Delayed Sunday Afternoon Thoughts

It was a largely uneventful weekend except for my internet service not working properly for most of the day on Sunday. As a result, these thoughts are being posted today instead of yesterday. I still do not know what the problem was. In any event, I attended the holiday function for a local real estate investor group I belong to on Saturday night – I got all done up in a tuxedo, in fact, with a red tie and red cummerbund in honor of the Holiday season – and then later went to Mixers and then to The Wave to dance. As I have said before, I love to dance and The Wave has non-stop dance music and I got to see some of the other regulars.

I went to church at St. Andrews Episcopal again this weekend. I still formally belong to First Lutheran and in many ways prefer the Lutheran service. It saddens me that the modern day Pharisee element both in the First Lutheran congregation – not to mention congregations of assorted denominations across the nation – sends out a message of rejection and self-satisfied superiority to members of the LGBT community. These (in my view) simple-minded, hate oriented people cling to a selective literal reading of a few passages of the Bible to commit the equivalent of spiritual murder to LGBT individuals who have every much as right to claim Christian belief for themselves as do these Pharisees.

Worse yet, these modern day Pharisees ignore (sometimes knowingly) advances in knowledge in medical and mental health fields so that they can wrongfully and self-righteously judge others as “sinners.” I strongly suspect that Christ would lump them in with the Pharisees of his day and castigate them for the harm they do others. I likewise fault parish leaders who lack the courage to call out those who thrive on excluding others and going about with their falsely pious noses in the air. Leadership often means speaking out and telling others that they are wrong and taking them to an understanding of views they do not initially welcome. Such courage and leadership are sadly lacking in far too many supposedly Christian churches and parishes across the world.

I find all of this anti-gay energy especially sad during the Christmas season when I suspect far too many members of the LGBT community long for involvement in church and spiritual matters yet feel that they are either not welcome and/or will be subject to gossip and criticism if they attempt to take their rightful place in church communities.