In January the St Dustan’s property was listed for sale. The pastoral letter (below) outlines the process that brought us to this decision. Ongoing updates on St Dunstan’s and all our diocesan property projects can be found on our website.
On the first Sunday in February, I look forward to being with the people of St Dunstan’s and Two Saints for their joint worship. I am so grateful for the wise and faithful wardens and leaders of both of those parishes and how well they are navigating all of these transitions.
If you have not already seen it, please take a moment to read the pastoral letter below and, above all, please keep the good people of St Dunstan’s in your prayers.
+Anna
Pastoral letter from Bishop Anna
All the nations are as nothing before him;
they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.
— Isaiah 40:17
Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
— Isaiah 40:24
Can you think of a country in the world right now with a stable government?
We are mid-way through the turbulent 2020s and it’s not getting any less turbulent. November saw Trump elected. December brought no confidence votes in France and Germany, an impeachment in South Korea and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. In January our own Prime Minister announced he was stepping down.
Most mornings, before or after looking at the news, I open the Church of England’s Daily Prayer app and listen to morning prayer. So often the Hebrew scripture reading is one of the prophets lamenting the state of the world; calling the people away from their wayward and sinful ways and back into right relationship with God and with one another.
The prophets call us to look after the widows and the orphans, to beat our swords into plowshares, to put aside greed and live with compassion and mercy. They rebuke us for the ways our economies make people build houses that others inhabit and for how we so easily sell the poor for the price of a pair of sandals. We are reminded that our way of life means destroying God’s creation.
“They have made it an empty wasteland;
I hear its mournful cry.
The whole land is desolate,
and no one even cares.”
— Jeremiah 12:11)
My question, as we hit the midpoint of these turbulent 2020s, is, are we ready to acknowledge that we have hit the limit of our current way of life?
Josh Weinsch took this image of his daughter’s bicycle that was left on their LA driveway when they fled the January fires.
Have we hit the limits of individualism, secularism, modernism, capitalism and our current way of doing politics? In so many ways it’s just not working anymore. The world is, quite literally, on fire. The widening gap between the rich and the poor, the housing and affordability crisis, climate change — it all suggests we have to find another way.
The good news is that there are other ways of being. As scripture reminds us, we are not the first people in history to come to the limits of our current way of being and to have to find a new way. We are not the first people in history to have to repent and come back into right relationships with God and with one another.
During the Advent season we spent time with John the Baptist. The people, disillusioned and beaten down as they were by the Roman Empire, sought John out in the wilderness. When they asked him how they should live, he told them that those of them who had two coats should give one away, and those with food should do likewise. He told the tax collectors not to take more than is due to them and soldiers not to abuse their power. He didn’t call for full-scale revolt against the Empire, but he most definitely called people to live differently.
I invite all of us to reflect, this coming year, on how we are called, individually, collectively, as church and as society, to live differently. Let us hear the voice of God calling to us, through the prophets old and new, and let us remember that, ultimately, we are citizens not of the kingdoms of this world, but of the Kingdom of God — a kingdom of love, justice and compassion.
