Andover United Reformed Church              Sunday May 9th 2004

Service of Thanksgiving for the Emergency and Rescue Services

A month or so ago, in London, I was walking towards Parliament Square from Westminster Bridge, just a bit down from Big Ben. Two mounted policewomen passed me, their horses walking quietly towards the Bridge. A minute or two later, there was the sound of beating hooves and a rider-less horse came back towards the square, mercifully avoiding the traffic which stopped; and then came running after it the young police-woman – and then her colleague, at a sharp trot and speaking into her radio. The horse turned towards the House of Lords – a wise move! – where I saw it a few minutes later, restored it to its rider. I felt very sorry for her; but the saddest thing about the whole episode was that many of those around me on the pavement just thought it was funny; and their laughter seemed to me not just a lack of sympathy for the young woman, but a lack of appreciation and respect for the Metropolitan Police....... So I’m especially glad to be here with you all this morning for this Hampshire Thanksgiving for all the Emergency and Rescue Services. 

In that second Reading (Luke 10:25-37), the young man got more than he bargained for! He was trying to test Jesus out, and perhaps to limit his own commitment; but he provokes Jesus first into that telling, questioning story and then into the searching question that turned his own question back upon him. The story contrasts the behaviour of two pillars of the Jewish religious establishment with that of a man from the group that Jews would have nothing to do with, whom they despised – to them Samaritans were both heretics and of mixed race. The man had asked, “Who is my neighbour?”. When Jesus, having told the story, asked him, “Who do you think proved neighbour.....?”, the man can’t bring himself to utter the word Samaritan; but he does say, perhaps between clenched teeth, “the one who showed him mercy”; and Jesus reply to him, “Go and do likewise”, contains a double lesson: not only “do as he did, help the stranger”, but “take a lesson from a Samaritan”. 

I find the whole exchange much to the point in today’s Britain with local elections ahead, today’s Europe at this moment of “Enlargement”, and across the world wherever you look from Iraq to Southampton. The question that presses people everywhere is: 

“How will I think and speak about the stranger, how will I behave towards the person who’s foreign, the person who speaks a different language, or who looks different, or who practises a different Faith, from the people I grew up with and with whom I feel instinctively comfortable?” 

And it’s especially difficult to think coolly and decently about all this, and to respond with humanity and with a helpful welcome, if I’m poor myself, or suffering injustice or insecurity – or if wherever I live the press or the government are telling me that the stranger is some sort of threat to me. 

Here are critical questions for each of us, and for Governments everywhere including our own; and critically for the Faiths at a time when their influence across the world is greater than ever in the face of forecasts to the contrary. That fine religious leader the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has recently written:

“Every great faith has within it harsh texts which, read literally, can be taken to endorse narrow particularism, suspicion of strangers, and intolerance toward those who believe differently than we do. Every great faith also has within it sources that emphasise kinship with the stranger, empathy with the outsider, the courage that leads people to extend a hand across boundaries of estrangement and hostility. The choice is ours...” (The Dignity of Difference, 207).

You don’t need telling how important and pressing all this is for each of your own Services; and you need understanding and encouragement from the rest of us – to which I pray that today’s Thanksgiving is some contribution. You are on all the front lines where meeting and interaction become confrontation, fear, abuse, violence. You have opportunities, and the responsibility, not only to defend individuals and the public order, but to provide an example of good, decent behaviour – even to offer a lead for which others of us, politicians included, may not yet have seen the need or think that we’re ready. And all this when the same front lines are within your own mess-rooms and your appliances and your disciplinary proceedings as well as on the streets. When any of you put feet wrong, we turn on you - when the heaviest responsibility lies much broader and deeper, with each of us and the political leaders we elect, the culture and the assumptions which we share in shaping and sustaining – as we are seeing today around the Coalition’s treatment of captives in Iraq.

We owe you our thanks and our respect that you are faithfully struggling to keep your feet, morally and ethically and also religiously, on this hugely significant and dangerous front line; and I believe that today’s Thanksgiving, and much else that people are undertaking in this region as in others, shows that many in the Churches and the Faiths, and many others, want to work with you, to support you and to learn with you – because where you are in the service of the rest of us, you are very often revealing the issues, and still more the people, to whom we need urgently to be giving our informed, sympathetic attention – but whom we may prefer to “pass by on the other side”.

It matters enormously, for us all and then for your Services on whom we depend so much, that we are prepared to learn from whoever is for us the Samaritan; and whether as individuals or Services or nations, that we “show mercy as he did”. 

Amen.