NB: You can also listen to the talk here.

 

The following talk was given by David Ison, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, at the first Two:23 meeting on 24th November 2012:  

 

I’m glad to be here in order to be able to support you at the beginning of your new venture.

I also note the context of the text which gives your network its name, Hosea 2.23.  It comes near the beginning of the book where the prophet is acting out the unfaithfulness of the people of Israel to the Lord God, by getting together with a prostitute to have children, and to live through the infidelity that follows.  The whole point of the book is that the suffering you see the prophet acting out is a picture of the suffering love that God holds for his people.  God will never let his people go, even though he has been hurt by their lack of faithfulness; and God leads his people from disordered sexuality and worship to a place of security and love.

The theme of being made into a people who belong to God reappears in the New Testament in the second chapter of the first letter of Peter, where God’s action in Christ has been to bring together a diverse group of disciples to become one people and to receive God’s mercy.  And the point of that is not that they should just sit around and enjoy it, but that they should ‘proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light’.  As Jesus tells us, the measure we give is the measure we get, and love is given to us so that it may be shared.

But more of that later.  I thought I should begin by telling you a bit about why I’m here at all.  When I was young I had the topic of homosexuality all sorted, as a young fairly conservative evangelical should.  I knew some homosexual people, and ministered alongside them, and when I was at university as president of the Christian Union,  I even approached the Lesbian and Gay Society in order to have some dialogue with them, because there were some Christians involved in it too, and I thought it important that we should be open to others and oppose homophobia and discrimination, even if I couldn’t understand theologically quite what that would mean.

I left university, went to theological college, got married, had children, and embarked on a career as a Church of England priest, working in inner-city London and an outer housing estate in Coventry.  My formative experiences with regard to wider aspects of sexuality had to wait until after I’d moved to Exeter, where I was responsible for in-service training for the clergy of Devon.  It was the decision of General Synod to debate the Issues In Human Sexuality document, published in 1991, but not considered by Synod and commended to deaneries until 1997/8, that forced me to reconsider my somewhat complacent views on human sexuality.  In order to prepare clergy for the debate, I organised a training conference which included a retired Bishop who had done a lot of work with AIDS patients bringing two Christian gay men to speak, as well as a Christian sex therapist who disclosed at the conference that he too was gay.  I sat listening throughout the sessions with my head saying, “this is interesting”, and my guts saying, “I don’t really want to hear what I’m hearing, because if I do, I’m going to have to think differently about all of this.”

That particular piece of learning was reinforced by the experience of going to a number of deanery synods at their request to inform them about, and help them discuss, the Issues document.  My first synod was in Tawstock in the wilds of North Devon, where there was a group of people who were quite vocal about what the Bible said, and how I was helping to lead the Church astray.  There were also two old ladies on the front row who were saying to one another, “Well, I was just brought up to believe it was disgusting.”  I began to think that I wasn’t going to get out of there alive, until the rural dean spoke up and said that he had a very close friend, a wonderful priest and a godly man, whom he had recently discovered was a leading light in the gay liberation movement, and he now didn’t know what to think about it.

After a couple of similar experiences, I learned to begin the session by asking the members of the synod to remember the words of Jesus that we should deal with the plank in our own eye before looking at the specks in the eyes of others, and so to get into groups of four and tell each other about our past and present sexual practices, and how they made ourselves and others more or less holy in the sight of God.  You can imagine their reaction.  So I asked them why they didn’t want to do it, and they said, “Well, it’s private”, to which I respond that if they were prepared to talk about other people’s private lives, why weren’t they prepared to talk about their own, and indeed there might well be gay people in the room while they talk about sexuality.  It it was a fairly direct way of helping to change the terms of the discussion from something about gut reactions and intellectual positions to more of an encounter with people, although, for their own protection, I used written personal testimony rather than taking a gay person around with me, who would have been left horribly exposed.  I think there are still people in Devon who are convinced that I am both gay and a leading crusader for gay rights.

In Exeter, I was on the staff of the Cathedral, where, as with most cathedrals, there were a number of gay people, and we did some work on how we could walk together in our Christian discipleship.  When I went to Bradford, which is a Cathedral with an evangelical heritage, I had the experience at my first Christmas Day service of giving communion to a married couple who were a transsexual and a woman, for whom it was the first time that they had been out in public in that way together.  They became part of the Cathedral, and the congregation were fantastically accepting: I just had one man who came up to me after a few months, and asked whether what he thought was the case was the case, and when I told him it was, he thanked me and went away again, and that was that.  We also had some gay people as part of the congregation, and again, that congregation was wonderfully loving in a truly Christian way: it was simply not an issue, and at the request of the Bishop’s chaplain and after consultation with the Bishop, we were able to provide appropriate pastoral and spiritual support to a couple who were entering into a civil partnership.  It was thus a bit of a shock to come to St Paul’s and find myself thrown into questions about gay marriage in a very public way, rather than the pastoral and reflective mode with which we had been working.

So what’s a vision for the future for LGBT Christians in the church?  I want to suggest three particular angles on this.

The first is the call to courtesy and generosity.  The church at its extremes tends to lose sight of people and instead reduce them to issues or problems which can be stuffed into a particular box and given a particular label or answer.  In reality it’s personal encounter which enables real openness and appropriate change, whether that’s a change of attitude towards sexuality in theory, or, more simply, a willingness to accept others as they are, as people on a journey.  We need to have churches which are truly liberal and truly inclusive, which is to say that they bring together people of every opinion and background, as the body of Christ does across the world.  Churches are not places for the like minded, but places where we can learn from one another how to be different and yet united as disciples of Jesus Christ.

But that’s not easy.  It’s costly to be different, and to love others even when they don’t know what to make of you, or when they react with hostility because they feel threatened.  It’s being secure in the love of Christ that enables you to be secure in loving others, even when they are different from you; and it seems to me that generosity which springs from love is one of the greatest needs in our church today, whether it’s about LGBT issues or women bishops.  And, of course, as Jesus reminds us, it has to begin with you and me.  It’s no good complaining about a lack of generosity in others; much better to be generous to them, and allow them to find a quality of love through which God may be able to touch and change the hearts of those who find one another too difficult to live with.  My hope for 2.23 is that you will be able to support one another to build that quality of generous love which can help to change the hearts and lives of our churches, and of our brothers and sisters who find it hard to be generous towards you.

The second angle is about the need to be local, rather than central.  We are in an age of globalisation, where being different tends to be perceived more as a threat than an advantage, as local identities and old certainties are being eroded.  It’s important for society as well as for the church that we keep things local, so that human beings meet in communities of the diverse, rather than clustering in groups of the like minded.  That’s one of the wonderful gifts of the church: we don’t choose our fellow Christians; and it’s always sad to see a church which, deliberately or by accident, has narrowed its horizons and largely eradicated diversity, whether of age or gender, churchmanship or spirituality, race or sexuality, or any other form of difference.  I’m well aware of the difficulties faced by those who feel different from the majority in their church or local community.  But it’s precisely in that local interaction of difference that we discover more about ourselves and our own identity, as well as enabling others to be stretched as well, so that all of us can discover the riches of the creativity and love of God.

That again, it seems to me, is a good justification for the existence of Two:23.  It’s a way of enabling you to stay local, by providing appropriate support for the exploration and establishment of your identity as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual or straight disciple of Jesus Christ.  And remember that’s only one set of adjectives!  There is of course a danger that this particular set of adjectives becomes the primary definition of your identity as a disciple of Christ, simply because it’s the major focus for Two:23.  But there will be other adjectives and other issues which have been, are, or will be more important in forming your Christian identity, through which God will challenge and develop you.  It will I hope, be part of the nature of Two:23 to be both inclusive and challenging: a school for saints as much as a sofa for sinners.

And third, I think we need a proper eschatology of sexuality.  What I mean by that is that we need to look at sex in perspective, in the light of what we are called to become in Christ.  The single most important thing that I think Jesus said about sexuality was in passing, when he was rebuking the Sadducees for their inability to believe in the resurrection.  He makes the comment that there is no marriage in heaven, but that we are all like the angels.  I take that to mean that we are intended to love all people equally, and therefore that sexuality in this life is not simply a means of having children, nor is it an end in itself as if having “a significant other” is essential to being human.  In Christian understanding, sex is something which we will get beyond, and it’s there in order to enable us to learn what it is to love, so that our hearts may be enlarged to love – with agape love, not sexual love – as many people as we possibly can.  Partnership is one way of doing that, and living in community (whether in a family, or an intentional community, whether religious or otherwise) is another way.

What this means is that all of us are on a journey, and that includes our sexuality as well as everything else.  We are called to our end point in Christ, where we love as Christ loves us.  We will all start from slightly or very different places; our journeys may require different disciplines and commitments, though within the overall discipline of the sacrificial love of God in Christ; but if all of us, whether gay or straight or anything else, can accept that we are all growing together as we are being made into the likeness of Christ, then we can accept both our differences and our commonality and thereby treat each other with greater kindness and generosity.

How might this work out with the current hot topic of gay marriage?  As Christians, we need to challenge secular culture, whether gay or straight, with a Christian call to wholehearted commitment, exclusivity, and nurturing love.  One of the important contributions that gay Christians can make to social cohesion as well as to Christian witness is to uphold a sexually exclusive partnership as the only viable model for human flourishing, because it provides a secure context for total and vulnerable self-giving and self-discovery, and also because it allows agape love for others without the threat or the strings of erotic love, in contradiction to dysfunctional forms of sexuality.  Another contribution LGBT Christians can make is to look the other way: to challenge the prevalent Christian nuclear family culture by highlighting the Christian call to diversity and acceptance and the need for a breadth of friendship.  The myth of the significant other as being the key to all happiness needs to be exploded, and the dignity and opportunities of being single – as our Lord was – need to be affirmed, given that many of us for at least some of our lives will be single.

 

There are further questions about how, as Christians, we might think about the way we describe partnership, and the words that we use.  One of the problems the Church faces is that the words “marriage” and “blessing” are changing their meaning rapidly under the pressure of popular usage, in a way which could make the Church look foolishly out of touch.  I suspect that we need to be careful about how we use our adjectives: the assumption that marriage is marriage, and the same institution at all times and in all places, never was correct, but is being publicly questioned as perhaps never before.  The unqualified use of the word “marriage” is no longer working, because it means different things to different people.  What might we mean by Christian marriage, gay marriage, Christian gay marriage, or indeed Islamic or Jewish marriage?  They aren’t the same in practice.  And, as Christians, we can’t talk glibly about “Biblical marriage”, because polygamy is biblical.  This is still work in progress as far as the Church of England is concerned, and I’m waiting to see what the conclusions are.  What I have said, and believe, is that LGBT people need to be affirmed, and to be given the opportunity to experience the virtues of marriage; and that LGBT Christians should be able to put them within a Christian context, however the Church decides it may be able to do that.  And I also think that single people need affirming, as we can be whole people with or without a partner; and that the importance of childbearing and nurture within marriage also needs to be affirmed, remembering that many marriages cannot produce children, but that all marriages and partnerships are called to be nurturing of others.  God finds us as we are, and moves us on, whatever our sexuality.  The question is whether we are, or are not, becoming people of disinterested love.

I’ve already been giving you as a new organisation a number of tasks to undertake, even though it’s really none of my business!  As a good Anglican, I would see the ministry of Two:23 as one of being in the middle: that will inevitably be uncomfortable at times, but it’s such an important place to be, so that you can act as a bridge between people who are different.  Four obvious tasks from the centre will be:

• To enable churches which are gay-unfriendly to have a future in mission.  There are two dangers for such churches: one is that they become identified with particular sectors of British society which are ill at ease with LGBT people and so become captive to social prejudice, rather than challenging it in the name of Christ. The other danger is that they become increasingly irrelevant to most people and lose credibility in commending the gospel.  For you to be alongside such churches will be hard, but by God’s grace, you may enable constructive change to happen: and I can only point to my own experience to say how much in my own life I have learnt through the sufferings and struggles of Christian gay people.
• To enable all LGBT people to journey towards the kingdom of God.  Precisely because the Church can be so unfriendly and unaware, you will have a ministry in sharing the love of Christ around the tables of tax collectors and sinners.  It’s harder for people to dismiss the validity of Christian experience when they encounter it in people who are like themselves.
• To help slightly confused people like me, or even people prepared to admit that they are very confused, to work out what we really do think in relation to some of these very difficult issues around sexuality and Christian discipleship.
• To bear one another’s burdens.  We all need friends, and in particular, friends who we know can say in all integrity that they understand how it is for us.

My hope and prayer for you all is that you can find together a level of love, acceptance and understanding which will enable you to grow in Christ and to be a part of enabling the Church to become the body of Christ in its loving, its serving, and its worship: so that in the end, we may know all together in our diversity that we are God’s people, and that together we may say in Christ, “You are my God”.