St Andrew's Day

I've spoken in a lot of places.  In front of thousands, hundreds, dozens and less than ten; in freezing cold and searing heat, before vagrants and fabulously wealthy people.  More stories than a blog could ever cover.

But one place I spoke I will certainly never forget and Scotland's day - St Andrew's Day -  is a special day to remember it.  It was February, it was cold and windy and it was Howmore Church on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides.

To the west of Howmore Church there is a small area of moorland, a beach and then the North Atlantic Ocean.  Some thousands of miles later comes northern Labrador and Hudson Bay.  To the east there is not much either, as the picture shows.   Yes, that building is Howmore Church.

Amazing to think, on St Andrew's Day, that the news of Jesus the Messiah that Andrew first shared with his Galilean brother Simon (later called Peter) reached as far as Howmore!  The ends of the earth indeed.

Synod

Rarely does the Supreme Governor of the Church of England stray into deeply theological territory.  I suppose that in the week after one of her junior bishops called her son Big Ears it is unsurprising that she is looking a little beyond her Church for virtue!

The Queen addressed her Church's General Synod thus,

"It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue and that the wellbeing and prosperity of the nation depend on the contribution of individuals and groups of all faiths and none."

Wow.  I wonder if she realised what she said?

This is profoundly true and far too little understood.  There is no difference in the duties and opportunities of virtue for the Atheist, the Agnostic, the Believer, the Nominalist, the Buddhist, the Muslim or the whatever.  This is explained by the apostle Paul:

For we must all of us appear before Christ's judgement-seat in our true characters, in order that each may then receive an award for his actions in this life, in accordance with what he has done, whether it be good or whether it be worthless. [Weymouth's translation] 

Virtue will indeed be expected all round.  Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking, Queen Elizabeth, Kim Jong-il, Barack Obama, Richard Dawkins, Pope Benedict and every one of the rest of us.  Does faith help virtue?  I think this is possible.  Indeed, our Lord said that his followers would be light and salt in a dark and rotten world.

 

But at the heart of the Christian message is no virtue.  Just the opposite in fact.  A cross.   Condemnation, not complements.   Death not life.  Savagery not elegance.  Blood not beauty. Bad not good.  Shame, not virtue.

 

What the Synodic observation lacks are two further observations:

 

1.  That people of faith and people without faith - all of whom have the same possibility and responsibility for virtue - ALL FALL SHORT.

 

2.  There is forgiveness through a crucified Saviour who calls us to him.

 

To put it another way - the call to virtue is universal, the remedy for our failing it is unique.  Thank you Jesus!  

Formidable

Our oldest Church member died recently.  The word most of us could agree well-described her was the word formidable.

You don't get to live to 102 years old without having some determination, and Evelyn had plenty of that.  And then some.  Even at a century old she was still, well, formidable.

Which brings me to Melville Beveridge Cox.

On the face of it he was decidedly not formidable.  He set out as a preacher in New England in 1822 before contracting tuberculosis.  You don't usually live to 100 after having TB.  He gave up preaching .

He moved and began working in a bookstore.  He edited a weekly Christian magazine.  He married.  That might be calculated to turn a sickly man into something a little stronger.  He and Ellen had a baby daughter, but not long after her birth both Ellen and the baby died of cholera.

The weakly widower volunteered for missionary work in South America.  This was refused but instead he was assigned to Liberia, the African state being formed from freed slaves.  There were doubts that this not-at-all formidable man would last long in Africa.

He began as quickly as he could with a church and two mission stations further up the river.  By now he had malaria, and 15 weeks into Africa he was dead.

This story of hopeless weakness is formidable too, however.  His story had so inspired other, stronger people that even as he died five further missionaries were en route to take up and expand his work.

In truth, all human formidability is to be found in God alone.