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The Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon at All Souls Anglican Church, Tsakane Diocese of the Highveld, South Africa, 7 March 2007
March 07, 2007First of all, thank you for your welcome. Thank you for all that you have done already to make your guests feel so completely at home here in this wonderful place, in this extraordinary country which so many of us love so much and for which we give God thanks so very often.
Thank you Archbishop for your welcome, for all that you have done for us in these days and for all that you have done for the church worldwide also. I know that the people of God in the Anglican Church here in South Africa have good reason to proud of their Archbishop before Almighty God.
Clapping
Now, because of what I have said you’ll realize that it is very hard for me to disagree with the Archbishop (congregationlaughs) but I am just about to do it. Early on in this mass the Archbishop spoke about the language of heaven. Now, I come originally from a place called Wales and we know in Wales what is the language of heaven (congregation laugh). It is of course Welsh. But among the many things that the Welsh people have in common with the people of this land is that they love singing.
And I am going to begin by telling you a story about Welsh singing. And this is a story about a Welshman who went to heaven. Some of us do. We do not quite know how many but we are trying to improve our records. And like all good Welshmen he had sung in a choir for most of his life and he had sung tenor. Some of you may have heard Welsh tenors singing and those of you have will know that you do not forget it quickly.
Well, our friend let’s call him Will entered the gates of heaven and St Peter said “Where do you come from “ Wales”, said Will. I expect you can sing then”, said St Peter. “Of course, I can”, said Will “fifty five years of the Treochy Male Choir”. “Well”, said St Peter “It so happens that St Michael is always looking out for people to join the heavenly choir. So go and report to him”. Will went along to St Michael.
There was St Michael in front of the Heavenly Choir - a thousand million sopranos, a thousand million contraltos, three thousand and seventy five basses and no tenors.
“So, your are Welsh?” said St Michael. “What do you sing?” said St Michael. Tenor said Will. Wonderful said St Michael join the choir. And we are singing the Hallelujah chorus I expect you know it. St Michael tapped the baton on the desk and they started singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Two minutes into it St Michael said “Couldn’t we have a bit less tenor, please?”
(Congregation laughs)
Now, I am telling you this story not just to praise my nation, although I love it greatly.
Imagine being able to notice if one voice was missing. Imagine in that huge Heavenly Choir St Michael suddenly stopping the singing not tell Will to be quiet but to say I can’t hear Henry, I can’t hear Agnes. As if he could hear every single voice in that endless Heavenly Choir. It is as if he knew that if one voice was missing the music would be wrong.
Now, the gospel today tells us that that is how Jesus Christ listens to the world. The world is a choir that he calls to sing his praise and glory and if one voice is missing the music is wrong. And Christians are concerned about justice, concerned about those whose voices are not heard on earth because every voice is heard by Jesus in heaven.
And if one voice is missing the music is wrong.
This week in our meeting here at Boksburg we should be asking ourselves and asking God how we make the music right. How we work for a world where every voice can be heard. Where the music is what God wants it to be because all voices are there.
“Which one of you having a hundred sheep” says Jesus “and losing one of them does not leave the ninety nine in the wilderness? The shepherd, the good shepherd, notices the one that is missing and he goes to search for it.” And sometimes, I imagine the ninety nine sheep protesting to the shepherd. Can you hear their voices? They are saying “Why are you going after that one sheep? Is that one sheep more important than the rest of us? Why do you need the one who goes astray, the one we can do without?”
And the good shepherd says to the protesting sheep “I do not know who you are unless you are with all the others”. And that’s what Jesus Christ says to the world to each one of us “I do not know who you are, I do not know who you are, I do not know who you are, without the neighbor, without the other, without the person who may be lost who may go astray, who may not have the means to make their voices heard. I do not know who you are without the others with you.
The lost sheep has nothing without the flock but the flock has nothing without the lost sheep.
And so it is that Jesus goes in search of those who are needed, who are valued, who are precious to him and he tells us that if they are precious to him they must be precious to us because without them our music will be wrong.
That’s part, a big part, of the good news of the Christian gospel and it is a big part of the challenge that in our conference this week but also in every act of Christian worship and witness we are trying to answer – getting the music right, part of the good news.
And today’s second reading fills that out and takes us a stage further. Tells us something more about the good news that we need to hear, when Jesus comes in search of the lost sheep, when that great Heavenly Choir director comes to look for the voice that is missing. He does not do it from a distance; he does not do it as somebody who has power working for the powerless he comes right into the middle of the situation of powerlessness and suffering. He shares it and he transforms it by sharing it. God made him to be sin who knew no sin.
Jesus Christ, perfect and holy, becomes completely caught up in this world of ours. This world of people like us, who are neither perfect nor holy but he does not speak to us as speaking to them but he speaks of us. And he speaks with and for us to God as one of us. He is not afraid of being alongside. He is not afraid of the risk and even the loss that that can mean he comes to identify with us, he comes to share the risk with us. And he draws out our voices by speaking in a human voice himself. Not a voice that thunders from the sky. Not a voice that finishes the conversation but a voice that invites us to speak with him, to open our hearts with him because he knows our human hearts.
And if we with Jesus are to go in search of the lost, to go and listen for the voices that are missing we go taking risks, standing alongside him. We go knowing that we do not have all the answers. As you all know that the worst kind of work for justice and peace that anyone can do is to go into a situation saying, you do not know but I do know how to solve your problems. And most of us have suffered from that at one point or another even in our individual lives not least from those kind fellow Christians who tell us in great charity and love that they know better than we do how to run our lives.
But Jesus comes and speaks in a voice we can trust. Remember in John’s gospel it says that the sheep know the shepherd’s voice and they trust him. We trust Jesus Christ because he speaks as one of us because he suffers and he struggles as one of us. So we hear, we answer, we question and out of that everything begins to change and as St Paul says, “there is a new creation everything old has passed away, see everything has become new”.
There is our second part of the good news. Not just that God in Jesus Christ comes to search for the lost but he comes into the world of the lost, he comes to share its pain, its struggle and its hope. He recreates the world not from outside but from inside by bringing his divine life into the heart of the world and letting it grow and blossom there he breaks the moulds, he breaks the chains, he breaks the limits of the old world. He makes it new and he makes us new. If any one is in Christ there is a new creation. The old has passed away everything has become new.
This is the good news for the poor. This is the good news for each one of us. The news, that each one of us has a voice without which our neighbors cannot be themselves. The news that we depend upon each other to be human. We depend upon each other to be human, we do not learn it in isolation, we do not learn it in the abstract we learn it together, the body of Christ. And we learn it because Christ himself has come to speak our language, to live our live to risk our suffering, to die our death and to renew our world by resurrection bursting the bonds from within.
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed. Isaiah said that to us in our first reading and in the other two readings we discovered what that good news was. The good news that is first for us for each one of us and then for everyone we meet and everyone we encounter whose voice is precious in God’s sight, in God’s ears. Whose praise has required for each one of us to be ourselves, learn to be human together, learn to be human in the company of Jesus Christ. The old has passed away, the new has come. And when this work of proclaiming the preciousness of each person in God’s sight when that work in undertaken, when we are set free to take the risks of love then the spirit of the Lord God is visible, then the spirit of the Lord God is at work, then the anointing of God is on us. If you want to ask were do we see the Holy Spirit one great Christian writer said we can see the Holy Spirit in the face of a free Christian person doing the work of Jesus Christ, there is the Holy Spirit. You can look at one another in this service of worship and you can say the Holy Spirit is there. What does the Holy Spirit look like? The Holy Spirit looks like the person next to you. That may be quite a shock, may not be what you expected but yet there is the face of Holy Spirit. The person next to you who is here because they want to do the work of Jesus Christ, because they want to tell you and tell the world of that preciousness of each one of us in God’s eyes. To tell you and to tell the world that every voice matters in God’s ears, that without every person’s praise the music would be wrong.
I began with one kind of story but let me finish with a very different story which seems to be a story about the new creation. Today in the church calendar of the Church of England we are remembering two saints from about 1800 years ago. Two of the first African Saints, in fact, so it is very appropriate to remember them here today. Two women who gave their lives for the faith, Perpetua and Felicity, executed in Carthage by the Roman authorities for their allegiance to Jesus Christ. Now there were many martyrs, there were many who gave their blood for the gospel in that generation. But there was something very special about these two women. Perpetua was a rich young lady and Felicity was her slave. They had been baptized together, they had been imprisoned together, and they came to execution together. We are told that Perpetua and Felicity, these two brave women walked into the arena where they were to be attacked by wild beast, hand in hand. A slave woman and her owner, recognizing in that moment neither would have been herself without the other and that in Jesus Christ their relationship was completely transfigured. They came in hand in hand, Perpetua the rich young woman, the spoiled young aristocrat, holding the hand of her slave saying, “I can only be myself here as a Christian if you were with me”. Felicity as a slave who had endured God knows what humiliation and suffering as a slave in her mistress’s house holding on to her mistress’s hand saying, “I am prepared as a slave to help to set you free as we walk together in the will of Jesus Christ”.
Perpetua and Felicity among the first martyrs of this continent were remembered everyday in the old mass of the Roman Catholic Church; their names were repeated everyday at every celebration of Holy Communion along with many other saints from Roman and North Africa in those early centuries. It is as if the Church saw in that moment an image of what the new creation was, new creation in which slave and the slave owner had to drop their old identities and move into a world, not only of freedom, not a freedom for the individual but freedom for one another, freedom to build up one another’s humanity as those two women built up each other’s courage and endurance in that terrible moment. A new creation is about how we are set free in that way, set free each one of us, to draw out the voice of our neighbor in prayer and praise. But when we labor for justice, for reconciliation, for peace between nations, for justice and liberty for the slaves of our own day that is what in Christ’s name and by the power of Christ’s Spirit we are seeking to do. To draw out the voices of all so that God may be rightly praised so that the music may be right, so that all God’s children may sing “Hallelujah” together, together with those millions in Heaven and with Will from Wales, together with Perpetua and Felicity, together with all the lost and suffering, the poor and needy who have become fully human when having come to Jesus Christ, when having heard his human voice, and they have learned that they can speak and sign to him in a human voice as well. That human voice that glorifies God as God has created it to do, a new creation. AMEN!