Love that will not let me go
Simon is Rector of Holy Trinity and St Mary's, Guildford. He preached this sermon at a recent service to mark and celebrate the contribution LGBT+ people make to our churches. ‘I preached a very personal sermon', he writes, ‘which on reflection feels like my own response to the very limited outcomes of Living in Love and Faith’.
Readings: Genesis 32:22-32, 2 Corinthians 4:1-12
One of the things that growing up gay teaches you very quickly is that you are different. Our society has norms and expectations that are so natural to it that they become like breathing, almost unnoticeable. So when you experience to be somehow different, particularly something as intimate and personal as sexuality or gender identity, it’s something you cannot ignore. You start giving time to exploring, worrying about or, as many who are older will testify to, hiding the bit of you that doesn’t fit with the norm. The journey to coming out as LGBT+ is one that requires a great deal of thought, heart-searching, good timing, and courage. It is one that, to a greater or lesser extent, marks you out forever as different.
Not all of this is bad, however. In wanting to celebrate LGBT people in the life of the church, I want to be unequivocal about marking, not just the challenge of defining yourself against the norms of society, but the gift it brings. One of the things I am most grateful for in my own journey was the gift of having to work out my identity in a way that many of my straight friends did not. They did not have to think about who they were in quite the same way I did; that is not to say that being straight is a walk-in-the-park – of course not – there are times when most of us have to think about who we are. But being straight is to not have the same opportunity – at least in the same way – to think about who we are as people. I give thanks for the chance my sexuality has given me to do this.
Part of that wrestling was to have to find a way of being both Christian and gay. This added a further complication to the whole affair, because – as many of us know to our cost – the Church has never been a reliable friend to LGBT+ people, or often to anyone who is different from the cultural norms of the culture in which the Church finds itself. Too often, the Church has accepted the norms of the society in which it is situated. And you don’t need to be LGBT+ to know that. Slaves (and we should mention their descendants too), women, and the divorced – to name but three other groups – have all had to experience the discontinuity between the Church of which they are a part and the example of Jesus Christ whom the Church is called to follow. For many of us, this discontinuity is acute because we have come to trust and believe in the Lord Jesus, and we have experienced the profound love and acceptance that comes from God in ways that have given us a deep sense of belonging to God and others, and yet we find ourselves excluded, or barely tolerated, by the wider Church, sometimes at the local level, but almost always in official teaching.
As a result, I believe that one of the gifts of being LGBT+ in the church is a vocational gift; it’s the profound discipleship matter of bearing witness to the all-embracing love of God to other Christians who have yet to discover it. In a famous sermon for the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in Southwark Cathedral in 1996, the then Bishop of Guildford, John Gladwin – the first bishop ever to preach at a Cathedral service for gay people – asked this very singular question: “How did we come to be here? Why is it that a company of gay and lesbian people find themselves, against all the odds, to be Christians and members of God's Holy Church? Clearly that did not happen by human design.” Those words opened my eyes to the fact that God was calling me, and those like me, as well as our trans sisters and brothers, to be witnesses to a church not yet fully able to comprehend the wideness of God’s mercy and the depth of God’s love.
Two biblical texts have informed my response, and neither of them are entirely comfortable. In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, the apostle makes a defence of his ministry because some in Corinth appear to think him unworthy to be an apostle. Knowing himself to be called by God, and chosen by God, however, he persists. Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart, he says. The vocation of every Christian is the call to follow Christ. Vocation isn’t an exclusive concept for the ordained; it’s the fundamental call of Jesus for all to follow him. Paul continues to believe himself called by God to a particular ministry, and he will fulfil that ministry despite the critics, the nay-sayers, and those who will say, “by what right do you preach the Gospel?”
Friends, the right we have to proclaim the wideness and depths of God’s love comes from the same mercy of God as was given to St Paul. We too are called to bear witness to Christ, whenever the critics say to us, “by what right do you preach the Gospel?”, however hard the Church makes it for us to belong This is not an easy path to walk, for none of us like to be told that we are not proper Christians by our fellow Christians, or that our so-called moral defects make us unworthy or unqualified to minister. But, notice that Paul sees this too. He talks in this passage about the hardships he faces for his faithfulness: But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. Paul goes so far as to realise that, just as Jesus was killed and then raised to life, so the same power of death and resurrection is at work in him and in his ministry. On the one hand, he experiences the cross…afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down…always carrying in the body the death of Jesus; but on the other hand, he also knows the resurrection…not crushed, not driven to despair, not forsaken, not destroyed…so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. This dynamic of the experience of death and resurrection is, in my experience, the common one of LGBT+ Christians. We seek to be faithful to Christ, to bear witness to the wideness of God’s mercy and love, but all too often we find ourselves walking the way of the Cross because of the Church, listening to modern-day Caiaphas’s, perhaps dressed in episcopal purple, who never say but paraphrase the High Priest’s words, “It is better for these people to be excluded…than for the whole church to be divided”.
So we know about death in the life of the church; but yet we also know about life. We know ourselves loved and accepted by God, we find allies among the church – and sometimes beyond it – who give us bread for the journey and support in the struggle. LGBT+ Christians are privileged – if that is the right word – to understand the depths of Paul’s understanding of Jesus and ministry, “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.”
And that means that, however hard it may be, however understandable it is that some choose to walk away from the Church in despair, some of us are not yet able or ready to do that. For we can see in the Gospel a promise of new and better life, not just for LGBT+ Christians, but for the wider Church, whose understanding of the Gospel, to use Paul’s word, is “veiled”, who cannot see the fulness of what he calls “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.”
Which brings me to the second reading, the story of Jacob wrestling with God at the ford of Jabbok. One or two of you may know that this reading is significant to me and became something of a defining moment when I quoted it in what was the most important speech I ever gave in my sixteen years in the General Synod. In 2017, faced with the Bishops attempting to shut down any progress on LGBT inclusion, the clergy decided that this was unacceptable, and we managed to defeat the Bishops in a powerful debate. In that context, when powerful conservative voices aligned with the Bishops to try and achieve this goal, I spoke of this passage coming to me in a flash of inspiration during worship, something that is rarely the way I experience God speak. The speech was well-received, so much so that a friend recently told me that the Archbishop of York quoted me in a Presidential Address at General Synod this July, nine years after I gave it. Here is what Stephen said, “I remember – and will always remember - Simon Butler’s speech in a previous Quinquennium, quoting Jacob’s words as he wrestled with the angel, that he would not let go until he had been blessed.” “I will not let you go until you bless me,” said Jacob to God, as they wrestle through the night. This verse spoke to me then, and to many others, of the challenge that we have, not of wrestling with God, although that is the initial context of the passage, but of wrestling with a Church that cannot accept us in the way that God does.
I cannot say I blame or want to condemn those who have walked away from the Church because of its institutional and individual acts of homophobia; it truly can be a toxic environment, and I find myself wary of gathering in spaces where the language of welcome is not truly lived out. I would always want to encourage my LGBT+ friends to look under the bonnet of a local church before believing the words, “all are welcome.” But for those of us who do find themselves able to remain, this verse seems to encapsulate the calling we have which is to go on holding on, to go on being faithful, to go on loving the Church, through gritted teeth sometimes, even as it sometimes seems to want to throw us to the ground. “I will not let you go until you bless me”
There are very few texts in the Christian tradition that speak of this wrestling and this sense that God holds us when despair and darkness comes, even from the Church. One person who I think would understand is the Scottish Presbyterian minister George Matheson. Blind from the age of nineteen, he was a prolific author and hymn writer, and once preached to Queen Victoria at Balmoral. On the evening of his sister’s wedding he recalled his own experience of being engaged when, on discovering her future husband had gone blind, his fiancée ended their relationship because she couldn’t imagine a life with a blind husband. Aged forty now, and reminded by his sister’s wedding the following day, Matheson penned a hymn that reminded him of God’s love that would not let him go in the darkest and most challenging times, and which speaks of God’s persistent and ongoing love even as we wrestle with God and his church. Matheson wrote, I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any retouching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other verses I have ever written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high. Perhaps, as we listen to the choir sing his words* we can think of how God’s love clings to us, even as we sometimes, or perhaps if we are LGBT+, often, feel tempted by circumstance, or sometimes even our fellow Christians, to abandon the Church, or even God, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. Amen.
*Matheson's hymn, O Love that will not let me go
© Canon Simon Butler, Rector, Holy Trinity & St Mary’s, Guildford
