August 2008

Is anyone actually following the Lambeth Conference? After a while – a very short while – I find that yet another archbishop talking about sex-and-the-bible loses traction. But the video clips (Episcopal Life Online) are a different story: there you discover that the eminent person quoted by the BBC or The Times is not particularly articulate or profound, just a sweet old duffer with a bad haircut. You realize that the pithy sound bite was carefully excised from a web of woolly thinking. And you also occasionally glimpse, behind the bluster and bravado, a hesitancy and uncertainty and, too often, fear. One Archbishop rabbits on for twenty minutes before finally admitting that basically he is just embarrassed to be an Anglican in an overwhelmingly hostile Islamic culture. “That’s why I am here - because we are called ‘infidel’ by the Islamic world!” And suddenly it all becomes very human and sad and understandable.

We are embedded in a culture formed by the civil rights movement, by the women’s movement and gay liberation, newly conscious of global warming and our carbon footprint, while much of the world, enveloped by poverty, hunger, and disease, lives under Sharia law. At Lambeth, all the currents swirling through the world converge, and men and women try to step outside the different cultures that have formed them, and fashion something new and vivacious and refreshing.

Like them, every one of us is born a member of several households, households of race and ethnicity and nationality, of class and politics, households of family, past and present, and ahousehold of religion, and every one of those households carries with it its own history, its own expectations, and often its own traditional set of victims. Jesus had no household of his own – foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head – and he still invites his disciples to leave their households, to walk away from all those inherited feuds and fears and targets, so as to see with fresh eyes and new hearts.

Once we have set foot outside the peoples and places that have formed us, and often deformed us, and once we have begun to see ourselves as members of this new humanity, burnt with the fire of Baptism and emerging as new creations, then we can never again truly, wholeheartedly belong to any household, except the household of God. That’s why St Paul anticipates the collapse of all categories that divide – Jew and Greek, slave and free, even male and female – because all of these groups define themselves, in part, in terms of who and what they are not, over and against someone else, whereas we reside in the endless and eternal hospitality of our God.

I believe that our bishops will build at Lambeth a new household, that they will discover with delight that no category speaks their truth entirely, and that their spirits already overlap the boundaries that have been created. I don’t expect problems to disappear, but simply the fascination with scandal to diminish as they become excited by possibilities for good. We could ask no better for ourselves.

TPG+

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