Year: 2019

“The Healing Power of Love” (Part 6) – “Deliver Us From Evil” by the Revd Andrew Woodward

In my role as the Bishop’s Liaison Officer for the LGBTI+ communities in the Diocese of Chichester, part of my role is  to build relationships of trust with those who identify as LGBTI+ both inside and outside of our churches.

Hearing these stories with dignity and respect and sharing my own journey with vulnerability enables people to express something of who they truly are, created and loved by God without the need to fear and to hide.

Coming out from the shadows of pretence and coming to terms with one’s own sexuality and identity is a huge first step.

Often the fear of the next step, of sharing this with others can paralyse one’s very existence and rob us of what it is to be truly human. It is still daunting for many, especially when one doesn’t know whether there will be acceptance or rejection.

The Pastoral Advisory Group in the Church of England has just produced six principles for living well together.  They write:

“The quality of our relationships they write can be hindered by six pervading evils which have the capacity to kill and destroy – Prejudice, Silence, Ignorance, Fear, Hypocrisy and power.”

I commend their work to be used in small groups, PCCs and Diocesan groups up and down the country. Conversations are happening and stories are being shared from which experience can enlighten our theological understanding and analysis, whilst still respecting that threefold cord of scripture, reason and tradition.

Being real with one another and having good and positive LGBTI+ role models in the church will ensure that we grow in grace and in our life together, even with those with whom we may disagree.

Jesus Christ shows us the way to life, to come out of the darkness where the thief comes only to steal and destroy and to enter instead God’s marvellous light made present to us in Jesus Christ.

This is not just about survival or even religion but rather about bringing our whole created being to life in Christ, breaking the bonds that entrap us to these six evils and freeing us to be the people that God has created us to be in all our glorious diversity.

A Prayer

Teach us Good Lord not to fear the one that comes to steal and destroy and to hide away our true selves.  Rather in our generous loving of ourselves and of one another, may we come to know your life in us, life in abundance.

Amen

Next week  – a series of reflections on “Hope in the Desert”

“The Healing Power of Love” (Part 5) – “Take Heart, Daughter” by Jay Greene

I love this verse because it speaks to my own experience: when I turned 40 I finally found the courage to come out to myself, to God, and to my friends and family.

The coming out went well enough but life was complicated as I was married and had two children. Over the next year I began to feel more and more trapped and despairing.

Conservative evangelical friends suggested that I should pray that God would heal my marriage so I did pray most earnestly and sincerely and God, our God of Surprises, did hear me.

However, he did not heal my marriage but he did heal me: first, I became so ill that I had to see a doctor  – another member of that conservative evangelical church – who took time to listen and  unexpectedly said: “You cannot go on like this. You need to leave”. His words and his kindness gave me hope that day and thus I began to look for a constructive way to leave.

Life can indeed be complicated and difficult.

These painful changes affected everyone in our family but I am pleased to look back now and realise that they also set my ex-husband free to re-make his life.

I only wish that I could go back those 25 years and show my troubled desperate self this photo of the settled loving relationship and positive future which our God had in store for me.

A Prayer 

Lord Jesus, we thank you for the gift of hope, for unexpected kindness when we need it most, for staying with us when we are desperate. We pray today for all those who feel trapped and cannot see their way out. May they feel your healing touch, your arm around their shoulder to help them take heart and to begin anew to have hope.

Amen

Tomorrow – Revd Andrew Woodward, “Deliver Us From Evil”, John 10:10

“The Healing Power of Love” (Part 4) – “Seeing is Believing” by Alex Huzzey

The blind man healed by Jesus in John 9 finds himself in the middle of a religious and political minefield.

The Pharisees draw him and his parents into tortuous interrogations about whether he was really healed and who did it, fearing the impact on their own influence, reputation and authority. Theology and religious law are aggressively invoked to explain why the healing cannot possibly have taken place as it did.

And yet at the centre of the drama, a man who cuts through the confusion with a simple truth. ‘Though I was blind, now I see’. He counters the Pharisees’ head knowledge of the rules about Sabbath, sin and cleanliness with his newly acquired heart knowledge – the man he has met, the man they call Jesus; he is from God.

Our culture puts a lot of weight on head knowledge, on the provable, arguable and intellectually rigorous. Outside the Church, the claims of faith appear increasingly ridiculous, whilst inside the church, we sometimes ride roughshod over each other’s lives in the name of one theological perspective or another.

Yet out there in the messy, glorious and mysterious reality of our lives, in all those moments when theological answers may not appear to be forthcoming, satisfying, or life-giving, that’s when I remember the blind man who found he could see again.

Someone who may not have had the authority, learning or social background to be taken seriously by those with power, but who knew that whilst life could be rubbish, he had met the God of the universe, and that this was a God of love, healing and redemption.

A Prayer

God of love, for those times when we are so aware that we see only in a mirror dimly, when our theoretical answers struggle to make sense, may we hold fast to our knowledge of the depth and breadth of your redeeming love for us.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen.

Tomorrow – Jay Greene, “Take Heart, Daughter”, Matt 9: 22

“The Healing Power of Love” (Part 3) – “Listening for Love” by Ann Reddecliffe

On the darkest night of my life, I learned that God loved me.

I hated myself, I believed that God hated me, my self-respect and sense of self-worth were gone.  My life hung by the thinnest of thin threads and I had nothing left.

In that night, God managed to get through all the pain and just enfolded me in love.  As I watched the dawn on a day I never expected to see, I had hope for the first time in a very long time. The Church may not love me, but God did.  God loved me just as I was.

There is only one ‘God is…’ statement in the Bible and it is this one, that God is love.  We know that for a certainty.

So, when I hear people going on about sexuality or gender, I don’t look at how big the cross is round their neck or what type of collar they are wearing, I listen for the love in their words. If there is no love, then their words are not of God.  It has helped me to deal with some of the really nasty things that I hear and have to deal with.

God calls us to love and when we love, we are closest to God.  We are called to love those who God gives us to love. Anyone who denies us the right to love does not know God the way we do.

Being gay in the church can be a hard road to travel, but it means staying close to God and trying, day by day, to live in love.

For God is love.

A Prayer

Gracious God, thank you that you love me just as I am. Help me to speak your message of love, inclusion and affirmation to all those who feel excluded from our churches. Give each of us the strength to follow the path you have given us.

Amen.

Tomorrow – Alex Huzzey, “Seeing is Believing”, John 9: 25

The Healing Power of God’s Love (Part 2) – “Be Still” by the Revd Andrew Foreshew-Cain

This verse has been my constant companion throughout my whole life of Christian faith.

I found it, or it found me, leaping out from the pages of my Bible when I was deeply unhappy in my first year at University.

It has grown into me over the years and it calls me back to the deep, profound stillness, and the quiet strong undeniable presence of God in our lives.  It doesn’t speak over or try to drown out the hurt and confusion and pain of life’s events, and there have been plenty in the following years.

Instead it simply places before us the fundamental truth of God, and invites us into silence, to stop in the frantic movements of whatever it is that is filling our minds with distress and allows us to breathe, to focus and to remember, to KNOW, that God is God, and we are God’s.

It doesn’t try to explain, it doesn’t try to excuse, it doesn’t blame or demand of us something that we cannot do. It just calls us back to the memory that we may have lost in our struggles and offers some respite.

Afterwards the struggle will almost certainly remain, and there will be actions to be taken but for me it has always given me a breathing space and helped place things in a wider context and the deeper reality of the Divine.

If you need to do so today, make some time to pray it, and sit with it. You will be strengthened for what lies ahead.

A Prayer

Loving Lord, call me from busyness and worry to the still centre of your divine peace. Hold me when life is troubled and overwhelming, and let me know what you know, that you are God, I am yours and all is well.

Amen

Tomorrow – Ann Reddecliffe, “Listening for Love”, 1 John 4: 7 – 8

“Created in God’s Image” (Part 6) – “The Best Bolly!” by Canon Robert Hammond

Isn’t it strange that we often keep precious things in fragile containers?

Great Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne wines costing thousands of pounds are stored in glass bottles offering no protection if dropped and smashed. Of course, the treasure we have, ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ is far more precious than any Pomerol, Gevrey Chambertin or even Dom Perignon.

But where is that treasure kept? The answer is “in us” – perplexed, persecuted and afflicted people.

Many of us who are LGBTI will have felt some of those emotions and feelings during our Christian lives. Perplexed by being sure of who we are and while sure of our total acceptance by God, constantly being told by some of the church we must repent of the sin of being who we are.

Persecuted by many in a church that seems to see LGBTI people as a threat, not a gift to be opened, celebrated and used for Christ’s purposes.  Afflicted by feelings of not being good enough, straight enough, Christian enough.

We are like clay jars; hand made by a skilled craftsman, beautifully decorated, filled with an amazingly precious treasure.

But we can be broken and that treasure spill out and evaporate.

As LGBTI Christians it must be our role to be that beautiful clay jar, keeping that treasure in the best condition, opening ourself so others can experience it, and not allow ourselves to be broken by those who want to drop and smash us.

A Prayer

Heavenly Father,

You crafted us in your image, as a potter creates beautiful jars, to be containers for the treasure that is the light and power of Jesus Christ.

Give us this Lent the strength not to be broken by those who do not understand us but to be strong and resilient for the sake of your Gospel; a message of hope and salvation to us all.

Amen

Next week – a series of reflections on “The Healing Power of Love”

“Created in God’s Image” (Part 4) – “Healing & Hope” by Philip Baldwin

The story of the Healing of the Centurion’s Servant is central to my understanding of faith and sexuality. It is also one that has often nourished and sustained me through periods of hardship.

I came out as gay in my mid teens and then discovered Christianity in my mid-twenties, following an HIV diagnosis. St John’s in Waterloo was the first church I began to attend regularly. It is headed by Giles Goddard, who has played a central role in advocating for LGBT people within the Church of England.

Giles loaned me his copy of Jeffrey John’s The Meaning in the Miracles, in which Jeffrey superbly analyses the role of the centurion and his servant. Through his miracles, Jesus sought to include those previously excluded within the love of the Church. The centurion describes his servant as “very dear to him” (Luke 7.2). When this man gets gravely ill, the centurion is so concerned that he asks Jesus to intervene.

Seen in the appropriate Greco-Roman context, the centurion and his servant were almost certainly lovers. Ancient history is full of such liaisons, most notably Hadrian and Antinous. In my view, the inference that the centurion and his servant were in a romantic relationship would have been clear to Jesus and to early readers of the gospels.

I have never experienced any conflict between my faith and my sexuality and Jeffrey’s analysis of these verses reinforced that view. I can see reflections of my own life in the Healing of the Centurion’s servant and hope, one day, to have a committed monogamous relationship, celebrated through marriage in a Church of England church.

I hope and pray that wherever you are, whatever you are going through, that you too might know that Jesus is interested in reaching out to you – that He actively seeks out those on the margins, and that He has time and interest in each and every one of us.

A Prayer

“Lord, we are all gloriously made in Your image to live and love as we choose. Give us strength in the face of homophobia, even when this comes from our brothers and sisters in Christ. Let us find places of worship where we are accepted, can prosper and grow into the individuals You would like us to be, free from shame.”

Amen

Tomorrow – the Revd Dr Christina Beardsley, “No More Shame”, Psalm 34 : 4 – 5