George Pitcher

This is a transcript of a sermon delivered by George Pitcher at St Bride's on 7th October 2007

I'd like to talk this morning about the 7th-century BC prophet Habbakuk, from who we heard in our Old Testament reading, and connect him with a story currently running in The Archers, the radio series which the BBC has been airing, it seems, since about the same time as Habbakuk. This may sound like one of those bets that professional people make among themselves to brighten up otherwise boring material: "I bet you can't get Habbakuk and The Archers into the same 12-minute sermon". Well, here goes.

The Omnibus edition of The Archers is running about now, but those of you who follow it during the week may know that the long-suffering Jennifer Aldridge has just had to talk to her philandering husband Brian about his attitude to his son Adam. Adam is gay and lives in the village with his partner Ian (interestingly the BBC recently had them celebrating their "marriage", something we in the Church are not yet allowed to call same-sex civil partnerships). Brian has brought home his infant love-child, Rhuari, after his former mistress died of cancer and Adam and Ian have offered to look after him while Brian and Jenny go away for a break. Brian doesn't like the idea: "It's an instinctive reaction," he says. "It doesn't feel right. Two men, living as partners." Jenny corrects him: "Two people - who love each other very much." She goes on: "Promise me you'll stop seeing this as confusing. Love is love, Brian, and that child needs all the love he can get." Hold that thought: Love is love. An obvious truism, but that's because it's True.

Now back to Habbakuk. He's the eighth of the minor prophets. It's a short book, only three chapters long, and deals with the prophet's complaint about the oppression and lawlessness in Judah, which he predicts will lead to God's punishment through an invasion by the Chaldeans (he proves to be correct on the invasion bit). It's a seemingly innocuous passage, but it contains one of the most important phrases written in the Bible for the formation of our Protestant faith: In verse 4 of chapter 2, Habbakuk describes how the innocent will be sustained even as they are involved in the sufferings of the guilty: "Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith". Now hold that scripture: The just shall live by his faith.

This is an important phrase because it's picked up in Pauline theology throughout the New Testament - in the letter to the Romans 1:17 (" Therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith") and to the Galatians in 3.11 ("No man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for the just shall live by faith") and by the author of Hebrews in 10:38 ("Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my souls shall have no pleasure in him."). And the Evangelicals say we don't do Bible study, eh? In the way of the Lectionary, none of these passages followed our Habbakuk reading this morning, but the same implication is there in the passage from the Letter to Timothy that we heard (1:13): "Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou has heard of me, in faith and love which is Christ Jesus."

This is important because Habbakuk with that one simple phrase lays the foundations through the epistles for the principles for which our Reformation was fought, at the core of which is Martin Luther's doctrine of "justification by faith alone" - meaning that we are made right with God not through what we say or do, through our earthly acts and laws, not by some mediation on our behalf by the Church or pious people, but solely through our faith in Christ alone. The predominant view during the Reformation was that St Paul, when he was writing to the church in Galatia and to others and was picking up on Habbakuk's "the just shall live by his faith", was saying that Judaism was a faith of "works" - that Jews believed that you were judged by what good works you did in your life - a system that had now been overturned by the new covenant of Christ, in which we were justified with God solely through our faith in Christ; an act of God's "grace" rather than an act of our "works". In fact, more recent scholarship called the New Perspectives on Paul suggests that Paul wasn't saying that Judaism was a faith of works at all - he was saying it was a faith of grace, but that the Jews' pre-occupation with dietary laws and cultural laws of circumcision and the like was getting in the way of faith. Some scholars are going further today and suggesting that Paul was questioning whether laws and legalistic structures are an effective framework through which to recognize God at all.

This fantastically rich heritage - that God cannot be understood or illumined or contained by our petty rules and laws on earth, but only through our faith - is what makes Anglicanism so special, so exciting and so attractive, at least to me. Because the implications are enormous - of course God cares if we sin, if sin is to be defined as something that separates us from God. But it's not by behaving well and obeying rules that we're in God's favour - it is only by having faith. It makes so much more sense of the Christian story - everything can be a terrible mess, but if we just hang in there, if we just hold the faith, then we will live by that faith.

It's a theology that has made the Church of England so attractive. To borrow New Labour language, it's a Big Tent - actually a tent with no walls and with more than enough room for everyone, with no entry requirement beyond faith. No rules, just faith. A limitless shelter in which all are welcome, whoever they are, regardless of race or colour or gender or disability or sexuality or, yes, regardless of creed. A Big Tent of enquiry and exploration and questioning and debate and dialectic on the exciting journey of faith towards understanding the mind of God. This was the triumph of the Reformation, replacing and extending the authoritarian, catechistic and, at that time, corrupt Church of Rome.

Tragically, that Reformational heritage is under threat today from those who would seek to draw up rules for what it means to be Christian, sort of minimum entry requirements, a checklist of beliefs. There is a draft Covenant before Synod, to which we may be asked to subscribe if we are to call ourselves members of this Church. This agenda is driven by the Reform movement, as it's called. I think it is profoundly dangerous because it threatens all we hold dear in the principles of "justification by faith alone" and is dictated to us by people who claim a better grasp than us of the mind of God. People who tell us in the supposedly pluralistic and inclusive Big Tent that, in a chilling echo of the Augustinian principle that "error has no right", we have no place in the Big Tent.

There have always been people with these views down the ages and the tent has proved big enough to accommodate us all. But now the tent is being torn apart. And the weapon of choice is the Bible - the very same Bible that contains Habbakuk and the Pauline professions of justification by faith alone is turned into a rulebook. But the Bible is not a set of rules, it's a dialogue, a constant engagement with the changing world in which we live. To reduce it to a narrow prescription for human behaviour - human "works" if you like - is to abuse it, as it has been abused already down the ages. As John Shelby Spong, former bishop of Newark in the US, recently wrote to Archbishop Rowan Williams: The Bible was quoted to support the Divine Right of Kings in 1215, to oppose Galileo in the 17th century, to oppose Darwin in the 19th century, to support slavery and apartheid in the 19th and 20th centuries, to keep women from being educated, voting and being ordained and consecrated in the 20th and 21st century. Today it is quoted to continue the oppression and rejection of homosexual people.

These people are entitled to their views. What they are not entitled to do is to tear down the Big Tent that is Anglicanism, with its mass of reasonable and tolerant and thoughtful and compassionate people, and turn it into a club, the entry of which is to be prescribed by rules of their own making. I respectfully suggest that that is the principle that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be upholding - that all are welcome in the universal tent that is Anglicanism - rather than the pursuit of unity at all costs to that truth, a truth which can only be compromised in so doing.

So back to Ambridge and The Archers. Brian cannot accept his neighbours, one of whom is his own son. It doesn't "feel right", he says. But his wife Jenny knows instinctively, though she doesn't ascribe it to any faith of hers, what Anglicans have held down the generations. The one simple and uncompromisable quality of two people who love each other very much. There can be no qualification, no further justification needed beyond her faith in that principle when she tells him: "Love is love, Brian." Amen to that.