Readings – Revelation 7: 9–17; John 10: 22–30
“…you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep…”
I wonder if I say the name William Stringfellow, does that mean anything to any of you? I don’t mean the man with the dodgy nightclub, but the American Anglican theologian of the 1960s to ‘80s. Stringfellow refused ordination despite having a doctorate in theology, preferring to live in a slum tenement in Harlem while working as a lawyer offering his services for free to the poor of New York.
A garrulous, bibulous, chain-smoker, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Scripture and theology, Stringfellow was heavily involved in activism against the Vietnam War. He was known in particular for allowing the famous Jesuit war resister Daniel Berrigan to hide in his house. This saw him visited by an FBI agent, who made the mistake of asking Stringfellow about the Bible. Questioning the legitimacy of Christian civil disobedience, he asked, “Doesn’t the Bible say you must obey the emperor?”
Stringfellow reports his own reply as follows:
I could not concede the simplistic premise about the Bible which his question assumed, and I rebuked him about this, taking perhaps forty-five minutes to do so. During the discourse, he wilted visibly, and, when I paused momentarily, he abruptly excused himself and departed. This was some disappointment to me, for I had only just begun to respond to the multifarious implications of the issue he had raised.
I introduce you to Stringfellow because not only did he always refuse to allow Scripture to be used to simplistically reinforce our pre-existing notions, but he had a particular demand that we read Scripture in tension. When confronted by passages of Scripture that seem to contradict or clash with one another, he argued that we should not seek to impose a false consistency on them, for we would inevitably do so in ways that simply suited our own ends. He argued instead for seeking to hear what God is saying to us in the dissonance between passages of Scripture – he argued that Scriptural Truth is often complex and can only be unveiled by being prepared to remain with the texts in tension.
Indeed, I would argue that spiritual growth often comes from allowing ourselves to sit in the tension, allowing the weaknesses and fallacies in our thinking and our attitudes to be stretched out; to allow our spiritual muscle to be built up.
This morning we have two passages of Scripture which are to some extent in tension. A Gospel that sets firm boundaries about who are God’s people; and an Epistle reading that presents a vision of heaven that is packed with people of every possible kind.