Charity and Clarity

Without clarity there is no charity, for Love cannot exist without Truth. He who is Love is also Truth and you can’t have one without the other. 

An unpopular truth is that Love and Truth also cannot exist without Holiness, for He who is Love and Truth, is also Holy and calls us to be Holy. One cannot accept God without accepting all that He is. You can’t choose one attribute at the expense of the others. In the bellwether issue of sexuality the debate rages on and on, in part because we have become afraid of stating what we really believe because in so doing we are accused of a lack of charity.

Sexuality as an issue is derivative and related to the larger issue of whether or not we believe that Christ actually transforms lives, or perhaps even the question as to whether or not our lives need to be transformed; but remember that it is the God of Love who said, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” The question of sexual orientation is foreign to the biblical authors. Neither Jesus, nor Paul, nor any of the biblical writers ever concerned themselves with “Gay” or “Straight.” What they were concerned with was behavior and transformation of life. In surrendering to Christ are we willing to let the past die, and be made new creatures in Him?

There is a welcome call for unity in the Episcopal Church, but that call is often extended to us on the basis of Love without Clarity over the very issues that divide us. Unity is not possible for people who will not be transformed into the image of Christ. That transformation calls us to grow in Love; in surrender to Truth, and in Holiness. The issue fundamentally boils down to whether or not Scripture is authoritative in the matters of sexuality, or whether our contemporary humanism is the ultimate authority. If you accept the authority of Scripture you accept at face value what it says about sexuality. What it makes abundantly clear is that there should be no sex outside of the marriage union of one man and one woman. 

There is another related question: Don’t we have something better to talk about? Is this issue, the issue on which we want to spend our time? Unfortunately the issue is being pushed by those who reject the authority of Scripture and the call to transformation in Christ. That will come to a crisis point at the next General Convention of the Episcopal Church which will consider changing the definition of marriage and repudiating the current clear teaching of The Book of Common Prayer that tells us that marriage is between one man and one woman. Do we want to spend time on this issue? No. Do we have to? Yes.

In all of this we are being confronted on the national level with a New Fundamentalism that makes man the measure of all things, and extends absolutely no tolerance to those who wish to remain true to both Holy Scripture and Tradition.  From that quarter there is clarity, but no charity.