In this year of 2003 we are seeing the whole issue of the gay debate coming to a head in the churches across the land and in the Western world. It will be very interesting to see the outcome of the summit which the Archbishop of Canterbury has called for the month of October when the primates from all over the world are coming to talk about it. Today we need, I think more than at any time, a sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit with us to guide us into all truth, which is why I chose this reading for this afternoon, and I'll read a bit more of it again in a few moments.
I wonder, for many people who don't normally step inside a church and know little about Christianity, there must be a very confusing picture for them at the present time as to what it means to be a Christian - who this person God is - what relevance Christ has to our lives. And indeed if somebody were trying to understand what Christianity was about, if they knew nothing and looked at the media for instance, then at the current time - apart from the various ways in which the church is lampooned in comedies and other situations - they would see on the news endless debate about whether you can be gay and Christian, whether or not it's OK to be gay, Christian, and have a partnership. And so it would appear that the church has an extraordinary obsession with this issue and an extraordinary obsession with sex. It would be very hard for people to gather from what they hear in the media and see on television what on earth this Christian thing is all about; just that - whatever it is about - it's not good news for gay people.
And that's a great tragedy, because the big contrast between the message that's broadcast loud and clear so often - albeit not the way the church would have liked, I grant - and the message that Jesus preached is as different as night and day. Many of us are here today because we've come to understand something of the love of Christ for us, and the complete acceptance with which we can come to him. But for many of us, because of the culture we live in, it's been hard gradually to come to understand that God will take us just as we are, and that being gay, lesbian or transgendered is no stumbling block either to coming to know Christ, or receiving his forgiveness for sins, or receiving the new life that he has for us.
But it's a confusing picture even for us at times because there's a temptation to revert to thinking that, as a professing Christian, we ought to be doing better - better in leading our lives, better in evangelism and reaching out to other people, doing more praying, - and the pressure that we should be doing better constantly keeps coming back. And if we begin to believe that such pressure is going to produce the results, then most of us, at some time, are going to become pretty discouraged.
So if we realise that we're not going to be good Christians by trying to be good, then perhaps we think that we should be giving up things, which are pleasing and a blessing to us, in order to please God: somehow to make sacrifices that are going to make us purer in some way. But when we struggle to come to terms with an issue such as our sexuality, then it becomes all the more important to know a sense of freedom in God, and that we don't need to spend all our time negotiating some form of freedom in this area.
It is a difficult challenge for us; yet I believe, in these days, we see more and more that the true challenge we face is a challenge which manifests itself in different ways in every generation. Right now the big issue for the church happens to be the gay debate. Not very many years ago - in fact it's still going on - there was a great debate about whether women could be in the priesthood. I can easily remember the times when there was a great debate about whether you could be charismatic and Christian, and people were being thrown out of churches for claiming that they spoke in tongues. As you go back, generation by generation, there has always been something which has been a major cause of contention between Christians for them to have a good row about, and either you're 'in' with one group or another. And that is a great tragedy: it gives a very confusing picture to the world around us.
But the same dynamics were true in Jesus's day. As he lived in a country that was occupied by the Romans, and people were living a very oppressed life, the Jewish community managed to keep going, and the teachers of the law, and the Pharisees, continued to maintain traditional Jewish culture and their understanding of the law. And yet somehow this still didn't have the result of bringing people close to God or enabling ordinary people to feel welcomed in God's presence, or that they could have a relationship with him. And you then begin to see, from the whole ministry of Jesus, how different he was to the religious leaders of his day.
Jesus had none of the advantages that we have today for publicity or for putting across his cause. In the book of Isaiah, chapter 53, we read a description of what Jesus would have been like: we see that had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, there was nothing in his appearance that we should desire him; he was despised and rejected by humans, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering; like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised and they esteemed him not. He didn't have a kind of famous 'Tony Blair' smile that you see appearing again and again on television and elsewhere. He wasn't a David or Victoria Beckham who constantly have their images displayed in papers and magazines all over the world - we even saw their pictures in the papers in California on a recent visit! Nor was he like Diana, Princess of Wales, who gained such popularity, or Anne Robinson who is popular for being hated so much for The Weakest Link. Jesus was terribly ordinary and had none of the opportunities that the modern age affords for getting the word out or making himself known. Yet he became so outstanding in his ministry and in his outreach to people, that he was a major threat to the religious establishment of his day.
And you wonder 'How did he do it'? Then you begin to see that, throughout the Gospels, we read of a ministry where he reached specifically to the poor, to the disadvantaged, to the outcasts, to those who really were not welcome in the synagogues or church equivalents of his day. I'm always amazed that, even when he preached, Jesus had the ability to hold people's attention for days on end, and they would even go hungry in order to hear what he had to say. That shows that there was something incredibly special about him. We see an incredible quality around Jesus's own ministry that, while he himself was not so attractive or interesting in human terms, the love that he had for ordinary people, and the way he could make you feel when you were in his presence that it was good to be alive, were remarkable qualities. Somehow you mattered to him, and the issues of your life which were so much a cause for division with other people were an opportunity to draw close to him.
Also he was a man who spoke with authority, and had a remarkable ability to teach in ways that were never heard from the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. And the way in which he taught constantly intrigued people: he would often respond to questions with another question; he would speak in terms of stories and parables which always left you feeling that there was more to understand about whatever he had to say.
But above all, when people know and understand they are in the presence of Jesus, they sense a peace. In a lot of the battles that torment our lives, the issues just don't matter any more. We can come to that place of peace and know a joy in walking with him.
So if Jesus is
known for his love and care for ordinary people and outcasts, it must have been
a cause of absolute dismay for his disciples when he announced at the Last Supper
something that he had been trying to tell them for some time - that he was going
to be leaving them. Even among many unbelieving people today who are dismayed
at the state of the world, I hear remarks such as, 'Well really we need God
back today'. And in some senses, even people who know little about Jesus sense
that, if he were to come back then all would be well. And we know as Christians
that he's going to come back in a very different way to the way he came the
first time.
But the truth is that the real challenge for us today is that Jesus us asking us to be the people who spread the message; for us to be the ones who communicate the same Spirit. And he promised his disciples at the Last Supper that he would give them his Holy Spirit; in fact he even said, as we heard in the reading: 'It is for your good that I am going away, because unless I go away the Counsellor will not come to you; but if I go I will send him to you. And when he comes he will convict the world of guilt'. He also says, 'I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. And when the Spirit of Truth comes he will guide you into all truth.'
This has very much been the lesson that I have had to learn over the years. Because as a young man, as I was growing up through my teens, I was discovering that I was gay and I didn't know what to do with this. I thought I was the only person in the world who was like this, or if there were others then somehow they were completely beyond my ability to contact them. And I would have never done so anyway - my fear of even acknowledging that I was gay was so great.
It wasn't until
about my mid-twenties, after having gone through an awful internal battle struggling
with the scriptures and hearing that apparently - according to Leviticus - I
was an abomination in God's sight if I were to act on my feelings, at a certain
point I met some gay people from an MCC in the South; and it was as if, for
a short while God opened a little window of revelation for me that showed it
could be OK to be gay and to be Christian. And I met two marvellous Christian
gay couples - gay men, as it happened - who had fought through this battle and
discovered this was true for them. And yet for me that would have meant leaving
behind all my friends, it meant risking my family, my job, everything else -
a little bit like Troy Perry had already been through. And I didn't have the
confidence to believe it: I thought there was too much of a chance that I was
just being led into self-deception. And it was as if, then God closed down the
door so that I couldn't see that possibility any more, and I reverted to the
traditional view of homosexuality that I had been brought up with. And I felt
more confident with that, even though it was in a sense preventing me from understanding
my own self and my development. So I went on trying to live in a straight world
and somehow to push myself through into a kind of straight identity.
I perhaps felt a little bit like an interesting quote that I heard about recently,
from Malcolm Muggeridge's memoir called 'Chronicles of Wasted Time'. (For this
I'm very grateful to Dr Ralph Blair who quoted this is a talk in America where
we were recently.) In his memoir, Malcolm Muggeridge, that brilliant 20th Century
observer, tells of a scene in his mind that constantly recurred, both sleeping
and waking. He describes ...
'... standing in the wings of a theatre waiting for my cue to go on stage. As I stand there I can hear the play proceeding; and suddenly it dawns on me that the lines I have learned are not in this play at all, but belong to quite a different one. Panic seizes me: I wonder frenziedly what I should do. Then I get my cue. Stumblingly, falling over the unfamiliar scenery, I make my way onto the stage and there look for guidance to the prompter whose head I can see just rising out of the floorboards. Alas, he only signals helplessly to me and I realise, of course, that his script is different from mine. I begin to speak my lines, but they are incomprehensible to the other actors, and abhorrent to the audience, who begin to hiss and shout, "Get off the stage! Let the play go on. You're interrupting." I'm paralysed and can think of nothing to do but to go on standing there and speaking my lines that don't fit - the only lines that I know.'
Well have you ever felt like that? Miscast - gay in a play that's straight? Christian in a play that's pagan? A fruit out of season, a fish out of water? With Saint Muggeridge we might counter that only dead fish swim with the stream. And so, many of us have had to come to understand that we are not going to be able to force ourselves into the world's mould, or the mould that we think we are required by society to be living in: and certainly not the kind of message the church is bringing.
For most of us this is a journey, and it takes some time to come to understand the truth that I believe God would have us realise. And the Holy Spirit is very gentle in the way he leads us, little by little; he doesn't try and force us to understand things that we're just not ready for - that's certainly been my experience. But the good thing about the gentleness and the gradual way in which he teaches us is that we have time to learn the lessons well; and then, when we've learned them, our feet are really standing on solid ground, so we're in a good position to give reason for the hope that is in us.
When we began the ministry of Courage, back in 1988, we began by trying to do things the right way, as the church prescribed. That meant believing what they believed, which was the idea that homosexuality really was a sign of rebellion against God, and that you had to make every effort to be fully repentant - to expunge from your mind and your heart anything that might indulge that way of thinking about ourselves. And we had a community of people who strived and showed incredible commitment to a way of life in which we were trying to put Christ first; and that meant putting out of our minds our struggle with homosexuality.
But, without going into all the details, it took about seven or eight years to discover that, for all the effort put into it, it simply didn't achieve the objectives we thought. In fact it left people feeling depressed, hopeless and unable to carry on with this kind of battle and struggle. And I have to say that each of us who took part in those years of running a community and a Special Discipleship programme all joined in with this because we all came from the same kind of background where we believed this was the only way to go forward: we saw no other way. And so, at the same time we had to come to realise this was going nowhere. Some people took longer than others to discover that: some people found out quicker than I did. But we had to have the courage to face the truth and recognise that this was not what God was doing in our lives or in the church. We began to realise that God was far more interested in us learning to love one another, learning to build wholesome relationships, gay relationships if we were not going to go ahead and marry; and to support that as a ministry we faced a very major question: were we prepared to allow God to go on confirming the message that he'd begun teaching us, and lose our reputation in the eyes of others. That's really what it comes down to, and I find that for so many people in ministry this is the crunch issue: if they hold to the truth that God has shown them, it means losing their reputation, and perhaps losing a salary, income, friends, and all sorts of other things. But this was so often the kind of challenge that Jesus faced people with - that to follow him meant turning our backs on other people who we would have remained popular with if we'd held to their particular party line.
So I have tried to reveal through our own story how it is that the Holy Spirit, little by little, leads us step by step, and shows us the way into truth, and gives us the confidence to stand firmly on that truth. But I just want to pick out the last part of the reading we heard earlier, because I feel there are three lessons here that Jesus touches on and that we need to hold onto really clearly if we're going to move forward.
Jesus said: 'When he comes, the Holy Spirit will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin, and righteousness, and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you will see me no longer; in regard to judgment, because the Prince of this world now stands condemned.'
Now, at a quick reading, one just thinks 'Oh yes, of course.' But when you stop and think what he's saying, there are some very important messages wrapped up in that which actually summarise the whole of Jesus's ministry.
First of all, we're going to be culpable, or guilty, if we do not know the truth or learn the truth from the leading of the Holy Spirit with regard to sin. Now, what do most of us think of in terms of sin? Most of the time, especially in any discussion on the subject, we're thinking of transgressions, things we do wrong, some of the things we confessed in the Confession just now, the things we've left undone that we should have done, the things we've done that we shouldn't have done - in another version! But Jesus goes right to the point here: he talks about sin because people do not believe. In actual fact, throughout the scriptures, the real difference between the righteous and the wicked is that the righteous are the people who believe in Jesus and follow him, and the wicked are those who do not. Now, a lot of the 'wicked' people might actually be quite decent citizens in many ways, but the fact is that sinfulness - which separates us from the presence of God - is something that can only be resolved through the work of the Cross: it is simply nothing that we can do to make ourselves better. God isn't into self-improvement courses, he's into transforming us from within. And the incredible good news is that, through knowing Jesus and through walking with him, we are set free from our sin.
With regard to righteousness, this is a gift that God has for us; and the Father draws us to Jesus in order that we might become righteous and have our lives put right with him. So our righteousness is a gift of God, and something that none of us can boast about either. It's something that is simply imparted to us through knowing Christ.
With regard to judgment, we think of it as being something which takes place either because we've done wrong things which mean that we're under judgment, or we've been justified by the good works that we've done. Jesus refers to the Prince of this world; and that is the way that this world works. You get a job if you have the right qualifications and the right experience and prove to be up to the mark for the job. In almost every field of work in this world you have to be up to the mark; in other words, those who are prepared to work hardest, or give the most time to their jobs, are the ones that get the promotions and everything else. The way this world works is a kind of 'survival of the fittest', 'survival of the best'. But this is completely different to the way the kingdom of God works, because the world's way actually leads nowhere. We will all one day have to face the fact that we will die, we will leave this world. And what will we have done during our time if we simply had a period when we had a brilliant job and earned lots of money? We can't take any of it with us. But with regard to the judgment of Christ, that is settled by whether or not we are walking with him and whether or not we abide by his values.
The important thing I want to leave us with is: will we have the confidence to follow Jesus today, given that the message he has for each one of us is that we know we are acceptable in his sight if we come to him in trust and faith and confidence? Perhaps all we need to do, if we are coming to him in faith, is just to ask for wisdom as to how he wants us to handle the difficult decisions of life and how we should make our way forward in life. And God promises to give wisdom to all who ask: we can read of this in James chapter 1. From verse 5 onwards we read: 'If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks he must believe and not doubt.' And he goes on to talk about the instability of living a life tossed about by doubt.
I believe we just need to be, in this time, able to have the confidence to be who we are, proclaiming Christ and nothing else. When I arrived, Andy showed me an article on the front page of the Manchester Evening News which tells of a Vicar who went to preach a message that homosexuality is something completely against God, saying that the Bible's teachings are clear and consistent on this issue. But we know, I hope, that this is not where the issue lies at all with Jesus; the issue is 'Do we trust him or not?' And if I were to meet that Vicar I would say to him, 'Where do you find in your Bible the calling to go and preach a message against gay people?' As far as I understand it, we have one message to preach which is 'For Christ' and to bring all people into knowledge of him; not preach against one or any group of people in that way.
Let's pray as we finish now:
Heavenly Father we thank you that you have drawn each one of us here today to be in your presence, to be in fellowship together, and to worship. We give you thanks for helping us to come to know your Son Jesus who had made it possible for us to walk into your presence without fear and without any stumbling block because of who we are, or what kind of a person we are, just simply because we believe in Jesus. We thank you that you have given us your Spirit today, not only to guide us into all truth, but to empower us to communicate the Good News to all who have a hunger to know you. We pray that we might be fruitful in this way, and quietly but confidently speak out the Good News that you have given us to share. For Jesus's sake.
Amen.
This
sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester.
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