Pastoral Letter from the Bishop of London             

The Audacity of Hope - Advent 2008 

Dear Friends,

Our 24 hour media are full of the sight and sounds of politicians and economists scrabbling for solutions to the current economic crisis. Increased liquidity and unified regulation may be a necessary response to this time of financial turbulence but the most urgent need today for individuals and communities is hope. It is hope which can give a meaning to life and history and which gives us the courage to continue on our way into the future together.

We are in the midst of a crisis of confidence partly because we have invested our hopes in a project which was bound to disappoint - the project of growth without limit without any end in view beyond the process itself.

Deep down we knew it could not last. As Jonathan Swift said when the South Sea bubble burst, “Most people thought it wou’d come but no man prepar’d for it; no man consider’d that it would come like a thief in the night”. Swift is echoing the saying of Jesus reported by St Luke, “If the master of the house had known in what hour the thief was coming, he would have watched and not left his house to be broken into”.

Daily immersion in the Scriptures is a way of watching and some measure of protection against what the American Central banker Alan Greenspan called “the irrational exuberance” to which markets are periodically prone.

But smug assertions of the “I told you so” variety are not helpful as we face the present credit crunch. It will bring unemployment and anxiety to many more thousands in London. The plight of so many among us and so many of our neighbours should at least make us more sensitive to the level of distress which already exists among some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

The Bishops of the Diocese have recently authorised the wide circulation of a paper from Jack Maple, our Community Ministry Adviser, which gives details of relevant initiatives already under way in the Diocese. They include food banks; debt counselling; time banking and youth employment projects. These examples of existing good work, offering a practical response to the recession, are posted on the Diocesan Web Site. The Time Bank, in particular, is one of the few banks on which a “run” would be positively welcome.

But we are all in the front line of another vital element in our response as a Christian community. We must marry biblical insight into the purposes of God and the deep structure of the universe to reflection on the current challenges that we face in order to proclaim the faith afresh in our generation.

As bearers and interpreters of the word of God in daily life, our way of living and way of speaking must reveal the heaven in ordinary existence and the mystery of love at the heart of all things. We constantly fail to rise to the challenge but Advent is the time of year when all Christians are recalled to our primary vocation as bearers and interpreters of the Word made flesh.

In Holy Scripture the period of forty years has obvious resonances with the story of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness. This year, 2008, marks the fortieth anniversary of a number of events which have shaped our contemporary world.

One of the most significant was the repudiation of inherited wisdom in the social revolution of 1968 – soixante-huit – which in French has come to describe a whole generation whose leaders now rule the G8 countries. I was recently in Sweden, in Uppsala, at the request of the Archbishop of Canterbury to attend an interfaith summit on Climate Change. Some of the delegates fell to musing on what they had been doing in 1968. One of the Swedish bishops revealed that he had been part of a demonstration in Uppsala University against bishops. He had been punished by being appointed one.

But also on Christmas Eve 1968 we saw “earthrise” for the first time; the first photograph taken from space of the entire globe sapphire blue and beautiful. This photograph has become a symbol of hope which proclaims afresh the interconnectedness of all things on the planet. 

The church with some honourable exceptions has spent much of the past forty years wandering amazed, confused about what its response should be to the mocking apostles of the social revolution and the new global realities.

Relieved only by flashes of prophecy like the action which followed on the publication of the Faith in the City Report, we have spent much of the past forty years elaborating a defensive bureaucracy, fidgeting with structures and other in house pre-occupations.

In this the fortieth year and in the encircling turbulence we have the responsibility of choosing a future for our church. God is calling us out of the wasteland over the river to the strenuous work of communicating the Christian hope to our generation. We shall either cross that river or choose to stay in a cramped space which has become familiar and comfortable.

There are some encouraging signs. The recent campaigns, “Jubilee 2000” to relieve the debt burden on some of the poorest countries in the world and “Make Poverty History” were partly inspired and largely sustained by Christian individuals and organisations. They demonstrated the capacity and the will of the Christian community to enlarge the room for manoeuvre in the public square so that sympathetic politicians are freed to act without fear of electoral suicide.

At the same time the American experience offers encouragement. 1968 was also the year in which Martin Luther King was assassinated. But he had a dream and a hope which was nourished by his faith and, forty years on, Barack Obama has been elected President – an event inconceivable in 1968. It is significant that the latest book written by the President-elect is called “The Audacity of Hope”.

It is still true however that tuning into hope remains a challenge. One of the most striking things about the icons of “the harrowing of hell” in which the risen Christ drags the ancestors of the whole human race, Adam and Eve, from their tombs is how reluctant they seem to come out. The thermostat in the tomb seems to have been set at “comfort”. The Advent Season advances with the cry of “Sleepers Awake!”

What has happened to the world economy is a shock but one which can open us to a new awareness.

One necessary response is obvious. We need a fresh emphasis in teaching and practice on the classical virtues. Plato discussed them and St Thomas Aquinas re-worked them and they have equivalents in nearly all cultures.

The first of the cardinal virtues [as they are known in the Christian tradition] is foundational. Justice is giving every person their due, knowing our own needs but having a sense of proportion about ourselves; knowing that we are not gods and that we flourish only if our neighbour is flourishing as well. The sign at the entrance to the shrine at Delphi – “Know thyself” - was not an invitation to resort to the antique equivalent of Sigmund Freud. It was a reminder to mortals that they were not gods.  Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, who came in the form of a servant taught that the first step in becoming a human being in his image and likeness is to refuse to be a little god.

 The three other cardinal virtues are built upon justice and relate to our powers of reason, our animal spirits and our appetites.

Prudence is practical wisdom; the intelligent understanding of the balance between the promise and perils of this life.

Courage is the spiritual capacity to say “yes” to life and to have the courage to be rather than idling in risk-averse mode. There is no creativity without respect for animal spirits.

Moderation relates to the appetites and establishes the balance between feasting and fasting; between “dressing and keeping the earth” which was the way of life enjoined upon human beings under the Maker’s Instructions. The other sign at Delphi was “Nothing in Excess”.

Practising the virtues can create an ethos out of ethics and this creates a more powerful moral culture than results from mere compliance with a rules based system. Democratic politics and free markets need a third component if society is to cohere and flourish. They need to operate within a firm moral architecture. Free markets in particular cannot flourish within a value-free environment.

Spiritually, however, the virtues are a preparation for receiving the higher gifts. They are a way of cleansing the sight and reducing the light pollution so that we may see what is above us.

Most urban dwellers in the West suffer from light pollution which paradoxically means that the glare obscures the sky; we cannot see the stars and the vastness of space. The heavens lie under the pall of the light generated by our hectic activity. The shock that has been administered to our economic system has the potential to dispel some of the illusions which contribute to the light pollution. It is possible that we can now have a clearer view; study the stars and receive the promise of that which calls to us from the heart of the universe.

Some of the most hopeful people I have ever met are members of our church in Mozambique. Their country is one of the poorest in the world. There is little scope for light pollution and the result is that our friends can see clearly how central hope is to the greatest human endeavours.

Hope which is unshakeable and which creates civilisations comes from beyond ourselves – not from our own schemes and calculation. Those weary wise men from the East studied the heavens and noticed the star which led them to the birth of a most surprising hope. The star led them to an encounter with the Word made flesh; not to God the tyrant; not to some idea of a God infinitely remote from the passion of human life but to a child.

Jesus Christ born in Bethlehem is not a symbol of some trite proposition such as “hope springs eternal” or “nature always renews herself”. God entered history in human form with un-coercive love to love even his enemies into loving. This is news at which some scoffed; some were scandalised but which has planted hope in the heart of history. We are the bearers of this hope.

He has taught us that joy in life comes not from having more and more things but from loving and being loved; from participating in the great exchange of love between the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit and which animates the whole universe. The Chief Rabbi recalls his father, a struggling shop keeper during financially depressed times in London’s East End but he was never poor “because he had his family and he had his faith”. 

As members of the Diocese of London we are bearers and interpreters of this Word made flesh in the way in which we live and speak and respond to this time of anxiety. It is the Word made flesh which has formed us into a community of hope. We must not waste the present opportunity to participate in “making all things new” forty years after the great convulsions of 1968. May God send us his blessing this Advent as we lay aside all unworthy and trivial impulses and dedicate ourselves to His service and in the words of St Paul, may “the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that ye may overflow with hope in the power of the Holy Spirit.”
+Richard Londin: