Text: The kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14.17)
“You cannot be serious”. We used to be shocked by such outbursts, but nowadays, at least in professional sport, it has become routine to try to unsettle and if possible deceive the umpire. If you succeed, you may get a line-call, a penalty decision, even a red card against your opponent, which tips the game in your favour, and if winning is what matters, then such actions are widely regarded as a legitimate part of the game. The referee is a professional too, and if you can outwit him, then his incompetence may be criticised as fiercely as your deception.
If you thought evensong sandwiched between the finals at Wimbledon and the World Cup was a safe refuge perhaps the only refuge – from the national obsession with sport, then I’m sorry to disappoint you, but issues of disputed judgment and justice are at the heart of our readings tonight, and of course they resonate far beyond the field of sport. Jeremiah was notorious for playing blatantly off-side. Pashhur has had enough, and shows him the red card. He puts Jeremiah in the stocks overnight, but of course that is no good. It merely compounds his convictions with an understandable sense of personal grievance. Our reading was itself a game in two halves. The first half consists of Jeremiah’s judgment against the government and people of Jerusalem in general, and against Pashhur and his family in particular. The second half takes the form of a personal lament. He claims to take no pleasure in prophesying doom and gloom, but he is constrained to do so as if there were a fire burning within him which he cannot suppress. He begins by blaming God for enticing him into the role of prophet of doom, and ends with the defiant claim that the Lord is with him like a dread warrior. Stirring stuff, though it makes me feel uncomfortable, as if the sharpening of personal animosities in the heat of the battle is in danger of obscuring the truth by turning it into a matter of us and them, the true prophet ranged against the temple thought police, the faithful few against the great mass of the enemy. We were faced with the same black and white division in the psalm a beleaguered David facing a host of his enemies and of course such divisions between good guys and bad guys are utterly contemporary too. We are all more comfortable sticking with our tribal loyalties, in sport more acceptably than in politics. It allows us to paint the enemy in the darkest possible colours, much as Jeremiah changed Pashhur’s name rather chillingly to “Terror all-Around”
No doubt Jeremiah had to shout loudly to make his point, and of course his prophecies were written down after the event to serve as the starkest possible warning for the future, but is this really how God thinks and acts? I’m not convinced. Even in the pages of the Old Testament there is plenty of evidence that our God does not delight in vengeance, nor indeed in the evil that we bring upon ourselves. Remember how Elijah’s anger had to be cooled. He thought he was the only faithful prophet left in the land, but God knew there were another 7,000 who had not bowed down to Baal. Remember how willing God was to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if even so few as ten good people could be found there. Remember how even Jeremiah came to see, as Sarah reminded us last week, that God in his mercy would reach out beyond the old covenant, that his people had broken, to establish a new covenant, written in their hearts, under which God would be able to forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.
The very name – New Testament – is of course a reminder that gospels and epistles are a record of how that new covenant was brought into the world through the life and death of Jesus, and how it began to be applied through the inspiration and activity of the Holy Spirit to overcome the barriers which we so readily erect against one another and against God. Our new testament reading shows just how much difference the new covenant has made. Paul was no stranger to sharp divisions within the Church, and he could be decidedly trenchant in his view of those with whom he disagreed, or who disputed his authority. But he refrains from calling down judgment on them. On the contrary, in tonight’s passage he specifically makes room for different opinions.
The issue about eating meat offered to idols was not an abstruse matter of theory in first century Corinth. Nor incidentally was it an abstraction among the Chinese Christians Anne and I knew in Malaysia 40 years ago. It probably mattered as much to the Church in Corinth, as does, say, the role of homosexuals in the Church to-day. The knowledge tendency, who were the liberal intellectual elite within the Corinthian church, had no problem with eating meat offered in pagan temples, since they could argue that for them the pagan gods did not exist, and therefore any sacrifice to them was meaningless. For himself, Paul could share that view. But he was sensitive to the fact that there were at Corinth other Christians for whom the eating of such food was bound up with the whole pagan life- style from which the good news of the gospel had only recently set them free. They could not eat meat which had been offered to idols without confusing and compromising their rather fragile new commitment to the Christian way. Rightly or wrongly, the issue presented itself to them as a matter of conscience, and Paul consequently took the view that although the eating of such meat was perfectly OK as afar as he was concerned, it was wrong for him and for the liberal leaders of the church in Corinth, if it was going to set an unfortunate example to others, betraying their conscience and undermining their faith.
The principles underlying his position seem to be these. First, where opinions differ, you may be quite sure of your ground, and entitled to make your case, but in the end the only judge is God himself – “we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (v 12). Confidence in our position must therefore go hand in hand with humility before the only tribunal that really matters. Secondly, nothing which God has made is in and of itself unclean or sinful. Paul applies this to food and drink, but we may just as well apply the same principle to our own readiness to accept as natural the full spectrum of sexual orientation, including its physical expression. However, Paul goes on to say of food and drink, that it is or may be unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean (v 14), for example because it is inextricably associated in his or her mind with the unredeemed way of life from which they have been set free by a faith in Jesus Christ which is as yet naïve, fragile, and not very securely rooted. It may be that similar considerations apply to the practice of homosexuality in certain cultures less advanced than our own; after all it is not so very long ago that homosexuality was still considered both sinful and criminal in our own country. Third, Paul stresses our obligation within the Christian community to walk in love with all our brothers and sisters and especially with those whom Paul a little patronisingly but perhaps realistically characterises as weak in faith that obligation of love may require us to refrain for their sakes from doing some things which our consciences tell us we have every right to do, for the kingdom of God is not about food and drink (or as we might say now, it is not about sexual orientation) but about righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (v 17).
So we have three principles: God is the judge, nothing that God has made is unclean in itself, but it may be for those who think it so; and we must walk together in love with those who are weaker in the faith than we are. Thinking about these principles alongside Rowan Williams’ recent reflexion on the Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today, I note first that St Paul’s advice to the Corinthians about waiting for others’ is the only specific scriptural reference he makes, but it is I think a good pastoral reason for asking liberal intellectuals like ourselves in parts of the Anglican church in this country and in the USA to be patient as we walk in love with those who are not yet able to accept that sexual orientation is not a matter of choice, nor to separate its manifestation from a whole range of moral evils. We may privately deplore their cultural conservatism as well as their Biblical fundamentalism, but we have to assume that they are sincere, and that they reflect prevailing opinion within their own church. Sadly, walking with them in love may well entail further costly sacrifices of the kind that Jeffrey John has already been asked to make and not he alone, but all who have been deprived of his leadership as a bishop. Nor can we say how long such restraint may have to continue. But we have to remember that God will be their judge as well as ours, and meanwhile we have to continue to love them and pray for them as our brothers and sisters within the Anglican Communion.
Where I have more doubts about what our Archbishop is proposing is in his suggestion that such walking together and waiting for one another should be set within the structure of a formal covenant relationship among constituent churches. To my mind this would seem likely to act as a barrier to change rather than making room for more liberal ideas to take root and spread if they are consistent with the gospel. More worrying still is his statement that it could mean the need for local Churches, including presumably the Church of England, to work at ordered and mutually respectful separation between “constituent” and “associated” elements. I do not at all relish the prospect that we could ultimately find ourselves in this parish having to choose between membership of a constituent church, which would have to be uncomfortably conservative if it was to be linked in a covenant with a worldwide majority of Anglican churches, and second class citizenship in an associated church which would presumably no longer be the parish church. I hope it will never come to that, but rather that there will be extensive debate within the Church of England as well as the Anglican Communion before any concept of constituent and associated churches goes forward for debate at the next Lambeth Conference.
These things are important and we have to give them our most serious and thoughtful attention. But what a sad distraction they are from the kingdom of God, which is not about food and drink or sexual orientation, but about righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
Handley Stevens