Sarx

I’ve had the day to cogitate on the article from Harper’s referenced in the previous post. And it has been quite a day: my office, filled with mentally healthy folks, puts work down in some quite logical piles on Friday and picks them up again on Monday. Taking the reactor off line and bringing it back online make for some insane times. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to recognise the pattern.

Now, Cam preached a sermon, yesterday, that involved us Christians remembering who we are and whose we are, for a time today, I had to remember who pays my salaryl and so there really wasn’t much time to worry about the whinging of Episcopalians today, as the thing that butters my bread was more important today.

But now I can come back to the article, having relaxed a bit, taken care of some important personal business (my BF, my former-housemate, a wonderful Fraternity brother, some grocery shopping and cooking supper). Now I can attend to blogging and picking up the rant where I left off this AM.

Three threads run through this article. One is the complaints of Americans, largely, of all camps, about all the Americans, largely, in all the other camps. Another thread is about members of the larger communion using the aforementioned complaints as wedges with in us to drive us apart and get our money. A third thread arises as we discover the writer - an Episcopal Priest - doesn’t see either side as “left” or “right” and wonders is we’re really doing justice and loving mercy.

This third thread appeals to me.

The first two treads are meaningless. They are Christians fighting against Christians - ie the work of the evil one. The writer makes this clear when be paints the shades along the spectrum from the scary homophobia of one extreme to the scary doctrinophobia of the other. At which point along that spectrum, which runs from Jack Iker to Jack Spong, can you say to have crossed the line? At which point, along the power spectrum that runs from Peter Akinola to Desmond Tutu can you say you’ve crossed the line? The writer takes pains to show good and bad on all sides - from Kendal Harmon helping a gay man deal with same-sex spousal abuse, to the Ugandan Martyrs and Davis Mac-Iyalla, all acting in Christ-like ways. There’s good and bad on every side.

But if money is included - along the third thread - with Marty Minns and other fine, wealthy Americans doing the ghost writing for Akinola, can you say the same thing? Be mindful that the average American gay man is more educated and earns a higher income than his heterosexual counterpart. Be mindful that that same gay man is partnered to another gay man - who also is higher educated and earns more. Be mindful that when these men speak of “oppression”, at best it can mean fear of holding hands in public. That’s a bother, I admit - I’ve been called a “fag” on the streets of Progressive Canada and on the sidewalks of New York.

But that’s not the point: can any non-American clergy say the following (in the words of our ECUSAn Presiding Bishop)?

To form and educate a ‘professional’ cleric takes a hundred thousand dollars and a three-year displacement… and who would add her most condemning fact? To invest rhose kinds of resources in someone who will serve a congregation of twelve people seems, at the very least, wasteful.

To this the writer comments:

I can’t help finding it bitterly funny that the entire Anglican Communion is tired up in knots about whether it is just to withhold the “minor sacraments” of Holy Oder and Holy Matrimony from a person on the basis of his or her sexual orientation but it quite content with restricting a person’s access to the “major sacraments” of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion and other riches of our beautiful tradition based on the demography and economics of his or her neighborhood.

The same is true around the world. While we - and our puppets in the global south - debate the finer details of sexual liberty in Christ: there are two major wars and untold minor wars (started by the USA and her “allies”), a global economic/credit crisis (started by greed in the USA) and a massive Environmental Collapse (to the creation of which, thankfully, we can not lay sole claim, but those who are contributing most fully do so wishing to follow the example we set). The Sex Debate is the “bread and circuses” of our current mob. And we play it gladly while we rape the mob under the bleacher seats.

What the church in crisis shows to an America in crisis is how very silly we can start to look when we debate such important but minor “sacraments” as gun rights, and copyrights and abortion rights and not the major sacraments of bread and roses and the building of the kind of society in which a woman’s reproductive freedom is not pinched in the forceps of her income bracket and a young man can find better employment than supplying his name to a murder board.

There is this brilliant passage in the middle of the article. I’ll have to quote it in full:

My tendency - perhaps my temptation - is to see the church crisis, at least in American, as I see most other political disputes between bourgeois conservatives and bourgeois liberals: as cosmetically differentiated versions of the same earnest quest for moral rectitude in the face of one’s collusion in an economic system of gross inequality. It goes without saying that by touting this stark binary, I, too, am seeking to establish my rectitude. Still the question remains: How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor, and environmental rape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson. Or, on the flip side, by making approval of Gene Robinson the litmus test of progressive integrity, a stance that I have good reason to believe would impress no one so little as Gene Robinson himself. Says he:

“I don’t believe there is any topic addressed more often and more deeply in Scripture than our treatment of the poor, the distribution of wealth, of resources, and the danger of wealth to our souls. One third of all the parables and one sixth of all the words Jesus is recorded to have uttered have to do with this topic, and yet we don’t hear the biblical literalists making arguments about that.”

If this is sodomy, sign me up.

All day I sat at my desk working, waiting to, finally, settle down to the things I enjoy: a glass of wine and some blogging. But work was actually more important - where my job is actually to get the unemployed employed and to facilitate those recruiters who do so. Now, I enjoy a good debate about sex as much as the next guy (or gal) but there’s a whole GOSPEL on the table here, going to waste, while you tell me I can’t be a Bishop and I deny you the right to say so.

When are we going to set down to work?