Beyond Sneering

We need words to communicate, but we also use them to consolidate the tribe. On the Day of Pentecost God used words to include everyone as they are in the tribe. It was the end of tribalism.

Back in the eighties the great ra-ra sneer was “Fundamentalism.” All it meant was “something unpleasantly Conservative better rubbished than understood.” The more Conservative noughties brought a new ra-ra term — “Revisionist.”
The give away is always that the person being described thus wouldn't use it of themselves. It may one day become a badge of honour, like “Methodist”, but until it does, whenever you see it used you know all that is going on is mindless sneering.

Then there’s the L-word. At a meeting in 2004 about the Windsor Report, our Diocesan Registrar told us of a young man he saw in Sierra Leone when he was a missionary there in the seventies, necklaced for being gay. He supposed “most of us here were more Liberal than that.” A hand shot up — “Why are you accusing me of being Liberal?”

Since the 1830’s “Liberal” has been the Napoleon of ra-ra words.

Served up in a tasty ad hominem all it means is “if you’re one of those people who believes in say, not hanging people, voting, ending Apartheid, rehabilitating criminals — well then... splutter... you’re just one of those people who believes in...” Preached to the choir, the name-calling combats tribal insecurity, oft reinforced as howler monkeys do, by bouts of furious mutual masturbation that, unlike the simian version, is mercifully mainly verbal.

But what lies beyond? Why, for example, do I believe passionately that women and gay people are equal apart from a mere irrational attachment to a social agenda and a drably conventional theology of Creation that says “whatever God has made is good?”

It struck me yesterday how the cacophony of language on the day of Pentecost says difference is good and unity is emergent. God respected the people’s varied cultural idioms, but the ensuing chaos told the mighty acts of God. To receive the word people didn’t need to divest themselves of their cultural particularity, as would have been necessary if God were a merely tribal deity or mascot. One mark of toxic Pharisaism is scouring land and sea to make people like yourself.

The mightiest act of God is his commandment to love him as we love our crooked neighbour with all our crooked heart. It’s shockingly unconditional. Someone wrote to me last month to say it beggared his belief that a bishop should think that “Love thy neighbour as thyself” applied to homosexuals. It beggars this bishop’s belief that anyone should think that it doesn’t.

“Yes,” I hear some say. “We love people, of course. We welcome all. But that doesn’t mean endorsing what they do.” On one level this is obviously true. Best of luck to you, say I. But make sure you really are welcoming people, not just laying a grinning veneer over a subtext of disapproval. It doesn’t work because, I find, people who have experienced oppression have an almost psychic radar about that kind of hypocrisy. And please remember two other primary truths of the Gospel —

1. I am in no position, as one sinner, to endorse or not endorse what another sinner does. The Lord does that bit. In God we trust. All others pay cash. I therefore have to be very careful and critical of my own perception. Only when I have removed the plank from my own eye can I help my neighbour see more clearly. It is comical if I, as a Pharisee prone to anger, contentions, party spirit and self-righteousness, all things Jesus taught are evil, rise up and denounce anybody for things Jesus said absolutely nothing about.


2. We need to assess, ruthlessly, our impact and its fruit as well as our intentions. The good Samaritan teaches us that our actual performance with real people matters more than our good intentions. This is the hardest discipline of all, perhaps. A second sign of toxic Pharisaism is laying burdens on others’ backs too heavy for them to bear. If our welcoming strategy is experienced as oppression it doesn’t work and we need to repent of our hypocrisy ten times more than the object of our welcome needs to divest themselves, even if they could, of whatever it was about them that disgusted us in the first place. By their fruits ye know them. Any policy of the Church that produces scarred, broken self-loathing or even the anger of feeling oppressed in the people it is designed to help needs to change. because either God has given up on all that “Love thy neighbour as thyself / do unto others...” stuff, which is unlikely, or it’s a pretty useless policy.

This, not some notional tendency called Liberalism is the root of the matter. Blessed are those who hear the word of God and do it. That’s all.

Bullying, Bureaucracy, Vague Values?

Do we need a load of bureaucracy to tackle workplace injustice? At heart I am a swashbuckling Cavalier, who would like everything as easy as possible. Too much bureaucracy can actually foul up a process with excess semi-relevant information, and procedures that paralyse action. Ask any police officer. Maybe Bureaucracy is just a standard human activity, like politics, cooking, sex, or religion. If so, there’s good bureaucracy and bad bureaucracy. Small and effective beats big and cumbersone every time. At its best, like electricty in a home, you should be unaware of bureaucracy as a thing in itself. It should just be working away in the background. Ye shall know how good or bad it is by its fruits.

There’s something disturbing about playing off trust against audit trails. Up to the 1850’s you could be a doctor in England by self-definition. Today doctors have to go to medical school and pass exams. There’s far more than a bit of paper involved in the healing art, of course, but the paperwork actually increases, not reduces, my trust when I go to the surgery, as well as reminding my doctor of the story so far. Medical standardization mustn’t stifle creative research, or, even more importantly awareness of the patient as a person, but without some standardization we’d be back where we were in the 1850’s.

How vague are the positive values I suggested were the antidote to cultures of fear and intimidation — diversity, equality, respect? Call them anything you like, but

1. the logic of the Day of Pentecost implies the Church isn’t meant to be definitively homogenized around any particular culture, but incarnate in many cultures. It takes a whole world truly to know Christ.
   
   
2. Jesus had strong views on equality: “call no man Father, for you have one Father and you are brothers.” This was no incidental soundbite, but the cornerstone of a new philosophy of leadership that was not optional. Where the institutional Church has not been wholehearted or disciplined at implemeting that philosophy, it has suffered.
   
   
3. Respect, or the Golden Rule, is the centrepiece of the Sermon on the Mount. Niceness and good intentnions are no kind of substitute for justice. Ask the prophet Amos. His standard is the plumb line, and applying that standard doesn’t happen by accident.

Actually, I don’t see anything vague about these values at all. Life is full of practical opportunities to apply them. What’s truly vague is assuming “anything we do is bound to be OK because we are, after all, the Church, and we’ve been doing it for years...” A Church that is always being reformed has to be healthier than one that thinks it’s arrived.

I think the best way of defending the Church is for it to be authentically and recognizably walking in the way of Jesus Christ.

That means putting in serious, intentional work to focus on and apply these simple gospel values, in ways that can be measured. This involves rejecting deceit, self-deception, corruption and manipulation in our life together, in any practical way that presents itself. And a Church which is always being reformed will, by grace, come closer to being what it was called to be. It will be more missionally attractive than one that is content simply to coast on, with occasional kicking and screaming when it’s caught out.