Bishop’s Easter sermon includes lessons from Brighton family court

The Bishop of Chichester Dr Martin Warner spoke about the day that he spent in a Brighton family court during his Easter sermon.

He also said that giving people a sense of belonging was an essential dimension of the Easter story whether in Syria or Sussex.

He delivered the sermon today (Sunday 20 April) in Chichester Cathedral.

Dr Warner raised the dilemmas of those who feel “exiled” or “barred” from “the garden of friendship and inclusion in the global and local society of today.”

The Easter garden represents good news, resurrection and a fresh start and Dr Warner challenged the church to be “confident, compassionate and compelling in sharing the gospel” to every man, woman and child.

He said: “Within this diocese we embrace communities where significant numbers are living in some form of exile or another. Gatwick airport is an obvious gateway for that experience; it challenges us to ask what our response is to the asylum seeker and refugee.”

The bishop added: “We rightly value our links with the Syrian Church but how clear nationally, and in practical terms, is our Easter message to Syrians who desperately seek and need asylum, by echoing the welcome of today’s good news?”

More locally, Dr Warner again urged his Diocese to do everything it can to “heal home life” in situations where people find themselves challenged on a daily basis.

A significant number of people, the bishop explained, “find themselves distanced from family and familiar networks of support because it’s cheaper to send them from overcrowded London boroughs down to Sussex.”

He also drew attention to a day he spent at the family court in Brighton earlier in the year where he saw at first hand “the trauma of broken relationships, low self-esteem, rubbish jobs, and refuge sought in dependency on drugs and alcohol form their tally of multiple deprivation, or, might we say, exile from the warmer climate down here of aspiration, achievement and affluence.”

In light of recent events, Bishop Warner stressed that the church also had some way to go in ensuring that everyone felt loved and welcome as Easter 2014 is celebrated: “Some of the most demanding and painful conversations I have take place with those who feel exiled from the institutional Church.”

He added: “The reasons are in the public domain; they touch in issues of gender, especially for women; of human sexuality, especially for those joyfully entering equal marriage; of the survival of sexual and emotional abuse, and of other instances where human experience has imposed a sense of exile from the Church that no advocate of the gospel has yet fully challenged and lifted.”