The Inconvenience of Truth

From February 13 to February 19, Anglican leaders from all over the world met in Tanzania. From everything I've read and listened to, the meeting could justifiably be described as tense. The presiding Bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, left that meeting with a demand by the Anglican Primates for she and the U.S. branch of the denomination to stop blessing same sex unions and to stop consecrating openly gay bishops. She was essentially told that if the U.S. Episcopal Church did not stop doing this, that they may be asked to leave the Anglican Communion. At my first reading of those events, I had little hope that Bishop Jefferts Schori would in any way acquiesce to these demands.

It appears that she will not, even though a great number within the U.S. Episcopal Church objected strenuously and still do, to Bishop V. Gene Robinson's elect status of nearly four years ago. When I first began to take notice of Bishop Jefferts Schori, http://ourbreadoflife.blogspot.com/search?q=Katherine+Jefferts+Schori she demonstrated a bland dismissal of homosexuality as sin, and a blatant disregard for the relevancy and sufficiency of Scripture to and for "modern living."

The Episcopal Church is obviously divided where issues of sexuality and biblical interpretation are concerned, and Bishop Jefferts Schori has already shown that she is intentionally oblivious to any supposed authority that the Anglican Primates may have over her or the Episcopal Church's standing in the Communion. She has off-handedly twisted what amounts to an ultimatum into another opportunity to heighten what she views as an ongoing 'discussion' about something that she believes God wants people to keep 'discussing.'

On February 23, she told an assembly of leaders at the denominational center that, “It is part of our mission as a church. This conversation that has been going on for at least 40 years is not going away. God keeps bringing it back to us.” (Emphasis mine.) I'm sorry, but that just isn't true. Saying that God wants us to keep seeking to make inclusion of gays in the church a priority is no different than saying that He wants us to keep talking about the inclusion of those who routinely place any other lifestyle of sin before Him. It is the sinful desire of mankind, and his reluctance to submit to God that keeps bringing the topic to the table.

When it gets right down to it, this is just a matter of compromise. To Bishop Jefferts Schori and others like her, it is easier to ignore the clear meaning of the text in passages like 1st Corinthians 6:9 and to say that God wants her to continue this discussion, than it is to face up to the fact that it is hard to convince people of their sin. It is easier to accept sin than it is to confront it. You simply cannot make everyone happy, or have everyone happy with you. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Bishop Jefferts Schori said: “I ache for the pain that this communiqué is causing to people in our own church who see issues of justice as absolutely central, because I share that view. I also hunger for a vision of the world where people with vastly different opinions can sit at the same table and worship at the same table because I think that eventually that is how all of us are converted.”

It is really hard to know what conversion really is to Bishop Jefferts Schori. Is it this spirit of community that she envisions? That I believe, is what is at the heart of this matter. She views conversion as some sort of situation where harmony reigns, despite differences of opinion. That is just another of the enemies' well-crafted deceptions in a postmodern world. It is through the grace and goodness of God, by faith, that people are saved. Judas suffered a vastly different opinion regarding the Lord than any of his peers, yet he sat at the same table at the Last Supper.

That analogy may break down at some point, but the essentials do not. God came to earth and took on a flesh and blood body like ours, and we are saved by God's grace alone, through faith in Him alone. Jesus suffered and died in our place for our sins. He rose, bodily, from the dead. Jesus was completely human, and completely divine. Within the nature of our one eternal God, there are three persons, the Father, the Son (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit. These three persons are coequal and they are coeternal. They share the same glory.

When so many say that the Bible says that homosexuality is a God-replacing sin that condemns one to hell, and others say that it is an acceptable lifestyle before God, somebody has to be wrong. Both groups cannot be right before God. We must be 'born again,' to be able to enter heaven, as Jesus told Nicodemus, and when we are, we become new creatures whose former lifestyle, one devoted to sin, goes away as we are now devoted to God. We may fall into occasional sin, but if we are born again we do not actively plan sin pursue it. We instead should be growing in holiness.

For me, the chief accompanying doctrine of our essential beliefs is the inerrancy of Scripture. Bishop Jefforts Schori made the statement that, "The Bible has a great deal to teach us about how to live as human beings." What people then should do, is recognize the entirety of what it teaches in that regard. We can't as believers just arbitrarily decide to throw out the parts of Scripture that convict us, that we find inconvenient to our lifestyles. That is simply pride in action.

I do not personally relish confrontation, but as believers in Christ we are a people called to bring the Gospel of Christ to as many as we are able. We cannot do that effectively if we don't stand up for the Word of God. That certainly isn't always convenient. Many people will try to argue with us about the Word. "It was written by men, not by God." "It is full of contradictions." "It's an old book from a different culture. It doesn't apply to us today. We're much more technologically and culturally advanced than the Bible writers were." "God has a different view of things now that so much time has passed." All of those things can be refuted by the Word itself. So how do we go about doing that?

2 Tim 2:24-26"24The Lord's servants must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone. They must be able to teach effectively and be patient with difficult people. 25 They should gently teach those who oppose the truth. Perhaps God will change those people's hearts, and they will believe the truth. 26Then they will come to their senses and escape from the Devil's trap. For they have been held captive by him to do whatever he wants."

"Be kind to everyone." How kind is it to see someone who is walking in their sins, and because we as sinners are sympathetic to their weakness, decide to change our definition of their sin to make them happy with us, to avoid confrontation? They may be happy with us, but we would be helping them into an eternity of terrible anguish, without God. All the exegetical gymnastics in the world about those passages dealing with homosexuality can't bounce away the fact that it is sin in God's eyes. He will not countenance it. Does God love homosexuals? Of course He does. He died for them. Will He allow them to continue to actively pursue that sin, rather than give it up in submission of their souls to Him? No, He will not.

Proverbs 16:1-4
1We can gather our thoughts, but the Lord gives the right answer.
2People may be pure in their own eyes, but the Lord examines their motives.
3Commit your work to the Lord, and then your plans will succeed.
4The Lord has made everything for his own purposes, even the wicked for punishment.

Misguided people are always going to think that what they are doing is right, largely because they have no steadfast moral center. The trouble is, they are going to suffer the consequences. How can we who have been shown the grace and mercy of God stand idly by? We cannot. We must speak the truth of God in love, however inconvenient that might be. Peter's raising of a sword in the Garden of Gethsemene was forbidden by Jesus, telling him (and us) that the Gospel could not be spread by force. We must spread God's message of redemption through His Son by means of persuasion, appealing to people to get them to examine their own consciences, showing them that they are in desperate need of a Savior who loved them enough to die for them.

So this begs another question. Are we praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ in this matter?

The United States Episcopal Church has just elected a new leader. Formerly the Bishop of the Diocese of Nevada, Katherine Jefferts Schori was elected last Sunday. In her first significant interview since being elected, on Larry King, she stated that she didn't consider homosexuality to be a sin and that;
"Some people come into this world with affections ordered toward other people of the same gender and some people come into this world with affections directed at people of the other gender."

King also asked Jefferts Schori how she reconciled her position on homosexuality with specific Biblical passages that declare sexual relations between men to be an abomination. Her answer didn't surprise me because I've heard it many times before. She remarked that the Bible was written in a very different historical context by people asking different questions.

She followed that up by adding, "The Bible has a great deal to teach us about how to live as human beings. The Bible does not have so much to teach us about what sorts of food to eat, what sorts of clothes to wear -- there are rules in the Bible about those that we don't observe today."
This kind of statement doesn't surprise me either. This sort of thinking has been popularized by many, even in a now famous scene on "The West Wing," where an American president rudely tells off a character written to resemble Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

The problem is, people who agree with that thinking have not paid attention to what part those passages "about what sorts of food to eat, what sorts of clothes to wear" play in the big picture of the entire Bible and it's "historical context." Or, if people who make such statements were paying attention, they're being willfully ignorant of the same.

The Hebrews were God's chosen people, the people through whom He chose to bring the Messiah. They were to be a people set apart from the rest of the world. Part of the way they were to be set apart was to be determined by some of these rules for how they dressed and how they ate. God was serious about it as He established them as a nation. Man had sinned and fallen short of His glory. He wasn't kidding around. That's why the punishment for abandoning these rules was severe.

But the lives and history of the Hebrew people demonstrated that man's inability to completely obey God proved our need for a Savior. Someone to save us from ourselves and our own weaknesses.

When King Jesus the Messiah came to us and the world was shown that forgiveness of sins for our salvation was to be for all women and men everywhere for the asking, and it was He Who sets people apart for God, He declared all foods clean to Peter in Acts Chapter 10. There was no longer a need for the provisional prohibitions that had been placed solely on the Jewish people.
You might be asking, "Isn't that just what the new Bishop, Katherine Jefferts Schori just said?" My answer would be yes, and a definitive no. She's missed the point entirely. Let me explain.

Food and clothing prohibitions were incidental. That's why the restriction was removed. Take a close, long look at the specific warnings God gave to His people in Leviticus, Chapter 18. Read the whole chapter a couple of times, slowly. Take the words in.

Which of these things do you think God now looks upon with disregard? The different instances of incest? Bestiality? Homosexuality? God specifically identifies these acts in this chapter as abominations and perversions and then gives warning about what will happen if the Jews, or "any stranger who dwells among you" defiles the land by committing such sin.

God tells the Hebrew people that for such defilement they will be vomited out of the land given them, just exactly like the people who came before them were vomited out of the land for the same type of sins. There is the historical context. These sins, their heinousness and their consequence.

The sin of homosexuality and the others mentioned in Leviticus, as well as other places in the Old and New Testaments were not just something for the Jews to avoid for a while to show themselves different from the nations around themselves while God established them. These sins were an abomination before God at the time of Noah, at the time of Moses, and they are an abomination before Him now.

Just dismissing these things out of hand as something no longer relevant in today's world is easy, but it isn't right.

9 Or know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with men,10 nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. 1 Corinthians 6:9,10

If anybody cares to parse words and engage in semantics about the phrase in verse 9, "abusers of themselves with men," which is often translated 'homosexuals' in other translations, and say that homosexuality is not the type of abuse being talked about there, get with a Greek scholar, or at least somebody who will honestly translate for you from the original text.

The word used in the Greek is, "arsenokoitai." I have pursued this and except for a very few adherents to the notion, for Greek lexicographical reasons, that it is mistranslated, most Greek scholars agree that this word quite simply refers to male to male sex. One Greek scholar I listened to said that it means, "man who accepts another mans sperm." As graphic as that is, I tend to think it takes a lot to ignore the existence of the word and its place in the context of these verses.

The really good news lies in the verse that follows;
"And such were some of you: but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God." 1 Corinthians 6:11

All sin can be turned from in faith and can be washed away by the blood shed by Jesus, in His gracious work on the Cross. The various ways of dismissing sin are just part of accepting a sin "lifestyle". A sin lifestyle sets us apart, from God, which makes Paul's stark warning not to be deceived all that much more important. The enemy has tried to minimize sin from Adam and Eve to us. Our responsibility is not to listen to the enemy, but to listen to God's word.