Bishop Frade of Southeast Florida is at it again:
One of the reasons I was attracted to the Episcopal Church was because you don’t have to surrender your brain, or who you are, as you come into church. That meant that I was going to encounter others who would have different ideas and who might be different from me in every way—except in our love for the same Lord. We all could pray together from the same Book of Common Prayer, regardless of whether we did it standing up or on our knees, with incense or with tambourines, in modern or archaic English, or in any of the countless other languages of this planet.
I miss the days when our only litmus test for being “in” was if we loved God with all our heart, soul and mind and our neighbor as ourselves. It saddens me when in the name of the purity of religion some try to destroy and divide our church, and ostracize those who are different or express another opinion.
Please note that I am not naming any one side on any one issue or referring to any specific ethnic or cultural group. I am speaking of anyone, of any background or theological position, who uses his or her belief as a weapon to denigrate any other child of God.
Let’s stop using God as an excuse to discriminate against and put down those whose beliefs, religious practice, sex, race, national origin, language, social class or sexual orientation may be different from ours.
Leaving aside the fact that here we have a bishop of the Episcopal Church quoting not from the Bible but from an EEOC regulation, this is the kind of straw man argument on which so many of the church’s heresies and doctrinal abominations have been carried through the door.
Also, please note that he is naming one side - ours - in his little screed here. If you doubt it, imagine the bishop turning now to our side, and then to the other side, and delivering this little lecture, and imagine how absurd it would sound when directed at the revisionists.
Of course we should not “use God” to discriminate against those who are merely different from us, as in skin color, ethnicity, or the language they speak. That is not the issue, bishop.
First, no one is “using God” to do anything. God is most certainly using us, in ways we sometimes realize and sometimes don’t. But what “we” are doing that you obviously disapprove of is using the faculties God has given us to insist that those who would lead a Christian church actually be… you know, Christians, and to insist that they not pollute our faith with strange doctrine. No one, certainly not on the orthodox side of this debate - where worship styles indeed run the gamut from incense to tambourines - is saying that this person or that should be excluded from the church based on their worship style. And certainly no one on the orthodox side of this debate - a substantial number of whom are now under the episcopal oversight of African bishops and archbishops - is saying that anyone should be excluded because of their race or nationality. As I’ve said many times, this debate is not about the diameter of communion wafers; this is about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and what it means to be a Christian.
Second, what we are saying is that the notion that there are no boundaries to “inclusiveness,” that there is no belief that should not be welcome in the church, is false. We are saying that to be a Christian means to hold certain things as true, and that to open certain things to ambiguity or “multiple interpretation” on the grounds that “inclusiveness” is our highest calling, is to gut the Gospel of its meaning, and thus make Christianity incoherent.
Bishop Frade declines to name the specific incident that spurred him to write this piece, but we can make some educated guesses. The openly gay bishop? The creeping paganism? The swirling sufis? The Druid priests? The Muslim priestess? The Buddhist bishop?
Well, whatever it is, bishop, know that meaning is, by definition, exclusive. “Donut” has no meaning if it includes bagels and burritos. “Blue” has no meaning if it includes green and red. “Christianity” has no meaning if it includes Allah and karma. Something you might ponder, too - especially during Lent - is that the Gospel has no meaning when it’s reduced to a sub-paragraph of federal hiring regulations.
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Marc Andrus talks about how his mother in law joined the TEClub because it “hadn’t sacrificed justice.”
Most people don’t think that the 15 dissenting congregations getting the keys to and kicking the people out of the 66 majority parishes is just.