Parable of the wheat and the tares

IN THE INNER and outer turbulence of recent days I found myself remembering some important words spoken by Rowan Williams at the Lambeth Conference. In his address on making moral decisions, he tackles the issue of serious disagreement among Christians over ethical questions, and the pressure to break communion with those who take positions he finds it hard to accept as Christian.

The Rt Revd Peter Selby, Bishop
of Worcester

"When I reluctantly continue to share the Church's communion with someone whose moral judgement I deeply disagree with, I do so in the knowledge that, for both of us, part of the cost is that we have to sacrifice a straightforward confidence in our 'purity'".

The quest for moral and doctrinal purity generates its own costs, of course. The arrangements that were made around the issue of the ordination of women witness to the cost of staying in one Church. Can there be communion without complicity? Where shall we draw lines, knowing that both drawing them and not drawing them has a cost?

What communion we can share, and from whom we may receive it, are questions, in the end, about integrity and what would break it, both for us as individuals and for the Church of God.

"Being in the Body means that we are touched by one another's commitments and thus by one another's failures." Williams's word "touch" so close to his mention of "the Body" seems significant, for it is traditionally touch that endangers purity. It has been borne in on me of late that, for some, it is words that taint, causing "confusion" in the Church.

Speaking of open debate as confusion indicates the conviction that only a Church free from the taint of confusion can properly address the world. On that view, leadership involves the removal of confusion, certainly not allowing, let alone creating it.

When we sense the danger of such taint or confusion within the Body, it is vital for us to remember that taint is a mutual matter. "We are touched by each other's commitments and . . . failures." There are those who feel complicit in what they regard as the Church's false acceptance of feminist assumptions; but then there are those who have to explain to their feminist friends how they can remain in a Church that makes such concessions to patriarchy.

There are those who believe the Church would be corrupted by the marriage of people within the lifetime of a former spouse; but then there are those who have to explain to those involved in divorce how they can continue in a Church that makes such "unforgiving" judgements.

Of late I have been told that I am perceived as a danger to the purity of the Christian message; but then, what am I to say to the correspondent who asks how I can stay in a Church in which homosexuality meets such hostility?

These examples are, of course, about different issues, not items in a single package. But we seem as a Church to be becoming a community where our response to disagreement is to become immensely concerned for the purity of our own conscience.

Of course, it is true that there are dangers in never reckoning with the possibility that you may have to declare some behaviour or belief outside Christian acceptability, and a danger to the preaching of the gospel and the character of the Church. Eagerness to compromise at all costs has its own spiritual perils.

Yet we cannot fail to take note also of the dangers of a habitual resort to the drawing of lines. "I cannot in conscience . . ." becomes a habitual pattern of response, the Body's knee-jerk reaction to the possibility that we might be "touched by one another's commitments and . . . failures".

I write this because I think I sense a growing resort to that response, and not only in my recent experience of some people's reaction to me. Looking back over my life, I know that I have myself been where they are; and, of course, it is not hard, within the Christian community, to wind one another up in an auction of steadily hardening attitudes.

This is not a plea for flaccid tolerance, let alone indifference on matters of profound importance to our lives and our teaching. Being touched by one another's commitments is tolerable only, in fact, if we share with each other what we believe to be at stake for us in the attitude of the other.

I need to know what is arousing my discomfort and what discomfort I am causing, and I need to take the risk of sufficiently close encounter to run the risk of having my mind changed. Only on that basis could there be any reason for continuing to be in communion with those whose ethical decisions affront me.

THERE IS another reason why this is not another plea for mere tolerance. I have a sense that taking the risk of taint and confusion has deep roots in scripture, and above all in the teaching of our Lord. It is not just that the sheep and the goats need to be balanced by the wheat and the tares. It is that the sheep and the goats speak of the judgement at the end, the wheat and tares of life in the meanwhile.

Knowing where we are in God's time is, therefore, of the essence. It is as serious to anticipate the end when we are still in the meanwhile as it is to fail in alertness to the time of judgement. We have a responsibility to notice which error we are prone; and what I sense now is a rush to judgement before the time.

In particular, the quest for a pure Church with a message not confused by open questions seems to me to be a particular danger. On the basis of having at times pursued that goal, I know that too many of its roots lie in angers not faced and frustrations visited on others.

Too much of such judgement comes from the sense of having spent long hours carefully tending a vineyard only to find it invaded by latecomers, or your place at God's feast apparently usurped by riff-raff from the highways and hedges. From such roots come the dangerous projections of what we have not resolved on to others who offer themselves as convenient and available scapegoats. We are surely charged by the Saviour to acknowledge these as real dangers that afflict especially the religious.

It is not simply that Anglicanism has had a tolerant face which is worth guarding, nor that its allegiance to scripture is held together with a veneration of tradition and a respect for reason. All Churches have their particular ways of rounding the sharp corners of judgement which might otherwise be a far greater danger to their integrity and purity than to risk allowing a certain untidiness to affront those who seek clear teaching and know what it should be.

Neither is this only a seasonal reflection on the importance of reckoning with the end time, and with the God who alone judges the secrets of our hearts and with whom alone lies the determining of our moral and doctrinal priorities.

Until the end that Advent makes us face, there is good reason for human beings to accept the provisionality, the questionableness, of all our judgements.

But there is also the fact that the Church must in some way reflect a God who did not refuse to be touched by the commitments, and also the failures, of humankind. A Church which gives the highest priority to the quest for its own purity, or seeks too soon to rid its preaching of confusion may be walking away from the questions it needs to face. In the process it may also walk away from Christ, who represents precisely God's willingness to bear our taint and who will wait for us and with us, showing us only when we can bear it what we cannot bear yet.

There is excitement in the process of discovery; but there is also the extreme discomfort of knowing that we disappoint one another so often, and do not achieve the quick and clear answer that seems so often so desirable.

The structures of our Church, on the other hand, hold open to us the possibility of shared decisions, of truth to be discovered when we take risks with and for each other. The frustrations and tensions, and the loss of purity involved, might turn out to be a price worth paying, despite all the apparent advantages of guarding our individual consciences.

I have a sense that we are going along too readily with the drive to break with one another for the sake of purity and an end to confusion. We may discover too late that, if we had waited with one another, we might in fact have presented a clearer image of the God whom we await and the truth that we proclaim.

Dr Selby is Bishop of Worcester.