Confessing Evangelical

A good Thought for the Day from the Archbishop of Canterbury this morning (listen to it here, or read the transcript here). I normally avoid Platitude Thought for the Day, and only caught it this morning because it was delayed by a few minutes. And I'm somewhat ambivalent about Dr Williams - on the basis that when he's good, he's quite quite good, and when he's bad, he's incomprehensible. But this was good stuff.

Dr Williams began as follows:

A novelist, some years back, put it very well when he described what it was like to arrive in the empty hallway of a monastery in Yorkshire for the first time: "There is an impression of intense activity elsewhere". That's a phrase that comes to my mind, sometimes, when I'm in a church towards the end of the Good Friday services.

We spend the service trying "to summon up the appropriate emotions for this overwhelming day, the day on which the whole history of the world depends", but by the end "the church has been stripped of everything that might make it look attractive" and become "an empty hall", and "we've run out of things to say and do". But like the entrance hall of that monastery, there is a sense of "intense activity elsewhere":

At the end of a Good Friday service, we get to the point where nothing we do will be or feel adequate to what's being remembered. And that's completely right, because what matters on this day is what's done elsewhere, done by God, somehow using the stark injustice and horror of the execution of Jesus to turn around the way the world works. Intense activity elsewhere; as if you could hear faintly a workman hammering steadily away at the blank surface of human self-satisfaction and self-deception, and an irregular sound of plaster dropping to a distant floor.

Dr Williams expresses regret that "sort of peace, but more a sort of 'limbo', an in-between moment" is found all-too rarely in the church:

The pity is that so much of the atmosphere in churches these days, during services and between services, never really gives people that sense of being able to rest because the work's being done elsewhere. Instead it feels, to regular worshippers, let alone anyone dropping in, busy and anxious, as if the worst thing that could ever happen would be for silence to fall and for people to have to face the fact that they weren't in the driving seat any longer.

This makes it even more important "to get at least one day right, to allow Good Friday to announce its own particular message":

It's a time when we who are Christians might well ask how we can rethink some of what we do the rest of the time to stop what happens in church being just a frantic assertion of ourselves and our religious busyness.

Because it isn't us as Christians, as religious human beings, who are in the lead, heroically making the world a better place. Humanly speaking, our record in this is patchy. It's good for us to shut up and sit down occasionally. Our task is both very simple and very hard: to create a kind of rest and quiet that begins to tune people's ears to the impression of intense activity elsewhere. That would be worship worth the name, a space for the heart to grow into.

Some good, thought-provoking material there. That said, it would also be nice if, just once, the Archbishop of Canterbury could be as direct and straightforward in proclaiming the Gospel as his counterpart in Sydney, Peter Jensen, whose Easter message (complete with video and MP3 options) can be found here and is well worth a read.