Colossians 1.1-14, Luke 10.25-37
The Seventh Sunday after Trinity, Sunday 10 July 2016
Sutton Montis w Corton Denham, Queen Camel w West Camel
‘Who is my neighbour?’ - a question which is now, and always has been, at the centre of every Christian’s thinking about how we are to live, faithfully, with others in this world.
‘Who is my neighbour?’ - an interesting question to ponder on this, Sea Sunday, a day set aside for us to think about the sea and those who work on it, to consider our connections with them and our ministry to them.
How we answer the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ will depend on our answer to another, more fundamental question, ‘Who am I?’ For there are deep-rooted reasons why we regard other people the way we do, and they are to do with the stories of our own lives.
Here in South Somerset we may feel relatively landlocked. But as we today mark the 160th anniversary of the Mission to Seafarers, it is interesting to note that it began on the beach at Clevedon, when one day, looking across to Flat Holm, the son of a young Anglican clergyman asked him, “Daddy, where do sailors go to church?” and the Reverend John Ashley turned down a parish appointment to begin a ministry to seafarers in the Bristol Channel. [1]
I’m certain that many of us here do have strong connections with the sea, whether through the places we have lived or through involvement in the Royal or Merchant Navies, or whether simply through enjoying sea journeys on holidays, travelling overseas on business - I’m sure the sea and the people who work on the sea, resonate with you, make connections with your own life story.
As for me, the sea played a large part in my formation. As many of you know I was born and raised right alongside the banks of the River Mersey, the view from my bedroom window across to the Wirral peninsular and the hills of North Wales and Snowdonia beyond, out to the Irish Sea. Ours was a port city, so as I played on the beach at the end of our road, commercial ships and ferries passed by, and the sights and sounds of loading and unloading at the container docks less than a mile away were part of the background to every day. And I remember every New Year the sound of ships in the channel blasting their foghorns in the dark at midnight.
So when I think of the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’, I’m deeply aware that my neighbours aren’t just those next door, they are also ‘over the water’; aware that the waters which separate my place from other places, actually also connect those places together through those who move across them from port to port, from place to place.
Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us that our neighbour is the one who does something for us. And growing up in a place which embraced people from every continent and culture, with the oldest Chinese community in Europe, the site of England's first recorded mosque, a large Irish and Welsh population, I felt myself blessed by what these others gave me: a love of oriental food, an appreciation of the traditions of other religions alongside their acceptance of my own, and the art, poetry and music of the Celtic fringes. Most of all, perhaps, Liverpool as a whole, and ‘Merseybeat’ in particular, was formed by what the so-called ‘Cunard Yanks’ did for us; the ‘Cunard Yanks’ being sailors who worked on the transatlantic liners that shuttled between Liverpool and New York in the 1950s – and every time they docked, they brought fresh sounds and fashions to an eager city. Which in turn, via The Beatles and others, we returned to the world. [2]
Those who work the shipping lines of course give virtually everything to us. The 40,000 freighters on the seas today between them carry 80% of the world's trade and 90% of its energy. Nearly everything we eat, wear and work with has spent some time on a ship. Although it is almost invisible the sea trade is enormous, and this shows us how dependent we are on our international ‘neighbours’ whose work ensures that our material needs and desires are attended to. [3]
Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan also teaches us that our neighbour, the one who does something for us, is often the one we’d least expect to.
Of all the occupations in the world, sailors aren’t the best regarded. Their hard living, social isolation and general poverty has always put them on the margins of society, and when they have come ashore they have on the one hand been prey to the exploitation of opportunists, on the other have been looked down on for their drunken excesses. A famous Liverpool waterfront thoroughfare is called Paradise Street, because historically it was a sailors’ paradise of readily available women and alcohol. As in port cities everywhere, worried fathers would tell their daughters to ‘keep away from sailors’ on their Friday and Saturday nights out.
So it follows that if he had told the story in another time and place, Jesus might have called it the Parable of the Drunken Sailor, for in this respect, sailors are just like the Samaritans of Jesus’ time and place. Given a wide berth by Judeans not so much for a perceived lack of morals, but more because of their religious differences; Jews regarded Samaritans suspiciously as semi-pagans in their beliefs and practices and went out of their way to avoid them. [4] This is the real shock value in Jesus’ story - not so much that someone stopped to help the bruised and bleeding man, but that a Samaritan did. He really wants us to understand that our neighbour, the one who does something for us, can often be the one we’d least expect - and to be always open to that possibility.
Of course, the question, ’Who is my neighbour?’ was the lawyer’s response to the law which said, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself’.
Part of the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ rests in how I ‘love my neighbour’ - how I behave towards the other - and especially, towards the one I’m least connected to, or comfortable with.
I haven’t researched the story of Reverend John Ashley enough to be able to support this with certainty, but knowing human nature the way we do, I think we could rightly imagine that there would have been some opposition to his idea of leaving conventional parish work at the start of his ministry to embark on a previously untried venture supporting outcast sailors. From family, peers and diocesan chiefs who would regard this a risky move at best, a scandalous waste of his time and energy at worst.
Like other Christians who have stepped out into the unknown to pioneer mission work, not everyone would have shared Ashley’s view of his neighbour being the lonely, exploited and rather rough-edged sailor, not everyone would have seen any value in leaving the parish behind and taking church out onto such choppy waters. But ‘Ashley’s work inspired others to minister to seafarers and by 1856, when the Mission to Seafarers was officially constituted, there were mission “stations” in a growing number of British ports and harbours, and within a short time, chaplaincies on the Elbe, in Mediterranean ports, in Halifax, Nova Scotia and by 1866, as far away as Singapore’. [5]
If Ashley ever asked, ‘Who am I?’ he could have justifiably said that he was one who showed what it really meant to ‘love God with everything; and his neighbour as himself’. An inspiration.
I wonder how this connects with your story? We all have our inspirations, who have helped us to regard unusual others as our neighbours, and who have led us to try to reach out to others in need.
Back to my story in Liverpool. As a boy my Baptist minister was also the first Ecumenical Officer for Merseyside, a brave pioneering position in a city then still riven by religious sectarian divisions akin to Belfast and Glasgow. He helped me see my Catholic peers as near-neighbours, and those Protestants I disagreed with as equally loved too. [6]
Then living in a city which was dealing with the cultural legacy of the slave trade, just like Bristol and London, was a challenge in understanding how to enact the law of love towards neighbours. My first job was in Liverpool 8, Toxteth, during the riots of 1981, sparked by racial inequalities between the city’s institutions and its residents. In my first parish, nursing staff at the nearby large teaching hospital who had come from overseas to work here, would occasionally have their windows smashed for their trouble. There was always challenge in learning how to bring healing / reconciling initiatives into play in these situations. And I always learned through wonderful people who at the grassroots worked away at breaking down barriers, building community, loving the unloved, often misunderstood by the wider, influential society and unsupported by the institutional church.
I’ve just finished the biography of Paul McCartney, 850 pages of engrossing reading. McCartney was a pupil of The Liverpool Institute, which he resurrected twenty years ago as LIPA - the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. The original school was founded by Victorian ship owner and merchant George Holt, and the book quotes the motto of the Institute, "Non Nobis Solum Sed Toti Mundo Nati”. I close with the translation, for I think it is a fine motto for anyone seeking to embrace others, and willing to be embraced by others as neighbours, regardless of whatever their differences might be. "Non Nobis Solum Sed Toti Mundo Nati” translates as “Not for ourselves alone, but for the whole world were we born.” [7]
Notes
[1] The Mission to Seafarers: History, The Mission to Seafarers at 160 [pdf download] and Wikipedia: John Ashley (clergyman).
[2] Wikipedia: Chinatowns in Europe; Chris Long and Jerry Chester, 'The birthplace of Islam in Britain': Kensington's Victorian mosque reopens, BBC News, 27 June 2014; Declan McSweeney, A trip through Liverpool's rich Irish history, Guardian, 15 October 2012; Liverpool Welsh website; Tim Jonze, Cunard Yanks: the sailors who taught Britain how to rock’n’roll, Guardian, 1 July 2015.
[3] Rose George, Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90% of Everything.
[4] Wikipedia: Samaritans, Tensions between the Samaritans and the Judeans.
[5] The Mission to Seafarers at 160 [pdf download]
[6] Revd David Savage, mentioned in The Free Church Leaders - Together For The Common Good.
[7] In composing, with Carl Davis, his ‘Liverpool Oratorio’, Macca added a line of his own to the Institute motto, “Not for ourselves alone, but for the whole world were we born. And we were born in Liverpool”. Philip Norman, Paul McCartney, The Biography, p.642.
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