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What best friends are for

What are best friends for? Proverbially to tell you things an over-polite, embarrassed or squeamish world won't, or can't. The less than perfact breath ... the intimate button undone ... the offence given unwittingly to a third party - these are the bits of unpalatable news that best friends, apparently, exist to convey.

Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference have had a variety of visits from friends and - as good friends - some have been courageous in entering senitive ground and engaging with issues that are challenging for us. Controversially (because of the metephors he used) Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of the Peoples at the Vatican, warned us against "spiritual Alzheimer's", in which the sufferer loses contact with his or her past, and therfore identity, and "spiritual Parkinson's", where the problem is that of loss of articulation and co-ordinantion between the constituent limbs and organs of the body. The warning made for sombre reflection as we contemplate our surrent struggles with innovation and coherence across the Communion.

The Cardinal's was an instance of "Best Friend Ministry" - but for me two of the most powerful experiences of this Conference so far have come from leaders in a community that has no real obligation to call Christians friends at all. For a thousand years from the First Crusade to the Holocaust Christians have treated Jews - our Lord's own people - shamefully and despicably. It may be that Anglicans have been less prominent in the sorry history of Christian anti-semitism than some of our fellow relisgionists, but we are hardly exonerated from the charge. Yet - for me - it is two separate visits from (and addresses by) Jewish rabbis that have represented two of the highest points of this Conference so far.

Last week I attended a self-select session (that is one of the sessions which we choose according to preference rather than attend in our pre-selected and random Bible study or indaba groups) entitled Jews and Christians: are we still getting it wrong? The principal speaker was Rabbi Tony Bayfield, Head of the Reform Movement in UK Judaism, and he presented a startlingly generous, gracious and challenging paper. He spoke of the relationships within the family of Abrahamic faiths (Jews, Christians and Moslems), which he described as the most dysfunctional religious family in history (a strangely encouraging judgement for an Anglican attending Lambeth 2008, I felt!), and argued that if we are to make a reality of our self-understanding as siblings within the family, we must be ready to abandon claims to superiority or additional favour and acknowledge much more frankly the fact and the implications of our shared inheritance (in Jewish-Christian terms especially our shared Scripture). With startling courage and large-heartedness Rabbi Bayfield followed his own precepts, and at the same time made challenging claims on our own ability to be theologically genreous, too: "If I am to treat you as equal siblings, the child of a common parent, Abraham, and of the Common Divine Parent, then I demand to be treated in the same way. ... Just as much loved by our Parent in heaven and not in need of you as intermediary or of your saving grace".

On Monday our visitor was Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, a significant world religious leader and a stimulating thinker, writer and broadcaster. Archbishop Rowan (a personal friend) had invited him to speak to the Conference on the subject of "Covenant", which is a key theological concept in Judaism, Christianity and (just at the moment) Anglican Christianity in particular. In classic Christian theology there are two covenants (or "Testaments") - the "Old", which is God's covenant with Israel to which the Old Testament bears witness, and the "New", which is God's covenant in the blood of Jesus with the New Israel, which is the Church of Christ. For most of the Anglican Communion the idea of covenant - a relationship of formalised trust and promise - is at the heart of any credible strategy we may evolve to regularise our stormy and centrifugal family of Churches, and hold us together in shared faithfulness and witness. (This is what the so-called "Windsor process" is all about.)

Sir Jonathan offered us an immensely richer theology of covenant than (I suspect) many of us had ever considered before. He spoke of no fewer that three biblical covenants (that is, covenants in his Bible - what we patronisingly call the Old Testament), namely God's covenant with Noah after the flood, God's covenant with Abraham when he called him to be the father of many nations and God's covenant with Israel when he gave them the Law at Mount Sinai through Moses. In his thinking (difficult for many Christians) older covenants are not superseded or negated by newer ones, so there is no sense that any of these covenants and what they reveal about God's ways and priorities have ceased to have validity - and in this sense what he went on to say was even more striking.

The Chief Rabbi made a distinction between Noah's covenant, which he called a "covenant of Fate" and the other two, which he termed covenants "of Faith". The covenant of fate, established with Noah as forebear and representative of the whole human race, marks the moment of the race's (and creation's) salvation from destruction and estabishes foundation principals about the sanctity of life, the integrity of creation and the richness of diversity in God's provision (symbolised by the rainbow). This is the first covenant - the covenant of Fate, in which is caught up all who share the fate of existence - and it is the foundation and seedbed in which all subsequent covenants (which are particular to particular communities) are based. These would include that with Abraham and his descendants and that with the people of Israel at Sinai and - most significantly for Christians - the New Covenant established by God in Christ Jesus by his blood and resurrection.

There are wide implications in this but it's late and as my first version of this blog disappeared into the computer meaning I've had to write it twice, I'll say little more. Except this: Sir Jonathan's arresting summary definition of covenant and its purpose was that it is the "redemption of solitude". The point and achievement of covenant is to assure us that we are not alone. We are created in and for relationship with God and - through that - with one another. Covenants - marriage, parental, religious and other - are expressions of the relationships of trust and promise that bind us to one another. And covenant - in some form - is where hope lies for the continuation of the Anglican Communion as a coherent entity. In an unscripted answer to a question at the end, the Chief Rabbi gave moving personal testimony to the debt that he owes to Anglicanism (both his schools were C of E establishments) as formational of an environment of tolerance and openness that enabled him, as a Jewish child, to grow and appreciate his Jewish identity.

It was a debt he fully repaid this week - and in so doing reminded us not just of the breadth and generosity of our tradition at its best, but also offered us in the idea of covenant - a relationship based on promise and trust - a glimpse of how we may retain and enhance that breadth and generosity by the grace of God.

Posted by HumphreySouthern on 2008-07-29 17:45:30 | Rating: