Who are we to hinder God? The command to inclusive love
The Rector of Liverpool and friends hold flowers spelling out ‘Liverpool Loves You’ at the city’s parish church on Saturday 14th May, in front of the iconic Liver Building and a flagpole flying the Progress Pride flag. PHOTO: Rian Bailey-Weir
A SERMON preached at St Dunstan’s Liverpool on the 15th May 2022, the day after controversial US evangelist Franklin Graham came to Liverpool, by Steven Shakespeare, author of several books including Prayers For An Inclusive Church, and long-term supporter of our first Open Table community in the city.
Readings: Acts 11.1-18 & John 13.31-35
‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
Yesterday, there was an event around Liverpool Parish Church called Liverpool Loves You. The occasion for it was the arrival in Liverpool of Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham. The son has continued his father’s work, drawing big crowds to his evangelistic meetings, and held one such in Liverpool as part of his God Loves You tour.
The Liverpool Loves You event was a response to what Graham has said about homosexuality: that it is a sin, an abomination. He has also spoken in support of so-called ‘conversion therapy’, the pseudo-scientific practice (condemned by mainstream churches and clinical practitioners) which tries to make gay people straight – and he even compared it to conversion to Christianity.
I don’t want to go into the detail of Franklin Graham’s own statements, which are easily available. And I’m delighted that activists in the church have publicly offered an inclusive Christian witness in response.
But I do want to talk about the underlying issues: the nature of love, the role of Scripture, the importance of conversion.
From the point of view of Graham, Christians must follow the teaching of the Bible. And the Bible clearly states that homosexual practice is sinful. His charge is that Christians who affirm same-sex relationships are putting the authority of their own experience - and their own cultural biases - over the authority of the Word of God. I imagine he would say that, where we do use Scripture - appealing to the loving welcome of God, for example - then we are only paying attention to the parts we like, that suit us. We are not taking seriously those things which challenge our modern likes and prejudices.
I suspect he would also say that those of us who support Liverpool Loves You have a one-sided view of love. We like all the acceptance and warmth and fuzziness of love, but we do not like the way God’s love challenges us to change. We fail to take seriously that God calls us to conversion, a fundamental change of our way of life and our values. We put all the emphasis on love, and not on God. We are guilty, so Graham would hold, of taking God out of the equation and putting human ideas in God’s place.
What can we make of these charges? Today’s Gospel is actually a good place to start, because it brings us back to the central question: not ‘who can we judge?’, but ‘how can we love and love well?’
And one thing that may surprise us is that Jesus commands his followers to love. That seems odd: surely love is something spontaneous and natural? How can it possibly be commanded? No one can love to order.
The command to love makes a crucial point: love is difficult, the hardest thing of all. It is not enough to talk about love, or assume we know what love means. We know all too well the negative side of love: the jealousy and manipulation and self-deception it inspires. We know how love challenges us, changes us. We know how it takes time and commitment. We know it can break our hearts as well as fill them. Love is difficult. It goes to the deepest tangled roots of what it is to be human.
Jesus’s words shock us out of our complacency about love. But it is not just a commandment he gives but a new commandment: love as I have loved you. Love, as I love, not as the world loves. That means a love which goes out of its way to accept those who are not accepted. A love which risks itself, body, heart and soul for the other, which even offers up its own life. A love that is made strong in vulnerability.
This is not a love we can pick up and throw away as we like. It is costly. It binds us. Of course, no one can be forced to love. There is no room for domination here. Love must be free because it answers to our deepest longing. But nor is it simply chosen. There is good reason why we say that we fall in love. We fall in love, and it catches us, commands us. And this is because love is rooted in truth, in seeing things as God sees them.
It begins in love of self, as Jesus makes plain: love your neighbour as yourself. He spends a lot of John’s Gospel telling his followers that they are loved, despite all appearances. Only knowing ourselves loved can we really be secure in giving love to others. God knows and loves us, runs out to meet and embrace us. We are accepted for who we are. Love, Jesus says, as I have loved you. Notice the past tense: God’s love in Jesus has always already been given.
Of course there are things about us that need to be forgiven and healed. But God offers forgiveness and healing out of love for who we truly are, so the gift of who we are can come to light and share in the glory of God.
Sadly, many people hear the opposite message from the church - especially if they are lesbian, gay, bi or trans. They are told that they are not wanted or accepted for who they are. They have often experienced a painful journey to come to terms with their identity. Many experience abuse and violence. And all too often, the church can still treat them with suspicion and outright rejection. It makes its clergy live hidden lives, or forces them to do without faithful relationships.
This cannot be the love that Jesus commands. He challenges us to let go our prejudices and see the person as they are seen by God. He offers to us and people of all identities and orientations a welcome of grace.
I take the point that we should not just change the teaching of Scripture or the church to suit our own whims. But Scripture itself shows us how people can gradually come to a fuller sense of God’s nature and revelation. What was once taken for granted has to be revised, not because of changing fashions or selfish desires, but because the mystery of God’s inclusive love is always inviting us to go deeper and find what is truly lifegiving.
Our first reading from Acts is a case in point. For the earliest followers of Jesus, it was essential to be Jewish to be Christian. Male converts had to be circumcised, for example. Peter seems to have been very reluctant to change this, and, from Paul’s letters, we can glean that the two men had some ferocious rows about it.
But change Peter did: he came to accept that Gentiles were being called into communion with God through Christ, without conditions. He follows the promptings of God into a deeper understanding of what he has experienced, and what is being revealed. As Peter puts it:
‘If then God gave them [the Gentiles] the same gift that he gave us when we believed in Jesus the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’
According to Acts, this silenced his critics for the time being. But we know that wasn’t the end of the matter, and disputes and arguments continued. This was a break with what tradition and Scripture seemed to demand. No doubt, to some it seemed like betrayal and faithlessness – a weakening of what it meant to follow Christ.
Including the Gentiles as Gentiles - not demanding they become something else - was obviously the position that won out. Two thousand years later, it is easy to underestimate the radical (and, for some, traumatic) nature of that change now. But was it a watering down of the gospel? I think not. For Paul, it is evidence of one of the most challenging aspects of the gospel, one we are still working out today: that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female. Christ calls for a transformation of our cultural mindsets, by exposing all the ways we divide and exclude people, or the ways we hoard property at the expense of others, or the way we use power and status to secure our position.
Against all of this, Paul sets the foolishness and weakness of God on the cross, revealed as the transforming power of God in the resurrection. ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be conformed to Christ’ means here: do not go the easy way of excluding those who are other, of belittling, ignoring, neglecting, silencing or dominating them. For you are one body in Christ, all of you: one body. That is, and that has always been, a challenge to the way the world is - to the powers of the world, the rules and the forces that dominate us from the outside but also wend their way into our hearts, so that we see this cruel, divisive way of being human as natural, as the only way.
It is not the only way: Christ embodies another way, truth and life. And so he calls us to conversion: to turn around, to be renewed.
There is no contradiction, then, between an inclusive love and the radical challenge of conversion. To see that love as weak is to make the mistake of the Gentiles and Jews of Paul’s day, who could only see in the cross a man cursed in his shameful weakness. But Paul reminds us that this weakness is God’s strength - and only conversion and the grace of the Holy Spirit can help us to see that.
There is also no contradiction between an inclusive love and faithfulness to Scripture. I don’t think we can just cherry pick the bits we like from Scripture: but we do have to interpret Scripture, within the central Christian conviction that the heart of God is made flesh and made known in the welcoming, inclusive, challenging, crucified love of Christ. Even the great Reformers did not give equal weight to every part of the Bible; they had to make judgements about what was closer to the heart of God, and what was secondary. And even the Catholic Church, with its teaching magisterium, does not remain static in its interpretation of Scripture, as it must speak to new situations and new insights.
Peter asks us:
‘If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’
And God is giving to LGBT+ people those gifts: of courage and kindness, of solidarity and faithfulness. Of love. Despite everything that is thrown at them, many still remain in the church, following Christ. The gifts of the Spirit are in them: who are we to hinder God?
‘A new commandment I give you: that you love one another, as I have loved you.’
Republished with permission from Steven Shakespeare’s website.
