Colossians 1.1-14, Luke 10.25-37
The Fourth Sunday after Trinity, Sea Sunday, Sunday 10 July 2022
Austwick, Keasden
‘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.
The Mission to Seafarers began on the beach at Clevedon, Somerset, 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]
What are your connections with the sea, through the places you have lived or worked, or through journeys you’ve made?
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 we think of the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’, we’re conscious that my neighbours aren’t just those next door, they are also ‘over the water’; aware that the waters which separate our 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. Those who work the shipping lines bring us virtually everything we need. 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. [2]
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. There is knowing irony in the name, for rather than being a real paradise this was a poor replacement for the genuine intimacy of the relationships the sailors so dearly missed with loved ones back home.
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. [3] 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.
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.
We might imagine that there would have been some opposition to the Reverend John Ashley’s 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’. [4]
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? Who are the Good Samaritans in your life, those who have impressed you for the way they have reached out to others in need?
Notes
A shortened (and less Liverpudlian) version of Not for ourselves alone, but for the whole world were we born: the Good Samaritan on Sea Sunday, preached in Somerset, 2016.
[1] The Mission to Seafarers: History, The Mission to Seafarers at 160 [pdf download] and Wikipedia: John Ashley (clergyman).
[2] Rose George, Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Brings You 90% of Everything.
[3] Wikipedia: Samaritans, Tensions between the Samaritans and the Judeans.
[4] The Mission to Seafarers at 160 [pdf download]
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