Diocesan News30 Jan 05

Bishop Richard Clarke's address to the Sant' Egido Community, Barcelona

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ? 24 January 2005

I would of course first wish to express my very sincere gratitude to the members of my beloved Community of Sant? Egidio who have invited me to share with you in worship here in Barcelona. It is truly a pleasure and a privilege to be with you tonight.

This gives me also the opportunity to express my deep gratitude for what the Community has meant to me and has given to me over these past few years.. Nowhere else have I ever encountered this wonderful drawing together of Christian worship and Christian action in such a single and seamless unity. This has been for me (coming as I do from a different Christian tradition) a great gift and blessing ? one for which I am truly thankful to God. Worship, prayer, and the study of the Word of God should always lead inevitably and inexorably into powerful and compelling action for the dispossessed and disadvantaged of the world around us. This by no means always happens. You make it happen.. This is the grace given to you, and it is one which you do not misuse.

As we turn now to the issue of the unity of Christian people, something also close to the heart of the Community of Sant' Egidio, I want us to begin where we as Christian disciples must begin, with the Sacrament of Baptism.. Thankfully and significantly, Baptism is no longer an area of division between our different Christian traditions. Together, the different Christian traditions (whether Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican or Protestant) recognise in Baptism something which is not the possession of any of us or of any one tradition. Instead we see, in Baptism, Jesus Christ?s loving acceptance of a child of God who now becomes part of His Body, the Church. Baptism is something we can recognise in each other?s traditions as equally valid, and we should never overlook the significance of this.

Baptism is for each every one of us the beginning of all vocation, the call to discipleship , the call of Jesus to follow him; it is therefore the beginning, the root, of every call to Christian ministry, whether an ordained ministry or a ministry within the laity of the Church. Above all else, it is the recognition that it is not we - from whatever Christian tradition we may come - who choose Christ, it is Christ who chooses us. Let us never forget that. As Our Lord tells us in the Gospel of John, ?You did not choose me, I chose you..? Each one of us (from wherever we have come) has been chosen individually, chosen in love and for love by Christ himself to be his disciple, and this must place our understanding of the call to Christian unity in a fresh focus. We have all, in Baptism, been chosen by Christ to follow and to serve him.

And so the call to Christian discipleship - something embedded in our Baptism - also calls us to energetic action in the name of Christ and in the service of Christ. We are reminded in the Scriptures that when we minister to others, we are (whether we always recognise it or not) ministering to Jesus Christ himself. In a famous chapter in Saint Matthew?s Gospel, we are told that whatever we do for the least of those around us, we are doing for Jesus. More frighteningly, we are reminded that whenever we refuse to give help to those around us in need, it is Jesus Christ himself that we are rejecting and despising.

We need to remind ourselves, again and again, that Jesus does not distinguish between those whom he will love and those he will not love. He loves them all.. he loves us all. Jesus would never cross-examine people as to their goodness or their beliefs, before he touched them in love and with healing. We cannot set up barriers that Christ would never have sanctioned.

And therefore, as we pray for greater unity between Christian people and as we work for that unity which is the will of Christ, we should make certain decisions. The first is that we will seek, with God?s grace helping us, never to see other people with ?labels? attached to them ? labels of religious creed, labels of social class, labels of culture ? but that we will view them only as people, only as children of the same loving Father. We see Christ as the one who loves all his disciples equally and calls them all to be his friends.

Following on from this, we can say that no individual Christian tradition ?owns? Christ, or is even a ?majority shareholder? in him! Rather we are his, and all that we have within the Church is his - Baptism, Eucharist, and Christian Ministry are all Christ?s, they are not ours.. They belong to him rather than to us, and all that Christ does for us through the Sacraments or through Christian ministry is done by him, through his grace ? and he does what he wills, not what we tell him he has done! Do you remember what Saint Paul had to tell the Corinthians? ?So let no one boast of men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours; and you are Christ's; and Christ is God's.? We are all Christ?s, and everything the Church is and does faithfully is Christ?s action and activity, and not ours...

Of course, we are not to pretend that there will not be differences of emphasis and belief between different Christian traditions (and often, indeed, even within the same tradition!) but when we believe in our hearts and souls that we are each walking with Christ - ?the way? as he refers to himself - we are also walking with one another with love and with respect. Indeed, I would want to say that if we are not walking alongside one another with respect and with affection, we cannot truly be walking with Christ either.. Conversely, if we are walking humbly and attentively with Jesus Christ, we will also want to walk with one another.

If we follow this image of walking with Christ who is the way, we quickly recall that Christ speaks of himself as ?the way, the truth and the life..? And the search for truth is always essential. Finding truth is finding Christ. The closer we get to Christ the closer we come to the fullness of truth, and the closer we come to each other. The image is that of a triangle. Christ is the apex. As we approach closer to Jesus Christ in humility and love, the closer we discover we have come to one another. And the closer we are to Christ, the more we are prepared to learn from one another. We learn what is really important and what is peripheral. As the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, we reach towards ?attaining the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God..? Unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God - the two belong together. They cannot be separate aspirations. And so our search for unity is always a search for the living Christ. The search for Christ is the search for real and living unity.

And so, my dear friends, it is in the company of Jesus Christ himself, who (let us remember) chose some very diverse, varied and even rather strange characters to have around him, it is in his company that we find new life, new life in him, and new life with one another?