Fr Jake with reports from a mission church in the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin, whose membership, bishop included, announced recently that they were no longer part of the Episcopal Church (maybe-sorta). The church, St Nicholas in Atwater, Calif., has been threatened with closure, esp. since their vicar priest declined to vote the party line at the diocesan convention. Bp. Schofield was scheduled to visit this past Sunday, amidst fears that he was going to shut the place down.
The reality ended up as tawdry and as inspiring as one might hope and fear.
Another report. And another. And an observation (or three) on Bp. Schofield’s position.
66 view(s)
As an atheist one might expect I’d find a bit of schadenfreude in Christian schisms but instead it makes me sad. I still think the most profound question is some variation of “Can’t we all just get along?” OK, it’s difficult to live or work or worship next to someone who disagrees with me on questions that won’t likely be resolved in our lifetimes. But the life of agreeing when we can and striving together when we can’t is the harder road and in the long run, leads to a better place.
The desire to be pure, the mania for being right at all costs… If there is a God, couldn’t He sort that stuff out in His own good time?
What I find most interesting / amusing / alarming in the whole San Joaquin thing is that it’s *not* just about all this newfangled Episcopal Church acceptance of gays, but about something as “didn’t we settle this, oh, a quarter century ago” as ordaining women to the priesthood. (The same evidently holds in most of the significantly dissenting dioceses.)
The irony, of course, is that Christ’s teaching, based on Scripture, was a lot less about dogma than about how we treat each other, how we treat the dispossessed, the poor, the outcast, the hungry, and our neighbors (who include all those things). But it’s always the dogma and doctrine that these disputes (and their bloody antecedents over the last two thousand years) get hung up on.
Or maybe that’s not so surprising, since I suspect that a lot of people get bound up *emotionally* in being *right* in belief, and are willing to let the rest of the world go hang as long as they can feel justified in their rectitude. Which, it seems to me, is the antithesis of what Jesus taught.
Ultimately, it’s all very sad, yes, and very human — a trait held by both theists and atheists.
And a not-so-Merry Christmas.