Story Of The Day - Day Break

liking each other because it's a beautiful
day & it seems like a waste of time to
disagree about stuff the other one is
refusing to change out of sheer
stubbornness


From StoryPeople.

ECLA Opens Ministry To Partnered Gay And Lesbian Pastors

From ELCA News Service:

MINNEAPOLIS (ELCA) - The 2009 Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voted today to open the ministry of the church to gay and lesbian pastors and other professional workers living in committed relationships.

The action came by a vote of 559-451 at the highest legislative body of the 4.6 million member denomination. Earlier the assembly also approved a resolution committing the church to find ways for congregations that choose to do so to "recognize, support and hold publicly accountable life-long, monogamous, same gender relationships," though the resolution did not use the word "marriage."

The actions here change the church's policy, which previously allowed gays and lesbians into the ordained ministry only if they remained celibate.

Good work, brothers and sisters!

And here's a personal story from Southern Voice:

Pastor Bradley Schmeling

Despite loud and repeated threats of secession, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted this afternoon to stop requiring gay pastors to remain celibate or be defrocked.

By a 55 percent to 45 percent vote, the ELCA national assembly approved changes to its policies that would allow gay pastors to be sexually active in the context of committed relationships. The denomination also voted earlier today to allow churches to conduct ceremonies recognizing same-sex couples.

The vote seems to clear a path for Rev. Bradley Schmeling of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Atlanta to return to the rolls of active pastors after being defrocked in 2007 for acknowledging his relationship with Darin Easler.

Schmeling's congregation has kept him at the helm although he was removed from the clergy roster by ELCA after an ecclesiastical trial. His story made national headlines and he has been referenced in USA Today, National Public Radio and Associated Press reports this week as the church considers the new legislation.

Remember Pastor Schmeling? Good for his congregation. This change in policy is not an abstraction. It's about real people, faithful Christians trying to follow the Gospel as best they can.

H/T to Caminante for alerting me to the news.

Comment Moderation Is On

Troll is visiting and leaving annoying comments, so I've turned on the comment moderation function.

Troll, look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself why you take pleasure in annoying people. That sort of behavior is rather common in bored 9-10 year old boys, but I assume that you are past that age. Why do YOU persist in such behavior?

Another Nail In The Coffin...(Part 2)

Continuing on the the subject of my earlier post on the excellent editorial in Modern Churchpeople:

COMMUNION, COVENANT AND OUR ANGLICAN FUTURE

MCU's reply to Drs Williams and Wright


The Archbishop of Canterbury, along with certain of his fellow bishops in the Church of England, bash the Episcopal Church, scold our bishops, and generally give the impression that the opinions of ordinary clergy and the lowly laity in the US church shouldn't count at all. A good many of us in TEC felt quite lonely as the folks in the English Church, with very few exceptions*, let us hang out to dry for so very long with the ABC pounding away at us, blaming us for the divisions in the Anglican Communion, disrespecting our church and our Presiding Bishop, and disregarding our laity and clergy.

Finally, finally more voices in the English Church are speaking truth to their leaders. Perhaps he will hear the voices coming from within his own church in his own land.

I take up where I left off:

The ethics of homosexuality

Central to the debate, then, is the question of whether homosexual activity is immoral. The policy of TEC's opponents is to suppress this question. It was excluded from the remit of the Eames Commission; the Windsor Report, which it published in 2004, took that exclusion to mean that as far as the Anglican Communion was concerned homosexuality was definitely immoral. Williams reaffirms this stance, warning against being

"completely trapped in the particularly bitter and unpleasant atmosphere of the debate over sexuality, in which unexamined prejudice is still so much in evidence and accusations of bad faith and bigotry are so readily thrown around (3.11)."

It is this strategy which enables them to present TEC as self-consciously deviant, and the debate as purely a question of how to discipline errant provinces.

Williams and Wright are of course aware of the common view that homosexuality is not immoral, but they claim to know little more.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Sorry folks, I learned that expression from my sainted Roman Catholic grandmother in my early days. When I read the words of the ABC, they often call forth that expression.

Does Dr Williams believe that the great mass of us in TEC relish "the particularly bitter and unpleasant atmosphere of the debate over sexuality"? Has he done his part to make the debate less bitter and unpleasant? Did locking Bishop Gene Robinson out of Lambeth ease the bitterness? What about his scoldings and blaming?

All right, I got a bit carried away there. Back to the article.

Both Williams and Wright dismiss the human rights and changing with society arguments for a possible adjustment in church policies, although...

Human rights

Human rights discourse has been immensely influential in Anglican discourse, at least since the seventeenth century, and should not be dismissed so peremptorily as alien.

Changing with society

Williams and Wright tar it by association with the view that the church's teaching should change to reflect society's attitudes. This is of course a straw doll: the only people who hold such a view are secularists who simply want to use religion for their own purposes. It is in any case quite different from human rights theory. Nevertheless the fact that Williams and Wright argue this way is revealing: denying that the church should always change its doctrines to suit society, they jump to the conclusion that in this instance we should attribute no value to what society believes.

Oh my, yes! Moving on to...

Suppressing natural desires

Wright emphasises that being a Christian involves suppressing one's natural desires, and appeals to texts in Paul's epistles.

There are indeed many times when we need to resist temptation and suppress natural desires. Whether homosexual intercourse always needs to be resisted, even by those with a homosexual orientation, is precisely the ethical question at issue, and these quotations do not answer it.

A more frequent claim in the Bible is that obedience to God's law should bring shalom, which is often translated as 'peace' but has a wider meaning including 'harmony' and 'fulfilment'. It is because of this biblical belief that we have been made by a loving God who wishes us well, that people ask 'Why did God make me with such strong homosexual urges and then forbid me to express them?'

We are given the impression that Wright does not himself have a homosexual orientation. To impose lifelong celibacy on those who do does not distress him at all. In general, moral rules serve people in two ways: to guide them in their own lives, and to give them bullets to fire at others. Wright uses the latter for all it is worth at no cost to himself.

Indeed "[w]e are given the impression that Wright does not himself have a homosexual orientation." As he said on Stephen Colbert's show, he has a wife and four children and grandchildren! Why should he give a rat's rear about imposing celibacy on gay folks? But wait! He's a shepherd. Shouldn't he pastor all his sheep?

What the church cannot do

Williams and Wright both insist that the church cannot bless same-sex unions and that people in homosexual partnerships be ordained to the church's ministry. Yet both know that these things happen. What is the meaning of this 'cannot'?

It is clearly not an empirical statement about any public ecclesiastical institution. Both are in fact appealing to a mystic 'true church', the institution desired by the mind of God, a kind of Platonic ideal describing what the public institutional church ought to be. Their 'cannot' therefore means 'ought not'.

Williams allows for change as a theoretical possibility but makes it impossible in practice, demanding 'the authority of the Church Catholic, or even of the Communion as a whole'.
....

It is hopelessly unrealistic. The whole of Christendom will never reach agreement on anything. What makes this Catholic vision seem credible is two limitations which are in practice imposed on it, though they are rarely spelt out: that the agreement of the whole church really means only the agreement of archbishops, Vatican and patriarchs; and that Christendom-wide agreement is only needed on a small number of issues. Which those issues are is never spelt out.

Wright's vision is Calvinist rather than Catholic. In this tradition, the 'true church' is an invisible entity known to God alone.
....

In this tradition there is no interest at all in the unity of the institutional church. What is of interest is the exact opposite: to clarify the distinction between true Christians and everybody else, and to ensure that one's own church is entirely governed by true Christians. It is this ecclesiology which responds to the fact that one of Anglicanism's 800 bishops is an open homosexual by treating it as urgent crisis needing to be resolved immediately.

"[H]opelessly unrealistic" is often enough an apt description of the ABC's thinking. And Bp. Right Wright seems to want to be in charge of separating the sheep from the goats, right here and right now.

That's enough for today, class. To be continued. I know your attention spans are not unlimited, and neither is my own. I get overexcited when I see writing as well-reasoned as this piece, especially coming out of England.

*Exceptions to my statement near the beginning of the post are MadPriest and Pluralist, who spoke out early and often.

Daily Meditation - Richard Rohr

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us his only taught prayer,
which we call the “Our Father”
~ Matthew 6: 9 - 13

The prayer aligns all relationships truthfully and situates us correctly in a universe of meaning. The first three petitions align us vertically with the Transcendent, and the second four align us with the horizontal world of right relationships. Beginning with the first word, our, we are taught that we are social beings and that our relationship with God is not “mine” or private. It is shared, and others have the same dignity and relationship with God as we do. We either come to God together or we don’t come at all. We have allowed too many Christians to say a pious “My Father” instead of what Jesus clearly taught us, “When you pray say ‘Our Father’” (Matthew 6:9).

Adapted from Jesus’ Plan for the New World, p.164

Oh my! Father Rohr has similar crazy ideas to those of our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori:

...The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being...

(Wrings hands) What is the world coming to?

Worst Case

I always imagine the worst possible
thing that can happen, she told me. It
gives me a great excuse to stay home
& have tea.


From StoryPeople.

Daily Meditation - Richard Rohr

"You are the salt of the earth. . . .You are light for the world." - Matthew 5:13a-14a

Our job is to be a shining truth, a savory salt, to live open and exposed on the hilltop for others to see (who are ready to see!), to “flavor” this flat predictable world, and then let go of any particular consequences. No need for anybody else to agree with us, or to need their reassurance that we are right. “We do not think ourselves into a new way of living, we live ourselves into a new way of thinking” has become a motto for us at the Center for Action and Contemplation. It is surely true.

Adapted from Jesus’ Plan for the New World, p.144

From the Center For Action and Contemplation.

The Miracle Doctor

Doctor Bloom who was known for miraculous cures for arthritis had a waiting room full of people when a little old lady, completely bent over in half, shuffled in slowly, leaning on her cane. When her turn came, she went into the doctor's office, and, amazingly, emerged within half an hour walking completely erect with her head held high.

A woman in the waiting room who had seen all this walked up to the little old lady and said, "It's a miracle! You walked in bent in half and now you're walking erect... It's a miracle! What did that doctor do?"

"Miracle, shmiracle," said the old lady. "He gave me a longer cane!"

From stringer Doug.

Another Nail In The Coffin Of The Covenant?

I hope so.

According to their website, "The Modern Churchpeople's Union (MCU) is a membership organization [in the UK] that promotes liberal theology." The president of the group is Rt Revd John Saxbee, Bishop of Lincoln.

From the MCU:

COMMUNION, COVENANT AND OUR ANGLICAN FUTURE

MCU's reply to Drs Williams and Wright

This paper is a critique of two papers, by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Durham respectively. Both are responses to the decision by the Episcopal Church of the USA (TEC), at its General Convention in July 2009, to abandon its earlier moratoria on same-sex blessings and openly homosexual bishops.

I found the link to this statement at Pluralist Speaks. I deliberately did not read Adrian's post to see which excerpts to the paper he chose to quote, because I didn't want to be a complete copycat.

The response to Drs Williams and Wright is excellent. It is lengthy but is worth reading in its entirety. The emphases in bold type throughout are mine and are there because the particular words resonated strongly for me.

Williams and Wright both acknowledge that progress is not being made in the controversy over homosexuality, but blame TEC for this failure. Williams writes: 'a realistic assessment of what Convention has resolved does not suggest that it will repair the broken bridges into the life of other Anglican provinces... The repeated request for moratoria on the election of partnered gay clergy as bishops and on liturgical recognition of same-sex partnerships has clearly not found universal favour.'

Wright puts his case more bluntly and reveals his impatience: 'the Communion is indeed already broken... the breach has already occurred. We are not, then, looking now at TEC choosing for the first time to "walk apart", but at the recognition that they did so some time ago and have done nothing to indicate a willingness to rejoin the larger Communion' (3).

Thus Wright declares with characteristic bluntness that authoritarianism which Williams shares but prefers not to advertise. Both insist there is an Anglican consensus that homosexuality is immoral, and on that basis blame the Americans for acting contrary to it. Outside the higher echelons of church bureaucracies this seems a bizarre claim: in normal English usage 'consensus' means 'general agreement (of opinion, testimony, etc.)' (Concise Oxford Dictionary) or 'general or widespread agreement among all the members of a group' (Encarta Dictionary). The current controversy is precisely about whether homosexuality is indeed immoral, and as long as debate continues nothing could be clearer than the fact that there is no consensus.

Is there something of the good-cop, bad-cop strategy at play between Williams and Wright? I first believed that the ABC would be embarrassed by Bp. Wright's words, but now, I wonder. Perhaps he's pleased to have Wright speak out.

Furthermore, even if there were a consensus that homosexuality is immoral, their conclusions would not follow. Anglicanism does not have a papal magisterium: every province would be departing from the consensus as and when it saw fit. Neither the Archbishop nor the Primates' meetings nor the ACC nor Lambeth conferences has the legal or moral authority to impose a particular view - even a majority view - on the whole Communion.

Yet Williams and Wright both write as though this authority was already there, already competent to discipline the Americans for disobeying instructions. We must therefore ask why these two senior clergy, who know full well that Anglicanism does not have central authorities with that authority, condemn the Americans on the basis that it does. It is difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion: that (perhaps without realising it) they are in the process of creating an authoritarian centralised system, and are identifying themselves with it. The Americans are to blame for the controversy only from the perspective of those claiming more authority than they have.

Yes, here we see the belief that the strategy of creating the facts on the ground as though the reality is already in place will, in fact, put the reality in place. Remember the Windsor Report, which is only a report, but somehow morphed into a law according to certain members of the Anglican Communion?

Well, I believe that my posts on the MCU's reply to Williams and Wright will be in parts, so consider this Part I.

What, Me Worry?

From the AP at Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON – No fish can escape mercury pollution. That's the take-home message from a federal study of mercury contamination released Wednesday that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the country.

The toxic substance was found in every fish sampled, a finding that underscores how widespread mercury pollution has become.

But while all fish had traces of contamination, only about a quarter had mercury levels exceeding what the Environmental Protection Agency says is safe for people eating average amounts of fish.

The study by the U.S. Geological Survey is the most comprehensive look to date at mercury in the nation's streams. From 1998 to 2005, scientists collected and tested more than a thousand fish, including bass, trout and catfish, from 291 streams nationwide.
....

Mercury consumed by eating fish can damage the nervous system and cause learning disabilities in developing fetuses and young children. The main source of mercury to most of the streams tested, according to the researchers, is emissions from coal-fired power plants. The mercury released from smokestacks here and abroad rains down into waterways, where natural processes convert it into methylmercury — a form that allows the toxin to wind its way up the food chain into fish.

Some of the highest levels in fish were detected in the remote blackwater streams along the coasts of the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana, where bacteria in surrounding forests and wetlands help in the conversion. The second-highest concentration of mercury was detected in largemouth bass from the North Fork of the Edisto River near Fairview Crossroads, S.C.

"Unfortunately, it's the case that almost any fish you test will have mercury now," said Andrew Rypel, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Mississippi who has studied mercury contamination in fish throughout the Southeast. He said other research has shown mercury in fish from isolated areas of Alaska and Canada, and species that live in the deep ocean.

There you have it. And for what it's worth, I don't entirely trust the EPA's statements about what is safe to eat or drink. I know that life is full of risks and hazards, and we can't avoid them entirely, but I hate it when we make our messes that the younger and future generations will have to lie in. Although this news is no surprise, I find it very sad.

And what the hell, the death rate is 100% anyway.