The Ojibwe clergy whom I knew growing up said that if they hadn’t been good hunters and skilled fishermen, their families would have suffered hunger. “The stipends were pitiful,” but they remained faithful. To this day, the heroes of the faith, and the churches they established serve the Indian community with heart, hope and energy.
Does anyone besides church-obsessed bloggers or seminary professors care any more about the difference between Episcopal and Presbyterian polities (there’s a church word for you), or what Calvin or Cranmer or the Thirty-Nine Articles say about predestination?
Hospitality has become a one-way street. We determine who is invited and who is excluded because it is our home, our castle. Such an interpretation is not about welcoming anyone-it is about control. Welcoming someone has become secondary to an assessment-a judgment by me as host about the kind of stranger that is welcome and the type of welcome that is appropriate.
I hate going to church alone. No, actually I despise going to church alone. I skip going to church on Sunday morning sometimes just so I will not have to go alone. Going alone and sitting there among people makes me fell even more alone than when I am at home all by myself.
Perhaps we all suffer a universal disease that might be described as labelism. Labels are ways we control and define others. The quickest way to objectify another human being is to twist a descriptive label into a slur. We put labels in scare quotes and live into their narrow meanings at great peril.
What does the catechism have to do with homosexuality or interpretation of scripture? Bluntly, what does it say about sin? It is not by chance that the catechism opens with the topic of our human nature