Posted by
Rick on Sunday, February 25, 2007 2:47:04 PM
Is it only I, or do others out there feel that Jesus, has become less concerned with the state of our collective faith and more concerned about the state of his church over the last 20 years or so? Perhaps it is an issue of perspective.
For some reason, my tiny brain remembers Fr. Price giving some really good sermons at St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in Boca Raton during my pre-teen and teen years when my father would take my younger brother and sister and me to church on Sundays. Jesus seemed to be an achiever back then. He was a butt-kicker who took names and asked questions AFTER he did what he needed to do. Fr. Price is no longer working at this church, for those of you who Google him. The wife and I did go back to the old church a little more than a year ago to visit, and it was nice. My memory didn't recognize a soul there, however.
Thankfully, the liturgy at St. Gregory's still came from the Bible. If you were to attend some churches out west, however, you would find them, for example, reading from "Dave's Book of Really Good Stories" - not scripture. At least this was the case in the few times that interviews in the past had me visiting churches in Phoenix or Tucson, AZ. The company would fly me up on a Saturday night, pay for a full weekend stay at the hotel, and the interview would be on Monday. Flight would leave in the afternoon on Monday. No big deal.
The episcopal dioscese here hasn't faired much better with the recent election of a homo-loving bishop. She says, basically, that we are to love all humans regardless of their sexual orientation. Amen to that! But, aren't they the ones who need to change and be "brought to the light." It's not our goal as parishoners to accept everyone who walks into the door as an apostle and change OUR ways to suit his or her needs. Jesus asked his disciples to be rocks in the swift river of human emotion and to build his church upon these rocks so that it would not move to the rythm of the tides or outside influences like homosexuality or abortion, for example.
So, my wife, who is a Catholic, steared our Sunday activities to the local Catholic church, and we forgo the local Episcopal church entirely. We used to attend BOTH churches on Sundays, but the schedules never synched really well. So we were usually late for the latter service.
So, enough of this for now. When my brain considers another point on which it needs to touch, another blog will be written.