“O Lord, deliver me from the man of
excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all
things and desperately wicked.”[i] ~
T. S. Eliot
We
are drawing close to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church and there
is an ongoing furious debate in the church.
The debate is not about sexuality, but about the nature of authority in
the church.
The
Psalmist asks, “Why do the heathen rage?”[ii] It is a rhetorical question, but the answer
is implicit in the response of the heathen.
“The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel
together, against the LORD and against his anointed, saying, "Let us burst
their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us."[iii] The problem that the world has with the Lord
and his Anointed is authority. The world
cries out, “I am my own!”
The
world is in the Church and it loves to call the things of the Church its own.[iv] The world within the Church rages against the
authority of God and his Messiah and that raging takes the form of mocking
denial of the authority of God’s anointed Word as He speaks in Holy Scripture.
The
problem is not intellectual or a matter of scholarship. It is a matter of the heart. It is painful to be told that the things that
you are doing, the things that are closest to your heart, are sinful. The issue
is not over one’s orientation. The issue
is lust. What an awkward and condemning word
that is! It is so unlike the loving
projection of God from the humanist heart of the world. God is not a humanist. He does not center the first principle of all
things in the desperately wicked human heart,[v]
but in himself.
The
argument could be over almost anything that the human heart holds dear. More subtle are the hidden passions of
intellectual snobbery, or human pride, or the self-assumed fundamental right of
human beings to be self-determining; the right to say with Eve and Adam, “I am
my own. I want to do it my way.” But be aware that in practice that
self-assumed fundamental right means the right of the children of the world to
mold everyone else in their image.
That
of course is the issue. It is not just
that the world within the Church seeks acceptance. It is not just that the world within the Church
seeks approval. There is a difference
between accepting people and approving their actions. The world within the Church seeks something
else. Ultimately the world with the Church
seeks your participation in its lusts.
That is the final approval.
