Father Pemberton's Sermon

From Changing Attitude:

Jeremy Pemberton preached about the Archbishop of Canterbury's Reflection on General Convention in Southwell Minster last Sunday morning. He says that he has never had such a deluge of positive comment after a sermon in all his years as a priest. The comments came from members of the mostly fairly elderly Minster congregation - comments like: at last, thank you for saying what we needed to hear. The sermon is reproduced below.

I won't post the entire sermon, just selections. You can see the whole grand sermon at CA.

I want to try and do, as Paul put it in our epistle, a little bit of speaking the truth in love this morning. I want to talk about sex and unity.

There – I thought that might get your attention! The reason I want to is that this epistle is a great call to the Church to live out her vocation in unity – and we live in a Church that is dangerously riven by disagreements. Paul is calling the Ephesians to living a worthy Christian life together – and the means to enable that are the unity of the Christian community and its generous sharing of the gifts it has been given by God. It is a wonderful picture of mutuality and generosity and of many being built up – an image of a rich diversity creating something true and beautiful for God. The church’s unity is to be preserved by humility, forbearance, gentleness, patience and love. Her strength will be shown by her ability to face and speak the truth as together her members grow up into Christ, the source and goal of her life.
....

I don’t know how well you have been following the controversies of the past six or so years. They have all ostensibly been about the rights and wrongs of homosexual relationships, and particularly those of clergy. Two events triggered the present disagreements, which threaten the unity of not only the Anglican Communion, but to a certain extent the Church of England itself. In 2003 Dr Jeffrey John, then Canon Chancellor of Southwark Cathedral was nominated to the see of Reading – one of the suffragan bishops of Oxford Diocese. He was a gay man with a partner, with whom he now said he was in a celibate relationship. Storms of protest from prominent conservative clerics and laypeople focused on the facts that he was still in that relationship, did not repent of having had a sexually active one, and had written in support of permanent, faithful and stable gay partnerships. He withdrew his acceptance of the nomination – and is now Dean of St Alban’s Abbey.

In the USA, the voters of New Hampshire Diocese of the Episcopal Church elected as their bishop Canon Gene Robinson, a divorced father of two, who was now in a long-standing partnership with another man. The election of bishops in the Episcopal Church has to be confirmed by the other bishops giving their consent. In this case these consents were forthcoming – not least because the other bishops could not see any way in which the electoral process has not been followed scrupulously, and Canon Robinson was, as you know, consecrated.
....

We live in a world where widespread virginity before marriage is a fairly distant memory – even for most Christian young people. Contraception, not least the pill, changed social attitudes for ever. Fear, a great motivator to chastity, has been removed. Lots of young people get married these days in their late twenties and early thirties, and most have had one or more quite long-term sexually active relationships before they met the person they now intend to marry. I can’t honestly remember the last time I saw a marriage application with two genuinely different addresses on the form.
....

And what has the Church of England to say? Nothing but: get married! No one bothers much talking about living in sin any more – indeed, only last week a new liturgy was published (with some conservative grumblings) for a Wedding with the simultaneous Baptism of the couple’s children.
....

Paul, writing to the Ephesians, places great emphasis on the ethical actions he wants the Ephesians to demonstrate: being loving, forbearing, and exercising humility and gentleness. Isn’t it time that we rethought our sexual ethics so that we placed a greater emphasis on the quality of the actions that people engage in and take some of the focus off the formal state they inhabit? In that way we encourage people towards responsibility, permanence, fidelity, even if they are not ready to marry yet, and away from exploitative and careless sexual behaviour.
....

Again, what are we to say about the attitude of the Church towards homosexuality? There is no doubt that society has undergone a huge revolution in attitude towards this relatively small minority of the population.
....

The church, meanwhile, is tearing itself apart over this very issue. The last substantial piece of teaching was eighteen years ago in 1991. The House of Bishops statement Issues in Human Sexuality said –

"that what it called 'homophile' orientation and activity could not be endorsed by the Church. “…Heterosexuality and homosexuality are not equally congruous with the observed order of creation or with the insights of revelation as the Church engages with these in the light of her pastoral ministry.”

Nearly a generation on from that guidance the observed order of creation has revealed hundreds of species where a number of the creatures can and do regularly form homosexual partnerships. There is so little in Scripture about this whole area that enormous tomes have to written to uphold an interpretation of no more than six odd verses scattered about the Bible that would ban homosexual relationships entirely.
....

Moreover, the Church of England has managed to think and talk its way through to a new perspective over a question of sexual ethics, while maintaining its unity. That is precisely what we have done over the question of divorce.
....

Very slowly and painfully, and with great attention to the pastoral difficulties that this policy was creating in a society with significant numbers of divorced people not only on the streets but also in the pews, the Church has revised its understanding of marriage, divorce and remarriage.
....

Paul wanted an extraordinary quality of relationship – a unity that transcended their differences – to characterise the way the Christians of Ephesus grew together. No one is imagining, certainly not him, that this was easy. Forbearance is one of the qualities he singles out to achieve this, and humility and gentleness. We face a world of sexual living that is very very different to the world of fifty years ago. I wonder if it would be possible for the church to find a way to speak differently into this world and encourage the qualities of living that will lead people, heterosexual and homosexual alike, towards the fullness of life that God wants for them. But that is, perhaps, only possible if we exercise a forbearance, a gentleness and a humility that so far the official pronouncements of our church have been unable to get anywhere near.

Jesus said, in everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. Matt 7:12

May God give us grace to exercise gentleness and forbearance, and to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us. Amen.

The sermon is excellent, and I found it difficult to select only parts of it, and you see that I included a great deal. Fr. Pemberton's sermon gets to the heart of the matter which causes so much turmoil in the Anglican Communion, the Church of England, and the Episcopal Church in the US and points us in the direction of the way out. Please read it all at CA. It's very fine.

Thanks to Lapin for the link.