Some thirty-four years ago, I was faced with a choice. Having completed my Masters in theology, and some graduate work, I could either go to Tunisia for a couple of years to learn classical Arabic, and then continue studies in Islam, or I could go to Geneva for one year and study in the Ecumenical School of the World Council of Churches. I chose the latter, because it seemed to fit in better with the processes leading to Ordination, and partly for economic reasons- the funding was already in place, while that for the Islamic studies was tenuous. I often wonder if I made the right choice. Today there is a great need for understanding and interpretation of the Moslem world, and had I gone to Tunis, I might today be better equipped to do it. But we have to make choices many times in life, and then follow the paths that lead from them.
That time in Geneva was a fascinating experience, and I always recall it to myself at this time of year, the week of prayer for Christian Unity. We were some fifty theological graduates on the course, representing forty countries and twenty-five churches. The course work was simultaneously in three languages, so as well as an opportunity to dialogue with Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and Protestant theologians, it also helped me with conversational French and German. In December last year, when the Montreal Council of Churches was preparing a service here in the Cathedral, some of my ecumenical colleagues were surprised at my knowledge of the Kimbanguist church of Zaire: I had known and studied with a member of that church in Geneva all those years ago.
The theme of the studies was mission and election - not the political kind, though it was the sixties, just after the Paris student uprising, and politics kept creeping into the agenda. But the election we were studying was the choice by God of a people of his own, and we were trying to understand that election in relation to God's sending out of his chosen people on their mission in the world.
The paper I wrote as my dissertation looked at the Biblical understanding of the context of election, and my thesis was that individual people are chosen and called by God for special tasks in the mission of the Church, only in the context of the election of the whole church as God's community. Secondly I wrote that the election of the Church as God's people is to be understood only in the context of the election of the Jewish people. Despite many changes and developments of my theological thinking over the years, that double contextuality has remained a constant in my thinking: it is why I was delighted with the move to the new way in our diocese of enabling the discernment of vocation to ordained ministry. God calls us (and this applies to both ordained and lay baptismal ministry) only in the context of the community of the church. So each of the candidates from this community for whom we pray is in a process of discernment of vocation which begins in meetings with members of the Cathedral, continues with meetings with a diocesan group, and is confirmed in a meeting with representatives of the church on the provincial level. It is also why I have been quick to espouse the tendency of a number of scholars to speak of Hebrew and Christian Scripture rather than Old and New Testaments.
However, while I still firmly believe that we are called and chosen by God to be the church, his people, and while I still firmly believe that this vocation is to be one people, hence our constant need to pray and work for the unity of the church, I also have to raise some questions about how that vocation and election has been interpreted over the centuries. These questions are already present within the scriptures. The prophets of Hebrew scripture are constantly reminding the people of two things: firstly, their election by God requires a response on their part, and without a response which demonstrates itself in moral and compassionate living, God can revoke his election of his chosen ones. Secondly, God's election is not a promotion to a place of special privilege in God's dispensation, but to the service of the whole of humanity.
In the first three or so centuries the church developed its theology in a context of external opposition with persecution and internal dissention. It is easy to see why the true church needed to define itself over against the false, why the community had to define its boundaries against the outsiders. These needs affected the way election was understood. In the often quoted phrase of St Cyprian, Nulla salus extra ecclesiam, there is no salvation outside the church. But once the Western Church came into a position of power, this self-understanding of being the truly chosen people of God became the root of the disdain and persecution of the Jews, of the crusades against the Muslim people, which turned into crusades against Eastern Christians. The Reformation, with its division of opinion about who were the true people of God, led to religious wars and burnings at the stake. The "other" was demonised - and from that came witch-hunts and racism, and the forcing of newly "discovered" peoples to abandon their own spiritual paths and adopt the true way - and the true European culture that went with it. In many of the events of our own day we are seeing, I believe, the outcrop of an underlying seam of this way of thought which sees our way as the true way, which sees election as a special privilege rather than a special call to service, which sees the otherness of the other as something to be denied and the others themselves either to be assimilated or marginalized.
Now I have no doubt that both in Scripture and in Christian tradition, this understanding of the church as the only true people of God is the major voice. But there is also a minor voice speaking. We hear it today in our reading from Mathews Gospel.
Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: "Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles-- the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned." From that time Jesus began to proclaim, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.". (Matthew 4:12-17 NRSV)
When Matthew uses the word anakwrein, - to withdraw or retreat - he always suggests a deliberate choice by Jesus to go where people most need him. And so we see that Jesus left Judea - the heartland of the chosen people of God, and went to the people of Galilee, whose membership in the chosen people had always been suspect after the return from exile. And then he left Nazareth, the place of his family, and settled down - made his home- in Capernaum. Now Capernaum was not a nice little up-market seaside town in the Jewish hinterland. It was the construction of the Roman imperial authorities, a place to settle army veterans from all over the empire. It was a nearly totally Gentile environment, which led Matthew to describe it using the ancient words of Isaiah which we read in our Hebrew Scripture reading. And in that place, with all its foreignness and Gentileness, Jesus chose to settle down, to make his home.
In the face of the strife in our world today, much of it driven by difference of culture, religion and race, together with the greed and excess of the Western world, we Christians may need to heed again that minor voice, and ask what is says to our understanding of our election - a call to privilege or a call to the mission of compassionate service.
The Very Rev Michael J.Pitts, Dean