Anglican Communion News Service

A Sermon Preached by the Most Reverend Dr Peter Carnley, Anglican Archbishop of Perth and Primate of Australia

St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, at 3pm on Sunday 30 April 2000

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the northern autumn of 1562 an Antwerp cloth merchant was unpacking a consignment of cloth which had recently arrived from Turkey. In amongst the bails of cloth he found a small brown paper package, which he assumed must have been sent as a gift from the fabric supplier. On opening the package he found it contained some strange looking smallish onions. Some he planted in his vegetable garden next to his cabbages in the hope of producing a crop next year. The rest he roasted and seasoned with oil and vinegar and then ate for his supper. Next Spring, to his amazement the onions in the garden bloomed as, yes, you will have guessed, as tulips; these are believed to be the first to flower in Europe, in the Spring of 1563.

This is an incident with which Ann and I can resonate, because when the mania began for us, our bulbs had to be refrigerated in brownpaper packets to give them the experience of a northern European winter. Eight weeks or so of cold storage is needed to trigger the internal chemical changes between sugar and starch necessary to make them bloom. Long before our supply of bulbs grew to our present 2000 I was firmly given orders to vacate the kitchen fridge and buy my own, which I have done. But in the early days we lived with a low grade anxiety about whether our precious bulbs might inadvertently make their way into a beef bourguignon.

For the last couple of years Ann and I have been taking the advice of the Council for Positive Aging seriously by working out in advance how we see ourselves spending our retirement. I have to tell you that in the week or two before the primatial election on 3 February I received both my ABN number for GST purposes as a small business operator as well as a license number from the Nannup Shire Council as an ownerbuilder, to allow me to put up an extension to the little house. A radical change of plans, however, and genuine newness of life, has clearly overtaken us, so we must push thoughts of retirement to Stillpoint Tulip Farm a little further into the background.

But, why am I speaking so personally? It is because the ministry of a Primate, and indeed, any form of episcopal and priestly ministry, is in the first instance personal. It is the ministry of a person. We are not convinced as Anglicans that the shepherding ministry of pastoral oversight can effectively be exercised by a group or a committee. It is the ministry of a person, often in one on one ministry, with his or her particular personal interests and agendas, and with all the foibles and frailties too, that are necessarily brought to the task.

And, speaking personally, it means a huge amount to me and to my family to have so many of you who are our personal friends from so far back and from so far away here today to support us. Woody Allen once said that life for ninety per cent of the time is just a matter of turning up to things. Believe me, I am very encouraged and grateful for all of you who have gone out of your way to turn up today.

But this service today marks more than just the new ministry of a person. This happens to be the first representative gathering of leaders, both lay and ordained, of our national Church since the beginning of the new millennium. The focus should not just be on a person but on the opportunity it gives us for the renewal of our national Church life. Indeed, that is a second reason for speaking about the tulips. For had St Paul been a Dutchman, which I know is a big ask, and had he lived in the seventeenth century, when he searched for explanatory images to communicate something of the surpassing mystery of Easter faith as he wrote I Corinthians 15 , he might well have said that when, not just a seed, but a bulb is placed in the ground and buried it to all intents and purposes disappears from view and dies. But then, through the hidden mystery of the creative activity of God it blooms, a 'thin clear bubble of blood' dancing in the breeze.

At Easter we celebrate the bloom of new life, the mystery of the renewal of our life in Christ; it is a time for baptisms and for many of us it is the time for the renewal of our ordination vows. As you look at us bishops assembled in the Cathedral today, I guess if we are honest your first thought may come in the form of a question: Can these dry old bulbs live?

At first glance it may seem that the Church is a gerontocracy, but I hasten to say that some of these onions are in fact already retired, and if you look more closely you will see some bright young faces beginning to emerge, so it is not quite so desperate as it may at first appear. And I can assure you when these chaps are out of the rig they are in today, and when they are not standing in the traditional attitude of prayer with arms outstretched in the classic standing (orans) position leading worship, their hands will be more characteristically in the ten-to-two position as they drive their cars backwards and forwards and up and down the length and breadth of this nation.

We have the research officers of the Premier of New South Wales to thank for the discovery that the first official use of the title 'Australia' in Australian history, was in 1836 when William Grant Broughton was made the first 'Bishop of Australia'. There were at the time no cities. Sydney only became a city in 1842. In 1836 Broughton's See was the whole of Australia. Since then Australia has been sub-divided into its present twenty three dioceses, served by a college of bishops and assistant bishops whose dedicated and heroic pastoral ministry covers the whole land. As a national Church we are very conscious that the marginalised are not only the poor and socially deprived or ethnic groupings of disadvantage but also the geographically isolated, 'the lonely and those who feel that the rest of the nation is neglecting them. Working out how to minister effectively in the neglected rural and isolated parts of Australia with properly trained non-stipendiary clergy is an important item on our current agenda.

It is a standing zoological joke that the Primate is the missing link. But in a sense that is true, at least insofar as he is supposed to be a link person, to facilitate the gathering and the deliberating and the decision making, with an originating role in relation to the corporate prayer and the thinking and the work of the group. It is a great privilege to have been asked to be of service in this kind of way, to this splendid body of dedicated men in this national work. Thus, today we are conscious that while primatial ministry is personal, it is also collegial, a ministry that is exercised as first amongst equals, in unity with others.

A Primate is also the link person with the other provinces of the Anglican Communion, and particularly those of this immediate region. I am very grateful to colleagues from New Zealand, New Guinea, Melanesia, Myanmar, South East Asia, Hong Kong, and representatives of the Primates of Japan, the Philippines and the USA for taking the trouble to come today from so far away to remind us of our greater international belonging. Written expressions of support have come from Korea, Sri Lanka, India and Southern Africa. Since the recent international Primates' meeting in Portugal I count them already to be friends, and we are acutely conscious of our mutual interdependence, and of our responsibilities and obligations to one another in an international communion of Churches.

Primatial ministry is personal, it is collegial. By now those of you who know the 1982 Lima Report on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches will have dropped to the fact that I am working with its threefold categorisation of ordained ministry, and especially today episcopal ministry as personal, collegial, and, finally, communal. For the ministry of a bishop, including the bishop in a primatial role, is not just personal and collegial but exercised in relation to the whole community of the Church, Bishops, Clergy and People together, as the whole people of God in their mission and ministry to the wider community of society as a whole.

As we relate to Australian society as a whole, all Churches at present have a clear evangelistic task to do to connect and re-connect with vast numbers of increasingly secuarlised Australians with whom we have lost touch. In the context of the tragic brokenness of the present world we also have responsibilities to foster dialogue with other faiths. We Christians certainly know that we have to look at ourselves and what we have to offer, how we are performing, and how we can better work together. For we know perfectly well that we must be one that the world may know what kind of God our God is in terms of the unity and harmony of love and the ultimate relationality of persons. Clearly, we all have a task to do in terms of communication if the census figures relating to religious adherence in this country are to be turned around.

For all that, we have to remember that Jesus himself taught his disciples to think of themselves as a ministry, doing a representative or priestly job for the whole, as. salt in the stew and yeast in the dough. It is not the task of salt to turn the whole stew into more salt or of yeast to turn the whole lump of dough into more yeast, but rather to give some added flavour to the whole and to raise up the quality of community life. In the work of proclaiming in words and deeds the dawning Kingdom of God, success is not therefore measured in numbers alone, though the proportion of the active agent in relation to the whole has, of course, to be adequate for the task. But how do we conceive the task of being salt and yeast? I want to make two points:

First, something about leadership. In 1990 Vaclav Harvel, addressing the United States Congress spoke of what Czechs and Slovaks had to learn from the capitalist west, following the humiliating collapse of eastern block economies. But he also said that he believed they had learned something from experience which they could teach us: 'The specific experience I am talking about', he said, 'has given me one certainty: Consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim'. The Marxists mistakenly thought, he explained, that if you get the outward material circumstances of human being right, then right thought, right values, right morality, right human relationships and right culture would follow. That was, he said, both the essence of the Marxists' programme and their fundamental mistake. And it is something for us to learn, for in a curious inversion of dialectical materialism, we currently often hear the view expressed that if we can get the economy right, then everything else will fall happily into place. Thus, Aborigines are told that what they need is housing and health services and all will be well. There is no doubt in my mind that better housing and vastly improved health services are certainly needed, but something else is missing, something to do with consciousness: right fundamental attitudes, generosity of spirit, an open preparedness to acknowledge and honour original custodianship of the land, and to own the many injustices of dispossession - in a word, spirituality is the essential nub of the matter. 'For this reason' Harvel said, 'the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed - be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization - will be unavoidable.' If consciousness precedes being and not the other way around, then for those of us with responsibilities of leadership, matters of outward style may not be so important, whether leadership should be exercised from out front or from behind, or dressed up in one way rather than another; what is important is that leadership should be exercised from within.

Secondly, something about citizenship. The entire world at the moment seems to be disenchanted with leaders. From Clinton to Yeltsin, from Milosevic to Mugabe, the world is shadowed by disillusionment and disappointment. Within our own shores and in this South East Asian region a similar despondency is in the air. Those in leadership positions do not appear to be delivering the goods in the way we expect. We wring our hands and complain: why doesn't so and so do something about x, or y, or z? Since the Primatial election on 3 February I have received a lot of unsolicited advice through the mail about a wide range of issues. Indeed, it has become clear that many think of a Primate as a Mr. Fixit. The expectations are enormous.

But if we think that way we delude ourselves and the truth is not in us. Perhaps its time to swing the focus from leadership to citizenship, and perhaps the leader's chief communal role is to encourage people generally to ask some simple questions: what can I do in my place, my street, my block to build networks of love and neighbourly care? Without waiting on leaders to do things, what can I do to build a civil society right where I am? How can we enter more fully into community life in this locality with a little creative imagination so as to re-claim our hope?

There is an enormous difference between genuine hope and wishful thinking; hope by contrast with wishful thinking is grounded in positive experiences which convince us we can go on and do better. We can give an account of the hope that is in us. And perhaps it is time not to get hooked on the many dispiriting problems that weigh us down, but, instead to rekindle community commitment and participation by reflecting a little on the good things of the path along which together we have come: 'Father, we have heard with our ears, our Fathers have told us what wondrous things you have done in times of old'. Appreciative enquiry, reflection on the positives, identifying the spots where there is already energy for change, may be a better way forward.

Let me give you two examples of which I have recently become aware that speak to me of new hope. The first has to do with the struggle of the people of Fitzroy to keep their local swimming pool in the face of a governmental decision to close it on the basis of the economic rationalist principle that, though providing an important community service, it did not pay. The imminent threat of closure mobilized the people of the Fitzroy community to make a noise 'You can go down to the neighbouring Collingwood swimming pool' they were told. And so they did. Can you imagine - one thousand of them all trying to get into the Collingwood pool at the same time! The result: the Fitzroy pool is still there but the government is not. This was its first major public defeat, which signaled worse to come. There is an important message in there somewhere. For me it is that our best contribution as leaders may be to help people in local communities re-vision and re-claim their own destiny, so as to unleash wellsprings of creative imagination and hope across the land.

And hope arises in the most unlikely of places. In this last week we have had working with us in Perth a remarkable woman priest from Chicago, named Bliss Browne. She is the founder and director of a social transformation programme entitled Imagine Chicago and is helping us launch a similar, through in. our case statewide programme, Imagine WA. In the Cathedral on Maundy Thursday she told the story of her niece who suffered an unexplained paralysis at the age of 16. At 17 years she went to a Lutheran Youth Convention and was sitting on the sidelines in her wheelchair at a dance. At one point a young Latino guy came up to her and asked 'Would you like to dance?' She said - 'Yes'. It was a courageous choice; she might have said no. He wheeled her wheelchair into the centre of the dance floor and then went and got a chair and put it in front of her and sat on it. And then they held hands, shoulders and arms moved to the rhythm of the music, and ... sitting in their chairs ... they danced. Another Latino guy noticed this and went and got another girl in a wheelchair and did the same thing. And the miracle was that in a matter of a few minutes every one of those teenagers on the entire dance floor was sitting on a chair ... dancing. The rekindling and re-claiming of hope happens in the most unlikely of places.

When we Christians give an account of the fundamental hope that is in us, and touch down on the high points of the journey over which we have come, it takes us back to the story of the empty tomb. Over its door we read the affirmative banner: 'even where there is death there S hope'. And from the tomb we dare to hope that in the good purposes of God it is possible for the whole world to bloom.