Another fine mess!

A Message for Our Bishops: “Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into”

You can read all about it on this morning’s BBC News website under the headline: Church of England abandons proposals for same-sex blessing ceremonies.

For years now, Anglicans have been wrestling — and that really is the right word — with questions surrounding gay relationships. The long and painstaking process known as Living in Love and Faith was intended to bring clarity and healing. Instead, it has brought considerable pain.

Gay Christians feel understandably aggrieved, having been led to expect meaningful change. Meanwhile, many conservative Christians feel bruised and unsettled, fearing an uncertain future that at times has seemed to involve some form of “parallel church.”

This abrupt handbrake turn has come because the bishops have now accepted legal advice that any substantive change would require a two-thirds majority in all three Houses of General Synod — bishops, clergy, and laity. Given the current composition of Synod, that threshold is highly unlikely to be met.

But here is the most troubling aspect: the bishops were aware of this legal advice some years ago and chose not to make it public.

That lack of transparency has left the Church divided, disappointed, and distrustful.

And yet — the good news is that God is not fazed by the messes we make. Human confusion, institutional failure, and wounded relationships do not place us beyond God’s patience or mercy. As Desmond Tutu once said: “God has a dream — a vision of love, peace, and justice — and God will not let our failures have the last word.”

Again and again in Scripture, God works through broken people and fractured communities. The Church has never been perfect, and it never will be. Yet God remains faithful — calling, healing, forgiving, renewing. Even when leadership falters and processes collapse into confusion, grace is still quietly at work, restoring what we have damaged and opening new possibilities.

At present I am working my way through the opening book of the Bible, Genesis, with BRF Guidelines, tracing how God begins to address the chaos related in the first eleven chapters by choosing one family, the seed of Abraham, to bless the nations, everyone. 

As my daughters’ former neighbour, Isabelle Harnley, writes: “There are no untarnished heroes in these stories; but there are men and women seeking to live with God, getting it wrong, learning and meeting the God of grace along the way.”

Everything rests on God’s promise to Abraham — later repeated to Sarah — that through their offspring the nations will be blessed. The difficulty is that nothing seems to happen for years, even as they grow old.

So, understandably, they attempt to hurry God along. At Sarah’s suggestion, Abraham fathers a child by her slave, Hagar. When Sarah later conceives Isaac against all expectations, the situation descends into rivalry and cruelty. Hagar and her son Ishmael are driven into the wilderness.

It is, quite frankly, a shambles.

Yet Harnley puts it beautifully: “There is no such thing as a pure, unadulterated working out of God’s plans: God works with imperfect human agents, and the outworking is messy – yet shining through with God’s grace and life.”

In the wilderness, Hagar hears God speak her name. An outcast Egyptian slave woman is seen and addressed by the living God. There is no hint that she is second-rate, nor that her son is of lesser worth. Ishmael, too, will become a great nation.

God takes the situation as it is — the disorder caused by impatience and fear — and turns it toward blessing. Grace lies at the very heart of the story, because grace lies in the very heart of God.

Such grace is rarely found in neat resolutions. More often it appears in wilderness places — in fear, exhaustion, and apparent abandonment. Hagar receives no explanation. She receives water. She receives presence.

She and Ishmael had earned nothing. They deserved nothing. They were caught in the consequences of others’ failures. Yet God heard. God opened her eyes. God provided a well.

Grace here is not sentimental. It is practical. It is life-saving. It arrives precisely when human systems have failed.

And perhaps that is the word for the Church in this present moment. When our processes falter and our certainties unravel, grace remains. God is still at work on the margins, still attentive to those pushed aside, still opening wells in unlikely places.

So in this confusion we are called not to despair, but to trust again in God’s patient grace — to listen more carefully, love more generously, and walk together, imperfectly yet faithfully.