20th anniversary of the Church Urban Fund.

Date: 1st June 2008

Preacher: Revd. Canon Christopher Ford

I wish to thank Hilary for his invitation on this 20th Anniversary of the Church Urban Fund. Together we set up and ran a Literacy Scheme in Moston, which received funding from the Church Urban Fund. My most delightful memory is of an OFSTED inspection - unusual you may think for the words delightful and OFTED to go together. But there we were in this area of great swathes of deprivation, and a child followed the inspector around, ‘What are you doing’ he asked. her ‘Writing things down’ ‘Like a diary’? ‘Yes like a diary’. ‘I see, rather like the one kept by Samuel Pepys’.

I have just returned from Finland where the diocese of Manchester has a partnership with the Diocese of Tampere. I stayed in a place called Hervanta, a new development from the 1970s, built next to an ancient forest and lake. You don’t have to travel very far to move from the urban to the country. Rather like Halifax. You know in the 1980s I had reason to travel from Manchester to Leeds quite a bit. And you know that route used to take my breath away. These ribbons of urban settlement following the valleys, the rivers, the canals, the old turnpike roads and now either side of the M62 are unique. I don’t believe there is another part of the world where urban development and infrastructure sit so cheek by jowl.

The hills are still there but much of the industry has gone. To be fair we didn’t exactly love the industry, that’s why people were determined their children went to the Grammar, so they could make a ‘respectable’ living away from heavy industry. Our ambivalence towards heavy industry mirrors the ambivalence we have to the urban. On the one hand our towns, our industries, were places of opportunity, places of progress, places of wealth creation, on the other they were places of noise, places of stench, places of danger both physical and moral. No matter how many English people lived in those towns, we did not think of ourselves as an urban people, the calendars we sent overseas, our chocolate box covers did not have a factory on them, but the crossroads of an English village, with a duckpond, a pub and a church.

Yet this place, Halifax, was, to many who came here in the nineteenth century, the promised land. A job. A skilled job at that. Respectability in the church or chapel. A piano in the front room and antimacassars on the armchair. Halifax was the promised land our ancestors discovered. And like many promised lands it was not the place of their birth.

Hervanta the place I visited recently is a promised land for many people. That is why I was visiting to meet some of those people. We meet them in a social centre for women set up by the church in Hervanta. There were people from Afghanistan, Somalia, from Iraqi Kurdistan, all of whom had a story to tell, all who had found hope and safety in Finland. They may have begun life in the Middle East or Africa , but the promised land was the lakes and forests of Finland. And many landscapes and horizons have been promised lands – the white cliffs of Dover for those moving to England, the skyline of Manhattan, Sydney harbour, for those moving from England. Human history is made up of great epochs of people moving and finding new promised lands for themselves and their families.

And we have to be honest many people throughout the world in our age struggle with accepting and integrating those who have travelled to find new lands. From South Africa, to the United States, to Australia, to Finland to England, the cry goes up who are these strangers in the land of my ancestors? The message all of these places need to understand is that if you want to build a new future, then you create new promised lands in the places where you live now. You will not create that new promised land by looking back, craving for the world of the past – that is gone. The new promised land, the new city, the new Jerusalem comes about by building anew. And there are no short cuts to that building.

Now and again in Hervanta you see in the midst of a housing estate a huge stone the size of a house, which is a reminder that the entire place is built on bedrock. So was Jerusalem and much of the surrounding area. And on top of this bedrock was hard clay, clay which is described in the book of Leviticus as being as hard as iron. Winter was no good for building as this clay then turned into mud. There was not short cut, to build a solid foundation you had to hammer away at the clay and get to the bedrock. In 1991 an apartment in Jerusalem collapsed. Investigations revealed that the builders had not gone down to the bedrock, there had been a water leak, the remaining clay had turned to sludge and the house had fallen. No short cuts in Jerusalem in Jesus’ time or now. You have to hammer through the hard clay and get to the bed rock and build a solid foundation.

And so it is for those of us building new promised lands, new cities in our day. You know we do not have the dis-ease that use to be in our cities, cholera, typhus, and many other infectious diseases. We’ve conquered many of them. But we do have ill-ease. Ill ease with crime, ill ease with anti social behaviour, ill ease with people who dress differently speak differently from us, ill ease with those have a different faith, appear to have a different framework of ethics. But in the same way that great Victorian sanitary reformers conquered the dis ease, we need great twenty first century reformers to conquer this ill ease.

And it already begins. I spoke of the projects in Finland. Think of those projects you have in Halifax; Action Halifax, the interfaith council, Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council, your Parochial Church council, this congregation. You are the builders of the New Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land. On this urban Sunday we rekindle our efforts to live like our ancestors when they moved into a new place. Don’t let the place inflict on you, inflict your desires, your noble aspirations, and hopes on the place. Don’t passively let the future happen in spite of your noble desires, shape the future because of your desires and make that future now.

When Jesus had ascended in heaven, his apostles were told to stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. We who stay in the urban in the city in our day have received that promised clothing. We not only hear the words of Jesus in our gospels. we act on them. We place these words in our heart and soul. We armed with the power of the Holy Spirit, resourced with God’s words, strengthened by his sacraments, most especially his sacrament of the Eucharist can get out there and make a difference, to create the heavenly Jerusalem. One built on rock.