Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost-Reflection on the Pericopes

After a lovely week of vacation and then a very not-so-lovely week of family illness and then one more somewhat unpleasant week of "catching up" from both, I find that it has been more than a month since I last made a post. It has not, however, been a month without reflection. For the last several weeks, I have taken up an interest again in the philosophy of religion. I was fortunate enough to have kept the textbook from my college course and used that as a starting point. I wish that I could say that I was ready to make a profound post that was a great breakthrough, but I have found that philosophical reflection has its own rewards, and some posts will likely follow shortly.

For today, I am sitting here on Monday morning with some thoughts in my head after attending church yesterday morning. The first biblical reading was from the first and second chapters of the book of Wisdom. It was striking to me first that the portion selected has a significant lacune in the middle that "robsbed" the "godless" of their full argument. The argument, of course, stated in rather striking poetry was of the evanscence of life. "In time, our name will be forgotten, nobody will remember what we have done; our life will pass away like wisps of cloud, dissolving like the mist that the sun's rays drive away and that its heat dispels. For our days are the passing of a shadow, our end is without return, the seal is affixed and nobody comes back." Then comes the conclusion of, therefore, "... let us enjoy the good things of today." This is contrasted against the god-fearing righteous man who makes his purpose the keeping of god's commandments. The difference, "of course," is that he "knows the secret" in that he contends that there is a life after death and his reward comes then. It is also one of the few times in the bible that we read, prior to the new testament, about a concern for an "afterlife." It also moves the blame for death out of the hands of god and blames the devil as the author of evil: "For God created human beings to be immortal, he made them as an image of his own nature; Death came into the world only through the Devil's envy, as those who belong to him find to their cost."

The further fallacy in the argument is that enjoying the "good things of today" comes at the cost of contempt and intentional disregard for the needs of others. This may be a practical consequence of the employment of the "live for today" mentality of some, but it is not an inevitable or necessary one.

In a further interesting "jolt," the Wisdom text is paired with the "receive a little child" story from the gospels. As the text was interpreted in our sermon, the idea was not that children were wonderful and innocent, but that they were regarded at the time as somewhat less than other human beings. The message was that we needed to concentrate each day on taking care of the "least of these," and that the "least of these" were the poor, homeless, etc. Certainly, I cannot argue with that, but the final argument advanced bothered me a great deal more. There was a reference made to the "current disagreement" in the Anglican communion. For a person "not in the know" this is quite simply dealing finally and clearly with the issue of justice for gay and lesbian persons in the church. It has been finally "forced" on the conservatives through the American church's ordination of an openly gay bishop (as opposed to closeted ones of which there have been many). It also involves a rather extraordinary turn of events that it has provoked a "crisis of Anglican unity." Simply put, those who disagree in the American church are forming splinter churches and dioceses, and those who disagree in the larger Anglican community are trying to force the American church to repent or depart. (This problem has been building, not just with regard to gay/lesbian issues, for more than 20 years) This has, very unfairly, foisted the onus of the "disruption of Anglican union" onto the backs of gay and lesbian persons in the church. "You really don't want to destroy the Anglican communion do you? Of course we (liberals) agree with you, but is 'having it all our way' worth disrupting the Anglican communion over?" We might have just as well have asked the sourthern slaves of 19th century America the same question: "You don't really want to have the United States erupt into war over this do you? Wouldn't it be better to....."

Where I was getting with this, however, was the rather additional extraordinary argument that if we got down to the "real business" of taking care of "the least of these," these other troublesome issues would take care of themselves. This was brought up at the General Convention under the protest that all the "gay and lesbian stuff" was "distracting" everyone from the "real" work of the church--in that setting this meant attention primaril to the UN millennium Development Goals to eliminate extreme poverty. While these are clearly worthy goals, I fail to see how the denial of fundamental human rights of justice and equality to 10% of the world's population is not a "real" issue for the church. There are plenty of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who would easily vote to criminalize and imprison gay and lesbian sinners who are perfectly happy feeding and clothing the poor and the hungry. I cannot see, therefore, that attention to the "least of these" inevitably will solve the issue of justice for gay and lesbian persons. Justice will at times be painful, especially as we consider that in cases at law, there are sometimes winners and losers. I will note, as well, that the "liberal" dioceses are not the ones threatening to leave after the weak response of the general convention and the 11th hour compromise, nor have they threatened to "leave" over the noncompliance of conservative dioceses for years over questions regarding the ordination of women. It was the conservative ones that immediately began to act out their blackmailing threats.

Am I angry still? I guess that I am. Yes, I want to feed/clothe the poor. No, I do not want to "wait" for justice at some future nebulous time.

Jeffrey Shy
Mesa, Arizona
(I suppose I would be "mad as hell" perhaps if I believed in the existence of such a place.)