Sermon preached at the Zoom Service for the First Sunday after Trinity – 14th June 2020: Exodus 19, 2-8; Matthew 9, 35-10, 8
Revd Canon Leonard Doolan
Who would have thought we would be making a link between the death of a black African American and the statue of Winston Churchill being clad in protective boarding. Who would have thought we would be making a link between the death of a black African American and the dumping of a statue of an 18th century slave trader into a Bristol river, Edward Colston.
The death of George Floyd at the hands of an America policeman is sickening. ‘I can’t breathe, officer’. How many tens of thousands of times will such a death have happened down through history. How many more? As we look on shocked at this ugly scene, it did not take long for the recorded action of some rogue policemen to ripple into a torrent of consequences.
His death touches on a sense of guilt that we harbour for things that have happened in history; things, events, people that are now being remembered in public art, but for whose actions in life we have formed a convenient forgetfulness. We are making all sorts of connections with the uncomfortable side of our national histories. We can now live in comparative comfort on the prosperity that some of these people created in time past.
George Floyd’s life matters. Black lives matter. All lives matter. Certainly no one formed in the Christian tradition can take any other view than this, because human life is a sacred creation of God, and each life is created to reflect the light and truth of God – no matter whether we each make a good or a bad job of it.
The death of one man has sparked a chain reaction of emotions and actions that have disturbed the latent memories of history. On one hand there must be a deep searching among us to ensure that all people are treated justly and fairly and equally, on the other hand we seek to assuage our corporate guilt by destroying the icons of things past. Which is the greater good? What has the most impact? What action will make the world a better place? How will our actions contribute most not to a national pride, but to a common good? Only you can decide on these sensitive matters for yourself.
However, for my own part, and on a general level, I feel an anxiety about attempts to obliterate our past, because this has something to do with identity. On a large scale we have seen how the Taliban destroyed ancient magnificent symbols of the Persian civilization. It is not just the elimination of history, it is an attempt at the elimination of memory, and memory is a key component of identity, both personal and societal. We have seen how evil regimes try to wipe out whole ethnic groups, genocides, not just in a vengeful way, but in order to try and eliminate the memory that such people existed.
We see this eradication of memory in the slow but methodical removal of the very ancient Christian Byzantine churches, many of them already ruined, in Eastern Turkey; remove the symbols to eliminate the memory. Destroy the icons, the outward signs of a culture or religion, and you give the impression not only that they no longer exist, but that they never did exist. It is the annihilation of memory. It is the creation of a historical amnesia, and when our history is wiped out we cannot fully understand ourselves, nor can we make improvements or reparations from our histories, and we cannot form what our future will be.
Remembering is a foundation of the Christian faith. It is the recalling, the reciting of the past that invites our faith into our lives and which gives the energy to pass on the good news to future generations. We describe this as living tradition – not just ‘old stuff that means nothing’, but the sacred things of the past that shaped our history, our religion, and shapes our present identity which in turn influences how we look forward in hope.
At the heart of our Christian practice is the word ‘remember’. We use the Greek word ‘anamnesis’. This is central to our action together in the Eucharist. ‘Do this in remembrance of me’.
It is in the remembering of Christ’s words and actions that countless generations and centuries of Christian people have been formed. It is by doing this that we have our corporate identity. The church is a body of people whose very being requires us to be together, to gather together around Jesus Christ, and to recall in words and actions who he was, and is, and will be – even to the end of the age (Matthew 28, 20).
Christians are not members of a club that gathers because we like reconstructions – like those enthusiasts for reconstructing the Battle of Hastings, complete with uniforms, or to re-enact the battle at the Ypres salient in WW I. Not at all!
The church is not a religious archaeological club, but the visible expression to the world of what humanity is called to be, and to proclaim that we believe in a God to whom George Floyd matters, black lives matter, Pakistani and Indian lives matter, Iranian lives matter – all lives matter. To remove that fundamental belief is to forget that there is a God in whose image we are all made.
Our Lord Jesus came that we might have life – and have it with abundance. All life matters. In Jesus Christ we have abundant life.
Now we can remove the public signs of this belief. We can be iconoclastic. We can break church windows that show the holy people down through the ages, our saints and martyrs as happened in the 15thcentury. By the way, Bristol Cathedral has a stained glass window commemorating Edward Colston’s philanthropy – will that get broken, who knows?
We can practice our faith without Byzantine icons if we have to. There have been historic attempts in the 9th Century to do just that when the Byzantine Emperors were iconoclasts. You can remove the public art. You can destroy the icons of society. However, for the Christian faith you cannot remove the memory, for it is handed on from generation to generation not in wood and bronze, glass and silver, but in bread and wine offered in remembrance of the one who came to give us abundant life. Thanks be to God!
What will happen? What will happen when all the historical statues in public squares are pulled down? Will we forget then that slavery, for example, was evil because we have no public reminder of its existence? What will happen if the statue erected to ‘Bomber’ Harris in London gets put away in a museum? Only those with an historic interest will see him. Will we be removing from the public corporate memory the reality that war creates terrible tragedies, but also brings out great bravery in defence of justice and the common good?
Who knows? I don’t. I do know, however, that for the rest of my life I will be committed with bread and wine to do this in remembrance of ‘Him’.
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