Who are you, where do you come from, and what are you doing here?

14th April 2013 

Acts 9.1-20 and John 21.1-19

The Reverend Wendy Carey

'You must give us your testimony'. Those words were enough to strike fear into a rather retiring High Church Anglican like myself. The circumstances in which they were spoken intensified the anxiety.

It was 1992 and I was in the second year of part time theological training at Queens College, Birmingham. The topic for the residential study week end was Christianity in multi-ethnic Britain. We students were spending the week end staying with families who had come to Birmingham from overseas; and the programme for Sunday was to attend worship with our host family. My hosts were originally from Jamaica, had been in Birmingham for about 20 years, and were Methodists.

But this was the Sunday in the month when they accompanied their Minister to his other. pastorate - as one of the Chaplains of Winson Green Prison. And this Sunday the service was to be led by the Church of God of Prophesy. Before the service their pastor came over to welcome the seven or eight students, their host families and one of our tutors. 'Who are you, where do you come from, and what are you doing here?' He asked. 'We're theology students' we replied. 'Then one of you must give us your testimony.'

Why did all eyes turn to me? Possibly because I had already accepted the post of Assistant Chaplain at Woodhill Prison, although the prison had not yet opened. To confirm the expectation, the Tutor said - 'I need to hear a sermon from you Wendy, and it's a long way to Milton Keynes.' So for the first time in my life I stood up to give my testimony, with virtually no preparation, and for the first time spoke in the Chapel of a secure male prison.

I spoke about three verses from Exodus, concerning God's call to Moses:

But Moses said to the Lord, ‘O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.’ Then the Lord said to him, ‘Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.’

I linked Moses dramatic story with my own less dramatic one of events that had brought me to that Sunday morning in Winson Green Prison.

This morning we heard as our readings two dramatic stories of conversion, forgiveness and sending in mission. In order for them to reach the pages of the New Testament, each private individual's story, of Peter and Paul, those two great shapers of Christian faith and practice, they must have originally been given as testimony. In some of Paul's letters he tells some snippets of that testimony, and the way in which his experience of God had shaped his life since his conversion. Both men's stories continue in the pages of Acts.

Two stories, quite different in their geographical setting, their details and in the events which led up to them. And a third and different story, one which had already influenced the shape and culture of Peter's and Paul's lives - the story of Moses. Yet all these stories, different in their content and details, have essential elements in common. In each we find God, God encountered as Jehovah, or God encountered in Jesus Christ, meeting a person in the course of their daily life. And in that encounter, all that they have been, have said or have done up to that point is part of the meaning of the meeting. Each one, Moses, Peter, Paul had asked of God at some stage of their life 'Who are you?' Then, in those dramatic encounters, experienced, in the wilderness at mount Horeb, by the sea of Tiberias, or on the road to Damascus, God had in effect said to Moses, to Peter and to Paul, 'but who are you?'

Each encounter involved some kind of forgiveness or restoration. Because the question 'Who are you?' involves an examination of all the events that has brought the person to this moment. And for each of those men there was a stain on their past life; Moses had killed an Egyptian and hidden his body, Peter had denied three times that he knew Jesus while he was being tried - just as Jesus had predicted he would, Saul, who was to become Paul, had persecuted Christians - those who followed the Way. Underlying the encounters was the question 'Where have you come from?' What are the events and attitudes which have shaped your life up to this moment?

And then the encounter becomes both dramatic and amazing, for there is not just acceptance, forgiveness, conversion from God, but there is commissioning, sending, giving a task. 'What are you doing here?' And even more importantly, what will you do? Who will you become? How will the rest of your life which follows this significant encounter with God be different from the past which has brought you to this day, to this moment?

And the stories which must initially have been given as testimony - 'see what The Lord has done for me!' told to individuals or to small groups of people, were spread through the Jewish and Christian communities, and shaped our lives as Christians. The First Epistle of Peter tells us:

'Always be ready to make your defence when anyone challenges you to justify the hope which is in you. But do so with courtesy and respect. '

You must give us your testimony. Each one of us has a story to tell. It is unlikely that many of us will have stories to tell as dramatic as as those of Moses, Peter or Paul, but there may be some among us who do have dramatic and significant things to tell. And how we tell them may vary greatly. We may want to be thoughtful about who, we tell our Christian story, and how we tell it. Most of us try to tell our story through our lives, words and actions, and we often, like those very human and flawed men, Moses, Peter and Paul, fail to tell it, or tell a different story than the one we are hoping to set out as Christians.

But God does not let go of us, with him there is mercy, says the Psalmist. God knows who we are, and where we have come from, and God knows also what we are capable of achieving, and supports and trusts us to achieve it.

Who are you? Without self knowledge, a genuinely objective assessment of our own strengths and weaknesses, we can neither properly make our confession, nor achieve our full potential, as human beings or as Christians.

Where do you come from? Moses, Peter and Paul became the people they were, not despite their chequered history, but because of it. We too are made the people we are because of the whole of our personal histories - even the difficult bits. We need to learn the lessons of history, not only the lessons of our personal history, but of our time, our culture and of our faith story. As we recount the stories and sayings week by week in our Bible readings, we understand how we come to be here, in this time, in this place, and in this situation.

What are you doing here? In other words, what is your mission? What purpose has God for you? The stories of Moses, Peter and Paul have their meaning in the fulfilment of the individual tasks given to each of them by God. For some of us, the answer to the question 'What is God asking of me?' may seem very clear, to others the answer may be uncertain or difficult to define or act upon. But each of us is asked 'What are you doing here?'

In the Newsletter there is advance warning of this church's Annual Meeting next Sunday. It is not just individual Christians, but Christian communities that must answer those questions; Who are you, where have you come from, what are you doing here? It is for churches, and for the universal church to tell the world their answers to those questions. There is a lot of routine business to get through at an Annual Meeting, but it is also an opportunity to ask and to give some answers to those questions.

Who are you, where have you come from, what are you doing here?

You must give us your testimony.

Victims

Mark 6. 14-29

A sermon by The Reverend Wendy Carey

Sunday 15th July 2012

‘Have you been injured by an accident that was not your fault?’ Or ‘Have you been mis-sold insurance in connection with a loan from a Bank?’ If so, you are a victim. And being a victim today, appears to call for one of two things – anger, or compensation, or perhaps both.

Over many years of work in prisons I have thought a great deal about victims. When I was often asked to speak outside the prison of my work as a Chaplain, a common comment was to chide me that in showing so much concern for convicted prisoners, I was failing to be aware of, and respectful to, the needs of victims. This was a rather simplistic comment, as it failed to recognise that dealing with the needs and the motivation of current prisoners was an effective way of ensuring that the number of future victims of crime was reduced. But a more compelling reason that the comment is too simple, is that a community of criminal offenders is likely to contain a much greater proportion of victims of crime, than does the general population. The matter is complex. Being a victim of crime, can never excuse or support becoming an offender, a perpetrator of crime, but it can go a long way to explain the matter, and that is a first step towards a solution.

These thoughts were prompted by reading our Gospel passage for today, St. Mark’s account of the beheading of John the Baptist, following the conspiracy of Herod and Herodias and her daughter. At first glance, this story seems quite simple, we have a victim, John the Baptist, and we have three perpetrators of varying culpability, Herod, Herodias, and her daughter, Salome. Surely this is a straightforward story of good and evil. But wait a minute, think again about Salome, is there not a case for viewing her as in some ways a victim as well? Is she a victim of the subservient role of young unmarried women at this time? Is she a victim of Herodias’ implacable hatred and desire for revenge? Is she simply a victim of poor parenting, and the lack of what has sometimes been called a moral compass? And what of her mother? Is she purely a perpetrator of crime, or is she a victim of circumstance, or treatment by others. Is Herod her victim, or she his?

If we think deeply about any situation, small and personal, or global and of major significance, we will see this complex web of perpetrators and victims. Court cases and judicial enquiries devote themselves to searching out whose fault lies at the bottom of any issue, but searching for such an answer may be just too simple. In a situation where journalists feel the need to tap phone calls and hack into emails, is there no recognition of the culpability of a society which loves to read a bit of scandal or gossip, and in general doesn’t much care how it is gathered, until the chance arises to become sanctimonious.

The complexity and interweaving of cause and effect, victims and perpetrators is bewildering, and almost inexplicable. But it can be, and is explained by a word we shall use several times in this and in most of our worship. It is, on the whole, an unfashionable word, but it lies at the heart of our Christian understanding. The word is sin. I suppose very few preachers set out to preach about sin in our times, but today you can go home and report that the sermon was about sin.

This evening, at St Mary’s church Bletchley, eight people, teenagers and adults, from the Parish of St. Frideswide, Water Eaton, where I now minister, will be confirmed. They will confirm the promises made by themselves, or on their behalf at Baptism:
‘Do you repent of your sins?’
‘I repent of my sins’.

Our Confirmation candidates have been preparing together using the ‘Start!’ course, led by two lay people. One young teenager had not been baptised, so last Monday evening at her baptism, I asked her that question: ‘Do you repent of your sins?’ How can one explain and help a young person to understand what is being asked? One way would be to point to this complicated and interminable web of victims and offenders, stretching back through time, to a root cause that can be explained by the word sin. Janet Morley wrote a collect for the readings that centre on the story of the Fall of humanity in Genesis chapter three. She writes: ‘Holy God, we are born into a world tissued and structured by sin....’ So where do we find an answer?

Before I began to write this sermon, I looked up the word Victim in the dictionary. Its earliest use in English is in the late 15th Century, denoting a creature killed as a religious sacrifice. So here we are, taken straight back to those words of a much used Good Friday hymn, whether or not you agree in detail with its account of Jesus’ sacrifice:

There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin
He only could unlock the gate of heaven, and let us in.

And here it is, the answer to our questions about how we untangle and begin to cleanse that unending trail of victim and perpetrator, of accusation and counter accusation that so besets our life as a community. Jesus, the ultimate Victim takes upon himself in crucifixion the sins of the whole world. Soon we shall recall again Jesus words at the Last Supper: ‘this is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sin’.

One of the most worthwhile things we can do for one another is to begin to break the unending chain of sin, of victim and offender, of action and reaction, of offence and response: ‘he hit me, so I had to hit him back’ that begins in the playground, and can continue into, and even dominate our adult life. Supporting those who decide to stop this chain of action and reaction, by absorbing the hurt rather than passing it on, is one of the most vital and the most privileged tasks of the Prison Chaplain. It is in the conscious decision not to pass on the hurt, not to create more victims, that we ourselves can become Christlike. But we cannot do this alone.

And that is precisely why in Baptism, in Confirmation, and in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we turn to Christ, the Victim, and the Victor.

So we pray Janet Morley’s prayer:

Holy God, we are born into a world
tissued and structured by sin.
When we proclaim our innocence,
and seek to accuse each other,
give us the grace to know that we are naked;
that we may cry out to you alone, through Jesus Christ, Amen

Sermon for Prisons Sunday

Revd Wendy Carey

20th November Matthew 25 35-40

About twelve years ago, I was leading a Bible Study at Bullingdon Prison in Bicester.  It was a special day, because as well as the dozen or so prisoners who could usually be expected to attend, there were four new clergy in their first year of training, who had come to see what Prison ministry was like.  The morning went well; one of the prisoners had prepared to share the leadership of the study.  Everyone joined in, and it was about as good and worthwhile a Bible Study as you might wish to attend.  The curates were impressed, and as I escorted them back through the locked inner gates to the Prison gatehouse, one said 'But you've chosen the most respectable ones, the nicest ones, to come and meet us.'. Little did he know, but most of them were serving long sentences, two of them, including the pleasant, quietly spoken one who had prepared and co-led the session were Lifers, and one was serving a nine year sentence for very serious crimes that would have shocked them deeply.

The theme of this year's Prisons Week is 'can you see me, or are you just looking'?  We are challenged by Jesus' parable to look at ourselves and at others through fresh eyes, and without preconceptions.  The curates who met the prisoners at Bible Study met them without being given their labels, 'car thief'  'burglar' or 'murderer'.  Too often when we are just looking, rather than when we are really seeing, we only see what we think we ought to see, and it becomes harder to discern the person behind the label.

Think about the labels we each carry through life, and how they make us feel. In my life I’ve been wife, stay at home Mum, teacher, woman priest, pensioner, bus pass holder, and many more.  Some of them make me feel angry, because they turn me into a stereotype, none of them fully represents the person I am.  What are the stereotypes used to describe who you are, and how do they make you feel?

Jesus’ parable about the Last judgment, when people are finally divided like sheep and the goats, is thought provoking, and asks the question whether we are just looking or really seeing the truth.  An intriguing point about that parable is how unaware the people being judged were about where they fitted in.  The sheep did not know they were sheep, the goats didn’t know they were goats.  Both asked ‘when did we do these things, or when did we fail to do them?’  We only know truly where we fit in, when we are seen through God’s eyes, God who truly sees us, and is not just glancing idly in our direction.

The God who sees us, sitting here in the Church of Christ the Cornerstone, is the same God who sees the congregation of prisoners sitting in the Chapel of Hope in Woodhill Prison at this moment.  I bring their greetings, and the greetings of Chaplain Alan and the Chaplaincy Team, on whose behalf I’m speaking to you on this Prisons Sunday. 

When I was ordained Deacon in 1993, my license was a joint one, to be Honorary Curate at this Church, and Assistant Chaplain to Woodhill Prison.  For four and a half years I had the perspective of bringing together two places in the city, one, high profile and ‘respectable’, the other low key, and probably little thought about, unless you happen to be related to someone who works or resides there.  When you come into this city, you can see the cross on the dome of this church from a long distance away.  We are set on a hill, and visible, Woodhill is set away behind earth banks, few signs direct you to it.   Perhaps the people who are there today, either as prisoners or staff are ‘out of sight, out of mind.’  Today, on Prisons Sunday, we take a closer look, and try to see reality.

To help you look more closely at our prisons nationally, a few facts.

• When I began work at Woodhill as it opened in July 1992, the prison population in England and Wales was 43,000.  Today it is over 88,000.  That is, it has more than doubled in nineteen years
• A very large proportion of offences causing that imprisonment are in some way alcohol or drug-related
• It costs about £38,000 to keep someone in prison, that is, more than it costs to send someone to a top public school
• A disproportionate number of prisoners have been in care as children or young people
• About a third of male prisoners, and over half of female prisoners have mental health problems
• The majority of women prisoners have school aged or younger children
• Prison Officers, please never call them Wardens, do a most complex and demanding job, keeping our prisons under control and safe, a job that is very little recognised or celebrated.

And two facts to make you think, I hope – first, that more than 50 per cent of prisoners will re-offend within two years

And second, proportionately more prisoners will have been victims of crime, than an average section of the community – some of them being victims at a very early age.

If we are just looking, and not really seeing, we may easily make the decision that we can judge who in life is successful, admirable, blessed.  But Jesus’ parable of judgment tells us to stop and think again.  We do not know what it is that we may have done, to honour the Christ in those about us – Lord when did we see you and come to your aid.  Nor do we know when we might miss seeing the Christ among us – Lord, when did we see you and fail to come to your aid?

I spoke about the two buildings, The Church of Christ the Cornerstone, and Woodhill Prison as two very different places, this building, set high in the centre of the city, the prison on the edge, concealed.  But I’d like us to begin this Prisons week by thinking for a few moments of the things we have in common.

First, we are communities of hope.  Both buildings, and the people who come to them, have the expressed intention that what happens within this place will further the ends of justice and peace.  The Chapel of Woodhill prison is called the Chapel of Hope, and I have seen hope expressed there against all odds, and in really tough and challenging times.   As you think about our prisons as places of hope, I’d ask you to pray for Prison staff.  Most Prison Officers, Governors and administrators begin their prison service with high ideals.  They have to struggle to keep them, through disappointments, difficulties, and sometimes betrayals.  Please pray for them, especially in the week ahead.

Next, we are communities of faith, in the context of a society where faith is not always openly on view.  At Cornerstone we struggle to make sense of a context of the shopping and business centres.  Open expressions of faith may be rare, but there can be a recognition of the alternative values that faith can offer.  Similarly, there is little open recognition of the place of faith in the busy and routine of a prison, yet the prison chaplaincy can offer a quiet place of renewal and refreshment to both prisoners and staff.  Please pray for our prison Chaplaincy Teams, offering hope and new and positive directions through faith.  Pray for the team at Woodhill

We are communities of reconciliation.  Neither Cornerstone nor Woodhill can serve its purpose unless we bring change and reconciliation into people’s lives.  One of the saddest things about the waste of lives and waste of money represented by imprisonment, is the re-offending rate.  Only by helping people to take a realistic look at their own lives, at the harm we may have done, and the way back to wholeness of life, can we bring healing.  Such realistic recognition of the offer of new life is not just the work of the prison, it is the work of the church as well.  As we confess our sins week by week we recognise that we too need to realign our lives to the life offered in Jesus Christ.

And so, finally, we are both, Cornerstone and Woodhill, communities of forgiveness.  Many of our prisoners have committed crimes that make it all too easy to consider them as beyond our understanding, or beyond God’s forgiveness.  Yet it is for forgiveness, after true recognition of the harm done by sin, that we both exist.  And when the end time comes, God will be our judge about whether we reached out to the Christ in our neighbour.

I would like to leave the last words to a prisoner.  Paul, imprisoned at Woodhill in the 1990’s wrote this:

                       

A prayer for Forgiveness

I ask for forgiveness

and yet

I don’t feel forgiven. 

It seems that by sinning

alone I am driven. 

I believe in God

and his son

Jesus’ death 

And for my sins

he sacrificed

his last breath.

So why do I feel

so unworthy and unloved? 

Maybe because all

my selfish actions

I know God has seen. 

I want

I need

To be cleansed from within.

And to feel reassured

that God has wiped away my sin. 

I don’t care

whether I’m rich

or poor.

 I just want

the Lord

 to come through my door. 

Doesn’t he know it is open?