91Èȱ¬

Please note:

This script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors that were corrected before the radio broadcast.

It may contain gaps to be filled in at the time so that prayers may reflect the needs of the world, and changes may also be made at the last minute for timing reasons, or to reflect current events.

Radio 4 Opening Announcement:Ìý 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4.Ìý It’s ten past eight and time t go live to St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square for this morning’s Sunday Worship.Ìý It’s the first in our series of Lent services and it’s led by the Vicar of St Martin’s – the Revd Dr Sam Wells.Ìý It begins with the ancient plainsong chant known as the Lent Prose

Music: Lent Prose

Sam Wells:
Welcome to St Martin-in-the-Fields. Desmond Tutu captured the imagination of the world by resisting apartheid in South Africa with courage, vision, and wit. Throughout Lent, Sunday Worship will be following his message from In God’s Hands, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book for 2015. In the first chapter he talks of human beings as God’s viceroys or representatives on earth. From the profound experience of being discriminated against, Tutu makes a case for universal dignity, the intrinsic worth of every person as a child of God. He here is, speaking about the revolutionary message of the Bible.

Reader:
What the Bible says categorically, exhilaratingly, is that what endows you and me with … infinite worth, is this one fact: that we are created in the image of God. Our worth is something that… belongs to all human beings, regardless.

If we really believed … that each human being without exception is created in the image of God, and so is a God-carrier – then we would be appalled at any ill-treatment of another human being, because it is not simply unjust but also, shockingly, blasphemous. It really is like spitting in the face of God.
Sam Wells:
During Jesus’ trial people really did spit in the face of God. What gives human beings dignity is that God believed we were worth living for, worth becoming human for; and that in Christ, God believed we were worth dying for, every single one of us. The phrase ‘image of God’ means not just that we were created to look like God, but that God chose to become incarnate and look just like us. Let us pray.

God of glory, in Jesus you became what we are so that we might become what you are. You have made us little lower than the angels and your viceroys on earth. Lift the hearts of the downtrodden and the spirits of the oppressed, that every weary throat may sing with your song of freedom and every tired shoulder be renewed by the gospel of your kingdom; in the name of Christ. Amen.

Psalm 8 reflects on the wonder of human existence. We sing the metrical version – the hymn ‘O Lord of every shining constellation.’

Music: O Lord of every shining constellation (Highwood)

Sam Wells:
Charles Dotou is a man in our community who knows what it means for his human dignity to be crushed and to be restored.

Charles Dotou:
My name is Charles. I’m a gynaecologist from Senegal. I trained in Dakar, Paris and London. I was successful, and I enjoyed a high reputation. In 2011 my life was threatened. I felt in danger and that I had no choice but to escape to the UK.
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I’d got used to life as a doctor with a good income but now everything changed. I had skills to offer: but it was like beginning all over again. I felt I no longer had a home or an identity.Ìý I turned up at refugee centres in search of help. I applied for asylum.Ìý My life felt worth nothing. I tried to keep myself from losing my mind or killing myself. It seemed even God had forgotten me.
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I came to St Martin-in-the-Fields. Within only a few visits I felt I had a family again. They welcomed me and listened to me and involved me in their church programmes..Ìý It was a breakthrough for me. God used the people in this church to say, ‘You are part of us - you are our brother.’ These people gave me back my dignity.
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One day several months later, out walking in the countryside, I came across a sheep in distress. The farmer was anxious because the sheep was bleeding and the vet had been delayed. I quickly realised that it was a breach birth. I went down on my knees and turned the lamb into the right position in the sheep’s womb. I’d done this so many times assisting in childbirth. The lamb was born safely and stood up trembling. Everyone watching clapped. As I was cleaning the blood off my hands someone in the crowd called out, ‘Are you a vet?’ ‘No’ I said. ‘I’m a doctor.’ The man called back, ‘We need people like you.’
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I long to be needed again and to do what God trained me to do. I want to be able to give as well as receive. The church gave me back my dignity. It has given me a community in which I can belong again.Ìý Now I am part of a training programme at a Manchester Hospital to revalidate my medical qualifications.Ìý I want to use my skills to bring dignity to others. I hope I will be given the chance again.

Music: Spiritual – There is a balm in Gilead
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Sam Wells:
Charles Dotou found a balm in Gilead. But he can relate to Jesus’ experience of dehumanising rejection, here described in the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 13.

Reader:
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings; for it is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by regulations about food, which have not benefited those who observe them. We have an altar from which those who officiate in the tent have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name.Ìý (Hebrews 13: 8-15)

Sam Wells:
The letter to the Hebrews points the suffering Jesus endured outside the city gate, but it also calls upon us to go to him and share in his sufferings. Our preacher is the Archdeacon of Canterbury, Sheila Watson.

Sheila Watson:
On the surface of the Moon, just a few feet from the Apollo 11 landing site and Neil Armstrong’s first footprint, lies a small white cloth pouch. Inside that pouch is a silicon disc, the size of a small coin, containing messages from 73 nations.Ìý One of those nations is the Vatican. In it the Pope quotes Psalm 8, aptly the first biblical text to reach the moon: ‘When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? You have made them little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honour’.

This is the first of the psalms to erupt in a great paean of praise to God. The psalms immediately preceding have concentrated on humanity’s suffering. Psalm 8 bursts out with an astounding affirmation of the status and vocation of human beings – little lower than God, crowned with glory and honour, with all things under their feet. It resonates with Archbishop Tutu’s emphasis on us as God’s stand-ins here on earth. It gives force to his challenge to imagine what would happen in our world were we to act as if each of us were God-carriers, God’s stand-ins? How would we view that person who irritates us so much, if we remember they too are a God-bearer? How could we mistreat, bomb or torture a fellow God-bearer and viceroy? How could we forget our responsibility to help all creation flourish by loving and caring as God would?Ìý (God knows, our beautiful but broken world needs it.)

Living this means getting our hands dirty, confronting the suffering of the world. It means remembering, as our lesson from Hebrews says, those who are in prison as if we ourselves are in prison; those who are being tortured as if we ourselves are being tortured.Ìý It is an extraordinary demand. Only a God who shares our suffering could make such a demand. Such a God spoke to those caught up in the horrors of the Great War of 1914-18, whose anniversary we continue to keep this year.Ìý As Edward Shillito, a Methodist chaplain to those in the trenches, wrote:

The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds speak;
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.ÌýÌýÌý

The season of Lent, which began on Wednesday and runs till Easter Day, asks us as Christians to go back to the bare essentials and reflect on what really matters in our lives. It’s a time to take up the challenge to live like God. What might it mean to live like God? Julia de Beausobre, a victim of Stalin’s Gulags, offers a humbling yet inspiring glimpse of what living like God might mean. Julia’s husband was killed in the camps. She herself was horribly tortured. A friend who met her in London describes someone who exuded a remarkable radiance, dignity and stillness; who had pared everything down to its essentials. Asked how she survived, Julia said ‘It was simple really. I tried to love my torturers, because if I loved them I would not be adding to the evil in the world, and they would not have succeeded in adding to the evil in the world by making me hate them.
But if I loved, it could just be that it might have some effect on them and even reduce the evil in the world. At its simplest level Christ’s way of love and trust and forgiveness seemed to be the only way.’

Is that too simple? Or too difficult? Julia loved her torturers in order to reduce the sum total of evil in the world. She loved them because if she hated them she’d have let them win. She loved them because she discovered that repaying hatred with love was ‘the only way.’ Too simple? Or too difficult?

Living like God means keeping faith with love and hope. It’s about loving life and looking forward. It’s why we take something up for Lent as well as give something up – to help the world be a better place one small step at a time.

And this brings us back to Desmond Tutu. Because this spirit of answering evil with good is embodied for me in the South African struggle of recent decades to become the rainbow nation. I remember on my first visit being overcome by the beauty of the landscape and overwhelmed at the idea that amidst apartheid that glorious landscape could not be shared by black and white together. It was a South African Zulu who, like Julia de Beausobre, taught me what living like God, living with Christ’s generosity and hope might mean. As a child she was walking with her mother by one of the most beautiful sandy beaches in the Cape. They could see everyone enjoying themselves on the beach and she wanted to join in. Her mother knew that no black could go there – but her response showed astounding wisdom and hope as she said ‘No, you can’t – but one day you will!’Ìý
That’s God’s promise too – not just the moon and the stars but that one day, in Christ, our broken world will be made new and Christ’s way of love and trust and forgiveness will be the only way. One day you will walk on that beach. One day your cruel torturers will become your forgiven friends. One day you will come face to face with the wounded God of the trenches and the dazzling God of the Moon and stars, and find they are the same God, the God who made heaven and earth and yet the whole time was mindful of you. And, with the psalmist, you will sing, ‘O, Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the world’.

Sam Wells:
Our dignity as humans is founded on the discovery that Jesus thought we were worth living and dying for. This is the message of William Walsham How’s tender hymn sung now to a new setting by Bob Chilcott.

Music: It is a thing most wonderful (Chilcott)

Sam Wells:
In wonder and gratitude we offer our prayers.

Richard Carter:
God who bears us, you have made us also to be bearers of you. In Christ you went outside the camp and suffered for us. By the power of your Holy Spirit, renew your image in all who are rejected and downtrodden today: lift every voice that it may sing, till earth and heaven ring with the harmonies of freedom, truth and grace.
Lord, in your mercy
Hear our prayer.

Radiant God, we see as cast in your image those who have treated us with cruelty or unkindness. Your son Jesus Christ called you to forgive persecutors for they know not what they do. Incline our hearts to embody his reconciling love, that as we know our hurts and seek your healing, we may too live your risen life in gestures of understanding and mercy.Ìý
Lord, in your mercy
Hear our prayer.
Wounded God, as we see the image of your son in one another, you promise that one day we shall see you face to face. Bring companionship to all who struggle in physical health or mental well-being, and hope to any who feel their lives are diminished and constrained. Raise up communities of imagination that model the life you make possible in the power of your Spirit.
Lord, in your mercy
Hear our prayer.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Sam Wells:
Our greatest joy and deepest knowledge is that we are God’s beloved child.

Music: I am his child (Hogan)

Sam Wells:
In his most famous speech, Dr Martin Luther King, jr said ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ Here we sing and share that dream of human dignity, and the joy of being made in the image of God.

Music: We have a dream: this nation will arise (Woodlands)
Michael Forster (born 1946) after Martin Luther King Jr.
Sam Wells:
Christ give you grace to grow in holiness, to deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow him; and the blessing of God almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.
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