Have you ever stopped and taken a few moments to consider just what a horrible place the world seems to be coming? By that, I mean just how really horrible people seem to be coming towards one another? Just think about it for a moment now. It can’t have escaped many people’s notice that, at the moment, there are two high profile libel cases going on; cases which have resulted from celebrities insulting one another in public. I’m sure we’ve probably all noticed too that we now have politicians who seem to be less interested in making good policies than in also trading insults and looking for scandal about one another, less concerned with political campaigning than in smear campaigning. Then, of course, we have the woke brigade with their cancel culture, a group which, to all intents and purposes, are setting out to ostracise anyone doesn’t share their views; not only to treat anyone who doesn’t agree with them as an outcast themselves, but to bully others in to doing the same. And this is to say nothing of what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment.
As we look at the world we live in, and especially the increasingly belligerent, intolerant, and even malevolent way that people treat each other, it would be very easy to despair of the world and its people. But then, every so often, something comes along to give us some hope that perhaps things are not quite so bad as they might seem because not everybody is so bad as people can often seem to be. And I came across just such a thing during the last week.
I came across it speaking to a bereaved family in preparation for a funeral, and I found it in the story of their parents. Mum, whose funeral I’d been asked to take, was born in Germany in the 1920s and she’d lived the whole of her teenaged years during the Second World War. During that war she’d seen her hometown of Hamburg virtually destroyed by allied air raids, and over 200,000 of her fellow Hamburgers (and yes, that is what they’re called) killed or wounded in those air raids. Nevertheless, after the war, she moved to England and came to live in Oldham where she met her husband to be. He was Ukrainian. He’d also lived through the Second World war and had also seen some terrible things, including the cold-blooded murder of some members of his family by German soldiers. And as I listened to this story I thought just what a really rather wonderful story it was. Not in terms of their wartime experiences , but in terms of how these two people were able to put those things behind them and rebuild their lives.
At a human level, it’s the story of a young German girl coming to live in a country whose armed forces had destroyed her hometown and killed and wounded so many of its citizens, her fellow citizens, and of a man meeting, falling in love with, and marrying a young woman whose compatriots had murdered some of his family. It’s a wonderful story of forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s a story of two people who were able to let go of the past and go on with their lives, and because of that, to find love and happiness with and amongst people who’d once been their deadly enemies.
I think this is such a wonderful story because it shows us just what can happen between people. It shows what can happen if people are willing to let go of the past and look to the future. It shows what can happen if people are willing to accept others for what they are, rather than to blame them for what’s gone before and for what their ancestors did. It shows what can happen if people are willing to accept others for what they are rather than insisting that others think and speak and act as they do. But this isn’t just a story about what can happen between people if they can do these things, it’s a story about what did happen between two people when they did do these things and so it’s a story that’s full of hope. And it’s a story that should resonate with us, as Christians, because we’re called to be people who do these things. We’re called to be people who don’t keep score of wrongs or harbour grudges. We’re called to be people who are forgiving and who always look for reconciliation between people. And we’re called to be people who love others, no matter who or what they are.
Unfortunately though, and as I’m sure we all know, people who call themselves ‘Christians’ don’t always act like this, in the way they should. We know that’s true, and we can’t even say it’s something that’s happened in more recent times. We might think that people have become more horrible and intolerant in recent years, and are becoming increasingly so, but this has been a problem in the Church from it’s very earliest years.
In the reading from the Act of the Apostles at St Mark’s this morning (which was the reading from Acts at St Gabriel’s on Wednesday morning too), we read about a dispute between the party known as the ‘Judaisers’ and Ss Paul and Barnabas. The Judaisers were a group of early Christians who thought that the Jewish law had to be enforced and that no one could be saved, and by extension be part of the Church, unless they obeyed the law. But Paul and Barnabas, who’d actually done the work of evangelising the new Gentile converts to Christianity, were having none of this and so, in the end, the problem was taken to the apostles in the Jerusalem Church.
As we read;
…some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question.
And in the end, and after ‘much debate’ the Church decided that Gentile converts to Christianity shouldn’t have to obey the law of Moses. They decided that, as God had clearly given the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles when they hadn’t been keeping the law, they, the human element of the Church, it’s people, had no right to insist that they must keep it.
If we boil this argument down to its essence, what is it but an argument about the kind of things that I’ve spoken about this morning? What is it but an argument caused by intolerance of people’s differences and belligerence based on that intolerance ? We keep the law and you don’t, so we’re right and you’re wrong. God gave the law to us not to you, so we’re his people and you’re not. If you want to be part of our Church, you have to do what we do and do what we say. And what was the Judaisers attempt to exclude people from the Church unless they did what they told them to do other than a 1st Century version of a cancel culture?
But in the end it was the Church who put an end to this argument. It was the Church who showed tolerance of those who didn’t keep the law of Moses, and we have to remember that at this time the Church was simply a group within Judaism. It was the Church who showed tolerance to those non-Jews who wanted to come to the Lord Jesus and follow him. It was the Church who was willing to put the past distinction between Jew and Gentile behind them and look to the future. It was the Church who wanted to reconcile these two peoples and bring them together, in mutual love, into a marriage, the marriage of Christ and his Church.
When I say though, that it was the Church who put an end to this argument, what I really mean is that the Church put an and to this specific argument that we read about in the Acts of the Apostles because, as we all know, these arguments still go on and still plague the Church today and sadly, it’s the Church herself, through her people, who causes and perpetuates them.
We all know these arguments and we’ve all heard them; are you Catholic or a Protestant? Are you High Church or Low Church? Are you in favour of women priests or against them?
And if you’re not in agreement with the one asking the question you’re quite likely to find yourself ostracised, sent to Coventry, cancelled, because of it. When I first came to this diocese, for example, at the first Deanery Synod meeting I went to, I was introduced by another priest to one of his Deanery Synod reps. I offered my hand in friendship, as people usually do, and in response I got a rather cold stare and then the person in question turned to the other priest and said, ‘Before I shake his hand, is he one of us or one of the other lot?’ With that, I put my hand down. I looked at the other priest, he looked at me, the other person looked at both of us in turn and then turned his back on me. I really don’t know what that was all about because I don’t know what he meant by the ‘other lot’. But if that’s how his lot treat people in the Church who don’t agree with them in some way, I rather hope I am one of the ‘other lot’ because I really wouldn’t want to be part of any lot who treated other people in such an appalling way.
It’s very sad that things like this go on in the Church and between people who call themselves ‘Christians’ but it does. It shouldn’t though. The story I heard a few days ago about that German lady and her Ukrainian husband is a story about how things should be, and could be, if only people could be willing to let go of the past and to be more tolerant of each other and their differences. I said it was a story of hope, not because it’s a story about what can happen but because it’s a story of what did happen between two people. This is the hope that the Church is called to bring to the world. The hope that there is a better way, the hope that people can let go of the past and look to the future, the hope that people can be tolerant of each other and of our differences, the hope that people can be reconciled to one another through mutual forgiveness of past wrongs, the hope that people can live together in mutual love. That’s the hope we’re called to give the world but it’s a hope we can’t give to the world unless we can do those things ourselves and show those things in our own lives.
The world might be coming a horrible place filled with people who are quite happy to be horrible towards one another, but we’re not called to be like that, and we don’t have to be. We are in the world, but we’re called to be not of the world. So let’s give the world some hope by doing all we can to not be part of the horrible way that so many people in the world treat one another.
Amen.
The Propers for the 6th Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 