Moderator's Address
Sheer Grace
The address given by the 2006/2007 Moderator to
General Assembly, the Revd Elizabeth Caswell. A summary of the address is
printed below and will be available in the next edition of Reform
magazine.
The full text of the address is available
here
‘I am simply asking you to think
about what you already know,’ said the Revd Elizabeth Caswell in her address
to the 2006 General Assembly of the United Reformed Church, in Exeter.
The Revd Caswell opened her address
with a reflection about water. A stream, she said, is always the same yet
always different. The course of the water may change with time, forging
different ways to the sea, even joining other streams, but it is still
water. ‘But you know all this.’
‘Little church, our stream, our
tributary, is precious; but it is provisional,’ she continued. ‘We are part
of the flow, pulled by the gravity of love into the vastness of God’s
creative purposes; joining as we flow with other streams, other rivers,
until at last we become whole. We are constantly changing because we are
part of God’s river of life, not a stagnant pond. We are a movement, not a
structure.’
During the opening worship verses 3
to 20 of Paul’s first letter to Colossians was read by FURY member Matthew
Dones. Paul writes of faith and love in people’s lives springing from hope,
reflected the Moderator: the water in the river of life is grace.
‘John the evangelist in the fourth gospel and Paul the apostle in his
letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians, tell us that Christ is the
agent of creation they are taking us to the place where grace springs up,
bubbles out of the ground of our being, creating life.’
The danger is that we rush headlong
into action without realising what strong stuff grace is, continued the
Moderator. ‘Why, this water of life can make lions eat straw like the ox! It
sets captives free, liberates the oppressed, acquits the guilty … did I
really say “acquits the guilty”?’
‘When the generosity of God
overwhelms us; when we fully appreciate the joy and wonder of the created
order; when we are grateful then we become generous; then we start to care
about the world around us. Then we tend and treasure the earth and its
creatures out of delight and respect.’
The Moderator reflected on how the
grace of God is not always comfortable to live with: ‘The God who calls the
guilty innocent. The God who holds everything together – even if it hurts?
Yes. Love hurts. Grace, love for the unlovely, the undeserving, the plumb
ugly – it is risky, absurd even.
‘The river of life flows on through
each generation,’ she continued. However, some generations fail to recognise
or choose to ignore the ugly face of injustice: ‘Owning slaves transmutes to
treating those slaves well, and then to seeing them as fellow human beings,
brothers and sisters in Christ; and finally (how slow we are!) finally the
logic of the gospel wins its long battle with commerce and cruelty and
slavery is abolished. Except that it isn’t, is it? For slavery and people
trafficking continues.
‘The truth has to be taught and
worked for, evil overcome, afresh in each generation. Universal truths and
values have to be owned individually. We see in the pages of the Bible the
‘to and fro’ of ideas, the struggle to establish the norms of doctrine and
behaviour, the ‘tug of war’ between law and grace. We can never assume that
these battles are won.
‘Those of us who have grown up in a
society which has taught us to be greedy, wasteful and dissatisfied have so
much to learn, and so much to un-learn. The struggle for trade justice and
for debt cancellation goes on; it is fuelled by our theology and requires
our steady commitment. There are few quick fixes in the world of global
issues.
‘Let the gospel of God’s grace, of
overwhelming generosity and compassion reaching out to all people without
regard to race, gender or age, motivate us to work for the transformation of
our sick and sad society. God, in your grace, transform our world!’
The Revd Caswell concluded her
address with a call for the grace of God to flow through the work of the
Assembly and beyond.
‘The same God creates and
re-creates; encounters us in the created order and in the person of Jesus
Christ; whose truth is discovered in observation and experiment and in
history, experience and poetry. God is revealed, chooses to be revealed, in
many different ways – the revelation is grace.
‘The cross shows us that there are
no limits on God’s love; forgiveness streams to us, bearing the full cost of
wrong, accepting the separation and the pain, breathing in the deadly
poisons of sin and breathing out the oxygen of grace.
‘Graced people, be gracious. Let the
exuberant, generous, hilarious creative energy of God inform our
relationships, our serving, our politics, our giving. Let us be what we are,
children of God, “chips off the old block”, reflections of the light.
‘A river runs through us, the river
of life. It’s not a Reformed river, a Catholic river, an Anglican, Methodist
or Baptist river. It’s not Orthodox, Salvationist, Coptic or Pentecostal.
Call it what you like. It’s just water – Ganges, Thames, Nile or Seine –
it’s just water affected by local conditions. It’s all off to the ocean.
Same source. Same destination.
‘Don’t pollute it. Drink it. Share
it.’
Read the full text of the address
here |
