No Deus Ex Machina: Why The Same Sex Trial Liturgy Will Pass

from Stand Firm by Sarah

I’m hearing vague buzzings about how the trial rite for same sex blessings might not pass because of a canonical Deus Ex Machina that will descend from the clouds and save us from the current horrible, incompetent, buffoonishly shallow and junior-high leadership of The Episcopal Church.  Briefly, and in theory, since the trial rite is a change or addition to the liturgy, one must have a majority of all the bishops entitled to vote to approve it—which would come to around half of some 300 bishops.  In theory, then, since halfish of the bishops aren’t bothering to attend the General Convention, the trial liturgy could be blocked.

Here’s why that won’t happen.


1) The same sex trial liturgy—vacuous, heretical, and tawdry sacrilege that it is—is the crown jewel of the ideology of those currently leading The Episcopal Church.  It must pass. For it not to pass would be the equivalent of, oh, say . . . newly elected Senators forgetting to show up for their swearing in on the first day of a new Congress. They’re not going to forget to show up en masse.  The crown jewel will pass.
2) Revisionist activists don’t follow canons if it interferes with their Special Unique Custom gospel. That’s just fact and demonstrated in spades over the years. Their Special Unique Custom gospel trumps honor, following rules, integrity, honesty, truth, justice, the Bible, tradition, reason, and anything else moral or ethical you can imagine.
3) Were they to decide to follow the canons, under the assumption that following the canons wouldn’t interfere with their Special Unique Custom gospel, it would mean that they recognize we don’t have even 10 or so bishops who will vote against it.
4) Were they to decide to follow the canons, under the assumption that following the canons wouldn’t interfere with their Special Unique Custom gospel, but recognizing that we might have 10 or so bishops to vote against it, they would simply fly in the 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 gung-ho retired loony revisionist bishops out there floating around—whatever number is necessary—to pull the lever for their vacuous, heretical, tawdry crown jewel liturgical rite.
5) They must pass the same sex trial rite. See #1 above. It must happen and it will happen. Failure is not an option. If they had to depose 150 TEC bishops in order to reach a smaller number of bishops entitled to vote, that’s what they’d do in order to pass the trial rite.

Recently, I blogged about the Deus Ex Machina “strategy” that desperate conservatives often rely on as a means of saving us from the consequences of decades of bad choices:

Whenever the conservative strategy consists of “and then, a deus ex machina Supreme Court will come down from the clouds and save us from ourselves”—save us from the Republican’s actions, save us from the Republican nomination, save us from the country’s Presidential choice, save us from the Democrats, save us from the dreadful public schools churning out vacuous, irrational emoticons for students—that’s a bad sign of desperation and No Real Strategy. When you find yourself giddy with hope [false] and expectation [completely unwarranted no matter the conservative prognosticators] in the supposed future actions of the deus ex machina, you’re almost always bound for a disappointment.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for Deus Ex Machinas springing down from the clouds and saving me and saving you. I’d be all for fire pouring down from heaven and consuming the altar at General Convention’s final service. I’d be all for Presiding Bishop Schori suddenly resigning and the entire convention voting in Mark Lawrence as the new PB. I’d be all for Kendall Harmon becoming my diocese’s new bishop because we counted the ballots wrong.

But the likelihood of these sorts of things happening is very very very very very—not to say vanishingly—small. Deus Ex Machinas coming down from the clouds to save us are very very rare.