Sermon: Before Eames

I should like to have explored with you the parable of the unjust judge, another eloquent display of Luke’s skill as a storyteller. I would have linked this with the fact that tomorrow is St Luke’s Day, and invited you to share my gratitude for the wonderful New Testament legacy we have in the books we know as the third gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.

But tomorrow could also be a day on which to bury bad news. I mean that the Church of England, or rather the Anglican Communion, will be in the headlines again, following the long-awaited publication of the Eames Commission report. This body, let me remind you, chaired by the luckless Archbishop of Armagh, has been examining the implications for the Anglican Church of the consecration of Gene Robinson as an openly homosexual bishop in the USA. It has not been discussing those theological and ethical issues per se, rather, trying to explore how our communion, already put under great strain as a result of these decisions and reaction to them, could arrive at processes of decision-making, a common discipline that would both recognise the proper freedoms of provinces and dioceses in our church, but would also enable Anglicanism to hold together as a worldwide family of churches.

And if that were not enough, two weeks later the Rochester Report about women in the episcopate will be published, and this too will expose the tensions between the wings of our church. In both cases, the issue is of how we live together as a church: those on the one hand who believe that that gospel calls us, in the light of contemporary insights and knowledge, to think in fresh ways about human sexuality or the gender of ordained ministers with those on the other hand who argue that we are not free to modify teaching and practice beyond the historic mind of the church represented by the scriptures and catholic tradition.

Many people, egged on by the media, think they know what the Eames report is going to say, and are already taking up their positions. I am not going to second-guess its contents, not least because our Bishop is himself a member of the Commission and he must be the first to speak about it after tomorrow. I preached from this pulpit last summer about how I believe we ought to handle difference in the church, and this is not the time to reiterate those points. But I do want to speak about how we as Christians receive this report and handle its conclusions, because I believe there are difficult days ahead for our church, and that far from healing the divisions in our communion, it is likely that the report’s publication will provide yet another opportunity for opinion to become even more polarised.

The first thing I want to say is that we are living through a time at which our worldwide communion as Christians, our koinonia, is at real risk. I am not one of those who say that truth must at all times be subordinated to unity: there are occasions when speaking the truth in love leads to the parting of friends. But no-one could wish this for the Anglican Communion, which despite all its faults still holds out the wonderful vision of churches holding hands across the world, one in their love of God, their witness to the gospel, their struggle for peace and justice, their modelling of friendship between people of many different races, colours and backgrounds. Here in Durham, our link with the Diocese of Lesotho is a cherished symbol of north and south learning from each other, supporting each other in many rich and varied ways, not least through prayer.

There must be a presumption that however serious the matters that divide many American Christians from many in the developing world, our unity in Christ, based on generosity and sacrifice, must not be jeopardised. I do not want to be naïve about this. But I do believe that a quick solution, the kind of easy formula that masquerades as the answer to deep and complex questions, is at all costs to be avoided. I pray, though not altogether hopefully, that what the Commission invites us into is a patient process of discernment that will help all of us take the time we need to come to a mature understanding of a situation that is new to us. The desert fathers valued what they called diakrisis – the gift the Prayer Book collect calls ‘having a right judgment in all things’. It is a pastoral skill that avoids premature closure, rather, waits for the Spirit to inform mind and heart. There is a sensus fidelium that takes time to recognise. The report could help us in this. But it will require generosity and grace.

My second point is to offer a comment on what we say in the aftermath of tomorrow’s publication, and how we say it. I am speaking especially to those of you who belong to the Cathedral community, for cathedrals, being the public places that they are, can model for good or ill how others may take up this or any other major debate. It is often said that cathedrals can and should be prophetic places, blazing trails for truth and justice in ways not always open to parish churches. I sometimes get tired of being told to be prophetic: as John Habgood once said, it’s difficult to be prophetic when you see so many sides to a question. But the prophets are not the only tradition represented in the Hebrew Bible. Another insight is what we call the wisdom tradition: those who pondered, thought and reflected on the complexities of human life and interpreted its dilemmas in ways that not only helped Israel through times of crisis but also deeply enriched the New Testament church.

One of the insights of wisdom is both to know what we don’t know, and not to speak until the time is right. Perhaps wisdom is to recognise that what the church needs right now is not to raise the temperature of the debate but to lower it. We are, I am sure, going to hear a lot of rhetoric over the next few weeks and months, some of which will be so distasteful that we wonder how Christian lips could ever utter it. Perhaps our calling is to model a different way of holding this dialogue between people who hold their views passionately (and I am one of those). The first task of engaging with this report is surely to listen. It is important to remember that the Eames Report does not bring a process to an end, but takes it on a stage. Tomorrow we shall still be a communion that is making a journey through uncharted waters. We need to check our bearings, listen to what the day brings, listen too to our own selves, perhaps more divided than we publicly admit, so that when we are ready to speak, it is out of the abundance of the heart and not simply because the silence is too difficult to bear.

Wisdom, says the Hebrew Bible, is defined at its profoundest by our relationship with God. And this is my third point, where tomorrow’s news must be informed by today’s gospel reading. Jesus tells the parable of the unjust judge, he says, in order that we may pray and not lose heart. Discernment, having a right judgment, in the Christian spiritual tradition is always linked with prayer, waiting upon God, trying to discover his mysterious, often inscrutable, will and purpose. It is not an invitation to passivity or quietism to say that prayer is critical to this whole process we are now in. It is to say that it begins and ends and is inbreathed by prayer. Prayer is our vital breath. Today’s collect, asking that God’s Holy Spirit ‘may in all things direct and rule our hearts’ makes a good beginning for prayer. When the time is right, let us speak, and speak robustly, though always with love. But for now, and in these coming days, we need not to rush into speech but to seek God’s help, and to echo the prayer of our Lord before his passion, that we may be kept from the evil one