A View From The Vicarage - July
Dear Friends
Black Lives Matter ………..All Lives Matter
As I write this the Prime Minister has just announced a further easing of the Coronavirus restrictions in England. As well as providing a fascinating insight into devolution in action these past months have also taught all of us I suspect a valuable lesson in self-reliance and what is actually important to us and to our lives. With the places where we might routinely spend our leisure locked and barred many of us have enjoyed the experience of simpler pleasures and the ever new delight of the natural world around us.
Over the past few months I’ve heard numerous people explain how fortunate we are to live in such a beautiful part of the world. I fear that part of that beauty lies in the entirely misguided belief that Covid-19 wouldn’t manage to reach somewhere as remote from major centres of population as here. If Coronavirus has taught us nothing at all, then surely what it must have instructed each and every person wherever in the world they are is that with today’s modern transport and communication systems nowhere on the planet is as safe and remote as once it was. If news can travel around the globe in minutes a new virus can follow it as quickly as people can travel from one corner of the globe to the other. Before the Coronavirus pandemic a great many people thought absolutely nothing at all about jetting off to the more remote and exotic corners of the planet we call home.
It strikes me that one of the lessons this crisis may be teaching our world is something which people of faith have known and practised for a very long time indeed; no, I don’t mean social distancing. That’s something we’re going to have to learn anew whenever public worship is allowed to resume.
A health crisis which began in one country and rapidly spread to every other reminds us as a world population of how interconnected and interdependent we are wherever in the world we live. Surely Coronavirus reminds us that something which happens to people in a country far away isn’t their problem it’s our problem. We must not and cannot make the mistake of pretending that it’s nothing whatsoever to do with us, surely the rapid spread of Coronavirus to every quarter of the world is a lesson that what is “their problem” today can and will be “our problem” tomorrow.
The acceptance of this understanding of the interconnectedness and interdependence of each and every person is the beating heart of any and all intercessory prayer.
Prayer is about bringing before God our own concerns, those of our families, friends and communities but also situations and conflicts in places far from our shores. We bring other peoples’ concerns before God because in God’s economy all lives matter irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation, economic states, educational attainment. Intercessory prayer is a powerful and potent reminder that in God each and every human person is uniquely precious and valuable as the hymn expresses it rather well:
“In Christ there is no East or West,
In him no South or North,
But one great fellowship of love
Throughout the whole wide earth.”
These lovely words by John Oxenham remind us that as Christians we believe in the equality of all people. The reason why people have left these shores to carry the good news of the Gospel of Christ to the remotest corners of the globe was and is fired and motivated by that very understanding. We might look back on some of the language these missionaries used to describe those they ministered among with horror or indeed revulsion but we must always remember that it is the motivation that we should continue to admire and respect. Each age, indeed each generation speaks in the language that it acquires for itself; language is not fixed and firm, it changes through time and usage, words which we may have taken for granted as children have in some cases altered their meanings during our lifetimes and that process continues apace. We must not, therefore, judge the language of the past by the standards of the present because they will not be the same.
That’s surely the challenge that the Church lives with to express the universal truths about God and his redemption of the whole world through Jesus Christ in a language that each and every generation can understand. However it is a challenge which we can and must rise up to as we remind those around us and ourselves that to God all lives matter whoever or wherever they are. Let’s leave the final words to John Oxenham
“In Christ now meet both East and West
In him meet South and North.
All Christly souls are one in him,
Throughout the whole wide earth.”
With my love and prayers as always,
Ben