Diocesan Synod Presidential Address
16 October 2004

The on-going international and national situation with regard to Iraq together with the continuing violence in Israel and Palestine prompt me to offer some reflections on the themes of Truth and Trust. While none of us can not but have been appalled by the murder of Kenneth Bigley and by the suffering which his wife and family have had to endure, the wider situation in Iraq and in Israel and Palestine challenge our understandings of the Gospel and the responses which we might, and indeed I would assert, need to make to the wider community.

While, to use the cliché, the first casualty of war is truth may be an apt comment in the politics and violence not only of the Middle East but of the so called Super Powers as well, I grow increasingly concerned at the extent to which its inherent cynicism has become almost daily coinage in our lives. The apparent ease with which the Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons this week that the statements and claims with regard to the weapons of mass destruction and the 45 minute claim have now been withdrawn does little to build a confidence in the rightness of the invasion of Iraq in the first place. Equally, the statement of the Leader of the Opposition that we, whoever the we are, have lost trust in our politicians is barely answered by the cry trust us. Why and on what grounds, we might reply.

In a world of bewildering statistics, one which I heard this last week strikes me as being particularly apposite as we struggle to find response, let alone answer to what is actually going on on the ground in Iraq. The percentage of non-combatants who have died as a direct result of either war or specific campaign has risen inexorably since the First World War to a staggering 60% today. While we rightly mourn every soldier both of this country and of the United States who has died since the Iraq invasion in the attempt to bring peace and democracy to the Iraqi people, no one appears to have any idea of the death toll of Iraqi people who have been caught up in the programme of systematic bombing and the on-the-ground campaigns, let alone the almost daily car bombings. 

Truth and trust seem to many to be almost bankrupt words, empty of meaning. But the loss of truth and trust can only lead us further toward the slaughter of self and others.

Whatever else we may do or say in the present world situation, we need to recognise that acts do have consequences. The terrible events of 9/11 continue to challenge America’s belief that it is not only impregnable to outside forces and violence, but somehow still has the right to impose its solutions on other countries which do not accept its [America’s] view of the world. Many of us here today, I suspect, still question the grounds on which Iraq was chosen, dare I say in preference to other regimes whose human rights records cannot stand even the most minimal of scrutiny. 

Just how possible it will be for free and fair elections to be held in Iraq next year remains to be seen but the mere presence of an enormous military force on the ground will surely not of itself pave the way for a peace without a commitment to negotiation with all those involved, and that includes all who would use violence to gain the upper hand. 

The building of a wall between the communities of Israel and Palestine on the grounds that it will enable the two communities to live within their respective borders while at the same time denying the Palestinian communities access to adequate food supplies and medical resource, seems to me to be a sleight of hand which should be named by every decent human being. 

The international arms trade which enriches the haves yet provides the very soil for conflict cannot, and must never, be detached from the suffering of so many innocent bystanders. Acts do have consequences.

It would be seductive to see these issues of truth and trust as only “out there” subjects. “To try and identify the sin of the politician without identifying, bitterly, with it is simply to treat the world’s untruth as something which does not touch me” (Archbishop Rowan Williams). If truth and trust are now bankrupt words, their bankruptcy are as much my responsibility as anyone else’s. Post modernity with its emphasis on me can too easily absolve the very me from any sense of responsibility, of any sense of belonging, of needing that which is “other” than me. Truth and trust can only begin their work in me when I accept my own incompleteness, my own need for wholeness, the point at which I acknowledge that I am not the centre of the created world.

Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Matthew 16, 25-26).

Truth and trust remind all of us of a need for shared repentance. 

Let my references here to the truth of our belonging, of our need for each other, and of the other which alone can open up in us the lack and poverty in ourselves speak also to the bulk of our agenda today concentrating as it does on the nature and calling of the Church. I have in mind the questions asked of us by Brian Walker, of our forthcoming debates on the shape of parochial ministry, and on the 2005 budget. We need to struggle, now more than ever, against pressures to become inward looking, concerned only for our own well-being; narrowness of self-serving parochialism.

We began this Synod in the context of the celebration of the Kingship of Christ; a Kingship not of this world. This Kingship embodies the truth and the trust of God. His Kingship is to be found not in political statement nor in force of arms nor even in the self referencing which seems to prevent so many of our world leaders from saying sorry when we have got it wrong. His Kingship is to be found and lived as we become:

As a child; a discoverer of hidden treasure; as afraid of compassion and jealous of gifts given to others.

Above all His Kingship is to be found in the silence and the love of the Cross. The Cross claims to tell the truth about the world that we inhabit. It calls us to truthful living; a living which challenges the depersonalisation which lies at the heart of so much of modern conflict – the “them and us”; the demonisation of the other be it individual or whole nation; the enemy whom we refuse to love as ourselves.

Pilate said to Jesus “what is truth?” And when he had said this, he went out. 

Whatever our answers to conflict with its inevitable casualties of truth and trust, Pilate’s option is not open to us.

+Trevor Basingstoke