Healing and Rebuilding by Reverend Richard Owen - 12 March 2023
I am a great fan of the BBC television quiz show ‘Only Connect’ in which teams are challenged to find connections between seemingly unconnected things. If you share my enthusiasm for this programme, here is a question. ‘What connects the summer of 2019, a post-war architectural icon and a renowned Swedish diplomat?’ The rather tenuous connection between them is in this sermon, with its theme of healing and rebuilding; to which I could have added the strap-line, ‘healing the past and rebuilding for the future’.
As human beings we tend to have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the past. Occasionally, in my more unguarded moments, I reminisce about the glorious summer of 2019. In reality I don’t know whether that summer was particularly glorious, but it was the last summer before Covid and lockdowns, before face masks and hand sanitisers; and before the subsequent distressing events of the war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis. In consequence, the summer of 2019 has taken on for me an almost mystical significance as the last summer of normality, even the last summer of freedom. This is nonsense of course and such nostalgia is quite pointless. I quickly tell myself, ‘Oh, get over it’ and I move on.
The past is often not quite how we choose to remember it. Nostalgia can act as a kind of opiate which induces a condition of selective amnesia; we remember only the best of times and forget the worst. The people of Israel were adept at doing this during their wanderings in the wilderness. Whenever the going got tough and food or water was scarce they complained to Moses saying it would have been better had they stayed in Egypt where there was ample food and fresh water, seeming to forget that there they had been oppressed as an enslaved people. Given their rebellious ways, it is little wonder God told Joshua (in our first reading) that he would need to have strength and courage to lead the people of Israel into the promised land. I shall say a little more about Joshua later.
For some, the past is painted in a much darker colour than the rose pink of nostalgia. There are some who are trapped in the past by a deep unhealed hurt at the hands of another person which they can neither forget or forgive. Richard Holloway, the writer and former Bishop of Edinburgh, as a pastor recognised this: ‘I have known people who fitted this description’, he wrote, ‘Visiting them was to endure a recitation of outrage at an injury from the past, often the distant past. Most of the energy of their life was consumed in rehearsing it. They suffered from a locked-in syndrome that imprisoned them in the memory of the offence. And it played on a loop to those who would listen to it’. For such a person the past needs healing; healing from that hurt they can otherwise neither forgive or forget.
Then there are those who are haunted by profound personal regrets. The French chanteuse Edith Piaf famously sang, ‘No, I do not regret anything’. I think there are few who can say and mean that. Many of us have had some regrets about things that have happened or have not happened along the way. For example, a regret over the way we contributed to the breakdown of a friendship or a regret that we failed to support someone in need; or recalling - with a sigh - that we did not take the other road in life at the place where two roads diverged, somewhere in our past. But when regrets about the past come to dominate a person’s sense of identity such that they feel unable ever to forgive themselves, then for such a person the past needs healing.
For all those for whom the past is burdened either by a sense of the injuries done to them by others or by an overwhelming sense of guilt and regret, healing comes through the capacity to forgive and to accept the gift of forgiveness. When we truly recognise that God has forgiven us and that he goes on being willing to forgive our failures and sin whenever in penitence and faith we turn to him; then we are free; free to be healed from an otherwise unforgiving and unforgiven past. And when we truly know ourselves to be forgiven by a gracious and merciful God, how can we not forgive others? How can we not forgive ourselves? C.S. Lewis once said, ‘To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you’.
To quote Richard Holloway again. He wrote, ‘Jesus thought the unforgiven and unforgiving life were not worth living … The forgiving and forgiven person has a certain lightness of being … a refusal to let heaviness and grievance and hate be the only or the dominant game. … Lighten up, forgiveness smiles. Yes, forgiveness smiles. Forgiveness is a lightsome thing. Come on, it cries, lighten up’.
Our experience of the generous, loving forgiveness of God for our past sins and failures is an important step of the process of healing and rebuilding. Free to move on, free to rebuild, free to lighten up.
A few weeks ago I went to visit members of my family who live in the West Midlands and I took time out to look around Coventry Cathedral for the first time in about 40 years. (Yes, that is the post-war architectural icon.) I am sure you know the story. On the night of the 14th of November 1940 much of the city of Coventry was destroyed or damaged by enemy air raids, including much of its Cathedral building. The morning after the air raid, the then Provost of Coventry, Dick Howard, stood among the ruins of the nave and vowed that the Cathedral would be rebuilt; just as Christ had risen from the dead.
I would like for a moment to draw a parallel between the re-building of Coventry Cathedral in concrete, stone and glass and the way human lives can be healed from the ruins of deep past traumas and rebuilt in hope and confidence for the future.
At Coventry the new cathedral was built to symbolise faith in the triumph of Christ’s resurrection over sin and death. With building work starting only ten years after the end of the Second World War, when the horrors of that conflict were still relatively fresh in people’s minds, the new cathedral could have been built as a symbol of defiance: it was not. It could have been built simply to be a sombre memorial to the war dead of Coventry and the terror of the blitz: it was not. Instead it was as built to the glory of God as a symbol of hope, as a symbol that the future would be built in forgiveness and reconciliation with our former enemies; built to proclaim life triumphant over death.
When, with the Lord’s help, we seek to rebuild our own lives after some traumatic or destructive life-changing event such as, for example, bereavement, divorce or redundancy, only God can fully heal and empower us to rebuild our lives in a positive spirit of blessing and forgiveness; rather than in a negative spirit of grievance or resentment for past hurts. In seeking and receiving God’s forgiveness and healing for what has happened, we are enabled to forgive, to embrace and to accept all of the past … and so to move forward, trusting in God’s assurance that, in Christ, he is with us wherever we go.
Which brings me back to Joshua. In our first reading Joshua was commissioned by God to lead the people of Israel into the promised land after the death of Moses. It was not going to be an easy task and three times God tells Joshua he will need to have strength and courage. ‘Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed’ God tells him. Most importantly of all Joshua was called to place all his hope and trust in God , who assured Joshua, ‘I will be with you; I will not fail or forsake you’ and ‘The Lord your God is with you wherever you go’.
And so we come to the renowned Swedish diplomat. Dag Hammarskjöld was the Secretary General of the United Nations Organisation from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in 1961. After his death they found among his diaries and various jottings an interesting couplet he had written down. Hammarskjöld was not a man of conventional religious faith but I find it hard to read this couplet other than as a prayer. He had written; ‘For all that has been, thanks; and for all that shall be, yes.’ Deceptively simple words and yet utterly profound.
I commend this couplet to you as a prayer. It is a prayer of thanksgiving for God’s presence with us throughout the past including his forgiveness and healing of our hurts, mistakes and failures. It is also a prayer of hope, confidence and affirmation for both the present and the future, lived each day in the resurrection power and presence of Christ.
For all that has been, thanks; and for all that shall be, yes.’
In those 13 words, this prayer embraces all I have been trying to say in the last 13 minutes. If you take nothing else from this sermon, please take this prayer and try to pray those words. Offer the prayer; knowing that, in the words of the well known hymn, in Christ you are ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’. Offer the prayer; knowing that in Christ you can embrace positively all of your past because God has been with you throughout, in your experiences both of wilderness and of promises fulfilled. Offer the prayer; knowing that in Christ you can confidently affirm and embrace the future because, just as he promised Joshua, God assures you that he will be with you wherever you go and that he will not fail or forsake you.
‘Lord, For all that has been, thanks; and for all that shall be, yes.