Vigeon Post

            Trinity II  2006  St Mary Magdalene Coventry
Last week we took our little grand daughter to visit Twycross Zoo.  I noticed in their guide that they are particularly proud of their collection of Primates.  Which is a bit confusing - because when our newspapers talk about Primates they don't mean gorillas and chimpanzees they mean Archbishops of the Anglican Communion.  Rowan Williams is of course Primate of All England - rather like Wimbledon Tennis Club. 
If you are at all interested in the affairs of your national church you cannot be unaware that there is great heart searching going on around the world. The row about homosexual bishops rumbles on and the idea of women bishops got a fillip recently when the American church elected a woman as their presiding bishop which is what they call their archbishop.  So the situation is further complicated by us having the first woman primate ever. In America they are - for better or worse - more democratic than we are and they elect their bishops
The arguments and divisions are of course in reality more about authority than any one particular dispute.  Only recently I was glancing through a book written in 1944 in which the writer said 'of course the time when the issue of the literal inerrancy of the bible was a matter of debate is long since gone and we don't have to worry about that any more'. The author who had a very acute mind would have been very surprised and I thank horrified to find that biblical fundamentalism is very much alive and kicking in modern Christianity.
So the big issue is not about sexuality in its various forms but about the authority of the bible over everything else.  This is what divides the primates.
I gather the Daily Telegraph commented this week that all this talk about a splitting up of the Anglican communion etc. etc. is something of an irritation to the run of the mill Anglican congregation who simply want to get on with living the life of their parish church.
I think this is probably true.  I think our church tends to attract the kind of broad personalities who want neither to be tied  to the literal meaning of every word of the bible nor to the discipline system of Rome. Neither of those choices seems to the Anglican spirit to represent the way of Christ who seems to have been in constant collision with those who represent an authoritarian or legalistic  religion. So into these muddy waters we come into church this morning and encounter one of the great prayer book collects.
God who has ordained that all our works without love are nothing worth; send into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity the very bond of peace and of all virtues without which whoever lives is counted dead before you .
It is a prayer which is at the same time reassuring and unsettling. Reassuring because that is what we want to hear.  Whatever we put in our Sunday envelope means nothing without love;  morality without love is nothing;  in fact there is nothing more terrible than morality that is loveless.  The love we refer to is of course the love that cares - caritas in Latin - in old English charity.  Jean Vanier - who is a modern day saint who created the l'Arche communities for handicapped people - said once that love means doing ordinary things with kindness.  And that is a pretty good low key definition for starters.
But it is also unsettling because it does not give us an option.  Without this thing called love, it says,  even what appears to be living is in fact dead in God's sight. That's pretty dramatic - pretty strong stuff. however successful your church - unless it is motivated by love it is nothing.
There is a very ancient traditioin of how St John the apostle lived to a great age in the city of Ephesus. In his younger days he had been a great protagonist for Christ and had argued the case for Jesus with great fervour. But as he grew older he simplified things down more an more . And the John people remembered was a very old man going about the city saying over and over again 'little children love one another'.
Yet despite this from very earliest times Christians seem to have had a predilection for divisions of opinions which could become ferocious on occasions.  One of the  faults of we human beings is that we seem to have an inner need to be right. So that if anyone disagrees with us then they have to be wrong  - and that means every effort must be made to make them see the error of their ways.  The first big argument of this sort takes place in the Acts of the Apostles where at one point most Christians believed that to be a Christian you had first to be a Jew.  When sergeant majors in the roman army start witnessing to their faith in Christ, a big yes/no divide erupted.  Then when non-Jews were allowed into the church the question arose as to whether they could sit down and eat at the same table as Jewish Christians who observed kosher laws. This continual argument about how inclusive the Christian church should become has gone on in all kinds of ways since Pentecost itself.  And I suppose what the world outside tends to be conscious of is how one lot of Christians can sound so very nasty to other Christians with whom they do not agree.
That's the flip side   Fortunately there is the good side too.
At its best Christian love exhibits itself in glorious ways.   St Paul this morning lets his hearers know in no uncertain terms that his work as a Christian apostle is worth everything.  He believes that though he has nothing - yet he has in reality got everything that is worth having. In another place [Romans 14] he argues with people who are being contentious within the church. He says this - and I reckon it is a hefty statement particularly as translated by JB Philips.
"Who are you", he asks, "to criticise someone else's servant - especially when that someone else is God"
Somehow we have to temper our tender consciences.  There have always been different ways of doing the Jesus thing.  and in the end it is to God we must answer for ourselves - not anyone else. 
The New Testament insists over and over again that what every differences there may be yet they should never mean that the bond of mutual love between Christians is broken and thrown aside.  It is a two way thing.
For those who are on the side of tradition and keeping to the old ways;  they must beware of believing that they know what God thinks better than the Almighty does himself. For those who are labelled liberals - and that is not a modern phenomenon and it is an honourable label - then they have to be aware of the sensitivities of those of more conservative mind.  To my mind, for example,  when Gene Robinson, an openly homosexual priest , was elected bishop of New Hampshire  - whatever the ifs and buts of the case, it was not helped by the way he paraded his partner around for photo opportunities.
Perhaps we might put it like this: 
Do we all have to agree so that we are able to love one another -  or
do we have to love one another in order to find out how to agree - if only agreeing to differ.
I think the second is the best option;  yet it is perhaps strange that when Christians disagree then Christian charity is the first casualty to be thrown out of the window.  Then there is hurt. I felt very hurt about twenty years ago when I was voted off Diocesan Synod by my deanery because I was in favour of women being ordained priest. I had to keep reminding myself that I was a big grown up boy.
But in the end we have to keep a sense of proportion.  These disagreements and quarrels are not the only cause for concern.  Perhaps not even the most important causes for concern - just the most newsworthy. Since retirement some thirteen years ago now, I have ministered in a wide variety and number of churches. one cannot be aware that in some, indeed many places, our church gives the impression of gently seeping away through the floorboards. Only last week I  attended a Mothers Union Deanery Festival in another diocese where only four banners were paraded and there were perhaps fifty members in church. Not long ago most churches would have been packed to the doors for such an occasion, It can be very dispiriting.
In those circumstances we might turn again to the gospel for today.  The reason why certain stories about Jesus were remembered and noted down and not others is surely because they were found to speak to the needs of the church that read them. 












Very roughly the boat is the church, the disciples are you and me and all our Christian neighbours. And we are scared because disaster is in the air. We are being blown one way and another and cannot see a way ahead. And where is Jesus - he is asleep on a cushion at the stern of the boat. Astonished at his lack of interest we wake him up - Lord don't you care that we are heading for disaster ? 
And Jesus wakes up, and wearily says "Peace be still". A better and more relevant translation might be "Shut up and be quiet".  This is God in Headmaster mode.
And what is his next remark "How little faith you have !"  I think the implication is "How could you imagine there was real danger when I was on board ?" 
Like so many storms that have arisen in the church of God over the past two thousand years the passions of todays divisions will surely fade away.  No doubt they will be succeded by other matters of contention.  Ini the mean time you and I have to get on with loving one another so that we can love our world and save it .  That may sound like a get out but it is the big truth that matters. 
A good priest once wrote that the job of the parish priest is to love his people into holiness.  I have never heard a better definition.  Then I remember my Professor of History at Cambridge who was a devout Methodist,  saying that the really important historical fact about Church History was not the debates and the quarrels and the popes and the kings - no the most important thing is that for century upon century Christian pastors have encouraged their people to love one another.  Lets get the priorities right.  Our future will not be guided by Anglican primates shouting at one another across the monkey house which is Gods church. It will in fact be guided by God himself and it probably  may turn out in the long term to be something rather different to what any of us expects.