Ecumenical Service
Jun 14, 2006
St. Stephen’s Uniting Church, Sydney. Sesquicentenary of Responsible Government in New South Wales. Romans 12:2; Psalm 67. By + Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, 22/5/2006.
We are gathered here in St. Stephen’s to thank God for 150 years of self-government in NSW and for the progress this has brought, to ask God’s continued blessing on our state and nation and to acknowledge the indispensable contribution the Christian Churches have made to the common good.
We recommit ourselves, as approximately seventy percent of the population, to strengthening our contribution to what St. Paul describes as “the good, acceptable and perfect” in our society and maintaining the Christian voices in public discussion.
Recently a retired senior figure publicly criticised the proposition that marriage between a man and a woman should be legally privileged. He objected that this was a Christian notion and therefore could safely be rejected in our pluralist society.
The criticism was misconceived for a number of reasons. Men and women of every religion and of no religion marry one another, so that there is nothing uniquely Christian, or indeed Judaeo-Christian about marriage.
More importantly Christian contributions to public debate espouse particular solutions, not because they are Christian, but because of the social benefits they confer or because they conform to the natural law, to the proper ordering of society. The marriage of a man to a woman brings immense benefits to society through the love and protection of parents for their children. In other words there is an intergenerational dividend not equalled by any alternatives and it is for this reason that marriage should be legally privileged. And there is much evidence that public opinion massively supports this and recognises these benefits.
Christianity is one important source of public inspiration and the different Christian Churches might be described as mighty rivers watering our huge, dry continent.
Governments and oppositions are the fruit of the society which elects them. They generally share more of the strengths and at least some of the weaknesses of their communities. We are in trouble when the percentages of good and evil are reversed!
Societies where Judaeo-Christian truths and values are accepted and practised are different. I suspect they are generally better, and this is not inevitable, but they are certainly different. One does not need to think only of communist states to realise this, but to look at our neighbours.
The recognition of God to whom we shall answer for our conduct, the central position of love, the explicit rejection of hatred, the judicial curbing of the thirst for revenge, patience in suffering rather than eliminating the sufferer, compassion for those who weep and are persecuted, the exaltation of peace rather than war are marks of Christian Australia.
Not all these values are shared equally by explicitly secular societies, or societies based on other religious or ethical codes. We are tempted to regard most of the values I listed as immemorial, plain commonsense and therefore beyond dispute. But the decency and fairness in our society are not inevitable or permanent, but need to be nurtured, explained and defended to each new generation.
Christian Churches today are major sources of harmony, even when they espouse views different from those of the secularist minority or even from the majority of Australians. A strong democracy accepts the rights of minorities and is tolerant of differences.
Tolerance does not mean indifference to differences, but that genuine and important differences are discussed and debated within the bonds of civility. Democracy does not require moral relativism and is enriched by orderly public argument about contending truth claims. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has a vital public role in explaining and defending these perspectives.
In the past the different Christian churches often followed different national boundaries and were sources of sectarian conflict. We thank God this era has passed and renew our commitment to preserving and developing a rich and varied polity.
With the psalm we pray “the earth has yielded its increase; God, our God, has blessed us”. And so we conclude by asking that this continue. “May God be gracious and bless us and make his face shine on us” and we make this prayer through Christ Our Lord. Amen
Ecumenical Service