ENGLAND: I am not coming to Lambeth to protest, New Hampshire Bishop Robinson says
Episcopal News Service, London. July 15, 2008 [071508-02]
Solange De Santis, Editor of Episcopal Life Media
Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire said he is going to some events at the Lambeth Conference "not to protest in any way" his exclusion from the main part of the conference, but to "tell the story of God's work" in his life and "tell people that God is available to them."
Robinson, the first openly gay man to be elected a bishop in the Anglican Communion, spoke July 14 at the British premiere of a documentary film, For the Bible Tells Me So, which profiles Christian parents struggling to accept their gay children in the context of a reading of the Bible that condemns homosexuality.
Robinson's parents, Victor and Imogene, are interviewed in the film, as are former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, his wife Jane and their lesbian daughter Chrissy, and other families.
The film presents both liberal biblical scholarship and conservative voices, but the focus is on family stories, such as that of Mary Lou Wallner, who rejected her lesbian daughter but came to regret her action and support gay Christians after her daughter's suicide.
Robinson's parents said that learning their son was gay was "a shock," and they were initially uncomfortable around his partner, Mark Andrew. "We got a couple of books and read about gay folks," said Victor Robinson. "It [the fact he was gay] didn't change our love for him," he added and they concluded that "God made him that way. If anyone would go to heaven, he would."
Parents and family members in the film confront both conservative and mainline Protestant churches such as the Lutheran church in efforts to have gay Christians accepted.
After the film, Robinson appeared onstage for a conversation with British actor Sir Ian McKellen, who publicly supports marriage for gay couples and candidly described himself as a "nonbeliever."
Robinson took questions from the audience of about 500, saying that he wished they could all come to New Hampshire, where "90 percent of the time" he is performing diocesan tasks and can often be found "in a church basement with a macaroni salad."
He also confirmed that although he was not invited to participate in the decennial Lambeth Conference of the world's Anglican bishops in Canterbury, his diocese received a request for $7,000 in support to which he "didn't respond," he said.
He also said he realized Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' current position -- trying to keep a fractious Anglican Communion together in the context of issues such as homosexuality and whether women may be allowed to become bishops -- is extremely difficult and praised him for also trying to focus on pressing world issues such as poverty and HIV/AIDS.
In answer to one questioner, who said he and his partner have "given up faith in the Anglican Communion," Robinson said: "God and the church are not the same thing. Give it another try. Maybe the Communion isn't what it used to be."
Other Protestant denominations are watching the Anglican church, he said. "Are we going to make a statement about the expansion of God's love?"
After the onstage interview, at Robinson's request, McKellen rose and held the audience spellbound by reciting a passage from the play Sir Thomas More, to which Shakespeare is believed to have contributed. The passage criticizes the English for attacking foreigners and urges them to welcome strangers. In the play, More points out that if an English citizen leaves the country, he must be a stranger elsewhere: "Would you be pleased/To find a nation of such barbarous temper/That, breaking out in hideous violence/Would not afford you an abode on earth? ... This is the stranger's case/And this your mountainish inhumanity."