There's a wonderful sermon on one of my favourite passages of Scripture, Luke 18.9-19, over at Affirming Catholicism. It's by The Most Revd Carlos Touche-Porter, Presiding Bishop of La Iglesia Anglicana de Mexico & Bishop of Mexico.
In it he says:
'The story of the Pharisee and the tax collector is so well known to us that we risk missing its full force. It is an example of divine reversal: two men are contrasted not only by their behaviour but by the way each understands and describes himself. The judgement that is passed is based on self-assessment, not on the evaluation of another...
The Pharisee’s self-estimation is really a self-eulogy. While he may be living an upright life, he takes credit for his virtue and he claims superiority over others who may not be as compliant as he is. His idea of prayer is to offer God a list of all the things he’s against: extortion, injustice and adultery. He seems to be against everything and in favour of nothing.
The tax collector, on the other hand, acknowledges that justification comes from God. He is ashamed of what he has done, but he also knows what God is able to do in the face of his sinfulness and he asks for mercy...
A sad and shameful reality for the church is that many of her members have come to believe that being Christian means being against other people, or, to use the words of today’s Gospel, trusting in their own righteousness and despising others. They measure the world and those around them by their own standards rather than those of our loving and merciful God...
It is so easy for a tax collector to become one of the Pharisees, and to forget that, one day, we claimed and received God’s mercy. That same mercy we now deny others.
I believe that this is what’s behind our current problems in the Anglican Communion: many of the tax collectors of yesterday have become the Pharisees of today. They want today’s tax collectors excluded from the family of God and from the Lord’s table. They now deny others the same mercy and grace that was so freely given to them yesterday.
The faithful are being required not to associate with openly immoral church members (whatever that means), and I am afraid that the same is being required of Jesus; who, according to the Gospels, did exactly that; not one or seven times but seventy times seven. And recently, one province of our Communion has been brought to trial for trying to practice justice and inclusion for all; with actions, not words.
With all this in mind, it is now so easy for us to fall into despair, to lose hope and to conclude that there is no longer a future for the Anglican Communion or, at least, for us as members of it.
But that is a temptation that we can easily overcome by remembering the promise of our Lord Jesus Christ: “I will be with you always”. Or the words of Julian of Norwich: “God did not say: you will not be tested, you will not labour hard, you will not be troubled. But God did say: you will not be overcome”.
And finally, I would like to join my voice to that of Archbishop Terence Finlay of Canada, when reflecting on our current situation he wrote the following: “For a while the Anglican Communion will shudder like a great ship struggling through rough waters, but over time the Communion will find healing and reconciliation. We have been through rough waters before in the great controversies throughout our history. And although we’ll be a bit bruised and sore, I believe we will make it”.
Brothers and sisters, this is my prayer and my hope for our beloved Anglican Communion.'
What a man! How excellent it is to hear a voice not only of compassion (there are others preaching mercy, thank God), not only of deep Scriptural understanding (there are plenty of voices preaching from the Bible), but of profound hope. It is this hope, this mercy, and this willingness to do the hard and honest work of hermeneutics that has brought us through so many crises in our relatively short history, and has made the Anglican Church home for so many of today's "tax-collectors and sinners."
Given the choice, I think I'd rather be among the people Jesus hangs around with, than comfortable in my own righteousness...
3 comments:
Mike, from my own comment to this post at my blog:
Really. If we could move on to other things. There's is so much that is wrong in our societies and in the world that we should be working to change, in areas that involve war, torture, poverty, starvation, curable and preventable diseases, oppression, discrimination, I could go on and on, rather than prurient scrutiny of the private lives of good people.
Really. We should move on, but there are those who just won't let it go.
I believe that God will carry the Anglican Communion through this difficult time. Hope in God's mercy and prayers for ourselves to show mercy to all will lead us through the dark valley. I see light breaking through already. Those who are not willing to show mercy, but who are quite willing to exercise judgment are doing themselves in little by little.
Bishop Touche-Porter is a wise man.
I don't mean to push my blog, but I wanted to put my comment, which I thought was pertinent to your post, in its context.
Of course I didn't think you were "pushing [your] blog," Mimi! In fact you could push that post all you like around here - it's one of your best!
My point in quoting the good Bishop was not to add fuel to the controversy, if it needed any more, so much as to highlight his beautifully-phrased conclusion.
For all its creaking legal and political superstructure, for all its extreme adherents on either end of whichever spectrum you care to think of, the Anglican Communion is in the long run not only wonderfully resilient but wonderfully discerning. You are so right when you say that, "Hope in God's mercy and prayers for ourselves to show mercy to all will lead us through the dark valley. I see light breaking through already."
A-MEN!
Post a Comment