I was greatly dismayed by your above sermon which was a travesty of both church discipline and doctrine. Coming from a senior C of E priest it made a mockery of the Church of England's current commitment to traditional teaching on marriage as being the exclusive union between man and woman. Just as repugnant was the desperate attempt to spin a deceptive web of highly speculative pseudo intellectual argument calculated to confuse lesser minds in the congregation and delude them into believing that there was a scriptural justification however far-fetched for a homosexual lifestyle.

Your main point was that by miraculously healing the centurion's desperately sick servant in the famous incident Jesus endorsed homosexual partnerships, because in your opinion the centurion and his servant were homosexual lovers ! In support of this view you maintained that the main purpose of our Lords miracles was not so much a demonstration of divine power and the mighty rewards of faith, but rather to teach lessons in social inclusivity where the marginalised (homosexuals included) would find acceptance. In pursuance of this somewhat banal understanding of the significance of miracles you dealt at length with the healing of the embattled woman with a menstrual bleeding disorder who you claimed had been socially ostracized for many years owing to her condition. You then proceeded to say that if the apostle Paul was here today you were " pretty confident that Paul would say that a faithful same sex marriage can reflect the union of Christ and his church much as a heterosexual marriage". Finally you appeared to boast about your own 40 year homosexual partnership while confidently predicting that notwithstanding disenchanted Anglicans in Africa leaving the Communion it was only a matter of time before the Church of England will endorse homosexual marriage. That is more or less what you conveyed in the audio clip of the sermon that can be accessed at the following site:

https://soundcloud.com/livcathedral/sunday-29-may-1030am-very-revd-dr-jeffrey-john-dean-of-st-albans?in=livcathedral%2Fsets%2Fsummer-term-2016

In response I would like to make the following points:

1. The theory that the centurion and his servant were homosexual lovers is by any estimation a piece of far-fetched romantic speculation driven by the desperate LGBT need to scour the bottom of the barrel in the vain search for even a fragment of scripture somewhere that might conceivably endorse homosexual marriage. Otherwise what Jesus really felt is manifestly clear when he said : " Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said 'therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh ? So they are no longer two but one flesh" ? (Matt 19: 4-6). There can be no more unambiguous endorsement of the traditional family. Nor does this statement allow for any conclusion other than that Jesus never equated homosexual unions with marriage. Indeed to conclude otherwise would be sacrilege.

2. The legendary debaucheries of ancient Rome and the role of widespread moral decay in the fall of the Roman Empire are matters of historical record. You may be right in saying that such perversities included widespread homosexual relationships between Roman officers and their servant boys. Considering the quantum difference in rank and power between the parties one would imagine that such relationships were largely sordid, exploitative and coercive. However while they might have been common that does not mean that such relationships existed in each and every case. Indeed there is no basis whatsoever for extrapolating that the centurion and his servant were homosexual lovers. The fact that the servant was "highly valued" by his master could easily mean that in this particular case the former was a trusted worker and so highly valued. Indeed I read that even the theologian Gerd Theissen ( to whom you refer ) when asked " are you certain that the centurion was a homosexual ?" replied " of course not but everyone must have their suspicions . .". So you base your entire thesis on a tendentious suspicion that is entire speculative because it tally's with your homosexual bias, while conveniently ignoring Jesus's far more illuminating assertion which I have quoted.

3. You may also be right about the Jews in Jesus's time having a disdain for the Gentile homosexual practices of Romans which were a common target of anti Roman polemic in Jewish literature. However notwithstanding such scruples according to Luke the Jewish elders came to Jesus and 'pleaded with him earnestly' to help this particular Roman centurion. Is it likely that conservative Jewish elders would have gone to such lengths on behalf of a Roman officer who was widely known to be sodomising his own servant boy ? Indeed the opposite conclusion is far more plausible namely that this centurion was not a practicing homosexual at all but as one who loved the Jewish nation and had built them a synagogue ( Lk 7:5 ) he probably had a more sober lifestyle that pleased the Jewish elders. Conjecture is a two way street. If you can indulge in fanciful speculation, so can I.

4. The above considerations notwithstanding, even if for arguments sake one were to concede that the centurion and his servant were lovers it would still be utterly illogical to conclude that Jesus approved of homosexual partnerships just because he had compassion on a suffering gay servant who was "sick and at the point of death". Nowhere in Jesus's healing ministry did he confine his miracles to righteous people. Jesus's compassion towards the centurion's servant ( even if the latter was a practicing homosexual sinner ) is entirely consistent with his holiness where he would have hated the sin but longed for the salvation of the sinner.

5. As for your understanding of the general focus of miracles in the gospels it seems to me that you are straining to contrive a general principle so as to facilitate your preferred interpretation of the specific case. Some miracles may have an element of social relevance in that they are theological statements favouring inclusion of groups marginalised by society. But you make too much of it as do those who preach a social gospel instead of the gospel of grace. In the godly search for truth about the real significance of miracles better than fanciful theoretical contortions by theological scholars, is to allow scripture to clarify scripture. Accordingly Prof. J.I. Packer in Concise Theology sees the significance of miracles as twofold, authenticating the miracle workers themselves as God's representatives and messengers, and also showing forth something of God's power in salvation and judgment. He makes no mention about demonstrating inclusivity. The truth is that from first to last the purpose of miracles in the Bible is to glorify our Trinitarian God - not so much to tutor us on the imperative of social justice.

6. Therefore when one reads the story of the centurion's servant objectively without frenetically seeking to find within it something that one is looking for ( like a moot justification for homosexual marriage ) - it is obvious that what is unique here is the stunning faith of the Gentile Centurion in the Son of God , such faith as Jesus had not encountered in the whole of Israel. That is the big point of the story which has nothing whatsoever to do with endorsing the gay lifestyle. To give it that kind of twist suggests a grotesque manipulation of scripture in pursuance of a gay agenda.

7. The suggestion that the apostle Paul were he alive today would have supported homosexual marriage sounds like a piece of LGBT wishful thinking. Otherwise it has no scriptural warrant whatsoever and is hardly worthy of serious rebuttal. In Romans 1-3 ( to which you referred ) Paul lays the foundation to his subsequent exposition of the glorious doctrine of justification by faith, by painting a vivid picture of the utterly depraved nature of unregenerate man in the grip of original sin. The description includes a reference to men giving up natural relations with women and being consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error ( Rom.1:27 ). That Paul genuinely identified homosexual behaviour as a sin (alongside other sins) is there for all to see. Even a child in Sunday school could not miss it. Your attempt to dismiss Paul's impassioned description of the debased nature of fallen man in Romans 1 as simply a clever bit of Pauline rhetoric where he is quoting standard Jewish polemic about gentiles without really believing any of it - represents a disingenuous attempt to wriggle out of scripture that you find inconvenient. Indeed such an understanding is nothing but the personal opinion sans evidence of the Dean of St Albans, as when you say that you are "pretty confident" that Paul would endorse homosexual marriage today. But our 'pretty confident biased pet theories and opinions' are surely worthless is the face of timeless biblical truth which affirms that " all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift . ." (Rom.3:23-24), where homosexuality takes its place alongside other forms of unrighteousness as a sin no less that demands humble repentance.

Finally, while seeking to decipher the mind of Paul in Romans 1-3, I am perplexed by your profound amnesia when it comes to 1 Cor 6:9 -10 " Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God ? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God". Nor do you seem to be aware of 1 Timothy 1:9-10 where the aging apostle puts "sexually immoral men who practice homosexuality" in the same basket with the ungodly, sinners, the unholy and profane, those who strike their parents, murderers, enslavers, liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine " Surely one would have to be dreaming to imagine the same apostle Paul being actively in favour of homosexual marriage in our day and age !

I commend these reactions for your kind consideration while forwarding them to other Christians at home and abroad as a contribution to the discussion of these issues. That "the devil can cite scripture for his own purpose" may be a banal Shakespearean quote rendered hackneyed through familiarity. But I am not being facetious is saying that it takes a sermon like yours to remind us of the subtlety, deceptive theological pretention, and veneer of intellectual authenticity with which congregations can be beguiled into accepting a grotesque distortion of scripture to suit the morality of the world.

The Bible teaches unequivocally that a homosexual lifestyle is sinful alongside other sins which directly or indirectly violate the commandments. Far worse than the sin itself is to sanctify what is sinful after the moral fashions of the world, stubbornly deny the need for repentance, and teach people so by gratuitously distorting scripture. Sadly that is what you are doing as a senior Anglican Churchman. That by so doing you are accelerating the fragmentation of an already troubled communion should worry you. Or do you gaily look forward to the day when the Church of England will shrink to the limits of its homosexual community in a disoriented world where the traditional family that has been the cornerstone of our Judeo Christian heritage has long ceased to exist ?

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Asoka N.I. Ekanayaka, Ph.D (Lond.), DDPH.RCS (Eng.), BDS
Professor Emeritus (University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka)

cc. Archbishop of Canterbury et.al