Emmanuel Church, Bungay, Suffolk

The Minister's Sermons

Civic Service Sermon Delivered at the Civic Service - St Mary's Church on Sunday September 19th 2004 by Revd Bruce Waldron
I went to my supervisor, just a few months after taking up my first charge after being ordained a Minister. I was thirty years old, almost, and had attained the great wisdom of one of such mature years. What I couldn't understand was that all the brilliant ideas and profound theology I had brought to my church from Theological College were not leapt upon with joyful enthusiasm by the milling masses who should have been in awe of my great learning and enthusiasm.
They said unspiritual and uneducated things like "You'll learn son!" and "Settle down lad. Rome wasn't built in a day."
I went to Gordon, my supervisor, deeply frustrated one Saturday afternoon, and after listening to me for a while he sat back and looked at me and he said. "You seem to be saying Bruce, that all of the problems of your church would be fixed by a few good funerals." I said to him "Do you think God might arrange it for me?"
Gordon was a very patient man. Over the next couple of years, he guided me through the frustrated expectations of my over-optimistic youthful enthusiasm, to recognise that in public office, of whatever shape, you must live with many views, many ideas, many cultures, many frustrations. But I think that the greatest thing Gordon did for me was to teach me that in any mode of leadership, the result of any action is only as great as the integrity with which you treat the least of the people in your community. You cannot serve the love and compassion of Christ for people, if you do not have love and compassion for the least important, the troublesome, the obstacles to your ambitions. You cannot shape a community unless the way it is shaped bears all the hallmarks of the shape you hope and desire. You can only create a community of love and respect, if you have love and respect in the way you deal with its people, even those who are an obstacle to what you dream.
I remember well the words of our local MP, who I often found myself at odds with over Aboriginal policy. On this particular day I was listening to Parliament on the radio, and one of the MP's was engaged in a refined and academic description of the people on the other side of the house. With characteristic wit and incisive intellect, he leaned across the benches and shouted across the floor: "Yer all a pack of drongoes and yer ought to be hung out ter dry."
When the shouting had died down, our MP stood up and said something like "Mr Speaker, in my electorate, there are many people of deep integrity who disagree with me on many issues of policy. I may disagree with their position but I respect them for their integrity. I would like the honourable member to afford me the same privilege."
I think what our MP understood was that a community is shaped, not only by what is said and done, but by how it is said and done. This is, I think, a profoundly Christian understanding. Jesus was not so concerned about winning as he was about how he was in being. Although he was judged by his community a profound loser because he would not compromise his way of being, his integrity, his way of being has had far more profound affect upon the world than the people who were at the time judged the victors. Knowing the power of this way of being, Paul urges the church at Philippi:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.
I recall the Right Honourable Paul Keating, past Prime Minister of Australia, remarking at a Press Club Luncheon in Melbourne, that the task of government was not merely to balance the books but to shape a society.
The question is of course, what shape would we like the society to be and how do we shape it? This is the real question which faces each of us as we take our role, our part in this community of Bungay. It is the question which sits behind every Council Meeting, every church service, every by law and public statement, every committee meeting. What do I want my society to look like? What vision stands behind my actions, and how can I hold integrity with that vision? The reality of that integrity is not found in how we respond to the powerful and the influential amongst us, but how we respond to the vulnerable and voiceless.
As we meet here today, we come to ask God's blessing upon our community, our civic leaders, our institutions. To seek God's blessing is to acknowledge that it can only be, if there is in each of us, a readiness for the kingdom of God to be sovereign in all we do. If we come to our community with this awareness, and strive for integrity with that vision in all we do, then our community will be truly blessed, and so will we.