Sermon for CCN Sunday 2024 at Southwark Cathedral

 Cats and Dogs

Cops and Robbers

Montagues and Capulets

Democrats and Republicans

Jews and Samaritans

Protestants and Catholics

Conservatives and liberals

We humans have an extraordinary and distressing tendency to view the world in terms of opposing binaries, and to build division into the very fabric of our social structures. We are intensely tribal apparently needing to organise the world into “people like us” and “the others” - to be viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

We even convince ourselves that such divisions have been built into the very fabric of existence, that it’s somehow part of “the plan”. The Genesis creation story has God dividing light from darkness, land from sea, even before the Fall. And after that, of course, it’s official.

I will put enmity between you and the woman. She shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise her heel.

And have you noticed how often matters of faith – or, more accurately, matters of religion, are the pretext, if not the actual basis for division? It is, you see, all about group identity. The very word “Religion” comes from the Latin ligare, to join or bind. Religion binds people within the group....More specifically, since some of the most bitter conflicts take place within a faith, it binds members of the same sect, church, or denomination. It invests group solidarity with sanctity. In advocating a special relationship between god and believers, every religion potentially creates an in and an out group. Religious identity creates draws firm boundaries, which we defend come what may. Within our groups, we may manage to practice altruism. Between and beyond them, we are all too prone to practice aggression, and because religion is the most effective way to establish a group identity, it is too often implicated in the consequent violence.

On the basis of the evidence I was genuinely surprised that the rather splendid group of year 10 students who visited the Learning Centre on Friday felt, on balance, that religion might still be a force for good...Or rather, that FAITH might be. It’s important, you see, to maintain the distinction.

Religion binds us together – but it might also set us against one another.

Faith, I think, looks beyond.

We see this in our gospel – that story that is so well-known you probably switched off as soon as the deacon proclaimed it. Admittedly, Luke’s account, more succinct than that elsewhere, does not labour the point - but there’s no evading the identity of the man who offers help to the benighted traveller. He is a Samaritan – one so far beyond the pale that you can almost imagine a hiss from the crowd, a collective drawing in of their skirts, as Jesus has this uncongenial outsider stopping to offer the help that the Insiders – the priest and the Levite – had failed to offer.

Imagine if the traveller had been conscious...Would he have accepted the rescuer before him? Or would partisan pride have won the day? We don’t know. We never will...though I’m always wryly amused that when Jesus asks “Which of the three was a neighbour...” the lawyer cannot bring himself to utter the word “Samaritan” - but, looking uncomfortably at his feet, mutters “The one who showed him mercy”

We can, it seems, be choosy and partisan even when we are offered help.

But there IS another way...and it is this that we are recalled to today, as we celebrate our membership of the CCN – for here we are reminded that faith can support those values on which peace and reconciliation flourish. 

You’ll know the story – but nontheless I make no apology for sharing it again, our story is a living proof that we CAN rise above a dualist view of the world.

In November 1940, one night of heavy bombing reduced much of the manufacturing city of Coventry to rubble. Despite heroic efforts by local fire crews, the medieval cathedral of St Michael was one of the casualties, catching fire and burning all night. The following day, the leader of the Cathedral community, Provost Dick Howard, was walking amid the ruins of his beloved Cathedral. It’s easy to imagine his feelings. Distress, surely, at the destruction of something precious and beautiful. Grief at the loss of life across the city. Perhaps anger, - at so much destruction and waste...hatred of those responsible.

But no. 

Provost Howard was a remarkable man, who had taken to heart the message of peace and reconciliation that lies at the heart of the Christian gospel. So he asked for two words to be written on the wall of the ruined cathedral’s sanctuary, behind where the altar had stood. Just two words. “Father, forgive”. He deliberately didn’t complete the quote from Scripture...He DIDNT say “Father, forgive THEM” because he wanted there to be no “them” and “us”...no demonising of the German people, no pretext for nurturing hatred and revenge. He knew that we are all equally liable to those patterns of behaviour, that pursuit of power and glory, which left unchecked could lead to such disaster...That the destruction of the old cathedral was as much the responsibility of his own community as it was of the German pilots who flew the bombers that night.

Father forgive”….because in this we are all to blame. “Father, forgive” because it is only through following the way of costly forgiveness that hope and healing can be found. 3 of the ancient nails that had fallen from the roof of the burned cathedral were taken and bound into the shape of a cross, - and now that cross of nails has become the symbol of all the work of peace and reconciliation that has gone out from Coventry around the world. Here at Southwark we are part of it...part of the God-given message of reconciliation which has at its heart a refusal to make anyone stand as “other”.

At the beginning of the service we prayed together the Coventry litany of reconciliation. The response to each clause is those two words “Father forgive”

The power of the missing word...the refusal to stand and pour hatred over “THEM” - those other, different people who are not us, and who threaten us by their very existence...is the great gift that the Community of the Cross of Nails can offer to our divided world.

WE SHALL NOT “OTHER” ANYONE.

That must be our resolve – part of the way in which at Southwark we make space for love with heart, mind and soul. 

And this is something intensely practical. It’s seen as different faith communities come together to share food and fellowship at an Iftar in the nave. It’s seen as the Drakensburg Boys Choir brings black and white S African children together in an act of artistic revolution. It’s seen in the delight of two Muslim teenagers from Leicester who spent a summer Saturday knitting, with 2000 others, in our cathedral churchyard. Yes – those are all easy wins...Soft radicalism...But we can only start where we are, recognising that the time may come when the call to reconciliation demands more of us. 

When I worked at Coventry, a strong influence was the American Mennonite John Paul Lederach. He suggests that reconciliation is only complete when you have so fully entered into the life of those who were formerly “the other” that your own comrades feel that you have betrayed them. 

You see, reconciliation involves such identification with those who were once “other” that you cross the line to join them...you learn to see things from their perspective...you tell their story as if it were your own.

That’s just not possible in the binary world that we’re offered in Genesis, but the grace of God at work in Christ moves us on from the creation story to the confident assertion that there is a NEW creation, in which we no longer “other”, in which we no longer hide behind the stories of past wrongs but together tell a new story as we move from a fractured past into a shared future.

All this from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.