Sermon From Tom Cuthell 3 February 2008
Two Christmases ago I saw a BBC film about an ecumenical group of church leaders from
the UK who had recently visited Israel-Palestine. In the film there is a scene where these
distinguished churchmen visit a Palestinian school. The children had just had a painting
and drawing class. The drawings reflected life as these Palestinian children lived it. What
disturbed the churchmen was that every drawing contained a depiction of that ugly, sinister
wall built by the Israelis to divide the Palestinian population. A near-by microphone picked
up the quiet, little voice of one of the children, saying, ‘I do not like walls’. That, for me, is
too much of an understatement. I hate walls and barriers.
I will never forget a visit I made to the little town of Bethlehem during a trip to the Holy Land
a couple of years ago. To gain access to that hallowed piece of real estate meant
negotiating a complex obstacle course of concrete walls, barbed wire fences and military
checkpoints — the infamous means whereby the Israeli government seeks to control,
intimidate and hem in the Palestinian population, severely restricting access to their
families, to roads, to their places of work, to water supplies, to that which constitutes the
livelihood of so many, their olive groves. What had once been accessible was now
inaccessible.
The whole point and purpose of walls, barriers, fences and check-points, of course, is to
control, restrict and deny access. They are designed to separate, divide, alienate. They
suggest defensiveness and exclusiveness.
Now I have a theory that that God finds the whole apparatus of walls, barriers, fences and
check-points totally abhorrent. They make inaccessible that which, in God’s eyes, should
be accessible. It can be argued, for instance, that the meaning of Christmas can be
summed up in this one word ‘accessibility.’ At the first Christmas the God once deemed to
be as inaccessible as the furthest galaxies became astonishingly accessible in a fragile,
new-born child, a god who could be seen and heard and touched and cradled and adored.
At the first Christmas God re-invented Himself, so to speak — the old trappings of divinity
were discarded. God devised a totally new way of being God — He made himself
accessible to us as a new-born child smeared with a mother’s blood. In Jesus the One who
dwelt in light inaccessible hid from our eyes became unimaginably accessible.
If ‘accessibility’ is a basic, bedrock theological principle, then woe betide any religion that
builds walls and erects barriers and mans check-points, any religion that seeks to give a
divine imprimatur to narrowness, exclusiveness and separateness.
Remember that day in the synagogue at Nazareth when local boy Jesus returned to
preach the sermon and found himself almost lynched by the congregation. What triggered
the riot and had the good Kirk folk of Nazareth baying for Jesus’ blood was his scandalous
statement that God’s love, grace and favour was not restricted to Jews, that Gentiles were
included within the orbit of his grace. As though rubbing salt in their wounds, Jesus quoted
two instances of how the grace and favour of God had settled on two aliens, two outsiders,
two non-kosher Gentiles — a widow from the wrong side of the tracks in Zarephath, and
Naaman the Syrian, sworn enemy of Israel. What Jesus was doing in that synagogue was
challenging his townfolk’s vision of God — a vision that was narrow, limited and exclusive.
Theirs was a tribal God, a God who was exclusively kosher, a God whose grace and favour
did not extend beyond the confines of Jewry. Time and time again throughout his ministry
Jesus was found challenging narrow, exclusive religion, challenging religious mindsets
that sought to place restrictions on the grace and favour of God, that sought to narrow
down the circumference of the love of God. He was found challenging social, cultural and
religious barriers, and in fact undermining them — barriers that denied outsiders and the
marginalized, the non-kosher, the lowest and the least, open and unrestricted access to
the mercy, grace and love of God. Always we find Jesus sacramental grace — for it is not
the table of any one church, but the Table of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Like God, I hate walls and barriers. I hate that which is narrow and exclusive, and that is
why, throughout my entire ministry, I have sought to prise open that which is narrow, to
undermine walls, to chip away at barriers that alienate and divide, to witness passionately
to the inclusiveness of the love of God. And it is because I hate walls and barriers that I
have been an unrepentant ‘ecumaniac’ throughout my ministry. And that is why my joy
knew bounds when my dream of leading an ecumenical group of Catholics and
Protestants to Assisi in Italy, along with my good friend Cardinal Keith O’Brien, became a
happy reality in 2005. Though we agreed beforehand to respect the rules of each other’s
church, I was, in all honesty, chafing at the bit! However the Holy Spirit has a cheeky knack
of side-flanking the rules, with the result that there were moments when we all found
ourselves ambushed by grace.
There was, for instance, that hallowed moment towards the end of Mass celebrated by the
Cardinal at the little church of San Damiano. As the service was drawing to a close
Cardinal Keith suddenly left the altar, headed in my direction, stood in front of me and
requested a blessing. There he was — the Cardinal in full liturgical clobber — and there
was I — dressed in a T shirt and a pair of jeans. I stood up, laid my hands on the Cardinal’s
head and recited the Aaronic Blessing over him. It was a grace-filled, Spirit inspired
moment. It was also an experience that reinforced my conviction that the Holy Spirit finds
walls and barriers abhorrent and is constantly scheming to undermine them. And so my
challenge to you, the good folks of St John’s in the City, is this — where do walls and
barriers still exist in this congregation? Where do walls and barriers still exist in this city of
Wellington, in this country of New Zealand? Once you have identified the walls and
barriers that still remain, enlist in God’s regiment of saboteurs — prise open that which is
narrow, undermine walls that separate, chip away at barriers that alienate and divide and
deny access — above all witness passionately to the inclusiveness of the love of God.