LAMBETH

The parables of Jesus have many surprises. Today's is no exception. Apparently there are no selective weedkillers in the Kingdom of Heaven. This is what he said:
Let both wheat and weeds grow together until the harvest. Mt 13 29

Unless you have been living at the bottom of a well you can't be unaware that the Archbishop of Canterbury has been under massive pressure and sometimes vicious attack. He has been called a heretic and a snake in the grass and a traitor. And that is by some fellow Bishops in the Anglican Communion.  The infighting behind the scenes at the Lambeth Conference has not been a pretty sight and not a good advertisement for Christianity.
What  is going on?

One interesting thing to notice is that Rowan Williams has been attacked by both conservative Christians and by Liberal Christians, by Evangelicals and by Catholics.. Poor man. He is  the cleverest, most learned, holy and gentle Bishop in the whole of the Anglican Communion. And yet many Christian people who  call themselves Anglicans are prepared to divide the Church rather than accept his leadership. What is going on?

Behind the scenes there has been a lot of unpleasant lobbying, politicking and struggles for power. I am told  that large sums of money have been offered and accepted by some of the protagonists. Some of the abuse has been truly shameful. Some have asserted that their opponents are in the grip of demons.

But behind all this distressing rubbish there are some profoundly important differences about the kind of church – the kind of Christianity – which we are to proclaim. Rather than call them Liberal and Conservative I prefer to find two different labels. Let's call them Script Christianity or Seed Christianity – or we might call them inclusive church, or exclusive church.

If we go right back to the New Testament we notice that exactly this tension divided the first Apostles of Jesus. Peter and Paul had a stand-up public row over the issue of the inclusion or exclusion of Gentiles from the Christian community.

 Peter believed that the Christians were a kind of Reformed Judaism. He believed that Gentile converts must keep all the Jewish regulations about food and purity and circumcision as well as a the Jewish moral laws. They were part of the Holy Scriptures, part of the ancient tradition handed down to the ancestors by God himself.. So he refused to sit down and eat with Gentile Christians.

Paul believed that what mattered was living in and with the Spirit of Jesus and responding to every new social and cultural situation with the free guidance of the Spirit. He said to Peter:  How can you exclude people who are showing manifest signs of God's Spirit in their lives and relationships?. They are living holy, joyful, loving lives. Peter responded by saying, How can you expect people to behave properly if they have thrown overboard all the moral rules and regulations given to us by God? Everything will get out of control. We need rules and these are God's rules.
You are playing fast and loose with Scripture. Paul said: you are refusing to respond to the Spirit.

The same tensions drove the bitter disputes at the time of the Reformation in the C16th. The tangle of religious and political arguments then was much more complicated. But the basic question was: Where does authority lie for the Christian believer and the church? Was it the Pope? Was it the Bible? Was it the free Spirit of God moving in the hearts of his people? Men and women went to the stake for their beliefs. Christians did shameful things to one another because they were so certain that they and they only had the truth.

The Church of England tried to steer a course through the middle of these perilous seas. We said, Yes,  we want the Scriptures to be our first port of call for authority or authenticity. But we also want to hang onto the developing traditions of  Christian teaching down the centuries; so we hung onto Bishops and priests and deacons. We hung onto the Creeds. We hung onto the sacraments. We studied the writings of the saints.  But we added one new source of authority – the indisputable evidence revealed by science and the lived experience of men and women – what is generally called rational truth.  And we left a window open, rather cautiously, to the Holy Spirit.

Holding these  authorities together in tension is not easy.  People long for certainty, absolute certainty. The Evangelicals said you had certainty  in the Bible. The Catholics said you had certainty in the Papacy. The Pentecostals said you had certainty in the gifts of the Spirit. The liberals said reason and experience hold the trump cards.

But the Church of England said, right from the start, Certainty is not available. We have to live with ambiguity- provisional approximations to the truth perhaps. If you have certainty you don't need faith. So Queen Elizabeth set up a large tent and invited all Christian people  to come in under its sheltering wings, but on two conditions. One was that you sit down at table and break bread together with those who you disagree with. The other was that you never threw out anyone who wanted to stay in. You stayed under one roof and went on arguing, in the belief that in the end God would show us a way through these intractable problems. His truth lies beyond our certainties.

There are some marriages which seem to thrive on arguments. The Church of England has been arguing for four hundred years. There are Anglican churches which are just like Calvinist chapels. There are others which are indistinguishable from Roman Catholic churches. Some charismatic churches are like the pentecostals. .They seem poles apart. But those poles are part of the Big Tent. Sometimes people can't bear to compromise with other people and have left. That is their absolute right and proivilege. But our Church in the main has remained faithful to its heritage of being both Catholic and Reformed, reasonable and traditional, even though that is sometimes confusing and contradictory. Sometimes it just looks indecisive and woolly. But on the night before he died Jesus prayed passionately that his disciples should maintain unity at all costs.

So what is going on at Lambeth? The old arguments are being fought over but with added venom and intolerance. The Evangelical wing says that we have to accept the unique, unquestionable and literal authority of Scripture. They want to weed out anyone who doesn't subscribe to their particular hard line interpretation of the Bible. That has the advantage of being clear, unambiguous and incisive. It makes many converts. But there is no room for anyone to disagree or to have doubts or ambiguities. Things are black and white . Sometimes it looks very like a sect.
 
The hardline Catholic view is that we can't do anything without the full agreement of the Papacy – so women priests and Bishops are impossible. You buy the whole Catholic package or you're out.
Meanwhile in the middle of all this turmoil stands Rowan Williams and with him almost all the English Bishops trying to persuade their enemies that the unity of the Church is  more important than anything else – and that for the fullness of the Gospel we need each other. He is imploring his fellow Bishops to stay together in charity in spite of their differences.

I said earlier on that I prefer to talk about Seed religion and Script religion, rather than about conservatives and liberals. St Paul believed passionately in sowing seeds. He broadcast the Gospel everywhere he went. What germinated was often surprising and novel even exotic. Peter believed in Script religion. He's the sort of gardener who likes his leeks to be in absolutely straight rows like soldiers on parade and all exactly the same size. There's not a weed in sight.

But the truth is we need both don't we? We need Paul's extravagant generosity and Peter's careful husbandry. We need to listen to people who disagree with us, to hear their stories and to look afresh at our own. Many people here are very uneasy about homosexuality perhaps on scriptural grounds.. But my own opinion was challenged and changed when I met a gay priest  who is one of the holiest, most inspiring and most effective pastors I have known. Jesus said, “By their fruits you shall know them.”. We must listen to the stories of those we distrust and dislike.

Where does Jesus stand in all this? Jesus is reported as saying, “Those who are not with me are against me.” But he also said, “Those who are not against me are with me.” If only he had said one or the other. It would make things so much simpler!

Was Jesus inclusive or exclusive? Well, if we take today's Gospel I think we can say that on balance he is for Seed Christianity. Just think about how many of his parables are about seeds. Yes, he certainly says we must respect the great religious traditions which we have inherited from the past. But for Jesus God is always sowing something new. Yes, there will be weeds. But the New Wine of the Gospel has to go into new bottles. And everything I read in the Gospel persuades me that Jesus reached out and embraced everyone who was willing to follow him. And his disciples argued about precedence all the way to Jerusalem. There he sat down to eat with sinners and was crucified for it.

And today's Gospel warns us specifically about trying to weed out those who disagree with us. The thing about tares and wheat is that they are virtually indistinguishable until the seed head begins to form. Don't go weeding out people you don't agree with because only God knows which is a weed and which is authentic wheat. And most of us are both. Thank God there are no selective weedkillers in the Kingdom of God.

There are some Christian people whose beliefs make me shudder. But provided they are prepared to stay in the big tent with me, sit down and eat with me, and listen to my story as carefully as I want to listen to theirs, I do not want to weed them out. There is an American Indian saying: “Do not try and kill your enemy. He may have something in him without which you cannot be whole.”
So as we come to kneel at the Lord's table and share his bread let us pray not just for ourselves and this community with all its differences and oddities, but for the world wide Anglican Communion with its bitter disagreements. And let us remember Peter and Paul who apparently fought each other bitterly but ended up hand in hand in the arena in Rome being killed for the Master they both served.