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.
Monthly Archives: August 2005
Fists vs. Hugs
When did hitting fists together become the prominent way of greeting between guys? I know subcultures have been doing it for a while now, but it is now mainstream.
I’ve also read two different articles about how American males are discovering another way of greeting – hugs!
So, fist hitting or hugging, which is it, and will it replace the good ole’ shaking of hands?
A different kind of hall monitoring
I went to SixFlags Great Adventure yesterday with Ashton and a close friend of his, Chris. Chris used to be a high-school teacher and taught in California, Boston, and Florida. He got so fed up with the attitudes and actions of both students and administrators that he left teaching.
One example he gave that caused him much frustration in one particular district concerned assigned daily duties for teachers outside the classroom. In this particular school, certain teachers were assigned the duty of breaking up sex between students during the school day. This was not a poor school, but a successful public school with a dress-code, etc. The school had security cameras that caught guys putting on condemns while the girls lifted up their skirts and the two would go at it in – in front of cameras. “Let’s skip class and go have sex!†Chris, seeing what was going on via the cameras, would then go and break up the activity. He was quick to add that this problem was not only in this particular school! He also said that at least they were wearing condoms. I guess so.
Sex, for so many, has simply become a recreation activity. It has lost is uniqueness and “specialness.” I remember hearing a marriage counselor saying once that sex was like a Band-Aid. The more you play with it by putting in on and pulling it off, the more it loses its stickiness and its effectiveness. The counselor talked about sex losing its ability to act as a bonding agent in marriage relationships, resulting in more loneliness, less intimacy, infidelity, adultery, and divorce.
I believe sex is one of many primary means by which relationships are held together. If it simply becomes recreational and something to play with – putting it on and pulling it off – we lose one very important aspect of successful married relationships. We are bearing the whirlwind of “free” and “non-consequential” “love.” It is a great confusion between love and lust. Sex as a recreational activity may be fun at the moment, but long term the consequences of havin’-all-this-fun is nothing less than failing and dysfunctional future relationships. I think that then leads to much more loneliness, isolation, and a profound lack of fulfilling and life-giving relationships.
I see this in many gay guys who have played with sex for so long that the confusion of sex, love, and lust has caused them to be unable to form long-term committed relationships, which results in extreme loneliness, heartache, and with some great illness. This isn’t something that is specific to being a homosexual, but is the result of the homosexual subculture accepting with great gusto the whole “free-love” notion. This is, of course, common among heterosexuals as well, but our cultural boundaries still said to hold off and value sex as something deeply shared only between two people who have committed themselves to one another for life. These boundaries seem to be in their final collapse among most young people, and I suspect will result in a profound increase within their populations of the same things we witness among those who have gone before them. Sex is a wonderful and enjoyable thing, but like anything used in ways it is not intended and then abused, it turns into something that destroys.
Interview
Below are two questions asked of Presiding Bishop Frank Griswald appearing on Christianity Today’s website. I like the responses.
Q: Here in Kentucky, members of three Episcopal churches have voted to leave the denomination. They said that the church has departed from historic Christianity. What would you say to these people?
A: We all claim the authority of scripture. The ancient creeds, the doctrine of the trinity, the nature of Christ — all these things are not up for negotiation. … I would say if sexuality becomes the ground on which division occurs, then it means that sex is more important than the doctrine of the holy trinity and the divinity of Christ, which is a very sorry situation to find oneself in. Isn’t it ironic that people can overlook Jesus’ words about divorce and remarriage and claim biblical orthodoxy and become hysterical over a reference in the letter to the Romans about homosexual behaviour? The Bible, of course, didn’t understand homosexuality as an orientation. It only understood it as a behaviour. Clearly, the biblical writers presumed that everyone was naturally heterosexual.
Q: What would you want people in Kentucky to know about the Episcopal church?
A: The Episcopal Church is a questioning community. … It’s confident that Christ is at its centre, and that gives it the courage to look at things that are difficult. It also is a church which has lived with open-ended questions. It doesn’t need to reduce things to absolutes. We can deal with shades of grey, we can deal with paradox and ambiguity without feeling that we are being unfaithful.
The War on Terror
I moved to New York City 10 months after 9/11 and the City was still shaken. (I was actually here on 9/14 and a few days thereafter.) Every morning my train arrives at Penn Station in Manhattan and I walk through the station under Madison Square Garden and exit on 7th Ave. Walking through the station, I still have a hard time accepting the presence of all the soldiers with automatic rifles, gasmasks, body armor, and I’m not counting the NYC police, Amtrak police, Port Authority police, and security personnel.
Three years after arriving in NYC the city seems to be generally back to “normal” – economic activity, tourism, and the like – but the police and the army (and I’m sure other policing entities) are now randomly searching personal bags in the subways and stations. It isn’t like the airports, it’s just, “I need to check you bag!” as you’re walking to an exit or entering a station.
How can I believe we are winning the “War on Terror” when I look around me and it seems we are “progressing” towards a police-state. How can I believe that our foreign and domestic policies are making us safer? Seeing an every increasing police and military presence “protecting” us (and that isn’t meant to be pejorative) does not make me feel safer. It makes me feel as if the situation is only getting worse. Why else over the span of three years is the police and military presence so much more pronounced? Is this how we are to judge success?
One more thing about Emergent…
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…
Emergent Church and Misunderstanding
Much has been and is being said about the Emergent Church conversation/movement and especially Brian McLaren, its primary conversant. A lot of incorrect things have been written and said, which is typical of critique of any “new thing.” (… there is nothing new under the sun) I resonate with a good bit of what is being said within the conversation, especially as they engage Post-modern thought. (It really doesn’t matter what I or anyone thinks about Post-moderism – a whole generation – and following – are being raised on it and will be regardless of what we may want or demand!)
To answer some of his critics, Brian has begun a serious of three essays on an Emergent blog detailing his life. I think it would be good for anyone interested on new religious/Christian developments in the U.S., especially as this conversation changes the face of American Christianity (and it will, for good and for bad).
Here is the link: target=”_blank”>Brian McLaren on “Becoming Convergent” – Part 1 of 3
A New Way
This op-ed by Jim Wallis is reprinted from a recent edition of The New York Times.
The Message Thing
By JIM WALLIS
Since the 2004 election, there has been much soul-searching and hand-wringing, especially among Democrats, about how to “frame” political messages. The loss to George W. Bush was painful enough, but the Republicans’ post-election claims of mandate, and their triumphal promises to relegate the Democrats to permanent minority status, left political liberals in a state of panic.
So the minority party has been searching, some would say desperately, for the right “narrative”: the best story line, metaphors, even magic words to bring back electoral success. The operative term among Democratic politicians and strategists has become “framing.” How to tell the story has become more important than the story itself. And that could be a bigger mistake for the Democrats than the ones they made during the election.
Boredom
Boredom is not something I have the luxury of being inflicted with at the moment. Depression? – maybe, disillusionment? – possibly, but not boredom.
St. Paul’s has a summer book club and now we are reading The Diary of a Country Priest, by Georges Bernanos. The book takes place in France after WWII and before Vatican II and is written by a young priest in his first parish. I wonder how much more applicable today are this priest’s thoughts on boredom then even then.
“Well, as I was saying, the world is eaten up by boredom. To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn’t even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be for ever on the go. And so people are always ‘on the go.’ Perhaps the answer would be that the world has long been familiar with boredom, that such is the true condition of man. No doubt the seed was scattered all over life, and here and there found fertile soil to take root; but I wonder if man has ever before experienced this contagion, this leprosy of boredom: an aborted despair, a shameful form of despair in some way like the fermentation of Christian decay.
“Naturally I keep these thoughts to myself…” (pp. 2-3)
Anthropolical Heresy?
Another post on the House of Bishops/House of Deputies Listserv takes an interesting turn with the following comment. I like this idea, and it well sums up a way of looking at this issue of homosexuality and the current controversies in the Church and in society. Although he says he is a Traditionalist Anglican, he takes a position on partriarchy that most “traditionalists” would not share. Here is the post –
What strikes fear into the hearts of traditionalists, of which I count myself one, is the possibility that it is not just people who are challenging our impeccable opinions, but God. If we have learned anything about tradition over the centuries it is that tradition is flexible, and interrupted and altered sometimes by the God who is alive and well. That can be both comforting and threatening to us who love God but wish that He (…or She. Why is there not a non-genderous pronoun for God?) would stop giving us new information about truth, just when we thought we had it right.