7/7 Remembered
Address given by Prebendary Paul Hawkins at the Service of Remembrance 7 July 2006
In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, there is a curious but wonderful story about the ancient patriarch Jacob:
He is pictured crossing a stream at night: he’s feeling nervous and frightened because he is due to meet his brother the next day for the first time for several years and having greatly wronged him last time they were together.
Jacob’s way is blocked by a stranger.
They have to wrestle all night.
Jacob gets hurt, but he refuses to let go of the man.
But in the end the stranger blesses Jacob and also gives him a new name,
Which is the Bible’s way of saying that, through this mysterious stranger, Jacob discovers himself and what his life is for.
The stranger is of course God.
And the story provides a powerful image of what happens in life if, in the face of everything that faces us, including wickedness whether in ourselves and or in others…if in the face of all that life throws at us, painful and troubling things as well as joyous and happy things…this story is saying to us that if in the midst of it all we refuse to let go of what is true and honourable and just and pure and commendable, refuse to let go, that is of God..then, in the journey of life, yes we will get hurt, sometimes very deeply, but ultimately we will be blessed and will discover who we are, what we are here for, which is to love and be loved.
The sheer wicked pointlessness of what happened a year ago, the terrible loss and hurt and shock that so many people suffered, brought home to us the tragic violence of our world, but this must make us even more determined to hold fast to a different way of doing things. One of the realities and tragedies of our world is that for many people the word religion has connotations of violence and prejudice and oppression, and not surprisingly so, as so often people use religion to supposedly legitimise their own resentments and hatreds. So all of us who believe have the important task of reconnecting religion with the core of what it is all about, which is about being moulded by love, that love which we believe is the ultimate reality in and behind all things…
We need to remind ourselves and others that true religion is about making enemies into friends;
…it is about including people, not excluding;
…about affirming and supporting and encouraging, not about hurting and killing
…about generosity of spirit that respects and trusts others
…about a gentleness which is also a profound strength that will face violence with non-violence.
As our hearts go out to all who continue to suffer so dreadfully as a result of the events of July 7 last year: the bereaved, the wounded, survivors who experienced such shocking things, members of the emergency services who had to respond to awful situations and work in dreadful conditions,
we also recall that it is the way of God to bring good out of evil, a good that never justifies the evil, but nevertheless provides us with hope for the future.
One solid good is us being here together.
We are not pretending we all believe the same things, because we don’t. But we do share some core beliefs and values, values that of course extend way beyond our own faith communities.
And it is important to remember that faith itself is not the preserve of faith communities.
We all know that our friends and colleagues who are not believers, nevertheless have faith, faith for example, in other people, …or in the value of strong communities. Indeed faith and love go together: to love somebody you have to have faith in them. Where there is love, there will also be faith.
So a central task for all of us is always the building in our local communities and beyond, coalitions of people who have faith in the possibility of peoples of different traditions living in mutual respect, enriching and enlivening each other.
Or to put it more sharply in the words of the poet W.H. Auden, ‘We must love one another, or we die.’
So we pray together that out of what was an act of great wickedness, which has caused so much pain and loss,..that out of this evil may come a solid good, which it will, if we all refuse to let go of what is true and
honourable and just and pure and commendable, and never forget what we are created for, which is to love and be loved.
To Jacob: God came as a stranger, and God can seem a stranger to us when we are confronted by destructive hatred and the suffering it causes.
In the story, Jacob refuses to let go of God until he is blessed by Him.
And if we refuse to let go of what we believe in, which includes believing in each other, then we discover God is always transforming us, not a stranger but closer to us than our own breath, wanting our wellbeing and our peace.