The mess that is events at Wycliffe Hall (an Anglican training college) gets increasingly more ugly.  I never thought the day would come when I'd be turning to Tertuallian....

"Vide", inquiunt, "ut invicem se diligant" - ipsi enim invicem oderunt - "et ut pro alteruto mori sint parati"; ipsi enim ad occidendum alterutrum paratiores erunt.

"Look," they say, "how they love one another" (for they themselves hate one another); "and how they are ready to die for each other" (for they themselves are readier to kill each other).

Apologeticum chapter 39,7 From http://www.tertullian.org/quotes.htm

Don't quite know how I'm meant to take it, but a sarcastic reading, with Christians as the 'they' in the parenthesised bits, felt right today!  

I readily agree that the way Elaine Storkey and others were treated is wrong.  I'm just saddened that unfair dismissal and compensation seemingly is not enough - now we have to have lawsuits among/between believers.  The obvious passage of 1 Corinthains 6: 1 - 10 is I'm sure far from trivial to unpack, and I concur that wrong has been done to these folk at Wycliffe Hall, but I can't help feeling that the religious discrimination case - and the way it makes the church look - exemplifies 1 Cor 6:7a "In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you." (NRSV).  What must we look like?

But before I dare get judgemental, I also recall 1 Cor 12: 26a "If one member [of the body] suffers, all suffer together with it" (NRSV).  The whole church is damaged by this, as other, internal injustices and wranglings.

Father forgive us, we don't know what we're doing. 

I recall come words in a song I have on an old cassette tape, sung by Sheila Walsh back in the 1980s

We walk the aisle of history

Leave a battered, wounded bride -

But Jesus loves the church

 

I thank God for that much.