THE Church cannot solve the world’s problems, but it can model a way of living that rejects a “them and us” narrative, the Archbishop of Wales, the Most Revd Cherry Vann, said in her sermon at her enthronement service.
Addressing the congregation at Newport Cathedral on 8 November, Archbishop Vann, who became the first woman Primate in an Anglican Church in the UK when she was elected in August (News, 1 August), said: “We live in troubling times. Division and hate, mistrust and disinformation are rife across our world and in our societies here in Wales.
“There seems to be an increasing tendency, an encouragement even (from some at least) to define ourselves over and against others in ways that significantly threaten the community cohesion that many have spent decades trying to build.”
Speaking of war, community tensions, threats to free speech, climate change, and the cost of living, Archbishop Vann continued: “Whilst the Church cannot solve the world’s problems, we can and are called to model a very different way of going on, which holds out another way of being and the hope that is the Kingdom of God.”
She referred to a poem by Chuck Lathrop — “In search of a round table” — which she said had shaped her understanding of ministry and of the Church down the years.
She quoted: “‘It will take some sawing to be roundtabled, Some redefining and redesigning, Such redoing and rebirthing of narrow-long Churching Can painful be for people and tables. . . It would mean no diasing and throning, For but one King is there, He is a foot washer, at table no less. . .’”
The poem refers to ministers who come to sit at the head of this table of people, only to discover that it has been turned around. “They must be loved into roundness . . . For God has called a People, Not ‘them and us’.”
“And so,” Archbishop Vann said, “in our attitudes and behaviours, in the decisions we take and the values we espouse, in the way we live and relate to one another, there is to be no ‘them and us’. . .
“Hard though it may be sometimes, we are invited by God to celebrate the diversity of our global humanity, and to embrace it as a gift. . . There is to be ‘no diasing and throning’ — rather ironic in the context of what is happening here this afternoon, with a rather large throne sitting centre-stage. But the gospel reminds us, as does the poem, that we are all equal in God’s sight. God is not in the business of hierarchies.”
The Church was called to “reach out across the divides” at the risk of “being rejected and ridiculed for our efforts”, she said. “It means staying with and being alongside those who push our buttons and infuriate us beyond measure with grace and charity and an open heart.”
Archbishop Vann was enthroned in the archepiscopal chair in front of the high altar at the start of the service. Later, she took the oaths of office using the Monmouth Archbishop’s Bible, which has been used at the enthronement of all previous Bishops of Monmouth who have become Archbishops: the late Edwin Morris, the late Derek Childs, and, more recently, Lord Williams.