5 Epiphany 2023

Let us speak the truth… for we are members of one another.

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Once, when my brother Louis and I were young boys, he punched me, hard, on the arm, while we were sitting in the back seat of the car.

Louis is older than me, and so this kind of brother-on-brother abuse might seem expected, but it caught me completely off guard. He’d never done anything like that before, that I could remember, and so, pride and right shoulder smarting, I cried out to my mother, who was driving, ‘Ow! Louis hit me!’

‘Why did you hit your brother?’, my mother asked.

‘Because he wouldn’t stop talking!’ was Louis’ entirely accurate reply.

As a rule, my parents were not big ones for adjudicating arguments between us boys, opting instead for the threat that either we could work things out between us, or they would settle the matter in a way that neither of us would like.

In this instance, while my mother was in no way endorsing of violence, I *was* a very chatty little boy, and I think she could sympathise with my brothers’ having had quite enough of my going on and on and on and on, probably about what I was seeing outside the car window.  And, knowing my brother, generally a patient person, we probably did work it out.

One side-effect of this method of parenting was the deep solidarity that built up between Louis and me. Rather than taking sides in whatever argument we might have, my parents wanted us, if anything, to be united against them. Whatever our differing priorities, we should be as one regarding parental authority.

I am happy to say that Louis and I are still very close to this day, and that one outburst of brotherly violence was the one and only time I can remember us ‘fighting’ in any meaningful sense of the term.

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The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians is writing into a context of much deeper division than that experienced by the Shamel boys in their childhood, but his prescription for harmony is not entirely different.

Across the eastern Mediterranean world, as Christian communities sprang up and grew, the relationship between the Jewish inheritance of the Jesus movement and the Greek, gentile, context of the wider culture and world led inevitably to conflict both between more Jewish and more gentile members of the community and between the Jewish and Greek impulses within Christian thinking itself.

Where the Hebrew mindset was concerned with living in right relationship with God and with one another by means of the gift of the Law, the Greek imagination was concerned with living rightly in accord with philosophical traditions such as those of Epicurus and Zeno the Stoic.

For the writer of Ephesians, both the Hebrew concern for the Law and the Greek concern for philosophical Reason came ultimately under the judgement of the self-sacrificing love of Jesus Christ, who fulfils the Law and is revealed as the true end and goal of the pursuit of wisdom.

And so, when Ephesians exhorts its readers to put away falsehood, not to let the sun set on anger with one another, to speak only that which will build up rather than tearing down, he is directing a fractious, and sometimes fragile community to look to this fundamentally source and seat of unity: the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, which opens the way to a different way of life.

The community is to resolve its differences not for the sake of avoiding punishment, but so that its unity may become more visible, more palpable, better able to be an agent of transformation of a world suffering under the alienation and oppression of ignorance and sin.

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It will not have escaped many of you that this passage of the Bible speaks directly against what the writer calls ‘lusts’,

‘licentiousness’ and ‘impurity’.

Elsewhere in the Letter to the Ephesians, the writer instructs wives to be obedient to their husbands.

Throughout the generations, interpreters have used texts like these not to work for liberation from oppression but rather to reinforce it: to reinforce patriarchal structures of authority and discipline, on women, on anyone who doesn’t conform to a certain image of cis-gendered, heterosexual masculinity.

As I hope will be evident by the way that I am presenting this undeniable fact of the history of Christian teaching, I am not in sympathy with this line of interpretation.

But neither am I in sympathy with an attitude content to disregard the importance of the Bible for structuring the life of the Church and grounding Christian theological reflection on what makes for a good, full human life.

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As many of you will know, the synod of the Church of England will be meeting this week to discuss, among other things, the possibility of allowing clergy to perform weddings for same-sex couples, or, at the very least, to bless civil same-sex partnerships.

This is an issue of great pain and expectation. And now, more than ever, the Church would do well to heed the advice of Ephesians, by which all the rest of the letter ought to be understood: Let us speak the truth… for we are members of one another.

The Apostle Paul’s great insight, and the writer of Ephesians was almost certainly a disciple of Paul’s, is that we cannot do without one another, even when we disagree, even when we disagree deeply and sincerely.

This insight, I believe extends from Paul’s own history as a faithful student of Jewish Rabbinical teaching which is characterised, nearly as much as anything else, by its tolerance of and indeed glorying in disagreement. It is said that for any question of Torah, you will find *at least* as many opinions as you will find rabbis. And I believe that this is a lesson that Christians could learn from our jewish sisters and brothers. To find unity in disagreeing well, to speak truth remembering that we are diverse members of one body.

My own sympathies are with those in the synod of the C of E who are advocating for marriage equality and the recognition of the holiness of diverse expressions of love, as I understand this to be the most faithful reading of Scripture and the clearest image of the God I know and seek to serve. However, my prayers are with all who are striving to discern the truth of the Gospel for this time and for this generation, whether I agree with them or not. I pray that this might be a moment in which the Church can show the world something of what it is to disagree well.

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Now, to be fair, the Church has not covered itself in glory in this regard in the past, any more than most human institutions.

But, I hope, at its best, the Church is characterised by its knowledge that this is what it is called to be. And it is my hope that by disagreeing well, recognising ourselves in those with whom we hold deep disagreement, not only is it possible that a truth yet unimagined by some or by all might be discovered, but that in the process of this recognition, something of God might be revealed.

And if we learn anything from the witness of the Bible, indeed from the witness of many faiths from across the world, one does not encounter the divine and come away unchanged. Rather it is always a matter of liberation and the call to heal the world.