From an illustrated sermon preached at Stanhope Methodist Church, Stanhope, Sunday 4th September 2011 by Ray Anglesea
This is a special time of the year in Weardale. A time of beauty; purple heather moorland, harvested golden wheat fields, ripening berries, brambles, rowan and elderflower, the twittering of excited migrating swallows and the cry of the curlews. The annual Stanhope show, now in its 170th year, is a display case celebrating the best of agricultural and county life, the main ring the hub for the exhibition of local sheep, cattle and industrial produce, show jumping, horse and pony classes. It will rain of course, warm, soft rain that will make the cake stall cover up. Looking out over the fields and River Wear it is difficult to think that we belong, in the Prime Minister’s recent words, to a nation that has lost its way, a broken society, a sick society that is near breakdown, a society in a state of moral collapse. The August disturbances in the nation’s inner cities seem a million miles away from our beautiful dale, the town enclosed and surrounded as it is by the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, quite simply one the most lovely and unspoilt parts of England.
The peace and quiet of this nineteenth century Methodist chapel may seem like another world, but it is not. For here we come to encounter a God not of make-believe but of reality, not of other-worldliness but of this-worldliness. This holy space is a sanctuary of worship where our prayers and praises are not words that signify disengagement but connection.
That violent disorder should break out on the streets of London and other major British cities last month was a profound shock. For three unbelievable days, violent and lawless events ran horribly ahead of the collective ability to control or anticipate them once they erupted. We looked on in horror as we witnessed thuggery, vandalism and theft, murder, and the vicious and ferocious malice shown towards the police. The events and actions revealed the presence of a serious social disease, posing threats to the common good for which society was wholly unprepared. For most of us it was deeply unnerving to realise how fragile the veneer of civilised urban life really is. The Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks writing in The Times said “What we witnessed was a real deep-seated and frightening failure of morality; rebels with or without a cause - it was a moment when the nation caught a glimpse of its soul – and it was not a pleasant sight.” Whatever the reasons for this violent behaviour, they can never be excuses. For my own part I was relieved that the media did not blame my profession, the planning profession, for urban design solutions that have made the cities crooked places straight and the narrow ways wider to speed police access to trouble spots.
In the wake of these shocking events, it’s important to avoid, knee-jerk reactions and trite answers. Politicians and social policy commentators including Lord Sacks have, nevertheless, thrown in their two pennyworth. Already the analysis and debates have continued about the erosion of public values. Many people realise that the causes of the recent civil unrest and disturbances in our inner cities are complex; the problems have hitherto been politically managed and contained. Deprivation and measures of austerity are likely to have played their part as well as high levels of unemployment, dysfunctional families, ending of education maintenance allowance, the discarding of Sure Start programmes, attacks on social housing tenancies – all of which may have given rise to tension and anxiety - but it would be too simplistic to place sole blame there. But clearly something has gone badly wrong. Whether we talk about an underclass or social exclusion or simply poverty it should be clear that the problem may have been ameliorated, but it was not solved by the Labour government throwing money alone at the inner cities, however well intended their social and economic policies may have been; and credit here must be given to the magnificent success of the Sure Start programmes. But let’s be clear - the tone adopted by Mrs Thatcher following the Faith in the City report in 1985 still continues in this present administration. For Thatcher personal responsibility and wealth creation were the keys to a healthy and peaceful society, and the welfare state was undermining these – hence her famous remark that “there is no such thing as society,” and her memorable reinterpretation of Jesus’ words in which she argued: “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” Revd Dr Michael Northcott, Professor of Ethics at Edinburgh recently stated in the religious press “that what we saw on the street of England 3 weeks ago manifested not only a moral crisis, but a spiritual crisis; market and money are the gods of this new religion.”
The Bishop of Manchester, the Rt. Revd Nigel McCulloch, in a recent BBC Radio 4 broadcast suggested that “the disappearance of public values, some would argue, has led to a moral deficit in private and public life that has spawned acquisitiveness and dishonesty. It’s evident at all levels of our society.” To be frank, the riots are not the only recent examples of theft and greed. We are reaping what has been sown over the last 3 decades of creating a grotesquely unequal society, a society of looters created with MPs and their expenses, bankers and their bonuses, tax evading corporations, phone hacking journalists, bribe taking police officers. To create a false division between what we do in public and how we are in private is fraught with problems of credibility. This is not to condone but to understand the new forces of disorder emerging in our communities.
How can faith communities and the Christian churches, in particular, and Matthew’s gospel this morning help to bring light and wisdom to the problem of conflict and unrest? I’m not sure that shrill demands for the Ten Commandments as suggested by some letter writers to The Times are likely to be heeded – even though I have a high regard for that moral code of unsurpassed clarity about not stealing and not coveting what belongs to others. By sheer coincidence as we begin a new month and a new school year, the lectionary begins a series today on teaching skills for practical living. As Christ calls us to live in community we think about how such skills might help us to resolve conflict in our midst.
Matthew wrote his gospel some 80 years after Jesus’ resurrection to small church communities who were struggling to survive in scattered communities separate from the synagogues out of which they grew. Although Paul was the great founder of mixed congregations in Gentile cities, by the ninth decade the Pharisees had successfully banned Jewish Christians from participating in the synagogue for breaking the sacred laws of the
Covenant. It seems that Matthew needed to say something to the members of his own faith community to settle internal conflicts when such open conflicts arose.
Whether this was an internal, specific and isolated problem in the early church we do not know, but history has shown that the church has not heeded Matthew’s instructions. Through the ages the church has not been immune to its own conflict, protest, demonstration, infighting, power and greed. And that is perhaps why we in the church still say on a daily basis ‘forgive us our trespasses,’ only wishing that others would join us in this penitence. For me reading this passage, Matthew 18 is the bedrock for the practical outpouring of basic principles of reconciliation; it is severely practical as well as ruthlessly idealistic. Reconciliation is a huge issue today; we see clearly the results of not doing it: in inner city riots, suicide bombs, campaigns of terror. That’s on the larger scale. On the smaller scale we see not only discord in our soaps, Coronation Street and The Archers, but also in broken marriages, shattered families, feuds between neighbours, divided churches.
Learning to live together whether in the church or city community with a great company of different others is the challenge that faces us more now than it ever has done in the past. Positive interaction and interdependence between peoples whether in Tottenham or Manchester are fundamental to the creation of community. Reconciliation and peacemaking I suggest begins with not blowing social, economic and racial issues out of all proportion; we can have a conversation about whether we think we live in a broken society or a society that is being broken up, but facebook and social media networks prompts us to say what is on our mind which often calls for instant knee jerk reactions and responses. Responsibility for peacemaking begins with the individual – with me - I need to work on my behaviour, my attitude, my heart to help the community to work. Remember G K Chesterton’s famous dictum? – “What is wrong with the world? – I am”. Matthew’s instructions in his gospel to the early church suggest that we should not only be peacemakers but we should tread softly on issues, getting to the root of the problem before it festers. We have to acknowledge that conflict is painful; in recent years restorative justice has been increasingly valued. The encounter between perpetrator and victim is not easy but it may offer a long term solution for both parties if they can face it. One of the most remarkable women in Glasgow is Karyn McCluskey, a single mother, nurse, forensic psychologist, and community campaigner. In response to the damage caused by violent gang warfare in her native city, she “treated violence like a disease and mounted a public health campaign against it”. Her courageous and amazingly successful campaign was essentially about setting up meetings between victims, their families, and perpetrators of bloodshed. From all quarters of the community, members of the most vicious gangs were bombarded with requests to give up their violence and channel their energy into something that enhanced life — theirs and that of others.
Matthew through these instructions is offering not only the church but maybe civil society ways of developing strategies to access the grace needed to be good neighbours under circumstances of great disparity of both wealth and life chances: in modern cities where rich and poor live cheek-by-jowl and in the life of our churches.
Canon Stephen Cherry writing on the Durham Cathedral web site a couple of weeks ago indicated that the August riots were a disgrace - an absolute disgrace; evidence of the lack of the very grace that is needed for people to live together in community. He suggests “that grace becomes a force to be reckoned with when people freely open their hearts to their neighbours and to God, when they look to the interests of others rather than their own”. A society must measure success not simply in terms of material riches, but on its morality, its compassion, its concern for neighbour, its belief that the individual good is inseparably linked with the common good, particularly that of the most vulnerable. Our society will be judged by the values we teach our children and that applies to bankers and politicians as well as parents. And it is precisely that change, this strategy which needs to take place on a scale never previously imagined if our cities are to be good places for people to live in today and tomorrow.
God is not remote from our concerns any more than we are remote from the forces unleashed in our cities. Our faith is that ultimately grace will triumph. Our action must be to do what we can to let grace triumph in our own lives, our churches, in our own communities. The question is ‘how well are we playing our own part in the ongoing spiritual struggle between grace and disgrace?’ Alas we live in a world of good and bad and that makes our lives and relationships painful and complicated. It’s a struggle from which no person or community is ever spared and that is why life is often so painful. But since our faith tells us where true victory lies our own struggle is informed by the confidence that, however deep the pain, however terrible the disturbance and carnage, grace will triumph in the end.
Psalm 119 v33-40;
Romans 13 v8-14; Matthew 18 v15-20
Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and an authorised Methodist Minister working in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit.
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