The Second Sunday in Lent Year C
March 4, 2007

One can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine or listen to a news report without hearing something about the turmoil that currently characterizes the Anglican Communion. The conflict purportedly revolves around sex; the Primates of the 38 Provinces that comprise the world wide communion of Anglican churches have handed an ultimatum to the Episcopal Church in the United States: promise that you will approve as bishop no more people who are in same sex partnerships. Promise that you will not authorize rites for blessing same sex unions. Yes, the presenting issues are about sex, and I suspect that is one reason we get so much press. But the issues go much deeper than that. At heart, this dispute is about power and authority. It is about how we read scripture and about who should define what that scripture means for our daily lives. It is about declaring who is “orthodox” and who is “heretical”; it is about saying who is in and who is out; it is about what the shape the Anglican Communion will take in the years to come.

Reading today’s gospel it might be tempting to say that those are things we should be more concerned with. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, teaching at every opportunity along the way when he is asked, “Will only a few be saved?” In typical fashion, Jesus does not give a simple yes or no answer, but rather says, “Strive to enter though the narrow door, for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.” Much ink has been spilled over the years attempting to define what Jesus meant by the “narrow door,” and who will make it through, and at first glance, it might seem easy and perhaps tempting to equate the “narrow door” with a narrow reading of scripture, a strict adherence to a narrow set of ideas about what it means to follow Jesus.

It might be easy and even tempting to come to this conclusion, but I don’t think we have to go there. We don’t have to go there, because even though Jesus often cautioned his followers that they must toe the line in some way or the other, it was never in a way that was narrow or exclusionary. On the contrary, what Jesus most often called his followers to, what Jesus most often modeled with his own behavior, was reaching out to and including those who were overlooked or shunned by the mainstream. What Jesus pointed to over and over was stepping outside the box, not being confined by the letter of the law, breaking down the boundaries that separated the “in” from the “out.” In short, Jesus’ way was not narrow, it was not constricted, it was not exclusionary.

So what then, did Jesus mean when he said, “Strive to enter through the narrow door” if it was not subscribing to a strict and narrow set of principles? For Jesus that narrow door was the cross—the cross on which he died a painful death in order to open a way of new life for us. The narrow way for Jesus and for us was and is relying on nothing more or less than the love of God—relying on the love of God and giving up our reliance on all those other things we use to bolster ourselves—our possessions, our self-righteousness, our need to be right, to be in control.
When we hold onto our self-righteousness, our needs to be right and to be in control, it becomes very easy to think that adhering to a strict set of doctrines and rules is the narrow door Jesus is calling us to enter. And in some ways, it is so much easier to do this, to have everything clearly defined. But I would argue that such clear definitions were not what Jesus’ ministry was all about. Rather, Jesus’ ministry was full of violating expectations, living with ambiguity, doing the hard things. And this is what Jesus is calling us to, something far more challenging than living by strictly defined doctrine. Jesus is calling us not to build up boundaries, but to break them down, to reach out to those who may challenge us by being different. He’s asking us to step out of our comfort zone and consider how we find the Christ in the other. He’s asking us to consider that perhaps WE don’t have all the answers. He’s asking us to give up judgment in favor of love, trusting that the grace of God will be judge enough for all of us. I suspect that living this way is far more demanding than following a completely literal reading of scripture because it asks us to be open to the possibility of seeing God, experiencing God in new and unexpected ways.

It seems to me that this understanding of what Jesus is calling us to lies at the heart of the Anglican way of being Christian. Being Anglican does not mean that one is free to do anything or to believe anything. But being Anglican has meant that as a church we have struggled with scripture together, we have allowed for our beliefs and practices to evolve as our relationship with God, with the world and with those who inhabit the world evolves. It has meant that we allow for the possibility that God continues to reveal Godself to us in new and perhaps unexpected ways. It has meant that we can acknowledge that things we have done in the name of Christ have been perhaps misguided and in need of change. It has meant not being locked into a rigid set of beliefs and practices dictated by a magisterium set apart from the laity. It has meant relying on our life of common prayer and coming together at the Table to receive the blessed body and blood of Jesus to bind us together.

A friend of mine recently noted that perhaps the time has come to make a distinction between the Anglican Communion and the Anglican Way. The Anglican Way, that way of being Christian I just described, is what is at the heart of the Elizabethan Settlement that delineated the shape of the Church of England, and the Anglican churches that have come from it. The Anglican Way is a way that is based on common prayer, not doctrinal conformity. It is a way that allows for people with diverse beliefs to come together at the Table, to worship together in love, trusting that God’s house is big enough for all of us. For many years, the Anglican Communion was the institutional embodiment of the Anglican Way. But some of us are beginning to wonder if that is still true. Those who would have the Episcopal Church do the Primates’ bidding, those who call for stricter doctrinal conformity, those who would dictate what those doctrines should be, seem to many of us to be departing from the Anglican Way.

The next few months will be a difficult time for the Episcopal Church. The presenting issue is thorny enough—should the church step back from its prophetic stance of allowing for the blessing of faithful and loving relationships of people of the same gender? Should the church bar from the episcopate otherwise qualified people because they are in such relationships? Should the church abandon its ministry to a significant portion of our population for the sake of unity? For me at least, the answer is no, an unequivocal no. If this is the price of unity, the price is too high.

There are larger issues to face as well. Will this church continue to be a church in which we struggle together to follow Jesus as we are so called? Will it be a place where that struggle rests on the three-pronged foundation of scripture, tradition, and reason? Will it retain what is truest and best about the Anglican Way? I pray and hope that it will be so, but I don’t know how it will end. I am certain, however, of this: As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. No matter what the fate of the Episcopal Church, no matter what the fate of the Anglican Communion, we are still the body of Christ, sent to do Christ’s work in the world. And we are still the beloved children of God. As we go forward in these difficult times, I pray that we may trust in this bountiful love to sustain us.

AMEN