How fast is change possible?

 

The English societal cultural shift towards the acceptance of homosexual sexual activity and then of same-sex marriage has been historically rapid.  Homosexual sexual activity was still a criminal offence in my lifetime (not decriminalised until 1967) and fresh Government restrictions preventing schools and local authorities promoting a homosexual lifestyle were being introduced after I was ordained (1988).  It is striking that progress culminating in legalising same-sex marriage was then achieved by 2013 – the same political party which legislated against promotion of a ‘pretended family relationship’ in 1988 legislated to establish a real family relationship just twenty-five years later.

Now, ten years later, those members of the Church of England’s ‘House of Bishops’ who want to follow this through are in a trap.

First, our doctrinal limits are hard to pin down.  These often have to be deduced from what authorised liturgy (especially the 1662 Book of Common Prayer) and our Canons (a rule book much more limited in size than, say, the very substantial code of the Catholic Church) say.  But it is clear that marriage is explicitly referred to in both as being between a man and a woman.

Secondly, our ability to express fresh developments is circumscribed.  Changes to authorised liturgy or to Canons can only be made by consensual agreement in the General Synod.  The working definition of such consensus is that a majority is needed of two thirds in each of the Synod’s three ‘Houses’ (bishops, clergy and lay people voting separately).  This is the reason, for example, agreement to ordain women as priests and then as bishops came much later in England than in, for example, the Episcopal Church in the United States.

So even if a majority of the members of the House of Bishops have come to believe that homosexual sexual relations are not inherently sinful, that same-sex marriages are a welcome development, and it is politically expedient to progress in speaking and acting on these beliefs (which are, incidentally, three quite different things), they could not begin to act on these convictions by attempting new authorised liturgy or changing the Canons whilst they know the level of consensus does not (yet) exist in all three Houses.

Some voices urge strongly a move towards equal marriage celebrated in church – what the state has been doing for the last decade and some other Christian denominations churches are also now doing.  Some voices urge strongly an explicit recommitment to the position that any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage is sinful – the teaching of the church for most of its history.  The House of Bishops latest move is seen by some to be an attempt to split the difference between these two irreconcilable positions – proposing new liturgy to ask a blessing on those who have entered into same sex civil marriage but not proposing any move towards having such marriages take place in church. 

Actually the trapped House of Bishops may simply be moving as far as it can.  There is provision in the Canons which allows bishops to commend liturgy for situations in which no authorised liturgy exists - but such commended liturgy cannot be ‘contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter’.  This is what they are doing - although it remains an open question as to how many Christian men or women who have entered into legal civil same-sex marriage will want to seek such a blessing  which, when you look through them, studiously avoid mentioning that such a marriage exists or is possible.

They cannot, as far as I can see, do any more.  This dismays those who wish they would - it flummoxes both Christians in faithful same-sex unions and those in wider more accepting English society.  It delights those who wish they wouldn’t – many believing that the General Synod’s approach to over whelming consensus is an important safeguard against fashion or liberalism.  It is simply what it is - a church which, when it does change, for good or ill, does so slowly.

I mentioned the ordination of women.  I might have it in mind because the official cycle of daily Bible readings brought me to read 1 Corinthians 11 at Morning Prayer today – Paul spelling out that it is self evident to him (in his reading of scripture, reason and tradition) that it is inappropriate for women to pray with their hair uncovered.   Anyway, I’ve just looked things up.  Anglican women were being ordained priest in Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the United States in the 1970s, but, nearly forty years later, 36% of the members of the House of Laity of the General Synod were voting successfully in 2012 to prevent their ordination as bishops.

Meanwhile, I was given a bulb and some instructions by one of Deborah’s friends when I moved house at the end of September.  There has been a lot of change in the four months since and something spectacular is about to happen.

What are we after?

 

What are you looking for?  We were reminded on Sunday that, in John’s Gospel, these are Jesus’ first words: ti zeteite (John 1.38).  What are you after?  Do you know what you want?  Would you recognise it if you found it?

Perhaps the Gospel would be differently encountered not simply as a section of the Bible, nor as a particular biographical sketch, nor as a distinctive theological treatise, but as a separate epic poem entitled What are you looking for?

Towards the death-resurrection climax of the poem the words re-echo.  First those who arrest Jesus and then Mary at the empty tomb are asked Who are you looking for?  This is tina zetite (who rather than what) and then tina zeties (singular rather than plural).

Even at the climax, looking for a rebel to detain rather than for bread, life and light, or for a dead body to anoint rather than for truth, vine and way?

Perhaps I am reading too much into this - certainly the several commentaries on John which have survived my recent retirement down-sizing purge don’t highlight this.

But John the poem-writer had just had John the baptiser say he did not know Jesus until he found him Spirit-touched and Spirit-touching (John 1.34).  Short of that experience, every Gospel-poem moment is charged with Can you begin to know what you might be encountering here?

Meanwhile, here are the Red Arrows practicing over Lincoln - they’ve been particularly active over the last couple of days.

And with it, deep sadness today learning that Traidcraft is going into administration.  My wife Deborah had been active in it all the way from its beginning in 1979 (when she was an undergraduate), attentive to its restructuring and hopes forty years later in 2018/19 (towards the end of her life).

Covid and the subsequent economic climate, the most recent surges in energy and transport costs, and now tightness in consumer spending and unreliability in postal deliveries, are doing for many less vulnerable businesses, and have done for it.

Perhaps its legacy is the culture change of which it has been such an important part, but I grieve for the small suppliers who have now lost a rare outlet.

An obscure note

 

I was aware that weddings which take place in Lincoln Cathedral were recorded in the registers of St Mary Magdalene’s church, the parish church which almost abuts the wall around the Cathedral close.  I know this simply because my own wedding is so recorded.

The reason is that the Cathedral, unlike some others, is neither a parish church nor a ‘peculiar’ (that is, territory which does not fall within any parish), so weddings taking place there are taking place within St Mary Magdalene’s parish. 

Actually, the parish boundary runs through the Cathedral, so weddings in the retrochoir at the west end of the Cathedral were recorded in the registers of St Peter-in-Eastgate.

What I had not realised is that the same thing applies to burials.  Part of the Cathedral grounds was actually treated as the parish churchyard.  I was told this when I spotted that a Victorian Alderman is commemorated both on a memorial in St Mary Magdalene’s (which says he was a regular worshipper there) and on a grave stone close to the Cathedral’s  Galilee porch (where he is buried).

But the biggest surprise was then being told rule seems also to apply to burials in the Cathedral’s cloister garth (the grass area within the cloisters).  So I was shown the page which includes the burial of Bishop Edward King there in 1910.  The signature in the right hand column is that of the then Archbishop of Canterbury.

As always, clicking on the picture brings it up bigger.

Greetwell Quarry

 

My Boxing Day walk drew my attention to the way an earlier industrial intrusion into Greetwell parish was not the Lincoln bypass but a Victorian ironstone quarry.  I’d be unaware of it even when living less than a mile from it in 1994-1999.  So walking on New Year’s Day took me all around the scrub and overgrown land until reaching this extensive quarry wall.  The low afternoon late December sun came through and brightened the honey coloured surface.

Bronze Age further away

 

Still in the Bronze Age, and fascinated by the long anticipated report of the seventeen tons of cargo from a ship wrecked off what is now Uluburun, Turkiye in about 1320 BC.  This Mediterranean coastal trade is the background to all the stories over the alleged fifteen generations (perhaps half a millennium) from Abraham to Solomon. 

The tin on board had come two thousand miles from mines well west of the Caspian Sea and must have crossed modern Turkmenistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria to loaded aboard in Haifa.  There was ten times as much copper, so exactly the proportion needed for making bronze.

There were a hundred and fifty Canaanite amphora with foodstuff like olives and tree resin for making fragrant oils.  Prodigious quantities of murex shells for making purple dye.  Ingots of glass in colours like cobalt blue which could be melted to create glassware.

It has taken me back to the rare Amarna Letters, records from Egyptian court and diplomatic correspondence around 1345 BC, almost precisely the same time.  One had a request from exactly the coast of the shipwreck to exchange a similar range of goods including copper, oil and timber.  Others speak of tribute and mutual gifts from royal daughters to lapus lazuli which would have had to be brought from Afghanisatan.

The letters evidence a range of city states and larger empires, some treated as subservient and others as equal partners, many pleading for assistance as attacked by neighbours and external invaders.  One comes from the guard of the gates of Gaza and Joppa recalling being a young man brought to Egypt where he had guarded the palace gates.

And, oh, how the temptation has always been to use all these rare sources simply to secure the historicity of the biblical narratives - the internet in particular being a trap in which impartial academic analysis is sometimes indistinguishable from partial fundamentalist confirmation bias.   But these two sources give sheer richness in filling in a general background of the trade routes and conflicts in what we read.

From Abraham’s at first finding Canaan famine ridden and travelling straight on to Egypt, to Solomon calling in favours from neighbouring kings to supply timber for building the temple, via Joseph abducted to Egypt but finding a role in the palace there, the Amarna letters and, now, the shipwreck’s cargo, spell out a vibrant Bronze Age context.

The temple’s curtain used blue, purple and red thread, all among the dyes in the shipwreck.  The ‘Habiru’ in the letters are tantalisingly either the Hebrews or generally bandits ranging across areas including those Joshua’s genocides traversed.  And so it goes on.

This time, going back to it all, it is the subservient language of Abi-Milki, overlord of Tyre, which tingles my spine.  Generally the letters are deeply grovelling, the senders describing themselves in standard forms such as ‘dirt beneath your feet, the mire on which you tread’ (bowing seven time and seven times - just possibly proverbially echoed in Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness?).  But some of his particular language could be set out as if half forgotten verses of the Psalms:

My lord’s... words give life and prosperity:

to all lands his power gives peace.

...  He thunders down from heaven:

the earth trembles before him.

...  He who listens to the king his lord:

and serves him with love,

...  a good word from the mouth of the lord:

gives him life.

If he heeds not the commands of his lord:

his city will fall, his house perish.   

Meanwhile, the picture is from my Boxing Day walk and is a hamlet an hour east of here; remote, yet now still within earshot of the city's new eastern bypass; Greetwell's eleventh century church, abandoned mediaeval village and Jacobian manor.