At the end of last year, I attended an event at Wolves FC. It wasn’t a football match: that experience is yet in store for me.
It wasn’t a sporting event at all, but ‘sporting’ would be a good way to describe the attitude of people there. We were all trying to make room for each other.
It was organised by the Religion Media Centre, which brings together people from different faith traditions and communities with local media to try to connect them. Their purpose is to increase the quantity and quality of religious coverage in the media. It was just the right meeting in Wolverhampton's rich diversity.
I discovered, along with several new faith and community leaders, a surprising fact: there are no synagogues in Wolverhampton. There are places of worship for nearly every other faith community, but no synagogues.
If this surprises you, it surprises me, too. There are Jewish people in Wolverhampton, living out their lives of faith every day, but there is no synagogue. It got me thinking.
What would it do for our sense of identity and belonging if we had no churches? Would it put us on our mettle, or would it wound us so that we were left floundering?... longing for what we thought of as our home, the sign of who we are?
The tension between those two things is powerfully present at this time. There’s Christmas, and there are two bookends to Christmas: Christ the King and Epiphany.
Before Advent, we celebrate Christ the King, reminding us that as followers of Christ, we follow the King of a heavenly realm: the Kingdom of God. After Christmas, at Epiphany, the Magi visit, coming as rulers of earthly places to acknowledge the arrival of the baby Jesus and bring him gifts. Kings expect people to come to them: they do not travel with gifts across fields, fountains, hills, and mountains.
And then there’s Christmas, which brought the gift of ‘God with us’, coming to ‘move into our neighbourhood’ as Lichfield Cathedral’s Christmas poster said. Jesus is a King who is here now, moving into our street, making his home with us, but he is also the King of the kingdom that we don’t yet fully see; that means we need not feel troubled here by anything that challenges our sense of who we are here because who we truly are is citizens of somewhere else, heaven.
Many things challenge people’s sense of who they are or who they think they are, here and far away. There are wars, instability, and those stirring up polarisation, as we have seen in our country this last year. In this new year, let us recognise that we have an identity we cannot lose - that of citizens of the Kingdom of God. We can never be shaken; we are here to forget ourselves and find the eternal kingdom.
Let us live as if that is so in this new year.
Rt Revd Tim Wambunya
Bishop of Wolverhampton