RESPONDING TO GOD’S GRACE

2

2 3

& the Episcopal College

RESPONDING TO GOD’S GRACE

Our Diocesan Roadshows for 2017 are an opportunity for us all to explore further the implications of God’s free gift of his grace. No-one will tell us the ‘answers’, but we will each be given the opportunity to listen to others, to discuss amongst friends and strangers, to voice our own experiences, and to search out together new understandings. Full-time Mums and teachers, Churchwardens and choir members, parish clergy and police officers, retirees working-harder-than-ever and readers in training, archdeacons and architects…………

There will be something here for us all. Something to learn, something to be encouraged by, something to discover, and something to be challenged by. Together we will search out what God’s unlimited grace can mean in our lives, and what it will call us to.

This booklet forms the beginning of that search. Within we simply suggest 5 ideas which are connected to the Christian understanding of God’s grace. These ideas will form the basis of our investigations in the autumn roadshows. It will be really helpful if you can read, and begin to think about, its contents before you attend one of these meetings.

Let’s explore together.

“FREE GIFT!!” adverts are enough to entice us to purchase magazines, insurance policies, cars and cosmetics. (I can’t be the only person to have fallen for their promises, am I?). We do love the idea of getting something for nothing. The huge irony, then, is that we often fail to take full advantage of the most astounding free gift of all.

4

What does God’s grace look like for you, for your church, and for your bit of Cornwall, and how do you and your church respond to that grace? In the Bible, “grace” is another word for “love,” it holds the idea that God loves us because of what God is like, not because of what we are like. Grace is not earned by us; grace is generously given by God.

Grace is not remote; it is not just a vague feeling of contentment or something that “other people” experience. In Jesus, grace is made intimate and human. In Cornwall today the church embodies God’s grace in a unique and immediate way, God does not restrict grace to the church, but the church is surely one of God’s gifts to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly – so the church is a means of grace.

In the roadshows this year, we will be thinking about how we respond to God’s grace. The “we” means us as individual disciples, as well as “we” in our churches and “we” the Diocese of Truro bit of God’s church.

Responding to God’s grace is not about making sure we have ticked off all the things on a list so that we can be compliant- grace does not work like that.

Instead, responding to God’s grace is about becoming the person, the church, the diocese that is good at receiving God’s grace, and thus becoming a channel for God’s grace. Being the person, church and diocese that is good at receiving God’s love, good at receiving Jesus and good at the giving and doing that follow from that.

RESPONDING TO GOD’S GRACE“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

4

6

We believe in a generous God. By God’s grace we have received more than we can possibly need.

The word “abundance” is used more than 100 times in the Bible, often describing what God is like or does. In Isaiah 33.6 the prophet describes the Lord filling Zion with an “abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge.” In other places the abundance of God’s creation is described. In Genesis it is made clear that God’s plan for humankind is a garden where there is an abundance of good things, and that scarcity and famine relate to human greed and sin.

In the Gospels we are reminded that God gives the birds of the air and the lilies of the field all that they need to be clothed and fed, and then we are challenged by how much more he loves us. So it is clear that as Christians we should respond to this generous God by living as if we believe in the abundance of what God gives to us.

Most of us have probably experienced abundance directly at some time in our lives. Many people find abundance in the beauty and diversity of creation, in the overwhelming capacity of human love, in wisdom or learning, in music or art. But most of us also experience scarce and meagre. Not everything in Cornwall is beautiful, diverse and brimming with creative love. Sin and greed play their part in making scarcity more common than it need be.

Living as if we believe in an abundantly loving God is very different to how the world lives. The world operates a strong model of scarcity, we must compete for scarce resources and strive to acquire, work harder, be more productive. The things that matter are not freely given and gratefully received; they are won, owned, and defended.

If abundance is like being in God’s garden, then scarcity is like being in a lifeboat. There are limited resources on board, we may choose to help those who are weak and invest in the leakiest bits of the boat, but ultimately we know that there are “hard decisions” ahead if anyone is going to survive. Some parts of Cornwall look like scarcity is real, abundance may seem like a fine idea, but far away.

Probably the most famous proponent of “abundance” is the American theologian Walter Brueggemann. He insists that a scarcity mind-set leads to anxiety, and that an expectation of abundance is liberating.

ABUNDANCE

6

Brueggemann examines the Exodus story, which he characterises as a journey from anxiety, enslaved and dependent on hard work and Pharaoh; to freedom, dependent on faithfulness and God. Justin Welby’s recent book “Dethroning Mammon” picks up some of these themes by contrasting the manna, which is God’s life-giving abundant gift, with mammon, which includes the shiny acquisition of scarce stuff that threatens to enslave us. In Exodus, God’s people abandon themselves to God. Like Peter in the stormbound boat, they step out into the sea entirely dependent on God’s love. The faithful people discover abundance in the wilderness; not among the cucumbers and fleshpots of Egypt. The journey was long and hard, however, the leaders were reluctant, and many people died on the way: this is not an easy fix.

There are many powerful lessons for us in the Exodus story if we understand it using ideas of abundance and scarcity, and we should remember that the Exodus story is itself very important in understanding how the death and resurrection of Jesus is revealed in the Bible. One lesson, for instance, is that the Hebrew people are not liberated by hard work. Pharaoh’s remedy is to make more bricks with less straw (improve productivity) whereas what really leads to abundance is trusting God (grow in faithfulness). Most of us probably hold both abundance and scarcity at the same time in different parts of our life. We trust and love God, but also put quite a lot of trust in a salary and a pension. So if we think of “abundance” as a characteristic of God’s love, God’s grace, how then should we respond? How should we live? How should we order the church and our homes? What would living, working and leading be like if we were better at receiving and trusting in the abundance of God’s love?

• Does your community experience scarcity or abundance? • How does your community measure its wealth? • Does your family experience scarcity or abundance? • How does your family measure its wealth? • Sin and greed play their part in making scarcity more common than it need be, does your church need to work harder or live holier? • Do you need to work harder or live holier?

7

8

Responding to God’s grace in worship is about diving in and getting soaked (if you ever saw Bishop Tim do a baptism you will know that everyone gets wet); it is about letting the water of life wash every nook and cranny. Worship is not a polite splash behind the ears or even a wash of the face once a week; it is immersive, whole body, whole mind, and whole life. Our capacity to worship, to dive into God’s love, to respond in praise and adoration; this is God’s gift. God’s invitation to embrace Jesus in worship through the Spirit is grace.

For some people diving in is about reason and logic, some people find God in studying the Bible or through the inspiring words or actions of others. Some people feel near to God on a Cornish cliff-top or in any number of other special places. This is not just about what we do “in a service” or when we “say our prayers” – this is about a whole body, all the time and life-long response.

As we respond to God’s invitation, the idea of “worship” helps us. For example:

• “Worship” begins with the faithfulness of God. God is faithful even if at a particular moment we are sceptical or distracted. This means that God is calling to us even when we ignore the call or find it hard to hear. There is something important about responding to God’s faithfulness with faithfulness, even at times when we do not feel like it.

• “Worship” is about an action as well as something that goes on in our heads. It is not the same as being a spectator or an observer. We demonstrate our response to love by what we do, and if it is immersive then it must be about our whole life, not just the religious part of us.

• “Worship” expects to be a two-way experience, listening and watching, as much as speaking and showing.

• “Worship” is something that we do as part of a community; it is never solo. We might be “on our own” at that moment, but we are always part of the worship of the whole church. The church teaches that part of worship and part of coming before God is in worshipping with others regularly. This suggests that the pattern of our responding to God’s grace is something held within the wider community, not just a solo response.

WORSHIP

8

• We expect “worship” to change us, and we expect worship to change other people and the world. This means that responding to grace will challenge us to think and do differently; indeed, if we are never challenged in such ways we might need to think again about how we respond.

In the Ten Commandments we are commanded not to make idols, “you shall not bow down to them or worship them.” 21st century Cornwall is unlikely to set up a Golden Calf at Lemon Quay and start bowing down to it outside Marks and Spencer. But this is a warning against the danger of idolising all manner of tempting or distracting things, some of which we might find on Lemon Quay. The things we idolise may not be obviously wicked in themselves until they become a consuming obsession. It is easy to think of those who make an idol of sport or worldly success. How easily we neglect the wholesome and life giving things of life and idolise something that is not God. Even in the life of the church we can get things wrong, making an idol of a particular style of worship, or the musicians, or the building, or good works, when the only worthy focus of worship is God.

Worshipping the wrong thing, idolatry, is both a warning and a lesson. A warning about getting our life focus wrong, and an example of how completely some people respond to the things that they enjoy. See how football fans respond to a club doing well, or how people frame their whole lives around a chosen career: how much more should be the response of a Christian to God’s grace? Right worship frames a whole life around adoration, praise and relentlessly focussing back on God.

• How are you a different person, because of God? • In your experience, are church people as committed to church, as football people are committed to their team? • What do most people worship? • What about you? • When did worship in your church last change you?

10

We are called to witness to God’s grace; called to tell others about what we have seen.

The man in John 9 is blind; Jesus’ disciples ask, “Who sinned?” Jesus replies that the man was born blind, “so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Jesus declares himself to be, “the light of the world.” Jesus heals the man, telling him to wash at the pool of Siloam, and the healing is “investigated” by the Pharisees. The man is soon accused of being Jesus’ disciple, he witnesses to the Jews, is driven out by them, but at the climax of the story the man comes to Jesus and says, “Lord, I believe” and worships him.

There is a lot in the story that helps us to understand our calling to be witnesses to the “light of the world.”

Unpacking the passage, we see the disciples asking some hard questions and struggling with the answers. The “answer” that Jesus gives raises more questions, but whatever the truth is, it revolves around the claim of his identity, in this case, “I am the light of the world.” The disciples want to know the details of who sinned and when, Jesus points to himself as the truth they need.

Alongside the story of our discipleship, we see that hard questions and struggling with truth is honoured, but that we are directed to Jesus’ identity rather than to complicated constructions of cause and effect.

The man does not appear to ask for healing, or do anything to earn healing; rather it seems to come as a simple act of grace. We can begin to see how the man might stand for any of us.

At first, although he has been healed, the man does not “know” Jesus. It is only when the Pharisees begin to investigate that the man really starts to understand and to see. He moves from simply recounting the “who did what, and when,” to making claims for who Jesus is. For the early church, facing persecution, the reality of investigation and holding to account for knowing Jesus, was a pressing one. Not only are we unlikely to face persecution, but there is not an obvious parallel to “being investigated” for knowing Jesus, or for what he has done in our lives. Unlike the man in the story, we must choose to tell, there will be no Pharisees to compel us to do so.

WITNESS

10

The man’s brave speech to the Pharisees when he is accused of being a disciple and is “driven out” seems like the climax of the story, but there is more. Jesus seeks the man, finds him, and asks, “do you believe?” Here is the real climax, witness is not just to the Pharisees but to Jesus, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshipped him. “I believe,” he says, to himself, to the world, and to Jesus.

Worship and witness are laid side by side here in this short passage.

I am struck by a contrast here, the man says, “I believe!” and then worships Jesus as he responds to a transforming encounter. He is a witness in himself, to his family and to the wider community, and ultimately before Jesus. I contrast this with my typical Sunday morning, after the sermon, standing up and saying, “We believe.”

In a number of ways, the Creed is a response to God’s grace. In the most simple way we respond by standing up in public and saying, “I believe in God,” or indeed, “We believe.” In a more complex way the claims we make in the Creed describe the grace to which we respond, and in particular we claim that we are the people who look for the Resurrection. The gift that the man receives is healing, his response, eventually, is to witness. The story challenges us to think about how Jesus has changed our lives, about the truth to which we witness, and about whether we embody this witness beyond Sunday morning.

• Where are you in the blind man’s story? • Unseeing – struggling with hard questions – finding answers – experiencing healing – finding a new way to live – speaking with confidence – the world against you – rejected – witnessing? • What are the hard questions that you struggle with? • What does the “I believe/We believe” moment in church feel like to you? • Who is it hardest to say “I believe” to? Yourself, strangers, family, God?

11

People say, “You don’t have to go to church to be a good person,” and this is obviously true. Nevertheless, “church” is more than a building, and more than a collective noun for Christians who choose to be together.

The idea of the church being “one body” is a familiar one. “We are the body of Christ, in the one Spirit we are all baptised into one body.” So reads one of the Common Worship introductions to the Peace, paraphrasing St Paul in 1 Corinthians 12.

Paul tells us about Christians being baptised into one body, and goes on to tell us that the body consists of many members and that if one suffers, all suffer together. “You are the body of Christ,” he tells his readers, “and individually members of it.”

The earliest Christian thinkers taught that the church itself becomes a “means of grace” – we are more than a human organisation and more than the sum of our parts. We mentioned already that the church is “God’s gift” to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Putting this together with Jesus’ saying in John 13.35 that people will know his disciples by their love for one another helps us to think about how we should behave to one another as Christians, and how we should understand the church as one body. “Church unity” may once have meant relations between denominations, but increasingly it is also about the life of individual congregations, benefices, deaneries and within the wider Church of England.

A more radical way of thinking about the church as “one body” is to use the motif of courtship and romantic love, and to ask what the love we have for one another in the church might learn from this other understanding of “loving one another”.. We all know that the Bible uses different words for “love,” many of us will have grown up on these distinctions, but the Bible also sometimes deliberately challenges us with the way it describes “love” and the examples and metaphors it employs. It is not too fanciful to ask whether some of us need to fall in love with the Church of England again, and thus with the body of Christ revealed through and within it.

The idea of courtship and love suggests that we might learn to see one another with rose coloured spectacles; we might (re)discover what it is to long for each other with hearts on fire. Longing for deanery synod with hearts on fire might be stretching things, but you get the gist. We are such a long way from “see how they love one another” that some more daring ideas might be needed. This kind of love means seeing the best in one another, being generous, open hearted, open handed, and perhaps open-minded.

ONE BODY

12

Most of us have known the Church of England and its characters for some time. Renewing love when we are already bruised needs particular attention. We need to put in the time, stop taking things for granted, give second, third, even seven times seventh chances, you get the idea. How many of us who hold some office or role in the church know our opposite number in another place really well? How much time and effort do we give to that relationship? Is it, “see how they love one another,” or, “see how they generally ignore each other?”

I do not want to trivialise this. Loving, any kind of love, is risky, and requires us to be vulnerable. Not everyone in the Church of England or the wider church will always behave well and be faithful. The motif of romantic love may make us wary of those who will take advantage, it may well touch on slights and wounds that we would prefer left alone. How do we love those who would hurt us or not want the best for us? There is not a trite and easy answer here, well there might be a trite and easy answer, but it will not be true to the whole roaring complexity of love.

When we really love, we know that our happiness, our wholeness, relies on someone else. This interdependence is behind Paul’s “one body” motif and is vital to responding to the grace which he describes.

• What, in the life of the church, makes your heart burn within you? • How does the concept of romantic love make you feel about your benefice/ deanery/ diocese? • Does anyone in your church know that you love them? How? • Does anyone in another church know that you love them? How? • Think of one thing that would help another church to love your church.

12

14

The rainbow has long been a HOPEsymbol of hope. At the end of the flood in Genesis 9 God blesses Noah and his sons, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” and establishes a covenant with Noah, his descendants and with all creation. The promise is about never again wiping everyone out, and about the seasons of the year, the rainbow is the sign of the covenant. “When the bow is in the clouds I will see it and remember the covenant,” says the Lord.

The communities who first told the story of a great flood were unimaginably fragile to our modern European eyes. Nature was not tame; the rains they relied on to bring life, to water the land, could also bring disaster and wipe out whole civilisations. We might not be at the mercy of nature, but we need the confidence to build, to plant, to persevere, and the rainbow is a sign of the hope that gives that confidence.

We might not fear heavy rain, but we all know how fragile life can still be. Christian hope is what gives us the confidence to build, to plant, to persevere, and at the heart of Christian hope is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a hope not just in the past, but for the future.Christian hope is not a naïve optimism dislocated from reality, but neither is it rooted in a subtle evaluation of available evidence and prior outcomes. We hope because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and we know that he lives because in the Spirit we believe that we have met him.

Thomas in John 20 famously doubts, but it is not seeing Jesus’ face or hearing his voice that will convince him, it is the wounds. Hope is not about perfection, not about a clever argument, but rather about encountering the authentic risen Christ, and part of what is authentic, part of his identity, are the wounds.

The world might want glossy superheroes who are untouched and immaculate, heroes who soar far above the complications of human life. The authentic hope we offer is recognised in wounds, wounds that take us back to the cross. Like Thomas, we need to meet the authentic Christ who has suffered and risen; and this is who the world must also meet.

Hope in the resurrection draws the other themes in this booklet together. Worship, abundance, unity and witness relate directly back to the resurrection, we could not

14

meet Jesus in worship without the resurrection, so we witness to the resurrection. The incarnation and resurrection demonstrate the abundance of God more emphatically than the most generous harvest, and it is in the person of Christ that we find our unity; ultimately, we are one body in his body. Therefore, it is to us as Christians and to us the church, to whom Cornwall looks when like Thomas they would see the risen Christ.

There is a deep challenge here. Thomas needs to see the wounds, but wounds carried by the risen Christ. Good Friday on its own has not given hope to Thomas and to the others; indeed Good Friday left them in despair. So the challenge for us and for the church is to embody the hope which bears the authentic wounds of service and self-giving love, but which has been transformed by living the new life of resurrection hope. We are back to bathing in the living waters of baptism.

• Where do you experience hope? • What gives you hope? • Where do you experience those with wounds? • Do you see Christ there? • Where do you experience the hopeless? • Where in the church do you see Good Friday, where Easter Eve, and where Easter?

RESPONDING TO GOD’S GRACEWHAT NEXT?As we look to shaping our next steps together as the Diocese of Truro we will carry with us the five ideas and our work together at the Roadshows. Feedback, responses, and most importantly the prayers from the Roadshows will be part of the planning that goes into 2018 and beyond, we encourage deaneries and parishes to embed these insights into their work, as will the diocesan Executive and Bishops’ Diocesan Council.

LENT 2018Next year Bishop Chris will be inviting the diocesan family to share with him in reflecting on our Christian journey through Lent. We will be producing materials that could be used as a “Lent Course” by parish groups, house groups, churches, and individuals. We will deliberately use resources that can be used across traditions and denominations, as well as providing ideas for worship and prayer.

Part of the plan will be to “take stock” as pilgrims together, particularly as we await the calling of a new Bishop of Truro.

GET IN CONTACTT 01872 274351 E info@truro.anglican.org www.trurodiocese.org.uk

Church House, Woodlands Court, Truro Business Park, Threemilestone, Truro, TR4 9NH