The Word From Seals Island

Bishop Albert Heeman of Ashdown Forest came to Seals Island in the summer to open the new cactus garden at the College. We had a hell of a time growing anything on the land: it's reclaimed from the Chanel and has been under salt water for about 300 years off and on. We were able to restore the house behind which must have been new at the time of Seals Island's innundation. The severe drought in the south of England has meant that Seals Island has dried out and a lot more ground has been reclaimed. I'm the one on the far right carrying the holy water (see yesterday's blog).
It was really hot this summer, but thankfully we have the sea. Clearly it's global warming that causes all these changes, but I hear hardly anything about that from America.

Every one that drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life. Jn 8:13-14


The powerful scriptural message of embracing the completely fulfilling spirit of Christ was delivered by Jesus to a Samaritan woman. The Samaritans were the descendants of the remnant Jews who had stayed behind during the Babylonian captivity of the upper class Jews. The Samaritans had built their own temple and had developed traditions and practices no longer entirely like those the upper class Jews had maintained while detained in Babylon. When the descendants of the well-to-do Jews returned they came to Jerusalem to build a new temple and they found peoples in Israel whom they rejected as being insufficiently observant and unscriptural in their Judaism and they labelled them unclean people with whom one should avoid communication.

Peter Akinola the Archbishop of Nigeria has similarly withdrawn communion with Canterbury and the Episcopal Church in the United States. He regards the failure of the House of Bishops of the Church of England and of ECUSA to condemn homosexuality outright to be sufficient grounds to call them unclean and consequently he has cut off connection. Akinola has recently even gone so far as to have all mention of the See of Canterbury eliminated in the Anglican Church in Nigeria.

Akinola has missed Christ's message to the Samaritian woman. It's appropriate in our daily lives to concern ourselves bout material and immediate issues such as the ills of society. We must drink from the well and it will quench our thirst. But Christ has come to us to offer a deeper, more heady draught that will reach out and quench us and others for ever...to eternal life. Christ chooses one of the unclean ones to give this message to. He did not say: "Arise Samaritan woman, I have made you a proper Jew; go forth and be happy." No, instead she remained who she was, and yet she was given the spiritual water that equipped her to reach out to others. So by Jewish laws (the Jewish scriptures we know as the Old Testament) this woman was not regarded as clean, but for Christ she was good enough to receive the living water and to take that out into the community as a proclaimer of Christ. The Samaritan woman calls all the people of the town together; she is Christ's follower and she is a minister calling a people together in his name to learn of the spirit. All this happened before the Pentecost and yet it prefigured that descending of the Holy Spirit. This Samaritan woman accepted the Spirit as did the men and women gathered at that Pentecost and she is truly apostolic in her witness and in her reaching out to others.

The Christian's goal should be to emulate Christ. Christ's message is spiritual and he does not want any mistakes to be made about that. He calls all sorts of people to gather others together in his name. The disciples were horrified that Jesus spoke to a Samaritan and a woman at that. She was a powerful and faithful servant, just as she was. We need to make sure we can hear Christ's spiritual message clearly. If we try to block out voices because they do not conform to our preconceived ideas about what kinds of things are right and wrong, then we will be behaving like those who rejected Christ's message. Faithfulness to the spiritual message is an absolute and not a relative demand. We can't just say 'I will not listen to Christ's message here because this man or woman is unclean in my eyes.' The message of Christ is strong spiritual water and like the Samaritan woman it can be magnified through voices we might not be expecting. Do not bother with the water that will leave you thirsty again. Drink of that deeper spiritual well that will quench you unto everlasting life. If the spirit is there, it will well up and be available to others. It's a travesty of Christianity to relativise the spirit and to reject the spirit when Christ offers. We need to be radical in our spiritual orthodoxy, and we must resist the temptation to label and reject others for our personal comfort.

Radical moral condemnation runs entirely counter to the radical spiritual orthodoxy to which Christ calls us.

Vera

With logic that can only be described as bizarre, the Archbishop of Nigeria, the Most Revd Peter Akinola has blamed the supposed generational malaise of illegitimacy on lesbianism, divorce and homosexuality. It seems to me that people who have divorced have usually had their children, or at least they are the marrying types, and thus can rarely be blamed for illegitimate children. The biblical argument with homosexuality lies in the condemnation of particular sexual acts, and logic commands that those don't produce children either. I quote Archbishop Akinola from this week's Church Times: "Homosexuality and lesbianism, like divorce, breed a society of single parents which gives rise to a generation of bastards."
Of course, reason and logic are abandoned in arguments designed for emotive effect. Vituperative statements such as these are designed to shore up a bankrupt value system fraught with contradictions and characterised by self-satisfied conceit. The good Archbishop has abandoned Christian humility and love of neighbour in favour of invective. The Most Revd Peter Akinola, prophesies "much terror to the peace and stability of the society" from these modern sexual ills, but he is no Cassandra and is much more like Prokofiev's Peter. Why give such ill service to the church?
Let the title speak for the image. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

(PS: The caption competition was won by Canon Leni)

Prof. Revd. Vera Calico