EPIPHANY 2 EVENSONG 2016
Once again the Anglican communion has just failed to implode and an agreement has been produced which is being equally criticised by both sides of the argument, which in itself is quite an achievement. The expectations of the Primates’ meeting in Canterbury were largely negative; there were threats of a walk out; there was a letter and a petition to the primates asking for compassion for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Except for the Archbishop of Uganda, the walk out didn’t happen, but neither is there any statement of compassion in the Primates’ communiqué, (at least in the version originally leaked – there are more pastoral comments in the final statement). The Episcopal church of America has been excluded for three years from a number of ecumenical, interfaith and internal committees of the communion – which on the surface does not seem unduly harsh though the American Primate has expressed a sense of a deep hurt in the American church. A similar hurt was being expressed on the streets of Canterbury, by African gay and lesbian demonstrators, who in their countries of origin can experience exclusion from the church and from their families, violent persecution and in some places imprisonment.
Archbishop Justin clearly feels frustrated by the dominance of this issue when there are so many other crucial issues the Church should be expressing a concern for – issues of poverty, injustice and climate change. But he also feels that world wide Anglicanism would be deeply weakened if those on different sides of this debate chose to walk alone. ‘Without each other, ‘ he says, ‘we are deeply weakened.’ More importantly he believes that disunity presents to the world an untrue image of Christ. Conflict and separation are signs of untruth. Simply to agree to disagree and go our separate ways damages the church and the presence of Christ in the world. But tragically our arguments also damage the faith of gay, lesbian and transgendered Christians. And yet equally tragically African and Asian Christians in Muslim dominated societies are also made to suffer for Western acceptance of gay people and their right to marry.
The Primates’ statement also asks the Archbishop to appoint a Task Group to continue the conversation – though it is a little vague as to what should be at the core of that conversation. In my view it should not be homosexuality – almost all that can be said on that subject has already been said, over and over again.
What should be held, I think, is a much broader conversation about our use of Scripture. In a discussion on the channel four news on Friday between a liberal evangelical lesbian and the founder of a conservative evangelical group, the latter appeared to use the Bible to beat up the former. Her form of engagement was simply to quote scripture as though it were a knock down argument. It is that kind of approach which makes conversation extremely difficult.
This evening’s reading from Ephesians sounds like something Justin Welby might have written in preparation for this week’s meeting. It refers to lowliness, meekness, patience, forbearing one another in love, and being eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. It refers to there being one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all who is the source of our unity. It refers to different gifts or roles within the church for the building up of the body of Christ. And finally it refers to the possibility of our being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, cunning, craftiness and deceit.
What we may fail to register is that Ephesians says all this against a background in which the Bible as we know it, did not exist. The only scriptures of the early church were the Jewish scriptures. The existence of a collection of authoritative Christian texts isn’t evidenced until the late second century. The New Testament as we know it didn’t come into proper, universally authorised existence until 382AD.
In other words the church predates the Bible. The Christian community as the body of Christ is called into existence by Jesus long before the New Testament exists. Some Christians think in terms of a progression from God, through the Bible, to the individual Christian and then lastly to the church. But that is not how the New Testament faith sees it. The true order of our calling should be from God, through the Christian community, to the individual believer, and then lastly expressed in the Bible as the product of the Christian community and its developing traditions. It is in this context, it seems to me, that the task force’s conversation should begin.
The scriptures were the product of community and not vice versa. And that community must have been a remarkably strong one when you consider the scriptures they put together. The New Testament is a very diverse collection of documents. It represents a many sided fullness of witness. There were many disagreements about the inclusion of some of its texts. There are four differing gospels, one of which – Matthew – fits with difficulty alongside St Paul as also does the epistle of St James. Unless you choose, as some Christian traditions have done, to see the whole of the New Testament through the eyes of a singe writer – Paul – the New Testament bears witness to the early church’s ability to live with multiple tensions.
They were able to do so perhaps because they were rooted in a kind of primitive unity. That unity was held together by a belief in God as creator, in the redemptive life of Jesus Christ, and in the hope of the resurrection. They also believed that though there were many sinners and much failure in the Christian community, it was, nevertheless, the body of Christ indelibly linked with the church of the age to come. And that unity was established and maintained by the mysteries of baptism and the Eucharist.
How does this help us in our present dilemma? There is no straightforward answer. The tradition of the early community was as equally opposed to the homosexuality it saw in the society around it, as was St Paul. And yet the New Testament documents as I have said, represent a variety of tensions and a variety of developments.
In John’s gospel Jesus describes the role of the spirit as leading us into all truth. Does the authorisation of a fixed set of texts put an end to that process? If scripture emerges from community, just as the creeds were eventually to emerge from the same community, then development is part of the ongoing life of the church. What gave rise to the primitive unity is like a river which flows down the centuries as it might flow through a variety of landscapes. In each of those landscapes the contours of the river change, as does the quality of the water and the life it sustains.
So developments have to be tested; are they part of the mainstream or a side stream that exhausts itself in a barren land; are they nurturing new life within the tradition, are they bringing to life new qualities in the tradition; are they helping us to understand the direction and force of the mainstream more clearly? Such questions open up the possibility of a more fruitful conversation than repeated references back to the terrain through which the river first flowed. But until we have come to some agreement about the nature of tradition and development alongside scripture then all conversation will be fruitless; our church life will always feel like shooting the rapids rather than an ever expanding approach towards the oceans of God.