29 June 2008

Gay Pride Sunday

The Rev'd Lloyd Prator

New York City

As we celebrate Gay Pride Sunday, especially with the readings the church has given us, I think it is perhaps useful to reflect upon the larger picture of our Church, its situation in history and its circumstances in this present time.

It is difficult to assess the significance of the historical situation in which one finds oneself. It is easier to look at the past and to see there the significant moments and movements which have governed the story of the Church. For one thing, if you study the past, you have more authorities upon which to call and more footnotes you can cite. But, with that caveat in mind, I want to say a few things today.

I thin this is a point of crisis for this church. In the international scene, the western churches, those of England, America and Canada, for example are declining in numbers and influence. The churches in Africa are growing and thriving. But they are doing so by condemning the American and Canadian and English church for, among other things, our decision to include gay people in the life and in the ministry of the church — especially in the ministry. In the domestic scene, we face division, schism and departure. Most of you know our church is divided into geographical divisions called dioceses, and now, one of those dioceses has left the church to ally itself with a conservative African Church. In another diocese, on one day two years ago, that diocese lost eleven of its biggest churches — congregations that voted to separate themselves from the Episcopal Church.

It is difficult to see into the future and determine the lay of the ecclesiastical land there. Certainly, parishes like St. John’s, which have resolved the issues of sexuality for our own life, are not leaving the Episcopal Church. Parishes like ours, which are independent, stable, and thriving are capable of going on as we have, loyal to the Bishop of New York and to the Church in the United States. We can go on as we have, and as long as I am the rector of this parish, that is what we will do.

We do this because we are being faithful. I am not accusing the dissenters of being faithless, that would be an act of selfish pride and a judgment best reserved to God. But we are struggling to be faithful as we see and understand the faith and apply its requirements to our life. Micah the prophet said that the people of God are called to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. A better ecclesiastical life plan I cannot imagine.

We are being faithful to a church that is in the midst of a huge, almost immeasurable seismic shift in thinking. But it is not the first time we have made a huge shift in our thinking about God and his requirements for being faithful. The first reading and the second reading today, refer to two earlier seismic shifts that I, perhaps somewhat presumptuously, compare to the movements in our own time.

I refer to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, the sacrifice that did not happen. In this story, Abraham is called to be faithful and to do the unthinkable, to kill his son, his son Isaac who was the very tangible sign of his covenant with God. At the last minute, a ram was provided for the sacrifice. While this was certainly not good news for the ram, the substitution represented a major change in our understanding of the nature of God. The God who had been a demander of blood sacrifice turned into a God who, instead, demanded an ethical life, faith that sought to know God’s mind within human history, and piety that supported that new way of life. This is such a major change, it was almost as if on that day, trudging up the mountain, Abraham met a new God. It was a major seismic shift in our understanding of God.

A couple of millennia passed, as they do. And in the second reading, written in the early first century, we met Paul the Apostle. Paul was the giant of Christian theologians, the one who most clearly understood the major seismic shift inherent in Jesus. The transition that Paul calls us to make is no less cataclysmic. It is the shift which makes Christians no longer the follower of laws which they hope will lead to salvation, but makes them a community seeking to be incorporated into Christ, to become a new body, to have a new body, and to live in a new way. You were once slaves to sin, he points out in the reading today, and elsewhere he says that religious law, and its very holiness only serves to make us feel inadequate. So Paul suggests this: Jesus fulfilled the law by completing it, perfecting it, and living within it. And he does this for us, on our behalf. He does for us what we could not do. And then gives that perfection to us as a gift.

What a huge change in the religious worldview! Amazing new ay of looking at the world.

I would argue that we are on the brink of a similar change. It has to do with authority. Sometimes I feel little pangs of guilt for my own part in bringing the church to look in a different way about homosexuality. By arguing for a full inclusion of gay men and lesbians — what have I, and all the others who argued the way we did, and voted the way we did, what have se set in motion? The answer however is that this is not really an issue about homosexuality. Homosexuality happens to be the presenting symptom as physicians say, but the deeper controversy is authority. And that issue goes back a hundred years or so. It goes back to and finds its origin in a new way of thinking about scripture. We Anglicans have, for the most part, at least in the west, embraced the historical critical view of scripture. Not the literal view. That means that we apply the tools of linguistic study, textual criticism, social and cultural evaluation and literary style. We still take scripture seriously, it still governs and shapes our lives, but we do not take it literally. And we do think of it as a mixed bag with degrees of imperative priority. We are willing to set aside, say, the requirement that we kill disobedient teenagers; we give more eternal value to lines like those in the gospel which talk about giving a cup of cold water to those who are thirsty after a day of gospel proclamation.

Our church has faced many crises in its life. Early in English history, the Church was so tiny and far away that it was nearly wiped out by Norse invaders. In the 17th century, our Church went underground, as the catholic faith of Anglicanism became illegal at the time of the commonwealth when the monarchy, along with the church, was suspended. In 19th century England, the Hanoverian church, dry and arid in its intellectual life and dusty and grim in its liturgy, nearly rotted away under the leadership of absentee rectors and indifferent bishops. In our own land, we struggled for a century with no bishops, no confirmations, no ordinations, before we organized at the first independent Anglican church outside the British Isles. WE have had our dark moments before.

Of all the theological ideas which might give us light for these hard times, I think the best is, perhaps one which Paul alludes to in today’s reading from Romans, and which he develops more elaborately later on. He talks about presenting ourselves to Christ, as a slave to Jesus the Lord. Presenting ourselves. In these difficult times, it is my conviction that God has a purpose for this church and we will discern that when we turn down the volume on the resounding controversies around us. Turn down the volume of the shrieking and posturing, and present ourselves to Christ. Confident that he will take us,, reform us, correct us, and lead us into all truth — including those aspects of the truth which are better articulated by our contemporary opponents.

And one day, the speculations of theology can come to an end. And we will be swallowed up in the mystery of God that our scriptures strive, however imperfectly to portray. And we will be enfolded in love, love so deep, so broad and so high, that no one, no, not a soul, will stop to consider whether, int his world, we have loved one who is a man or a woman. What will count is that we have loved, not whom we have loved.