New Archbishop calls on Christians to model ‘the courtesy of God’.
In his first address as Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, The Most Revd Dr Richard Clarke called on Christians to model ‘the courtesy of God’.
The new Archbishop was enthroned on Saturday 15 December in St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, Armagh at a service of Choral Evensong.
“We live in a culture within which anger rather than courtesy is the most prevalent behavioural pattern … True courtesy is the converse of spiteful anger. And courtesy is not simply good manners but … means generously going further than we actually have to go, in our service of another individual,” he said.
The new Archbishop continued by stating, “The God we worship is a God of beauty and of truth, and our language and our actions are to mirror this. If, as St Augustine tells us, the weak are to be cared for, the faint–hearted comforted, the uneducated taught, the sluggish awakened and the good encouraged; if the agitators are to be rebuked, the conceited put in their place, the quarrelsome held back, and evil people to be endured, and all of them to be loved, it can only be when we hold – before our eyes and in our hearts – the image of Jesus Christ who calls us to be his co–workers together in his service, and in serving his world. And it can also only be, when we have learnt to model – in all that we say and do – the courtesy of God.”
Download the full transcript here.