SYNOD EUCHARIST

in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 at 7.3Opm.

Sermon by Rt Revd Richard Henderson, Bishop of Tuam, Killala and Achonry.

A couple of weeks ago, my daughter was looking for some Plasticine for a school project. I had forgotten that Plasticine existed, couldn’t even remember how to spell it (is it -ene or -me?) and in a flash my mind was taken back to Primary School and to those dreadful grey-brown balls of the stuff pushed into a horrid gem isch by hundreds of grubby little hands - and stored in old margarine tubs along with chubby crayons that didn’t work. But then also I remembered the pristine new packets of the stuff, multicoloured and ribbed in shallow, windowed cardboard packs with cellophane stretched over.

And it made me think of General Synod. Now I wonder where you mind is travelling!

Well, this is where mine was travelling: to state the obvious, in the Church of Ire land we have many strands and shades of opinion on complex matters, especially matters to do with people, where we can never quite disentangle the issue from the person (nor should we), neither can we disentangle the ideal from the reality.

The question is, ‘what do we do with this variety - as a church, as General Synod?’ Do we leave the colours of opinion, stretched out side by side, untouched under cellophane, saying that they are all equally valid? Or do we mix them all together until we have a dull brown mix that resembles nothing at all, that nobody would want to touch!

The answer must be that we do neither, or perhaps both. The colours of our opinion, even if we hold them with the deepest conviction, need to be seen alongside others. More than that, they need to be pliable, plastic, like

Plasticine - so that they can be modelled, modified. We cannot lie untouched, vacuum packed in our certainties, when it is given to us by our maker to lie side by side with the equally deep convictions of others. Indeed, the rock on which the church is built needs to be pliable too- a living stone, whose strength lies not in disengaged rigidity, but in being alive to the voice of God and the cries of our neighbours. We must not lose our Christianity on our Crusades.

Yet we can help to model the way to live, to form opinion, to search for the truth, but only if we are vulnerable to the same from others, within and without the church. General Synod at its very best is like this, and sometimes it still happens. Not so much the compilation of prepared speeches, let alone the black-bound Journal that comes out later, but the debate itself, searching for truth. If we lose this multistranded and pliable understanding of truth, and the working out of this sort of truth in contemporary situations, I greatly fear that we shall say nothing. We shall not touch, neither shall we be touched. I suspect that there are many who say nothing out of fear that their contribution will be wrongly taken up or extrapolated into a unilateral, monochromatic statement about a whole issue. We need to retain the collective maturity to accept that a contribution to debate is just that - no more, no less; a corrigible ingredient in the discernment of truth.

Fear is deadly. Apart from the extrovert and the very certain, or those who are really driven to the rostrum - say over the closure of a church - many people do not wish to step visibly out of line for fear of being shot down. But how then will the line move forward? And how shall we know what they think (unless it is focused in a vote) - and benefit from it? I maintain that common sense is quite common, it’s just that it is commonly silent! But hear the scriptures on fear: ‘perfect love casts out fear.., fear has to do with punishment’.

That’s just it - we must not punish each other for our opinions. If we could remove the fear, generate a gentle climate of love, like the May weather, I so wonder what we really, deeply, truly would say about the hard-to-talk-about issues of our day, especially the personal ones? About divorce, adultery, human sexuality, abortion, or indeed so many other issues - debt, hunger, genetically modified foods, pollution, foot and mouth, animal welfare ... the list goes on.

We live in a highly complex world where for the most part as individuals, we know a little about a lot - and maybe also as specialists - a lot about a little. That’s why together we stand a better chance of knowing things that we cannot know apart. In meeting. And we shall be closest to the truth, when we meet in love - the greatest and most accomodating gift of all.

For myself, I think that our present witness as a Church will be judged less by our consensus, or even our decisions (though sometimes these certainly have to be made), than by how we choose to disagree and live with difference. We know in part, we see through a glass darkly; so I wonder, does the provisional truth not lie in the debate more than the concluson? Is this the great strength of the Synod?

I think so, but only when we remember God. If we mix merely at our own level, then we risk annihilating all individuality. That’s the brown blob of Plasticine. We must, simply must let God work in our midst, the vertical dimension to our horizontal meeting.

Which leads to the really big questions, whose answers are hinted at in tonight’s readings. Jesus says that there is much that we cannot bear until the Holy Spirit guides his disciples into all truth. Jesus, the instigator of our variety needs to be our modeller also. It is he who can plasticise and soften human hearts, hardened hearts and inflexible position taking and lead us on. Later, one of his listeners, Peter the disciple sheepishly would have to acknowledge the truth of this; he had all sorts of fastidious hang-ups about religious practice, and about who was in and who was out. But the Spirit of God dreamed him into new freedom and sympathy, and demonstrated wonderfully the work of God beyond Peter’s meagre horizons. Even tonight’s Psalm says the same: ‘show me thy ways, teach me thy paths’. Does that not imply that there is something to be revealed? ‘He will teach sinners the way’.

Do you remember the Old Testament story of Jacob the cheat, the second-born twin clinging on to his brother’s heel, who spent much of his life manipulating his family to serve his own grievance. Until he too was changed by a dream of a vertical dimension, a ladder where his thoughts were exchanged with those of God. And oh what peace and reconciliation flowed in due course from that meeting, where God was thenceforth part of his wrestling - and reconciliation with his brother, as God must be part of ours at General Synod.

Now think of the Epistle tonight, and the person of Jesus Christ, our model and our modeller. Unlike Jacob, he did not cling to his birthright, though in very nature God. Instead, he loosened his grasp and let go. His response to our fallen nature was to fall himself down to our level, not to condemn or bemoan our condition from on high. His response was to take human form, the form of a slave, and to die, even horribly on a cross. To which Paul says our attitude should be the same. To which I say ‘Ouch!’, though I know it to be right.

But hear this as an expression of how we should deliberate lovingly as Christians: ‘Never act from motives of rivalry or personal vanity, but in humility think more of each other than you do of yourselves. None of you

should think only of his own affairs, but learn to see things from other people’s point of view. Let Christ be your example as to what your attitude should be’. Amen to that. If we get our attitudes right, our actions will follow suit. Spectators will not say ‘see what great decisions they make’ but ‘see how they love one another’. Best would be both, of course!

Christ let go and stepped into our world. We need to let go and step into the world of others, take a leaf from their book and paste it into our own, even if we feel it may spoil our story, or compromise something religiously dear to us. The promise of this marvellous reading is that, if we stay with Christ, the only weakening of our position will be the knee-bend of the rigid stance of pride and prejudice. Thus we will be pliable enough for God to work in us to will and to act according to his good purpose.

And so back to the Plasticine. Even those horrible brown blobs which I have been so rude about have a certain beauty to be discovered. When cut, there is wonderful veining and marbling - the sign of complex and constant moulding and intermingling of those original pristine strands. Here is the Good News: knowing of what we are made, God in Christ stoops to touch this unappealing and internally complex clay of our corporate humanity. He is willing to touch our General Synod! Not only does he touch, but he can form us into an open human vessel to be filled with treasure, the treasure of the Spirit of God, the treasure of truth which Christ has promised and made possible.

‘Lead me forth in thy truth, and learn me: for thou art the God of my salvation; in thee hath been my hope all the day long’.

To God be glory for ever and ever. Amen