Trees of our Fathers

In preparation for the synod’s 40^th birthday celebrations Ray Anglesea, minister at Crook, weaves together in the context of the days gospel reading, Crook’s Messy Church’s Harvest Festival (of Trees) with the synod’s summer pilgrimage to the preachingtrees at Windyhaugh, Coquetdale.

“Take up your cross”, says Jesus to His friends, “and follow.” (Matthew 16.24) What is it that we take up? What is it that we carry when we start walking with Jesus Christ? Sometimes we talk about everyone having their ‘cross to bear’, usually when the car breaks down or when we have a minor disappointment about arranging our holidays; sometimes, more seriously, when some really trying, testing time arrives for us; sometimes just in a general way, acknowledging that life is not all we want it to be. We all have our cross to bear.

But it falls just a little bit short of what Jesus meant, and what His friends would have heard. At that time, ‘taking up your cross’ meant accepting that you were going to die the death of a slave, a terrible and painful fate. It meant accepting that your future was out of your hands; accepting that humiliation, as well as pain, was going to be your lot. It’s a very frightening command indeed, seen in that light. To be a follower of Jesus Christ means letting go of what you think is yours, the life you’d like to own and organise, the life you’d like to be, the sort of life you’d like.

So the basic command and invitation of Jesus is: let go of that dream of being in charge of your life. That is a very counter-cultural message these days. We are told, a lot of the time that the great thing is that we should take charge of our lives; that what we really want is autonomy and freedom and choice and all those other things. And it’s not terribly welcome to be told that what Jesus is inviting us to do is to let go of all that. If that were all there were to the Gospel, it would be rather hard to see why it could ever be called ”good news” if Jesus is simply saying to us “Get used to a future completely out of your hands, and don’t come running to me for help.”

But of course that’s not the good news, or anything like it. And when we think about the life of our forebears, our 17^th century dissenting ancestors who, for the sake of conscious let go of their livings, their dreams, their employment, their homes to follow Christ, often fearful, often anxious, often preaching outdoors, in secret;  our descendants opposed state interference in religious matters, and were to later to found their own churches, Presbyterians, Baptists; educational establishments, and communities; some emigrated to the New World.  But they carried their crosses and many suffered terribly at the hands of the powerful Church of England through laws, known as the Clarendon Code, which were enacted by an Anglican Parliament. They restricted the civil rights of those not professing allegiance to the church and prevented working for the state, holding a position in public office or even go to university. These restrictions remained in effect until 1828.

But the flip and more positive side of the religious and political turbulence of the 17^th century produced extraordinary people, extraordinary imaginative writers and thinkers, extraordinary scientists, the world of the Dissenting Academies, the world of Doddridge the independent dissenting pastor from Northampton and Watts, the father of English hymnody, writer and theologian (whose father was incarcerated twice) the world in which joy in the things of the mind and the heart helped people move into the space they believed had been cleared for them, the space of being free citizens, even at a time when the state and the established church had, let’s say, not quite caught up with that vision. It is worth remembering that the events of 1662 marked a political as well as a religious watershed. That moment was the beginning of a new kind of political identity and a new kind of political idealism in this country – not simply the old ‘Puritan’ agenda but a new, focused, self-aware, minority Christian identity.  And so dissenters went on digging away at foundational questions of political liberty and theological exploration and have done so to this day.

But in the 17^th century these dissenters, and there were moderate dissenters, rational dissenters, independent dissenters as well as  those radicals, non-conformists  - they had odd names – ranters, adamites, diggers, brownists, 5^th monarchists, puritans, muggletonians, they didn’t want to play the King’s game, the Merry Monarch’s game. They didn’t want to play the game of setting themselves up as someone whose lives were more important than the lives of those they served. I would like to think that dissenters and particularly those in our own tradition carried their cross by carrying their people. That’s what they carried – they carried the needs and concerns, the sufferings, of those they had been called to serve and who were to follow them on this extraordinary journey of Christian discovery. They carried their people, people looking for religious freedom and toleration.

And, no doubt, in those terrible long difficult years small congregations often in isolated rural areas like those in North Northumberland and Teesdale carried their ministers as well.  In their desperate plight, attacked by royalist and Anglican vigilantes, poor, downtrodden and helpless, they carried their ministers in their prayers, as they sang their hymns of Watts and others.

And so we begin to get a glimpse of something a bit different, and a bit more hopeful, than just that austere command to ‘carry your cross’, to put up with your helplessness. What we carry is one another. In the body of Christ, in the family of the Church, we carry one another. We bear one another’s burdens, as Saint Paul puts it. We carry one another in prayer – quite simply, we remember the suffering of our brothers and sisters in our minds and hearts, day by day and week by week. As I depend on your prayers we depend on the prayers of others.

As some of you know I have withdrawn from non-essential, non urgent church activities for the time being, mostly meetings, to care for with Ki my dying mother in law, now in her 104^th year. But as I sit with her remembering her and folks in prayer I am conscious of other people praying for me, as the gospel writers have it – praying from afar.

We know that we live and we flourish as believers, our spirits and hearts come alive, not because we’re wonderful but because other people are praying for us. And we may never know quite what that means in practice and in detail.

In this family of Jesus Christ, the cross we carry is one another.

It doesn’t mean, of course, that other people are consistently and invariably a source of pain and suffering to us – not even in the Church! The French philosopher was wrong when he said “Hell is other people.” For the Christian, heaven is other people. The family of God, the other people God gives us in friendship and fellowship, they are our Heaven. And woe betides us if we forget that responsibility for one another and that willingness to be carried along by one another. The willingness to ask one another for help, to ask one another for prayer, for nourishment, so that we may grow.

So our forebears who preached under trees at Windyhaugh, Upper Couqetdale, are not there just to say to us “Look how wonderful, what heroic dissenters we are.” They are there to remind us that holy lives are lives in which people generously, trustfully, let go of their fears, their anxieties and let themselves be carried by the prayer and love of others, and above all by the love of God. And in our church, our task is that carrying of one another. It’s because of that faithfulness to one another that we are able to live and to grow. The greatest task given to us in the Church is to be faithful to one another. We know we have to be faithful to God, and this is the way we do it: by being faithful to one another and carrying one another along.

Because that, of course, is the underlying truth of the cross of Jesus. How and why does Jesus carry the cross? Because He is faithful to those God has given Him. He knows that for them to live and flourish and rejoice, He must risk everything. And He knows that if He is to be faithful to what He alone can do, if He is to be faithful to the God who has called Him, then He must be faithful to the path of risk and the path of suffering. But before we get too focused on the suffering, let’s remember the faithfulness. It’s because God is so passionate about us, so devoted to us, so consistent in His love and promise to us, that Jesus goes to the cross.

We’re involved with one another now. We’re summoned to carry one another, to be there for one another’s need, to help one another grow. We’re here, ambitious as it sounds, to be God’s gift to one another. Not in the sense we sometimes use those words – “He thinks he’s God’s gift to mankind” – but, quite literally and seriously, to be the way in which God gives hope and life and growth to the person next to us, and next to them, and to the people we’re never going to see or meet. The people we hold in our hearts, and carry in our hearts and in our prayers.

Christ Himself, we’re told in the letter to the Hebrews, carried this burden because of the joy that was set before Him. And we shouldn’t ever for a moment forget that joy that is before us, carrying one another in this way, letting go of our defences, letting go of our fears so that we can carry one another’s need. That is the way to life and the way to joy. Not the kind of joy we might have ordered for ourselves from the mail-order catalogue, but the kind of joy that God Himself wants to give us, and wants us to share with the world. May we be such a sharing, joyful, caring community?

Amen

 Mark 8.27-end, Judges 9 v7-15

16^th September 2012