Given at "Word on the Street" 6th October 2009

Isaiah 55: 1-11 2 Timothy 3:14-4.5 John 5: 36b-end

There's glory for you!'

`I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master—that's all.'

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. `They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'

Oh, it's wonderful stuff, this. Lewis Carroll's exploration, with Alice, into a nightmare world where meaning is turned upside down; where words mean just what the most powerful want them to mean.

You'll find impenetrability is one of the key strategies of those who want to dominate—we will all have experienced it. Whether it's reading a piece of post-structuralist blah—and think how dominant Derrida and Foucault are in higher and further education … or an overly-complex benefits form that has been poorly translated into Urdu. Impenetrability. And a number of different reasons why impenetrability can become the name of the game.

How often, when we differ, we close down in our minds and hearts the imagination that can enable us to understand. We make the other impenetrable. Their experience becomes a deep, dark wood into which we can't or won't go. Think of Peter Akinola: there's no way he will enter the forest of his fears of homosexuality. Much easier for him to use violent language, proud verbs, easy adjectives to mask his refusal to understand.

Violent language—of bestiality, often—to abject his fear powerfully onto gay people. "Don't expect me to find the imagination to penetrate your world. Don't penetrate me!” he foghorns.

Impenetrability. Non-communication. Closed hearts and minds. Where words become ideological, batted across the deep fears of difference.

One place you'll see this dynamic of non-communication is when relations between Christians and Muslims is couched as a clash of civilisations. Incommensurability; age-old rivalries. Recently we've appointed an interfaith development officer at Bradford Cathedral, Nuzhat Ali. What we are trying to do, Nuzhat and I, is model a deep public friendship. This is to take Aristotle's wisdom to heart: that the polis can only flourish on the basis of friendship. Hannah Arendt turned to Aristotle and the importance of friendship in public life after her experience as a Jew during Nazism. And there are long and rich strands of theological reflection within Christianity—and Islam, for that matter: Aelred wrote that God is friendship. Thomas Aquinas argued in his indomitable way, that the telos of humanity is friendship with God. Friends that talk, converse, dialogue with each other towards the end of a better society. This is not the easy companionship of private friendship, safe and secure in home or conference. But public friendship, where we model a way of talking through our differences, and try to absorb the wider anger and misunderstanding, and transform it.

But I'm struck by how so much interfaith work is hampered by fear. I find myself constantly faced with my own: that I may cause offence if I say the wrong thing. That the Cathedral is merely demonstrating the triumphalist belief of some Muslims that Christianity is going belly-up: further evidence that Christianity is a dying religion, succumbing to the last and final testament that is the Qur'an. Fear: that it's always Christians that initiate; that Muslims don't reciprocate. When I stop and think, the fears can start to overwhelm; the forest grows thicker by the minute. Fear, that it will all go wrong, that Nuzhat and I will end up boxed in by insurmountable prejudices. How much easier to resort to words that deliver nice, knock-down arguments, or blah, rather than real, meaningful communication across our profound differences of faith. And perhaps the biggest fear of all; born of the experience of brittle negotiation with those caught in the trap of identity politics. We know there are real victims of hatred—Muslims who suffer prejudice and violence. But there are also those who are very ready to shout 'Islamophobia' at the slightest exploratory criticism of Islam. Identity politics which creates a culture of the victim, of grievance, in a world where everything is analysed in terms of the dominant and the subordinate, the haves and have nots of power. Oppressors and victims. You're one or the other. You can't be both. And if you're a self-identified victim you can be very powerful.

Fear. Or friendship—enabling us to extend the hand of love across impenetrable fears and the refusals of hatred.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

Nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.

An impenetrable God? Whose thoughts and ways are incomprehensible?

No. If we hold together the beginning of John's gospel, with the passage from Isaiah, we are reminded, I think, that from the beginning, God creates a world of meaning and coherence, a world of Eucharist, where the delights of the feast—bread, water, wine and milk without money and without price are the signs of God's everlasting covenant with us—a steadfast, sure love. Love that drives out fear. At this feast, words are good enough to eat: The Word become flesh is bread and wine offered and received. Because the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, living our fears, transforming our hatreds, anchoring our meanings, our communication, once and for all in God. Where glory really does mean glory.

We must be careful with the words we use. We must check out, again and again, where the fear is—in me, in you, and try hard to ensure that our words don't proceed from there. We need to remember that Jesus died on the cross a victim to hate so that we don't need to be victim to our identities, but can transcend them in new life.

Church, an inclusive Church. A church strong enough to host a feast at which fears can be addressed and transformed. My experience in Bradford has changed me. I preach as an Anglican; and no longer do I repudiate the established Church as once I did. Now, in a city where Christianity is fast becoming a minority concern, I'm profoundly thankful that the Church of England has the confidence and resources to offer hospitality in a way no other institution does. There's a church up the road from the Cathedral in BD3, where Christian-heritage population in the parish is 19% and the church really struggles to survive. Dale Barton, the male vicar tells me that Muslim women now come, and take off their burkas and veils, in front of him, because they feel safe in church. That's a little bit glory for you, in Bradford.

How can you believe when you accept glory that comes from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God?

What does the Church of England offer? It's a public institution—in parishes, in cathedrals, in the many ways it penetrates our society. It's a messy institution: we seldom get anything right in the public eye. But I think we must see it as a means of grace that we repudiate at our peril.

The church gives us structures to hold the dialogue—however hard it can be to keep talking. However angry or full of fear and pain we can feel, we need to keep talking as friends, friends, gathered around Christ's table. Resisting the fear and hatred that make words meaningless bullets of power. Resisting the Humpty Dumpty within. Reaching out in friendship, rather than retreating into victimhood; realizing an inclusive church grounded on the love of Christ.

The Church of England has the potential to model glory to society in so far as its members can acknowledge the presence of God in those who are 'not of our party'. If it can model a pluralism that is on speaking terms with its others, then we have something to show the world of the wideness in God's mercy. I wonder who you need to make public friends with to demonstrate this?

We gather around a table at which God's grace is given: the Word made flesh, who penetrates our minds and hearts with love and forgiveness. In a world where too often truth is victim to power, let us know our need of that grace, and receive.