Light and transformation

If you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?

Lord, send us the light of your Holy Spirit. May He be our guide and teacher, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Here today in this very building is a chapel of justice and peace. It is to my mind a tremendous thing that such a concept should exist. A place dedicated to justice and peace. We are here today to celebrate that with an act of dedication, with an action.

For justice and peace are not passive concepts in which we sit back and bask. They can only truly exist if some action is taken to help ensure that they are at the forefront of our world.

St Wilfrid knew this. He knew that passivity and the hope that someone else would solve problems, someone else would passionately go out to bring the Gospel to this place and that someone else would love the world was not on. Wilfrid knew that each individual and their life joined together to make the fate of a nation. We praise him today as a man of action and the hymn we shall sing after the Creed proudly proclaims this of your patron saint.
He certainly succeeded in connecting the Church in England – part of the Universal Church – though he was very difficult to get on with on a personal level.

Healing, seeking justice and peacemaking require a peoples, a nation, to actively seek out the Kingdom of God. We each one of us are the sum of the nations. We cannot escape this truth. We cannot hide under anonymity or look to others to be the carriers of solutions. The actions of us, as individuals, make up the actions of the corporate entity. For as Matthew so rightly says, God will come to judge the nations. We are representative of those very nations, our hearts make up the heart of this nation itself.

As Winnie the Pooh aptly said: "I have one hand, you have another; when we join them, we are together."

Together Each Achieves More! A T.E.A.M.

In a democratic society a few commit evil deeds but all are involved. A few are guilty but all are responsible.

I want to tell you a story. It was sent to me by the international director of one of the medical relief NGO's operating out in war zones and areas where natural disaster has damaged communities. And it struck me that he was asking some of the same questions that I have been asking and that I challenged people with in my inaugural sermon. What does it mean not to understand oneself just as an individual Christian but as a corporate disciple? Not just to be responsible for our own relationship with God but for that of the nation.

The story has been used by Harvard Business School to ask questions about money, time and effort and whether there is a 'corporate', a 'body of people' responsibility or only an individual responsibility. It asks the question of where and how these inter-relate.

The story is written by a man who has taken some months from his work to walk the Himalayas. It starts with two English companions camping in a hut at 14,500 feet. That is high enough for altitude sickness to start kicking in. The last village they had seen was two days previously and they were tired.

They were joined that night by four New Zealanders and could see the fires of two others parties who later turned out to be a Swiss family and a Japanese hiking club. They were also accompanied by Sherpas and porters, all of whom were to climb the high pass the following day, a physical feat beyond most people in this world.

They started off at 3.30am in the morning. Each party was slightly behind the other; a widely international group of people from different places and backgrounds.

Just after daybreak, while they rested at 15,500 feet, one of the New Zealanders, who had gone on ahead, came staggering towards them with a body slung across his shoulders. He dumped the almost naked, barefoot body of an Indian holyman, a sadhu, at the feet of the Englishman. He had found the pilgrim lying on the ice, shivering and suffering from hypo-thermia. One of the two companions cradled the Sadhu's head and laid him out on the rocks. The New Zealander was angry. He wanted to get across the pass before the bright sun melted the snow. He said "Look, I have done what I can, you have porters and Sherpa guides, you care for him. We are going on!"

He turned and went back up the mountain to join his friends. The English man took the pilgrims pulse and found that the Sadhu was still alive. He thought that he had probably visited one of the holy shrines and was on his way home, but could not understand why he had chosen this desperately high route with almost no protective clothing. There was a safe well travelled route through the lower gorge. Was he mad? Or suicidal? Or a holy man of taste? Or simply lost?

He was shoeless and almost naked and lying on the pass beside them.

The Swiss group who had now arrived stripped off their outer clothing. The pilgrim was soon clothed from head to foot. He was alive and coming to, but not able to stand.

As a group they were all debating their concerns about getting over the pass before their health became weaker at this height and before the weather got bad.

The English man started to walk on and left the others to help. Some hours later the Swiss group caught up and said that the pilgrim, the Sadhu, was fine and that the English man's companion was following on. So he set off again for the summit.

An hour later his companion arrives at the summit. Still exhilarated by victory, the English man ran down the slope to congratulate him. His companion was suffering from altitude sickness, walking fifteen steps, then stopping and faltering. His companion just glared at him and said "how do you feel about contributing to the death of a fellow man?". "Is the Sadhu dead?" He asked astounded. "No", said his friend, "but he surely will be!"

The companion had stayed with the dying man while everyone else walked on. Then the Japanese arrived and he asked to use their pack horse to take the man down to the hut.
They refused as they did not have enough porters to carry packs without the horse and they wanted to keep moving. But they offered food and water.

The Sherpa guide then carried the Sadhu down to a rock in the sun at about 15,000 feet and pointed out the hut another 500 feet below. The pilgrim had last been seen lying on the rock trying to throw small stones at something which seemed to frighten him. That was the companion's last memory of him.

No one to this day knows if he lived or died.

A long ethical debate could ensue on the back of this story. No one person was willing to assume ultimate responsibility for the Sadhu and his life. Each was willing to do his bit just so long as it was not too inconvenient. When it got to be a bother, everyone just passed the buck to someone else.

Where is the limit of our responsibility in a situation like this?

A debate might pose the question as to whether the Sadhu holds some responsibility for making the choice of walking alone along a dangerous path half naked.

I want to know - if the pilgrim had been a Sherpa, or Japanese or a western woman for example, would one of the groups of people identified with the dying person and acted differently.

The debate might enter into the realm of mental health. Do people have the ability to decide how to act when under physical and mental pressure; if operating with a high adrenaline flow; when aiming for a super ordinate goal; where involved in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Do these things excuse judgment?

This story is set on a mountaintop, but it could apply to many of us at physically and mentally stressful times of our lives.

Real moral dilemmas are ambiguous and many of us walk straight through them unaware that they exit. Others of us are racked by guilt. Others of us excuse ourselves and can dig ourselves into a defensive position from which it is very difficult to emerge.

Whose responsibility is it to heal, to seek justice, to be a peacemaker, to love our enemies? Who, when and how?

As individuals, as corporate disciples of Christ, as a nation, I leave you to grasp hold of that question.

Creating solutions for healing our broken and injured world is now incumbent upon every individual both great and small. We must cast our efforts upon bringing compassion, justice and healing to the world's fragile communities. Christians must lead and advance this, not as a cause, but as a way of life.

Love is active and not passive. Love is meant to be actively carried out towards our fellow human beings under all conditions, not only when we pick and choose.

Jesus encourages us to carry out this active love and compassion even in the presence of our enemies. For we attain our humanity only by becoming Godlike. The one thing that makes us like God is the love which never ceases to care for others, no matter what they do to it. We fulfil our humanity, we enter upon Christian perfection, when we learn to forgive as God forgives, and love as God loves.

It is not about political solutions, for surely it is now up to each one of us to offer up a spiritual solution and by that I mean a human solution. We must try to understand the violence within ourselves and in our families, in our communities and our world.

Violence cannot just be crushed, ignored, repressed. It has to be understood and faced, and all of us who promulgate it wittingly or unwittingly also then need to be loved.

Let us not underestimate how dangerous corporate discipleship is.

Let us not underestimate how worrying it is to people when we take and hold responsibility for the actions of our nations.

Let us not diminish how much courage inspires communities and how much more contagious courage can be than fear.

Let us not underestimate how frightening are the peacemakers and those who seek justice. For these people challenge the world view that small actions are worthless because we cannot change anything.

We need to be those dangerous and frightening people who seek justice and actively make peace and who greet not just our brother and sister but love our enemy.

Jesus calls to respond to enemies with love, which can transform them – as God in Christ turned us as enemies of God into his friends. The only way of destroying our enemy is to turn them into friends.

"He that loves not, does not know God, for God is love". Therefore as Christians and as human beings let us show that we know God by engaging in active love towards our fellow human beings and thereby become perfect. That is 'mature' – to be perfect is that which achieves its intended objectives. We were created to be God-like – that is: Christlike.

Other peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.

With St Wilfrid and with all those who have gone before us as Christians and brought light and transformation to the world - go out and offer love, seek justice and make peace.

And if, for whatever reason, you are in a place in your heart or your head that you cannot do any of those things then believe you can receive them and are still a child of God. Amen

Related LinkRipon Cathedral