church sought to
suppress questions; it is equally a tragedy when the church seeks to create
facts on the ground that foreclose discussion and reflection on such
questions."

On the question of authority within the Anglican Communion, he said that he
had no desire to assume further powers:
"Since I do not have canonical power outside my own province, my freedom is
limited. I say it as a matter of actual fact; I do not have authority over
the canons and constitutions of another province... I don't want to be a
kind of pope, solving the problems of every province.

"For me, the prospect of an Anglican 'covenant' or a convergent system of
canon law is the best hope that we have. That being said, many provinces as
we know, are wedded to the idea of an absolute constitutional independence"

On the Windsor Report, he said that it was too early to come to a judgement
as to whether or not the responses of ECUSA and the Anglican Church of
Canada satisfied the terms of the report:

"I don't think we could say that they have satisfied in a simple and direct
way what Windsor asked because that process is still continuing and will
continue. Archbishop Eames gave an optimistic reading of this; I'm waiting
to see."

On the status of the networks of dissenting parishes in the United States
and Canada, he said that he was happy to recognise them as part of the
Anglican Communion

"There is no doubt in my mind that these networks are full members of the
Anglican Communion; that is to say that their bishops, their clergy and
their people are involved with the Communion which I share with them, which
we all share with them. Now formal ecclesial recognition of a network, as
if it were a province, is not so simply in my hands or the hands of any
individual. But I do want to say quite simply yes of course; these are part
of our Anglican fellowship and I welcome that."

The Archbishop's full text is below.

Note to editors:
I count it a great privilege to spend sadly a short time, but hopefully a
time of real sharing and fellowship with you. As has been said more than
once, already, the focus the centre of Anglican energy in the world is very
clearly in the global south in our time and it is therefore for me an
experience of learning as well as of fellowship to be with you and to seek
to understand better how it is that you witness to our one Lord Jesus Christ.

Now during the preparations for this meeting, a number of suggestions were
made as to what I might speak about. I think it was suggested that I might
speak about the oneness of the church, or about the holiness of the church,
or about the catholicity of the church, or possibly about the apostolicity
of the church. So I'm actually going to talk about all of them. You will
already have heard from some very distinguished and very searching
presentations on all these matters, and I've been greatly been helped by
being able to read the notes of those other presentations. I want then,
simply to suggest this morning one way of holding together the four marks
of the church; one way which to me seems simply the best way of seeing them
as essentially about the same thing and in the light of that to offer you
some reflections on each of hose marks of the church in turn. But the
simple thing I want to say is that all four marks of the church are about
Jesus Christ. The church is one because Jesus Christ is one; the church is
holy because Jesus Christ is holy; the church is catholic because Jesus
Christ is the saviour of all; the church is apostolic because, as the
Father has sent Jesus, so Jesus sends us. In other words, if we are to
understand the nature of the church at all, we are to understand who Jesus
Christ is and what he does.

And to see the nature of the church in these terms is, I believe, to be
liberated from any idea that the oneness, the holiness, the catholicity,
the apostolicity of the church are either characteristics that we possess
in out own right, or even goals that we can plan for before we can even
begin to thing about what belongs to us or about what goals we should have,
we must think about Jesus Christ. And I say this partly because as I read
St John's Gospel, I find in the 17th chapter, so often quoted in speaking
of the unity of the church, I find there Jesus spelling out all four marks
of the church in his prayer. And I read to you briefly from John 17
beginning at verse 17.

"Sanctify them in the truth. Thy word is truth. As though didst send me
into the world, so I have sent them into the world, and for their sake, I
consecrate myself so that they also may be consecrated in truth. I do not
pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their
word. That they may all be one, even as thou, Father art in me and I in
thee that they also may be in us so that the world may believe that thou
hast sent me. Meditate on those verses and you'll see how in them the whole
nature of the church is expressed. Jesus prays that we will be holy because
he consecrates himself. Jesus says that he is sending us into the world and
the word in Greek is indeed apostele, from which comes the word apostle.
Jesus prays for those throughout the world of all conditions and all
backgrounds who will believe because of the disciples; the catholic horizon
and he prays that they will be one as he and the father are one.

And I would say that in those few verses lies the foundation charter of the
one holy catholic and apostolic church. This is what Jesus prays for. Now
if I'm right in believing that all for marks of the church are actually
characteristics of Jesus which are shared with his disciples, what does
that mean in turn? Let me then think aloud with you about the unity and the
holiness the catholicity and the apostolicity of the church.

First, of all, unity. I've said at the church is one because Jesus Christ
is one. That is to say there is one place and one place only where we may
stand and call God 'Father'. One place and one place only where that
participation in the divine life which we hear of in 2nd Peter, which was
referred to this morning, becomes a reality. At the beginning of John's
Gospel, we read 'No-one has seen god at any time, but the only God who is
next to the Father's heart has made him known'. In the best manuscripts of
John's Gospel, that is what is said; 'the only God', not 'the only Son'
monogenis theos; the unique God who stands next to the Father, in the bosom
of the Father. So from the very first chapter of John's Gospel, we have
before us the image of the only one who is in eternal intimacy with God the
Father; the only one who is next to the Father's heart. Making God the
Father Known. So the oneness of the church is about how the church is the
community of those who are led to the one place at the Father's heart where
he can be known, where he can be seen. St John's Gospel is indeed about the
unity of believers but I think we misunderstand it if we treat that just on
a lateral level; unity between believers. It is about the unity of the
community as it exists standing in that one place where the only God, the
menogenis theos of chapter one of John's Gospel stands. And so I believe
that one of the external signs of the unity of the church in a sense more
basic than the universal Episcopal order, more basic than the creed, more
basic than the instruments of unity of the Anglican Communion, even, more
basic than Holy Scripture, is that Christians are called and enabled by the
Holy Spirit to say 'Our Father' because they stand in the one Christ and
are brought next to the Father's heart, but Christ. 'When you pray say "Our
Father", and when we pray our Lord's prayer, we affirm we stand with the
one Christ, the one eternal son, the one word in the Father's bosom.

So our unity is at its deepest, the unity which the spirit gives in
enabling us to fall God 'Father'; it is the unity given in baptism, in
which the spirit is given to us so that we may pray like this'; so that we
may pray the prayer of Jesus. It is the unity expressed in Holy Communion,
not as the result of what we share as human beings, but because in Holy
Communion we are drawn into praying the prayer of Jesus. Standing where he
stands, by the Holy Spirit, alive with his life. One of the things which I
think I have learned over the years in dialogue and in engagement,
particularly with Lutheran Christians, is that deep sense of our unity as
something that is given in baptism. I was at an ecumenical conference with
German Lutherans several years ago, where we were talking quite a lot about
bishops and structures and things like that and at one point one of the
Lutheran participants said 'this morning we were together praying at the
Lord's Table; what more is there to do?' I'm not quite sure of the answer
to that, but I think it's a very good question and the very asking of the
questions expresses something that we forget at our peril. There must be
moments in our Christian life in our Anglican life, dare I say, when we
just say 'what more is there to do?' We are given by the Holy Spirit the
authority and the privilege to say 'our Father' because of the one God who
is next to the Father's heart, in whim is the one way to fellowship with
the Father and participation in the life of God.

So over and beyond all our anxieties about our structures, our anxieties
about our ministerial order our anxieties about visible unity we should not
forget the gift of the Spirit in the one lord. Our oneness is our common
rootedness - and I was so pleased to hear Bishop John this morning speaking
about the importance of the word common - our common rootedness in Jesus
Christ, being where Jesus is, and I'll have more to say about that in a moment.

So to approach the unity of the church in this way is to invite a number of
questions and challenges questions and challenges which we cannot escape
which sometimes make our life quite complicated If our unity is about
standing in the one Christ, then it's quite clear that those who seek to
stand in another place are automatically breaking that unity. And when I
ask myself 'where is it in the New Testament that we find the clearest
statement of what breaks or betrays the faith?' there are perhaps two
places which cast some light on this question.

One is in St Paul's letter to the Galatians, in the first and the third
chapters of that letter. You'll remember that in the first chapter, St Paul
speaks of those who 'preach another gospel' and tells his Galatian friends
what their attitude should be; tells them in very firm terms even if we or
an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which
we preached to you, let him be accursed' Galatians 1 v 8; and what is that
Gospel? It's made clear I think in Galatians 3; 'Did you receive the spirit
by works of the law or by hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having
begun with the spirit are you now ending with the flesh? 'The gospel which
for Paul is non-negotiable is that it is by the work of God's grace and by
our trust in God's grace that we are saved and not by our achievements. So
that Paul marks off very, very clearly, what is and is not part of the
unity of the church and its faith because, if you refuse to believe that
you are saved by the grace of God which demands complete trust, if you go
back to reliance on the achievement on the works of the law, you are
ceasing to stand where Christ stands; you are trying to find some other way
than the one way of coming into the life of the one, the only begotten God
who is next to the Father's heart.

So it is not surprising that the other dramatic instance which I've found
in the New Testament of this is in the First Letter of John; from 1 John 2
chapter 22: 'who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ;
this is the anti-Christ; he who denies the Father and the Son. Once again,
the denial that Jesus is the only One is what fractures the one place where
believers stand, and it's taken up in 1 John Chapter 4 v 3; 'Every spirit
which does not confess Jesus is not of God'. So the unity of the church is
the unity of its standing together by faith in Jesus Christ, praying 'Our
Father', and it is the desire to stand someone else and to rely on
something else that ruptures and breaks that unity. And when we ask as we
do these days, what is it that most deeply threatens and most deeply
undermines the life of the one church; I think that those two spiritual
instances in Galatians and in 1 John give us a test to apply. Are we, are
others, seeking to 'stand somewhere else' than in Christ? Are they
depending on something other than Jesus Christ? And it is in that context
that we look at the structures and public institutions that serve the
church and ask whether they really do contribute to unity. When we speak of
the way in which our church is organised, the demands the requirements of
visible and structural unity, our question is as we examine them and
sometimes as week seek to reform them, 'do they or don't they serve that
kind of unity'.

Just in passing, I mentioned in passing 'the instruments of Unity of the
Anglican Communion'. I would be much happier, I have to say, if we spoke of
the servants of Unity in the Anglican Communion', because whatever the
instruments of unity are, I don't think that they are in any sense
conditions to be met for Christian faithfulness. They are human
institutions which seek to serve the unity of Christ's body and I would put
all those instruments of unity, not least the Archbishop of Canterbury,
under the rubric of St Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 3; 'it is not
ourselves that we preach, but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your
slaves for Jesus' sake'. Whether it is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the
ACC, the Primates or the Lambeth Conference, that must be what they hold in
front of them. I think someone recently said that 'the path to heaven
doesn't necessarily lie through Lambeth'. I agree entirely. The path to
heaven lies solely through Jesus Christ our Saviour and the unity he gives,
and the only use and integrity of the instruments of unity is when they
serve that.

One last thought about unity. We stand together in Christ, brought by his
grace into that fellowship where we are enabled to say 'Our Father. And we
stand together in a community which, humanly speaking, is often very
confused, full of the frail and sick. St Paul is especially in his
Corinthian letters, very clear that when one part of the body suffers, all
suffer. 'When one rejoices, all rejoice'. We can see this at several
levels; the body suffers in different ways. It suffers as, we were reminded
this morning, because of persecution and it is a poignant but important
fact that we are here in this place this week, a few days after our Coptic
brothers and sisters have suffered so dramatically in this country and I
know that they will need our prayers, our live and our support in the days
ahead. The church suffers because of persecution but, as St Paul says, the
church also suffers because of its own members' weakness. 'Who is weak',
says St Paul, 'and I am not weak? Who is cause to stumble and I am not
aflame with anger?' We are part of a body whose failures are our common
failures. It is always a temptation to say 'We are the true church, they
have abandoned us' and yet even as we make necessary disjunctions and
separations, there is appoint at which we must remember in our prayer, this
is our suffering; this is our loss, we are together in sin as well as in
grace. I believe that is part of what St Paul's vision of the body obliges
us to say. I believe that it is what the Gospel of Our Lord himself obliges
us to say and because we are where we are, I finish these thoughts on unity
with two stories from the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert; stories about
Makarios the Great, that great monastic saint of the 4th Century, who spent
most of his life not far from here in the Wadi al Natrum.

There was an assembly of the monks in the cells to condemn an evildoer. As
sentence was pronounced, Makarios rose to his feet and left the assembly
saying 'I too am a sinner'. There was an assembly held to judge, among the
monks, and Makarios the Great came from his cell and in his hand was a
pitcher of water with a crack in it and the water ran out of the hole.
'What are you doing, father?' said the monks. 'I'm going to condemn
another,' replied Makarios 'while my sins run out behind me like water on
the sand.'

Our unity involves that also; that recognition is not the stranger on the
other side of the universe - the sinner is me and my neighbour. And one of
the hardest tasks we have when discipline is exercised, when
discriminations are drawn, is how we remain in loving and prayerful
fellowship with those who are our fellow sinners, not wholly strangers to
us. Who accompanies? Who, like Makarios, rises to go out with the expelled
sinner? To sit and pray and love? That, too, is a challenge of unity.

And all of that leads us on, of course, to talk about the holiness of the
church. And so I move secondly to reflection on that.

Perhaps this is most clearly the note of the church where we are aware that
it is Christ not ourselves we are talking about. In the Greek Orthodox
liturgy, when the bread and wine have been prepared and consecrated, the
priest lifts them up and says 'Holy things for the holy people. 'Ta hagioi
tois hagiois' - Holy things for holy people. And the congregation protests
in reply and says 'One is holy, one is Lord, Jesus Christ, to the Glory of
God the Father'. I wish we said that in our Anglican liturgy, because it
seems tome the best thing we could say as we come to Holy Communion; 'One
is holy, One is lord, Jesus Christ.' And if we turn again to John chapter
17, we find those words which I referred to earlier, about 'becoming holy'.
Make them holy in the truth, says Jesus in his prayer 'your word is the
truth.' Make them holy in the truth; that is holy in Jesus, who is the way,
the Truth and the Life. And in verse 19 'for their sake, I am making myself
holy, so that they may be made holy in truth'. And that gives us, I would
say, a very important clue as to what Christian holiness is about; here is
Jesus, the night before his crucifixion, saying 'I am making myself Holy.
He is going forward to his crucifixion, where by the shedding of his blood,
he makes peace between Heaven and earth. And that is 'the holy place' just
as in Ancient Israel, the Holy Place, the Holy of Holies was where the
blood of the atoning sacrifice was taken, so the Holy Place, indeed the
'Holy of Holies' is now the Cross of Jesus. And when, famously, St Paul in
the third chapter of Romans, speaks of how God 'puts forth' Jesus as a
hilasterion, a propitiation in Greek, he is almost certainly saying that
Jesus, so to speak, the Sanctuary of the New Temple; the place of
atonement; the 'Holy of Holies'.

So Jesus says 'I am making myself holy, I am becoming the altar of
sacrifice where peace is made between earth and Heaven'. And on the day
after, on Good Friday, he establishes himself as the Holy place; his cross
is the place of peace the peace that comes from the shedding of his blood,
as St Paul tells us more than once.

Move on from the fourth Gospel to the very beginning of St Paul's letter to
the first Corinthians and you'll find an echo of those words.

'Paul, summoned as an Apostle of Christ Jesus, by God's will, and brother
Sosthenes, to the Assembly of God which lives in Corinth; to those people
who have been made holy by Christ Jesus and who have been summoned as Holy
People.'

Exactly the same word as you find in St John's Gospel - hagiasmenoi -
'those who have been made Holy' - and this interesting and telling phrase -
'kletois hagiois', 'called as holy' or 'summoned to be holy'. And there of
course is the little tension in our Christian understanding; we have been
made holy and we are called to be holy. Peace has been made between earth
and Heaven, by the Cross of Christ, and we are made holy in just the way
that Jesus prays in John 17. We are made holy by his making himself holy
and then we are called to be holy. So that the holiness of Jesus and the
holiness of the church is something a great deal more than being 'good' or
'virtuous'; it is being in the place where God through Christ makes peace
between earth and heaven. It is being under the cross, in short. For a
Christian to be holy is to be under the cross. A person may lead a deeply
impressive moral life; they may even have a deeply impressive spiritual
life, and yet if they don't 'live under the cross', we can't call them
holy, in the biblical sense; and that living under the cross I first of all
acknowledging the unique and unrepeatable debt that we owe to the grace of
God in the death of Jesus, living in gratitude for the gift given by
Christ's death and it is the seeking, day by day, to let that Cross live
and work in us as we carry the cross in putting away our self-defending,
self-justifying, self-protecting habits in every area of our lives.
Holiness is living under the cross, the place where Jesus makes himself
holy, so that we may be made Holy. It has all been done for us in the
cross; God be praised; it is all, for each one of us to discover, day after
day, in that self-emptying, that self-forgetting struggle to let Jesus live
in us. No-one else, no other power, no other spirit.

So to be holy is to be found in the neighbourhood of Christ's cross. And
that means that our holiness takes us where Jesus goes; our holiness takes
us to those Jesus died for; it takes us into the neighbourhood of those
whoa re forgotten, who have no voice; those who need healing and
forgiveness. It takes us into very strange places indeed and the holy
person, as we all know, is often found in very odd company. The holy
person, like Jesus himself, is to be found not among the righteous but
among sinners, not among the healthy, but among the sick and a holy church
is one that goes with its proclamation and integrity and its fidelity,
among those who need healing - literally who need healing - those whose
physical lives are wrecked by pain and disease and disaster. A holy church
is one that, as you have heard more than once this week, stands alongside
those who live with the scourge of HIV aids; a holy church is a church that
labours as some of you have done so generously, alongside those who have
been made homeless of bereaved by natural disaster, like tsunami and
earthquake. A holy church in my own country is a church which will go into
the heart of the city and sit with the homeless and the addicts and the
destitute.

About three weeks ago I visited a holy place in South London - it's called
the 999 club and it was started by the local church 14 years ago. Under the
inspiration of a very remarkable and unconventional priest who had a great
impact on that entire area of London - and he persuaded and enabled his lay
people to go and open a centre just over the road from the church, where
everyone would be welcome, where the homeless and the addicted could simply
be cared for and there would, all day long every day, be people there to
sit with them, to pray with them, to make them cups of coffee, to serve
them meals, sometimes to look after their children, sometimes to offer them
a bed for the night. It was a centre that has had great problems with the
local authority and with regulating authorities of all kinds, but I came
away feeling with all my heart that I had been in 'a holy place', where
Christians had gone to where Jesus was. In 14 years, that centre has never
had the police called in; every crisis and challenge has been handled by
the people there, and that in itself is a remarkable work of God, I should say.

Holiness is being under the cross, giving thanks for the Cross, letting the
cross live in us, being where the crucified Christ is, among his suffering
people and a suffering world.

And that, of course, opens out onto the third mark of the church;
Catholicity, a word so often misunderstood or trivialised. It doesn't just
mean 'universal' - it means 'whole'. You might even say 'wholesome'
although the word is a weak one in our context. The catholic church is a
church for the whole of the human race, not just geographically. It deals,
as St Cyril of Jerusalem said in the 4th Century, with the whole human
person and it preaches the whole divine gospel. And, yes, you do have a
passage from St Cyril quoted in your service book and Bishop John is
carefully looking it up for me!

The whole human person is touched healed and transfigured by the Gospel and
the catholic church is the church which is able to address every level of
human being; heart, mind and body. A church which promises healing for our
material lives which addresses poverty and disease, both in work and in
prayer. A church which does not suppress, but nourishes and purifies the
life of the mind. A church which touches our emotions and disciplines and
sanctified them. Every level, the whole person is transfigured. And when
people talk about 'holistic mission' a they often and rightly do these
days, we might say that they are talking about catholic mission in this sense.

But there is also, in the understanding of the word 'catholic' a very
necessary element which will be particularly significant for all of you,
though it is significant in the North and the West as well. And that is the
constant search for a language and a style of worship which are authentic
in the place where you are. Not something borrowed from another culture,
not a second-hand suit of clothes from somewhere else or second had words,
but the Gospel coming alive in this place, for this culture, in this language.

In all sorts of ways, the church over the centuries has lent itself to the
error, indeed the sin of trying to make cultural captives, whether it is
the mass export of Hymns Ancient and Modern to remote parts of the mission
field, the refusal of the Roman Catholic Church centuries ago to take
seriously the challenges of Asian culture in the first days of its mission
there, the abiding colonial shadow, the shadow of the British Empire that
hangs over our own Communion, or the export of American values and styles
to the whole world, we are all involved in a real difficulty here.

I spent as you know ten years of my Episcopal ministry in my native country
of Wales. And in Wales we were used to having bilingual worship; our prayer
book was in Welsh and English. But the Welsh prayer book was a translation
of the English prayer book and for hundreds of years, Welsh speakers had
not had the confidence or the courage or indeed the encouragement, to write
their liturgies, their prayers, in their own language. They'd written
hymns, great hymns - they'd prayed privately, but in the public worship of
the church English came first and Welsh was a translation.

I have a feeling that could be echoed in a good many of the countries and
churches that you represent, and, as we thought about the reform of our
liturgy in Wales over those years, the question came back again and again
'how do we encourage people to write liturgy, to write prayer books, to
write Eucharistic prayers, first in their language with the rhythm, the
association and resonance that your own language has for you and no other has.

It's a very different kind of challenge for each culture represented here
and I sense that we're still in the Anglican Communion in a phase of
'English first' at the back of the mind; that our liturgies are still, nine
times our of ten, translated from English into another language. I think
it's one of the most creative and interesting challenges that lies ahead of
us in the next century or more; to think our prayers in our own tongue, to
make them fully our own. Not, as I say, second hand clothes. And there is
one of the great opportunities for creative minds throughout our communion
to work.

In other words, a catholic church is not a church that seeks a uniform
global culture. The unity f the church is not cultural; it is in Christ -
one Lord one faith, one baptism, and any number of languages and costumes.
It's been said recently by one theologian that the catholicity of the
church is really a kind of great protest against globalisation; the really
catholic is the opposite of the globalised, because the catholic is about
wholeness, about the wholeness of the person, the wholeness of local
culture and language, therefore it's not simply opening the same fast-food
shop in every village on the globe, and it's not like the global economy,
in which people are drawn into somebody's story and somebody's interests
which in fact makes others poor and excluded. The catholic is the opposite
of the globalised because the catholic is about everyone's welfare,
everyone's growth and justice. And particularly in our globalised world
this witness to what I would call the truly catholic is perhaps more
important than ever. The affirmation the rights and liberties of local
persons but 'rights and liberties' is a weak and perhaps misleading phrase;
the language of rights has not stood us in good stead in the church. Let's
say rather the Christ-touched dignity of every person and every culture.
That is what the catholic church honours in its fullness and that is why
the catholic church protests about a globalised system that works in the
interests of a minority, whether in the church or in the world.

And so I come finally to the nature of the church as apostolic, and I've
already drawn your attention to that keystone of our understanding, in
Jesus' words in John17; words taken up again after the resurrection. Jesus
says to the Father that the Father has sent him into the world and he now
sends the apostles. After the resurrection he says 'As the Father has sent
me, I send you'. And while we can and rightly do concern ourselves with
apostolic integrity in terms of continuity and recgonisability in the
church, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that the language of
'sending', the apostolic language of scripture, is first of all about God's
mission in Jesus, or indeed we could say God's mission as Jesus. And the
forms, once again of apostolic continuity, especially the forms of
apostolic ministry are to be seen in that context: they serve the mission
of God which is in Christ Jesus.

The church is one in Jesus and holy in Jesus; the church is catholic in
Jesus and it is sent in mission in Jesus. It's a good thing that the marks
of the church come in that order, we might say, because we begin where we
cannot but begin and indeed end, in the oneness of Jesus Christ - the only
begotten next to the Father's heart. But we move from there into
understanding that from the Father's heart, the kolpos tou patros, the
bosom of the Father in John's Gospel; from there comes the mission that
takes the Gospel to the ends of the earth. From the Father's heart comes
Jesus Christ, whose grace and salvation are there for all and because of
Jesus Christ we are the bearers of that news to the ends of the earth.

At Lambeth 98 those who were involved in the section on mission and
evangelism had quite a bit to say about the bishop as a missionary and
evangelist. For me that was one of the most inspiring and focussing
elements of the conference. It needs reaffirming again and again. The
apostolic role of the bishop is not simply to be a witness of tradition,
though that is important. The bishop is the guardian of what has been
delivered, that is true, but what has been delivered is a gift that demands
to be given and shared, to be taken into evangelism. And what we take is
not just words and ideas; what we take of course is as St Paul reminds us
in 1 Corinthians, sprit and power. Our apostolic mission is a mission in
spirit and power; that is, it is a mission that leads to transformation.
Which is why, I think St Paul, certainly in 1 and 2 Corinthians associates
being an apostle with being a witness of the resurrection. The good news as
the good news of transformation, a changed and healed world, begins in the
resurrection where we are shown how the worst, most desperate sin of the
world's history, the deliberate rejection of God's chosen and his
humiliation torture and death on the cross is turned by god into the gate
of glory. The crucified, rejected Christ is raised from the dead by the
Father; he breathes his Spirit into the apostles and equips them to go and
tell every creature that God is more than death; that God is more than sin,
more than failure. He bids us go and preach the resurrection. The apostolic
church is the church which exists and renews itself day after day in the
power of the resurrection.

We don't just meet on Sundays because it's a convenient day that somebody
shoes by putting a pin in the calendar. We meet on the Lord's Day - 'This
is the Lord's day, the day that the Lord has made, it is wonderful in our
eyes' - we say that at Easter, but we should say it every Sunday. 'This is
the day that the Lord has made' or 'This is the day that the Lord has
acted, and it is wonderful in our eyes' because week by week we are
returned to the celebration of the resurrection. The church is perhaps
never more apostolic than when it gathers to praise the risen Lord. But it
should not suppose that simply praising the risen Lord and then going home
and then just shutting up shop is apostolic integrity, because the gift the
gift and the glory that we praise when we praise the risen Lord is the gift
now in our hands, our mouths, our voices to share with the world, and then
our apostolic inheritance the apostolic gift given to us, comes alive in
the transfiguring of the lives we touch by God's gift, by God's grace.

And it is as we perform this apostolic task that of course we are drawn
back again and again and again to where we started. The one Christ, the one
source of divine life and power. Because you see the apostles in the New
Testament are not heroes; they are saints and martyrs but they are not
heroes. They struggle, they fail, they repent, they return. Peter himself
betrays his lord and is called afresh. Paul speaks of how he's not even
worthy to be called an apostle because he persecuted the church of God and
Paul in 2 Corinthians with the great irony spells out, spells out just what
it is to be an apostle; a series of stressful heart-breaking, body-breaking
experiences and humiliation, failure and struggle, yet sustained always by
the one Lord.

So, just as the unity of the church is a solidarity sometimes in sin and
struggle, so the apostolicity of the church must be seen in that light of
failure, repentance, restoration. An apostolic church which continues the
labour and witness of the apostles is a church always engaged in
repentance, always open to renewal, always trusting the one Lord for his
faithfulness, always depending on him for its future.

All I've said this morning s really an attempt to put before you a vision
of the church; a church so deeply focussed on Jesus Christ that, in a
sense, it finds its unity, its holiness its catholicity, almost by
accident; not by human planning but by faithfulness to Jesus. What would St
John have said if someone had tapped him on the shoulder as he lay against
Jesus' shoulder at the Last Supper and said 'Would you like to explain to
me something about the oneness, the holiness, the catholicity and the
apostolicity of the apostolic band around the table, I think St John would
have said, perhaps rather fiercely - he was after all a 'son of thunder' -
'I'm listening to the Lord - shut up!'

The more we are focussed and drawn in to the mystery of Jesus, the more
these things become not matters that we passionately struggle to work to
master for ourselves, but things that flow form our relationship with
Jesus. Now I don't suggest that we can forget the practical questions
before us; the many appallingly burdensomely difficult question that are
laid upon us at the moment in our Anglican fellowship. But I do say that we
shall never begin to answer them adequately unless our eyes our minds and
our hearts are with Jesus, where Jesus is. Out of that who know what will
come, and as we are prepared to be silent and patient with the lord, like
John at the Last Supper, who knows what God will do. John listened at the
supper; his head resting next to the heart of Jesus, just as Jesus rests
next to the heart of God - have you noticed it's exactly the same phrase
used in 1 John and in the account of the Last Supper - en kolpo, in the
bosom, next t o the heart. There the beloved disciple listens.

And what does he hear?
'Sanctify them in the truth. Thy word is truth. As thou didst send me into
the world, so I have sent them into the world, and for their sake I
consecrate myself that they also may be consecrated in truth. I do not pray
for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word
that they may all be one, even as thou Father art in me and I in thee, that
they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent
me.' John 17 v 17 ff.

© Rowan Williams 2005

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