Many of you will be aware that the Church of England has been in the press this week. The media love a row and our bishops have provided them with one. Nine bishops, one of whom I have held in very high regard for many years, have issued an open letter criticising the appointment of the new Bishop of Reading. They have done this because he is known to have criticised the House of Bishops statement on same-sex relationships. He is also known to have been in a long-term close friendship himself. Our own Bishop of Ripon and Leeds has signed a different letter, this time of support for the appointment, feeling that first letter meant he couldn’t keep silence on this issue.

As I understand it, the new Bishop of Reading has said that he lives within the Church’s code for same-sex partnerships and will accept the discipline of the Church’s current position while challenging it. That seems to me to be what is required of a bishop. It also seems to me that the objectors have no grounds and the earlier letter from the “nine bishops” was verging on the libellous.

This is not the place and setting for a detailed look at the biblical texts that are drawn on, but there are a one or two aspects of this case that I want to comment on this morning.

Firstly, it is by no means straight forward what the bible says on all of this. This is because the texts concerned are not as knock down as some would try to make them. Even if they were, the Christian Church has dumped other long held views over the centuries as circumstances and understandings have changed, so it can do it with this if it feels so called. The tone was set very early on. The Old Testament has prohibitions against eating various foods, including shell fish and pork (e.g. Leviticus 11:1-12). These dietary laws were dumped by Peter in his vision reported in the Acts of the Apostles (10:9-16). He sees a sheet being lowered containing all the banned animals and is told to eat. To a Jew that is a seismic shift of thinking, one which doesn’t strike us because we don’t start from the same place.

It took something like 1500 years though for the Church to get round to overturning its ban on usury - that is charging interest on loans. Well I have a credit card and I have interest bearing bank accounts. The Old Testament tells us not to (e.g. Leviticus 25:35-37) and the New Testament doesn’t overturn it. Then we have the 19th century campaigns to end slavery. The New Testament takes it as read that there will be slaves and says nothing about their liberation. So the Church does change its mind in quite dramatic ways on the surface, but it does so because it looks more deeply at the thread of scripture rather than the letter.

What this says is that we need to be careful about how we appeal to what the bible says on any particular issue and remember that the Church has never been straight-jacketed by the mere letter. A collection of writings that come from a world view that assumes the world is flat needs to be read with some intelligent interpretation in an age that knows it is not only round but a speck in a vast universe containing an innumerable number of galaxies!

So I’m not arguing here for or against the Church’s current position as such, just that the bible is not as clear on this issue as some might want to make out and what is more the Church has changed its stance on some pretty serious things in the past and can do it with integrity again if it is convinced of this because it looks at the thread of scripture in the light of experience rather than the letter.

The second observation I want to make concerns the role of a bishop. The new Bishop of Reading has said that he will accept the discipline of the Church’s current position while challenging it. Bishops have a responsibility to unity and that means that he has to say what the mind of the Church is on a particular subject. It has to be acknowledged that on this issue the mind of the Church is pretty split and disturbed. It is the job of a bishop to explore that disturbed mind and help us understand what might be being said to us in it and through it. The current official stance is not the final one and that is widely acknowledged, even by our General Synod. What is more it is becoming increasingly obvious that those most affected are demanding that we hear their voices and in this light revisit where we are because their personal experiences will not be brushed under the carpet.

So my second reflection is to do with listening to the voices of real experience and other disciplines and a bishop’s role in ensuring that we do. As we do this we are forced to decide how we view those who find themselves attracted to the same gender. At its simplest level there are three approaches we can adopt. We can call them dirty freaks who should be shunned. We can view them as being ill who deserve our pity. We can come to accept that their position is not chosen but naturally occurring. Within these are a myriad of subsets, but they boil down to hostility, pity and acceptance, and all three are present in the Church.

If we are not prepared to go for the hostile approach, and the dominant voice in medical science doesn’t, then we have to revisit our tradition and face the debate that won’t go away. This doesn’t say that anything goes, that is licentiousness. But it does take us down a similar road that leads to all of us in this church not questioning having credit cards and bank accounts that pay interest, the same road that abolished slavery and accepts the existence of dinosaurs and a round planet. It is the road that takes new understandings and reassesses the tradition in their light. The alternative is to join the equivalent of a flat earth society.

This is a highly contentious issue that our Church has to face. It is contentious because people feel passionate about it and it touches a sub-rational part of our make up. There is not a consensus on it anywhere near the consensus that there is over women being ordained, or if there is a lot of people are keeping silent at the moment. In the wider society there is not as much of a consensus on it as our broadcasting media would have us think. We are in a boat on a very stormy sea. In this wrestling with forces we can’t control and don’t really understand, we need to hear the voice of the one who in our Gospel reading says to the storm: “Peace! Be still!” (Mark 4:35-41) Perhaps that voice comes through being challenged to look and listen more deeply in the trust that lies at the root of faith. It requires trust because we are being asked to step from the sure to the unsure and from what we feel we know instinctively to what may to us be almost unthinkable. It calls for faith because we are not in control of where it will lead us, but we trust the Holy Spirit to guide and lead.

© Ian Black 2003

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