Second Sunday before Advent
16 November 2008

10:15am Holy Communion

Matthew 25: 14-30

‘Yes we can’

On Thursday I was in London with a few hours to spare before a meeting, so I took myself off to the Royal Academy, just off Piccadilly Circus, because a friend had recommended the latest exhibition there.

Entitled Byzantium, the exhibition narrates in art, the story of that civilisation said to begin when the Emperor Constantine inaugurated the fortified city of Constantinople in 330, which saw that city become the capital of the Empire in 476 after the fall of Rome, and extended until 1453 when the city fell into the hands of the mostly Muslim Ottoman Empire.

That outline will perhaps have keyed itself into what for you – and for so many of us – is an anxiety about our present age. Has Christian history peaked and is it now in decline? Are we about to see again a resurgent, and to many minds, a militant Islam, storming the Christian barricades and turning Western Christian Civilisation upside down? Those are very real fears for many people?

But let’s for a moment park those fears and return to today’s reading from the Gospel, a reading from the same testament which promises elsewhere that “perfect love – love for God and for one another – that will cast out all fear”.

Canon Ward had very kindly emailed me the text of the Gospel reading whilst I was on the train the night before I went to the exhibition, so I ventured to the Royal Academy with the parable of the talents very much at the forefront of my thoughts.

And what an array of talent, what a rich harvest of the investment that had gone into the training of so many Christian sculptors and craftswomen, textile designers and workers, embroiderers and painters, the exhibition had to offer: an overwhelming, breathtaking, superabundance of talent. There were hundreds of people there. But all moved in awed reverence at the transcendent beauty, the God to whom all the displays bore witness.

From the intricacy of a decorated Psalter to the stark simplicity of large-scale iconography, from the intimacy of Christ the Good Shepherd carved in stone to the majesty of a candelabrum proclaiming Christ as light of the world, glorious reminders presented themselves at every turn of the limitlessly talented Christian heritage to which each of us belongs. Telling reminders, that whatever God gives to us, we are to make it good, to develop, to multiply, to use our gift to God’s glory and the good of each and every one of God’s children.

But as I looked at reproduction images of the Hagia Sofia, that great cathedral in Constantinople begun by the Emperor Justinian in 532, and which in the fifteenth century became the Aya Sofia mosque, I wondered how one could make sense of such a transformation? Of course since 1935 in very secular, modern-day Turkey it’s been a museum. And my goodness that tells a story for our times. But wasn’t the fifteenth century change of cathedral into mosque exactly what’s now beginning to happen with increasing frequency all over the country here in the UK: with redundant churches now turned into mosques?

There are all sorts of things that one could say about the reasons for the latter phenomenon – and lots that one might want to say about the change of a place of worship into a museum – but most of what would need to be said would frankly have little to do with Islam, and much more to do with – and to be critical of – an increasingly weak Christianity. This is a Christianity that has failed since the Second World War – especially in its Anglican institutional form – adequately to engage with God’s mission in the world: failed to engage, let alone commend or endear itself to the population beyond the pews, because it’s been just so obsessed with its own institutional affairs.

I shall probably be berated for saying this, but ‘fresh expressions’ which seeks at some levels rather belatedly to address all this, is itself in many – though not all – cases often simply another way of moving the same deck chairs round the Titanic, on a par with those other ways in which in the Church of England – to be very narrow for a moment – has moved them so frequently in the years following 1945. These were years when we most had a chance to reconnect church, nation and world, but when we so resoundingly passed this chance up in favour of our obsession with changing our worship and our structures every five minutes, and our further delight in the complex irrelevancies of canon law.

We haven’t got time to trace who was responsible here and how we got to the point where a majority of people – who might once quite easily have counted themselves as our friends – have ceased understanding what the Christian project means at all. But we know that we’re in a crisis.

Much worse than this, the world beyond our walls or the walls of any other faith for that matter, has got so used to the way in which, as my wife so tellingly puts it, we can often simply ‘open our mouths to change feet’ in response to this crisis, that it tends to the view that religion is either part of the problem – not part of the solution – or is a complete irrelevancy altogether.

All of which is really the backdrop to what we did in Blackburn when we decided to appoint a Muslim dialogue development officer to work in close partnership with myself and other members of staff in order to promote dialogue across different faiths and cultures.

We recognised the crisis was so great that we needed not yet another barely fresh expression of an old problem, and certainly not more rearranging of deckchairs on the Titanic, but a genuinely new expression of hope itself. People had so got out of the way of believing that faith per se – never mind any faith in particular – could be a powerful force for good, that we would seek to show them that this was in fact the case.

We also recognised the truth of which the exhibition Byzantium is so powerful a reminder. For study the art and artefacts in that exhibition and you soon realise that Christian art from the Byzantine period has in fact been deeply influenced by Islamic art and decorative calligraphy, and that the same is true in reverse. This is our history at best: a history of mutual enrichment which saw Muslim traders, for instance, as the arteries, if you like, by which the Christian civilisation of a place like Byzantium reached the rest of the world. This is a shared history of respect not the history of suspicion or hatred that creates a historical narrative encouraging us to see the Christian West in some kind of epic battle with the Islamic East. That may be how Samuel Huntingdon's Clash of Civilisations wrongly puts it. It may be how our politicians choose to interpret the virtual reality they’ve created as they translate such misinterpretation, manipulation and violation of reality into ever more dangerous foreign policy. But it’s not how we at best have experienced faiths living peacefully with one another.

Now this doesn’t take away from the reality of what happened when a largely Muslim civilisation eventually conquered a largely Christian one, and a cathedral became a mosque. But it does set this in context, because it points to other dimensions to the story: to a conversation and dialogue that had been mutually enriching for hundreds of years until politics not popular sentiment and experience began to hold sway. The subsequent turning of Hagia Sofia, Aya Sofia into a museum, and the victory in this change for a godless secularism is frankly much more worrying. Recovering the positive history between faiths, a positive view for the place of faith itself, has therefore been another powerful impetus to the public discussions and dialogues for which in Blackburn we’ve become locally, nationally and even internationally known.

Narrating for Muslims, for instance, the story of how they rescued Jews in Albania during the Holocaust. This was news to them in Blackburn as elsewhere. And it changed the way they tended to look at their relationship with Jews almost exclusively through the complex pain of the Holy Land as we all know it today.

Now these conversations and dialogues are surely of huge significance when we return ourselves to the parable of the talents and are soon reminded that the servant who does nothing with his talent is rightly castigated.

We naturally fear getting into conversation with people of other faiths. Will this mean that we’re watering down our own faith as a result? Will it see us sell-out our beliefs, desert Jesus and the fullness of truth that sets us free?

But on the other hand, if we do nothing with the gift that God entrusts to us, won’t it be the case that we shall face as severe a judgment as the useless servant in the story because we shall simply have done the same: buried our talent and buried along with it the Jesus we are called to share?

If we avoid the conversations I passionately believe we must have, I think we’ll deserve to be castigated because the unique gift that God gives to us Christians is the gift of conversation and dialogue. This after all is the nature of the gift to us of Jesus Christ himself. God is in Christ talking with the world, the world God loves so much that the Son is sent to us as the means by which our God begins the process of reconciling all things to Godself. The Word becomes flesh: presenting, revealing itself in our nature. And this incarnation, this supreme self-revelation for God is also the revelation about ourselves into which this same God calls each one of us.

Every human being, not just the Christian ones – as Archbishop Desmond Tutu so rightly reminds us – is made in God’s image. It is to each and in each, whatever their faith, that we must honour and bear witness to this Christ-likeness as Michael Ramsey used to call it.
And this is how it works in Blackburn with the hours of conversation and dialogue Anjum Anwar and I share, many of them in public, as we seek to engage others in dialogue and conversation.

We never water our faiths down. We live them fully. We never hide our differences. We share them openly. We never sell-out uniqueness. We proclaim it respectfully.

What God does with such faithful witness is ultimately for God. As Anjum said once in a Church Times interview, "We’re not paid enough for that!"

What we can say after nearly three years of shared conversation and discussion is that it’s always taken us not further away from our own faith but deeper into it. Like the Byzantium exhibition it’s shown us the almost overwhelmingly rich seam of treasures that our traditions have yet to mine.

If you appoint a similar person here in Bradford, I believe one of the consequences will be the same. Your own faith will be deepened and strengthened. It will not be weakened, though it may more searchingly be questioned. And in all this you’ll become better at bearing sensitive witness, better at participating in God’s mission in the world, better at sharing the truth of Jesus Christ. You will, in short, be re-equipping yourselves for the ministry of peace and reconciliation God calls you to exercise as disciples amidst the complexities of our contemporary world.

There’s frankly only so long that the institutional Church may go on moving those deckchairs from place to place. There’s only so long that the institutional Church can remain so turned in on itself, so preoccupied with the concerns of the in-crowd, when millions are crying out for us to show them the way that leads to peace.

In these last few days from across the pond, we’ve all learnt a new response to the possibility of change, in those three words of Senator Obama’s inspiring election campaign: yes we can. May these be the words on your lips and on your hearts as you respond to the incarnate one calling you into the divine dialogue of discipleship. May you never bury the talent, the gift God calls you to share with everyone. And may God richly bless all that you do in and from this cathedral community. Amen.