South Wales
Belonging to the Way
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- Created on Thursday, 02 December 2010 10:40
The Revd Adrian Bulley was inducted to City United Reformed Church in Cardiff on Saturday 27th November 2010.
Carla A. Grosch-Miller offered the following reflection as Adrian was inducted to his new charge.
Isaiah 58:6-12; Psalm 139; Acts 9:1-22
When we meet Saul this afternoon, he is breathing fire against women and men who ‘belong to the Way’, asking for permission to bind and to bring them to Jerusalem for trial and sentencing.
As you embark on a new chapter as the people of God in this place, I want to explore with you the notion of Belonging to the Way as what it is to be Christian and how the concept of our identity as a Way not a label, a journey not a handle, fosters our flourishing and our faithfulness.
We are women and men and children who belong to the Way. People of faith have long regarded themselves as people of a particular Way.Before the people crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land, Moses is said in the book of Deuteronomy to have given a final sermon to prepare them for their new life in liberty. He told them: I set before you today two ways: the way of life and prosperity, and the way of death and adversity. The way of life is to love God, walking in God’s way and following the commandments. The way of death is to turn away from God, following and serving other gods. Choose life! [Deuteronomy 30:15-20]
‘Way’ is a word with many meanings. It can have a rather rigid connotation as a habitual course of conduct –‘we’ve always done it this way’ is a phrase not unfamiliar in the church. I’ve certainly heard it in every church I’ve served.
‘Way’ can a little more flexibly connote a framework for decisions: the way we make important decisions in the United Reformed Church is that the church meeting discerns the mind of Christ. We use the values we have absorbed from the Christian way to determine a course of action, how we will spend our time, talent and financial resources. In this way, the ‘way we’ve always done it’ may be set aside for a new way to do things and change may be facilitated.As Chesterton reminds us: tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire – the energy for God-inspired change. We in the church reformataet semper reformanda, reformed and reforming, value God-inspired change.
‘Way’ can also carry a sense of movement, a fluidity like water over boulders in a brook, and a direction. Some of our streets are named Ways. We give instructions as the way to get from one place to another, aiming at a particular destination. We describe progress as making headway.
Finally as we begin the season of Advent tomorrow, the great season of preparation for the incarnation, we will hear and sing of making way for the coming of the Lord. Here ‘Way’ signifies yielding, making space and preparing room.
All of these uses of the word ‘Way’ have significance for us as People of the Way; some seem more helpful than others, but all play their part. Even what can seem like it is ‘in the way’ – for instance, controversies over what colour the hall is to be painted or where the communion table sits– may be an invitation for the community to work through ‘the way we’ve always done it’ to discover a new way to listen to one another and root decision-making in spiritual values.
Being People of the Way reminds us that we are a work in progress –God is not done with us yet! ; that we carry baggage –‘the way we’ve always done it’ --that needs to be dealt with sensitively and wisely; that our process is as important as our destination; and that ultimately we are about making space for God, living and walking in a way that spirit takes on flesh in the world.
Saul’s story reminds us that there may be radical re-orientations on the Way. He was dead sure that he was right as he chased and arrested those who belonged to the Way. His scriptures were clear; his zeal for God unparalleled. And he was completely wrong. He could not see the new thing God was doing until it smacked him upside the head and sent him sprawling.
The Christian church has been plenty wrong plenty of times. A review of our history is cringe-worthy – from the bloody Crusades of the 11th-13th centuries that put the sword to Jews, Muslims and bystanders to the heresy-weeding Inquisitions of the 12th through the 19th centuries where we murdered our own; from well-meaning missionaries bringing disease and commerce that expunged and exploited indigenous people to the white Christians who join the Ku Klux Klan in America or the British National Party in the United Kingdom; from the majority of the German Churches’ acquiescence to the Holocaust in the 20th century to the contemporary churches’ wilful ignorance about human sexuality in the 21st. The church has not always been on the side of justice or of mercy or of human and planetary flourishing – the things that matter to God. When our neighbours reject God, they are often reacting to our triumphal ignorance and arrogance, and who can blame them.
In the middle of the last century, the Revd Dr Martin Luther King, Jr wrote a letter from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama where he had been put because of nonviolent protest against American apartheid. If I were the queen of the church universal, I would paste his letter into every Bible because People who belong to the Way need to hear it. Here is a small excerpt:
There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being ‘disturbers of the peace’ and ‘outside agitators’. But they went on with the conviction that they were ‘a colony of heaven,’ and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. There were too God-intoxicated to be ‘... intimidated’. They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest.
Things are different now. The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the 20th century.
I can’t read that last line without quaking, thinking of so many of our diminishing congregations clinging to the ‘way we’ve always done it’, self-focused and aging, wanting the church to be there until they are buried – the last one can turn the light out.
God expects more from us than blind allegiance to the status quo, ‘the way things are’, in our churches and in our world. People who belong to the Way, whose vision is trained on the horizon for where God needs us to be, ought to be the headlights – not the taillights—on the road. People who belong to the Way, who see all life as a gift, with dignity and value, ought to be at the forefront of the great movements for justice and compassion in the church and in the world, repairing the breach and restoring the streets to live in. People who belong to the Way, who know that God does new things, ought to be looking and listening for those new things, and ought to bless and not to hinder them.
The challenges ahead of us, as a human family and as a church family, are immense. The threat of climate change is already smacking people upside the head and sending them sprawling in Bangladesh, the Arctic and the Maldives. We energy guzzlers in the West shrug our shoulders;it’s too inconvenient and uncomfortable to change our ways. The violence of fundamentalist religious belief – Christian, Jewish and Muslim – sidelines the kinds of theological discourse we need to be having that will enable the great faiths to work together for the flourishing of the human family. The rot in our economic system that has enabled the rich to continue to get richer and now requires the poor to pay for the mistakes of greedy bankers has not been routed out. Young people who wrestle their sexuality still attempt suicide at far higher rates than those who don’t.
We are People who belong to the Way – not the Way things are, but the Way things can be; not the Way we always do it, but the Way that lets in the light and moves us along the road.
And now you have recognised that God has called friend Adrian to lead and to accompany you on that road --a man who understands faith as movement, as pilgrimage, and as energy that is shaped and expressed in worship and in mission, on what God is doingin the world and how we might get caught up in it. And, I must warn you, a man who has an uncontrolled sense of humour and peculiar taste in socks.
You have all that you need to meet the challenges of these times. You have the Word which testifies to the nature and grace of God. You have the world which will continue to beckon you from these four walls. You have a living God, who knows and loves you through and through, and who will light the way to the future where all creation is made new. And you have each other – now all the richer because Adrian and Anne have joined you.
You are women and men and children who belong to the Way. Be good to one another. Listen to one another and to the breathing of the new world struggling to be born. Hold fast to the one who knows and loves you and will not let you go. Laugh with one another. And walk the way of Jesus with confidence, hope and joy: God is alive and goes before you, to bless you and make you a blessing.
Amen.