Message de l'archevêque de Canterbury

The imagery of a ‘cloud’ of witnesses is curiously apt here. Those who by God’s grace shape our discipleship are a great multitude whose faces are often hidden from us. It is good that we are able to identify some of those faces – the familiar and obvious ones in our own lives and in the life of our own community, and also the unexpected faces, the strangers who, we begin to see, have been brought into our individual and corporate lives by God for our health and salvation; and in identifying some of these faces, we are reminded of those others whose faces we cannot see, both past and present. And we turn to our Christian brother and sister in another Christian confession with new eyes and new expectations – new penitence as well, since we are faced with the reality of how we consciously and unconsciously ignore, avoid and even violently reject God’s gift when it comes in unfamiliar form.

The ecumenical celebration of holiness teaches us two essential things. It alerts us to the various ways in which we may be complicit in Christ’s suffering at least as much as sharing it; it teaches us to be very cautious about triumphalistic identification with the cross when, as flawed and fallible disciples, we are always also the crucifiers. It is the same insight that comes at every Eucharist, when we acknowledge that we sit at table among those who will betray and abandon their Lord, knowing that we have failed and will fail as they did. And it recalls us to gratitude for the pathless ways of God’s grace, given to us constantly in the unexpected person, place or community. In other words, the business of this Conference is not simply one aspect of liturgical life or historical study, but the whole character of the Church as a penitent and maturing body, watered by hidden streams and living out of the timeless resource of the Holy Spirit in whom the end, when Christ is all in all, is already real.

May this Conference be blessed by God the Holy Trinity for the enriching of our shared witness and the deepening of our unity.

From Lambeth Palace, London
SS Simon and Jude, apostles
28 October 2008