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Tag: grace

  • A Heart Transformed by Undeserved Grace

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early-retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource ssra.uk

    Last week, at Pride, my heart was transformed by undeserved grace. And on this occasion, it wasn’t from God, or fellow Christians, or the church. But it relieved the shame of decades and transformed my heart.

    Until last year, I hadn’t been to Pride since the 1990s. Back then, there were probably fewer than half a dozen in the entire country. I would be at London’s. It was mostly a protest march of angry men, with almost as many police as marchers. The march would be funnelled into a fenced-off field or park, where the stalls would all be campaign groups, and AIDS charities desperately trying to save men’s lives.

    Then last year, after a gap of a quarter century, I followed a small group down the hill after church to join the Lancaster Pride Parade, and I laughed with delight, as the contrast was almost unbelievable. There were all ages present, from babes in arms and pushchairs, to toddlers and children of all ages, to students and young adults, parents, and adults right across the age-range, and generally more women than men. Everything was joy: rainbow party and celebration. And the tallest presence in the parade was a fifteen-foot tall Big Jesus in a rainbow sash, surrounded by Christians at Pride with handmade placards announcing the names of Inclusive Churches and My God Loves Everyone in rainbow colours.

    The only police were managing traffic, to let the parade go past.

    The parade concluded in the historic town square, under Queen Victoria, where there were funfair rides, and food stalls, and musicians and poets and speeches – including a Christian minister – and three thousand people mingled through the afternoon. The small band of Christians at Pride seemed to have a gazebo and a few leaflets with Big Jesus parked outside.

    Another year takes us to last week. I had made contact with Lancaster Christians at Pride, which turns out to be a completely ad hoc group that has a couple of planning meetings and a bit of a scramble by email in the few weeks before Pride, to coordinate the superb work of some heroic individuals to produce what has become – over several years – an increasingly significant presence.

    As the parade concluded, and an afternoon’s duty on the stall lay ahead, I braced myself for an afternoon of well-deserved anti-Christian hostility from the LGBTQ+ crowd. I wasn’t expecting blatant abuse, but I was certainly expecting hostile stares, cold shoulders and dismissive looks – the hints of a well-earned low-level background contempt, after all that we know the churches have hurled at this community over the last forty years and more.

    What followed, across the next several hours, was a genuinely transformative experience of undeserved grace; not (on this occasion) from God, or fellow Christians, or the church, but from the LGBTQ+ community, gathered for Lancaster Pride. They approached Big Jesus and the Prayer Tree and our Christians at Pride gazebo with nothing but utterly undeserved warmth and grace. It was utterly disarming.

    They came for selfies with Big Jesus. They came to hang prayers for the world, and for loved ones. They came to hang heartfelt longings, which are the same as prayers; and wise hard-learned life-lessons, summarised in a few words, which are surely proverbs; and perhaps most movingly, in memoriams to loved ones, which held who-knows-what life-stories, in a moment of profound reflection, at this little holy shrine, on this big pounding party-day.

    I was braced for the shame of being Christian in the LGBTQ+ community – for the church absolutely deserves the hatred of that community for all that it has done, and continues to do. And all that I experienced yesterday from that community was undeserved grace. That undeserved grace relieved the shame of decades, and transformed my heart. That little holy shrine became a grace exchange. They brought in grace, and soon I had grace to share. I listened as people told their stories. I coaxed the cautious with gifts, which had seemed so pointless earlier in the day: “Everything is free! Free cake! Free prayers! The rainbow crosses were made here in Lancaster by the needleworkers at the Priory!” Suddenly everything made sense – in the light of grace received, grace upon grace. We had built a holy shrine in the city square, and the people brought in their gifts of holy grace to share.

    Some people only go to church once a year. This was our little holy shrine in the middle of Pride – their once-a-year church – and the prayers and the occasional conversations were profound. We’ll build it again next year. The rest of the church may still be squabbling, an unholy wreck, somewhere off-stage. But God is love and grace, active and fully alive amongst the ordinary people.

  • Agree or Disagree: I’m Still in Communion with my Bishop

    Fr Thomas Sharp is Succentor at Southwark Cathedral, and Parish Priest at St Hugh’s Bermondsey. He is Coordinator of the Young Anglican Theology Project, a Third Order Franciscan, and a member of the Provincial Council of the Society of Catholic Priests.

    When I was at University, one of our lecturers tried to impress on us just how chaotic and disputatious was the early Church. He had us gather in a seminar room, and argue about anything we could think of, so long as it generated plenty of theological insults. It was great fun, if rather a culture shock from the polite University discourse in which we were trained.

    My favourite ‘Christian insult’ was ‘How dare you forsake your Baptism?’ Screamed at the top of one’s lungs. The charge is weighty, vital.  And it helps that ‘forsake’ and ‘baptism’ are immensely satisfying words to spit at a colleague in the classroom.

    The patristic tendency of Christians to levy the charge that opponents have forsaken their baptism has given way in recent years to the charge that they have forsaken communion. Breaking or impairing communion is the ecclesiological offence-du-jour on a range of issues. It remains the great obstacle of ecumenism.

    But the two charges amount to the same thing. Communion flows from our baptism. We are in communion with one another by virtue of the fact that we are baptised into one body. To declare then that communion is broken is, simply, to make a fundamental statement too about baptism, that the sacrament, too, has in some way been broken.

    I have not always agreed with my bishops. Very occasionally, I have thought it might be easier if I could perhaps put myself under a different bishop more closely aligned with my views.

    Feelings of alienation, frustration, and misunderstanding within the Church are not, however, a consequence of broken communion, or a cause of it. They are fundamentally a consequence of our common fallenness – and so point to the grace by which they and we must all be saved.

    The doctrine of salvation by faith and not works renders communion an objective reality: it gives us confidence. In the darkest days of the Reformation, when it seemed that the Church really thought communion was simply about assenting to the decrees of councils and authorities, their blasphemy was to render salvation subjective. They made it seem that salvation rested on nothing firmer than whatever the latest power bloc or prelate thought I should be burned over should I disagree. Under such rule, communion depends on whatever is going on in head of the one who sits in judgment. And hell’s maw yawns open – apparently, not for forsaking God, but for standing up to an earthly ruler, whose mind might change tomorrow. What sinking sand on which to build one’s faith.

    This is a caricature of pre-Reformation thought, of course, but salvation by grace is our safeguard against that caricature becoming real. It defends us against the temptation to put our faith not in God but in earthly councils and secular alliances. Salvation by works says that there’s something you can do to be in with the right crowd or in the right place to earn the mercy of God. But salvation by faith  proclaims healthily and firmly our sinfulness, our inability to save ourselves. It plants our trust firmly on the ground of God’s grace.

    No human being can be righteous enough to earn salvation: it is given through the grace of faith. No human can earn what God gives them – either through ‘right-thinking’ or ‘lifestyle’ -for God gives it freely, as unmerited gift. No human can be good and wholesome enough to merit the blood of Christ: it is medicine shed for the sick.

    My point is this: no Christian minister, no bishop or priest can be stainless enough to earn the pastoral ministry. It is given through the grace of faith. No bishop, no pastor, can teach infallibly (at least, I hold this as an Anglican): each is fallen and saved by grace. No communion with a bishop is so subjective as to depend on what they think about any number of things, or even what they teach or do. If they claim the blood of Christ and confess the Triune God, if they call upon God in their distress for the mercy revealed on the cross, then they are Christians and we are in communion. I do not choose them: Christ died for them.

    When the Bishop of London declared in her speech to General Synod that all members of the Church would be welcome at her table, one might be tempted to see it as a statement of flagrant liberalism, theologically lax if well-intentioned. But I took it as a clear and conservative planting of episcopal feet on a firm foundation: the communion of the baptised which is God’s graceful gift to the Body of Christ.

    My own diocesan Bishop urges us ‘to continue to speak well of each other,’ and again some might be tempted to dismiss this as a well-meaning aspiration. But to speak well of one another, even when we disagree, is to resolve defiantly and determinedly (and against the odds) not to impugn the blood of Christ by which we and they (whoever ‘they’ may be for us) have been saved. By baptism we have been incorporated into one body. If we insult or injure one another, it is that one body – the body of Christ – which we are injuring.

    I did not choose my fellow Christians, those who are called with me to the supper of the Lamb.

    I have not chosen my Bishops, and they have not chosen me. We have been gifted to one another by divine providence and God’s mercy.

    I did not choose the body of which they and I are a part, and I have not built it – for it is God who builds it and elects members to it and feeds it.

    I am tempted, when I disagree with them and any number of my fellow members of the Church, to declare us ‘out of communion’, to insult and write them off.

    But then the Spirit’s voice accuses me: ‘How dare you forsake your baptism?’