The following sermon was preached by the Bishop of Winchester, The Rt Revd. Michael Scott-Joynt at the Installation of Canons in Winchester Cathedral - 17th November 2002, and following his return from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“He said, “Do not fear, greatly beloved; peace be with you; be strong and courageous.””

(Daniel 10:19)  

Two-and-a-half weeks ago, the Bishop of Bukavu took me, and Jeremy Pemberton the Chairman of the Congo Church Association who was with me and translating for me, to Goma – for an evening and a night.

The name may ring some bells. Goma is a town at the north end of Lake Kivu, around the middle of the eastern border of the DRC; Rwanda is  a couple of kilometres away to the east; and  Congo, Rwanda and Uganda meet some 50 kms to the North. There was a huge and infamous refugee camp all around the town after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994; and just under a year ago, the volcano that looms over Goma erupted again, this time sending two streams of lava, each two or three metres deep and anything up to 40 metres wide, slicing through the town into the lake. Bishop Dirokpa was taking us to meet the church in Goma, to hear how they are and  what they are doing, and what life is like; and so that we, visitors from the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion would, God willing, be some encouragement in Christ.

We had  already landed at Goma three days earlier on our way south to Bukavu. There had not been the very young men with guns, the trenches and the rough bivouacs that had surrounded the two airstrips through which we had already passed that day, and which we would find at the strip for Bukavu; but we had flown between the volcanoes, and from the air and on the ground we had seen the scale of the volcanic flows, and the way the whole town is built on their predecessors; and the roads marked across the lava, and the fresh building everywhere amid the ruins still standing half engulfed, including that of the Roman Catholic Cathedral.  

We landed, this second time, not long before dusk, and were taken straight to the church; people of all ages, with a lot of teenagers; very loud amplification; they dressed us with Scout scarves as we entered, and we walked up the aisle between lines of Scouts of both genders.

An hour and a  half later, and in a downpour which on the church’s tin roof had added a lot more noise to the service in which the Bishop and I and Jeremy, as well as the local team, had all spoken,  and in which I had brought them the greetings of the Archbishop of Canterbury as I did everywhere, we were taken across rough ground (which next day seemed still rougher, sharper lava but also proved to be the school playground if it had one!) to a well-worn classroom; and the Archdeaconry Council shared supper and talked with us – about thirty men and women, with a single weak light bulb, sitting at rough desks. Some had walked or cycled some distance to be there; some were among those who had lost their houses in the eruption, and were still living with relatives. The Archdeacon’s wife had given birth to their fifth child by Caesarean the day before the eruption; as it started, she had fled with her baby  from the hospital to relatives just in Rwanda – and the hospital had been destroyed; they had called the baby Grace – and we saw her, just beginning to walk.

They told us how the church had struggled not to run away, but to be faithful, in the time of the refugee camp, and how terrifying that had all been; how the whole area was still and again full of refugees, and of deserters and soldiers from this force or that,  and how people everywhere lived in fear of them; they told of the Rwandans extracting minerals, and exacting forced labour and women as well as food. They told us of the terror of the night the volcano erupted, the smell, the heat, the noise, the not knowing where it would go….; and they told us how God had drawn the church together and sustained – and enlarged – them through it all, about the Scouts who had found and restored lost people to each other, about the Mothers’ Union organising what food could be found and temporary homes, about the money from CMS and the Congo Church Association that had meant that the rest of the church cared; about how the clergy continued to walk into the villages in the foothills of the volcano even when guns were firing; about how  young people, as well as the Mothers’ Union,  went with them; the Mothers’ Union to seek out girls and women in danger of being expelled from their families after being raped, the young people  to persuade their own generation that they did not have to go with the soldiers. And the next morning, in the church as dawn broke at six, there were thirty or forty people, and a sermon from Archdeacon Assumani on Ephesians 6, the whole armour of God: this is God’s tested equipment that he is giving to you, in the face of all that you know is upon you and around you, this is God’s power and commission for the Church to be good news and the resource for the country’s future, for peace and reconciliation – for from where else could these come?  And then they gave us some breakfast as all sorts of people talked with us; and they drove us around the town, up and over and down the other side of the lava flow, before taking us back to the airstrip, itself cut by the flow…..

John the Divine was given his Revelation for people in a situation like that – and Daniel his visions:  “Do not fear, greatly beloved; peace be with you; be strong and courageous”, he hears the archangel say, standing beside him and touching him; no wonder the Risen Christ in John’s first chapter, standing among the churches like a general reviewing, reassuring, instructing his people in the front line, no wonder John’s picture of the Risen Christ owes a good deal to the archangel that Daniel sees earlier in tonight’s chapter 10. Daniel’s point, and still more John’s – and that of Paul in Ephesians 6 – is that by God’s presence and powerful love, and fundamentally in the Resurrection of Jesus, the conflict has been won, the ultimate outcome assured – so they encourage the believers, the Christians, to persevere and to rejoice, knowing, as St Paul puts it, “that in the Lord your labour is not in vain” (1 Cor.15:58).

I find that our Partner Dioceses, in this case those in the Congo, offer us so much assistance as their faithfulness puts this question to us: “Is your Christian faith just one element, one interest, among many? Or is it the governing factor for you, will you allow Jesus to be Lord over every part and moment of your life, your political thinking, your money?” For Christians, Anglicans among them, in the Congo these questions come just now with particular clarity, as everything in the midst of which they live is in so terrible a state; many recognise that they have an awesome  responsibility and opportunity. And so have we here, for our national life, and in the light of all the UK’s international commitments, as well as for the character of our own and our neighbour’s personal and family living.

The angel said to Daniel, “Do not fear, greatly beloved; peace be with you; be strong and courageous”. And the Risen Christ, in John’s Revelation, still stands among the churches as one encouraging and sustaining those in the front line; and he gives to John those Seven Letters that follow, for those in the Congo and elsewhwere, and for us for all that God has for us to do in  his service here.