The Sin of the Episcopal Church

To my three regular readers, I am sorry for this highly tangential post. I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time. I’ll return to regular ed-tech stuff tomorrow.

I am a cradle Episcopal Christian. I was raised at St. Andrews church on Martha’s Vineyard, where I served as an altar boy. I am now a proud member of St. Mary’s in Time Square. I love my church, and my faith. I love the tradition, scripture, and culture of discernment in the episcopal faith.  I consider myself a faithful Christian.

As you may know the Episcopal Church ordained an openly gay man as a bishop. This caused a shitstorm in the Anglican Communion including some diocseses leaving the American Episcopal Church and affiliating themselves with bishops in more conservative diocseses. The Anglican communion wrote a formal report called the Windsor Report. I read some of it, and basically, the Anglican Communion said You really, really really should of talked to us about this first.  Today, the New York Times reports my church is ending a moratorium on potentially doing this again.

I think the sin the American Episcopal church committed is by not fully considering themselves as part of the larger Anglican Communion. I believe this is a uniquely American error. The Episcopal Church broke with the Anglican Church shortly after the War of American Independence, but the Episcopal Church is not independent. We identify ourselves as members of the Anglican Church. We seek communion with our Christian brothers and sisters.  I think being in communion means talking, considering, empathizing, and compromising.

I don’t think Jesus would turn away people who are homosexual. I reject the idea of a “fundamentalist understanding” of the bible that being homosexual is wrong or a disease. I think as a Christian, I am admonished to love my neighbor as myself - and I don’t think gay folks are somehow an exception to this rule. Being a devout Christian is about being devout - no matter who you are.

My point? My church needs to do a better job of reaching out to our fellow Anglicans. Maybe this schism is inevitable - I think everyone flipped out when we elevated a woman to the priesthood, now it is simply accepted. But we are not just “the episcopal church” - we are part of a much larger communion with whom we must consider and love.

On 14 July 2009, Brian Yamabe inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

The fundamental error of the Episcopal Church was not that it didn’t work things out from the rest of the Anglican Communion, it was that it unbuckled itself from scripture. If you don’t take scripture as normative, then you’re left with yourself as being the final arbiter of right and wrong.

Jesus would not have turned away homosexuals. He would call them to repentance just like He did with every other sinner. It is not loving to allow people to continue in unrepentant sin.

On 14 July 2009, bill inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

see - I don’t think homosexuals are sinners - I don’t think it’s a choice for many of them, it’s just who they are, you know?

On 14 July 2009, Brian Yamabe inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Whether you have a choice or not doesn’t determine whether something is a sin. I tend to look at women other than my wife in ways that I should not. That is not a choice, that is who I am. Does this make it not a sin? No it is still quite sinful.

You can apply this to all sin. You can have a tendency to anger, lust, steal, deceit, gossip, etc. But having that tendency doesn’t make it any less sinful. Jesus did not minimize sin. Rather He tried to hammer home that we’re all sinners, just read the Sermon on the Mount. He did this out of love so that we wouldn’t look to ourselves and our works when determining how we stand before God.