I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
This last week, as the summer of 2008 begins, our attention has been drawn towards a global institution in crisis. We hear in the media about what is really a global network of organisations that have grown suspicious of their Eurocentric leadership. Their divisions are primarily on issues of sexual morality. And there is talk of different groups breaking away because of their lack of trust in the global body.
I am speaking, of course, about the FIA the global federation of Formula One and motoring organisations that has been thrown into crisis following the scandalous exposé of the private life of its president Max Mosley. From the moment the news broke the media has been baying for blood, and even after this week’s vote of confidence we are still hearing that the Americans may break away.
And that news item is perhaps a helpful context in which to consider the other event that is happening next month, the ten-yearly meeting of the bishops of the Anglican Communion, the Lambeth Conference. It seems timely and perhaps helpful for us to reflect a little on this Conference this morning. And to begin that, I’ve referred to the tribulations of another secular global institution to put things in perspective. We need to be very clear that those who hanker for an end to organised religion (and within our media there are many of them) read the conflicts of the Anglican Communion as if it were a symptom of exactly that: the church tearing itself apart, probably terminally, while the rest of the world wonders at Christianity’s irrelevance.
But I think we can confidently say that this is not the case. Global Anglicanism is in fact facing a series of challenges that all global institutions are currently facing in paralleled ways, and in addressing them it’s going through the process of, not losing, but rediscovering its relevance for the contemporary world. But let’s just backtrack and explain a few terms for those of you who are new to the esoteric world of Anglican politics.
What we now call the Anglican Communion is the network of churches that have, over the last four centuries, been brought into being in different countries around the world by mission agencies and delegations from the Church of England. Their initial bond then was really more colonial than anything else. But as the British Empire slowly dissolved, these churches began to realise that their link was in fact more than just a quirk of history. It was a distinctive, shared way of being Christian. Rejecting the centralised and absolutist approach of the Roman Church, but retaining too much order and history to be properly Protestant, the Anglican way of holding together scripture, church tradition and godly reasoning was seen as something worth fostering as a strong force for good in the world.
One of the ways this was done was in 1867 setting up a meeting of all the Anglican bishops throughout the world to be held once every ten years. It is not, as some have now come to think, a legislative body that carries a great weight of authority each Anglican province is autonomously governed according to different systems of governance. The Lambeth Conference therefore was, and is, an opportunity for bishops of the Anglican way to gather together, to pray, to worship and to converse.
Lest my own commitment to the global church ever be questioned, during the last Lambeth Conference, I was in West Africa with the Church Mission Society. But alas even from that great distance, I could see that the original intention of this conference had been lost and that it had degenerated into something of a media fiasco. If you remember anything from the summer of 1998, it is likely to be the Archbishop of Nigeria trying to exorcise the Director of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement to the delight of the hoards of on- looking journalists.
In the ten years that have past, we have seen escalating tensions, centring on the consecration of the first openly gay bishop in the United States, compounded by the appointment of the first female primate. Some church leaders in the developing world have viewed these actions as going beyond the pale of how they conceive of the church and, fuelled by American money, have even taken over jurisdiction of some conservative parishes in the United States. So as Lambeth 2008 approaches there are plenty of people spoiling for a fight, and I, for one, had entertained the idea of taking a long holiday somewhere very remote to avoid the whole sorry affair. (I’m sure the timing of the vicar’s sabbatical is purely coincidental!)
But this is all just the surface of the matter and the problems of Anglican polity are more complex than we will read about in the newspapers. I believe it would be wrong to say that the root of the problem is homosexuality, wrong even to say that it is the interpretation of the Bible, although discussion could perhaps helpfully move into this area. The heart of the problem is in many ways the same as that of the FIA: how do global federal institutions hold together in the age of globalisation?
Fifteen to twenty years ago, people rarely even spoke of the Anglican Communion; it was just a diocesan link here and the occasional friendly gathering of bishops there. But with the advent of the internet, mass air travel and a global media network we are now constantly confronted with images of each other and reflections of our collective selves as a denomination, that we are forced to take account of. As our world has got radically smaller, people of different cultures, moral codes, political systems and ways of life are engaging with one another through immediate but largely impersonal forms of communication: email, television, press releases. We all know how easily misread an email can be and how irreplaceable is real face to face communication.
And this barrage of low-level human interaction very quickly begins to characterise the life of a global organisation like the Anglican Communion as these totemic (but actually rather trivial) disagreements become vehicles for the shifting dynamics of power in our world, between north to south, between social conservative and social liberal. And all this is reflected back to us by a media hungry for a good story, which a church presented as living harmoniously is never going to bring.
As I have said, these are some of the new global trends and challenges faced by many institutions, like the FIA, the churches (of many denominations), even the UN. But these new forces bring out some very ancient human responses, namely the pursuit of a stable and secure community identity through the scapegoating of the different other whom we want reject: Blame the gays! Blame the tribalist Africans! Blame the decadent Americans! Blame the obtuse and prevaricating Archbishop! And let’s try and fix the problem by coming up with the wording for a statement (a Covenant it’s being called) that will push them’ out! (whichever them’ it is we object to).
It’s in response to that kind of strategy that we hear Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel this morning: “Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy, not sacrifice’.” Jesus isn’t just making a critical point about the liturgical practice of animal sacrifice. He is saying this to people who are anxious about the coherence and purity of their identity as a group, as they feel compromised by Jesus’ association with people they dislike or don’t understand. He is implying that the metaphorical burnt offerings of the Pharisees are all the unlikely people that he now wants to be included in God’s family. It may feel incoherent to them, these may not be people with whom they could even begin to enter into a written covenant, but this is how it has to be, because the Kingdom of God is not going to be constrained by the sensibilities of any particular social grouping, particularly those who have an inflated sense of their own religiosity.
Those words of Jesus allude back to the verse from Hosea we heard read, that in place of sacrificing and scapegoating, what God desires is for us to be steadfast in love and to grow in knowledge of him. These are our forms of Christian witness against the judgemental and destructive culture in which we live today strengthening our ability to be patient and generous in our love for others who are different from us, through attentiveness in prayer and worship to the God who surprises and unsettles us with the scandalous grace revealed in Jesus Christ.
That ought to refigure our priorities and concerns. I must say, for all the moral seriousness of Max Mosley’s indiscretions, you might think that in our age of impending ecological crisis, a sex scandal was something of a moral red herring for an organisation dedicated to the promotion of the burning of fossil fuels for public entertainment. But I’ve not heard anyone make that point.
Likewise, my prayer for the Lambeth Conference is that when our bishops overcome their instinct to sacrifice those with whom they disagree, the Anglican Communion might passionately commit itself to being that force for good in the world that I believe Anglicanism can be. How many millions of Anglicans are infected with HIV Aids? How many millions lack access to clean water or healthcare? And how many people in our world are longing to hear the voice of Christ calling them to follow him in spite of whatever they may have done in their lives?
So please pray for the Lambeth Conference, that it might be the constructive conference that the Archbishop and its organisers are working so hard for it to be. And pray for our Communion, that it might be a community of steadfast love and the knowledge of God in our broken world.