Evensong, Sunday 15 June 2008, at St. Michael & All Angels Church, Christchurch, New Zealand.

In  just a few weeks, the largely conservative (mainly African and American) contingent in the Anglican Communion, who have protested against the Episcopal ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson because of his being involved in a committed same-sex relationship - will be meeting together in Jordan and Jerusalem in order to isolate themselves from the rest of the Church in an effort to protest against the acceptance, by most people, of women and gays in the ministry of the Church.

In the meantime, most of the bishops including our own Bishop-Elect, The Rt. Reverend Victoria Matthews, will be preparing for the Lambeth Conference, which will take place at Canterbury University in Sussex, later in July. These Bishops will be meeting together for prayer and study, which will lead, hopefully to a common mind on what the Christian Gospel is all about which is an inclusive message to all peoples, rather than an exclusive message to just the righteous. However, they have pledged themselves not to issue any legislation that will lead to the ostracizing of any of the conflicting parties.

In his ministry on earth, Jesus was more concerned about the marginalized of society than he was about the closed attitudes of the existing hierarchy of the Jewish system. His constant battles with the Scribes and the Pharisees were mainly to do with their interpretation of the Law, which they saw as basic to the ordering of their society, and which tended to marginalize the sort of people who were unable to measure up to what they saw as a legalistic code of conduct. This, of course, meant that only those who were within the closed confines of Judaism were considered worth redeeming.

We all know that this situation was altered completely by Jesus, as he strove to open up the boundaries of salvation for everyone, and for this, he was put to death by the authorities of the Church as it existed at that time.

This closed attitude, which demands righteousness of those who seek salvation in the Church, seems, once again, to be rearing its head amongst the more conservative elements of our Church. What has been forgotten, it seems, is that we are all sinners and non-one can claim the sort of righteousness that Jesus himself was able to demonstrate in his own life. The only claim we have to any righteousness at all, is that we have been bonded by his incarnation into the righteousness of Christ himself, and our Baptism into his life and death has already guaranteed the salvation that Jesus promised to all who would come to believe in him. This is the message of the Gospel: that "Though we were yet sinners, Christ died for us", so that all who accept this simple reality for themselves would become heirs of Christ, in the eternal life he has already gained for us.

God will not be mocked. The Church will need to marshall all its resources of Gospel integrity in order to dispel the notion that we can ever earn salvation for ourselves. This is the very reason that Jesus was sent into the world " that we might be freed from the consequences of the sins that are part and parcel of the reality of our human condition.

We can no longer believe in a flat earth environment. Nor can we subscribe to the sort of patriarchalism that has bedeviled the mission of the Church for so long. We no longer believe that Our Lord's incarnation as a man meant that the male of the species had some special sort of priority in the process of salvation. We realise that Jesus was representatively human, not just male, but that he had to be one or the other. The fact that the society of his day did not recognize women as capable of leadership in the Church meant that, for very  practical reasons in that society, he could not be seen to send them out as his first Apostles their role of leadership would not have been accepted. However, when we examine the New Testament Scriptures, we come to realise that Jesus was always affirming of women on a personal level. In fact, we read in the Gospels that Mary Magdalene was the first to be sent by Jesus with the specific news of his resurrection to the other disciples!

This ˜being sent" was the characteristic of apostleship, so it could be said that Mary Magdalene was the first Apostle of the Good News of Christ's resurrection.

Similarly, the world has come to realise that our human sexuality is as varied and mysterious a phenomenon as the mystery of life itself, and that the Jewish religious patriarchal view of procreation as the most important feature of the sexual act was based on the need to produce as many little Jews as possible to boost the sheer numbers of the Jewish religious population. However, one has only to read the verses of the Song of Solomon to understand that human sexuality was much more than just an instrument of propagation of the species, and that erotic love was a means of showing the commitment of one being to another.

David's love for Jonathon, which was described as being "bove that of love for women" helps us to understand that the love of one man for another was something very different from the urge to procreate. In this category, too, could be seen the love of Jesus for Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist, who constantly refers in his Gospel to himself, a little coyly perhaps, as "The Disciple whom Jesus Loved".  This is not to suggest that in either case any physical act took place, but it does speak of same-sex love in a way that should alert us to the possibility of real love existing between two people of the same gender.

The split in the Church, however, is not just about sexuality, nor is it solely about the leadership of women in the Church. What is at its base is the interpretation of Scripture.

It is nothing less than a return to the rule of Law over Grace, which puts undue emphasis on our human ability to pull ourselves up by our own boot-straps instead of accepting humbly that, without God, none of us is capable of the sort of goodness that would earn us the benefit of salvation. Jesus tells us that only faith in God can secure this for us. The fact that the Son of God himself has shared the vulnerability of the human condition should inform us that, without his supreme act of love for all humanity, not a single human being would have received salvation. The gospel message is very clear: God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that all who believe in him should not perish but have eternal life. Our task, then, as members of the Body of Christ in the Church should be quite clear. It was not, nor ever will be, our own righteousness that will guarantee the salvation of anyone let alone ourselves. It is God's free gift to all who will accept it. Thanks be to God.