Pentecost: Fire lights on Babel Tower

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs...

What emerges from Acts 2 is the original Multinational — founded on absolute Equality, universal in scope, affirming particularity, non-Imperialistic (but welcoming to Roman tourists like anyone else), minimally and functionally hierarchical but inwardly driven by the Spirit. What’s wrong with that?

Sadly this simple vision conflicts with some dirty little habits:

• Inequality
  usually expressed as the feeling of entitlement you find in racists, bigots and sexual predators of all stripes, mild and strong, ancient and modern. It’s all about power, not sex.
• Narrow Tribalism
  even the corruption of the Pentecostal Community into a tribe. The idea was that all instincts of particularity that used to express themselves over and against each other should become a symphony of disparates. The Church’s calling was to transcend tribalism, not become a specialist faith group that revels in its habits and routines and, literally, idolises its particularity.
• Homogenisation
  because birds of a feather flock together. The herd instinct turns in on itself and opts for safety in numbers, the tyranny of the tidy-minded, groupthink and doubletalk. The Institution takes itself far to seriously. The Sprit is subjected to the letter of the law, bureaucratised and neutered

Perhaps the big crises the Church faces are not intractable issues in themselves, but the inevitable result of losing touch with its roots. The outward and inward predicaments the Church faces often draw out instinctive pragmatic love, especially at street level. Difference is no more than an invitation to love even enemies. 

Sadly, the same predicaments also produce flashes of inequality, bigotry and discrimination, imperialism, institutional inertia, complacency and self-obsession. Beware the leaven of the Pharisees says Jesus. “Be watchful of yourselves, whitewashed tombs, brood of vipers!”

We can't fix the problems beyond us, but we can attend to the rot within us and among us. Then, in the light of such repentance, we could look outward in the light of all we had learnt and, in Wendell Berry’s unforgettable phrase, Practice Resurrection. Who knows? Engaging and transformative vision could go viral as it did on the streets of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. 

Starting here. Couldn’t it?

Kismet

2014: Oh dear, Oh dear. We failed to heed the warning the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England gave us, and now look what’s happening

Gay Marriage: Must Try Harder

The Lion has Roared. The faith and order commission of the General Synod, no less, has uttered its mind on marriage equality.

Marriage is the faithful committed permanent and legally sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman central to the stability and health of human society

What would happen if we simply substituted "between two people"?

Well, very little has happened, actually, in jurisdictions that have done that.

Belgium remains, after ten years, a drably conventional place, where people are married and given in marriage.

In Belgium, Gay people are not forced to marry people of the opposite sex and pretend to be what they are not. A small number of them choose a life of marital commitment together. Er, that’s it.

But apparently this is what will happen in the UK:

When marriage is spoken of unclearly or misleadingly it distorts the way couples try to conduct their relationships and makes for frustration and disappointment. The reality of marriage between one man and one woman will not disappear as a result of any legislative change, for God has given us this gift and it will remain part of our  created human endowment. The disciplines of living in it may become more difficult to acquire and the path to fulfillment in marriage and in other relationships more difficult to find.

Really? How would that be? Has anyone ever met any couple to whom this happened?

I agree that broadening access to marriage to include gay people and abolishing the unclarity inherent in forcing them to pretend to be heterosexual in order to get married can only reduce confusion, frustration and disappointment all round.

Nobody is proposing gay relationships should be substituted for straight ones, merely treated equally.

Paragraph 8 is pure waffle:

The marvelous ordering of the created world has not lost its force for a generation made more aware than before by discoveries in physics and biology of the dynamic unfolding of the universe, the interplay between innovation and constancy, variation and intelligibility.

If the author of paragraph 26 which states “persons are not asexual” were to explore discoveries in biology they would learn that a tiny proportion, up to 1% of the population are, actually, asexual.

Paragraph 29 makes a clear and helpful claim that

In God's image we bring spiritual creativity to our natural endowment without denying or overthrowing it.

One would expect the author to recognise that for some people their natural endowment is gay. Someone in favour of equal marriage would agree. But hang on, the report goes on to imply that only heterosexuality is, actually, natural.

This is the crux of the argument and exposes its genteel homophobic assumptions. If gayness may be regarded, as a matter of fact, as part of the natural order, the whole argument of this paper works in the opposite direction to what it intended. It does not speak for all Christians, as it claims to, because many Christians do not regard gay people as in any way inferior.
The conviction they are equal arises from primary gospel values.

Whilst agreeing with 95% of what is said in this report about marriage, the whole thing unravels as an argument against marriage equality the moment one accepts that gay people are not freaks, crooks, or straight people being naughty. If you believe they are any or all of these things, most of its arguments stack up against equal marriage. If you don’t, they actually stack up in favour.

I recently met a Lesbian in church who was telling me that her worst experience of Church had been when it posed as the source of some cheesy form of pastoral care whilst continuing its essentially homophobic stance towards her personally.

Thus I quake in my boots when I read in the accompanying press release

this report also underlines the role of the Church in seeking to provide care, prayer, and compassion for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to receive the gift of marriage in the form that the Church has understood it and continues to uphold.

Many of my gay friends will find this tendentious statement wildly patronising and offensive. Offers of comfort from the very people whose homophobia caused the pain in the first place will not be received easily. If the Church wants to provide compassion, it can stop talking about gay people and start talking with them. It can demonstrate the genuinness of its care by ceasing to belittle and patronise them and start taking them seriously. If it wants to pray with them, this institution which cheerfully blesses nuclear submarines, hamsters and buckets of cement can start blessing their often stunning relationships.