It is not my habit to comment on the contents of sermons in this blog. However, the Dean of St Edmundsbury, The Very Reverend Joe Hawes, used his sermon at St Edmundsbury Cathedral last Sunday to comment on the Living in Love and Faith process[1] and it seemed to me to be important not to let the points he made about this subject go unchallenged.
The Dean makes five points in relation to the LLF process, and I shall consider each of them in turn.
The first point he makes is that he feels able to affirm:
‘… with heartfelt certainty, that although I get it wrong pretty regularly and need to hearken to the Baptist’s cry to repent, who I am in my creation, is essentially what God intended. That I am not an aberration, a mistake on God’s part, but, like all of you, a gift from God, and trying in my life, to be a gift back to God through loving service.’
The question that this statement raises is who the Dean thinks God created him to be. If he means that his creation as a male human being made in the image and likeness of God is willed by God and is ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31), I don’t think that there is anybody in the Church of England, even those who the Dean calls ‘hard line fundamentalists,’ who would disagree with him.
If, however, what the Dean means is that he was created by God to be a gay man then there would be many who would rightly disagree with him. This because, to quote Sean Doherty (who is himself same-sex attracted):
‘God did not create straight women, straight men, gay women and gay men. God created two sexes, with the capacity to relate to one another sexually.’ [2]
This truth is taught in the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 and, as Paul notes in Romans 1:26-27, it is also taught by nature in the sense that the observation of human biology teaches us that human beings have bodies that are designed to engage into the kind of ‘one flesh’ sexual union with a member of the opposite sex that has the capacity to produce offspring.
In the light of this truth the Pauline teaching that same-sex sexual attraction and the same-sex sexual activity that results from it are a result of the Fall makes perfect sense. If human beings are created to have sex with members of the opposite sex, it follows that desires and actions that are contrary to this must be seen not as a reflection of God’s original creative intention, but as a result of the distortion of the created order consequent upon demonic and human rebellion against God.
I have just published a new blog post, 'Why the cupboard is bare – a response to the reflections of the Dean of St Edmundsbury'https://t.co/fzxq2YZ4wr
— Martin Davie (@MartinBDavie) December 13, 2025