[Ely Announce] Presidential Address - The Bishop of Ely

[Sarah King]

Presidential Address, Ely Diocesan Synod, 11.6.11

The Bishop of Ely 

We have officially been designated as an area suffering drought. I think
that we already knew this! The soil is drier in some places than it has
been for fifty years and certainly this is the driest time we have
experienced since 1990. Yesterday, the Secretary of State, Caroline
Spelman, held a drought summit involving representatives of all the
stakeholders. The Environment Agency has committed itself to working
closely with farmers and water companies not only to monitor the
situation but to seek to ensure the best environmental as well as
economic outcome from a very difficult situation. The Fens are
particularly affected, worse effected, indeed, than other parts of the
region. 

We need to pray for and support our farmers through a situation which
for some is likely to get worse before it gets better. Farmers who have
irrigation technology are not affected at the moment; but farmers who do
not are in a bad way and need our particular prayers and concern.
Donations to farmers' charities will help a lot in the coming months.

The situation highlights the fact that our human flourishing is more
fragile than our human and western arrogance tells us. Many of us may
have met visitors to these shores from some parts of California who have
usually seen no rain at all for four years at a stretch. They marvel at
how green our country is - or has been. They are now facing the politics
of competition over water with various states claiming the water of the
Colorado River.  Similar disputes erupt over the tributaries of the Nile
and over river systems around the world. We generally take water for
granted in our green and pleasant land. Clean, fresh water is perhaps
the most precious natural resource which is available to us. We must
start regarding it as a gift from God and not as a commodity.

Access to clean water is denied to 1.1 billion poor people across the
world. We need to be more grateful for what we receive and to be much
more conscious of the need to collect rainwater when it comes. This is
our small way of celebrating our being a responsible and sustainable
community in a region committed to cherishing our fertile land to grow
food not just for ourselves but for the wider world. The Fenland,
recovered from the sea, is a wonderful sign of God's gift and of human
ingenuity. We must celebrate both and share the gift. 

 

When I visited a diocese in South Sudan, the local Christian revival
initiative had a factory making simple domestic water filtration units
out of wood and various kinds of sand to give away to families as a gift
from Jesus. Every deep bore hole drilled in an African village
dramatically improves everyone's health, but especially that of women
and children AND also radically improves the access of children to
education because they can attend school rather than walk up to twenty
miles for water. 

We are in human solidarity with all the poor because we, too, know what
it is to be thirsty. The difference between us is not only that they are
more thirsty just for water but that our brothers and sisters in Africa
are more thirsty than we often are to drink at the well that springs up
to eternal life. 

On Thursday evening I baptized two adults among a crowd of people to be
confirmed. There was a wonderful sense of anticipation on the part of
the candidates that they were caught up in a great transformation and
re-orientation of self. As the Psalmist writes in Psalm 63, "O God, you
are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul is athirst for you. My flesh
also faints for you, as in a dry and thirsty land where there is no
water." Although General Synod wants the Liturgical Commission to rework
the Common Worship Initiation Rites, the scriptural language within the
various alternative prayers is very rich. One of the shorter texts for
Trinity prays thus over the water,

"May your holy and life-giving Spirit

move upon these waters.

Restore through them the beauty of your creation,

and bring those who are baptized

to new birth in the family of your Church.

Drown sin in the waters of judgement,

anoint your children with power from on high,

and make them one with Christ

in the freedom of your kingdom.

For all might, majesty dominion and power are yours,

now and forever.

Alleluia. Amen. 

The Samaritan Woman discovered that there was a lot more to her
relationship with Jesus than sharing a water bucket at the well. Her
life was fully exposed for what it was - which was precisely the reason
why she was drawing water in the middle of the day repudiated by the
other women. Jesus breaks through all the barriers of caste and
tradition in his claims as the Saviour and sends the woman out forgiven
to be his witness. These are the consequences of drinking at the well of
salvation. 

You cannot live the freedom of the kingdom and not speak out. As a
communicant Anglican himself, the Prime Minister was the first to assert
the right of the Archbishop of Canterbury to articulate the fear which
many people have about the future of our public services. We are
properly concerned about how poor people living in our market towns, let
alone in the deep countryside, will be able to access jobs via public
transport. I know that the senior officers and political leaders of our
local authorities are working very hard to ensure that services are
sustained for those in real need. We need to be vigilant as well as
cooperative citizens. 

I am firmly of the view that our energetic and confident commitment to
evangelism must be yoked with our passion for mercy and sacrificial
service: building the kingdom is all about proclaiming Christ from our
knees, washing the feet of people whom we do not distinguish as either
deserving or undeserving. Demonising the poor to save money is a cynical
abuse of power. 

Mr Cameron was also right that we need to take up the opportunities both
to identify the importance of social capital in our economic future and
to throw ourselves into the running of a generous society. Bishop David
is leading an initiative to bring together leaders from every sector of
society in our region to discover how we change our culture away from
'me, me' to 'we and us'. We need a persuasive case to be made for
compassionate capitalism which we can all understand. As the Archbishop
said to the New Statesman readership, it would help if the Left gave us
a viable alternative to the Coalition's case to weigh in the balance. We
also clearly need not to be taking on great swathes of services in order
to flounder like a Southern Cross but we do need to galvanise that
altruistic service in the community which the Chief Rabbi rightly
identified as the gift of faith communities to the wider society. We
need to be thinking all the time about how we offer our time to support
activities like street pastors and very local neighbourliness when we
witness the miraculous quality in many forms of ordinary human kindness.

All of this arises from our conviction that dying and rising with Christ
through the deep waters of death in baptism draws us deeply into his
life as his priestly people. I often meet congregations which reveal
themselves as Anglicans by filling up churches from the back, leaving
space between what appears to be the centre of holy activity and
themselves. We are also very accomplished at creating wide spaces
between ourselves to ensure some internally coherent purity which is
felt as exclusion by others. In all this we just create spaces which
Christ then occupies and through which he always moves towards us as
Saviour and as merciful Judge. The baseline for our conversation today
about the efficacy of the current draft legislation to enable the
ordination of women as bishops is that we are all saved sinners, women
and men equally together in God's presence and in his service. We are
all in our different ecclesial languages united in one voice as the Holy
Spirit comes upon us afresh at Pentecost. We are all drawn into
something much deeper than community because the Holy Trinity draws us
into the communion of perfect love which is not going to let us down
whatever we decide in the next year or so. We need to hold one another
to account in living that communion to the highest degree possible even
when we disagree acutely.

It looks like the majority of the Church of England would support women
bishops as a natural development in the ordering of the Church. You know
that I take this view robustly myself. That does not mean that this
particular legislation will pass. It is really hard that the legislation
precedes a statutory code of practice but that is how the law works. My
prayer is that we shall find a way to stay together which honours
everyone acting with integrity. In all of this, we need to be alert to
what we present to the world, not worried that we should be like the
world but always focused on what witness to the world we seek to give.
Whatever we proclaim in word and deed is the shape and character of
human flourishing in Christ, not looking to my entitlements and rights
but to the gentle but vivid aliveness of the whole world in Christ. We
pray for the restoration of the beauty of creation when righteousness
and peace have kissed each other and our current groaning is transformed
as we hope to enter the glorious liberty of the children of God. Of
course, we are torn and do not always know how to pray or what outcome
to pray for but our confidence rests in the Holy Spirit who helps us in
our weakness and, in sighs too deep for words, intercedes for the saints
according to the will of God. Let us put ourselves and all of our
listening and discussion today into His hands.