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Lord of the Shepherds and The Sheep

Sermon

This weekend Deacons and Priests are being ordained to work as Ministers in the "Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church" but some Bishops will feel unable to ordain women as priests, not because they do not lead holy lives - otherwise they could not be Deacons - but because there is a doubt whether they are fit to act on our behalf at the Lord's Table.

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, in the very place where our Lord and Saviour gave his life for us, some 300 bishops have declared their "orthodoxy", calling for a new Reformation in language, unfortunately reminiscent of Luther in its violence if not its vision. What they have to say is important because if you add those not in Jerusalem who are opposed to women priests and bishops on "orthodox" grounds, more than half of the bishops of the Anglican Communion think that many of their flocks - many of us here this evening - are not orthodox.

It is therefore appropriate that our readings deal with shepherds, a traditional term applied to Bishops. Chapter 34 of Ezekiel is one of his more lucid passages, warning us that shepherds do not always act faithfully, that they do not always conform to the almost romantic view of them which combines echoes of the Lucan nativity with Western pastoral tradition; and the passage from John in which Peter is invited to be a shepherd, is one of the most harrowing accounts of self realisation in the whole of Scripture.

It might, then, be good to remember the kind of shepherds which Ezekiel and John had in mind. They were not the Jewish counterpart of nymphs, living an idyllic life, anticipating the promise of a rose-decked cottage and the comforts of an ample bosom. Nice girls did not marry shepherds. They were ritually unclean, landless outcasts. Neither did they drive their plump flocks, assisted by lovable dogs, from one lush pasture to another; they led their scrawny charges across barren wastes, as lonely as the blades of grass which they sought.

This is not to say that I think that our shepherds, our Bishops should not live in physical comfort, that they should give up their palaces. This would, in any case, simply be a token gesture to satisfy the mean rather than to feed the hungry; but we do need to ask ourselves what they are for without questioning individual integrity and commitment.

To begin to answer this question we need to go back to the ultra-pragmatic Queen Elizabeth I who articulated Jesus' principle that she did not want a window into the souls of other people. Whatever the Anglican Church was supposed to be it was not supposed to be Roman Catholic. Neither, as it turned out not much later, was it supposed to be Puritan. The Church was a channel through which, with the minimum of hierarchical interposition, we could conduct our personal relationships with God. That very Protestant insight, perhaps paradoxically, resides within the core of my Catholicism. We did not cut ourselves adrift from Rome and resist Geneva to be embraced by Sydney or Lagos, nor even to grant Rome a veto over our proceedings. Yet our Bishops have shown a growing inclination not to act as instruments of unity but to be advocates for their individual point of view. It is fair enough that every Bishop should have an individual stance on matters of Scripture and doctrine but it does not follow either that this should be aggregated into a hydra-like, collective Papacy or that those who disagree with a Bishop should be thought unorthodox. The purpose of doctrine is to use the best metaphors it can find to give a helpful shape to our understanding of the mystery of God for the primary purpose of assisting each of us in forming and sustaining our personal relationship with God. The same applies to our understanding of scripture for, being an account of the dialogue between God and people, it is our primary source for the shaping of that relationship. B

We do not, therefore live holy lives because we are instructed by doctrine or the Bible; we live holy lives because that is the only condition in which we are fit to pursue our relationship with God, not as a matter of obedience but of love understood through conscience. Obedience is usually invoked by people who know what they want us to do rather more clearly than they know what God wants them to do.

In the context of our current Anglican turmoils, therefore, Bishops ought to be doing more leading and less driving, more persuading and less haranguing, more synthesising and less dividing. They might, too, accord Archbishop Rowan the respect of understanding his frequently stated view that what we do and how we do it are the key markers of our Christianity, not the settlement of a narrow and artificially neat theological package which marginalises any of God's pilgrim people. If we can talk to people of other Christian denominations, why cannot we Anglicans talk to each other?

In the end, as I have said, theology is a series of metaphors about God; and there really is no point in falling out over metaphors. The least satisfying metaphor, to my mind, is the phrase "God wants". As creatures created to choose it is an act of cowardice to fall back on such a flawed metaphor. God, inasmuch as God can be said to want anything, wants us to love God, the purpose for which we were created, both directly and through loving each other. It is hard to see how banning people who feel they have a call to Preside at the Eucharist because they are women or gay can be understood as an act of love. Love is not imposing ourselves, no matter how virtuous our outlook or noble our qualities, love is creating space in which others can choose to love. As sheep we need that space which it is the duty of our shepherds to create. They might argue that there are occasions when we need to be led into the fold for our own good; but to be permanently confined for our own good, or somebody else's good, is a form of imprisonment.

In drawing these sermons to a close, let me remind us very briefly of our journey. In the first sermon I warned us against creating false dichotomies as we are creatures of the Creator who is Lord of All. In the second I sketched the need both for restraint in drawing apparently obvious conclusions from Scripture and the need for a renewal of our Eucharistic commitment so that we may open our hearts in humility and fellowship to Word and Sacrament. And in this final sermon I have warned against doctrinal obsession and imposition. Looked at through the eyes of those we say we wish to bring to Christ because our identifying characteristic, as made in God's image, is love, our disputes appear to be trivial and arcane in the face of a world in which many people suffer from a spiritual debility, from a lack of nourishment which it is our duty to provide. to be "catholic" means to be embracing not internally consistent; our imperfection lies not in our diversity but in our exclusivity.

What makes us a "Holy, Catholic and apostolic Church" is not the Credal formulae - of which that is one - but our struggles in a Corporate, Christian context to know and serve God in love and sacrifice, sustained by the animation of Holy Scripture and by the perpetuation of the incarnate Christ in the Eucharist, so that we may, having brought the good news to others in our speech and in our actions, be enfolded back into the infinite love out of which we were born.

Prayers

Can: Lord of the Shepherds and the Sheep
Can: Lead us into open pastures

Lord of the Shepherds and the Sheep, we thank you for the Church which is the Sacramental gift of your Son: for teachers and learners; for the certain and the uncertain; for the safe and the struggling; for the leader and the servant. Help us to play our parts as members of the Royal Priesthood.