May 19 2015
Vraiment, cela peut paraître bizarre, mais j’ai entendu dire que le plus long des pèlerinages est celui qui vous emmène… « depuis le cerveau… jusqu’au cœur ! » [1]
Ten years ago, my Savoyard friend Pierre Angleys set out from his home in Veigy-Foncenex, just across the border from Geneva, to walk 1,896 km to Santiago de Compostela, in north-west Spain. As an encore, he walked a little further to Cape Finisterre. He wore out several pairs of boots, met all kinds of companions on the way, and found himself.
You can read about his pilgrimage on his website here or (in his French mother tongue) here.
This year he set out to do it all over again, although this time with a twist. You can follow his journey, which began on April 27, here or here.
*
In the 1990s, Jim Rogers and I and one or two others fought a last-ditch battle to prevent the division of the then Board of World Mission and Unity into two, because we believed that mission and unity belong together inseparably.
We lost.
It was thus a great pleasure to see that our world mission council and our committee for ecumenical relations both structured their reports to this year’s general assembly around the theme of a pilgrimage of justice and peace – a pilgrimage proposed to the world church by the World Council of Churches at its assembly in Busan, Korea, in 2013.
Justice, peace, and the integrity of creation have been on the agenda of the world church (not always convincingly) for as long as I can remember.
What the image of pilgrimage does is to introduce the notion of dynamism. It reminds us that we are a church on the move. The spirit of God takes away our hearts of stone and sets our feet on a journey towards a kingdom that challenges all the sordid kingdoms of our everyday experience. The spirit points us towards new heavens and a new earth – towards a new Jerusalem. And we wear out our boots and our bodies getting there.
But this is the heart of God’s grace and the core calling of Christ’s church: a renewed humanity rooted, as it must be, in spiritual renewal.
On Monday, our general assembly encouraged presbyteries and congregations to take up the invitation to a pilgrimage of justice and peace and to do it ecumenically “wherever possible”.
I queried the “wherever possible”.
As someone who (not always convincingly) spent 11 years in rural parish ministry, I got the point. There are parts of Scotland where the Church of Scotland is the only show in town – or, rather, in that bit of countryside – and where the only practical ecumenism may be doing something with the Church of Scotland congregation down the road (sometimes more challenging that acting with churches of other traditions).
But mission and unity belong together inseparably. The ecumenical relations committee reminded us that the 1980s process that led to the creation of Action of Churches Together in Scotland (ACTS) was called Not Strangers, but Pilgrims. Out of the process came this great prayer:
Lord God, we thank you
for calling us into the company
of those who trust in Christ
and seek to obey his will.
May your Spirit guide and strengthen us
in mission and service to your world;
for we are strangers no longer
but pilgrims together on the way to your kingdom.
Amen.
I loved it then and love it now. In every generation we need to recapture and live out this vision.
Earlier, the general assembly encouraged Church of Scotland groups visiting the Middle East, including Israel/Palestine, to contact the world mission council for suggestions of partners and communities to visit. Here, more or less, is what I said on this point:
To visit the Holy Land and walk in the footsteps of Jesus in always inspiring and often life-transforming. But no one should even think of visiting the Holy Land without planning to walk a mile or two in the company of the local Christian community.
These Palestinian Christians trace their history back to the day we celebrate this coming Sunday, the day of Shavuot, the day of Pentecost. They span the whole spectrum of Christian traditions, from Latin Catholics and Protestants to Orthodox and Eastern Catholics and Oriental Orthodox. Crowded into Jerusalem are more patriarchs and heads of churches per square mile than anywhere else in the world.[2]
But their community today is small, and getting smaller. In east Jerusalem and the West Bank, in particular, they are under intense pressure from a state of Israel that would really rather see them get up and go. They need our support. They need us to walk humbly with them.
But the Church of Scotland is present in the Holy Land even before we visit. We have institutions there, and people who work for us there.
I encourage individuals, and families, and groups visiting to make use of Church of Scotland accommodation – the Scots Guesthouse in Jerusalem, the Scots Hotel in Tiberias.
I encourage you to visit Tabeetha school in Jaffa – a remarkable school with Christian, Muslim, and Jewish pupils and teachers, modelling the creative and harmonious community that Israel/Palestine could be, if justice and peace were ever to break out.
And I encourage you to come worship with us in St Andrew’s, Jerusalem, and St Andrew’s, Galilee: Sunday Communion at 10am in Jerusalem, 6pm in Tiberias.
Over the Scots Memorial flies a sun-bleached Saltire.
When you worship with us you fly the Church of Scotland flag. You strengthen our presence in the Holy Land and, if only for a moment, you become part of it.
Notes
[1] Honestly, this sounds odd, but I have heard that the longest pilgrimage is the one that takes you… “from your brain to… your heart”!
[2] See Betty Jane Bailey and J Martin Bailey, Who Are the Christians in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2nd ed 2010)