from Stand Firm by Greg Griffith
You may as well place your jaw gently on the floor now, so as to avoid injury when you finish reading this.
From the HoB/D: There is a step to take before we can talk of any of our "sticky" issues in terms of justice. An experience early in my ordained ministry (probably around 1957) illustrates this first step.
I took occasion one day, some three years into the six years I spent in my first congregation, to express my admiration for something one of our parishioners was doing regularly. Whenever she heard that someone in the Negro (that wasn't the word most people used) part of town was sick, she would cook up a large pot of soup and take it to the home of the sick person. Take note, please, that this woman was in her 80's, and one of the most loving persons I have met in my life. She had become accustomed to fending off the criticisms of her neighbors and friends for doing this act of mercy. She had been particularly criticized for those occasions when there was no one else who could stay with the sick person through the night, and she would take on that responsibility.
Her response to my expression of admiration stopped me cold. She said, "Well, they don't have souls, so this is the only life they get, so why should I not try to make it as good as possible for them?"
1957, and a loving Christian woman didn't believe that Negroes were fully human.
That women were considered less than fully human throughout human history - mere possessions of whatever man "owned" them - father, husband, brother - was the primary reason that the early Church stopped ordaining women and some in the Early Church said it was wrong for a woman to teach a man.
Coming to terms with the full humanity of black persons was an essential first step toward stopping our enslaving of blacks, preventing them from voting, being ordained, etc. Only after admitting that blacks shared the same humanity with whites did the issues of voting and ordination become "justice" issues.
Only after enough people in the Episcopal Church accepted the full humanness of women did the issues of women serving on vestries, as delegates to diocesan conventions and, (gasp!) as deputies to General Convention become "justice" issues. Only after that same full humanness was acknowledged did "deaconesses" become "deacons" and women could be ordained as priests. Only after the full and equal humanness of women eventually becomes an integral part of our thinking will women truly have equal "justice" in clergy deployment.
Only after those of us, who accept the full human nature of the members of the GLBTQ portion of the human race become typical of Episcopalians, can the issue of FULL INCORPORATION be a "justice" issue.
Submitted with love, and with hope that someday very soon, the Episcopal Church will quit telling God that God doesn't have our permission to continue creating some 10% of HUMAN BEINGS same-sex oriented,
Bill Fleener, Sr. Priest of the Diocese of Western Michigan, retired.
From Griffith:
Fr. Fleener.
You, sir, are a preening jackass.
It is precisely the souls of unrepentant, non-celibate gays (and those they would lead astray) on which those of us on this side of the debate are focused. Believe me: If I - or the thousands and thousands of people who read this site - didn't believe in their full humanity, we wouldn't spending this much effort on this debate. Strike that - we wouldn't be spending any time on this debate.
If anything is being missed in this debate, it is by you and your side: That tolerance doesn't equal acceptance; inclusiveness doesn't equal blessing; and the fact that something feels good doesn't automatically make it holy.
And to think... this is not even the most contemptible thing I've read in the last 24 hours.
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