|
As the Primates' Meet
|
|
|
Text: Luke 11:37-46 I’m not into sermon-illustrating stories, and time is precious tonight, and there are three of us contributing to the sermon, so let’s dive straight in. Jesus didn’t wash his hands before the meal in the Pharisees house. As I read and re-read this passage, this detail began to interest me more than what follows, neglecting justice and love while worrying about petty detail. Washing your hands isn’t petty detail. It isn’t just a strict requirement of orthodox Judaism, it’s a matter of basic food hygiene. Wash your hands before touching food, as the health and safety laws tell us. I’m curious about why Jesus did this. Did he routinely not bother to wash his hands before meals? Or did he not wash his hands just on this occasion to irritate and provoke the Pharisee, and give himself the opportunity to make critical remarks about Pharisaical behaviour? One of the reason’s we’re here this evening is because we are repeatedly told that the Bible is the prime guide to Christian behaviour. The Bible tells us what God’s rules are. And to be a proper Christian means that we must obey God‘s rules, as contained in the Bible, rigidly. Well, we know in practice that people do not obey every Biblical rule rigidly, even in Nigeria or the diocese of Sydney. And what we have is a Jesus who deliberately and consciously breaks the rules. One of the rules of Jesus is, it is necessary to break rules when they get in the way of justice and love. We who are gathered here tonight are lesbian, gay, bisexual and heterosexual Christians, mostly Anglicans. We are people called by God, blessed by God, and we are all equal in God’s sight, equal in love, equal in blessing, equal in the church. We have been called by God, called into an intimate relationship with God and called into relationship with one another in the church, the world-wide church. Called into relationship with the nice, friendly person next door, and into relationship with the most unwilling, with Peter Akinola and David Banting, Peter Jensen and Philip Giddings, David Anderson and David Holloway. We are called whether we like it or not and whether they like it or not, because it is God who has called, and God calls without discrimination. God calls us to love, to fall in love, to share love in the most intimate, sacred way in covenant relationships with a partner. These relationships help us fulfil and release our own divine energy and potential. God gives the capacity for sexual intimacy to all without discrimination and, disarmingly, draws us to desire to live with and share our love, physically, with our chosen life partner. Words are being hijacked. I’m going to hijack them back. We are traditional, orthodox, mainstream Anglicans. We are mainstream because we live in the Anglican tradition. We believe in a diverse, open and inclusive church rooted in divine love and justice. I am a gay man, a gay priest, living with a partner, and I am not ashamed of being gay. I am ashamed that parts of my church around the world exhibit ignorance and prejudice about me and my lesbian and gay sisters and brothers. I am ashamed that some in our church, Primates among them, want to banish whole Provinces from the communion. They want to sever relationships with other Christians, because a partnered gay man is about to be consecrated as a bishop in New Hampshire and in New Westminster, Canada, gay relationships are being celebrated and blessed by the church with the full authority of the church. Alleluia! They may want to sever relationships with us. We will continue to be open to them. To reach out in love and hope, to share our experience and the stories of our lives, and our deep Christian conviction, with them. There are three of us here tonight offering the sermon, because no one single person or group ever represents the entirety of God’s image. God creates diversity and difference and blesses us through our difference. God doesn’t just make us male and female, lesbian and gay, heterosexual and bisexual, black and white, short and tall, thin and fat, introvert and extravert, God doesn’t just make us with bits that fit together in the right way. God makes us different. Brenda Harrison and Rowland Jide Macaulay are going to talk about being lesbian and evangelical and black and gay in the Christian church, sharing quite different experiences from me. Testimonies, published separately, follow from: Brenda Harrison, Administrator of Changing Attitude Rowland Jide Macaulay, Poet and Pastor Our calling, our baptism, our ministry, our dignity, our integrity, our right to love whom we choose, is being questioned by opinionated voices amongst the Primates. What if the Primate’s meeting decides to discipline or at worst expel ECUSA, condemns Canada, declares a policy on lesbian and gay people even more rigid and hostile than the Lambeth 98 resolution? I will feel angry, hurt and betrayed. I feel as if I am under attack already. The Primates will have dealt with unreality. With the world as they would like it to be, not with God’s world as it is. They are trying to use the Bible to reinforce their ideas about God’s world, but it’s a fantasy world. Whether they like it or not, learning about human sexuality will continue, in every country and in every Province of the Anglican Communion. God is not doing a new thing in changing the place of lesbian and gay people in western society. God is revealing an ancient thing, known in different cultures from the beginning of civilization. God is bringing into the light the gifted presence of lesbian and gay people in church and society. As a Christian, I try and live in God’s real world, complex, challenging and ever-changing as it is. In God’s real world, in the west, lesbian and gay people have travelled a long journey over the past 150 years, from invisibility and fear to a quite new, visible, holy, healthy understanding of who we are. Societies in the west are rapidly coming to with our real presence, and are according us appropriate legal equalities. In southern hemisphere countries, the same process is only just beginning. It will not stop and it cannot be stopped, even by a majority decision of 38 Primates. Because the movement is of God. We are blessed to be living at a time in history when the holy spirit has enabled us to know ourselves more truly and fully as God knows us. Those of us gathered here are the church. We can’t be excluded from the church by any decision made by a meeting of the Primates or the General Synod, or any edict issued by another group within the church. And we won’t be excluded. We will never go away, because it is God who creates, God who calls, God who first loves us, God who blesses our partnerships and marriages and delights in our physical and sexual relationships.
|
|