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Joy in heaven, criticism on earth
Date: 18th September 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Jeremy Fletcher
Last week I met up with a fellow student from theological college. We’d not seen each other for two decades, and he was in York for an hour or two. After parish jobs in England and time lecturing in Tanzania, Phil has a new job. He is the facilitator of the ‘listening process’, commissioned by the Primates of the Anglican Communion to listen to the experience of homosexual people across the Communion, and to set up a process of mutual listening within and across the Provinces about attitudes to sexuality. Given the headlines in the church press this week about the Province of Central Africa being close to collapse over this, and the deposition of the Bishop of Botswana from a key role within that province because he said that there were some things, like famine and AIDS, which might be more of a priority than homosexuality, I think my fellow student and old friend has something of a job on.
Without wishing to minimise the importance of a Christian commitment to ethics and morality in human relationships, and recognising that we all fall short of God’s ideal for us, I think I have much sympathy with the Bishop of Botswana. How can one not prioritise the needs of people who are facing devastation? Some social issues need salvation and rescue because otherwise people will die before our eyes. Bishop Trevor Mwamba, the Bishop in question, said this at a conference of Ecclesiastical Lawyers in Liverpool earlier this year, and it’s this kind of thing which seems to have got him into trouble:
"The majority of African Anglicans are not bothered [about the whole debate on sexuality] because their minds are concentrated on life and death issues of HIV and AIDS, poverty and drought, malaria, dying from starvation and not what the church thinks about sexuality or what colour your pyjamas are!"
The full text of his lecture can be found on a website called Thinking Anglicans. It is closely argued and very instructive, and makes absolutely clear that there are standards and ethics and that there is wrongdoing and the need for forgiveness. He is not soft on anything. But he is clear that we must all operate from the basis of humility, not condemnation. It is that humility which will enable us to listen to each other, not lecture and grumble. And if that happens, maybe the Anglican Communion will be a force for reconciliation in a divided world.
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke each have a story about a shepherd who loses a sheep. The basic form is the same: the sheep who are safe are left because it is important to find the lost one. But the emphases are different. Matthew focuses on the pastoral care which should be shown to every member of the community: “it is not the will of my father…that one of these little ones should perish.” Luke contrasts the heavenly joy over a repentant sinner with the absence of joy over those who believe themselves to be righteous and cannot see the need to repent.
Luke is particularly keen to place this parable, and the parables of the lost coin and the lost son which follow it, in a section which attacks the self-righteous. The New Testament is not that sympathetic to the Pharisees and Scribes: here they grumble because Jesus is mixing with people who do not belong in fellowship with the religious. Even as we try to understand the revulsion which they would have felt, the overturning of centuries of religious belief that God would be glorified by a life lived in purity and discipline, it is still hard to justify their stance when they too know that loving God and loving neighbour is the fulfilling of the law. Jesus asks them whether they can’t see that the priority is to find the outcast, welcome them and bring them back, not keep them at a distance in case they drag us down.
What is instructive is that Luke shows Jesus’s attitude to the outcast as both affirming them as being valued and loved by God, and at the same time challenging them to come to repentance, to live in the new state of life which forgiveness from God will bring. We have to understand Jesus’s words about those who “have no need of repentance” as ironic: he has made it as clear as he can that those who do not reach out to the outcast are not doing what God does. They should be more uncomfortable than the outcast. Those who know they need to repent are closer to this love than those who deny any need of it, who think they have already arrived. We’re back to Bishop Mwamba’s prescription of humility for all. Imagine what it will be like to be in a community where the condemned and the condemners all realise that repentance and forgiveness are for all, not just for some.
Matthew is less keen to point the finger at those who think they are righteous already. He simply reinforces the point that if we are not reaching out to the outcast we are well outside the will of God. None should be lost. The pastoral position of the church must be about welcome, inclusion, care and searching out. No sheep will be restored by the flock by the rest of the sheep bleating on about how lost it is. Someone must pull it in. And Jesus had other things to say about his followers being one flock.
One of the problems my old friend Phil faces is that condemnatory statements are made by all sides in his particular argument. It can be hard to work out which ones are the Pharisees. It is worth remembering that not too many centuries ago Christians on both sides of the arguments of their day felt able to burn each other to death in the name of the gospel. We are very good at casting each other out. The parable of the Lost Sheep says that God is about restoring the outcast and finding the lost. We who feel satisfied that we are right might need to check whether it’s not us who need to be found. In the parable all one hundred persons need to repent
Bishop Trevor Mwamba sums it up better than I ever could, and I end with his words:
"There is a voice of grace embraced by the majority of Anglican Africans. You may not have heard it loudly because many people go about faithfully living out their christian lives prayerfully, patiently, in a spirit of forgiveness, in a spirit of repentance and reconciliation. This is grace. What is vital for all of us, is in all humility, to allow God’s grace to work in us so that we can be able to work out with patience, prayer, faith, repentance and forgiveness our own salvation and that of the Communion."