What Love is this

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A song I wrote for Lent, recorded at our Sunday service today:

What Love is this     
To come from glory to this world of sin and suffering;
To die upon the cross of shame, to give your life for me:
Oh what love is this whose power can hold the planets in their course.
Oh what love is this that’s strong enough to break upon the cross.
What love is this, oh what love.

To live a life of sacrifice, a King without your crown;
To be punished by the world that through your word was born:
Oh what love is this whose agony will put an end to pain.
Oh what love is this whose blood pours out in suffering for our gain.
What love is this, oh what love.

To know the end before your birth, still you chose to come;
Divinity to live as man: the Father’s only Son.
Oh what love is this that’s overcome the tyranny of sin.
Oh what love is this that broke death’s bonds to free you the third day.
What love is this, oh what love.

Remember That You Are Glitter, And To Glitter You Shall Return

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If, as I did, you attended an Ash Wednesday service, you will have received a sombre reminder that the day will come when mortality’s grip will cause you to breathe your last and your mortal frame will return to the dust from whence it came.

Unless you are gay, in which case you will return to glitter:

What is Glitter+Ash Wednesday?

Ash Wednesday is a day when Christians receive the mark of the cross on their foreheads to begin the 40 days of reflection and repentance in preparation for Easter.

Glitter Ashes lets the world know that we are progressive, queer-positive Christians. We are in the pews, in the pulpits and giving glitter ashes in the street to those who either may not have time to go to a church—or may have been rejected by a church.

To complete the illusion, you can bury your glittering remains in a glitter coffin supplied by the Glitter Coffin Company. Here is a tasteful example:

It’s glitter all the way to the glitter encrusted pearly gates.

Affirming homosexuality for Lent

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If you are looking for something to give up for Lent, Generous Space Ministries has a suggestion:

This Lent we are inviting church people to give up the comfort of silence and speak up in support of their LGBTQ+ siblings in Christ. The challenge is to tell your pastor that you affirm LGBTQ+ people in the church!

For those who might be a little unclear as to the exact meaning of this, let me explain: it is not enough to affirm the presence of an LGBTQ+ person in your church, something I presume we would all do.

We have to understand that Christianity has left behind outdated ideas like denying yourself, laying aside your old self, crucifying the flesh, putting off your former way of life, and being dead to immorality, impurity, passion and evil desires. We are far too enlightened to fall for that medieval self-flagellating claptrap – unless, of course, you are a BDSM+ person, in which case, we affirm your pain.

Now we affirm everything a person is, does and thinks. Otherwise ze will feel excluded. And since exclusion is the only sin left to the church, the full measure of the church’s wrath is visited on its practitioners.

If you are wondering what all this has to do with repentance, it’s really quite simple: this Lent you must repent of your odious, outdated and, quite frankly, phobic view of homosexuality and all its scintillating and inspiring variations, expressions and activities.

Wrestling in the Canadian house of bishops

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Considering the Anglican Church of Canada has become a repository for most of the nation’s gay clergy, for those old enough to remember it, this headline may bring to mind the notorious nude wrestling scene in Ken Russell’s film “Women in Love”. If that’s what the bishops were up to, no one is admitting to it.

What is being admitted to is a “currency of grace”, a reference to the fact that the bishops are desperate not to lose the currency derived from conservative parishes who might leave the denomination when the marriage canon is officially changed to permit same sex marriage later this year. At least, I think that’s what they are getting at.

From here:

“The National House of Bishops has worked very hard since General Synod 2016—not only on the issues from General Synod 2016 and the ministry of the whole church, but on how we work and live together,” said Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada. “We left this January meeting having wrestled with how we are the church and how we will remain united in Christ whatever the outcomes  at General Synod 2019.”

“One bishop commented that in our work there was a ‘currency of grace,’ a statement that resonated with members of the House. This is not to say there isn’t diversity and there aren’t differences among us, but there was space, respect and grace-filled conversation in how we went about our discussions, and for each other.”

The bishops spent a full day in retreat with Hiltz, reflecting on the nature of primatial ministry within Canada and across the Anglican Communion. This day was in preparation for the beginning of the nomination process for the primacy.

They also spent two days focused on issues that will come before General Synod when it meets in July 2019. These included the proposed replacement of the Book of Common Prayer’s collect for the conversion of the Jews with a collect for reconciliation with the Jews; the second reading of the proposed amendment to the marriage canon (Resolution A051-R2); and changes to Canon XXII in response to the evolving self-determining Indigenous church within the Anglican Church of Canada.

Drive through repentance

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As Kierkegaard noted:

A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless, transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.  Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually whilst by a dialectical deceit, privatissime, it supplies a secret interpretation — that it does not exist.

A perfect description of today’s mainline churches who pay careful attention to their symbols, liturgies and traditions but have meticulously emptied them of meaning.

Thus we have drive-through ashes, ashes to go and ashes to joke about.

God is Love

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A song I wrote a few years ago, recorded at our service yesterday:

God is Love     
Love is patient, love is kind;
Love forgives time after time.
Never proud or envious,
Forgetting wrongs, love always trusts.
Chorus
For God is love, who took our sin
Upon a cross of pain so grim.
A gift of love so great and pure:
To live in Love for evermore

Love is constant, love always hopes;
Slow to anger, love never boasts.
Greatest gift of the Father’s heart,
Fulfilled one day, now seen in part.

Love must guide us on our way,
As we love those we meet each day.
Loving Him who first loved us;
Forgiving all as he forgives.

Anglicans at the UN

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Although it is reluctant to admit it, the Anglican Church no longer believes in hell. If there is no hell, no one needs to be saved from it so Anglican clergy have nothing to do: no mandate, no mission and, most worrying, no stipend! What is to be done?

Save the United Nations, that’s what:

A match made in heaven since the only organisation that is as lost as the United Nations is the Anglican Church – although since Anglicans don’t believe in hell, they can’t believe in its opposite, heaven, either.

The rejoicing of the bishops’ wives

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The sound of rejoicing from bishops’ wives whose husbands are no longer compelling them to be bored into oblivion at Lambeth 2020 is resounding from Timbuktu to Tobermory.

This is because the wives/husbands (we need a new word: “wifebands”?) of homosexual bishops have not been invited to attend.

The Bishop of Liverpool, martyr to the cause, will sacrifice himself and attend while leaving his wife at home. In a safe space.

All this is assuming Lambeth 2020 actually happens.

From here:

The Bishop of Liverpool has said he will attend an international summit of Anglican leaders without his wife next year, in protest at a bar on the partners of gay clergy.

Rt Rev Paul Bayes described the decision to prevent same-sex partners of clergy from attending the 2020 Lambeth Conference as an “act of exclusion”.

In a message posted on Twitter, he said: “I deeply regret that, in the fractious complexities of our life as a worldwide people, this act of exclusion has taken its place.

“It is a grief to me and to my wife, and to many others. Despite this, I aim to attend the Conference, alone, in the hope of a common future.”

The Anglican Communion – which includes national churches from 165 countries – was forced to clarify its stance on the matter last week, following “misunderstanding”.

General Secretary Dr Josiah Idowu-Fearon said: “The invitation process has…needed to take account of the Anglican Communion’s position on marriage which is that it is the lifelong union of a man and a woman.

In more news, Bishop Bayes has informed Jesus that he should also voluntarily absent himself from Lambeth 2020 for claiming his Father is guilty of an even more heinous “act of exclusion”:

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Diocese of Montreal has a Queer Bible Study

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We are, after all, a peculiar people.

From here (page 8):

Queer Bible Study(ish) is a monthly Bible study for the LGBTQIA+ community. Its purpose is to create a Christian-ish space for queers to have fellowship, study the Bible, and support one another in community in a non-judgemental, non-denominational, trans-positive, inclusive, anti-oppressive space.

If that mouthful of hackneyed gobbledegook is not enough for you, here is some more:

The overwhelmingly positive response we’ve received after the first Bible study is proof of how important affirming spaces like these are for the queer community and for the church. The church, in its historical as well as modern iterations, has perpetuated and still continues to perpetuate trauma against queer and trans folks by remaining non-affirming, upholding harmful standards of sexuality and gender, and participating in practices like conversion therapy. As a result of this trauma, many queer and trans folks who leave the church may never be able to return. But spaces like this Bible study, where queer and trans folks can explore the intersections of their queer and Christian identities in a safe and neutral space, hopefully help to right some of those wrongs.

The irony is, the time has come in the Anglican Church of Canada when those most in need of that most loathsome abstraction “a safe space” are the few remaining orthodox Christians who, despite enormous pressure to do otherwise, still cling tenaciously to the traditional Christian understanding of human sexuality.