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Born that man no more may die

“I always see the death’s head lurking. I could be sitting at Madison Square Garden at the most exciting basketball game, and they’re cheering and everything is thrilling, and one of the players is doing something very beautiful — and my thought will be, ‘He’s only twenty-eight years old and I only wish he could savor this moment in some way, because, you know, this is as good as it’s going to get for him’ ... The fundamental thing behind all motivation and all activity is the constant struggle against annihilation and against death. It’s absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless. As Camus wrote, it’s not only that he dies or that man dies, but that you struggle to do a work of art that will last and then realize that the universe itself is not going to exist after a period of time. Until those issues are resolved within each person — religiously or psychologically or existentially — the social and political issues will never be resolved, except in a slapdash way. They’ll never be resolved as long as people wake up each day and worry that they’re finite, that they don’t know why they’re here or where they’re going or when they’re going to die.” (Attrib. Woody Allen, in Ortlund, Raymond, Whoredom: God’s Unfaithful Wife in Biblical Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996, fn 69 165).

 *******************************

Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace,
Hail, the Sun of Righteousness
Light and life to all He brings,
Risen with healing in His Wings.
Mild, He lays His Glory by,
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.

Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the New-born king!”

(Charles Wesley et al., ‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing’)

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“God sent into the world a unique person - neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.” (HM the Queen)

********************

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death — that is, the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (Heb 2:14-15)

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Opportunities and Perils for the Church of England

This month's 'Anglican Update' for Evangelicals Now:

As never before in my own lifetime, the Church of England is at a crossroads moment of great opportunity and yet great peril.

I have mentioned before in these columns the opinion of a colleague on the Crown Nominations Commission that the senior ministers of the Anglican Church are “staring into the abyss” when it comes to declining numbers.

Consequently, a new breed of bishops is emerging who are ambitious for church growth. At the same time, existing bishops and their dioceses are being required to come up with proposals to reverse the decline.

Just a month ago in our own diocese of Chelmsford, I thus found myself for the first time sitting listening to a bishop, who had just come from speaking at an evangelistic event himself, telling a gathered group of his clergy how to do evangelism.

Wherever this is happening, it clearly presents even the most conservative of Evangelical Anglicans with the opportunity for involvement not just in the evangelism itself but in the structures of their diocese.

Some may find this extraordinary — not that a bishop should be doing such a thing, but that it took so long for it to happen. Surely the Church of England has had Evangelical bishops before now? And indeed it has, but sadly they have almost to a man failed to produce a more ‘evangelizing’ denomination. In our case, that has been achieved by a man from (formally speaking) a Liberal-Catholic tradition.

And therein lies the peril, for at the same time as these developments are taking place, the Church is under immense pressure, both from without and within, to change its teaching and practice on human sexuality.

Early in December there were headline reports about the Church’s refusal to allow the registering of civil partnerships on its premises. But in a subsequent interview on Radio 4’s Sunday programme, the Bishop of Burnley made it clear that this prohibition could be overturned by the General Synod.

At present that would not happen, but already on the bench of bishops there are several, including some self-identified as Evangelicals, who would not uphold orthodox teaching. Moreover, the House of Bishops itself has recently set up a ‘review group’ to look at the whole issue of civil partnerships and specifically to consider whether clergy in such partnerships could be made bishops.

Furthermore, back in July the House announced the commencement of “further work on the Church of England’s approach to human sexuality more generally”. It would be surprising if none of the ‘unorthodox’ bishops found themselves involved in these processes and (sadly) just as surprising if the orthodox stood up to them robustly.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of churches are openly identifying themselves as ‘inclusive’ regarding sexuality. Doubtless the pressures for this come from the clergy. The laity are generally more traditionalist. But as society as a whole has shifted ground on the subject, so it is becoming easier for Liberal clergy to persuade their congregations to accept the changes. The significance of this will be seen, no doubt, in Synod elections a few years hence.

The orthodox therefore face a difficult challenge. On the one hand, it is vital that they do not withdraw from the institution just at the point where the whole issue of gospel proclamation can be brought to the fore. At the same time, they must develop and make the case for sexual orthodoxy and, if necessary, must be willing to confront even those bishops who are leading the evangelistic charge in their dioceses.

These are difficult days indeed, but in God’s plans nothing that hasn’t been thought of already.

John Richardson

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Her Majesty nails it again

For the last few years, the Queen's Christmas speech has been far and away one of the clearest 'religious' messages of the season -- far better than any of the clerical offerings. This year seemed to be even more so. Is she trying to tell us something?

Here's the last bit, but the whole is worth reading:

God sent into the world a unique person - neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive.

Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God's love.

In the last verse of this beautiful carol, O Little Town Of Bethlehem, there's a prayer:

O Holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us we pray.
Cast out our sin
And enter in.
Be born in us today.

It is my prayer that on this Christmas day we might all find room in our lives for the message of the angels and for the love of God through Christ our Lord.


I wish you all a very happy Christmas.

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Our Carol Services Sermon

What do the following pairs of people have in common?

             John F Kennedy and C S Lewis
Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett
Christopher Hitchens and John Hucklesby

The answer is that each died within a few hours of the other.

John F Kennedy, the 35^th president of the United States, died the same day as C S Lewis, a Cambridge academic famous for his Christian writings and broadcasts.

Michael Jackson, one of the all-time greats in the world of pop music, died the same day as Farah Fawcett, whom some of us will remember as a member of the original Charlie’s Angels.

And Christopher Hitchens was a writer, journalist and militant atheist who died on Thursday last week. But who, you may be asking, was John Hucklesby?

Well, as some of you know, John was a long-time member of the congregation at St Peter’s, Ugley. A fervent, believer, John was a man with a passion for God and a deep love of his Saviour.

Christopher Hitchens died a week ago on Thursday, John Hucklesby died the following Friday morning, and I couldn’t help remarking on the circumstances of such different men departing this world so close to one another.

Following his death, on Radio 4’s Saturday Live a resident poet wrote this obituary for Christopher Hitchens:

So long then Mr Hitchens,
Your perfect rage still burning bright.
Off to meet your maker,
Or maybe not, if you were right.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Christopher Hitchens was either right or he was wrong. Either there is a God or there is not. There is no ‘in between’ on this one, where we can agree to differ and both be right in our own way.

If he was right, and there is not, then in a sense he wins. But it is a Pyrrhic victory, for if there is no God we are all ultimately losers in the game of life. The one thing in that case that Christopher Hitchens will never be able to say to anyone is, “I told you so.”

But what if he was wrong? What if there is a God, and on Thursday last week Christopher Hitchens indeed went to meet his maker?

You see it isn’t quite right to describe Christopher Hitchens as an atheist. He described himself as an anti-theist. It wasn’t that he disbelieved in God, the way I disbelieve in leprechauns. He raged against God.

He said, for example, that heaven was like a kind of cosmic North Korea. And if God did exist, said Hitchens, heaven would be hell for him.

By contrast, when my wife Alison and I saw John Hucklesby on Thursday night, we found a man ready for heaven and rejoicing at the thought of going to be with his Lord. I prayed for him, and he prayed for me. In fact I especially asked him to pray for what I’d be saying to you now, so if you don’t like it blame him!

Now the news of the deaths of these two men, the atheist and the Christian, produced in me joy on the one hand and sorrow on the other.

But which is which? Whose death do you think gives me joy and whose gives me sorrow?

Well of course is it John Hucklesby’s death that gives me joy.

On Friday morning I wrote on Facebook (as you do these days) a brief note about John’s passing, which ended with words from the bidding prayer at the original service of nine lessons and carols: “Today,” I said, “he rejoices ‘upon another shore, and in a greater light’.”

There can be no sorrow in that. But what of Christopher Hitchens? If he was right, he is nowhere. If he was wrong, he is somewhere, but he didn’t want to be in heaven, so where else could he be? Either way, one can only feel sorrow.

You see, in the end, you can only be one thing or the other. The agnostic must make their mind up and become a believer or an unbeliever, and the atheist will, in the nature of things, become an anti-theist in the face of belief

Christopher Hitchens once wrote a book titled God is not Great, which might sound a bit like me writing a book called Leprechauns are Lying about the Crock of Gold at the End of the Rainbow. But I wouldn’t do that because I really don’t believe in leprechauns, whereas Hitchens, who professed not to believe in God, somehow seemed to feel that the God who didn’t exist was nevertheless in some real way evil.

And so if heaven was a kind of hell for him then hell would be a kind of heaven, where he could go on rejecting God forever. And that is a terrible thought!

But why is John Hucklesby with is Lord today? Certainly not because he was a good man — certainly not in his view. And not because he was a better man than Christopher Hitchens — in fact they both drank like fish and smoked like chimneys, which in both cases probably hastened their death.

Some time ago, however, John told me that the passage he wanted me to preach on at his funeral was the parable of the workers in the vineyard.

This was a story Jesus told about a man who went out early in the morning to hire some labourers to work in his vineyard. And throughout the day he kept going back to hire more labourers. He did this at the third hour, the sixth hour and the ninth hour.

Finally, at the eleventh hour he picked up some men who’d been waiting all day. These would have been the least competent, the least able of the lot, and they only had one hour’s work ahead of them.

When it came time to pay them, the men hired first got a day’s wage, as agreed. But then those who’d been hired at the third hour also got a full day’s wage, as did those hired at the sixth and ninth hours.

Finally, those hired at the eleventh hour came to get their wages, and they got a full days wage as well, at which point the men who’d worked all day began to complain — “Why should they get the same as us?”

The vineyard owner’s reply was simple: “It’s my money and my choice to be generous with it. Why should you complain?”

John understood the parable. He knew he was a latecomer — someone who had only come to know Christ at the eleventh hour. And therefore he knew that his reward of heaven was a result of God’s generosity towards him, not his service of God.

In other words, he understood grace — God’s riches, at Christ’s expense.

Contrast this with what Christopher Hitchens thought about God. He once said that believers have all their work ahead of them when they die — praising the dictator God who made them. John Hucklesby believed he had all the joy ahead of him — praising the Saviour God who saved him.

I’ll let you decided who’s right. And I have to let you decide which you want to be.

All I will say is that you can either have a slightly cynical Christmas or a very merry one. It’s up to you.

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Removing XP Security 2012

(Update: Although what I posted below was the method I used to resolve this issue, I have found a link to Norton/Symantec offering a free tool to remove this program. You may like to try that first. Note that if you enter Windows Task Manager, you may find the XP Security program running as wdt.exe, which I found I could safely stop. The trouble is, it will reload when you try to get online. You need to close all the 'fake' windows to get past it and browse the internet. Good luck!)

There aren't many people who deserve to be hung up by their goolies, but the devisers of XP Security 2012 certainly come into that category.

Somehow my wife managed to install their scam software on her half of the desktop PC this morning and it has taken me an hour plus to remove it. In a moment, I'll tell you how (as usual the time went in finding the solution, not applying it).

For those of you unfamiliar with the product, XP Security 2012 flashes up a series of fake 'security alerts' on your screen. These, however, look incredibly like the 'real thing' from Microsoft - so much so that, despite being a long-term PC user, and innately suspicious, even I was nearly fooled.

The programme will tell you that your firewall and automatic updates are turned off (which they were, but I suspect the programme had done that itself.) It even runs a fake 'scan' of your computer in front of your eyes, telling you that all sorts of worms, viruses and trojans are installed.

If you will only register and buy the full version, XP Security 2012 will get rid of them for you.

The trouble is, the whole thing is a fake, a scam, a con-trick, and undoubtedly illegal, given that the software adjusts the settings on your computer to do things you don't want it to do - so that, for example, every internet-using programme you try to open is blocked. Moreover, I suspect that some of the advertised removal systems may just be trying to take advantage of the problem.

(Incidentally, if you run Windows Task Manager [ctrl] [alt] [del] I think you'll find the offending .exe file running as Wdt.exe. Closing it gets rid of the problem temporarily, but it will keep 'reactivating', for example if you open a browser.)
So what to do? In my case I simply used a registry restoration point. Click [Help], search for 'system restore' then selext [Run the System Restore Wizard] and let the wizard do the rest. I went back two days to be on the safe side. You could try [Run System Restore in safe mode] as an alternative. You should be able to undo this if it doesn't work, and please be aware as always I'm not guaranteeing the safety or security of this - it just worked for me is all.

However, I then used 'Iolo System Mechanic', which I have on my machine, to 'repair' the registry and to delete all cached internet files and temporary windows files in the hope this might have got rid of the problem files which must have been downloaded somewhere.

I had to reboot the system a couple of times to get everything back to as near normal as possible, but it all seems OK now.

If anyone else has found this approach works, or if they know any undetected hazards, please post a comment.

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Is 'touching wood' a religious gesture?

I ask this because a short while ago I received a steroid injection for a painful shoulder joint. One of the medical practitioners involved explained that there were very few risks involved (I had to sign a consent form) - it could lead to an infection, but "touch wood" that wouldn't happen.

Having frequently commented on this in sermons, I felt obliged to point out that the wood god wasn't going to help either them or me, but that I'd every confidence in the procedure.

As far as I'm concerned, that's an end to the matter. But in these days of the litigious mentality which sees the need for recourse everywhere to rules and regulations to uphold 'my right' not to be offended (or is it just 'my right' to take offence?), I couldn't help wryly asking what might have happened had - perish the thought - the same person appealed for help at that moment to the God of Israel rather than the demiurge of the nearby bookcase.

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An Episcopalian review of 'A Strategy that Changes the Denomination'

Thanks to Philip Wainwright for the review and Bruce Robison for the original tip off, who also blogs here and here.

Evangelicals and the Transformation of the Episcopal Church
[...]
Richardson’s book may not attract much interest at the highest level of the Church of England, or even of the power structures of contemporary evangelicalism, but I pray that it will be read by others, especially in the Episcopal Church, and will one day be looked back on with the same respect with which Richardson describes Towards the Conversion of England. It’s not expensive. Order one for yourself here, and one for someone you know in the Episcopal Church.

Read the rest here.


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Canadian gay culture - one view from the inside

Looking for something else online, I came across this article written in September this year, from a Canadian newspaper. Just occasionally it helps to get an 'insider's view' of something. It probably won't cheer up your Christmas, but it is worth a read. 'Poignant' is probably the word.

"Life After Death" by Michael Harris

... My peers and I are supposed to be “over” our gayness. It’s unfashionable to have gay-related “issues.” Many of us consider the gay newspaper Xtra passé. Even the gay bars are tired spaces, for the most part, and younger crowds prefer one-off parties at weird hotel bars that aren’t explicitly queer.

I partake in all this, and enjoy it. But the impulse to do away with the ghetto and focus instead on social autonomy is also a flawed, neo-liberal ambition. We like to believe we are masters of our own fate (even as proponents of “free will” have a hard time explaining why poor people consistently produce poor children). Culture matters, actually, and nowhere is this more evident than in HIV test reports. Aboriginals comprise about 4 percent of Canada’s population, for example, but make up 6 to 12 percent of new cases. Race even affects the way people become infected. Aboriginals most often become positive via intravenous drug use; among Latin Americans and Asians, it’s mainly gay sex that leads to infection. Among the black population, heterosexual contact is overwhelmingly the cause. HIV preys on a culture’s fault lines. Like many diseases (tuberculosis in Buenos Aires, say), it is a litmus test for class distinction.

Single gay men in Canada are up to six times more likely than our heterosexual counterparts to kill ourselves. We tend to smoke more, drink more, use more illicit drugs. In a 2003 clinical guide, Dr. Allan Peterkin and Dr. Cathy Risdon estimated that the lifespan of Canadian gay men is between twenty to thirty years less than the average.
 
HIV, then, is a rude reminder that our civil rights movement is incomplete. How can I feel like an equal when gay men are damned to abbreviated lives? ...

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What they're saying about 'A Strategy that Changes the Denomination'

I particularly like this endorsement from Sam Norton at the Elizaphanian blog:

"I've recently read John Richardson's 'A Strategy that Changes the Denomination' which I thought was rather good."

The rest of the post (about Rev. and other matters) is worth reading too.


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Rev., the Happy Ending?

Earlier today I posted about the BBC sitcom  Rev. At least, it is called a sitcom, but there didn't seem to be much 'com' in episode 6.

There is, however, a seventh episode scheduled for next week, so perhaps all is going to come good in time for Christmas (in our time, if not theirs).

That being the case, what will happen?

For Adam and Alex, the answer's obvious - she gets pregnant. That would be nice for them, and no one could begrudge their 'success'. Plus we'd no longer have to watch clips of them having desperate sex.

For Adam personally (given his apparent pledge), giving up the booze and cigarettes would also be a plus (and would make kissing him a nicer experience for Alex - see above). Everyone wins.

Alcoholic unemployed Colin is another easy one. Drying out. Getting a job (and keeping it). Sorted.

Adoha needs a man who is not called Adam Smallbone. I doubt whether it should be Colin and it is scarcely conceivable that it could be Mick unless his schizophrenia clears up.

The latter seemed to be making progress in a slightly sideways manner in an earlier episode, but I doubt whether he is yet husband material. However, if Santa brings him a new toothbrush he might reap the benefits in other ways.

Headmistress Ellie could probably also do with a bloke. She had one a couple of episodes ago, but he got killed in a traffic collision (fans of Hot Fuzz please note, not a 'road accident'). Which reminds me, there don't seem to be too many stable relationships around St Saviour's in the Marsh.

Nigel, the Reader, desperately wanted to be a priest in episode 6, but that ain't gonna happen even in fiction (is it?). And apparently he's got a girlfriend. He does, however, spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around in St Saviour's itself, which is a pretty sad place, so perhaps 'a life' would be best for him.

The problematic one is gay Archdeacon Robert. He's been getting more 'openly' so since the second series began (I preferred it when it was obvious but un-stated - much more realistic in fact). What he wanted in episode 6 was to be made a bishop. What I wanted (until episode 6 where he was outed) was to see his expenses sheet, given his propensity for driving (or indeed in episode 6 just sitting) around in black cabs. What will the writers have under the tree for him? Unless the series heads off into some parallel universe, preferment will have to wait (at least until series 3). Of all the characters, oddly he's the one I could most see undergoing a profound spiritual transformation, so let's leave him with that and let's leave you, the reader, to decide what it would mean.


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'Rev.', the Sad Heart of Anglicanism

Having heartily disliked the BCC TV series Rev. the first time around, but aware of (and indeed encouraged by) some people who thought it was great, I have assiduously watched the second series up to the sixth episode (I gather there is one more scheduled — a ‘Christmas special’ perhaps?).

I am still polarized from its admirers. One reviewer in the Telegraph described it as having done “much to prove that sitcoms can ... still make you gag on your risotto with laughter” and I’m with him up to the last two words. However, I’m a bit clearer as to why.

The reason I dislike Rev. so much is, I suspect, that like Father Ted, it has actually captured quite well something of its subject matter. In the case of the latter, it is the madness of certain aspects of Roman spirituality and culture. The presentation, however, is frequently hilarious, regardless of the ‘situation’ bit of the ‘sitcom’.

Of course this can sometimes be painful, such as the excruciating build up to Ted greeting Richard Wilson (playing himself) with his Victor Meldrew “I don’t believe it” catch-phrase. You know its going to happen, but part of you is saying, “Stop!” Nevertheless, the release evokes laughter, not pity.

Rev. also captures an element of reality. Indeed, there was a rather neat coincidence in that the day I watched the episode involving the ‘exorcism’, I’d been asked to deal with something not dissimilar locally. (Interestingly, when I shared this with a clergyman, now retired, who used to work in the patch close to that covered by Rev. he told me it happened “all the time”.)

Unlike Father Ted, however, Rev. is shot through with pathos. At one level this simply means they are different and there is no harm in that. But the pathos of Rev. derives from the lives of those it depicts, and in many ways they quite accurately represent the sadness at the heart of so much Anglicanism. And yes, this makes me uncomfortable, but it is the discomfort of someone watching a fictional account of something painful they see in reality — and there is surely no harm in that either.

So we have the vicar’s wife committed to her husband but resentful of his job (though isn’t that true of other wives competing with other demanding careers?). We have the tiny congregation in the vast building (though contrast this with an Anglican church I know in east London which draws a multi-racial congregation of almost three hundred every Sunday). There are the vicarage ‘callers’ after handouts (a bane of urban ministry). And at the centre of it all, there is Tom Hollander’s well-meaning Rev Adam Smallbone.

Indeed the key to his character is the phrase ‘well-meaning’, for although he means well and tries his best, Smallbone is as lost as anyone else. He talks to God (in a whimsical way) but he leads a god-forsaken existence.

What keeps him in the job? Bearing in mind he is a fictional creation, nevertheless one would hazard a guess that it is his basic decency and a faith in something. But behind this there is an enormous amount of ‘force of habit’. This is what he does, he doesn’t know how to do anything else and for the time being there is (just) enough money left in the coffers to keep paying him to do it.

As he said in the latest episode, he feels he ought to be a priest. But if you asked him whether he thought anyone else should be a Christian there’d be, one suspects, a significant pause before you got an answer, and it wouldn’t be an unqualified ‘yes’.

Smallbone is definitely not an evangelical — not in the sense that he doesn’t hold certain doctrines, or sing certain songs, or have certain social attitudes, but in the sense that he has no word from God and no announcement to make to the world.

At the end of the most recent episode, there was a kind of Blackadder Goes Forth moment, as the lead characters each took a seat in Smallbone’s church, separated by miles of pews and lost in their own isolation — the benign but confused vicar and his loyal but semi-detached wife, the ambitious gay Archdeacon ‘outed’ as he was being interviewed for preferment, the lay reader who had tried to blackmail the aforementioned Archdeacon (who went along with it for his own career’s sake) but who was subsequently turned down for the priesthood, and the alcoholic ‘hanger-on’ fired from his latest job (where he had been cheating his employer).

As they gather, in the background Nina Simone sings “we have each other, and our love will see us through”, courtesy of an old lady we see Smallbone visiting in the opening scene.

What these people need, of course, is a saviour. The tragedy for them, and for many in the real-life Church of England, is that they are cut off from him by the very situation in which they find themselves in the church.

John Richardson
16 December 2011

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Putting things in perspective

If I’ve done my sums right:

There are 31,536,000 seconds per year.

According to modern cosmological theory, the universe is 13,500,000,000 years old.

So since ‘time’ began, there have been 425,736,000,000,000,000 seconds.

According to Prof Brian Cox, “As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe … life, as we know it, is only possible for one thousandth of a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billionth of a percent.”

That is to say,
1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th
of its total duration.

The shortest period of time possible is reckoned to be a Planck Moment which is 1/10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second.

Since the Big Bang, there have therefore been
4,257,360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Planck Moments.

Thus, according to these figures, if the percentage of the total life of the Universe during which life is possible were expressed as a fraction of time since the Big Bang until now, it would last approximately 0.000000000000000000000000000043 of a Planck Moment. Give or take.

( I’m preaching on Ecclesiastes at the weekend, which I think is a great book for putting life in perspective.)

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For Magazines: Why not civil partnerships in Anglican churches?

As previously, this has been kept to a length and style hopefully suited for parish magazines and the like. The article is about 600 words. If you use it, please give appropriate credits.

*****************************
Why not civil partnerships in Anglican churches? (By Rev John Richardson)

To answer this question we must first venture into territory unfamiliar to all but a very few.

 Most people imagine that this is simply a matter of ‘inclusion’, allowing the ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ minority to enjoy the privileges of the ‘straight’ majority. Church ceremonies, they believe, should be open to everyone, and indeed it is the government’s clear intention that this should be so.

But as experts in this field are well aware, things are far from being that straightforward. One such is Professor Adrian Thatcher, a Research Fellow in Applied Theology at the University of Exeter, and a strong advocate of change in church policy.

In a paper presented to the 2011 ‘Inclusive Church’ conference, he wrote as follows:

... there are other sexualities than straight and gay. Intersex, bisexual and transgender people, are generally excluded from the rigid and inadequate frameworks within which the Church discusses sexuality ...

And he added,

... sexual inclusiveness will not be complete until they too feel wholly affirmed as members of the Body of Christ. (‘Gender and the Gospel’, Nov 2011, p1)

What Thatcher says about the Church, however, is clearly the intention of others for society in general. For them, the idea that the world divides into either ‘straight’ or ‘gay and lesbian’ is already outmoded. Instead, human sexuality has a multitude of expressions.

According to Thatcher, “new research in Classics, New Testament Studies, Medical History and Queer Theory” are revolutionizing what has until now been a “sterile theological discourse”.

And if you’ve never heard of Queer Theory, you really don’t understand the current debate.

The fact is that in the long term the aim is not simply the inclusion of people in the existing institution of marriage but to go on broadening the patterns of relationships society accepts and endorses. Marriage, Thatcher notes, “is a flexible institution that has incorporated many changes”. The only question is “whether marriage can accommodate the change that some same-sex partners want” (p14). If not, then presumably other relationships will be have to be found.

It is against this background that we must understand the position of the Church of England. For Anglicans, marriage is not a “flexible” institution but a divinely ordered one, which ultimately reflects the relationship between God and his people.

What makes a marriage ‘marriage’ is two things: covenant and sex.

Where there is no covenant — no promise ‘to have and to hold ... till death us do part’ — there is either promiscuity (expressed in the prevalence of sex outside marriage) or widespread unfaithfulness (leading to divorce and marital breakdown).

Within the marital covenant, however, sexual activity is properly channelled — to bearing children and building love.

But as even Adrian Thatcher recognizes, sex is inextricably linked with reproduction: “Beings who reproduce,” he writes, “need to be sexed”, meaning they must have one of the two genders (p9, his emphasis). Thus although health issues and age may impose limits on fertility, ‘sexual’ intercourse is intercourse between two people of opposite sexes. ‘Same-sex’ sex, by contrast, is a contradiction in terms.

The Church of England has therefore taken the view that it will only recognize and bless ‘opposite sex’ unions as having the status of marriage. And insofar as civil partnerships are already widely treated as ‘gay marriage’ (as any follower of Coronation Street will know), it would thus be inappropriate for Anglican ministers to conduct them in church.

Ultimately, therefore, those who question the Church’s stance need to ask where they themselves would draw the line. The answer matters not just to us but to the future of our society.

(John Richardson blogs as The Ugley Vicar)

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30% off 'A Strategy that Changes the Denomination"

"[An] excellent and thought-provoking book. It ought to be read and pondered by all C of E evangelicals." John Pearce, former Rector of St Anne, Limehouse.

Lulu.com are offering a special deal on books until Wednesday (ie tomorrow!).

Entering the code "WINTERSAVEUK305" at the checkout will entitle you to a discount of 30%, up to a total saving of £100.

Click here to purchase or review.

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Give £10 to buy a Christmas meal for a homeless person

An appeal to donate £10 to enable a homeless person to enjoy a Christmas dinner has been launched by Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford. (Shown right with HARP chef, Amanda Luxton.)

Southend's Homeless Action Resource Project aims to provide up to 700 meals for the needy.

The Bishop said: "As Christmas approaches and the nights turn cold, I would like you to think for a moment about those who do not have a home or job, or support of a family and who may well be sleeping on the streets. "HARP in Southend provides many thousands of hot meals to the homeless every year."

Read more and follow link to donate here.

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Seriously insane

As someone with no head for heights, I am especially fascinated by this video. You can get the general idea early on and then skip a bit, but don't miss the end!

I couldn't help wondering what the guy's pulse rate was. I notice he didn't wear a helmet, presumably because if anything went wrong it wasn't going to do more than help them find his head afterwards.

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