CONTENTS:
1. Right Where You Need to Be...
4. Griswold and the Boundary Lines
5. ESA & AAC Breakthrough...!!! (to ESA Page)
1. Right Where You Need to Be...
"God has you right where you need to be to do your growing," I was told many years ago, somewhat to the chagrin of that part of me which would rather play the victim and indulge in self-pity. That remonstrance has upheld me over those years through some painful events.
So our task is to look around in the circumstance s of our lives to see what God is doing, and then to join Him in that. We must therefore let go of our plans, our hopes, our aspirations, and let go of those things to which we cling, other than God Himself, and allow Him to determine how our needs shall be met. It may or may not include being able to keep our church property. It may or may not include remaining in the Episcopal Institution. But it will include being drawn every more securely onto His hand, His provision and under His authority.
Weep not for me, but for yourselves, Jesus told the women as He carried the cross to Calvary. As bad as things were for Him, they were worse for them, He was saying -- not because they would be worse treated, but because if they were not trusting and obeying God, the circumstances to come would do them in not only physically, but spiritually and eternally.
God is in charge of the circumstances -- which does not mean that He always gets His way. There is sin and rebellion among us. But it does mean that the sifting process to divide the sheep from the goats is being perfectly done, and that our response to the circumstances of our lives is how we work out our relation to God -- for life or for death.
You are right where you need to be to do your growing.
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The Episcopal Church has formally apologized to homosexual persons for its abuse of them. And that is rightly done. If there has been abuse, it needs to be apologized for. Many parishes need to apologize for not inviting homosexual persons into their midst for forgiveness and healing of a compulsive and lethal condition. General Convention needs to apologize for not telling them the truth about the danger homosexuals are in both physically and spiritually. We have betrayed our fellow human beings with cowardice and deceit. And that requires an apology and forgiveness.
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We need to understand that most of the battle raging in the Christian community and in the civil society as well, is not between liberals and conservatives, but between pseudo-liberals and pseudo-conservatives.
A liberal is one who works for freedom (from the Latin 'liber' meaning free). He tends to concentrate on "process", the means whereby one gets to know the truth, and insists on an open field for reasonable discussion of any issue, based of fact and logic. That is the classical liberal.
The pseudo-liberal has abandoned the quest for truth because he has decided that there is none, and so aims not at truth, but at feeling good. The winners in the Episcopal fracas are not liberal in any sense of the word. They do not believe in honest freedom, but in control, and ultimately total authoritarianism. Totalitarianism is the track down which we are heading. (That is true not only in the Episcopal Church, but in our civil society. We had better wake up to what is being perpetrated among us, or it will be too late to avoid bloodshed. We are headed for another civil war if things do not turn around.)
A conservative is one who (obviously) tries to conserve. What he tries to conserve is the storehouse of truth which has been garnered at great cost over the centuries. The conservative does not object to new truth, but he insists that it come by responsible and honest due process. Every liberal becomes a conservative once his program gets into place. He wants to conserve what he has accomplished.
A pseudo-conservative (#1) believes that there is a truth -- and that he has it all. Clearly the pseudo-conservative and the pseudo-liberal are not going to be able to communicate.
Another form of pseudo-conservative (#2) is the conservative who postures about conserving the good old values, but who is not willing to stand up to actually make it stick against the pseudo-'s who are undermining truth -- at any cost to himself.
An honest conservative and an honest liberal walk arm and arm down the path of life because they have a common bond in objective truth. They may have family feuds, but they are blood kin. Like masculine and feminine, they are necessary complements to each other, and necessary to any healthy society.
In the Episcopal Church, the pseudo-liberals have managed to make the conservatives look like pseudo-conservatives (#1), rigid and mean-spirited -- an image which they have bent over backwards to wash off, and therefore come up acting like pseudo-conservatives (#2) -- incapable of standing firm on any issue because they do not want to be called "fundamentalists" (as Edmond Browning labeled us) or "mean-spirited", etc.
Friends, it is the truth that sets us free, and we get to that freedom only by obeying the Lord of all truth, Jesus Christ (it is all there in John 8:31 ff.). And His strategy is truth at any cost. If truth means pain, then pain there will be. The Lord of truth does not appear to think that causing us pain (pick up your cross daily...) is contrary to loving us, and we had better stop thinking that telling the hard truth is unloving to other people. The hard truth is that the pseudo-liberals are either ignorant, self-deceived, or dishonest. They have no intention of disciplining themselves to fact and logic any more than to the moral law of God. They are in rebellion against God, they are sons of darkness and of the prince of darkness.
If we will not discipline ourselves to being honest liberals and honest conservatives, we will be in the same boat as them with the judgement of God. "Depart from Me, for I never knew you...."
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4. Griswold and Boundary Lines
Presiding Bishop-elect Frank Griswold, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer (7/27) describes himself as a "moderate", and as an "orthodox theologian". If that were a matter of no consequence, it would be just silly. But the level of thinking of the American and Episcopal public is so inept that many will actually believe him, perhaps including the reporter. Griswold can think of himself as "moderate" only because he is so sure that his view is right that he believes his view to be the center of the universe, from which all other views deviate by their errors. Because his view is thus so self-evidently "infallible", he feels no need of critique in honest discussion of fact and logic.
The pseudo-liberals have adopted strategy of the Big Lie. Anything you keep saying with enough bravado and long enough will be believed by enough people to get you into office.
Mutt and Jeff in cartoon long ago had caught a boatful of fish on a lake. On the way in, Mutt says to Jeff, "Too bad we did not mark the spot. It was a good one." To which Jeff replies, "Not to worry, I marked an 'x' on the side of the boat." Good job, Jeff, you can never be wrong -- nevermind that you are not in touch with reality.
The Old Testament does not take kindly to surreptitiously moving boundary lines. But the pseudo-liberals have made the bell curve of right/moderate/left a moveable item. Like Jeff's boat, the center is wherever they happen to be at the time. That is intellectually incompetent and/or dishonest, and another of those items which we need to learn to challenge them on the spot.
Pamela Chinnis said, "I kept waiting for something to explode. It never did."
That is no credit to the pseudo-conservatives who kept falling into the pseudo-liberal strategy of arguing from feelings rather than facts. Even so firm a conservative as Bp. Fairfield complained that the PB's speech had caused him pain, rather than telling Edmond Browning that he was either ignorant or lying. The issue is truth, not pain. The fact is that pseudo-liberals do not care a tinker's dam about anyone's pain, except when it can be used to promote their cause. What they care about is getting their way, and justifying their sexual immorality. Or at least their right to fantasize about it -- if they are not bold enough to actually go out and do it.
We are not dealing with honest people. They have broken the covenant between God, themselves, and ourselves. And we need to tell them, much as the colonials told King George III:
"You have broken our covenant relation and therefore no longer have
jurisdiction over us. We will cross diocesan boundary lines to minister to
our people, and we will plant new churches in your dioceses. You may be bishops
in the Episcopal Institution, but you are not bishops in the Church of God."
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