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Archbishop of Armagh Address at Week of Prayer for Christian Unity Service, Newry Cathedral The Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, the Most Revd Alan Harper, OBE, will give the address at a Service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
The Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, the Most Revd Alan Harper, OBE, gave the address at a Service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity this evening (Thursday 21 January 2010) on the theme of ‘You are my witnesses’ at the Cathedral of SS Patrick and Colman, Newry (Diocese of Dromore) at 7.30 pm.
The full transcript of the Archbishop’s sermon follows below, please click here.
Archbishop Harper said, ‘My credibility as a witness depends as much upon how I behave, how I live my life, how I relate to the people and the creation around me, as it does to what I say. I shall not be a credible witness if my life and my deeds are not an enacted parable flowing directly from my express convictions. And that is why, as a witness to the presence and love of God in Christ, a life lived constantly at odds with expressed Christian beliefs and principles is a greater threat to the Gospel of Christ than any amount of atheistic hostility.’
He continued, ‘We should be proud to say, we should dare to say: “We are Christians. We do not always agree with one another about everything beyond our common confession of the Triune God, but we love and respect one another.” … love transcends difference – it does not remove it but it transcends it.’
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Transcript of Archbishop Harper’s Address, Newry Cathedral, 21 January 2010
You will be my witnesses…
Acts 1.8
My dear sisters and brothers in Christ, my first words must be words of gratitude and thankfulness for the invitation to be here this evening to pray with you for the advancement of unity in the Church of God. This is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, not to be confused with prayer for Christian uniformity or indeed unanimity. I will make reference to that a little later in my address.
First, however, I want to take you to Armagh where, in 1790, one of my predecessor archbishops – Richard Robinson – established the Armagh Observatory. That observatory still conducts frontline astronomical research with a staff which includes around 25 research astronomers. Ever since 1790, archbishops of Armagh have chaired the Board of Governors of the observatory.
Speaking to a government minister on one occasion he expressed himself surprised that a Christian minister should be associated with astro-physics and modern cosmology. However, had he looked in the Boardroom of the observatory he would have seen, on a cartouche which displays the emblem of the observatory, these words chosen by Richard Robinson himself:
The heavens declare the glory of God
Robinson chose as a motto for his great scientific investment words from Psalm 19:
The heavens are telling the glory of God
And the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
One day pours out its song to another
And one night unfolds knowledge to another.
They have neither speech nor language
And their voices are not heard
Yet their sound has gone out into all lands
And their words to the ends of the world.
Whenever I hear those words, I hear them to the setting of Joseph Haydn, a contemporary of Robinson, who completed his great oratorio The Creation in 1798, a mere eight years after Robinson’s foundation of the Armagh Observatory.
The burden of the psalmist’s glorious hymn is that the most eloquent testimony to the truth of the creator is creation itself. So, let me make a personal declaration – let me be, so to speak a witness: I do not disbelieve in the being of a creator because of the witness of science. On the contrary, the more I learn and the better I understand the mechanics of the Cosmos, together with the implications of the processes discovered through physical, geological and evolutionary science, the better and more nuanced becomes my insight into the mind (or perhaps I should say, more poetically, into the heart) of the Creator.
I cannot stand here tonight and declare to you that I believe in God as a logical inevitability – perceptions of God do not depend upon logic. I can no more prove what is carelessly called “the existence” of God than anyone can prove otherwise. Some people are content to say, “I do not need to recognize the reality of God in order to make sense of the world of which I am a part.” So be it, I respect that. What I want to say is that my understanding and my experience of the world of which I am a part is made significantly more coherent by the instinct and insight that behind all that I see, measure and feel there is unbounded being that fills creation with meaning and purpose, including moral purpose.
So, for me, the primordial witness to God is creation which I believe was called into being by God. The heavens declare the glory of God even though, as the psalmist says, they are speechless:
They have neither speech nor language
And their voices are not heard
Yet their sound has gone out into all the world
And their words to the ends of the earth.
I need to add this: the Bible is not a text composed to demonstrate the existence of God. Rather the reality of the being and purpose of God is the primary, underlying assumption of the biblical record. The Bible is a record of encounter, experience and interpretation. It would probably be right to say that the Bible does not prove anything, rather it points to someone. It points to God. For Christians, it points supremely to the fullness of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. I believe in that revelation and for that reason I am a Christian by conviction. I am, of course, an Anglican by choice.
It is as a Christian, therefore, that I take with complete seriousness the words of Jesus immediately before the Ascension, referring directly to himself, his incarnation, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection, as he instructs his disciples: “You shall be my witnesses”.
It is important for us to hear these words afresh for two reasons in particular:
First, because we can no longer assume that people outside the community of faith have any familiarity with talk about the being and activity of God. God is rarely on people’s agenda except to ridicule the notion or caricature faith, therefore I must maintain my consistent witness to belief in God.
Second, because the one whom I believe to have been the express incarnation of God commands me to declare to the world what He has shown us about the nature and truth of God, including the ultimate vindication of the triumph of God symbolized and exemplified in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Therefore, one of the most important questions I have to answer is this: “What does it mean and what will it take in 2010 to be a credible witness?”
My first response to that question is this: my credibility as a witness depends as much upon how I behave, how I live my life, how I relate to the people and the creation around me, as it does to what I say. I shall not be a credible witness if my life and my deeds are not an enacted parable flowing directly from my express convictions. And that is why, as a witness to the presence and love of God in Christ, a life lived constantly at odds with expressed Christian beliefs and principles is a greater threat to the Gospel of Christ than any amount of atheistic hostility.
One of the ways in which witness to God is severely compromised results from quarrelling and division amongst Christians. One hundred years ago, at the landmark Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910, it was powerfully declared that from a mission perspective the greatest impediment to evangelization is division among Christians. Edinburgh 1910 kick started the ecumenical movement. A century later conversations, consultations, committees and councils have multiplied, it almost seems exponentially. Meanwhile, a backlash against the aspiration of Christian unity has come from those who hold (I believe in good conscience) that one cannot engage fruitfully or faithfully in dialogue and the search for common ground with those from whom one differs in principle and perception.
With that viewpoint I beg respectfully to differ. Disagreements among those who claim the name of Christ, who recognize salvation as rooted in Christ, call for more and not les dialogue and in this respect the words recorded by Luke in the Book of the Acts directs us to a crucial opportunity.
After his resurrection and immediately before his final, physical departure, Jesus said to his gathered disciples, “From now on, you shall be my witnesses.”
A witness is someone who tells what he knows, what he has experienced, what he has seen, what he has recognised and understood. A witness in court takes an oath to tell what he knows of the truth of the matter at hand. Different witnesses speak of what they have seen or been party to from their own unique perspective. The more viewpoints, observations and perspectives that are gathered, the more complete – although perhaps the more complex – the picture one assembles. Disagreements, alternative perspectives, even apparent contradictions are from time to time inevitable. It could not be otherwise: not because God is fallible or unreliable but because we are; not because truth is simple (which it rarely is) but because we are simple.
Therefore what I want to suggest is that diversity and complexity, approached with reverence and respect – and wholly without triumphalism or delusions of hegemony – enrich our corporate experience of the mystery of God. We should be proud to say, we should dare to say: “We are Christians. We do not always agree with one another about everything beyond our common confession of the Triune God, but we love and respect one another.”
Let me put this another way: I believe that Christians should model a life of comprehensive unity through respectful diversity. Why? Because we are sinful; because we are fallible; because we are neither omniscient nor omnicompetent; because we require to be possessed of the humility to enter a caveat about ourselves that, from time to time, we could be wrong; and because only someone wholly deluded loves his own reflection. To express it personally: I love my wife not because of what I see of myself in her but because of what I see in her that is distinctively and attractively of herself.
Why then should I, why do I, love Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Pentecostalists, Calvinists? I love them for that which I see in them which is of Christ. I will cheerfully disagree with them about this or that, and my disagreements will probably be different in each separate encounter, but I love them not because they are Anglicans (which they are not), but because they are Christians which, emphatically, they are. They make plain, in much that they say, much that they do and much that they confess that the life and light of Christ is alive and shines in them. None of which is to say that I do not hold myself free to disagree or criticize, but love transcends difference – it does not remove it but it transcends it! And that I learned from Christ, from the very cross itself.
Christ Jesus set forward the testimony of the cross in he gracious words of the Gospels, perhaps expressed most poetically in the sayings of the Sermon on the Mount. St Paul picked up that theme in these words from his letter to the Galatians,
You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature, rather serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself”. If you keep on devouring and biting one another, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. [Gal 5.13]
Before we utter a word or lift a hand, either to aid or reprove, let us love one another. Only thus shall we retain credibility as His witnesses, recalling that evidence from an incredible witness is always distrusted and usually dismissed.
+Alan Armagh