Rule-breaking

I read this in a Facebook post yesterday. It is only a partial quote and, as it was Facebook, I won't attribute it but I have told the writer about this post:

'... for me the general issue would not be of orientation but of conduct. Church rules on sex and marriage are clear enough for all clergy, lesbian, gay or straight. I hope ... is able, with the help of others and God, to abide by them and if so I've absolutely no problem with her having lesbian sexual orientation.'

You probably know who the writer was talking about but it is not of importance.

Most of my regular readers will know that I make a point of not disclosing my views on sexual orientation and I continue not to. The point of this post is something else which grabbed my attention - abiding by the rules.

It is not illegal for a clergy person to marry someone of the same sex. It is not legal, to solemnise such a relationship in a Church of England Church building. The bishops's guidelines on same sex marriages for clergy say:

‘...it would not be appropriate conduct for someone in Holy Orders to enter into a same sex marriage, given the need for clergy to model the Church’s teaching in their lives’ (House of Bishops’ Pastoral Guidance 2013).

Not illegal, but not appropriate.

This guidance gave the strongest possible hint that those who had stated their aim to do such a thing, Canon Jeremy Pemberton being the first, should expect to be disciplined. He and others have been.

The interesting question is that a number of people have chosen to openly disobey the rules, judging that their desire to marry their partner was greater than their desire not to be disciplined. They took their chances. There has not been a landslide (yet) and we do not know, obviously, how many have quietly and discretely married and are waiting to be discovered.

As the number of those disciplined slowly increases so will the view take shape that this is a bad piece of guidance. The LGBT community do have people with extraordinary gifts of empathy, compassion and general social skills and contribute good pastors to the church. As these pastors diminish so will the feeling grow that the C of E is self-destructing.

The guidance is in place, I think mainly, because the church needs to work out its relationship with other parts of the the Anglican communion where LGBTs are treated more harshly. So it will change but slowly.

And of course the Church of England is full of others, myself included, who break all sorts of rules and guidelines and are not disciplined. Because the rules I break are not about sex. We are not very good at this.

Rev

It is a brave comedy that chooses not to be funny. Plot spoiling follows. Beware.

Last week's episode of Rev showed the Revd Adam Smallbone conducting an illegal gay marriage; having gone to great lengths not to, yet being told off for it anyway, he eventually did conduct such a service, although we were shown it to be done in apparent secret.

In the latest episode his attraction to the local school head-teacher, at a time when he and his wife are struggling with their sexual relationship, takes him to the brink of adultery.

Later, faced with an art installation in the church which manages to confront his 'sin', although it isn't intended to, he destroys it. But he has misinterpreted it. The installation is not Adam and the teacher but the artist, shown in a clerical collar, and his late wife. In breaking the work Adam loses the benefaction of the artist who would have solved the church's financial problems at a stroke. Again and again, the suggestion is, the church shoots itself in the foot.

So we are shown a church that has got so messed up about relationships that it has to skirt around the issue of gay marriage yet smashes an image of a powerful, but lamented, heterosexual relationship. And I think that is what the programme is saying is funny. Not funny ha ha but funny peculiar. Funny odd. Funny for Christ sake sort yourselves out. We want to laugh but it won't let us.

The national church I belong to is slow-moving, confused, pre-occupied by sex and full of pastors who are not leaders. It is stuck with raising huge sums of money for the retention of unsuitable buildings. From ground level hierarchy can seem frustrating. How does Adam get so much of his Archdeacon's time? My archdeacon is one of my best friends and I never get taken anywhere in a taxi. I am left to get on with it and everyone hopes I will not cock things up too much. Or be successful. Because that is just as awkward.

After a ten year incumbency the message that keeps everyone happy is to return the church to the bishop exactly as you found it.

I love this show. It holds a big mirror up to the church and tells it to stop being hopeless. That it takes a TV comedy show to do that is really funny.

Changing Things

Why is it OK for a surgeon to perform a sex-change operation, but not OK for a psychiatrist to try to 'turn' a consenting homosexual?

This was apparently (and I'm quoting the Guardian's diarist Hugh Muir here) tweeted by Conservative MEP Roger Helmer. Helmer is an avid twitterer and you can follow him at @RogerHelmerMEP. Try and put aside any knee-jerk reactions you might have against a Conservative MEP. The idea that he would be a homophobic second-rater is simply blind prejudice.

Let's get in touch with our inner Baggini and treat the comment fairly. Which means analysing the question.

That surgeon will not have had one chat with a patient and gone for the scalpel. Previous, lengthy psychological consultancies will have taken place. Surgeons cannot carry out random sex-change operations on a whim. None of the consultants carrying out such procedures, I'm sure, will have gone into the discussions with their patient with any particular outcomes in mind.

But we do know of counsellors, mainly those who approach their work from a faith perspective, who go into consultation with gay patients holding the view that re-orientation is the most desirable outcome.

So the flaw in the question, I think, is the comparison of a last-resort procedure with one which we know some people discuss as only-resort or first-resort.

It is also the case that Helmer has form. We can suspect that the comment was deliberately phrased as it was to make mischief. But whether or not that was the case we do well to answer questions as clearly and carefully as possible. If we credit mischief-makers with the best possible motives and simply answer the question we will train ourselves the better to answer genuine questions when they arise.

I would be quite happy to concede that for some patients, for whom sexuality is a grey area, therapy which helps identify a preferred orientation even if such preference is marginal might be beneficial. Note the words 'some' and 'might.'

The answer, widespread across Twitter, that Helmer is an idiot, will not do. This doesn't mean he isn't.

What To Say?

Rich and Ben, great friends, asked me to speak on the occasion of the service of prayer and dedication after their civil partnership last Saturday. They called it their wedding. A number of people have asked what I said (it is the first occasion I have done this). So the text follows. Critique welcome.

Ben and Rich. Congratulations. We're all delighted for you. You look happy. You look good and by your influence you've made everyone else look good. The only blessing, partnership, wedding or ceremony I've ever been to where I've spent the week before worrying that my shoes might be wrong.

And thank you for asking me to speak. Ben and Rich were aware that in asking ordained ministers in the Church of England to speak at, or conduct, this occasion, they were asking us to do something that would not meet with wholehearted approval from all our colleagues.

For me, I had decided a while ago that this was something I could do and wanted to do but I'm grateful to Ben and Rich for inviting me and making me (because I'm basically lazy) think about what I wanted to say.

The Corinthian correspondence, Paul's letters to the Corinthians and their letters to him, is something we only have extracts from in our Bibles. We have two of Paul's probably three letters and we don't have their letters to him. The Corinthian church was struggling with some ethical issues. When Paul gets to the great hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13 he is not writing a lovey-dovey poem, but a corrective. He is writing about the primacy of love – agapé not eros – to a bunch of people, who seem to have, literally, lost it. They have been disputing relatively minor matters and forgotten a major one. The greatest one.

Tongues – a special language of praise and worship.

Prophecy – to foretell the future and speak God's words.

Intelligence – fathoming mysteries.

Knowledge – fact retention.

Faith – even faith that moves mountains.

Generosity – giving all I have to the poor.

Well a Christian who had all these gifts would seem to be in a very privileged position. How could a church fail with that lot?

But, surprisingly, the church was not going swimmingly as this stuff was being argued about. The gifts were proving divisive not unifying.

So Paul suggests that agapé (old versions of the Bible translate it as charity) a concern for others, especially other Christians, in this context, is the missing bit. If we love one another that can be the context for our arguments, disputes, discussions and disagreements. And if we can't see the relevance of that to a lifelong, to the exclusion of all others, relationship then we are missing a trick.

God is big. So I get full marks for an obvious statement. The Old Testament understanding of God was that his brightness, when he showed up from time to time in person, was blinding. You couldn't look at him. Moses had to take his shoes off. Isaiah had to have his lips cleansed with fire. Priests who had been into the holy of holies changed their clothes when they came out to avoid people being too struck by the holiness.

Paul says that trying to understand God, who the Bible teaches is like that, is impossible. If he shows up you have to look away. And if you look away then your understanding of God will be like seeing 'a poor reflection in a mirror.' Paul looks forward to one day seeing face to face.

In the meantime we live in a world where some feel the Bible's literal teaching makes what Ben and Rich do today wrong. Others feel comfortable that there is 2-3,000 years of cultural change between us and this book and what is important is lifelong, to the exclusion of all others commitment. Either way we have to respect each other and live together so we celebrate with Ben and Rich the whole beautiful mess of eros and agapé which so fills up our senses yet is still something we see without clarity and one day we will see face to face.

I truly believe that one day, in eternity, someone in the heavenly realms will offer me a drink that will be so beautiful, so wonderful that it will be the culmination of all my attempts to drink every real ale in the land seeking the one. If your tipple is wine, or you seek the perfect pasta, steak or cake the same may happen. And to relationships the same applies. Which is why Jesus told a questioner that he had misunderstood heaven if he thought there was marriage there. There will be something that makes us realise what we were after in these human relationships, even compared to the heights that these relationships can reach.

These guys have made a covenant. Not 'I will do this if you do that,' but 'I will do this...' regardless. We are their witnesses and we need to keep them to their commitment. That's agapé. They need to live every day for the rest of their lives with this decision. Long after eros has passed away (and I hope it doesn't for ages) agapé will be the guiding force.

This side of heaven we get near, from time to time, to seeing face to face. When the wine ran out, when the prodigal came home, the gospel writers had only only thing to say of Jesus' ideas – let's party. Well done. Here's to the next 75 years together - silver, pearl, gold, diamond and finally oxygen.

We agapé you both.

I added in the middle a story about my grandparents 54 years of marriage and at the beginning some warnings about drinking the Leamington Spa spa water, as light relief.

Reality Check

See more at Graphjam. Respect, acknowledgement and all.

The Pope and Homosexuality

At a time when peace on earth and good will to all was supposed to be top of the list it was sad to hear the Pope embark on a bit of unnecessary gay-bashing. I wanted to respond but found Giles Fraser's article in the Guardian put it better than I ever could, '...the Holy Father has the ability to put even a vicar like me in touch with their inner Polly Toynbee.'

'Those who take the Bible as if it were a reference book cannot mentally accommodate the idea that the story being told is about the developing consciousness of the people of Israel, of how they got it wrong and how they are led to a new understanding by God. For Christians escpecially this new understanding is that God is there for all; that, as St Paul is very keen to insist, you don't even need to be a Jew for God to be there for you.'

Read the full text of the article here.

Apologies

Not sure we can apologise on behalf of all sane Christians everywhere - you probably wouldn't believe us when we tell you we are not alone - but two stories in yesterday's Guardian lead us to attempt such.

Headline one, and the story adds nothing, is 'Priest sued over seminar 'curing' homosexuality.'

Headline two says, 'Deacons and priests clash.' This latter story is simply a captioned picture of a load of robed guys in a church having a bit of a stand-off with sticks. The caption says, 'Greek Orthodox deacons and Armenian priests fight with broomsticks during the annual cleaning of the church of the nativity in Bethlehem after the deacons wanted to place a ladder over the Armenian part of the church.'

Neither of these stories is a spoof.

Just so you know, Mustard Seed Shavings does not believe homosexuality is an illness and does not think fighting is appropriate in church buildings.

Sexual Orientation and Hospitality

I have heard many sermons about the excitement of the life of the early church and a desire to get back to it. I've also been reading Ephesians so apologies to those who have already heard this thought for the day/week/ next few weeks.

In Ephesians 4 Paul rebukes the church for, amongst other things:

Deceitful desires
Falsehood
Anger
Stealing
Unwholesome talk
Bitterness
Rage
Brawling
Slander

And that's the church. It's a fearsome list and would probably mean St Paul's at Ephesus failed the mission audit hospitality criteria and got transfered to some emergency intermediate alternative pastoral care measure.

You see the church at Ephesus, and perhaps this would have been true of the other churches to which this apparently circular letter was passed, were converting people with severe behavioural difficulties. They got Christ but still stole. Yes folks, thieves were being converted. As were brawlers. Why? Well it's a wild guess but it seems to me that nobody condemned until after the Gospel had been heard and reacted to.

Does this have a message to those who wish to say, 'No same sex relationships under my roof.' I rather think it does. If I genuinely want to say 'gays welcome' shouldn't I mean it by welcoming them without condemnation?

The Bible has certain implications for our sexual behaviour, although Christians are divided about precisely what those are. Let's not put the cart of condemnation before the horse of the Gospel. In fact even with a woman caught in adultery Jesus, apparently, stopped short of condemnation. He just told her to sin no more.

More good news please and less protest about the sensible proposals of a government trying to do its best to make our country a level playing field.

Adultery

I'm about to embark on an interview season and expect that somewhere along the way I will be asked about sex and my views on it. I've been thinking it through to try and come up with a better answer than:

What do you think about homosexuality?
Can we wait until after the interview please I'm not in the mood.

Perhaps I shouldn't go work at any church whose appointment committee failed to laugh at that point. It would be doomed to failure.

Anyway I digress and I must learn to stop doing that during the first paragraph. I read this in The Independent yesterday (nothing to quote from the newspapers for months and then two come along at once):

'Adultery is now a quaintly old-fashioned descriptive term used by church-men and other judgemental moralists. It is not a breach of a moral code, or even a defining constraint within marriage. Spouses who commit adultery are no longer considered to have undertaken an act that is contradictory to the spirit of their publicly celebrated relationship.

'An adulterer is no longer considered to be legally or morally at fault within a marriage.'
(Deborah Orr, The Independent 31/5/06)

This was all written in the fall-out post Deputy Prime-Minister perving his secretary's melons with his cocktail sausage, as the tabloids have helped us to understand.

But I must admit that I felt a moment of sadness at another degrading of marriage.

This blog has a range of readers, church-men, non-judgemental moralists and various points in between. Does this quote make you stop in your tracks? If I were to commit adultery (which I've spent many years trying really hard not to do) I would make my marriage vows into lies. I would be legally at fault (it's grounds for divorce after all), morally at fault and it would be contradictory to the spirit of my publicly celebrated relationship. Wouldn't it?

Views and comments really appreciated.

St Valentine

Whilst I know that it is good practice to make a small post each day it is also good not to speak when you have nothing to say, a habit which makes me poor company from time to time. OK, regularly. Reactions to my last few posts have left me feeling like a grumpy curmudgeon who is not intending to rest until he has annoyed all his readers. A bit more sarcasm in your disagreements folks please. My tongue is often in my cheek but it doesn't affect my spelling as much as my accent.

Anyway Valentine's Day. Got one card. Think I can guess who it was from:

1. After 32 years of the same hand-writing.
2. She signed it.

Interesting piece in the Independent yesterday from the always provocative Johann Hari suggesting that the idea of staying romantically in love with your partner is a modern invention. Most people, he said, used to separate life-long relationships and romantic love. It was the fault of the Brontes & co that the two were put together. Philosopher Seneca (fast becoming my hero), the champion of having realistic expectations, apparently denied fully that you could have passion with a long-term partner. Passion was for the mistress; partnership for the wife. Some French Prime Minister (it would have to be French) said that when one marries one's mistress one creates a vacancy.

Well all that may be true. What I found difficult to take on board was the underlying feeling that if it is a modern invention to keep passion with your partner then it is a bad thing. The bad thing, if there is one, is the unrealistic expectation that the hots you had for each other in the early days will survive by repetition. Passion needs to be kept alert and so I suggest flowers and champagne (these are random items readers, make your own up if one of you sneezes at flowers or pukes at bubbly) on January 14th or August 3rd (these are random dates readers, make your own up if they are inconvenient) followed by sex on the stairs (January) or in a wood (August better) and yes these are random places too.

A minister I know often uses these criteria for single men choosing a wife:

Is she already married?
Is she a Christian?

I am always amazed that, 'Do you want to have sex with her more than anything else in the whole world?' isn't on the list.

I looked to see if there were any links to Valentine's Day from the BBC this morning and all I found was this article about Greeting cards by e-mail carrying viruses. How sad.

Maybe the cartoon blog will have a picture of Jesus and the Prophet (PBUH) exchanging cards and encouraging followers to do likewise.

Still, I hope nobody is lonely today. Tonight we're having some friends round for a Valentine's non-event. Shouldn't be passionate although Celine Dion will not be present and this may help.

Same Sex Relationships

A theological musing. If you come to the conclusion that, whilst wanting still to give the highest possible emphasis and authority to scripture, far more of it is culturally bound than you first thought, have you become a liberal by default?

I have come to that conclusion. I wonder where it will lead me? I almost hope it will cause an open discussion (disagreement) in the church so that we can talk about it more often. My church is holding together the liberals and the evangelicals by not talking about things.

On the particular debate (sexuality, wouldn't you know it) we have a small, but vociferous minority who want to affirm monogamous, same-sex relationships and, at minimum, would like to hear someone from the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (or someone sympathetic to that cause) put their case. On the other we have had several meetings and talks where the case for sexual relationships belonging solely inside heterosexual marriage has been made forcefully, although not necessarily convincingly, with the regular, traditionalist, conservative evangelical members nodding along.

Our current Archbishop of Canterbury has said that he is not convinced a homosexual has to be celibate in every conceivable circumstance, although conceivable might have been a poor choice of word since by definition such sex is not going to end in conception.

So for the record, I don't think the Bible can be used to gay-bash across three millennia of cultural change. The important things in such relationships are the 'exclusion of all others' and 'for life' bits.