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THE REAL CHALLENGE OF CHRISTIAN FAITH AND LIFE

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Bill Countryman					Los Angeles Clergy Conference
Sermon	May 10, 2017

Readings:  Genesis 12:1-4; Ps. 42; Matthew 5:43-48


	The scripture readings we've just heard underline how difficult it can be to accept God's call to love:  love God and love all our fellow human beings, even our enemies. I don't think I need to do any exegesis. If anything, they're too clear. 
	What I want to say instead, is that this is, after all the basic problem, the basic challenge, and the basic wonder and splendor of all Christian faith and life. To my mind,  no one has ever put a finger on it more precisely than a certain predecessor of ours, a seventeenth-century priest with a gift for poetry named George Herbert. And I want to share with you a couple of his poems this morning and say a few words about them.

	The first is "The Call," which shows up in our hymnal set to a beautiful tune by Ralph Vaughan Williams (Hymn 487):

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
Such a Life, as killeth death.

We recognize Herbert's starting point—Jesus' words in the Gospel of John:  "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Herbert is inviting Jesus in, and also meditating on what these three terms mean in his life. Perhaps we think of "the Way" as a narrow path of duty and struggle. He seems to think of it as a broad open way where we find space to breathe. Truth in our world has become a bone of contention; he imagines it as a moment of discovery so profound as to leave no room, no desire for strife. And the Life he envisages is not just the physical one we carry inside us, vulnerable to sickness, accident, and death, but a creative power that will ultimately destroy death itself and all its works. The audacity required to invite such powers into your life! But that's what Jesus asks us to do.

	Herbert continues with another triad of invitations, ones we can easily connect with this Eucharist we are about to receive:

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Here comes a light that will illuminate the whole heart and mind—and reveal what? Not our failures, our sins, our unworthiness, but a banquet laid out for us. And unlike our daily meals, it's a banquet that never grows stale, never leaves us sated, weary, longing for a nap. To the contrary, it "mends in length"; it gets better the longer we sit together. It is the true Christian feast of love.

	And then, that strange line:  Such a strength as makes his guest. What can he mean by that? What could ever make us strong enough to sit at the heavenly banquet, in this life and the life of the age to come? The answer, I think, comes clearer in another of Herbert's best-loved poems, also about a banquet (Love-III). It begins, "Love bade me welcome." And then the trouble starts. The thing that hinders us from Love's banquet is our own reluctance to be loved, humbly and simply. We would be happy to be admired for our goodness, our perfection, our moral worth. But simply to be loved because it is Love itself who has made us and seeks us out? Really, it's too much for us:

Love bade me welcome:  yet my soul drew back,
	Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
	From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
	If I lack’d anything.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
	Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
	I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
	Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
	Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
	My dear, then I will serve.

A clever ruse that one! It sounds so humble, so virtuous, so deserving almost, when it is really just a last-ditch effort to escape being loved. And the Love that has given us life and breath, and trust and hope, and the gift to be loved and to love, will not grant us this exemption:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
	So I did sit and eat.

	Sooner or later, we must all consent to be loved. And by God's grace this is also how we learn to love God and our sisters and brothers, our neighbors, even—however long it takes—our enemies. For how can we hate all these others whom God loves just as God loves us? 
	And George Herbert summed it all up—the perfect triumph of love—in the final verse of "The Call": 

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joys in love.

	Even so. Come, Lord Jesus!

FROM JUDGEMENT TO BETHLEHEM

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Bill Countryman

ADVENT SUNDAY, 2016

Sermon for St. James’ Cathedral, Chicago, Illinois

Year A: Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44

This time of year, I always feel as if I’m caught between two different calendars, grinding against each other like two tectonic plates moving in opposite directions. One is the public calendar that’s hustling us from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It’s very goal-oriented. The tension of preparing for the great day builds and builds—until !boom! it’s all over in just a matter of hours. I confess I’ve come to hate that calendar for cramming way too much into one great climax and consigning the remaining 12 days of the feast to weariness and oblivion.

The church calendar version of this season carries us on a very different time scheme. Advent, too, is pointing us toward December 25th. But instead of plunging us into a goal-oriented scramble, it starts with a strange reverse flow of time. Advent begins far, far in the future with the End of All Things before drawing our minds and hearts back to an event now thousands of years to the past, the birth of Jesus. Luckily, Advent takes its time about this maneuver; otherwise, we’d all have whiplash. But why? Understanding this strange calendar of ours can give us some help and guidance for how to pray and live the four weeks ahead of us.

We begin, as I say, at the End of the World, at the Last Judgement. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, tells us about it. It is unforeseen and unpredictable, he says; “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” It’s unpredictable and it is sudden, he says, like the flood that swept people away in the time of Noah. It’s unpredictable; it’s sudden; and it is seemingly random. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

It sounds like a summary of our worst fears. And all Jesus tells us here, in the face of it, is “Keep awake.” That’s where Advent starts—with the unknown, the daunting, the uncertain, and the advice to stay alert.

Some years it’s been hard to take all this too seriously. Life was sailing along on an even keel, and apocalypse seemed no more than a topic for the movies—scary, but potentially entertaining. Not so much this year, following an angry and disturbing electoral campaign and during the first weeks of a transition in government that seems to many dauntingly uncertain. And this is not even to mention Syria, the Brexit, global warming, and all the other upheavals in the world around us.

The Last Judgement suddenly sounds more relevant, doesn’t it?

But what, after all, is it intended to accomplish? Our usual reflex answer would probably be “punishment.” But that’s wrong. Contrary to the libelous claims made by generations of religious zealots, God actually takes no delight in punishing. If the Last Judgement occasions suffering, that is a byproduct of its true goal.

The true goal is a very simple thing, really: the ultimate unveiling of all hearts. What God already knows about us, we, too, shall learn in that opening of souls. We shall know it for ourselves and know it inescapably. And it will be unpredictable. It will be sudden. It may well seem, to our eyes, random. What distinguishes that man taken out of the field from the one who is left? this woman taken while grinding grain from the one who is left?

Still, it all seems quite daunting. What ancient bishop or monk, we might well ask, had the perverse sense of humor to put something like this into the calendar a scant four Sundays before Christmas? But there’s more to it. The Judgement is not an end in itself.

We heard about it from the prophet Isaiah this morning:

In days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains. . . ;

all the nations shall stream to it.

It was not in some happy, peaceful, safe era that Isaiah uttered this prophecy of hope. It was in a time of multiple threats, a time of change and uncertainty—a time like ours.

And then Isaiah reveals God’s purpose in this hope filled future:

[God] shall judge between the nations,

and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more.

I

Isaiah and Jesus are not in conflict here. God’s goal, the goal of the New Jerusalem, even in judgement, is to see all nations beating our armaments into tools that will sustain human life and the world around us.

The Last Judgement, whenever and however it comes, comes to show us who we truly are. Parts of that revelation may be painful; parts of it may be occasions of joy and thanksgiving. But whatever the Judgement shows us, it is granted to us precisely so that we can wake up and become part of the cloud of witnesses, the saints of this world, who are building the Holy City for everyone, transforming our thirst for enmity and destruction into love—love for God and God’s world and one another. The Judgement by which we see ourselves as we are frees us to join in God’s great work of creation and restoration.

And, yet, as we know, we live now in the in-between time. The Judgement is not yet. We are still trying to figure out where we can get the strength, the hope, the love to live through the present time. And that is where we turn from the Judgement and the New Jerusalem to another much humbler time and place—Bethlehem. No, it wasn’t mentioned in the readings. Those cranky old bishops and monks were too clever for that. Don’t show your hand all at once. Build up the tension before you get to the heart of the story. But they knew what lies four weeks off. And they knew that we would know, too.

This is really all about Bethlehem.

BETHLEHEM

Here comes to birth

the One who birthed us all.

Here lies the Upholder of all,

too weak to raise his head,

God, choosing helplessness instead,

has left the throne of deep tranquillity

to live in human poverty—

Has come to earth.

We speak today about the Last Judgement and the New Jerusalem in order to say that this is a world God has risked entering into. God has not sat back in the throne room of the universe, looking on while we struggle with fear and hope, blessings and disasters, failure and success. God has chosen to experience all this with us, alongside us.

I suppose God had the same thought that occurred more recently to the songwriter Eric Bazilian: “What if God was one of us?” “Risky,” God must have thought, “but worth the danger and the sacrifice. That’s what I choose to do.”

Our times are difficult. We find ourselves caught in deep national conflict, in a changing world order, in a crisis of ecology, and in a time when religion has again become, as it has sometimes been in the past, a stimulus to violence. We also find ourselves uncertain of our direction. Perhaps that’s why we follow the public calendar of feasts so intently: we find the distraction comforting.

The sacred calendar is trying to help us find our footing. If we start with acknowledging who we are, both our failures and our hopes, our weaknesses and our gifts—in other words, with the Judgement—we shall also begin to see ways, large and small, in which we can contribute to the New Jerusalem and grow into our citizenship there—citizenship in the city of peace.

Yes, there’s much to be done in the next four weeks as we prepare to greet the infant of Bethlehem again. But the great truth we encounter there is that God has already come more than halfway to meet us: “has left the throne of deep tranquillity/to live in human poverty.” And the God who was willing to take that risk that will stand with us in our time of struggle here and now.

BISHOP HENDERSON’S “CASE FOR A CONSERVATIVE APPROACH”

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In a recent issue of The Church Times, Julian Henderson, Bishop of Blackburn, offered a defense of “the traditional view” among Evangelicals on homosexuality. His essay does indeed give what I have come to recognize as a standard Evangelical response. For better or worse, it also makes clear the profound problems in that stance.

He is apparently responding to some Anglican Evangelicals who have begun to rethink their position on this issue. It is an in-house conversation, then, but of concern to all Anglicans. Although I am not an Evangelical, I am an Anglican who shares with them a great devotion to the study of scripture as the Word of God and I have devoted much research and reflection to the present topic. (See my Dirt, Greed, and Sex, 2nd edition, Fortress Press, 2007.) The present post, then, seeks to broaden the conversation into an Anglican rather than a narrowly Evangelical one.

Henderson’s principal claim is that the arguments for change all come “from outside scripture” and therefore carry no weight in comparison to the “traditional view” which, he assumes, depends on scripture alone. I would suggest, however, that his own argument comes “from outside scripture.” He has, in effect, conflated scripture with a particular modern Evangelical interpretation of it. I have nothing against traditions of interpretation. They are necessary and inevitable. A problem arises, however, when any given tradition is made absolute and thus substituted for scripture itself. How does one know when this is happening? When its proponents become so adamant about their own interpretation that they can no longer read scripture in dialogue with other traditions or entertain the notion that their tradition could be questioned, even from within their community.

What are the extra-biblical bases that Henderson believes his opponents rely on? First he feels that the appeal to the Christian “responsibility to show love, welcome, and compassion to all” has led to the voice of experience “becoming a more important driver and authority than scripture itself.”

I find two problems with this. The first is that all interpretation of texts starts from experience and cannot avoid doing so. For Evangelicals, their tradition of interpretation is in fact a formative part of their experience. People reading scripture outside that tradition may and do come up with different readings. Either way, one always winds up reading as a self shaped by experience, both cultural and individual. I do not suggest that all reading is therefore arbitrary. Good reading is critical and open to learning how the text may be different from one’s first impressions. I simply mean that you can only start where you are. If you have committed yourself absolutely to a particular tradition, you can expect to be enlightened by it—but also blinded. Human depravity is such that we will always tend to some extent to substitute the more manageable and definitive tradition of interpretation for the sacred text itself, which is often obscure, occasionally (as Origen noted long ago) offensive, sometimes even unintelligible, and also inclined to challenge the presuppositions we bring to it.

My second problem is with Henderson’s bracketing of “love, welcome, and compassion” as things that might led to misinterpretation of scripture. Yes, any tool of interpretation can also be a means of manipulation. But the dismissal of love, which Jesus clearly underlined as the highest commandment—indeed the one from which all others derive—and its tacit replacement with another commandment to which a higher value is attributed is a maneuver of dubious scriptural validity. Whatever else the commandment to love one’s neighbor—indeed, to love one another (for remember that this is a conversation primarily among Christians, not with the outside world)—it at least requires taking one another seriously enough to listen respectfully to others’ account of their life with God. Experience is itself open to interpretation and one’s self-understanding is never perfect. But love does not permit us to dismiss the testimony of others without careful attention.

Henderson’s second objection confounds two separate issues, one being the denial of marriage to a whole class of people and the other the vocation of celibacy. Paul quite clearly distinguished them, regarding celibacy as a higher calling and strongly encouraging it for all, but emphatically not imposing it on any who had not received the gift of it (1 Cor. 7:1-10, 25-28). The vocation to celibacy is indeed one to be taken seriously, and those called to it have made and continue to make a great contribution to the whole congregation of the faithful. Recent ecclesiastical scandals, however, should remind us that treating celibacy as a requirement rather than a spiritual gift and vocation can produce deleterious results both for those who lack the graces to meet the demand and for the community at large. The effort to require celibacy of a whole population is unlikely to prove any more spiritually productive in the future than it has in the past and also effectively denies spiritual support for those whose vocation is to marry.

Henderson’s third argument is not really Biblical, even though he quotes Jesus. It is an argument about whether the church should accommodate to the environing culture or not. The only possible answer to that question and the only one with historic grounding is “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” There is no simple formula that can easily distinguish the one from the other. Certainly, one cannot distinguish good message from bad by measuring their popularity. Jesus’ instructions to the disciples indicated that we should expect both acceptance and rejection of the same gospel message (Luke 10:1-11). The present growing unpopularity of the Evangelical opinion in the Western World does not prove it is wrong. But its previous popularity did not prove anything, either.

Still, accommodations with our environing cultures have been vital to Christianity all along.The Christian theological orthodoxy that I share with Bishop Henderson would never have been formulated without the contributions of Greek philosophy, whether direct or filtered through Wisdom of Solomon and Philo. The Reformation would never have happened had it not appealed to a changing perspective among the townsfolk of northern Europe. Slavery would not have come to an end in the Western World had not the very unpopular message of the Abolitionists eventually become broadly popular.

Ironically, American Evangelicals were using the bishop’s argument decades ago, posing as a “counter-cultural” force when they were, in fact, he voice of the dominant culture, representing the consensus of the American public on issues of sexuality. Their opponents were a minority probably much smaller, proportionately, than the early Abolitionists. Evangelicals can better claim a counter-cultural status today, but it would still be misleading. Their US audience is increasingly limited to demographic elements that already agree with them and indeed demand their continuing allegiance. Their new challenge is that their own young people are increasingly unpersuaded.

There is no possible a priori judgment as to whether accommodation to the culture represents a positive or a negative development. Each challenge must be judged by the one absolute value that Christians acknowledge, love. It continues to be a matter of great astonishment to me that, for Evangelicals, the absolute rejection of gay and lesbian sexuality that they find in the Bible (mistakenly, I am convinced) has acquired the same absolute value as the command to love God and neighbor. Indeed, in many places (though not, I trust, in Blackburn) this has encouraged Evangelicals to make the lives of gay and lesbian people hell. I am not blaming the bishop for the behavior of such of his co-religionists—behavior which he rejects. But I wonder what it is about Evangelical Christianity in our time that makes it so easy to replace the command to love with some lesser commandment and to ignore the harm done thereby. I fear that, in their eagerness to be faithful to scripture as the word of God, they have actually wound up making an idol of their own particular tradition of interpreting it. They will not allow scripture itself to say anything not already embraced within that tradition.

WEAK AND STRONG IN THE CHURCH TODAY

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Jesus’s commandment to his followers is framed in two ways in the New Testament: “Love your neighbor as yourself” or “Love one another.” For the life of the church, both forms are vital, but the second is the more telling. We seldom succeed in loving one another very well. Most of the time we do not know one another and, if we do, we may not like the people we know. What does it even mean to love people one does not know or like?

It is impossible to specify in advance what the full dimensions of such love might be, since love is a creative force, a manifestation of the Spirit. It creates relationship even as it grows out of relationship. But we can specify a few minimum elements of it. One would be to offer respect to one another as human beings and creatures of God. If we keep people submerged into some clearly defined group of “others,” we are keeping them at arm’s length, assuming that we know everything about them we need to know. Those people over there are “western liberals”—end of story. Those people over there are “bigoted evangelicals”—end of story.

Another element of love would be to esteem one another as people of faith. This implies that we all have a story of faith that, however imperfect (and it is always imperfect), is worth hearing out. It means that we do not readily dismiss one another. It also means that we persist in telling our own story, even when we may be saying unpopular things. After all, God has often been known to speak through prophets who were rejected by the larger community. At the same time, loving one another requires us to entertain seriously the notion that any of us may, being human, also be wrong. Our disagreements have to be talked through. But love does not co-exist with arrogance; it only lives in the house of humility.

The opposite of love is withdrawal from relationship—in other words, to use its churchly name, schism. Schism has always been regarded, at least in theory, as a grave sin, precisely because it is the opposite of love. This hasn’t kept Christians from practicing it extensively over the course of our history. But it is still a sin and a serious one, given how specifically Jesus warned us against it.

But what can we do when faced with divisive issues? How were the two parts of the community at Rome to eat together? How are Christians today who disagree over ordination of women, blessing of same-sex marriages, or the authentic identity of transgendered people to love one another and remain in communion? Despite claims on all sides, there is no simple formula for determining in advance which side is right. Christian conservatives were wrong on the topic of slavery in the nineteenth century; liberals were right. On the other hand, in the time of Hitler, some who opposed him could be described as conservatives, while some liberals (at least in one definition of the term) were willing to accept his “German Christianity.” Historically, the course of the church’s future gets worked out through a complex process of interaction. Each age’s issues are subject to a process of discernment. It seldom happens overnight.

How, then, to proceed? The answer is a bit different, depending on where your starting point is. Paul held that those who were “weak in faith” were inclined to be judgmental, those who were “strong” to be dismissive. Having found myself, at different moments in my life and on different issues, on both sides of that divide, I think Paul’s critique is right.

I can’t say why I have the misfortune of living on both sides of the divide. I only know that, by temperament, I like things to be relatively predictable and well-formed. Take the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. I shall probably always miss the cadences of the older language. The late twentieth century may have been a high point in liturgical studies, but it was a low point in terms of English liturgical prose. At the same time, the revisions revealed in a much clearer way the basic form and meaning of the rites, and for that I am grateful. I don’t want things to change. But I do want them to make sense. And, often as not, those two desires are in conflict.

In that situation, my “weak in trust” side thinks that the changes are destroying my religion. Easy enough to think. Christianity has repeatedly been botched by Christians with devout intentions. But my “strong” side is saying, “Oh, but it’s so much clearer and more intelligible now.” The “weak in trust” says, “You’re losing the sense of the numinous.” The “strong” says, “Mystification is not the same as mystery.” And so they go at each other. The “weak in faith” side thinks the “strong” side is a wrecker and a barbarian. The “strong” side dismisses the “weak in faith” side as a prisoner of the past who will just have to get with the times.

How do these two co-exist without producing some kind of spiritual breakdown? The “weak in faith” side has to get reacquainted with the Spirit, the creative whirlwind that deals out destruction as well as new life—destruction, indeed, that makes new life possible. I have to learn that I cannot make an idol out of every detail of my received faith or I will soon have no room in my sanctuary for the real God who is always making all things new. It doesn’t mean that I treat the received tradition lightly—only that I remember that it has changed in the past and it will change again and each change must be judged on its own merits.

The “strong” side, on the other hand, which sees (eventually) the sense of ordaining women or of celebrating the desire of two men or two women to a stable, life-giving, socially-supported and -supporting marriage or of accepting transgender persons as the people they have come to recognize they truly are—this “strong” me is tempted to dismiss the “weak” for not seeing what is so obvious. (I encourage this arrogance when I conveniently forget that I didn’t “get it” right away myself.)

To put it another way, both sides agree in one respect—in their ability to forget that they are not perfect or omniscient—and so each insists on the partial mode of grasping truth that each enjoys. And they’re not forgiving of the people on the other side. They dismiss each other. They break communion. They shut out the possibility that those other people are also trying to be faithful.

What do I hope to see happen? Not that either side should simply give up, but that we remember that we are, all alike, imperfect people who are nonetheless people of faith, people touched by the love of God, people who may yet see things differently. The bad thing is if we ignore each other and pretend that those people on the other side of the church aisle don’t really exist. The worst thing is if we leave the building and pretend that there is no one on the other side of the aisle. “What people? What aisle? I don’t see anybody over there. We left them back at St. Bidulph’s when we organized this new, purer congregation. After all, they were traitors to the Bible or the tradition.”

Loving one another means hanging together somehow through the troubles. And that is possible only if we have the humility to hear one another out and to go on seeking ways to explain our faith to those who cannot yet see what we see. In the process, I think all sides will have to unpack and reexamine their basic assumptions. And we shall all have to learn how to look around us for signs of faith, hope, and love in our lives and in the lives of others. Love does not live in the house of arrogance. No one is infallible—no single Christian, no single group of Christians. That’s one reason why love is so important.

ISSUES OF SEXUAL PURITY IN TODAY’S CHURCH

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In the previous post, I suggested that the church today, as in first-century Rome, is divided by different perspectives on purity. The focus, however, has shifted from food to sexuality. To some readers, these two issues will seem incommensurate. In their world, food purity is mainly a technical, hygienic issue, not one of religious purity, whereas sexual purity has long been treated as an important religious requirement. Some would probably argue that issues like the ordination of women, the marriage of same-sex couples, or the acceptance of transgendered persons are not purity issues at all, but matters of theology and ethics.

I agree that there are important ethical issues in regard to sex, but I don’t think those are what make our current divisions so tense and angry. The purity element is what drives anger, hatred, and schism. Purity, after all, is always, by its very definition, under threat. It is easy to lose and difficult—sometimes impossible—to restore. It occasions not only differences of opinion, but anxieties about contamination.

Fear of contamination has played a clear role in Anglican conflicts about the ordination of women. I was, early on, an opponent of this change myself, but eventually moved away from that position for several reasons, one being a deeper study of early Christian history where I learned that the life of the church has always involved risking new departures to meet the needs of changing situations. This meant, for me, that the Episcopal Church was free to make this departure from the existing tradition in the expectation that it would be confirmed by the fruits of the Spirit. Coming to know ordained women who were excellent priests sealed my growing conviction that this was indeed a movement of the Holy Spirit among us.

Even before that, however, something had given me pause and encouraged reconsideration of the topic. It was the element of anger, outrage, and even hatred that I saw among ardent opponents of women’s ordination. They already had multiple theological disagreements with other people in the Anglican Communion, but none of these evoked such hostile emotion or such a willingness to separate oneself from the offenders. Then I began to notice that opponents of women’s ordination not only refused to recognize their priesthood, but actually began to treat the male bishops who had ordained them as tainted by that action. It was not enough for them to keep their distance from women clergy; they had to avoid any sacramental contact with the hands of one who had participated in such ordinations.

This is actually contrary to the standards of doctrinal orthodoxy. The church long ago, in the face of the Donatist schism, rejected the notion that the sacraments are dependent on the worthiness of the priest. Ordinations are not dependent on the perfect orthodoxy of the bishop who performs them. They depend rather on the action of the Spirit in the church through that bishop. Opponents of women’s ordination, however, now insist on maintaining lines of ordination free of all contact with women, which makes sense only as a purity device. Women ordinands are seen as tainted, themselves, and also as tainting those who ordain them—a taint that those hands would then pass on to subsequent male ordinands. As always, impurity has to be feared as contagious and purity must be closely guarded.

The same kind of reaction is at work in our conflicts about gay, lesbian, and transexual persons. The objections, to be sure, are not presented in purity terms, but as an issue of scripture and/or tradition. But such arguments are not, in fact, compelling. The argument from scripture is cobbled together quite loosely and does not hold up on closer investigation as I showed in Dirt, Greed, and Sex (see especially chapter 12 of the second edition), The argument from tradition is no better. John Boswell’s two impressive scholarly studies, Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Tolerance and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, have been criticized for over-stating their case. But even if that proves so (and his scholarship was formidable), he successfully shattered the assumption that the whole of Christian history was pervaded by the extreme hostility toward homosexual persons that characterized Western culture in the mid-twentieth century.

The anger and hatred that have characterized some conservative Anglicans and allowed them to justify subverting the unity of the church over these issues is not mere odium theologicum (vicious and destructive as that can be), but an effort to maintain a fragile purity in the face of something felt as defiling. Paul, I believe, would say to them as to the weak in faith of his own day, “Your purity is no longer of decisive importance. Our relationship to God and to one another is determined by God’s grace, not by our avoidance of physical impurity. Our trust is in God, not in our own purity.”

The church is still in the process of finding a new norm for the future. We should not be surprised if the process is sometimes painful. We in the West are still emerging from an era of extreme repression of gay and lesbian people during the twentieth century. (Regions formerly colonized by the West seem to have absorbed that message as well.) The depth of that repression set the stage for the crisis of Stonewall and, in many places, for a reversal of public sentiment that has been astonishing in its rapidity but is still far from complete. In the meantime, we must ask anew whether Paul’s advice to “weak” and “strong” might give us help in maintaining the unity of the church in our present situation. More in the next post.

THE ARCHBISHOPS IN SECRET

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THE ARCHBISHOPS IN SECRET

The recent meeting of Anglican primates (the principal bishops of each of the separate Anglican churches, large and small) did nothing to improve the situation in the Anglican Communion. Whether it has left us materially worse off is something we shall learn only in the years to come. My guess is that the Archbishop of Canterbury invited his fellow primates to gather in the hope that he could at least prevent our incipient schism from growing worse. It is a legitimate goal. Schisms that reach fully institutionalized character are notoriously difficult to resolve. Whatever issue is claimed as the occasion for schism assumes an importance that it may never really have deserved simply because it becomes the distinctive badge of the community resulting from the schism. It must continue to be justified as the only acceptable decision, even if, in later years, it should cease to seem so important after all.

The Anglican tradition’s combination of dispersed authority and respect for tradition is both blessing and weakness. It helps avert the kind of political authoritarianism that created the Inquisition and provoked the Reformation, but it has difficulty in satisfying people’s desire for clarity. Once people are truly furious with one another over a contested issue, there is no authority that can rein in the warring sides. In this respect, of course, we are in precisely the same situation as earliest Christianity. No voice could successfully reunite those Jewish Christians who insisted on full conversion of Gentiles to Jewish identity with those who regarded the Gentiles’ presence in the church as a sign of the Holy Spirit’s work. In the same way, no voice in contemporary Anglicanism can reconcile those who feel that the existence of gay, lesbian, and transgender Anglicans is radically transgressive with those who are persuaded that it is an important victory of the gospel. The only hope of preserving church unity is to find, foster, or create a majority who are prepared to regard the issue as an adiaphoron, a matter that should not occasion division.

It is not surprising, to be sure, that Christians, early or late, have been uncomfortable with this protracted and uncertain sort of process and have sometimes looked for social mechanisms that could speed it up or even short-circuit it. The gradual increase in the power of the early papacy was fueled in part by requests that the Bishop of Rome intervene in local quandaries in Western Europe. The parallel rise of the patriarchates of the East owed something to the same process as well as to the emperor’s desire to quell conflict in the church. In the long run, however, the result was an increasing rigidity that had difficulty making room even for innovations of great spiritual value—with divergent and unpredictable results as exemplified in the cases of, say, Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther. The Reformation broke with the absolute power of the papacy, but held onto much of the rigidity of the Western Christian mindset and became, as a result, a welter of competing and conflicting organizations, divided by disputes that sometimes seem of dubious value in the present era. The desire for doctrinal purity occasioned much division. One distinctive element of the Elizabethan settlement in England was the effort to hold these diverse elements together under a single roof—an effort never completely successful even in the resulting Church of England.

We now have significant elements of schism among Anglicans. There are churches that refuse to share communion with The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, and wish to have the secessionist elements grouped together in the Anglican Church in North America officially recognized as their replacements. There are those who resolutely oppose this program. If the Archbishop of Canterbury hopes to prevent this situation from becoming more entrenched, he must probably aim at buying time in which to foster the growth and consolidation of the group that sees the matter as adiaphoron and rejects the idea of dividing over it.

This will not be an easy matter, given the global character of Anglicanism. The status of lesbians and gay men (still more of transexual persons) varies enormously from culture to culture. And it is part of the larger issue of gender, which also remains unresolved among us. It is no accident that many of the churches that are particularly angry about the embrace of homosexual persons are also opposed to the ordination of women. And it is no accident that the leadership of these groups is entirely male and presents itself as emphatically heterosexual.

But the fact that the task is difficult does not mean that it can or should be lightly abandoned. The unity of the church is more than an institutional convenience, more than a theological premise, and more than a concern of professional ecumenists. It is a matter of deep spiritual value. God’s creation of humanity in God’s image and likeness, implies, as I have said elsewhere on this weblog, God’s search for friends. And since God has created so many of us and of such different temperament, experience, and culture, it seems reasonable to infer that our very multiplicity is part of what we bring to God as God’s friends. The great danger of Christians in any one place or time is that we shall begin to identify the gospel with the practices and prejudices of our particular time and place. Only a community of discourse that is large and varied enough to disrupt that kind of fossilization is ultimately adequate to the needs of our growing friendship with God, this friendship for which God created us and to which we are learning to respond through God’s grace.

Accordingly, I praise and honor Archbishop Welby for his efforts to keep us all in conversation and not yield prematurely to the forces of disintegration. At the same time, there are consequences of the meeting that bode ill. Most significantly, it has reinforced the apparent power of the Consultation of Primates, a gathering that has no theological or constitutional rationale for exercising this kind of authority. It was first created as a consultation, and anything beyond that on its part is a usurpation. It has become, in effect, a weapon of convenience for those who wish to suppress theological debate on topics that they have defined as out of bounds. This is a dangerous precedent both in its own right and beccause the group’s meetings are essentially secret—out of the eye of the larger church in a way that our local conventions and synods or the global Anglican Consultative Council are not. Moreover, those who wish to control the discourse are resorting to the age-old schismatic device of trying to bar their opposition from participation. I fear that by reinforcing these precedents of secrecy and exclusion Archbishop Welby’s initiative may prove more destructive than helpful, for they cut against the real need—to foster the community of those who are committed to broad unity and disinclined to dig trenches between us.