2011 Yorkshire Association of Change Ringers' Annual service

Sermon to the Yorkshire Association of Change Ringers

at a service as part of their Annual Meeting,

St. Lawrence's parish church, York

on the afternoon of May 7^th, 2011

Fr. Tim Jones

Welcome, Yorkshire Association of Change Ringers, to St. Lawrence's parish church in York. We are justly proud of the bells we have here, and of our band of ringers. Without the ringers, the bells are useless!  Our eight bells were collected from various places, largely by York Minster, and were hung in our steeple just over twelve years ago. None of the bells were made with St. Lawrence's church in mind, but nonetheless, it is here that they do their job, and do it well.

I love to hear the bells ringing. Sometimes, when showing children around the church, I invite them to be an angel and ring a church bell. The bells, I explain, remind people of God in their lives, and call them to come together to worship him. That's the job of an angel, because the word “angel” comes from the ancient Greek word for “message”. The call to worship is a message our sometimes dark and difficult world needs to hear.

Church bells, of course, have historically had occasional other uses. In 1940, at the height of the fears of a German invasion, the ringing of the church bells was to be a warning that the Germans were landing, by air or by sea. Even in 1940, long before the full horrors of the Nazi regime were underway, the British people already knew they were at war with not just an enemy but with a force for evil. The bells were not simply for a call to worship, but also functioned as a warning, as a call to resist. The bells had not just an angelic role, but also a prophetic function.

That role – of messenger and prophet – is the function of the church bells and of the Church itself. One of the marks of a prophet is the delivery of unwelcome truths. The uncomfortable truism about unwelcome truths is that they are not welcome. A couple of days ago the Archbishop of Canterbury offered some unwelcome reflections on the death of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Like any bells rung in warning, the noise made was not found to be pleasing, harmonious and melodic; warning bells are all rung at will, producing a sound which is discordant and jarring. So with the Archbishop's words: they grated on the nerves of many.

Silly old Archbishop of Canterbury, the national media seem to have universally cried.. Who does he think he is, spouting warning words of wisdom and faith when there is rejoicing to be done at the death of an enemy? Few pundits have resisted the opportunity to ridicule Rowan Williams for his reflections on the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. A coalition minister (bravely anonymous) is quoted by the Daily Telegraph as calling the Archbishop naive: “It’s quite easy to talk about due process and justice from the warmth and safety of a palace in London, but out in the real world, things are rather more complicated.”

Lambeth Palace is no more cossetted than the Palace of Westminster. The warmth and safety of the Palace of Westminster is exactly where we trust our elected leaders to fight for due process and justice. It is precisely those, like Bin Laden, who are most despised and feared by the public and the powerful alike, for whom due process and justice are necessary, as much for our sake as theirs. When we dispense with such niceties simply because the offences of the accused are heinous, then we put at risk the very foundations of the civilization we profess to cherish. Thank God for a national figure who can calmly, gently, and pointedly remind us of that.

As for the real world, I suspect that Rowan Williams is one of the few prominent British voices to reflect on Bin Laden's death who was actually there in person in the heart of New York on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. Williams was at a church meeting two blocks from the Twin Towers when murderers struck. Like everyone else there, he experienced the Terror, the dust, and was a first hand witness to the death, the panic and the heroism. So get stuffed, anonymous coalition minister.

Towards the end of the Second World War, Churchill too was, for a moment at least, happy to see the perpetrators of the Nazi horrors simply executed as soon as they were found. Causing the fifty million violent deaths of World War Two is also a crime which merits outrage. But Churchill quickly came to recognize that the proper response to crime – even in times of war – is due process and justice. The subsequent Nuremberg war trials were a major triumph of that war. They were real trials, at which the crimes were recognized for what they were. Defendants were tried, some were acquitted, some were imprisoned, and some were executed. They were executed by hanging, as criminals, not by firing squad, as soldiers. Justice was done, and painstakingly seen to be done. There is no better way to honour the victims of crime.

The trial in Munich of John Demjanjuk, alleged to have been a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, is at its end. An elderly witness, Jules Schelvis, a survivor of Sobibor, who endured evil crimes beyond the imagination of any wannabe Dirty-Harry-esque coalition minister in today's Palace of Westminster, said to the court that he hoped for a guilty verdict. What happened at Sobibor needed to be marked, underlined and remembered for what it was. The victims deserve that, at least. He really didn't care whether Demjanjuk was punished, Schelvis said. He had, he explained, been raised to have humanity.

No doubt many politicians struggle to understand what the job description of the Archbishop of Canterbury – or any religious leader - might be in our exciting modern times. Part of the job is to take weddings, wearing really gorgeous clothes. Another bit is to help us, in the face of our sneering, to have humanity in the midst of evil.

One of the bells – the sixth - which hangs in the steeple of this church was originally commissioned for Albany Town Hall in New York state. It has done its job for the last twelve years of calling people to Sunday worship, marking the passing of life at funerals, and proclaiming the joy of weddings. God bless those who ring the bells. Let us pray that we never have to hear the bells rung in warning. And let us thank God for those who do not shrink from the call to speak words of warning to those who do not like to hear them.