Waiting to Welcome

Minister's Letter: September 2022

Dear Grace Church,

Patience is the virtue we all know but never want to practise ourselves. Especially when we know how to step in and fix a situation.

This has been on my mind as I have just started reading a new book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. This is not written by a bitter chauvinist but by Louise Perry, a firm feminist. Sarah and I listened to a podcast interview with Perry* on the way to Arbroath one morning and almost immediately ordered it from our local bookshop.

Through her experience working with women who have suffered abuse and seeing the national discourse of how women are to behave, Perry started to question the narrative. She started to examine whether it was true that women were truly liberated or if they have remained imprisoned under the guise of freedom. It’s not going to be a popular argument but she might have put her finger on the pulse of something.

There’s a Proverb I return to every so often:

Whoever digs a pit will fall into it,

and a stone will come back on him who starts it rolling.

Our downfall is often the result of our own schemes. This was what Hamlet meant when he said Claudius would be ‘hoist with his own petard’. His plot to assassinate Hamlet would be reversed to cause his own downfall.

The decisions we have made as a society will prove to be our own downfall. Where we thought we were building new foundations, we were instead building a grave. In Perry’s book, she examines how in the rush to escape the strictures of the 50s, we threw the the baby out but kept the bathwater. Women were not liberated but are now being erased. Major politicians can’t answer a simple question such as “What is a woman?”

For Christians, this has been deeply dispiriting. It has been hard to see Scotland, once known as the ‘Land of the Book’, now abandoning the basic moral foundations which governed and shaped our lives. And the answer seems so obvious, we just need to go back to the Bible as our guidebook. The tendency for the Church is to seek to solve the issue we see immediately. We try to initiate new legislation. We hold placards. We sign petitions on social media.

But maybe sometimes we just need to take a step back and allow the stone to roll back. Maybe what our country needs to see is the full implications of the decision to reject God and his word.

Louise Perry has seen through the veil of the prevailing narrative and sees that we are falling into our own pit. And she is not the only one. There has been a growing number of authors, none of them Christian, who have sought to demonstrate that the secular liberal viewpoint and values are derived from the Judeo-Christian worldview. Tom Holland, a historian of the classical period, is the most recent of these. In his book Dominion, he has helpfully shown that the moral compass of those in the west has its magnetic north in the gospel of Jesus Christ and its moral imperatives. While it comes across as stale and irrelevant to most twenty-first century westerners, Holland argues that the declaration that God in the flesh died on a cross is one of the most significant turning points in our moral development. It gave dignity to all humanity (in particular slaves and the marginalised) that God would take on flesh and suffer the shame of the outcast. This is a radical reorienting of social structures. Kings are now equals with their subjects in the eyes of God and must treat them as those loved by God.

But by rejecting the very foundation which gives value to every human being, our society has introduced dangerous consequences because it cannot coherently argue that each person is important regardless of what they have achieved or who they are related to. While people want to say everyone is special, they have no grounds on which they can make that claim. It is only because we are made in God’s image and God’s true image came to live on this earth that our worth and dignity is secured.

So maybe our duty in this current climate is to remain faithful to the truth and to offer an alternative. While our culture rejects God, our first responsibility is to follow his good word and will. His purposes for women, children, the poor and the outcast are better than anything this broken world offers. When people see the stone rolling back on them, seeing the consequences of our decisions as a society, we can hold out an invitation to those hurting and wounded. A word of hope and healing. A warm welcome.

In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, The Father waited patiently for his son to see the futility of chasing the shining lights of the world. He waited patiently for him to hit rock bottom.

Imagine how hard it was for him to wait. But he did. It’s hard for us to wait for our friends and family to see the folly of their ways. But grace and love is more powerful than condemnation. And we wait for those who are hurt and wounded. And we patiently wait to welcome them back with open arms. Some might not. But others will see the beauty of God’s will being worked out in the lives of his church.

The lie will be unmasked. The truth will shine through in the darkness.

*If you’d like to listen to interview yourself, click on this link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001b4fb