STAND UP, STAND UP FOR JESUS, YE LAWYERS OF THE CROSS

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

In a way, you have to admire the honesty of Mark Hall of the Episcopal Organization’s San Joaquin District. Why is TEO spending millions of dollars suing actual Christians out of their meeting houses? Simple. It’s engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the actual forces of darkness themselves:

We are not in a war like WWII, but I am getting tired of the litigation and the delays, and many of you have expressed comparable feelings. Similar to those tired and stressed soldiers, we too are tired of it all. So, “Why are we doing this?” I believe we are doing this for two very important reasons: We are upholding the principle of the integrity of the Episcopal Church, and we are opposing a big lie.

And we all remember what a stickler Our Lord was for organizational integrity. But what’s this “big lie,” Mark?

The lie that we oppose is simple. It is based in the very erroneous assertion that “the faith” was once delivered complete, and that Holy Scripture speaks plainly on certain social issues. The current issue is that of the LGBT community and full inclusion. I’m sure Jesus explained his faith and understanding of the Father clearly, but his followers didn’t get it complete. This is fact. We are still trying to get it and live it.

So much for TEO’s “we have all sorts of opinions here” garbage. Mark’s come out and admitted that as far as he’s concerned, any conservative Christian opinion is wrong a priori but we’ll cash those bigots’ pledge checks anyway.

And I can see how breezily he can claim that Jesus would have been perfectly fine with the idea of making a bishop out of an unrepentant sinner since it’s certainly not weighed down by actual evidence.

The early church argued over the inclusion of gentiles, then barbarians.

And here’s how they solved that one, big smacker.

Since we have heard that some who went out from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your souls, saying, “You must be circumcised and keep the law”—to whom we gave no such commandment— it seemed good to us, being assembled with one accord, to send chosen men to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who will also report the same things by word of mouth. For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from SEXUAL IMMORALITY. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.

If there’s anything else I can help you with, be sure and let me know.

Cultural norms quickly excluded women from leadership roles.

Either that or caution. Most intelligent people draw back from automatically assuming that God Incarnate would have had female apostles if only He was as enlightened and as intelligent as we are.

It’s interesting to learn that Catherine of Siena didn’t realize that “cultural norms” excluded her from church leadership back when she was lecturing kings and popes. And it’s fascinating to discover that an Albanian nun figured out on her own that true Christian leadership does not involve the wearing of mitres or the carrying of croziers.

The church has used scripture to affirm slavery,

Once again. You can invoke that argument ONLY when you can point me to a passage of Scripture where men were COMMANDED to own slaves. Because I can point you to several that forbid the way Gene Robinson likes to have sexual relations.

the superiority of the aristocracy,

You mean in passages like this one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one here?

the inappropriateness of women’s suffrage,

I’ll have to take your word for it there, dude.

condemning women as witches, and a whole lot more. We all should be embarrassed by the abuses done in the name of the church.

The Mark Hall Bumper Sticker Festival, ladies and gentlemen. We should also be embarrassed by “arguments” as sloppy and intellectually barren as those are.

Yet, the church also has been at the forefront of social progress. By using more complete understandings of scripture to overcome cultural conditioning, we have been able to “draw the circle wider” and include more and more of God’s people into those who we understand to be “His beloved.”

Here’s where I have to ask the question. Do people like Mark Hall believe that there is such a thing as eternal truth? Because he doesn’t sound like he does.

Two key phrases stand out there. One is “more complete understandings of scripture” and the other is “cultural conditioning.” So since I feel particularly provocative today, let’s take the most extreme case.

Pedophilia.

You’re an Episcopal bishop. One day, a man who wants to become ordained in the Episcopal Organization turns up in your office. During the course of your conversation, the man tells you that he regularly has sexual intercourse with underage children.

This man is most emphatically not a specimen of the human slime that used to regularly turn up on To Catch A Predator but a perfectly calm, rational and, in some ways, quite attractive human being. He explains to you that he has fully explained the nature of the sex acts to all the young people with whom he has had sexual encounters and in each case, they have consented.

As you listen to his story, you’re horrified. This man’s sexual relations are nothing more than exploitation of the weak; children can’t possibly understand the ramifications of engaging in sexual intercourse.

You inform the man that not only will he never be ordained in your diocese but you are seriously considering informing the authorities. You plead with him to repent.

At the sound of that word, the man smiles. He accepts your decision and doesn’t hold it against you. And he also understands that your cultural conditioning made you react the way that you did and that you will, eventually, learn that a more complete understanding of Scripture will prove him right.

Got an intellectually-coherent answer to that scenario? You’d better since you will face something similar to it in your lifetime.

And we should be proud of the fact that the Episcopal Church has more often than not led these movements in the last two hundred years or so.

The last fitty, maybe. In the early 1950’s, when my home town closed the municipal swimming pool rather than let blacks and whites swim together, one of the leaders in the fight to get the pool reopened was my old parish.

But most of the time, the Episcopal Organization has followed rather than led. This is, after all, a “church” that still considers it a virtue that it didn’t officially split up before and during the Civil War.

Unfortunately, during the struggle to understand the greater demands of the Gospel, there were elements of our church that opposed changing their perspective.

I guess those would be the people who demanded that Episcopal innovations be backed up by the Word of God.

Yet, the progressive positions have always become the mainstream because they were (and are) on the Gospel side of loving, openness, acceptance, honoring and grace.

Let’s see. The Catholics are rocking a billion and change, I don’t know what Orthodox numbers are but I have to think that they’re up there and the Pentecostals are skyrocketing pretty much everywhere.

Episcopal numbers, on the other hand, have been dropping ever since I was in high school. TEO claims two million while its average Sunday attendance sits at around 700 grrr or so.

So it seems that just about everyone in the world has rejected the Episcopal gospel, Mark, which makes me wonder about the power of a deity who can’t seem to get his message across.

Christian charity has prevailed against misdirected bombast and distorted rhetoric often grounded in the special interests and “sacred cows” of cultural chains.

The Bible, in other words.

Literal Biblical narrowness

Believing that words mean what they say.

does not reflect the grace and spiritual wisdom of the “Good News” of Jesus Christ.

Believing what we think those words would have meant if both Christ and the allegedly-Holy Spirit-inspired writers of Scripture had been as smart and enlightened as we are.

We are using the only means in our system, the civil courts, because we need to stand up for the organizational integrity of the Episcopal Church. And possibly ever more importantly, we are also standing up for the Truth of Jesus. The continuing challenge we face, individually and corporately, is to engage in and to live fully that Gospel Message.

Actually, Hall, you pious fraud, the Gospel thing to do would have been to go to the conservatives, admit that the split was, for now anyway, irreconcilable and see what you could have worked out.

I’m sure that San Joaquin’s conservative parishes would have been more than happy to let whatever leftist parishes you managed to gin up worship at little or no cost. But that won’t work. That won’t work at all.

Because if you do that, you tacitly admit that the conservative position is a legitimate one and Episcopalians cannot ever permit that. So you have to have all the properties even if you’re eventually going to have to sell most if not all of them.

You may end up “winning” most if not all of those properties, Hall, and the conservatives may end up worshipping in middle schools or movie theaters. But here’s something you can take to the bank.

Here in Missouri, these people were sued out of their meeting house. But they’ve done more for the Gospel and for the Anglican tradition in six years than the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri has done in at least forty. And those conservative San Joaquin parishes, whatever they’re eventually called, will still be around and will still be proclaiming the Good News long after you’re an unpleasant memory.