• Sermon for RSCM Music Sunday

    Here’s what I said on Sunday evening for the Royal School of Church Music – Music Sunday Massed Choirs Evensong

    Video available here.

    Just a few thoughts before our prayers – a few thoughts about what we are doing here tonight.

    I had it in mind to preach such simple things tonight. I was going to take as my starting place the story we heard of David playing his lyre to sooth Saul’s soul when Saul the King got crazy with his violent rages.

    My intention was to come up with a great paean of praise to music itself. For we do celebrate Music Sunday here.

    I was going simply to stand here and list the glories of the West End Festival that those of us who live in this city are enjoying and to sing the praises of the Royal School of Church Music under whose banner so many good things happen.

    I had it in mind to stand here like the conductor at the end of the Last Night of the Proms and to list the glories of our summer days. Of concerts and happenings and sung services and festival masses. And to cry for the glories of music, for music is inherently good.

    But something happened as I was sitting down to write this rhapsody of words in praise of music. (more…)

7 responses to “The Archbishop, the gays and their sins”

  1. fakepete Avatar
    fakepete

    Nicely put, he seems to feel entitled to freedom from criticism. It’s a censorious attitude that I thought the CoE put behind it when most of us learned to laugh at the Life of Brian and it is contradicted by the church’s own call to participation in democracy.

  2. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    The poor old Arch. He really is an old school establishment man who cant really understand where the deference has gone. The Green Report, the other Reports on the ‘future’ of the Church of England and the ‘Conversations’ all speak of a deeply controlling man who is deeply frustrated that there is no control to be had any more. When the split comes he will probably want to make what is left into a more confessional and defined group (the evangelicals have always wanted that) but I suspect the Church that will emerge will be more liberal than he likes even if it is outwardly more evangelical and enthusiast than the Church of England has been for a very long time

    1. fakepete Avatar
      fakepete

      @Andrew I’d switch that around. Justin Welby is someone who does not show deference to what has in Western society become The New Orthodoxy (definitions on a postcard please), this is why he provokes such puzzlement, and thus consternation and anger.

    2. Daniel Berry, NYC Avatar
      Daniel Berry, NYC

      Andrew, I don’t see how that can be, really: he hasn’t the pedigree to be “an old school establishment man.” He’s a late vocation who had been a high-power figure in the corporate world–meaning he’s undoubtedly accustomed to having the last word.

      As to his attitudes toward gay people, I’m disgusted with him and the many others who accept the natural sciences’ contradiction of bible, but just can’t bring themselves to the same place with the behavioral and social sciences, and even with medicine itself–ignoring along the way that homosexuality is found in upward of 450 animal species besides our own. Otherwise they seem perfectly comfortable with dispensing with the savagery found in much of “holy scripture.”

  3. Dharma Nicodemus Cuthbert Avatar

    I love the line “who am I to judge them for their sins, if they have sins” makes us seem angelic compared to those who have children. Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together. Does this mean that he is disagreeing with orthodoxy, and we are not sinning by being together.
    God bless all and may his words of love bring more, troubled, souls to him.

    1. JCF Avatar
      JCF

      “Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together.”

      I *think* you meant “according to false translations/interpretations of the bible…” (or should have meant).

      “Being together”: can we call sex, “sex”? If not, why not? [And can we call marital sex (same- or opposite-sex) “marital sex”?]

  4. Daniel Berry, NYC Avatar
    Daniel Berry, NYC

    best line for me:

    You say that stuff and you are going to get people observing that there’s a lot more archbishops who claim that gay people are their friends than gay people who claim archbishops are their friends.

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