Dedication Festival 2007 Jeremiah 29: 1, 4-11, Matthew 14:13-21
‘Seek the Peace of the city… and pray to the Lord for it.’
Exodus! Hard to think Leon Uris’ novel of that name is fifty year old. Hard to think Bob Marley’s ‘Exodus’ has been around for 40 years:
We know where were going, uh!
We know where we’re from.
Were leaving Babylon,
We’re going to our father land.
Exodus! What a sweet word of triumph! It is of course the name of the second book in the Bible, about deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery and alienation, about their road to freedom;
Sing to the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously
Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
Leon Uris wrote, Bob Marley sang, as they did because of that Biblical original. Exodus: a great milestone of human experience.
But what about ‘Exile’? ‘Exile’ is a bitter word (its pain numbed only slightly by a bitter-sweet longing for what has been left behind), a word of despair for those struggling to live a human life in an alien place. As the Spiritual says "sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home". There are millions today who feel like that, and in their hearts a longing burns. Maybe they’ve been uprooted from their homeland by poverty (from Eastern Europe), by the breakdown of civil society (from Somalia), by civil war (from the Congo), because of dictatorship (from Uganda under Idi Amin), or persecution for religious or political reasons (from Iran) and so on. People from each of these countries are, or have been, part of All Saints congregation – which means this gathering today includes them, perhaps the man beside you or the woman in front of you - or you yourself.
Exile, bitter word of despair and longing:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
Ye-eah we wept, when we remembered Zion.
When the wicked carried us away in captivity required from us a song,
now how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Psalm 137 - and didn’t our young people sing it well for us?! The words are 2,500 years old - 586 BC. when the Babylonians carried the descendents of the first Exodus off across a second hot desert, this time into exile. That’s another great milestone of human experience, and it’s resonated down through the centuries in thousands of troubled hearts - right down to 1979 when Boney M recorded that song of Rastafarian longing for the African homeland. We should note, incidentally, that that theirs is a censored version of the Psalm: the original Bible text ends with "happy is he who takes your children and dashes then against a stone"! Yes, exile at its sharpest can breed more than longing, worse than despair; it can breed hatred and vengeance, and that is a very up-to-date observation, is it not?
But in a sense all of us have a sense of exile, of being cut off from what we once knew and still feel to be our true selves. Loss of loved ones, disappointed hopes, betrayal by those we trusted, fear for the future of the planet, all these give us the sense that we were born for better than this. A man startled me a few months ago as I waited for the 50 bus: "Ah Vicar!" he said, "if you only know what this High Street used to be like, and look at it now. I HATE it!" And so saying, he thumped the showcase bus shelter with his fist!
Christianity has always recognised all this: "here", says an anonymous writer in the New Testament, "we have no continuing city; we are looking for the City that is to come". But what it says equally clearly is, ‘do not let these things have the last word, don’t just sit around longing for the past, don’t hang up your harps, don’t let despair overwhelm you, and never, never hate the children and young people of those who are different from you – or thump bus shelters! Instead, whilst you are here, praise God, keep on doing good, share what you have with others.
But it is earlier than that, at the time of the first Exile, that the most amazing word of all in our faith was spoken: ‘Build houses there’, says the prophet Jeremiah, ‘grow food there, get married there, bring up a family there. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace.’
Peace – absence of war? Peace - an hour’s chill time? Well yes, but much more than that. In Israel, you know, instead of ‘Hi’ or ‘Good Afternoon’, they say, ‘Shalom’ (‘Peace’) when you meet. This Hebrew word embraces everything which is good; absence of war and time out are only the beginning. Shalom means a wholesome communal well-being, prosperity, living in good relationships with other people, with the earth and with God. That’s what peace is, everything we feel, at our best, we as human beings were really made for.
And what makes for the peace of the city is generosity of spirit. When I say ‘generosity’, I mean much more than giving money to good causes (although, the Development Project depends on the generosity of its supporters and there will be a chance to be generous in that way in a few minutes!); I certainly mean much more than being a nice person, though that helps. A generous spirit is one that reaches out beyond the little boxes in which we normally live – family, friends, interests or profession – and reaches out to others. If I were asked what has helped the Development Project more than anything else, I’d say ‘generosity of spirit’. If I were asked what has been hardest for us to deal with, I’d say some professionals seeming to us to stick to their remits without generosity of spirit, failing to communicate to us any empathy with the consequences of their decisions.
This church is more than a place where people who want some religion in their lives go to get it: it is where God fosters within us generosity and openness of spirit in the midst of our exile; our Youth Project is more than a place for youngsters who want to chill or play football: it's where young lives are treasured, nurtured and transformed in the midst of their exile; in my estimate at least, All Saints Medical Practice is not just where you go when you are ill, it's a major community institution, a powerhouse of wholeness of life in the midst of our exile, Lloyds’ pharmacy dispenses not only pills, but also good advice, warmth and reassurance in the midst of our exile; our schools are not just skills factories, but a place where the fullness of humanity is shaped and formed.
All these treasures of expertise and skill will soon be under one roof here. And I’m sure that in a few years time, when the buildings are complete and a Centre Manager is well established in post, someone – perhaps my successor - is going to ask for an audit of how it’s all going. By what criteria will the auditors evaluate us? I hope they choose ‘generosity of spirit’, that wellspring of peace. Because, take any human experience which we address here: having a first child, teenage sexual health, parenting, growing old, facing death, the meaning of life, it’s self-evident to me that all of these involve the whole person, that none of them is the preserve of any one organisation which will shelter under the Project’s roof.
So, either we will have become a number of organisations renting space in uneasy proximity, protecting ourselves, Psalm 137-like, behind our respective traditions and core business, or we will be generous of spirit and open to each other, Jeremiah 29-like, seeking the peace of the city, of this place where God has put us now. If it’s the latter, then we won’t be wasting our energy and our spirit thumping bus shelters, resentful of a vanished past, but celebrating our High Street now, this place where we live, with its daily round and common task.
We proceed now
John Wilkinson
147th Dedication Festival
15 July 2007