Sermon on 5th Sunday of Easter - Fr Sam Rossiter

May be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please do be seated.

As I've told many of you before, when I was a younger man there was a period of my life where I tried to walk away from my faith. I tend to look back on that time with some wry amusement because I really was a terrible atheist. I spent hours a day in prayer telling God why I didn't believe in him.

There were several reasons for my distress which at the time I thought were to do with God but really were more to do with the church and with me. Young people all go through a phase of establishing their own faith aside from that of the faith of their family. This is rarely an easy transition but the way that the foundations of our faith are built in childhood can make a big difference.

If our foundations of faith are built in a way that allows for questions, which embraces the challenges of faith, which has room for mystery and the unknown, then when the inevitable period of exploration comes there's a well-worn roadmap to follow. Young people who are taught to question and to think for themselves can use the time of exploration when they're older to establish an adult faith which puts into practice those tools of questioning that they've learned through childhood. And even if their faith tradition then comes to be very different from what they had as a child this is usually an exciting time of growth.

Childhood faith flourishes and transforms into the fresh growth of young adult faith, blooming into the newness that God has for that next stage of life. But if a childhood faith is built on foundations which doesn't have any wiggle room then that exploration which comes will be much more painful. Then if a child has never been allowed to ask questions when they do inevitably question those assumptions for the first time, having never been taught that this is okay, they will feel that they have no choice but either to accept what they were taught as a child, in which case there won't be much growth, or else abandon their faith altogether.

For me the latter was a closer truth of the experience and my crisis came over the theology that I was taught about same-sex relationships. My childhood church was very conservative and I was taught the old line, love the sinner, hate the sin, when it comes to same-sex sexuality. But as I became a young adult the theology that I'd been taught through childhood stopped making sense.

I became close friends with people in same-sex relationships and saw in their love all the dedication and mutual flourishing that I saw in the best opposite-sex relationships. I was also by that point a philosophy student and I was taught as a first principle to take apart any set of propositions and examine their validity. As I did so with the precepts of the theology that I was taught as a child, I saw that those conservative arguments that have been taught weren't very effective.

The biblical theology used to discriminate against same-sex couples was based on selective readings from the Old Testament which applied purity laws to some situations and not to others. For example, why teach that Christ intended his church to keep Leviticus 18.22, which has been taken to refer to same-sex sexuality, but not Leviticus 19.19, a command against wearing garments of mixed fabric, or Leviticus 19.27, a command against cutting the hair of your temple or the edge of your beard. The arguments from the New Testament weren't any stronger.

One of the key texts that's brought out on the topic, 1 Corinthians 6 verse 9, has been taken to refer to St. Paul saying that same-sex relationships are sinful. But that's based on a translation of a word that St. Paul likely made up, arsenicotai. It's a word that doesn't appear anywhere else in Scripture or anywhere else in classical literature at all.

1 Corinthians 6:9

Its translation has been a matter, therefore, of lively and long-running debate, and its relevance to same-sex relationships, certainly in a modern understanding, is really very questionable. Before I go further on this sermon, though, I want to be clear. I am not preaching about the theology of same-sex relationships.

I've always been clear about what my theology is on this and on many other matters, and we are an inclusive church. But part of being inclusive means being able to bear with and spend time with and love those who think differently to you. The question is, how do we do that in a way that is faithful and central to the principle of our Gospel reading? I have given you a new commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

We have to begin by questioning ourselves, by wrestling with our assumptions, and asking if what we believe about the church and about God is really because God has led us there, or because we're a bit personally uncomfortable with the alternative. Of course, we want to be faithful to Scripture and theology, but faithfulness means probing, challenging, examining, not just the words, but the spirit behind what we're reading. Because although it sounds straightforward, love one another as I have loved you, can be taken in lots of different ways.

So for example, the church that I grew up in talked about loving one another all the time. Its mission statement was, loving God, loving people. And almost every sermon that I heard growing up, boiled down to the principle that God loves his people.

This is great, and true. The difficulty was, that it was assumed that his love was for only people like us. God loved everyone, as long as everyone meant people who were heterosexual, non conformist, didn't drink too much, didn't smoke, didn't have tattoos, didn't swear, didn't ask difficult theological questions.

If you fell outside of that archetype, then God's love quickly became, love the sinner, hate the sin. Of course, God did love you, but he didn't like you, not the way you were living. And it was the duty of the church to tell you, because the most loving thing was to make sure that you changed.

But of course, that's not really love at all. You can't love someone until they've changed into a version of you, then you just don't love them. And for a long time, I fell into that archetype.

And I was loved. I was the son of a non conformist minister after all. But when I began to see other ways of following Jesus, when I began to question the teaching of the church, suddenly, I was loved as a sinner, and hated for my sin.

But what did Jesus command in our gospel? Not simply that we love, but that we love as he loved. And how did Jesus love? Well, consider John 1, the hymn of the Logos, in which St. John unpacks the meaning of the incarnation. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. God came to his covenanted people, the ones who were supposed to get it right, and yet his own people did not accept him. The religious leaders, the ones who knew and followed the law to the letter, couldn't accept that God had become a human being.

And so to them, the ones who were right, who were righteous, Jesus said, woe to you teachers of the law, you hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, but have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith. They were people of the letter of the law, but not of the Spirit. So God became a human being, went to the outsiders, to those who were hated, to the sinners.

He called a tax collector from his booth, a zealot from his violence. He praised the faith of a Roman centurion as greater than that of all Israel, used a Samaritan as his greatest and most famous example of godliness. He made a woman the first true Apostle and trusted the foundations of the church to a fisherman, proclaiming that the gates of hell would not stand against it.

Yet God's inclusion, in fact, goes further in Jesus than even St. John's prologue describes. Consider Romans chapter 5, for while we were still weak at that time, Christ died for the ungodly. God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

The Word made flesh didn't just love his own, because who was his own except the Father and the Holy Spirit? No, he loved those who were other. He came to human beings who had abandoned and hated him and he joined their otherness, took it into himself, raised it to the divine life and made it holy. Whilst humanity was still in rebellion, whilst we crucified him, he sacrificed himself for us, giving everything he was and had as an act of all-embracing love.

And did that act of inclusion deny or destroy the ones included? Far from it. Our humanity became what it was always designed to be. In Jesus's resurrection, our humanity was raised to its truest form.

As we look to Jesus, we see who we are called to be, our potential realised, and what we are becoming as he realises our potential through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Love one another as I have loved you. How radical and challenging these words are.

Love one another, recognising that within that circle of love are people who look and speak and dress and love and identify differently than you. Love includes those people who you don't like. It includes people who don't like you.

As I have loved you, love not to turn people into a version of yourself, a more sanitised, a more holy version. Love includes otherness. Allow the other to flourish as God has made them to be.

Walk with them, laugh and cry with them, become one with them, be willing to die for them in order to protect that otherness because it is holy. That is what Christ did for you. That is what he calls you to do for others.

Love one another as I have loved you. Imagine what the world would look like. Imagine what the church would look like if we actually did that.

Amen.