Sermon 6 July 2008

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This is the text that I was using, based on the story of Isaac being found a wife in the second part of Genesis 24:

We are going back to the Old Testament soap opera this morning. I want to talk about the story of Isaac being found a wife by his father’s servant.

The story is this – the servant goes off to the old country. He parks his camels by a well and does a deal with God. If he asks a young woman for water and she offers to draw some for the camels too then, she is the one. She gets the nose ring, bracelets on her arms and gets carried off into the sunset to meet the man she will spend the rest of her life with who shoves her into his dead mother’s tent and climbs in himself.

It has to be said, it is a dating strategy that I have not yet tried.

I’m very conscious sometimes as I read the scriptures that I read them as a single person, and I sometimes wonder whether they were meant to be read by me. Having a partner seems to be the norm, the expectation, the rule, and that is not my experience of life. Is this faith for me, or is it bound up in being partnered?

People very rarely celebrate singleness in church. And yet I know that I am whole and believe that people can be whole if they are single or married or partnered or single again or whatever.

However, knowing that I am whole does not necessarily mean that I have not tried one or two dating strategies myself. One wonders, is there the perfect person out there who will make all things complete, wipe away every tear from the eye and always remember to put the rubbish out before I do.

(I’ve a feeling that the answer is probably no and I know that some married and partnered people still hope for the same years into a relationship!)

However, one sometimes dreams. But what to do? As I am without camels or servants, I am hardly in a position to try the biblical means of finding happiness that we have heard about in this morning’s reading.

I must try other strategies.

So what to do?

I’ve never placed a lonely hearts ad, but a while ago I worked out what it would say if I did.

Male 41. Own home and cathedral. Seeks similar. GSOH, obviously.

But where on earth should I post that advert?

However, even saying that, I know that it does not really represent my position. There are times when being single is just great. And times when it feels less so. And I do really believe that people can be whole, whatever their status.

So how do we go about these kind of negotiations if we are God’s people.

You see, I long for the day when we the nonsense about sexuality in the church dies down and we can actually talk about the quality of relationships.

The church is always said to be talking about “issues in human sexuality”. But there only ever seems to be one issue and I am weary of it.

What about the issues that really matter. Fidelity, love, passion, stability, excitement? What about the elements of love which affect us so deeply. The pain of unrequited love. The sadness that comes when a partner dies. The point when a marriage has died and people just have to walk from it for their own good and the good of those who are around them. When on earth are we going to start talking about those kind of things which affect us all, every one?

This Lambeth conference is going to resolve nothing if people go with nothing more to say about human relationships than to ask, “What causes people to be gay? Is it natural or not?” To ask such questions diminishes every one of us and stops us asking more holy questions about how to live in God’s presence and enjoy being who we are.

For goodness sake. It is time to talk about what can help people build relationships that are worth having. It is time to talk about making ceremonies that help people to tell the truth about their love in front of the God who loves them. It is time to start talking about what is good in people’s lives.

And time to be unashamed about finding that good in all kinds of place:

  • in the bible,
  • in people’s stories,
  • in fiction, in poetry
  • and in good old fashioned, traditional, orthodox common sense.

The values of human relationship which are worth fighting for are faithfulness, forgiveness, stability, love, passion, truth-telling, kindness, reconciliation and love.

And this nonsense chatter all over the church is distracting us from being able to tell the truth.

The truth this morning that I have to share is that whatever we can get out of the Old Testament soap opera, with all its camels is this. People have moved on. People don’t find partners that way. There are other ways of relating and thinking about human relationships in the bible which we also have to move on from and get on with the business of proclaiming holy, orthodox common sense.

It is time to talk the talk of people who know that God is good and know that God wants good things for us all.

These days, inspired by God’s holy spirit of common sense, we have turned our backs on a world order where women were objects to be stowed away on camels and taken off into the sunset to be the possession of a man they had never seen.

These days, the goal in human relationships is mutality. Our new wedding service takes as its starting point that the couples meet and marry as equals.

That is a departure from the kind of marriage that this morning’s reading told us about. That kind of wooing won’t do.

Respect, tenderness, mutuality and love. These are the things that nourish lasting love.

I’m glad we have changed our minds about marriage. We are inspired by scripture. Fascinated by scripture. We pray with scripture. We think about scripture.

And then we use our minds.

Holy common sense.

It is a gift from God. And it is a charism of the Holy Spirit that I want to pray into our wider Anglican Communion in these horrible times.

Holy common sense. A gift. A holy gift. A gift from the God who loves us. A gift from the God who wants every one of us to be content, inspired, whole and holy.

Comments

  1. Rosemary says

    Well, yes, the whole of the Old Testament is, in a way, about Jesus, but not, I think, in the way Peter is taking it. Peter is seeing it as a symbol or an allegory. That is, of course, how many of the early father’s read it, and it was (ironically) swept away as a style of interpretation by the reformers, especially the great Biblical scholar and biblical theologian, Luther. He brought in the interesting and serious question of ‘what did the original author mean by this piece, and if we take THAT seriously, how does it speak to us today.’ (though not in so many words, you understand. I am distilling)

    I think I would be inclined to say that one interesting thing about Rebekah is that at no point in any of the narratives about her is she anybody’s chattel. She chooses. She chooses to go on this huge adventure to a rich man in a strange land. She chooses to promote one son over the other. A formidable woman – and it all goes wrong when she chooses to be manipulative, instead of straight and honest. She moves away from the openness and honesty we see in Christ. She stops confronting, because male power blocks the way. It was never right (the writer plainly sees this, and the whole story of Jacob is how he suffers for this way of doing things). Given her situation it is profoundly understandable – an object lesson in how blocking the ability of women to act as equal partners in life is a wrong thing, which breeds trouble.

    So, yes, it is about Christ, in that it is his background, and speaks profoundly to and of him. But tangentially.

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