The new episode of the Something Beautiful Podcast features an interview with Lawrence Moore, director of the URC’s Windermere Centre and author of Disclosing New Worlds, a fabulous lectionary blog.  It’s his story of his journey from Zimbabwe  where he served as a police officer in special branch through the civil war to a realisation of what he’d been involved in and a changed life and understanding of who God is.  Well worth a listen!

I’m watching Question Time, the weekly political panel show, on the BBC.  I probably shouldn’t blog while watching.  I’ll probably write something I’ll regret.  But here goes anyway…

There seems to be a theme.  It’s all Gordon’s Fault.

The world economic situation was him.

The situation with MPs defrauding their expenses system is his fault.

The ‘young people’, you know, those aliens that roam our streets, stab each other and generally causing havoc, that’s his fault too.

We’re happy to blame others.  We’re happy to lay responsibility at the feet of the government.

But it’s just as much our fault as Gordon’s.

I think it’s fine to have a go at the government, but it’s not fine to abdicate all responsibility for every part of our lives to our elected representatives.

It’s interesting that the discussion has turned to a TV company’s duty of care to participants in reality shows.  There’s an outcry about how Susan Boyle was treated, mostly from the same people who bought the newspapers and watched the TV shows who dragged her through the mire.

Big Brother starts tonight.  Another chance for people to watch people be systematically abused for our amusement.

No-one forces us to watch, but we do.  No-one forced us to borrow more than we could afford, but we did.  No-one ever said that MPs shouldn’t be watched, but we were happy to put an X in a box as though that somehow ends our responsibility in a participative democracy.

There are reports that voter turnout could be as low as 28% or as ‘high’ as 50% in today’s elections for the European Parliament.  So, rather than taking action when we are dissatisfied once again we have chosen to disengage.

Why on earth do we think that things will change if we do and say nothing?

Silence is consent.  Shhhh.  It’s ok.  Someone else will sort it out.

You can now watch Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s inspirational address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from this morning.

As I sat at my desk yesterday afternoon another spectacle unfolded before my very eyes.  The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland webstream was on my desk top and the Council of Mission And Discipleship were presenting their excellent report on Singleness, asking that it be disseminated for study.

What followed was simply remarkable.  Speaker after speaker condemned the report and one went as far as to move that the report should be received but not sent out.  Why? What could the controversy be?  Well,  the report says that some people have sex outside marriage.  I know.  I was shocked by this revelation.  Who knew???

This is the body that only the day before had said that it wants to have an open and frank discussion about sexuality and was now chastising Peter MacDonald for having the nerve to a) admit to pre-marital sex with his wife of 26 years and b) be funnier than them.

There is a serious underlying issue at play in all of this though, and the proposal to supress this report is just a symptom of it.  Over the course of the past week the Church of Scotland has, in my opinion, trampled all over the human rights of all of its office bearers.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 19 states that

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

On Monday the General Assembly banned anyone subject to its courts (all ministers and office bearers) from making public statements about the ordination of gay ministers. (UPDATE: the final wording of the motion was: Instruct all Courts, Councils and Committees of the Church not to issue press statements or otherwise talk to the media or to make decisions in relation to the contentious matter of himan sexuality, with respect to the Ordination and Induction to the Ministry of the Church of Scotland, until 31 May 2001.)

Article 30 states that

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

So, congratulations to the Church of Scotland.  You must be very proud.  Contravening at least two articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in one day and that’s before we even get started on the employment rights of gay ministers which were curtailed by the moratorium on them moving charge for 2 years.

What on earth do you think you are doing?

Do you think that avoiding the debate, the fight, the argument, the falling out is the best way?  At any cost?

Or is their another way?  Is it not possible just to agree to disagree?  To give congregations the right to call who they want to be their minister?  If they want to call a minister who is gay, let them.  If you don’t want that then don’t call a gay minister.

Would that be so hard?  To agree to disagree?  To be grown up about it?  To recognise a genuine difference of opinion which will NEVER be resolved no matter how may Special Commissions and gagging orders you issue.

Last week’s sermon focused on John 15: 9-17 and used some material from the excellent OneKirk worship material and from the equally excellent Lawrence Moore’s blog, Disclosing New Worlds.  As always, youth thoughts and comments are wel,comed.

I’ve raved about Godin’s book Tribes before and spoken about it in a double header on the Something Beautiful Podcast (part 1 and part 2).  Here’s his TED talk about what tribes are and why they matter…

You’ve got me thinking, you and your comments and blog posts and yesterday’s lectionary readings about vines and pruning!  Over at Abbotsford Roddy has, as usual, been mixing insightfull questions with fabulous liturgy.  All of this led to a sermon yesterday that was a bit of a half formed thought.  So I’m going to ty to finish the thought here…

Roddy’s question was simple, yet our answers to it reveal something fundemental about what we already know about church and how it should be.  He asked:

‘If I were to start a new church it would…’.

Think about that question for a moment.  How would you answer it?  I we were to wipe the slate clean and start afresh what would church look like?  How would it be?  What principles would it be founded on?  What would we miss out?

What struck me yesterday as I was preaching my sermon was that we already know what church should be.

Our answers to that simple question reveal that.  So I’d like to ask another question:

Why do we allow church to be all the things we know it shouldn’t be?

Some of the bloggers I read have been posting their thoughts on the petition to the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly regarding the ordination of ‘practicing’ homosexuals.  I wrote about it in my posts ‘Not In My Name‘ and ‘How Would Jesus Behave?‘ but there are some other interesting thoughs:

John Orr has posted some interesting thoughts on Biblical interpretation to follow up his initial post.

Chris Hoskins asks ‘Where’s the Grace?‘.

Iain McLarty has some posts on the implications of the Lochcarron and Skye overture, the logical problems with it and a summary of some of the blogging on the subject.

Bryan Kerr asks what happened to a God of love for all?

My previous post on the petition launched ahead of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly in support of the overture (motion) from the Presbytery of Lochcarron & Skye was my most viewed post ever.  I didn’t set out to say anything controversial and hoped to appeal to people to be calm, reasonable and gracious.

The question that I ended that post with was one asked by Christians all along the theological spectrum. ‘What would Jesus do?’.

This morning it struck me, and not for the first time, that one of the problems with this discussion is that Jesus said nothing specifically about homosexuality.  That leaves us with a bit of a vacuum when trying to answer the question ‘What would Jesus do?‘.  It means that we need to try to work out what Jesus might have said from his other teachings.  We also need to consider the rest of the Bible where again, little is said directly about homosexual relationships.

There are passages in the Old Testament in Leviticus, we read the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and in the New Testament Paul has some words in Romans.

The problem for many is that these passages are in their view inconclusive.  For example, the passage about Sodom and Gomorrah tells of a host offering his daughters to visitors rather than them having sex with another man.  Not something we would see as acceptable now.  Paul’s words in Romans are the subject of much debate around the translation and context.  Is he talking about homosexual relationships or about the practice if ritual sex with young boys at the pagan temples?

I refer to these passages by way of illustrating the difficulty and complexity of the theological discussion.  Perhaps we need to move beyond throwing passages at each other and engage in a discussion about what the core of the Gospel is?

One of the biggest steps forward the Church could take is to begin these kinds of discussions is to start at the general rather than the specific.  As many will point out in the coming weeks, there are many things supported in the Bible that we have moved away from.  If the early church had not decided to admit those who were not Jewish to their membership then we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.  Those decisions were often painful, often divisive.

So, let’s try to start again.

Let’s try to start from the question ‘How would Jesus behave?‘ because to be honest when I read the scriptures almost everytime I expect Jesus to do one thing He does something completely different.  What is consistent is how he does things.

You may have heard on the BBC Scotland news this evening that Queen’s Cross Church of Scotland’s right to call an openly gay man to be their minister, a decision endorsed by a majority vote of the Presbytery of Aberdeen, has been the subject of a complaint and the case will be heard by the General Assembly in a few weeks.

There are some in the church who don’t think that a homosexual should be ordained as a minister so a petition is being gathered to take to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to call on them not to uphold the right of the congregation to make its own decision about who they can call to be their minister on the grounds of his sexuality.  Apparently 1/5 of the ministers of the Church of Scotland have signed the petition.

I don’t want to get into the discussion about sexuality here and now.  That will no doubt come in the future.

What I do want to say is that tonight people across Scotland and across the world have had their own prejudice confirmed.  Their own stereotype image that the Church of Jesus Christ is intolerant, bullying and homophobic has been paraded on the evening news.  Again.

There are ways to go about disagreeing.  Disagreements can be had with dignity and with respect.  Raising a petition, giving that petition to the press as an ‘exclusive’ and trying to raise a groundswell of support to pressure the poor souls whose turn it is to attend General Assembly into making the decision you want is not dignified.

‘What Would Jesus Do?’.  I wonder where ’start a campaign that will put someone under intense media pressure, drag them in front of the General Assembly and have their life paraded for all to see’ comes in the answer to that question.  I don’t think it does and tonight I am ashamed to be a member of the Church of Scotland.

So, no.  I won’t be signing your petition.  And I hope no-one else does either.  Not because I don’t belive in your right to have one.  Not that because I don’t think you have the right to hold your opinion.  But because I believe that we are called to love one another and to conduct our discusions with love and respect.