You know, when it all comes down to the ground, this issue for me is no longer about homosexuality per-se, but it is about Truth, and it is about our own human arrogance, and about following the model of Christ, and about the whole phenomena of forcing Scripture to conform to our own proclivities. Too much of the Fundamentalist Church (and many Evangelicals) finds itself rejecting anything that challenges what they WANT Scripture to say – what they WANT Scripture to bless or condemn.
Here is a commentary written by Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., who “serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world.” He will argue that if we accept homosexuality we MUST reject most everything about Scripture and most everything held true by the Church. This is a ludicrous belief.
Here are a couple paragraphs:
“Put bluntly, if the claims put forward by the Homosexual Movement are true, the entire system of the Christian faith is compromised, and some essential truths will fall.
Lest this be seen as an overstatement, consider the issue of biblical authority and inspiration. If the claims of revisionist exegetes are valid, then the very notions of verbal inspiration and biblical inerrancy are invalidated. But the challenge is yet deeper, for if, as the revisionist interpreters claim, Holy Scripture can be so wrong and misdirected on this issue (to which it speaks so unambiguously), the evangelical paradigm of biblical authority cannot stand.”

Read it all.
What he fails to understand is that WE can be wrong and misdirected in our attempts to interpret and apply Holy Scripture. Just because exegetes, theologians, pastors, regular ole’ lay people, UNDERSTAND parts of scripture differently does not impinge upon inspiration or validity of the Scriptures one iota! Who are and who are not the true Christians between those who understand Scripture to support Calvinism or those who understand Scripture to support Arminianism? Are we going there, still?
Was Scripture proven wrong when most Christians came to believe with Galileo in The Copernican Model of the solar system? The Vatican declared Galileo a heretic because he believed the earth revolved around the sun. This was a belief that contradicted “Biblical Truth” as the Church understood it from the beginning of the Church! Scripture was not proven wrong, but OUR understanding and application of Scripture was proven wrong.
This guy, and those who steadfastly follow this line of thinking, believe that we have all the wisdom and understanding we need right now, right now during the beginning of the 21st century, to competently and fully understand God, God’s ways, and Holy Scripture. How arrogant and profoundly prideful! I guess we know all things at this point, huh?
I am convinced that they do not really want to know Truth, but want to find justification and consolation for what they WANT to be truth.

This is nothing new, I know, but I’m just thinking…
The “real” Church (the one God recognizes), simply is. The One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, as we might put it, simply is. God has His criteria for who is part of that Church and who is not, for whatever reason. That is God’s prerogative regardless of what we may think about it. That is what makes God’s Church – it simply is.
We like to attempt that determination ourselves – what the “real” Church really is and who belongs to it. We have nice imaginations and go off on flights of fancy, but what we want to think makes no difference to God in establishing what the Church simply is or who simply belongs to it. Western Protestantism has excelled at this and made it into a true art form. All of Christendom participates, however.
How hard is it to recognized that all our machinations of what is and who belongs are nothing more that our attempts to place ourselves in God’s place and our attempts to create the Church in our own image?
We say all kinds of things and establish all kinds of criteria and create all kinds of policies to define who and what we are, and we mistake these policies and criteria for God’s. Pride and arrogance are very hard things to recognize in ourselves and at times even harder things to repent of.
I am not a religious relativist or a Universalist, and I recognize the inconsistency in what I just wrote above and my own attempt to make the claim that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. At least I think I can say that I may be absolutely wrong!
Life is so much easier when I leave all those judgments to God. I am called to evaluate, to discern, and will have to make judgments, but ultimately the Spirit of God is the only one who knows the heart of any wo/man and whether s/he is a member of the “real” Church or not.
I think I am called to encourage and challenge anyone and everyone to have a relationship or closer relationship with God through Jesus Christ by the enabling of the Holy Spirit. I don’t have to do anything more by way of judging who is in or who is out or what is real and what is not, thank God! Thank God that I can leave that to the “real” Judge – the one who saves us from ourselves.

There has been some discussion on the House of Bishops/House of Deputies listserv lately on the change in the beginning of the Nicene Creed from the pronoun “I” to “We” in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.
I thought this post below was good, not because I necessarily know enough to agree with his statements or not, but because of his differentiation between “assent” to belief and “a cry of the heart”:

Fr. _____’s response to the issue of the pronoun in the Nicene Creed points so clearly to one of my major problems with Western Christianity.
The common explanation is that, while the original form was for the purpose of defining “our” beliefs, participants in the Divine Liturgy must personally assent to the truths of the Gospel.
For him, as for so many of us, belief is “assent” not worship. Of course the Eastern Church can say “I,” because in the Divine Liturgy, the Nicene Creed is not a gate to the mysteries, a place through which one must successfully pass in order to enter and inner sanctum, it is worship. The Creed is a cry of the heart, not a statement of the brain.
Until we regain the sense of mystery and wonder Bill hinted at in his original post, we can continue to expect to be thus divided over issues of right “assent.”
Peace,
Jeff _____

Most of American Christianity has become a “religion of self.” It may apply to “cafeteria Catholics” or Episcopalians. It certainly applies to Unitarian Universalists (remember their commercials from several years ago that depicted people cobbling together their own belief systems). It applies to American Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism in the “me and Jesus” mentality and the incessant splitting of congregations and denominations as if we can say to one another, “you are not needed any longer,” as we yell heresy.
It is grounded in self, the defining of faith by individual religious feelings, rather than seeking Truth. The individual is paramount.
As I have come to understand the notion of the “catholic” nature of the Church, I have moved further and further away from “religion of self.” I am not the final arbiter of what is Truth, even my “personal truth.” I can reject anything and blindly believe anything, but Truth is something that is beyond the mere self.
So, what does this all mean?

Those who wish to discount the Bible as being anything other than the writings of simple people trying to understand their world in an unscientific and irrational time, here is a report of a rediscovery that substantiates biblical history and geography.
It is perfectly legitimate, in my opinion, to suggest that John or any of the biblical writers use allegory and story telling to convey religious truths, but many demand that that is what the Bible is all about – and as proof they often discount historical and geographic accounts as untrue. This was the case with the Hebrew Testament cities of Sodom and Gomorra, which many scholars used to prove the unreliability of biblical accounts because they did not believe the cities ever actually existed. Until they were found, that is. There are many such examples. Now, the Pool of Siloam has been found. I love it when this happens.

A Gospel of John Passage Is Proven True
It turns out that a specific passage from the Gospel of John wasn’t a religious conceit, that is a kind of poetic license John took to prove a point. It’s true. Now there is proof. When the sewer line in the Old City of Jerusalem needed repairs in the fall of 2004, the workmen made a historic discovery: the biblical Pool of Siloam. The Gospel of John cites this as the place where Jesus cured the blind man. Theologians have long thought the setting of the pool was a “religious conceit” used by John to illustrate a point. Turns out, the place is real. And it’s exactly where John said it is, reports The Los Angeles Times of a new study published in the Biblical Archaeology Review.

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You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pas judgment do the same thing. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things,” list in chapter 1, “is based on truth. So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you towards repentance?
How easy it is for me, for any of us, to pass judgments on others. The fact is we all judge, and we must continue to make judgments on all manner of the things. I don’t think Paul was instructing us to stop making judgments, but to stop being hypocrites in our judgment of others. Who knows the heart of man, but God.
As years pass, I am much more willing to leave the judging to God. When I was young, zealous, and far more self-righteous, it was far easier to pass judgment on others and never realized that I was thinking, “thank God I am not like THAT person! See how much better I am than…” Over the years my own stupidity, my own hypocrisy, my own self-righteous pride have come home to me more than I want to admit. It is in our make-up to behave in such ways, but if we allow God to have His way with us then we are transformed and made new daily.
We, too, are more often than not blind to our own pride or need to pass judgments on others in order to boost our own sense of worth or worthiness. I think this is what Paul is getting at as he writes to the Roman Jewish Christians.

So, here is another example of how we as Christians need to be different than those “of the world.”
Have you heard? Pat Robinson, founder of the Christian Coalition, former Presidential candidate, chancellor of Regent University in Virginia Beach, suggests that it would be prudent, productive, and cost-effective to assassinate President Chavez of Venezuela. According to Robinson, probably not one drop of oil would stop flowing, and besides it would be cheaper than getting into another costly war over one two-bit strong-arm dictator spreading communism and providing opportunities to militant Islam.
Read the AP article here.
As a professed Christian, Robinson advocates murder of his fellow man for crass nationalist reasons. Robinson does not like what this man advocates economically, politically, or socially for his own country, so kill him. This is advocacy of pre-mediated murder – hardly what Christ calls us to do or be as His follower’s. What is so tragic about this statement is that most people “of the world” instinctively know this is an immoral proposal! So much for being “in the world, but not of it.”

I’ve been preaching at St. Paul’s these past couple of Sundays and will the next few, too. The message I feel compelled to give, and frankly repeat, is that the life we live as followers of Jesus the Christ, as the ones “who join themselves to the Lord” (Proper 15, Isaiah 56:1-7), as those who “pursue righteousness” (Proper 16, Isaiah 51:1-6), as those who confess that Jesus is “the Messiah – the Christ – the Son of the Living God” (Proper 16, Matthew 16:13-20), the life we live should look very different on significant and fundamental levels than those who are “of the world.” It is not really a matter of doing or not doing, although our actions certainly are a reflection and outgrowth of our inner condition, but a matter of what is built upon our foundation of understanding pertaining to our relationships with God, our fellow humans, and with the culture of our day.
This coming Sunday’s epistle reading Paul writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good, acceptable and perfect.” (Proper 17, Romans 12:1-8) What are the results of our thinking and actions not being conformed “to this world?” I want to periodically write down some ideas I have about being different – again, not just to be different in action or speech for the sake of difference, but because our lives are so infused with the Gospel of Christ that we cannot help but think differently, speak different, act differently in an intuitive way.
So, this morning as I sat in Au Bon Pain eating my apple croissant (which, by the way, has far less calories and fat than a cinnamon scone!)and drinking coffee before work, I read in USA Today a commentary on youth and sports. I’m only going to mention one small part of the whole article that deals with parents and their actions and reactions concerning their children and sports. Some parents are demanding their children focus exclusively on one sport throughout childhood so that the child may become champions in something and get scholarships, etc.
“Says sports psychologist Rick Wolff, author of Coaching Kids for Dummies: ‘Excelling in sports has become as much a part of the American dream for parents as getting their kids into the best school and living in the best neighborhoods.” What is their intent? Is it truly for the betterment of their children or their own sense of self-worth and success?
“‘Parents are using their kids as a lottery ticket,’ Sanders says. ‘Before all this money came along, moms and dads didn’t go crazy at games. They didn’t curse their kids and get on them to play better. It was just fun. Now, there’s a Yellow Brick Road, and parents think it’s their ticket.’ In making youth sports so specialized, so adult, we’re killing our children’s joy for the game.” The article goes on to touch on the physical and emotional dangers for the kids under such pressure.
Youth sport is developing into something no longer about teaching kids sportsmanship, the love of sport, team play, but to excel to win, win, win, so that they can get money and often so that parents can live vicariously through their children. Greed and self-centeredness (whether monetary or for self-something), in the name of their children. I realize these are generalizations, but the cultural current is certainly flowing in this direction.
What makes a follower of Jesus different? One example is selflessness! We are to live our lives not for ourselves and our own betterment, fulfillment, or enjoyment, but we are to live our lives for others – our children, our parents, our friends, the poor, our parishioners, etc. In so doing, we discover the ironic dynamic that exemplifies so much of life in the Kingdom of God. We find ourselves full in all aspects of life. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” In our culture today, there is an expectation that we should not deny ourselves anything, and the expense or the effect on others should be no consideration! Christians are to be different, and the ability to be different – different at our core of being – in this sense comes from the transformation we experience as we yield our lives to God.

I listened to a news report the other day on All Things Considered from NPR concerning the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s national convention and their dealings with the ordination of gay people and the blessing of same-gender unions. One of the people the reporter interviewed said that those who favor the ordination of gays and the blessings of same-gender unions are propagating a different Gospel. I’ve heard the same accusation in the Episcopal Church as we navigate through these controversies.
The homosexual question is only the current flash-point between the groups of people who supposedly advocate competing gospels. There is some truth to the assertion, because there has developed two fundamentally different interpretations of the purpose of Jesus’ message and work – for the lack of better words: Affirmation vs. Transformation. I do not agree, however, that all who favor the inclusion of homosexual people in the life and ministry of the Church must be part of one group and excluded from the other. Of course, these are arbitrary terms and groups.

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From an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer (when, I have no idea):

“This new flavor of evangelicalism, with echoes of the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and a dash of medieval ritual, is especially popular among young urban adults. It stresses tolerance, inclusiveness, social justice and environmental stewardship, and it shifts the theological focus from individual salvation to helping one’s earthly neighbors.
“This blows away the assumption of what church should be,” said Jayne Wilcox, 36, of Levittown, after the service, as son Kobe, 4, clung to her leg and Seth, 6, headed for the door. “It attracts the college age and young families… it catches the ones that other churches miss.”
Emergent blog is where this came from. Read the whole thing below…

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