Diocesan News23 Oct 11

Address given by The Rt Revd Patrick Rooke at his Enthronement Service in Saint Patricks Cathedral, Kilalla on Sunday 23rd October

Life will never be quite the same again!

The appointed Gospel Reading goes to the very heart of Christianity:
(Gospel Reading St Matthew 22: 34 – 46)
“‘Love the Lord you God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it; ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’” (v 37 – 39)

I am not sure that we ever really understand the implications of these verses.  It is easy to acknowledge God when the situation lends itself to spirituality. When we are fearful for our health or that of our loved ones,  when we seek guidance for a difficult problem, when we are going through a ‘spiritual high.’  Then God can seem very close and it is easy to give him his place as ‘Our Lord’, ‘Our Creator’, ‘Our Saviour’. It is easy to flag him up as ‘the being’ we love with all our soul, mind and body. But hard I suggest to maintain and remember.

And what is true of our relationship with God, is true too of our dealings with other people. It is easy to love people we like;  it is easy to love family, for the blood ties are strong and compelling;  it is easy to love our friends, for we can have a laugh and a chat and we think more or less the same about things anyway. But how much more difficult with those we dislike, those for whom we feel full of righteous indignation, those with whom we totally disagree.

Yet the command is unequivocal – ‘love your neighbour’.

Like Joshua, after the death of Moses, taking on the task of leading the people forward, (First Reading Deuteronomy 34: 1–12) I come to this Cathedral today tasked with the responsibility of leading the clergy and people of these Dioceses. I come, as Paul did on his first trip to Thessalonica, in gentleness (Second Reading Thessalonians 2: 1 – 8) – but also in the hope that the seeds we plant together in the coming years may, in the words of our psalm, ‘bear fruit in due season.’ (Psalm 1:1–6) I come therefore in humility and in gratitude to Almighty God,
but also in gratitude to all who have appointed me, and to those of you who have played a part in welcoming us over the past few weeks and not least today in this service of Enthronement – and I will return to this theme of thankfulness when we gather together after the service.

Much of my knowledge of the West of Ireland comes from childhood holidays spent here over the month of August each year until I was 10 or 11.  I remember the long long journey from Dublin with nine of us –yes, nine of us, without a seat belt in sight, crammed into a Morris Minor.  I can still picture my late father bent double in a quiet corner somewhere with his radio held to his ear as he desperately tried to decipher the commentary of the latest cricket test match. On my Uncle’s farm where we stayed, I recall the arrival of the first hay bailer and the excitement that it would bring to an end the laborious task of building haycocks with hay forks. Yes, I really am that old!

How things have changed.
Now we have motorways traversing the country. Cars are nothing like what they were then. Thanks to satellites, placed thousands of miles up in the sky, we now have little or no difficulty with radio signals, let alone television, mobile phone and internet connection.  Life on the farm has changed beyond recognition with massive multi–purpose farm machinery available to ensure maximum speed at the lowest possible cost in terms of manual labour.

And it isn’t just that we can do things we couldn’t have dreamt of doing then, but also that they, in turn, have changed bigger things about society and the way we live. For instance, now that we can be in touch pretty much with anywhere in the world and at anytime;  so our rules of courtesy and privacy are challenged as never before.
So too how we find and keep friends, contacts and do business are very different.

Even 10 years ago we could hardly have predicted how our lives today would be altered so dramatically by email and the web. So also employment patterns and opportunities have changed – not always for the better!  And who knows what changes are ahead and how in another 10 or 20 years life will have moved on.  Each great invention will involve some kind of shift, the benefits and costs of which will, no doubt, be great;  so that of one thing we can be sure, life will never be the same again.

‘Life will never be the same again’ – familiar words we have all said ourselves at some time or other. Words that the Pharisees and Sadducees too must have uttered in response to our Lord’s command – “Love your neighbour as yourself. He was introducing something very new to them – something that was no less of a shift in the existing world order, which is why it caused so much conflict.  ‘Love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’ – they could cope with that.  But ‘Love your neighbour as yourself,’ that was quite a different matter!

It is hardly radical stuff to our way of thinking, but what Jesus was proposing was a whole new way of life for them. He was challenging moral and hierarchical standards – No longer were the rich, as a matter of rite, assured a place in the kingdom of heaven, while those at the bottom of the social pile were to be placed on an equal footing with the ‘respectable and religious’. The familiar was being turned upside down….and they didn’t like it!

Yet, if they were to be his followers, loving God and loving their neighbour were inextricably linked.  Jesus was defining how the neighbour should be treated and in doing so, messes up the bigger ideas about how God should be loved and by whom.  He does no less than unlock the kingdom of heaven and cause a fundamental shift in the world order.  Little wonder he didn’t get an easy ride.


Things change all the time – far too quickly for most of us.  And our challenge as Christians is to keep up with how we should love our neighbour in our current time and place. Perhaps here, there is prejudice against people of another religious faith or culture or nationality or social class. Perhaps there is division in your family, in your place of work, in your town or village, even in your church congregation.  Wherever men and women live out lives together, the temptation is that competition, pride or jealousies rear their ugly heads and misunderstanding, suspicion and distrust result.  The Christian Gospel, which thankfully hasn’t changed with the passing of time,
speaks to each and everyone of us regardless of our stage on our life’s journey. Do you reach out to the poor, the mentally challenged, the migrant worker, the drop–out in society?  Or do you ostracize the eccentric, the gay, the weak, the timid or the person with special needs.

Those of you who have been in the whispering gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral know that if you whisper the words of a great prayer, the words come echoing back to you.  The same thing happens if you utter words of blasphemy or hate,
back they come just as you uttered them.  ‘What you sow, you reap.’

One contemporary novelist, Susan Howatch wrote:–  ‘Remember that God’s creation is amazingly diverse and that every strand of it is cherished.  Christianity, real Christianity isn’t about preserving walls to keep out people you don’t like – it’s about bashing the walls down to welcome all people in.’

‘Dealing positively with difference’ is the modern day jargon – but it is as basic as the command to love your neighbour.  It is about getting priorities right, standing up for what is right, and being able to distinguish between what is really worth standing up for – and what is simply part of our in–built prejudice. This means looking at issues, important issues from the other’s perspective and of course through the eyes of Christ
whose priority was always ‘neighbour’ before ‘self’.

In the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, we read of the Prophet’s anger when he heard that the people of Israel, who had been carried away captive, had forsaken the worship of their God.  So he decided to go to them and denounce them,
but then he received a vision from God, commanding him to go and live with the people before he condemned them –
and so he went:– ‘I sat where they sat, and remained there among them seven days’.

And the experience changed him – he was astonished, overwhelmed, stunned.  The hot words of denunciation were never uttered, for he now realised the trials which exiles faced.  Instead of denunciation, there was understanding,
instead of anger, there was love.  If we are to understand people, we must be prepared, to sit where they sit,  to share their difficulties and sorrows, their joys and successes.

And this we must do, because it is what Christ did, in the mystery of the incarnation.  ‘The word became flesh and dwelt among us’.  He sat where we sit.  When we look at Jesus in the Gospels, we see God coming down to dwell among us.

What a wonderful Gospel it is.  He came and walked among men and women like you and like me.  And because of that, He knows and understands you as he knows and understands me – and he commands; ‘Love your neighbour as I have loved you.’

So, at the beginning of this new chapter in the life of this United Diocese,  let us determine to sit where others sit –  view from their perspective and the picture we will then have in our mind’s eye, both of them and of God,
will be quite different indeed!

Make this relatively small change,  and life will never be quite the same again.     

Amen.

+Patrick