equal

Last week I had the pleasure of spending time with a lay member of the C of E’s General Synod, a person I’d never met before, someone who spends their working life in a professional environment that prides itself on its inclusivity. 

We have a mutual friend who suggested we should speak - and, of course, in Christian life, it turns out out, lots of other mutual friends too!

In the course of our conversation, this very wise and carefully thought-out person asked me what my hopes were for our current Church debates on sexuality.

I replied in one of the many ways I reply to such questions, with a broad brush statement. I said I hoped that eventually I would be seen as an equal human being.

This took my conversation partner by surprise. 

Honestly, he said, he’d come across all sorts of things, but he'd never come across anyone who wouldn’t want to see gay people as equal humans.

Really? I replied. There are genuinely moments when I feel like the three-eared rabbit that runs around my garden - I know people are looking at me strangely, but I can't understand why...

So I blurted out:

Then why are you allowed to get married, and I am not? How equal is that?

If we gay people are equal human beings with everyone else, then the Church’s current debates already have their answers written for them; we’re just working out how to get there. And if we are not - then at some point the Church has to get honest about that, rather than carry on fudging. But right now - 

When I got very ill, around eight years ago, one of the people who spent time talking to me, helping me recover, showed me that I’d allowed myself to believe I was a second class human being. Because I’d hidden in plain sight, because (on the whole) people around me hadn’t realised I was gay, all the thoughtless things that get said by evangelicals about gay people (when no-one outside our number is listening) were said to me. From pulpit and from pew. And I had believed the lot. Everything had sunk in deep. 

And it shouldn't have done so.

It was a lightbulb moment for me.

Because - of course - there are no second class human beings. There are no second class Christians. In Christ there is no Jew nor Gentile, no slave nor free, no male nor female. Jesus works with the Samaritan woman, the Canaanite woman, the tax collectors, the lepers - there are shepherds and magi at his birth, for goodness’ sake. Everyone is welcome. Everyone comes in on the same deal. All have sinned - and for all a gift.

A lightbulb moment? It changed me completely.

Why are we all equal human beings? Because we are all made in God’s image. It’s a fundamental Creation ordinance. It’s how God has made us. And if the world and sin and any fallen thing takes away that equality, we Bible believing Christians should fight with every ounce of Resurrection power granted to us to restore it again.

Following the Church of England’s ‘Shared Conversations’ process on Sexuality, in January 2017 the House of Bishops published a report for General Synod as a route map for the way forward for the Church. Its second sentence ran as follows: “We want to begin by reaffirming the key Christian understanding that all human beings are made in the image of God”. For me, the problem with the report was that it never came back to that theology; if the 'Shared Conversations' had been about listening, the report did its best to hide the fact, and I was glad when in February 2017 the General Synod took the unusual step of not taking note of the House of Bishops' submission. This meant the report was dead in the water, and forced a second attempt, published in June 2017.

The second paragraph of this new report acknowledged that it was to be about “us, all of us, as persons whose being is in relationship,” and (in slightly fuller language than its predecessor) “that we are talking about and talking to people, with their immense capacities for joy and for pain, created in the divine image and precious in God’s sight in ways we can barely begin to fathom.” 

The Church of England bishops declared that we are all made in the image of God. They even hint at more with that phrase “persons whose being is in relationship”. And the 'more' matters as we ask this further question - so what exactly does it mean for us to be made in the image of God?

When I was at theological college, one of the texts we read for our ethics class was David Atkinson’s ‘Pastoral Ethics in Practice’. Nearly thirty years on, Christian ethics have changed in all sorts of ways, but this passage is as strong now as it was then:

“We begin with the foundational truth of our faith: God is a community of love… The Holy Trinity is a communion of persons in love and communication…Just as the Being of God himself is personal communion within the Trinity, so to be in the image of God is to be in personal communion with other persons. Aloneness is not part of God’s creation intention. Love in all its aspects…has its meaning in personal relationships.”

When we read in Genesis 1: 

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” -

This is not a statement of gender and exclusion, of the natural law of the supremacy of heterosexuality. It’s a celebration of relationship and community. More, in the context of the world of patriarchal power that will follow through the rest of the text of Genesis and way beyond, this equality of male and female is a glorious counter-intuitive strike for inclusion and the full humanity of every person. To use such a terrific blow for inclusion in one area (oh yes, God does accept women as equal to men) as a strike against inclusion in another (no, LGBTQ people are quite another issue) is not a reasonable position for serious minded Christians who take the Bible as their rule for life. 

What it is, is a reflection of the times we live in. We should celebrate that we have got as far as realising that the first bit of inclusion (men and women) is true. It’s been there as an eternal truth in the Scriptures since the beginning, but we are amongst the first generations to begin to work it out. As I’ve said before, it’s within my ministerial life that women have been allowed to be ordained as priests in the Church of England; it’s since I’ve been in my current parishes that women have been allowed to be ordained as bishops. 

Sometimes seeing what lies in front of our faces on the pages of the Scriptures is simply a question of choosing to take off the spectacles of ages past, and with fresh eyes reading the Scriptures that give life, re-envisioning truths lost awhile - 

And with a heart full of hope and the Holy Spirit as my comforter, if I as a gay man am as much of a person as any straight person, if I have the gift of salvation and am a member of Christ’s body, if Jesus himself uses the Law to bless and to include, and if I am made in the image of a God whose nature is persons in relationship and love - 

Then why would a life of singleness and celibacy be a possibility, a calling and a gift to my straight neighbour but a requirement for me? In what way does that suggest we are equally human? Equally free to live in the image of God in which we are both supposedly made?

Back to my conversation last week. Of course gay people aren't equal human beings in the Church right now. And of course I support equal humanity with all that entails - because as an evangelical I know that the Bible tells me that anything else is is second best and leads to second class people. 

None of us want that.

Choice

With all that entails?

Equal is equal. If being made in God's image involves an understanding of being made for relationship and we invent restrictions for gay people on what those relationships might be, Equal is not Equal.

Yes, the Bible makes the example of marriage heterosexual, and all the positive Biblical role models of sexual relationships are heterosexual. Of course, all of the negative Biblical role models of sexual relationships are also heterosexual.

But now we get to make a choice: 

In a fallen world, an imperfect world, a world where straight people aren’t perfect and where gay people aren’t perfect either but where as a Church we want to help people live in God and in love, do we read a text like Mark 10.6-9 as an example or a prohibition? Is it inclusive or exclusive?

“At the beginning of creation God made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 

Does Jesus say marriage is a man and wife, and it is, and life and faithfulness, and companionship and love are the model and the goal and the joy, and they are - but in this world where gay people also love and live and want that faithfulness, companionship and joy, may we too equally share in this model of life? 

Or did Jesus say marriage is a man and a wife, and only a man and a wife, and don’t even think of asking about it if you don’t comply to this exclusive picture?

Example or prohibition. 

By early 2017 the House of Bishops Report ‘Marriage and Same Sex Relationships’ urges no change on traditional teaching on marriage - quoting this teaching and doing so in a prohibitionary way. So is that it? Is there only way to see these words?

We get to ask this question afresh on this issue. To make this choice anew here. Our parents didn’t get to do this because the world was different for them. When I was born, homosexuality was still illegal. Now we get to face this one without the spirit of that age, with open Bibles and open eyes and open hearts.

And where once the Church only had one answer, now at least there is the potential for variety. There is the possibility of difference, and not because the spirit of this age has infected some of us. Not because some of us are weak on Scripture. Not because some of us care deeply for folk we know and want them to have everything they want. But because on both sides of the debate we love Scripture, we love Jesus and we love people. And because it’s only fair to apply the same reading of Scripture we already offer to some folk to everyone, equally.

Because we are all, equally human. Made in God's image. Often needing to be re-made in that image. Always remarkable in that image. 

(Later)

A friend of mine posted about the CU in Oxford University today. We were on the student Exec that ran it, thirty years ago, and in our time we changed the constitution so that women and men were equal in leadership. Before us, there had to be a majority of men on the Exec, and the President had to be a man. 
We changed that.
And yet...
Today Lis posted that the OICCU (Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union) has just appointed its first woman president.

It's only taken thirty years.
If we'd had any idea, I have no idea how we would have coped. Thirty years before us it was the 1950s! 

I remember some of the arguments from those days. We were told (by peers, by older wiser Christian leaders within evangelicalism) that allowing women equality in leadership was putting ourselves onto a slippery slope leading who knows where.
Actually, I had something of that conversation today with my namesake over lunch at a pub before I knew this news. We agreed - there is a slope.

But it goes upwards.

Whenever we allow another person equality as a fellow human being, whenever we see them as being made in the image of God, whenever we show generosity, respect, love, and offer to do something that raises someone up (as opposed to restricting or lessening them) - we do a godly thing. Absolutely, this may challenge us. Absolutely, this may make life complicated at times.
But who said "good" and "easy" were always synonyms? I'm not finding that in red ink anywhere in my Bible...

Thirty years. Oh my.
And yet I recall the elation, the joy, the relief we felt after we cleared the last hurdle and won the final vote on changing that constitution. So what that it has taken a generation for our theology to become someone else's reality? 
It has happened. In the OICCU.

And as I turn back to the Church's debates on sexuality, I do so with a smile on my face. 
People are people. Made in the image of God, loved by God, equal in his God's sight. The slope is upwards and change - however long it may take - will come.
God is good.