Talk by The Rt Revd Michael Langrish

Transcript of a talk given at BibleLands' Annual Service 7 October 2006

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I was visiting a school in Devon recently and one of the children asked me: “When God created the world did he know that men and women were going to make bombs and tanks and landmines and nuclear weapons and things like that?”  And my answer was, ‘Yes, I think that he probably did.’

Throughout the Bible there is a realism and farsightedness about God’s view of human beings.  In fact, if there were not, then he would hardly be God.  From the very moment that human beings are formed in God’s creativity there seem to be three ever-present truths which characterise his relationship with what he has made.   The first is that he has the highest hopes for them and of their potential to rise to them.   The second is that he is utterly aware not only of their capacity to fail and fall short and narrow their vision, but also of their propensity to do so over and over again.   The third is that despite all this, he never gives up on them, but remains utterly committed to them.

So, while God may weep at what happens in the lands of the Bible today: the bombing and destruction of large swathes of Lebanon; the suicide bombs that terrorise and claim innocent lives; the looming humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the intolerance of fundamentalism and the homelessness in Egypt, the refugees from Sudan, Darfur and Somalia – although he no doubt sheds tears for such wickedness and folly, I cannot believe that it takes him by surprise because he has seen it all before.

So much of our history, our predicament, as we read it through the story of the Bible is one of great promise barely recognised, and great gift easily misunderstood or forgotten.  And nowhere is that perhaps more clearly seen than in God’s relationship with one group of people and the lands of the Bible, and what I have in mind here is the long saga of the relationship between God’s will, God’s people and the land they are promised in which to dwell.  Let’s start in Genesis Chapter 17 where the landless Abram, living a nomadic life in a place in which he has no rights (he is an alien in the land of Canaan), is confronted by God who promises him a future in which he will be blessed.  He will have a place to which he belongs, a place in which he will have meaning, and significance and identity, and continuity through many generations.  And Abram’s response?  It’s to laugh, to scoff at this idea that there could be a future that he does not himself shape and control; and this is precisely what he immediately sets out to do – take control.  In place of the heir that God promises to him (the child that will be Isaac), Abraham points to the one that he has already secured for himself, Ishmael.  The land on offer, the future, is something that he wishes to manage and control himself rather than accept as grace, in which he is to be blessed as God sees fit.  And so we glimpse that pattern of human behaviour which is so very, very familiar.  The story goes on; and Abraham, as he now is, has to be shown that it is God, not he, who will set the future for those whom he fashions, and it is he, God, who is the only true Lord of any land that we may be given to possess. And so, when Abraham dies, the land that he holds personally is just big enough to take his grave.  For his descendants, Isaac and Jacob, it is still more or less the same, for real settlement in the land is yet to come; and when it does come, the irony is that it is not in Canaan that this happens, but in the land of Egypt.  Only now can God’s people settle themselves because they now have land that has been obtained for them through Joseph.  It is the best land in Egypt (Gen 47/6); it is a land in which they can dwell in security and prosperity; it is a land of plenty – of fleshpots, indeed – but before long it is also a land of slavery and oppression, because ultimately this is Pharaoh’s land, controlled and managed according to Pharaoh’s culture and Pharaoh’s will or whim.  This, they come to understand, is not the land promised of God, because this is land experienced and lived in not by gift and privilege, but by strategy and power.  It has been attained by brilliant management and political leadership on the part of Joseph, but no amount of management can wrest it from imperial authority and make it what it is not.  And so, once again, land is left behind and in the landlessness of the Exodus, as they wandered, exposed and vulnerable, they learned, fitfully, to trust not land itself, or themselves, but the God who calls and gifts; the God who provides all that is needed but only what is needed.  Or, as Dean Horace Dammers used to say, in commending a proper approach to the stewardship of the earth; ‘There is enough for everyone’s need; but not for everyone’s greed.’

And so by the time they come to enter the land promised to them once more, they should have learned that with the promise comes ambiguity; that with the gift comes warning; that with land comes inherent danger.  If they learn the lessons of Egypt then the land will be a place of blessing and freedom; if they forget them then once again there will come bondage and curse. ‘When you have come into the land which the Lord God has given you  . . . see that you do not become proud and forget the Lord . . .  and say to yourself, “My own power and strength have gained me this wealth.  (I don’t know about you, but I find in those words a sobering and awesome resonance with so much of what I see around me today).  Yet this is precisely what happened and, during the period of the kings especially, what followed was a long story (with the two noble, and notable, interludes during the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah) of the grabbing of land, of hanging on to it and defending it against losing it, whatever the cost might be – including compromises with, and capitulation to, contemporary power politics and secular gods.  And this preoccupation with managing and holding the land, stealing from and subjugating others where necessary to get it and maintain it, leads to spiritual amnesia, forgetfulness; it produces the very things against which Deuteronomy 8 is directed.  It fosters in people, especially those in control, the illusion that life always has been, and is always intended to be, as we have arranged it now; and that it is thus ours by right to be defended by whatever it takes – ‘our right to our way of life’.  Again there is the slide from being recipients of mercy and grace (and thus generous givers of this to others as well) to being managers of achievement and defenders of our rights – and it is a slide to which kings and priests, governments and churches are susceptible alike.  In spiritual terms people turn from openness to the living God (living in terms of being present to us in a way that is both ubiquitous and existential – the source of our freedom at all times and in all places) to slavishly following secular gods (in bondage to the prevailing values and absolutes of just the here and now).  So God, who calls us to liberation and freedom, is reduced to being treated as if he were our own private patron of the status quo.  But this situation is intolerable and ultimately it becomes unsustainable as the fantasy collapses and the people lose the land of promise to go into the land of exile. 

The Exodus is reversed and their slavery becomes obvious yet again. ‘How long can this go on’ says Jeremiah ‘I cannot keep silence . .. . These are the words of the Lord: the whole land will be desolate and I shall make an end to it’.   

The warnings that this is what happens are ever present as prophet after prophet, in word and deed, attempt to unmask the illusions of their age, and to shed light into the dark regions of God’s people’s forgetfulness. And this cannot be done without naming the evils and the suffering, the oppression and the injustice that this illusory belief in security and destiny through acquisition and power involves.  And it is this naming and recognition of what is so dreadfully wrong, this prophetic tradition of unmasking untruth and telling things as they really are, that lies behind all that New Testament language of light and dark, blindness and sight.   Ultimately, it is only when we tell things as they really are, without fear or favour, that we find repentance and compassion.  It is only then that we discover that gut anger and that compassion, that ‘feeling with’ those who are in need which results in action to both bind up wounds and also to challenge and resist the cruel weapons that have caused them.

In brief then, one thread running all the way through the story of God’s people is that entry into land, and into a future, at the invitation of God is a privilege, it is a work of grace, and so always carries with it a responsibility – to the will and work of God.  And that brings me to what brings us all here today – the story and work of this society called, significantly, Biblelands.  For over 150 years this organisation has responded to a call to come into and to work in, those lands, that part of the world, in which the story of God’s creative and redemptive purposes has been so powerfully shown.  And what I find very interesting is that in these lands it is so often with the landless, the expelled and ejected, the vulnerable and the dispossessed, that some of its most important work has been done.  Whether it is in responding to the massacres and expulsions of the Armenians; to the hundreds and thousands of homeless and traumatised people scattered across the Balkans and the Middle East after the first world war; whether it is in working with those who survived and fled the horrors of the mid 20^th century, or those who lost home and livelihood in the great disruptions that have afflicted Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, or whether it is in responding to the needs of the homeless and displaced of modern Egypt, the refugees of Sudan and Somalia as we were hearing this morning, it has been a means by which grace has come as promise and gift, light has been brought to bear in places of darkness, compassion has given birth to hope, and men and women supported in keeping faith in God’s eternal promise alive.  It is a story of privilege and responsibility going hand in hand.

For all this we give thanks today, but to live gracefully in a land of grace, requires more than gratitude.  ‘Bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you, but see that you do not forget by failing to keep his commandments, laws and statutes’ wrote the Deuteronomist: ‘continue to see things not through the prism of management and acquisition and manipulation and power games, but through the eyes of the God of mercy and grace’.  Do this and you cannot but feel compassion, the compassion that will not only respond to human suffering with practical help, with long term development as well as short term relief, but will also speak out and confront the things that cause the suffering, the poverty, the shame and the loss of hope.  Do this and you will know that somewhere a prophetic voice must be raised to challenge the illusions so powerfully defended by those they benefit, even when their power is used to the full to procure silence through fear.

And there is certainly a great deal of fear bedevilling how we might respond to the deep and long term needs of the Middle East at the present time – fear of being anti-Semitic, or anti-Islamic; fear of being soft on terrorism, or unpatriotic; or just fear of not really understanding and getting it wrong.  But when we fear, this is both a failure of love and also a failure of trust.   It is a failure of trust in the God who, as he did with Abraham, calls us to live very vulnerably and to be dependent on him in a land of promise, rather than as managers and defenders in a landscape of our own devising.  It is worth remembering that when Abraham and Sarah each laughed at God’s promise, and scoffed at the  idea that there could be a future other than that which we shape for ourselves, God’s reply is very simple: ‘Is anything impossible for the Lord?’  Life can be different, quite simply because God is God.  And hope becomes then not a fantasy or a day dream, but a glimpse of what shall be, what God will do, rooted in recalled memory of what has been before, what God has done and continues to do now.  Signs of hope for the future are rooted firmly in recalling and understanding the truth of the past.  And that, I think, brings us to the hope that brought this organisation into being and what, I hope, it is still very much about.  The great passion that led Cuthbert Young to found the society in 1854 was to make known ‘the truth as it is in Jesus’ – God’s truth in the word made flesh – the truth about us, our potential for the best and the worst, the truth about what brings freedom and the truth of what results in slavery; the truth that gives life, because it gives faith and love and hope; and the truth that has the courage to confront fantasy and illusion about power and might, and the things that lead to poverty, injustice and death.  So that wonderfully inspiring history of this organisation: ‘The Light Bearers – carrying healing and hope to the Middle East battleground’ concludes like this: ‘in making that truth evident, Cuthbert Young’s successors today, just as in earlier years, will always be working where the need is greatest, following in the steps of the master himself, who came to give sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’

All over the Biblelands of the Middle East today voices are crying with the prophet, Jeremiah (4/19): ‘The anguish! I cannot bear the pain! My heart – my heart is beating wildly’, but then, we must remember, and we must remember most vitally, the prophet immediately goes on: ‘I cannot keep silence’   The truth will out, God’s view of things must be articulated; justice, mercy and grace must not be squashed, even when this involves huge personal cost.  And to anyone tempted to scoff or laugh that this might be so, then hear the word of the Lord: ‘Is anything then impossible for God?’