Under the Shadow of God’s Wings

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 17, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Psalm 91: 1-4

When we talk about heaven, we usually mean two related things. One is joy: you may not be super-excited by angels, harps and clouds, but you’ll have your own configuration of elation, celebration, happiness, reunion, companionship, vindication, restoration and fulfilment. The other is safety: like the refugee movie when the migrants reach land, or the rescue drama when the firefighter gets the child out of the burning building, heaven’s about being saved from destruction, despair, punishment and disaster. That’s why we so often use the word salvation: salvation means being delivered from jeopardy to a place of safety. That’s at the epicentre of what Christianity has always been about. And not just for the future – but for the present. The reason the early church was populated by women and slaves is that such people experienced no security in homes dominated by predatory men, and came to the church because there they found respect, dignity and, yes, salvation. They were saved – and they were safe.

Which is why it is an indescribable tragedy and grotesque travesty that churches and other Christian initiatives have in many, many cases been communities not of safety, security and salvation but of harm, abuse and neglect. Christians and their leaders and representatives have taken advantage of people’s trust and turned what should be a community of devotion, goodness and justice into an opportunity for exploitation and manipulation, particularly of children and adults at risk of harm. In some cases that abuse has been precisely around the most tender and holy convictions and practices of the faith, turning what is godly into something monstrous. Whether in an evasion of culpability, a lack of thoroughness, or a misapplication of notions of forgiveness, church authorities have often not held perpetrators to account, failing to listen to survivors and instead prioritising their own interests and perspectives.

The fallout from all this lands in two categories: the hurt and the damage. The hurt is that there are thousands of people for whom church is inextricably tied up not with safety, security and salvation (let alone joy, elation and happiness) but with betrayal, fear and harm. This agony has been compounded by the denial, distrust and duplicity with which their experiences have often been treated and the way similar incidences have continued to recur and surface. The damage is that such experiences can stay with people for a lifetime, inhibiting health, identity, relationships and confidence. The damage is also that the moral authority of the church has been undermined, and its currency of trust, compassion, honesty and integrity compromised. More than just a question of bad actors, this has become a matter of the plausibility of any Christian claim to truth.

We are talking about human failure before God. Lament is the practice by which Christians dwell in the space between the trajectory of God’s purpose and the chaos of human reality. This time of reckoning is a moment of deep humiliation for the church – a dismantling of all pretension and a demolition of any lingering pride. What must follow is repentance. Repentance means saying, ‘This isn’t a simply bureaucratic or institutional failure. This is about all of us – the culture in which we participate, the moments we opt to look away, the tendency of preferring the false safety of saying nothing to the true security of speaking and reporting and letting scrutiny shed light. This isn’t about other people, nefarious malefactors: perpetrators are people like us, among us – and survivors are we ourselves, or people beside us.’ Repentance means regret, sorrow, and apology, but it also means three things I want to dwell on more specifically: rigour, reappraisal, and renewal.

Rigour means adhering to the provisions now in place. Undergoing checks by the Disclosure and Barring Service is an act of solidarity with all who wish for no one to be let down by the church so terribly again. Being trained regularly is an act of humility that says we all need to be alert to the delusions of wishful thinking, the sophistication of perpetrators, and the role we can play in making a safer church. Understanding the need to report and record, and what it is and isn’t appropriate to say and do when issues arise, are ways we turn our repentance into concrete acts of transformation that affirm our commitment to be better and do better. In our parish we have a Safeguarding Lead and a Safeguarding Officer and, working with me, they provide a framework to assure the whole community we’re fulfilling our commitments. In turn dioceses provide professional advisers and the police have trained teams. Together we form a network of support and good practice and a net through which nothing should fall. In the words of the Elizabethan sailor Francis Drake, ‘When we are given to endeavour any great matter, it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same unto the end, until it be thoroughly finished, that yieldeth the true glory.’ That’s what’s meant by rigour.

Turning to reappraisal, safeguarding can never be allowed to be just about procedure. It’s about recentering the church, not on its public representatives, or its visible ceremonies, or its claims to truth, but on those who’ve experienced hurt and those today most at risk of harm. Reappraisal requires facing unpalatable truths. One is that those who perpetrate harm in many cases emerge from an upbringing or life-experience in which they themselves have been exposed to exploitation and manipulation. Hurt people hurt people. Reappraisal needs also to attend to gender. There’s a difference in the manner and the numbers of men and women perpetrators of abuse. Likewise the experience of abuse will vary, with girls reporting a higher level of sexual violence, whilst both girls and boys will equally know the force of physical threat from both parents. Another unpalatable truth is that some who have been accused, shamed and punished have not done the things of which they’ve been charged. This compounds tragedy.

Reappraisal also means revisiting the central Christian notion of forgiveness. Forgiveness can never be something anyone can command another person to do. It’s a gift that may arise over a sometimes-long period of stock-taking, reflection, justice-seeking, true acknowledgement, cessation of harm and accountability. It may lead to reconciliation and healing. But it’s not to be confused with downplaying culpability or minimising harm. If a person’s been found by due process to have been responsible for hurting a child or adult at risk of harm, has been duly held to account, and has faced the consequences, the church may well engage in a practice of readmittance to the sacraments and some degree of fellowship; but that will almost never again mean being allowed access to children or adults at risk of harm – for the person’s own benefit as well as that of vulnerable people. Psychologists insist that these problematic tendencies are not subject to change. The church’s duty to protect sometimes means helping to protect people from themselves.

Thirdly, after rigour and reappraisal, repentance means we hope and pray for renewal. As in many other cases, the church has much to learn from twelve-step recovery programmes. Just as a person whose life has been dominated by alcohol always thereafter regards themselves as a recovering alcoholic, and exercises extreme caution by maintaining complete abstinence, so the church must recognise its profound problem in relation to secrecy, deception, manipulation and exploitation. It’s very painful for all concerned to accept that some of the most wonderful and lifegiving things in the church are subject to distortion and disgrace. It poisons the water that nourishes everything and everyone. So safeguarding can never be an extra, an afterthought: it must always be a fundamental commitment. The church will never be ‘over’ this – able to relax its vigilance. It will only ever be recovering and alert. In the words of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician: ‘First, do no harm.’

I once sat with a person in great pain who’d spent a year realising that the truth about his family was not what he had always thought and believed. He’d been disentangling his own hurt from a clear appraisal of whether he could go on in the relationships that had hitherto been at the centre of his life. I said, ‘How do you see things now?’ He replied, ‘I’m a sadder and a wiser man.’ He was quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But I believe he was also describing the church in the face of this ghastly poison. Wiser and sadder. Humbler and gentler. Yet in response, we hope, more rigorous; and renewed.

I dare to say renewed because this process of naming, facing and responding to the reality of what has happened among us and coming to the point where we can say, ‘This is something the body of Christ of which we are members, has done,’ brings us back to the very first principles of the Christian faith. We are not self-made. We exist by God’s indescribable grace. We are flawed. And yet we exist to be God’s companions. We are made to encounter Jesus Christ, and find our peace and our joy in one another in him. We continue to fail, finding ever more manipulative ways to pursue our own misguided goals outside the bounds of God’s enjoyment of us. And we find our identity in our willingness to be found by the Good Shepherd and restored to the sheepfold and reshaped by the Holy Spirit to dwell with God and one another and the creation forever. Life has ultimate meaning insofar as we participate in this process.

Safeguarding names an inescapable and inextricable part of this process. But it also names that, however profound our procedural or moral failures, God is our ultimate guardian of safety. God will never ultimately let us be harmed beyond the Spirit’s ability to heal and transform. Our experience is that for far too many, this has not been the reality in this life. Our faith is that, when it comes to the life to come, it will transpire for all of us. The risen body of Jesus points us to those two realities: the scars he bears never go away; but their ability to hurt, damage and destroy him does. Resurrection has taken Jesus beyond the unspeakable things he has been subject to in this life. Those things can’t un-happen, but they no longer need to poison his relationships and inhibit his flourishing. In Christ’s risen body we see how bad things can be, and how searingly they can hurt and damage God’s own body. But in his resurrection, we see that nothing bad can ultimately hurt or damage us forever. For finally, hard as it may be to see it from here, in God, forever and safety are the same thing.