Sermon for Unity Sunday

A sermon for Unity Sunday (Epiphany 2C readings)

These are my sermon notes from this morning: the context was a service held jointly with the local Methodists. This isnt an exact script, and some parts are more in note form than others!

What is unity?

Specicifically, what is Christian unity?

It's a question that has been particularly live for us in the Church of England over the past year. It's certainly been a key question for me in 2012, as a member of General Synod until the summer.

We began the year by the dioceses voting on the whether the proposed Anglican Covenant was a good way to deal with serious theological differences across the communion. We decided overwhelmingly that it wasn't, and I think that was the right decision. But it dies of course leave us still with the question, and we don't have an alternative answer at the moment. We spent much of the year working our way through the final stages of the women bishops legislation, trying to find a way both to have women as bishops and accommodate those who think women's ordination is unacceptable, only for that compromise to be rejected at the last hurdle in November. And then at the very end of the year the government's proposed legislation on same sex marriages reopened what were very fresh wounds in the body of Christ.

So what unity means - really means - in the face of seemingly irreconcilable differences among Christians is no abstract idea for us today. It's not just a nice to have, a lovely idea that we all say we would like, pray for together today and then ignore for the rest of the year. Christian unity is the cutting edge of church theology and church state relations at the moment. If we can't get to grips with it, we may well end up with the Church of England disestablished, and with the Anglican communion a distant memory. And that's just the internal situation. Unity with other denominations remains a distant dream. Certainly structural unity with Methodism has been ruled out until we open the episcopate to women. Methodism and other denominations such as the Quakers have been pushing to be allowed to hold same sex marriages in church, and the governments current proposals drive a deeper wedge between us as denominations. And our ability to engage in ecumenical discussions both nationally and internationally is seriously hampered by our inability as a denomination to know how to handle our own internal differences.

This stuff really matters. Im not going to solve the problems this morning: the best minds of our generation have been working on these problems and not sorted them out yet! If I had the solution to Christian Unity I'd have told Synod about it....

But let's look at what our readings this morning say about unity, when we read them with this question in our minds.

Each of  our Bible readings this morning shed light on what unity is from rather different angles. Isaiah gives us the image of marriage as a metaphor for unity. John tells us a story about Jesus at a party. And Paul gives us a densely argued piece of theology, with a surprisingly radical message.

Images of unity : marriage, party (eating and drinking together). Cf communion. Not abstract theory but practical reality. We are unified if we eat and drink together. This approaches the queation of who we are in communion with from a completely different angle to those who say they won't share communion unless we are unified. Or that we are in imoaired communion with those who don't agree with us, or do things differently to us. The suggestion here is celebrating together creates communion. Is the real reason people refuse to take communion with others a deepseated sense that they do believe in the power of taking communion together, and fear having communion created with thise with whom they profoundly disagree?

Unity is action, not theory. And delight, celebration,joy. Never dour, solemn, agreement: lavish hospitality, exuberant delight. In Isaiah, delight, marriage and rejoicing are used virtually as equivalents - no sense here of marriage as a loveless contract or submissive relationship, Here it is all about joy, delight, love, celebration. Unity in joy.

It hardly needs saying, I hope, that Unity is not about being the same. The image of marriage is of two very different people coming together in mutual joy and delight - God and Jerusalem, a young couple. The story of the wedding at Cana is obviously about a large group of different people finding unity in celebrating the marriage of two of their friends or relations, and in drinking together.

But even more notably, this story starts with one of the most arresting moments of dramatic conflict in the gospel stories. Mary notices that the party has run out of wine, and tells Jesus. And Jesus' reply, however much we know it is coming, still has the power to shock us. It is very uncomfortable to hear. 'Woman, what concern is that of mine?' It is a shockingly rude way for a young man to speak to his mother! But she ignores him and simply turns to the servants and says 'do whatever he tells you'. And so the miracle happens. It seems to me that this begins to address  some of the very real questions we bring to the question of unity. Unity doesn't mean not being in conflict. It doesn't mean necessarily being polite to one another. It is unity of action that matters, not unity of words. Jesus' words are rude, harsh, dismissive. But he does the business, and his actions speak louder than his words.

Our reading from 1 Corinthians takes a different approach. Instead of metaphors or stories, Paul gives us some densely argued theology. Paul focuses on the Holy Spirit, on what is animating our actions.

'Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone'.

It is interesting that even Paul the theologian again focuses not on the differences in what we believe but the differences in what we do. Gifts, services, activities: these are our business, our jobs, our work. And he goes on to list various examples, again busy busy busy: speaking wisely, teaching, healing, working miracles, prophecy, languages and so on. It is very interesting that Paul puts faith in this list - here, as elsewhere, it is clear that for Paul, faith is active not passive. It is something we do, we act out our faith.

Paul deliberately lists a bewildering variety of activities, some of which may seem rather alien to us. He is deliberately demonstrating the very wide variety of activities that the Holy Spirit animates in different people. The link that unifies this bewildering variety is the Holy Spirit,  from whom these gifts come and by whom they are activated.

So, does anything go? Is unity simply a question of recognising that the same Holy Spirit is working in and through each one of us, regardless of our very obvious and sometimes very serious differences?

Nearly, but not quite.

Paul addresses this question very directly in the previous paragraph. 'I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says 'Let Jesus be cursed!' and no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit.'

Thats it. As far as Paul is concerned - Paul the stickler for getting theology right - that is the one, simple test of whether someones gifts and activities are animated by the Holy Spirit or not. I find that quite mindblowing. Paul, of the rules and regulations? Paul, constantly writing to churches all over the known world teling them what they are getting wrong? Yup, that Paul says here that it is this simple.

So, what is unity in the light of these passages? Isaiah gives us the image of marriage. Its about delighting in each other, finding joy in the differences. John tells us a story: its about celebration, eating and drinking together, and what you do not what you say. And Paul gives us a theological test: anything that is animated by the Holy Spirit - anything that goes alongside acknowledging Jesus as Lord - is held together by that same Holy Spirit.

All of them seem to me to focus more on actions than words, and more on joy than correctness. Unity, it seems, is about eating and drinking together, delighting in one another, and accepting that the Holy Spirit is active in a bewildering variety of ways.  It is something we do, not something we say. Unity is what we are doing this morning, as we sing and eat and drink together.

Normality and Deviance

One of the many interesting and distasteful things about the rhetoric of poverty and privilege in political discourse, both now and for at least the past 400 years or so, is the extent to which poverty is conceptualised as deviant, and privilege as normal.

Statistically, of course, poverty is quite normal. There has always been something of a skewed bell curve of wealth distribution, with a few very wealthy individuals, a few in the middle and a long tail (though the shape of the curve changes over history). As Jesus remarked, the poor will always be with us.

What we consider to be poverty is culturally determined. When you ask rich people what poverty and wealth are, they come up with some astounding answers. A recent survey of City workers, who were asked what figure they thought the top 10th percentile of income started at, revealed how skewed their view of the world. Those relatively high earners thought that the top 10% of earners in this country earned more than £200, 000 a year. The correct figure is around £40,000; it is roughly where the higher rate tax band comes from. But most people earning this amount do not say that they feel rich.

Most people in this country have a household income of below £22,000 for a couple without children, and the bottom 10% less than £11,000. Yet struggling to pay for a washing machine when it breaks, or being unable to afford the bus fare to go to the doctor’s surgery - things that are, in fact, 'normal' - are widely seen as unusual. Not normal. Abnormal. Deviant.

‘Obscene’ wealth – and the choice of adjective is significant – is also regarded as deviant, but wealth – or as we in the middle classes prefer to call it, ‘being comfortable’ - is defined as the norm, despite all the statistical evidence to the contrary.

And if being comfortably well off is the norm, then clearly the poor are deviations from the norm. And the way we human beings use the language and concepts of the group means that we slip so frighteningly easily from speaking of deviations from the norm – which should be a matter of statistical fact only - to speaking of deviancy, and from deviancy to demonisation. We see this only too clearly in the rhetoric of poverty and benefits today.

What is the opposite of 'normal'?

Abnormal - odd - deviant?

All of these imply some sort of value judgement. We have few words in our language that can simply refer to the statistical fact that some things occur more or less often than others.

In mathematics, the norm is a particular type of measurement: the single number that occurs most often in a list of numbers. (For example: if five people's scores on a test were 1, 2, 2, 6, 9  the norm would be 2, whilst the average would be 4). Similarly, deviation from the norm is measurable (there is such a thing as 'standard deviation', a measure of how much variation there is a given set of statistics) and morally neutral.

But outside of mathematics, we seem to use normal to mean not just 'the way most things/people/examples are' but 'the way things should be'. This makes it hard for us to discuss statistical outliers neutrally.

One of the key goals of all liberation theologies, and perhaps of feminism in particular, is to challenge the extent to which the dominant social status is seen as the norm, with the subordinate status seen as deviant.

Just as poverty has been seen as abnormal, so has being a woman.
Male
ness has for centuries been seen as the norm in our society. And it has followed apparently logically and inevitably from that, that maleness is the norm from which femaleness is deviant.  In past centuries this was very explicitly discussed. In the seventeenth century, for example, there were serious arguments amongst both theologians and natural scientists as to whether women were fully human. Women could be seriously considered to be deficient versions of men, in much the same way as children were deficient versions of adults. Though children were in some ways better off, as of course they could be expected to grow up.

This is not merely of academic interest. The oppression of women – physically, sexually, economically and politically – was routinely justified and explained on the basis that women needed to be looked after. We were seen as simply not having the same capacity as men to make financial, political, sexual or any other judgements, because we were not thought to have 'normal' (ie male) rational capacity.

The way we use the language of normality and deviance is of course also very relevant to current debates about those who have an LGBT sexual identity. We seem incapable of having a conversation about sexual orientation that accepts the existence of a statistical norm (most people are heterosexual), and of alternatives (some people - perhaps 5-10%, though estimates vary greatly  - identify as LGBT).

People say - you will have heard this, perhaps even said this, yourself - 'but it's not normal, is it?'. It is, mathematically speaking, entirely normal for some people to be not normal. As the adverts said - some people are gay, get over it. It may well be that we want to have a conversation as a society about the  acceptable use of our sexuality, what is and is not acceptable sexual behaviour. As a Church, we may well want to discuss the morality of certain sexual behaviours. But 'normality' is very poor grounds to base such a discussion on.

We need to pay much more attention to our discourse, our language, of normality and deviance. I would love to see the media - and all of us - resolve never to use the word 'normal' without a statistical qualification. If we said 'it is statistically normal for....' Or 'the statistical norm is....', we might begin to disentangle statistics from morality.

Some things are indeed more the statistical norm of human experience than others. But things that are less common are no less normal. It is within the normal range of human experience to be a rich gay woman, it just occurs less frequently than being a poor straight man.

But our current use of language tends to imply a value judgement on anything that occurs less frequently. We slip so easily and smoothly from normality to deviance in the way we conceptualise groups. Whatever your views on poverty, or women, or LGBT people, greater clarity in our way of speaking would be a great step forward in our discussions.

A New Year Calling?

This is my sermon for Christmas 1C.
The readings are 1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26, and Luke 2:41-52.

Last week, we heard about Jesus being born. This week we hear in our reading how his destiny begins to unfold.

It's rather like flipping through the family album. On page one - ahhh! Baby Jesus in the manger, surrounded by shepherds, Mary and Joseph and the shepherds all beaming at the camera. Do you remember how that donkey kept us awake all night with its eeyore? And the smell of that goat!

On page two - oh my goodness, that takes me back! Do you remember when that one was taken? Jesus just twelve years old and we thought we had lost him- you thought he was with your mum and dad, I thought he was with Mrs Nextdoor and her kids, and then those awful three days of panic before we finally found him in the temple. Look how cross he was at being dragged off home!

We are working with lots of different calendars today. On one timescale, Jesus was born just a few days ago. He is now five days old, perhaps just beginning to establish feeding to Mary's great relief. He is not yet sleeping through the nights, and Mary and Joseph are shattered. Even though they've registered for the census now, they can't begin to face the long journey home just yet. And to top it all,this enormous star is shining above the inn. We know, but they don't yet know, that it is acting as a beacon for the magi from the East, who saw it shine when Jesus was born and are even now travelling to find this new born king. On this calendar, they'll arrive next week, and Mary and Joseph will then flee before the jealous King Herod can find them and slaughter Jesus.

On the other calendar, our lectionary, we catch a rare glimpse into Jesus' childhood. In our gospel reading today we see him at 12 years old, on what we're told was his annual visit to Jerusalem with a great crowd of extended family and friends. It's fascinating to think that when Jesus went into Jerusalem as an adult, he was returning to somewhere he'd been many times as a child, the place of happy holiday memories. Even the temple, where he was to throw out the money changers and engage in a hostile and ultimately fatal confrontation with the scribes and Pharisees, was somewhere where, as a child, he had longed to be and had sat at the feet perhaps of some of those same scribes and Pharisees, or their fathers, asking eager questions.

And on our secular calendar, we are at the cusp of a new year, with most of 2012 behind us and 2013 stretching ahead. We've read the annual letters from assorted friends, relations and distant acquaintances, summarising what 2012 meant for them, and we may well have written our own, or taken mental stock of a year now ending. And we begin to turn to the new year, whether with New Years resolutions, new gym memberships, new diets, or simply with new holiday planning to look forward to. we have new diaries to fill, we may well know were about to be given new objectives and targets at work, we may be looking forward to a forthcoming birth or a wedding, or a special trip. Christmas can suddenly, even though it was only five days ago, seem so last year.

So many different calendars. All held together, today, by the central figure of Jesus, and his unfolding destiny, and what that means for us.

Both our readings this morning give us little glimpses into the childhood lives of great Biblical figures, the prophet Samuel as well as Jesus. The focus is very much on pointing out their destinies, that even as children they were part of Gods plan and were serving God's purposes. Samuel in particular is well known as the child who heard Gods voice, calling in the night - 'Samuel! Samuel!' - and thinking it was his mentor Eli who was calling, until Eli realises it must be God and advises him to reply 'here I am Lord, your servant is listening'.

And in our gospel reading today, we hear about Jesus, as a twelve year old, getting himself left behind in Jerusalem because he was so caught up in debating and learning in the temple.
We often focus, when we hear this story, on the human drama of a lost child. I'm sure those of you who are or have been parents or in any sort of caring relationship will know the surge of adrenaline you get when you realise the child you're responsible for is out of sight for a second - and the overwhelming relief, and anger, that comes when you find them again!

But I want to focus today on where these two stories coincide. Both end with an almost identical sentence:

Samuel, and Jesus, we are told, both continued to grow. They grew both naturally in size and age as children do, and they grew in favour with God and people.

It is unusual for the heroes of one, let alone two of our daily readings to be children. In these readings Jesus is 12, and Samuel about 7. And it is very noticeable that whilst they are both growing - there is a clear sense of future destiny for both - they are also both serving God and being the people they are called to be now, too. Jesus is sitting and learning from the temple authorities  - effectively sending himself to extra school because the subject fascinates him. Samuel is serving in the temple, being visited annually by his mother - I suppose the closest equivalent today is a choirboy at boarding school. They are both still learning from the masters, but they are also really doing religion themselves too, not just having it done to them. These children are demonstrating something of what it means for children to be the church of today as well as the church of tomorrow. They are still growing, but they aren't waiting until they are fully grown to get started on their life's work. Even as children, they are participating fully in the life of Gods church.

Sometimes we all feel that we will do something good, something important, but we are not ready just yet. We will make changes in our life, but not yet. The time isn't quite right just now. When we've learnt more, earned more, seen more, been more, then, then maybe then....but the time never seems to be quite right.

These stories of Samuel and Jesus as children show us, perhaps, that we can get on with things even as we are growing. We don't have to feel we've made it as Christians before we can be useful to God and others. God works with us as we grow and change and learn.

Just as God called Jesus to certain tasks and to a certain life, so God calls each one of us. We aren’t all called to the same things, and we are called to different things at different times. But we are all called to do something. We are all invited to co-operate with God in bringing his kingdom about. The start of a new year is a good time to take stock, and to make plans. And I want to suggest that it is also a good time for us to think and pray about what God is calling us to do and be. Because one thing I am absolutely sure of is that God has something for you to do in 2013. It might be more of the same. It might be radically different.

Think for a minute about the idea of us as God’s children, his heirs. One of the important things about that image is that there is a future dimension to it. Like Samuel, like Jesus, we are always growing and changing. We learn more and more about God, about ourselves, and about the world around us. We ask questions. We are constantly faced with choices to make about our lives. And what God wants from us can change too.

So as we stand at the start of a new year, what is God is calling you to in 2013?

Reviews of The Essential History of Christianity

Here are the links to the two online reviews of which I'm aware, of  The Essential History of Christianity (SPCK, 2012).
Do let me know if you review it, and I will post the link!

http://runninglife.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/book-review-essential-history-of-christianity/

http://admiralcreedy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/book-review-essential-history-of.html?m=1

Rough Guide to Feminism 3: Recovering Women's Voices

A key area in which a distinctively Christian feminism has been revitalising Christian theology is in recovering women’s voices from the past.

An early and very influential book was Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s work ‘In Memory of Her’, which focused on the women who are either barely mentioned, or not mentioned at all in the Bible, but whose presence can be inferred. Since then it has become part of mainstream biblical scholarship and preaching to note the presence of women in the biblical texts.

Some are obvious, and the first step on this journey was simply to read and use the stories of the women that are indeed in the texts. The role of the Virgin Mary has been rediscovered in the Protestant tradition, for example, and Old Testament heroines such as Esther, Deborah and Jael are now much more commonly cited when we are doing a Sunday school series on Old Testament Stories or biblical heroes, in a way that simply didn’t happen a generation ago.

 More subtly, Christian feminism has pointed out the presence of other women who are relatively hidden in the texts. To take perhaps the most obvious example: The feeding of the 5000. We still call it that, don’t we? Yet what we’re told in Mark 6 is that those present ‘numbered five thousand men’, and in Luke ‘those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children’. Woah! This isn’t the feeding of the 5,000. It might be the feeding of the 10,000, or the 15 or 20 or 25, 000.

That passage is a very stark demonstration of how feminism can open our eyes to the extent that the Biblical texts were very much a product of their time. It would have suited the writers purposes to give us a bigger number, as it would have made the miracle even more impressive. It simply doesn’t seem to have occurred to them to count the women and children – literally, only men counted.

This is why Christian feminism is deeply sceptical of arguments against women’s ordination which are based on the so-called fact that Jesus only called male disciples. Really? We don’t actually know that.

What we know, as a strict matter of historical evidence, is that the biblical texts written between 70 and 200 or so years after Jesus’ ministry, describe 12 of his male followers as a special category of disciples. They also mention several female followers, often with an extremely close relationship to Jesus. Amazingly, in fact, we know that far more of these women were with Jesus at his death than the only male disciple recorded; and that women were the first witnesses of the resurrection. Feminist theologians wonder, therefore. Was there in fact such a distinction between the men and the women at the time, or might this be a later interpretation imposed on the record? The question is worth asking.

Similarly, another major strand of work amongst feminist theologians is the recovery and critical study of the work of female theologians of the past. It is still relatively common to see lists of major theologians, or anthologies of Christian writings, which include either no women at all, or only one or two examples, often Julian of Norwich or another of the medieval mystics. This is often defended on the basis that, sadly, the way the world was in the past meant that women simply weren’t given the education or the opportunity to write. The giants of Christian theology were indeed all male and there is not a lot we can do about that, runs the argument.

Yet in mainstream history we have largely discarded the ‘great men’ way of doing history in favour of a much more nuanced and multi-vocal approach. Historians are very used nowadays to seeking out the stories and voices wherever possible of those normal members of society who were having history, in the old model, done to them. And as feminist theologians have gone looking for women theologians of the past, they have found them, working away in whatever ways were just about deemed culturally acceptable and open to them at the time.

The amazing role of the early abbesses, for example,has been rediscovered in recent decades. Double monasteries, containing communities of both monks and nuns, were relatively common in England before they were banned in the papal reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And double monasteries were always headed by an Abbess, who was in overall charge of both communities; the most famous example, of course, being Hilda of Whitby.

The medieval mystics, of which Julian of Norwich is only the best known example, were very often women, and this was clearly a way in which women with great spiritual wisdom or theological gifts were able to use those in an acceptable – indeed, in a very highly valued – way.

Another aspect of women’s theological writing that has been rediscovered in recent years has been particular genres that were available to women. The most well known of these is poetry. Women writing poetry was very widely accepted, and with the invention of printing women’s poetry could even be published acceptably and enjoy a very wide readership. Some of these poems, such as those by Aemilia Lanyer – who is best known as one candidate for being Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ – are in fact carefully argued theological treatises, simply arranged in poetic form.

Another genre that was particularly available to women in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was the ‘Mother’s Legacy’. This was a book of theology written, or supposedly written, whilst a woman was pregnant. It took the form of a letter to her unborn child, the idea being that, if she were to die in childbirth, this is the substance of the faith that she would otherwise have taught the child in infancy. These were often substantial theological treatises, and again were frequently published and enjoyed wide sales. They were often published with a foreword pointing out that since the initial composition of the letter, the mother had found that other mothers of her acquaintance had found it helpful in teaching their own children, and that on the advice and entreaty of the local bishop it was now offered to a wider public.

So Christian feminism points out that our view of what is a theological writing has itself been skewed through a patriarchal lens.

Women were writing theology, they were simply having to use alternative genres to achieve acceptance and publication opportunities. If we continue to limit our view of what comprises the canon of classics to the university texts written by male theologians, after becoming aware of this other history, then we are complicit in continuing and extending the suppression of women’s voices.

Rough Guide to Feminism 2: Raising Awareness

The first key task of feminism is awareness raising.

And the first thing that feminism has contributed to modern Christianity is an increasing awareness that issues of sex and gender are issues at all. In particular, feminism has hoped to make people realize how much our cultural assumptions about what it is to be human have been based on what it is to be a particular type of adult man.

In the early days of feminism this needed saying again and again and again. Feminists have sometimes have been accused of being ‘strident’, and we’ve all had the experience of raising a point about gender in a meeting and seeing everyones eyes roll – there she goes again! But sometimes, when one is saying something that a culture doesn’t want to hear, you have to shout repeatedly to be heard at all.

Feminism is first and foremost about raising awareness of issues of sex and gender.

The two  terms 'sex' and 'gender' are often used interchangeably, but they represent slightly different aspects of the issues. In broad terms, ‘sex’ is a matter of biological reproductive fact. It concerns the variety of sexual and reproductive differentiation in both plants and animals. So when we speak of issues of sex we are properly speaking referring to issues regarding the spectrum of physical and biological differences between the male and female of the species.

‘Gender’, on the other hand, refers to a much wider variety of culturally determined understandings of what it is to be male or female. Sex, we might say, is a given; gender is performed. And there are a wide variety of gender identities, which often change over time: simple examples are girl/woman/mother/grandmother, or boy/man/father/grandfather. Each word encapsulates a distinct set of cultural expectations as to how that gendered role will be performed, and what it is to be a good boy, woman, father, grandmother. Once we grasp the idea of gender as performance and as a cluster of cultural expectations, we can see clearly just how much variety there is and has been historically.

In the past, the category of eunuch was a distinct male gender identity (there is a fascinating chapter on eunuchs in Teresa Berger's excellent book Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History). Nowadays, the category of gay man is clearly differentiated from the category of heterosexual adult male, or ‘family man’. In our culture, too, heterosexual adults who remain childless often find that they are problematised by society as not fitting neatly into any of our main cultural gender stereotypes.

In the early days of feminism this emphasis on raising awareness of sex and gender was heard as being about ‘women’s issues. But maleness is, of course, as gendered a concept as femaleness. I say ‘of course’, but in fact this is one of those seemingly obvious statements that people seem to find it very hard to fully accept.

Feminism has done quite well at this core task of awareness raising, though the task is by no means over. But the very fact that we are having arguments about women bishops, and that in those arguments nobody is suggesting that the women we have in senior roles now wouldn’t make excellent bishops, shows how far we have come.

Writing in the Church Times in the autumn, Rowan Williams argued that our current position in having women priests but not bishops is anomalous, and doesn’t reflect a proper theology of the priesthood of all believers. And he acknowledged the debt that Christian theology owes to this awareness raising task of feminism. He said: whilst ‘Wanting to move beyond this anomaly is not a sign of giving in to secular egalitarianism… we must be honest, and admit that, without secular feminism, we might never have seen the urgency of this, or the inconsistency of our previous position.’

A Parable for Christ the King

My husband couldn't sleep after the vote on Tuesday, and the next day he told me this story.

This is my sermon this Sunday, and he also asked me to post it here.

Once there was an inspirational Scoutmaster, who set off with his small Scout troop on a hike.  As they walked with him, He gave them a vision of the beautiful far country, the King’s own country, that they would reach if they followed his Way.  They had also been taught the Scout hiking rules; that you stay together and you can only go at the speed of the slowest walker.

After only a very short while, the Scoutmaster had to leave the Scouts to hike alone, but they had faith in the vision of the beautiful far country and the Way to it that the Scoutmaster had described, so they walked on together.  And as they walked, they talked to people they met on the road, and they told them about the Scoutmaster and the beautiful far country, and many joined them on the hike.  As they walked and talked together, they realised that the Scoutmaster was in fact the King and had gone on ahead of them to His beautiful far country, and their thirst was redoubled to reach there and meet him again.  

They needed this faith as the terrain got rockier, and the Way became less clear.  The Scouts realised that the hike was longer than they had thought, and they did not have a map of the terrain ahead, or where the Way was when the path branched.  

The Scoutmaster had described to them what the Way was like, so together the Scouts wrote down his descriptions to give a navigation guide to those who had joined them on the road, and had not heard the Scoutmaster for themselves.  As they wrote together, they realised they each remembered different things of what the Scoutmaster had said, one recalled that he had been especially clear about following the rules of the road, another that he had said …., and yet another that he was….. 

And as they walked on the number of Scouts on the hike grew and grew. They became so numerous that they organised themselves into Patrols, sometimes grouping together Scouts who had joined at the same place, sometimes because they agreed about a particular image of the Scoutmaster.

And sometimes, when they came to a branch in the path, the Patrols would disagree about which was the Way, and would take different paths, with bitter regret, and hoping that the paths would converge again later, and they would meet again in the King’s far country.

So now we will follow just one of these Scout Patrols, after they had been hiking together for many miles.  They had the navigation guide that other Scouts had written before them, and they also had faith that the Scoutmaster continued to guide them and that they were walking in roughly the right direction. Even though they could not see him, sometimes one of them thought they could hear his voice calling to them in the night, or speaking to them in the silence as they walked. And they were also guided in finding the path forward by continually looking over their shoulders and comparing the terrain ahead with the path they had followed to get there.  

For some time this patrol passed through some lush valleys. But then the road became steeper, and the terrain less welcoming, and they could all see a big mountain up ahead.  It became very unclear where the path was going, or even what was the path and what was just rocks. 

And as the going got steeper and the path less clear, a few of the Scouts began to say that the lush valleys behind them were in fact the King’s far country already.  

They increasingly wanted to slow down, stop, and turn around to admire the beauty of the view. Look how lovely it is, they said. This must be the beautiful far country the King spoke of. The path was so clear up to here, and that view down there is so beautiful and so peaceful.  They began to suggest that carrying on walking ahead was to walk out of the King’s country. Some began to say that they should just sit down and stay where they were, looking backwards along the path they’d come and admiring the view.

 Many others recalled that there had in fact been steep and rocky hills between each valley, and potholes in the road that had tripped them up. They did not believe that this was the King’s own country, and they wanted to press ahead on the Way. But the Patrol had remembered the Scout hiking rules; that you stay together and you can only go at the speed of the slowest walker, so they waited, more or less patiently, as some groups stopped or walked slower. 

But as time went on, and the walk got slower and slower, and the arguments about whether they should climb the mountain, or stay here, or try a different path went on, many got bored and disillusioned by the bickering. And more and more of the scouts gave up on the walk and drifted away, or set off on their own.

Eventually after the Scouts had said many words to each other, but they were still at the foot of the mountain, the Patrol Leader got tired and decided to retire. And he handed onto a new Patrol Leader just at the point where all the Patrol thought they had agreed that they were finally about to ascend the mountain together.

But just at that moment, a few of the Scouts didn’t want to go up the mountain on the unclear path sat down, or lay down, and refused to move. The rest of the patrol pleaded with them to get up and keep going. But they refused to move, and shouted triumphantly that the rest of the Patrol could go not go forward either, as the Scout hiking rule was that they should remain together and go at the speed of the slowest hiker.

And all the rest of the Scouts looked at each other in amazement.  They wanted to follow the voice of the Scoutmaster calling from over the mountain, and eventually to meet him face-to-face in the King’s far beautiful country.  But they didn’t want to leave their brothers and sisters sitting and lying in the dust of the road. And they didn’t want to all  stay under the shadow of the mountain, whilst many of those who lived on the mountain laughed down at the ridiculous spectacle they had made of themselves.

 “Enough is enough” they said.  And they picked their brothers and sisters up from the floor, swung them over their shoulders, kicking and screaming, and - more slowly than they would like, as they were carrying their friends - they set off on the Way up the mountain together.