The Whale

Whales are special creatures. On one level we might think of them as belonging with fish, but we know that they are mammals and therefore somehow connected to us. They are majestic creatures and people pay good money to travel to the places where they play, feed and bring up their young. Sadly, whalers can end up being beached. They often die, collapsing under their own weight and quickly carcass both poisonous and dangerous to human health. Beaching is thought to have various causes. The whale might well have lost its sense of direction, either mistaking the guidance of magnetic fields or being confused by human generated sonar. Beaching can also be caused by moving into too shallow waters and then finding that the tide has gone out.

There is a sense that a tide is going out for the Church of England. On 29th March 2014 it became possible to two people of the same gender to get married in our country. The Church of England has remained firmly in the same place in this matter. It is the rest of society that has changed. I remember from my childhood places where there were large beaches of gentle incline. In a very short period of time the water where we played was gone and a huge area of sand was revealed. The change in attitude over same-sex relationships has happened in a very short period of time. The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken of this change in terms of living in a time of revolution. But we will not change with society. We insist on remaining in the same place, despite the shoreline moving to a new place. That shoreline is where the people are. It is where people play and enjoy life. So we proudly sit on our sand, like a beached whale. In the distance we hear the laughter and the chatter of people's lives, but we are no longer engaged in such living. We have made a virtue out of maintaining our position, but it is no longer where people are living. And here we will die, collapsing under our own weight of righteousness and festering inner infection. We lost sight of the need to play where the people are and to give ourselves in showing them how to celebrate life and to claim the blessings of God. They are learning to live and to discover such blessing without us.

Our mistake was to think we could survive out of the water and somehow have an existence set apart from the culture of our society. Indeed we thought that being counter-cultural was a clever thing to be, but then we completely misunderstood what such counter-culturalism might look like. Sitting on our beach, far removed from the place where people are falling in love, committing their lives to one another and finding the joy that brings, is not being counter-cultural. It is to withdraw from our involvement in culture and to set ourselves apart as a group with as much impact or influence as the Flat Earth Society.  We become an anachronism. We cannot be counter-cultural if we have ceased to engage in that culture.

We face the probability of collapse and then rotting, but even now we could at least try to re-enter the water and find life in the place where the people play. In terms of the 29th March, we could say that we will open our churches to anyone getting married, straight or gay. We could make a stand, not for heterosexualism, but for marriage, and we could be counter-cultural in the way we stand for permanent, sacrificial and sacramental relationships. By the way in which we engage in our culture, we could demonstrate the possibility of living Christ-filled lives. By the quality of our humanity, we could give ourselves to living for others in a way that is creatively life-transforming. We could live as a community in which is fulfilled the promise of Christ, that he came to give us life in all its fullness. That is counter-cultural, but what we choose instead is to be anti-cultural. In doing so we become more and more beached, mistaking the holding of a traditional perspective on gender for the vocation to live in costly self-giving as the face for Christ reaching out to heal a broken world. Instead of being the embodiment of a love that gives life, we will become, even more, an expression of a homophobia which is seen more and more as something rotten and to be avoided.