The Bishop of Stafford has delivered a sermon during a service of prayer for Stafford Hospital, in which he said “Health is far too important to be left to politicians or even hospitals”.
The Rt Revd Gordon Mursell added: “The way we live, the choices we make, the amount of alcohol we consume, the cars we drive, the amount we recycle, the example we show to young people and the care we offer the elderly - these things have a direct and massive impact on our health and our hospitals. If we all lived more responsibly, we could make a huge difference to our own health and well-being - and to pray ‘your kingdom come’ is to ask for wisdom and guidance in making that happen.
HOSPITALS FOR THE FUTURE
Full text of a Sermon delivered by the Rt Revd Gordon Mursell, Bishop of Stafford, for Service of Prayer for Stafford Hospital at St Mary’s Church, Stafford on the Feast of St Luke the Evangelist, Sunday 18th October 2009
This is a service of prayer; and although prayer is a personal activity it is not (or shouldn’t be) a partisan one. True, there have been plenty of times when people have told God what they thought he ought to be doing. No doubt there were as many Germans praying for victory during the two World Wars as there were British. Nor is there anything wrong with praying in a way that feels right for you - in a sense, that’s all any of us can do, for none of us see the whole picture. But God does, which is why Jesus taught us to pray not “my will be done” but “thy will be done.” And we have come here today, not to take sides in the exceptionally painful and sensitive arguments about our local hospital, but to pray for all who have any part in its life - patients, all who work in the hospital, visitors and local residents alike - in the hope that, by asking God for his will to be done, we may find the right way forward for us all.
And yet Christians believe that prayer is more than just saying to God “thy will be done.” It is also an active envisaging, an active entering-into, God’s new future, which is why we are taught to pray “thy kingdom come” - again, not our kingdom but God’s. Prayer is always in some sense a recognition that none of us have the fullness of truth, nor have we complete control over events. It is a recognition of our need for help. And if we take the Lord’s Prayer as our model (printed in your service order), it is also a request for the grace to forgive (“forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”), and a request for deliverance from evil. All three of these aspects of prayer - entering into God’s future, seeking forgiveness, and asking to be delivered from evil, are relevant to our purposes here today.
First, then, prayer is asking for God’s new future to become a reality: “thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.” Christians are passionate about working together with all people of goodwill to imagine and bring into being the new future that we believe God longs for all his creatures to enjoy. And that means making exceedingly difficult choices. As standards of health and of medical diagnosis go on improving, so the proportion of the national budget absorbed by our health service grows larger and larger. Tough choices have to be made: do we want better cancer care, or the Trident missile system, or more schools? We need good politicians and public servants to help us make those choices. Although people are right to be angry about MPs abusing their expenses, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that most people in public life do an excellent job, and that we desperately need to encourage more good and able people to become involved in politics and public service.
But something else needs to be said here, something that in no way excuses any wrong-doing or failures either by individuals or organizations. Health is far too important to be left to politicians or even to hospitals. The way we live, the choices we make, the amount of alcohol we consume, the cars we drive, the amount we recycle, the example we show to young people and the care we offer the elderly - these things have a direct and massive impact on our health and our hospitals. If we all lived more responsibly, we could make a huge difference to our own health and well-being - and to pray “your kingdom come” is to ask for wisdom and guidance in making that happen.
So first, we pray for God’s new future to become a reality now, and for the grace and vision to bring that about. Secondly, we pray for forgiveness: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Here we come to the heart of the matter. “Forgive us our trespasses” - the Christian belief is that God is angry at our sins, yet by sending his Son to die for us he takes the consequences of those sins on himself. Justice and mercy belong together: we deserve justice from God but we receive mercy; and we are invited to show that same mercy to others - because we know how much we need it ourselves. But - and it’s a very big but - that does NOT mean that justice is abandoned, or that wickedness or failure don’t matter, or can be airbrushed away - on the contrary, they matter so much that only God was and is able to accept their consequences in his own person. Provided we are able to accept our failures and acknowledge them, we are open to the new future God has won for us on the cross.
And in terms of public life accepting our failures demands two things: on the one hand, a culture of openness and truth and honesty, a culture in which people are not afraid to acknowledge failings in the system or in themselves, and to seek help in addressing them - and, on the other hand, a willingness to forgive once such acknowledgment is made.
Your kingdom come - help us together to build the healthy communities you long to see. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Finally, we pray “deliver us from evil.” Evil is like cancer - it feeds off the good; it can set up home anywhere, in any individual or organization, and unless it is identified and rooted out it ends up by taking us over and killing us off. Evil is not just the work of evil people, but of good people who are blind to the sufferings of others, and of systems that have gone badly wrong. Evil is also like a thick cloud: it obscures the good and the healthy. Whatever may or may not have happened at Stafford Hospital, we can all be thankful for the vast majority of dedicated clinicians, nurses, managers and others there who, day by day, are doing their very best for the health of this region.
But there’s an even more important point still. The greatest of all evils is when innocent people suffer, for when that happens we are all diminished. And in our prayer today, we need to give voice to all those who have been hurt in the last few years - to patients and their relatives who feel betrayed, to staff who feel unjustly accused, and above all to those who have no one else to speak for them. God does hear those voices, and as a community we must too - the cries of the innocent and of the bereaved, the cries of those who feel no one cares about them, the cries of anger and of sorrow; and in his loving mercy God can help us turn even the most grievous wounds into the raw material of a new and greater good.
One more thing needs to be said. I began by saying that this is a service of prayer, and that prayer is personal but not partisan. In a profound sense I was wrong. Prayer is partisan, passionately partisan. But it is partisan because it is on the side of truth and goodness, of reconciliation and mercy, of justice and a new and better future. In that sense, it is something all of us can do. For every one of us has a part to play today. All of us are the losers if innocent people suffer, if health becomes just another commodity, if money or profit rather than truth and justice become the values by which we live. Our prayer today is that out of so much pain and grief we can together, by God’s grace, look forward, to the healing of wounds, the resolving of painful disagreements, the renewal of trust, and a whole new future for our hospital and our lives.