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'Being open to expectation'

Address given by the Rev James W Jones, Chair of the Methodist Church in Scotland, at Archdiocesan Vespers for Church Unity Week in St Andrew's Cathedral, Glasgow, on Wednesday January 18, 2006. The Office Reading was 1 Peter 5.1-11. 

It is a great joy to begin the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity by sharing in Vespers with you this evening.

I wish to thank Archbishop Mario for his gracious invitation and I bring you the greetings and prayers of the Methodist people in Scotland. I am glad that our churches regularly work together in the Forum of Action of Churches Together in Scotland and in all kinds of local and individual ways. As Methodists, we are glad to have in the Methodist hymn book a lovely hymn for unity by Fr James Quinn who for many years sat on the former Scottish Churches Council.

But of course, here is the catch. The more I celebrate these and many other good things about drawing together, the more it exposes the underlying broken-ness of the Church, the Body of Christ. We all faithfully pray Our Father and we declare our belief in the one holy catholic church. But these profound prayers and declarations stand in tension with how things are in an everyday sense, where human frailty and finitude have fractured that Body.

Nevertheless, the Spirit-inspired and ancient prayer for the unity of God’s Church remains at the heart of the divided body. It nestles there in order to heal our wounds and raise us to new life, so that the Church can more fully exercise its God-given mission as a herald, instrument and model of the liberating Kingdom of God.

As we make that prayer in the face of history and human-ness, we need and find guidance and encouragement in Scripture, not least in that part of Peter’s letter to the Church which we read earlier.

Perhaps we should begin with encouragement, because the ecumenical task can sometimes appear hugely daunting and complex. Encouragement comes from the realisation that if the task is God-given, then it will come to fruition. Praying for unity, we are participants in a work of grace. “After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen and establish you. To him be the power for ever and ever”.

The Church is the gift of God, for the purposes of God. And so it is the Spirit of God at work among us, guarding, guiding, nudging, tugging, in the midst of our own halting stewardship and practices.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is, I believe, an example of just that work of the Spirit, helping us realise not only the shortfall of our present situation, but putting into our hearts to change attitudes and perspectives.

Another such striking instance is the signing by the World Methodist Council in June 2006 of the Joint declaration on Justification signed previously by the Roman Catholic Church and The World Lutheran Federation in 1999. At first sight nothing could sound more dull or remote, hardly competition for Big Brother or even The Broons. But wait, “justification” is church-speak for all that has to do with the human sense of identity and standing. It is the issue which so catastrophically split Europe in the sixteenth century. In our time we are witnessing the two main parties to those momentous events again finding common ground, and I am delighted that my own tradition will now be associated with that continuing work of reconciliation.

And with that encouragement, what guidance?

The letter writer is very immediate: “All of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another”. At the heart of the prayer for unity and the actions to which that commits us, is the spirit of humility, what we might call the preferential option for the other before ones-self. In the work of reconciliation, that can be heard as a call not so much to talk, let alone pronounce, but to listen, firstly to the Spirit and then to each other.

This kind of listening involves being open to the unexpected, being willing to be surprised and to making discoveries, seeing things afresh and in a new light. Humility knows it does not have a monopoly on the truth and that truth will reside in part in all kinds of places other than those which are familiar. So, for example, some Methodists have come to know the place and ministry of Mary and have found that a great enrichment of their devotions.

But it does mean changing the question. Instead of “we don’t do that”, to say “why do you do that?” opens up all kinds of fresh possibilities and perspectives. This is the very opposite of all those activities and actions which reject, even violently reject, what is not “ours”, whoever “we” may be, and which is at the bottom of prejudice and finally sectarianism.

Humility is the natural consequence of realising and recognising the Church as God’s and therefore the truth as God’s, who will reveal it as God chooses. We ourselves are here to look and to listen, in openness, faith and expectation.

Let two verses of Fr Quinn’s hymn gather together our hearing of the word:

Here in Christ we gather, love of Christ our calling.
Christ, our love, is with us, gladness be his greeting.
Let us all revere and love him, God eternal.
Loving him, let each love Christ in all his people.

When in Christ we gather, members of one Body,
Let there be no discord, but one spirit.
Banished now be anger, strife and every quarrel.
Christ, our God, be present always here among us.

Amen