Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham in the Church of England, responds to a letter he received in his post titled "Letter to a Saloon Bar Moralist".
Jesus also taught us to beware the leaven of the Pharisees within and
among ourselves. Indeed, whilst he said absolutely nothing about what we
call homosexuality (hardly surprising, since the concept was not
defined until 1892) he said an enormous amount about using the law to
lay burdens on others harder than they could bear, not treating others
as you would have them treat you, failing to see the human being in need
for the child of God they are, erecting the small matters of the law
into crucial shibboleths that confound the purpose of the law, thinking
that searching the scriptures in itself will bring life, supposing that
people were made for the sabbath not the sabbath for people, and so I
could go on. St John tells us that it is futile to think that we are
loving the God we have never seen, if we do not love towards the person
we have seen.
Read the letter in its entirety. As I said, it is excellent.
It is an excellent WOW! He definitely gets that what is really important is the Intangible Concreteness of God.
ReplyDeleteThose that search scripture to lay heavy burdens on others don't seem to internalize the Intangible Concretes. YMMV but some of the Intangible Concretes that speak to me and some that I see in others are:
All made in his image.
All his beloved.
All enfolded in the arms of his Living Christ.
All enfolded by his Holy Spirit.
All enfolded in his tender, tender mercies.
All enfolded in his never-ending grace and love.
All enfolded in his living water.
All enfolded in his arms.
Alan has a way of getting to the heart of the matter, and he knows so much.
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