Pope Gregory and #Primates2016 - diversity, sex, and church order

 Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 597. Soon afterwards, he wrote this letter to Pope Gregory with a series of questions concerning matters of church order and doctrine.

Of the eleven questions that he asked:
Six are about sex;
Two are about bishops, one specifically about the limits of authority when dealing with foreign bishops;
Two are about money;
One is about diversity in church liturgy and order.

As the Primates of the Anglican communion gather at Lambeth next week to discuss very similar things, the vatican has lent the crozier of Gregory, the pope 'who initiated the conversion of England' to edify and inspire the meeting.

The crozier, from the Anglican Communion website linked to above

Apparently it is a 'symbol of ecumenical encouragement' and 'a mark of the bond that spiritually unites the Catholic and Anglican Churches'. (Nice to see the Vatican spokesman there calling the Anglican Church a Church).

Maybe, then, the meeting might also be inspired by reflecting on the advice that Pope Gregory gave to Augustine of Canterbury?

Pope Gregory I dictating, from a C10th manuscript (via wikipedia)

Pope Gregory was a prolific writer. His letters run into several volumes: they are online here, for example.

He is very widely considered to have been A Good Pope. Commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, he is one of the Doctors of the Church, and was considered by Calvin to the be last pope worth listening to!


So, what does he have to say on the big issues facing the Angles then, and the similar issues facing the Anglican Communion now?

 On Diversity in the Church:

Augustine's third question: Since there is but one faith, why are the uses of Churches so different, one use of Mass being observed in the Roman Church, and another in the Churches of Gaul?

Answer: Your Fraternity knows the use of the Roman Church, in which you have been nurtured. But I approve of your selecting carefully anything you have found that may be more pleasing to Almighty God, whether in the Roman Church or that of Gaul, or in any Church whatever, and introducing in the Church of the Angli, which is as yet new in the faith, by a special institution, what you have been able to collect from many Churches. For we ought not to love things for places, but places for things. Wherefore choose from each several Church such things as are pious, religious, and right, and, collecting them as it were into a bundle, plant them in the minds of the Angli for their use.

This seems pretty clear that diversity in liturgy is perfectly acceptable, and that choosing things fit for purpose in particular contexts is fine. Of course, we can argue til the cows come home (and no doubt the Primates will indeed do so) on what is 'pious, religious and right' - but Gregory seems fairly clear that this is left to Augustine's good judgement.

It is also worth noting that all the complexities and sensitivities in our Communion about colonialism are put into a much longer historical context here - the Church in England was itself first a church which was planted alongside occupation by a colonial power, the Romans, long before Gregory's mission, and was then re-planted by the Roman church (with some inevitable tensions - fast forward to the Synod of Whitby).

On Sex, Marriage, Morality and the Bible:

Isn't it interesting that matters of sex and marriage law (albeit with different specific hang ups) were as much of an obsession then as now?

Six of the eleven questions relate to sex:

2. Whether clerics can get married (Gregory says yes)
5. Whether two brothers can marry two sisters (Gregory says yes)
6. About the permitted degrees of kinship for marriage
7. About whether those in marriages that controvene (6) should be denied communion
10. Various questions about pregnant and menstuating women, and regulations for cleansing men after marital sex
11. About wet dreams

Here there is no easy reading-across of answers from Gregory to present day controversies. However, there are a few things that it is worth noting.

First, some of Gregory's answers are based on current empirical understanding, or a view of what is 'natural', as much as, or more than, theology. For example, he says that although Roman law permits the marriage of cousins (as English law currently does), church law forbids it because
'we have learned by experience that progeny cannot ensue from such marriages'. 
More positively, he rules (clearly against the cultural expectation of the Angles) that menstruating women should not be barred from communion as
' the menstruous habit in women is no sin, seeing that it occurs naturally'.

It would seem, then, that Gregory's example encourages the Primates to consider up to date scientific views on matters of sexuality, and the question of what is natural (for example, the scientific consensus that homosexual behaviour occurs naturally in animals?)  as well as what the Bible has to say.

In fact, what Gregory has to say about what the Bible has to say is also worth reflecting on:

For while the law forbids the eating of many things as being unclean, the Lord nevertheless says in the Gospel, Not that which goes into the mouth defiles a man, but the things which come forth from the heart, these are they which defile a man Matthew 15:11. And soon after He added in explanation, Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts (Ib. 19). Hence it is abundantly indicated that what is shown by Almighty God to be polluted in act is that which is engendered of the root of polluted thought. Whence also Paul the Apostle says, All things are pure to the pure; but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure Titus 1:15.  
  
That's again in the context of menstruating women, so he is quite happy to read from dietary laws to matters of sex and gender as they relate to purity: and indeed to elide 'what goes in' with 'what comes out'. 

Not that I am arguing that Gregory was a wishy washy liberal! Immediately after that passage he declares that although menstruating women can take communion,
'a man after sleeping with his own wife ought not to enter the church unless washed with water, nor, even when washed, enter immediately'.

This  is because, he argues, it is impossible to have sex without thinking impure thoughts, and taking sinful pleasure in the act, and so those thoughts have defiled you.

Interestingly, he then again refers to local diversity of practice, and seems to rest his prohibition more on secular Roman custom and practice than on theology per se:

'For, although in this matter different nations of men have different notions, and some are seen to observe one practice and some another, yet the usage of the Romans from ancient times has always been for a man after intercourse with his own wife both to seek the purification of the bath and to refrain reverently for a while from entering the church.'

  
I am reminded, reading this and the sections on who can marry whom, of Prof. Linda Woodhead's point that our debates about same sex marriage echo very closely indeed past historic moral panics about other marriage questions. She pointed out line by line how the Hansard debates on the C19th Deceased Wife's Sister Act mirrored closely the debates this decade on same sex marriage. Here, Gregory and Augustine (and Augustine is clearly passing on concerns of the society to which he has been sent) have similar debates about going to church after having (marital) sex, and about the marriage of cousins. 

Finally, about Bishops:

I also find it amusing that two of Augustine's questions (three, if you count the first one about where the money goes) are about bishops, and specifically that question 9 is about jurisdiction.

Reading between the lines, it is clear that Augustine has been given a mandate to reform the church in Gaul as well as establish one in England (Gregory seems not to have known about the existing church structure and bishops in England - who were understandably narked at having this new Archbishop suddenly put over them). How, he asks, does he deal with the bishops in Gaul?

Gregory's reply is clear: you will need to influence them by persuasion and by the evident holiness of your life, as you have no authority over them:


Over the bishops of Gaul we give you no authority, since from the ancient times of my predecessors the Bishop of Arelate (Arles) has received the pallium and we ought by no means to deprive him of the authority that he has acquired. If therefore it should happen that your Fraternity should pass into the provinces of Gaul, you should act with the same bishop of Arelate in such a way that vices in bishops, if any, may be corrected. And, if he should by chance be lukewarm in the vigour of discipline, he must be stirred up by the zeal of your Fraternity...you yourself will not have power to judge the bishops of Gaul by authority of your own; but by persuading, alluring, and also exhibiting your own good works for their imitation'.

The letter doesn't give easy answers, but I very much hope that reading it may help to problematise the questions a bit. Adding in to all our discussions of context and morality some curve balls from a very different context - but one that still has all the complexities of a past empire and colonial thinking - might help the primates to discuss these issues more abstractly and with less heat, at least for a brief pause for thought. 

Church Growth - being a Masterchef?

Is Church Growth a bit like making a bechamel sauce?

You start with the basics - butter, flour - and make a roux. Then you add milk, slowly and carefully, stirring in each new additional quantity.

I suspect that Church of England congregations tend to think of adding new people as like adding more milk. So long as they are added judiciously and steadily, with the vicar and maybe some key sous-chefs doing some good stirring, and the Holy Spirit keeping the heat on, then they should incorporate smoothly and mean the sauce stretches further.

You can only add so much milk before there just isn't enough of the original roux to thicken it all. But a Discipleship Programme could be the equivalent of tipping in a bit more cornflour - or instant thickening granules - and helping it all gel.

But what if it is more like a Masterchef invention test? A fiendish one, in which you have to incorporate new ingredients into your plan as they are added to your bench?

You start with your basic roux. And at first, you are given some milk, so you make a bechamel sauce. But then you turn around and find some cheese and mustard at your elbow. So you stir them in, and it becomes a cheese sauce. Then you are presented with a bottle of white wine. You could stir that in, and some more cheese, and it could become a fondue...

The question I think we have failed to really address in church growth is whether our bechamel sauce is happy to become a fondue, or a cheese sauce, or part of a lasagne or moussaka, depending on what other ingredients turn up. Is 'church' bechamel sauce, or is 'church' whatever we make with the ingredients we are given?

Its the same question, really, with similar underlying fears, as how we 'integrate' refugees and immigrants into our country - or whether we really want to. Far right parties make great play of the image of communities being 'diluted', or becoming 'unrecognisable' - with the unstated assumption being that this is a bad thing.

Churches, too, in my experience, are wary of the 'wrong kind' of people joining. A nice problem to have, perhaps - but of course it doesn't work out like that, as we are very capable indeed of sending out signals that mean the problem never arises. Some people in some churches - and this is not limited to Church of England churches - speak openly of hoping that the church stays the same, even if that means continuing to decline - 'to see them out'. Clergy speak openly among themselves of congregations where this sentiment is frequently heard. Rather than embrace change, some of our members want, above all, stability until death, hoping only that they will predecease the congregation they belong to.

So questions about 'what is church' and whether it needs to stay as a bechamel sauce need to be openly discussed. And my view is that the greatest barrier to growth is the attachment people have to stability. If I can put it this bluntly, I don't think many congregations actually want to change. They would like to stir a bit more milk into the sauce to stretch it a bit further, if that's what growth means. But they have no intention of becoming a minor part of a lasagne, or changing entirely into a cheese fondue or something as yet unimagined. They are here to be bechamel, they like bechamel, and their vicar had better keep stirring that bechamel and not try to fancy it up.

Yet most of us vicars are trained at college to be aspiring Masterchefs. We've learned the fancy techniques, we've read the classic textbooks, we've eaten, so to speak, in the Michelin starred establishments and dream of one day running one ourselves.

Worse, we are told every other week that this is a competition, and that our invention and its results are about to be judged. Our bechamel sauce wants to be thinned a bit at best, while we beat ourselves up with visions of being thrown out of the competition for lack of inspiration and a poor showing on the plate. There is, to put it mildly, something of a mismatch of expectations here.

What do you think?

Christmas Refugees: Micah, Bethlehem, and the Flight to Egypt

Sermon preached at the Northumbria University Carol Service,

Newcastle Cathedral, 10.12.15

O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie. Bethlehem, the iconic sleepy little town of carol and christmas cards, the dusty backwater that was the long-prophesied birthplace of the Prince of Peace. How ironic that sounds to us today.

Now, Bethlehem is a living symbol of human division at the moment, nearly surrounded and cut off  by the Israeli separation wall.

In fact, Bethlehem, dusty backwater as it was, doesn’t seem ever to have been particularly peaceful. The earliest recorded mention of the town, back in the 14th century BC, comes in a letter asking for a neighbouring king to send some archers to help take it back from insurgents who had overrun it. More recently, in the mid twentieth century it became home to three large refuggee camps as a result of the 1947-8 conflict, and ever since then has had a large population in semi-permanent refugee settlements.

In the prophecy from the book of Micah that we heard at the start of our service, Bethlehem is referred to as the quintessentially small, insignificant place. Its only claim to fame is a distant historical royal connection, as the original birthplace of the legendary King David.

This historic royal connection throws into strong relief the contrast that Micah is drawing, between a small, insignificant backwater and all the powers that be in the world. King David was famously plucked from obscurity as a humble shepherd boy to become King of Israel and establish the dynasty that included such great names as King Solomon. In a similar way, the little town of  Bethlehem - and all that it symbolises of the tattered remnants of Israel's faded greatness now it is surrounded by burgeoning foreign economies and new emergent superpowers - is promised as the source of a new kind of royal power that will change the world for good, and finally, hopefully, establish a lasting peace.

Fast forward 800 years, and in Matthew’s account of the nativity, we seem to see that promise beginning to be fulfilled. And yet the peace of a baby sleeping in a manger is a very transitory thing in Matthew’s account. It is swiftly followed by a bemusing visit from foreign academics, bringing strange and worrying gifts, and then by the terror of a flight from persecution and potential massacre.

Matthew is the only gospel that tells us of the Holy Family’s Flight to Egypt. And just as for those fleeing and displaced around the world today, the focus of their flight is on terror being escaped, not the reaching of some sort of 'promised land'. And it is worth pausing here and noting just how ironic it is that they escape to Egypt in this telling of the story.

Egypt features quite heavily in the Bible, but not as somewhere that the people of God want to reach, not as some sort of safe haven. On the contrary, Egypt is the paradigmatic place that they want to escape from in the history and mythology of the Old Testament. The Exodus from Egypt, from slavery under Pharaoh, crossing the Red Sea, and then spending 40 years in the wilderness rather than go back there, was foundational to the Jewish identity that Jesus and his family were born into.

Egypt was the place the people of God escaped from, not the place they escaped to. It was a place where slavery and luxury lived side by side, a rich powerful neighbor, a place of labour exploitation and consumerism.

Egypt was the place where Joseph – he of the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat – was trafficked to. A place where he narrowly escaped sexual exploitation only to be thrown into prison.

Egypt was the place where Joseph’s family later came to as economic migrants, driven there by years of famine in their homeland.

And now Egypt was the place where the Holy Family fled to as refugees from a local tyrant who wanted to kill them to neutralize any threat to his political power.

Like so many millions of displaced people around the world today, they fled to the nearest place where they would be safe – not the nearest place they could have gone, but the nearest where they knew that international politics meant they’d be safe from extradition or a friendly chat between leaders leading to their assassination. Somewhere where they almost certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable or at home, but where they could at least be secure from the credible threats against them. And like so many hope and pray to be able to do, we are told that they returned home some years later, as soon as they heard the news that Herod had died and so thought they could do so in safety.

In Matthew’s version of events, the birth of Jesus is almost skipped over, and the focus on the terror to come as Herod massacres infants. It is a clear foreshadowing of the clash that will come later, when the grown up Jesus proclaims the coming of Gods kingdom, and this clashes with the interests of the powerful ruling elite. The passages we have heard this evening function as a prologue or overture, setting up the themes to come. Themes of powerful elites and vulnerable masses; themes of innocence and violence; themes of fear and hope.

Wherever you look, the books of the Bible are searingly honest about the propensity of humankind to do evil. Nowadays, we often speak of things like Isis, or a school shooting, or the vicious murder of an innocent passer by, as Biblical or Medieval. We use these words as distancing mechanisms: it is comforting to think that such actions are aberrations, done by people who aren’t really people at all but ‘monsters’. It’s the same human and rhetorical impulse that leads people who wish to deny the humanity of refugees and migrants to refer to them as insects or swarms. Language matters.

And the carefully chosen language of the Biblical writers refuses to let us of the hook. It doesn’t allow us to distance ourselves from evil and brutality, but forces us to confront the fact that these impulses are in all humanity, and in every generation. For thousands of years, human beings have yearned for peace, for a secure world order that will be able to guarantee that people can go about their business in safety. And every generation discovers again that the impulse to maintain what power and security and lifestyle we have at the expense of others is not just an impulse felt by those people out there, and those people long ago.

Herod, we are told, was ‘frightened’. And in his fear, he planned to do away with the one he perceived as a threat. The story goes on to relate how he massacred all the infant boys under 2 years old in Bethelehem, in the hope of killing the right one and also, I imagine, of killing any risk of a rumoured challenge to his authority.

The biblical stories invite us to reflect on ourselves. That fear that Herod felt is not far from the fear of a dilution of our lifestyle, and a challenge to our privilege, that lies behind so much of the rhetoric against allowing refugees and migrants into this country. Think of debates in our own parliament over the last few weeks and months, about bombing Syria, about how many refugees and of what kind and quality to allow in. How much of that rhetoric was actually about our government’s fear of losing its own authority and power in this country, if it didn’t pander to the fears and self-interest of the voters and of our allies? How much of our own inner conflict about how much it is sensible to help refugees is caused by fear of what we might be risking? Do we give a tenner? A hundred pounds? Something that would actually cause us to sacrifice our own standard of living?

It is easy to feel paralysed by the sheer volume of the difficulties and complexities of the situation. It is easy to feel that our small actions, however generous or self-sacrificing, will make little difference in a world where millions of people are displaced, or to feel overwhelmed by the problem of how to help 5,000 new refugees entering Greece alone every night. But as Aidan and Ridley’s experience shows, when you break that problem down into individual people, helping them is as simple as giving out a bottle of water, a blanket, a pizza; or texting a donation to allow others on the ground to buy another bottle of water, blanket, or pizza. [this was a reference to the story, read earlier in the service, of the experience of two Northumbria graduates who ended up helping refugees in Budapest on their travels]

Bethlehem was famously a small, insignificant town, a dusty backwater, its only claim to fame a distant historic royal connection. Yet to that small insignificant town, came a small, apparently insignificant family, and they had a small, apparently insignificant child. They had to flee for their lives, to a place where they were even smaller and even more insignificant; but we still gather here, 2000 years later, to give thanks to God for the birth of that child, and to pray for peace.

So don’t despise the small and apparently insignificant. Don’t be put off helping by the smallness and apparent insignificance of what you can do. It is from the small, the lowly, the forgotten and insignificant that a tiny flame of hope and love and peace is lit. And that light is still spreading its message of hope and love and peace in a dark world.

Martin Luther King said, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’

As we remember the light of Christ coming into the world this Christmas, let us resolve to be ourselves agents of light, committing ourselves to meeting hate with love.

Amen.

A Parish Share Approach to Funding the Refugee Crisis?

Just thinking aloud...

Obviously, one of the major problems in practical terms with large numbers of refugees is paying for them to live. Fear of how much this will cost is a major issue in the discussions over open borders and resettlement. Even if they are settled in refugee camps, as they are in large numbers in Jordan and elsewhere, someone has to pay for the tents, the infrastructure, the schools, the medical care, the toilets, etc.

But particularly in Europe, there is the additional factor that the southern countries of Europe bear the greatest costs, as they are nearest. Greece, Italy, Spain - not the wealthiest of European countries - are on the front line. Understandably, they resent more northerly countries like the UK standing back with our arms crossed and saying it is nothing to do with us as the refugees reached them first so are their responsibility.

I wonder if the financial model of the Church of England could have something to offer?

I don't mean so much the 'charity economy', but the Parish Share system. This works in various different ways in different dioceses, but basically the idea is that costs are shared across all the parishes. The total bill for a diocese (mainly clergy stipends and pensions, with a few additional central costs, training and so on) is reckoned up, and then parishes each contribute as they are able. In some places this is shared out on a 'taxation' system, but in the dioceses that I know best, Durham and Newcastle, a voluntary offer system has worked best.

When I was in Newcastle diocese, the system was that the amount was divided between clusters of parishes who then got together, looked at each others finances, and decided between themselves what was the fairest way to divide the amount asked for. In Durham a couple of years ago, Bishop Welby startled everyone by proposing an even more radical solution: parishes would simply offer what they felt was right! The total has gone down - meaning some things have had to be cut - but not by as much as some people feared, and morale in the parishes in relation to their giving has shot up.

Parish Share is a system that means that rich parishes subsidise parishes in poorer areas. Some rich parishes don't like this, of course, and try to wriggle out of their obligations. But overall, the system is a wonderful expression of the commitment of the Church of England to being one body, providing ministry and worship to all who live in this country, without reference to the wealth or resources of the particular area in which they live.

So maybe something similar could work across the European Union, to fund the refugee crisis? After all, this is clearly not a one-nation issue, and it seems very unfair for a disproportionate burden of costs to be allocated purely according to geography.

Maybe the Church of England's Parish Share system is the answer? Could the UN or EU add up all the estimated costs of caring for the refugees, and invite bids towards it? The money given could then be allocated back to the countries in proportion to the number of refugees there.

Ideologically, I guess that if you don't want to express the view that Europe is united, you won't like this idea. But without any coercion or 'centralisation' (after all, the Parish Share system is essentially voluntary - bishops have far less power than people often imagine!), this could be a way of expressing the essential unity of humanity that the people of all European countries have been very clear about in recent weeks.