WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS

Saturday, December 27th, 2008 | Uncategorized

People constantly ask me, “How much longer are you going to keep writing about the Anglicans, Wannabe?”  I don’t have the slightest idea.  At several points during the last five years(the Windsor Report, the primates meetings, GenCon 2006 and its aftermath and, especially, the recent Lambeth Conference), I probably should have read the writing on the wall and gotten the cooking blog going.

Yet here I still am.  And I suspect I may be at this a while.  I know it pretty well; after all, if you get baptized into and spend the first 48 of your 53 years in a religious tradition, you pick up a few things.  Guys like John Chane have got a lot of Frank Griswold in them and I got a whole book(which will probably be going out of print soon so order a copy right away) out of my encounters with Mrs. Schori’s legendary predecessor.

But there are two basic reasons why I think I may just keep going(although if the GAFCON primates botch the upcoming Primates Meeting regarding ACNA, I’ll keep going a whole lot less and at a much greater distance than I did before).  One of them’s this.

A little over a week ago, the Washington Post’s “On Leftist Hallmark Cards With The Odd N. T. Wright Commentary Thrown In Now And Then To Make The Rubes Think We Take Their Stupid Ideas Seriously Faith” feature ran a piece in which a certain retired Episcopal bishop had this to say:

Let me lay out the facts: The negativity toward homosexuality emanating from these groups is first based on a naïve and outdated definition of homosexuality, namely that it is a choice made by persons who are either mentally sick or morally depraved. If they are mentally sick they are to be cured if possible and if not, they are to be pitied. If they are morally depraved they are to be converted. If that fails they are to be judged, condemned and ostracized.

Second, these dated and false ideas are then buttressed by biblical quotations that reveal little or no awareness of contemporary biblical scholarship. The favorite verses of condemnation come from Leviticus, which calls homosexuality “an abomination” in chapter 18 and prescribes the death penalty for it in chapter 20; from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18-19, and from chapter one of Romans. They fail to read the rest of Leviticus which reveals attitudes and values long abandoned as immoral in our day or to note that the Bible itself calls the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah the violation of the Middle Eastern hospitality code. In Romans 1 Paul actually argues that homosexuality is God’s imposed punishment on those who do not worship God properly. A strange God this would be!

Several other texts are also frequently cited, but they are usually based on mistranslations of a Greek word (arcenokoitus), which means a wide variety of other practices like Temple prostitutes, with homosexuality being a minor note, if present at all, in that word. All of these texts assume that homosexuality is a choice, for that was the “common wisdom” when the Bible was written some 2000 to 3000 years ago. Other common assumptions of that period of history also found in the Bible are that epilepsy and mental illness are caused by demon possession, that sickness results from divine punishment, that women are property, that menstruation is an abomination, that slavery is legitimate and that God is the cause of everything we did not then understand. These data raise questions first about why anyone today would give credence to a literal understanding of a Bible, containing as it does such obviously outdated ideas; and second, why anyone would pay attention to those who do?

Both science and medicine have obliterated most of these dated attitudes. There is, however, always in every social change a small body of people who cannot embrace new knowledge and who thus will not move to any new conclusions. They shroud their fear in the suggestion that they alone represent “God’s will” and that anyone who disagrees with them is actually disagreeing with God! The Christian Church has dealt with this mentality many times throughout history — when the divine right of kings was challenged by the Magna Carta in the 13th century; when Galileo opened our minds to the size of the universe in the 17th century; when Darwin’s thought was published and when slavery was ended in the 19th century; when segregation was struck down, women emancipated and mental illness recognized as a sickness in the 20th century. Today the energy of this backwater mentality floats around the issue of homosexuality. There is nothing unusual about this. What is unusual is that these ideas in their irrelevant death throes can still command a front page story in the New York Times!

There is, of course, no use pointing out that John Shelby Spong is a gutless atheist, that actual theologians have obliterated this crap, that anyone who owns a Bible can effortlessly do the same or that Spong is an intellectual and theological whore who will say and do anything, however degrading, as long as the secular culture puts the cash on the nightstand.

What’s troubling is this.  Spong’s stupid views don’t ever seem to have ever truly bothered anyone.  In the Post piece, the old fraud prattles on about how awful the conservative bishops with whom he had to associate were but the fact remains that those conservative bishops continued to associate with him and never once brought him up on any kind of charge or even considered the idea.

You didn’t bail until 2003, Chris.  If you only count the years during which you were seriously aware of and following the controversies, you spent thirty years in that church, give or take.  True to my shame.  But I did eventually get out.  And I’m not charged with defending the faith.  The bishops are.

All of which means that John Shelby Spong’s views became just another opinion in the Episcopal Organization.  People may tell you that they consider Spong to be a goofball but they certainly don’t favor actually doing anything about him.  So it will no longer do for you to piously claim, “That has nothing to do with me!!  I and my parish certainly don’t believe THAT!!“

You may not believe Spong’s ravings.  But you’re part of a church that considers Spong’s ravings to be a relatively minor matter.  And if you think that anyone’s going to continue to draw a distinction much longer between what you claim to believe and what your “church” tolerates as an acceptable point of view, you love the institution way more than you love the Gospel.

Here’s another reason.  When your “church” has lost all sense of the transcendent, it tends to view courses of action like this one as perfectly acceptable:

Remember—ECUSA first managed to push Merrill Lynch, who is the brokerage house that manages many of the accounts maintained by Bishop Schofield and the departing diocese (as well as the funds of ECUSA itself), into placing a hold, or “freeze” on all those accounts so that no further money could be withdrawn from them without the Church’s and Bishop Lamb’s consent. They did this not by obtaining an attachment order and by putting up a bond, as a normal plaintiff would have to do. No, they accomplished the same result by the simple expedient of naming Merrill Lynch itself as a party defendant. Merrill Lynch panicked at being sued, and froze the accounts. It is now trying to pay them into the court to let it decide to whom they belong.

Before it can do so, however, the court has told both Merrill Lynch and ECUSA that since ECUSA requested, and Merrill Lynch cooperated in, the freezing of investment accounts held by churches like St. John’s in Tulare, St. John’s in Porterville, and St. James’s Cathedral in Fresno—whom they did not name as defendants in the case—they would first have to come to some form of agreement with those entities about the use of their funds, or add them to the lawsuit. Thus far, some agreements have been reached, but some of the accounts still remain frozen.

It’s pretty neat, don’t you think, when you are a big enough bully that you can get a bank to freeze a person’s account just by suing the bank as a defendant, while not bothering to sue the person who actually put the money into the account? ECUSA accomplishes this by citing its ubiquitous Dennis Canon. “Since all those parish moneys were actually held in trust for us as a result of the Dennis Canon,” they say, “we get to have them frozen when they try to leave the Church.” 

But wait—now comes the latest bullying tactic from ECUSA and its legal team. They demanded, as part of the lawsuit, that Merrill Lynch turn over to them copies of all of the diocesan account statements over the previous year. When it obliged, ECUSA found that Bishop Schofield’s diocese had written a retainer check to its law firm, in anticipation of the lawsuit that TEC was expected to file over the impending withdrawal, in the amount of $500,000. (ECUSA has only recently admitted that it spent nearly $2 million on legal fees in the year 2008 alone—$1.5 million over budget. Its budget for 2009, including an unbelievable $600,000 just for legal fees, is in the red by $2.5 million—a feat made possible only because of accumulated prior surpluses.) And guess what: ECUSA—and Bishop Lamb, of course—now want those funds turned over to them, as well!

In other words, ECUSA and Bishop Lamb are trying to see that the money which the diocese budgeted for legal expenses cannot actually be spent for that purpose. And in doing so, the plaintiffs propose to amend their current complaint a third time to name the law firm of the Co-Chancellor of the Anglican Diocese as a new defendant. I have no doubt that this is a prelude to bringing a later motion to disqualify the firm from acting as counsel for the defendants in the lawsuit.

You tell me that you are absolutely appalled at this course of action and certainly do not support it.  Yet you’re still part of a “church” that has undertaken the very course of action you claim upsets you.

Believe me, I know as well as anyone that this moment comes at different times for different people.  That’s why I stayed in the Episcopal Organization for as long as I did.  But there comes a point at which you have to finally admit to yourself that you see what’s right in front of you. 

So I guess that’s why I keep doing this.

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