But what's for dinner?

Looks like Rowan Williams has jumped on another Schori bandwagon. Nothing like a worthwhile secular cause to help distract from the primary spiritual, theological, moral and ecclesiastical crises facing the Anglican Communion Lambeth Anglican Fellowship.

Last Monday, at the Lambeth Conference, Bishop Winston Halapua from Polynesia spoke about a meeting of churches from various Pacific islands where the subject for discussion had been neither social justice nor personal ethics, but the bare fact of rising ocean levels. Within a very few years, the likelihood is that several small islands will simply become uninhabitable.

Nothing could have brought home more directly the issue that the conference discusses this Saturday – the church's responsibility for the environment. While scepticism about climate change is still given astonishing prominence in some western media, the day-to-day reality of rising water levels is not a matter of debate for our colleagues in the Pacific. Part of the importance of the Lambeth Conference to us all in the Anglican Church is that it lets us hear these things in first hand detail.

Okay, archbishop... but if anyone has served or eaten beef at the Lambeth Conference, I'm afraid we won't be able to take your concern as genuine. After all, your buddy Dr. Schori already warned us in her theologically profound Easter sermon this year:

When atmospheric warming, due in part to the methane output of the millions of cows we raise each year to produce hamburger, begins to slowly drown the island homes of our neighbors in the South Pacific, are we truly sharing good news?

First cast out the beef out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the steak out of thy brother's eye.

The Bovine Primate

The Presiding Individual's Easter Message was just too rich in possibilities. Here's another satire from back then:

Episcopal Church Center
New York; April, 2053

Today, by a 5:3 margin, the Episcopal House of Bishops appointed the first non-human as a Presiding Bishop in the Canturbury Anglican Communion.

"This is a great day for the Christian World" said retiring chief executive Jim McGreevey. "For centuries the Judeo-Christian tradition had denied equal civil, employment, and sexual rights to its non-human brothers and sisters. Today, we in TEc take a bold step to right that wrong."

An official statement relased by TEc, concerning the appointment, read "there is nothing sinful about being non-human. Accordingly, there is no impediment to ordaining a non-human. Moreover, though the Canturbury Anglican Communion is still engaged in discernment concerning the morality of sexual intimacy with non-humans, we are exercizing our 'local option' to permit this ordination, without prejudice to that on-going listening process."

Observers confidently predict that the quality of the Presiding Bishop's easter messages can, with the new administration, only improve over what they have been in recent decades.

Asked for a statement after the ceremony, the new presiding bishop said: "MOO!"

First posted on the MCJ blog.

Presiding Administrator's Easter Message

The Presiding Administrator’s Easter 2008 message - DECODED

Your Easter celebration undoubtedly has included lots of physical signs of new life—eggs, flowers, new green growth.

Because you’re an Episcopalian, it certainly won’t include going to church… or, if it does, hearing anything about Christianity if you do.

As the Easter season continues, consider how your daily living can be an act of greater life for other creatures. How can you enact the new life we know in Jesus the Christ?

The “easter living” and “new life” which is, of course, the United Nations’ MDGs. That’s what it’s all about after all… read on. The “new life” certainly isn’t that of the Episcopal church, which is shrinking faster than any other denomination in the U.S. and which is actively replacing the life-generating love of marriage with sterile homoeroticism and murderous abortion.... but never mind all that… just keep chanting “MDG… MDG...”

In other words, how can you be the sacrament, the outward and visible sign, of the grace that you know in the resurrected Christ? How can your living let others live more abundantly?

After all, it is _you_ who are and does sacraments, not God. It is _your_ living—not His… er, sorry, _its_—which is the center of the Easter message.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition has been famously blamed for much of the current environmental crisis, particularly for our misreading of Genesis 1:28 as a charge to “fill the earth and subdue it.”

In case you missed such “famous” blaming, check out some of my other fine lectures.

Our forebears were so eager to distinguish their faith from the surrounding Canaanite religion and its concern for fertility that some of them worked overtime to separate us from an awareness of “the hand of God in the world about us,” especially in a reverence for creation.

And in fact—hmmm… maybe this is why I mention this point—people still do that today, thinking that Christianity is “true” or “better”. Look at all these silly un-modern “witch doctor"-like so-called “orthodox” these days who are actually so presumptuous as to claim Christianity reveals unique truth.

How can we love God if we do not love what God has made?

Remember: start with the fallen and corrupt creature… and then make God in that image. It’s so much easier that way. Imagine and then love God only insofar as He—er, sorry, it—matches our desires. Don’t love Creation for the sake of its Creator. That’s much more inconvenient.

We base much of our approach to loving God and our neighbors in this world on our baptismal covenant.

That’s the _new_ baptismal covenant, mind you, with the innovation of its 60s-ideology secular-humanist “justice” trumping all that depressing talk about sin, repentence, forgiveness, and faith.

Yet our latest prayer book was written just a bit too early to include caring for creation among those explicit baptismal promises.

… but don’t worry. We’ll be fixing that soon enough. We’ll be getting rid of some more of its inconvenient religious baggage at the same time too.

I would invite you to explore those promises a bit more deeply—where and how do they imply caring for the rest of creation?

Er, that would be “those promises” as I’ve just redefined and rewritten them mind you—this environmentalist stuff—not what the text actually says. But that shouldn’t be any problem for you… we’ve been teaching our clergy (and you) to do that with the Bible for over 30 years now.

We are beginning to be aware of the ways in which our lack of concern for the rest of creation results in death and destruction for our neighbors.

Of course, the few of you who have read the first chapters of Genesis might just notice that this isn’t a new idea… but, then again, those of you who actually read and believe the Bible will have left the Episcopal church years or decades ago, so that’s not really a concern for me, now is it?

We cannot love our neighbors unless we care for the creation that supports all our earthly lives. We are not respecting the dignity of our fellow creatures if our sewage or garbage fouls their living space.

Of course, the same might well be said about this sermon… and everything produced by the HOB.

When atmospheric warming, due in part to the methane output of the millions of cows we raise each year to produce hamburger, begins to slowly drown the island homes of our neighbors in the South Pacific, are we truly sharing good news?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, _this_ is the Easter message… _this_ is what Christ (and, of course, Muhammad and Buddah and Confucious and John Lennon) came to save us from.... (drum roll please)… COW FARTS!!!

The food we eat, the energy we use, the goods and foods we buy, the ways in which we travel, are all opportunities—choices and decisions—to be for others, both human and other. Our Christian commitment is for this—that we might live that more abundant life, and that we might do it in a way that is for the whole world.

Yup… _that’s_ our Christian commitment. Environmentalism. MDGs. Please stand by as we update your Prayer Book accordingly.

Abundant blessings this Easter, and may those blessings abound through the coming days and years.

Just don’t eat meat. Or drive SUVs. Or read your Bible or believe in Christianity. Or we’ll have to charge and expell you under Title IV or our new and improved canon law.

Have a nice day.

(Please find enclosed the latest draft of our new Canaanite easter liturgy.)



First posted on SFiF, before I was banned there for being too articulately traditional and catholic... as have quite a few other anglocatholics.

Vita Sancti Eromatici

Apparently the Presiding Individual of the Episcopal Church, faced with the awesome responsibility of spiritually edifying her flock with a noble message on one of the greatest feasts of the Christian year -- Easter: the day we commemorate our Lord's triumph over death; the reversal of the curse of Adam; the fulfilling of the Law of the Old Covenant and the triumphal invitation of the people of God, the Church, Bride of Christ and one Flesh with Him, into the New Covenant of Grace -- sat down at her computer and decided that the most important thing about which to preach to the Episcopal church was (and I'm not making this up).... Cow Farts.

Thus, in celebration of Dr. Schori's so-called "Easter Message 2008" -- and in the spirit of the "Propers for St. Viagra (the Upright)" -- I bring you the Life and Propers for St. Eromatic, the Flatulant... patron saint of Greenhouse Emissions and Episcopal Preaching.

Let my prayer be counted as incense before thee.


VITA EROMATICI

St. Eromaticus is believed to have been born in the small village of Kopros along the Nile river. As a young man he came under the influence of the elderly St. Anthony, and he converted to the life of monasticism. He stayed among the great man's disciples for only a very brief time -- it appears that it was in this period that he was first given the sobriquet "the Flatulant Postulant" -- before he adopted the life of a travelling ascetic. He wandered throughout Asia Minor, living on a strict diet of beans, onions and garlic, and studied (briefly) with many of the major Christian ascetics and teachers of the time in Ennema, Rhoeia, and Pettus. Eventually he settled in Syria, where he founded a loose community of hermits - notable both for its adoption of his unique diet and the unusual practice of meeting for corporate worship only on the Church's greatest feast days. Toward the end of his life he came to be reveared as a great saint by the local villagers, who would gather (upwind) to hear his preaching... from which sermons, scolars believe, he earned the nickname of "the Breath of God". His brand of "stoolite" asceticism did not survive his death.


PROPERS for the feastday of St. Eromaticus the Flatulant

ENTRANCE HYMN (PECUSA 1982 hymnal)
710 Make a joyful noise unto the Lord

INTROIT (Eccl 1:14,17 - RSV)
I have seen everything that is done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind... And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.

PSALM (78:39)
He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and comes not again.

COLLECT
Almighty God, who didst give man breath, And who hast wiped away the pollution of our sin, Help us remember that our life is but a wind that passeth, And that all worldly glory but a straining after wind. Help us to follow the example of Thy servant, Saint Eromatic, who, even when shunned by his brothers, raised his voice to Thee day and night, So that we, like him, might ever lift our, um, _h_earts up unto Thee, and make a joyful noise to Thy glory, AMEN.

GRADUAL (Isiah 26:17-8)
Like a woman with child, who writhes and cries out in her pangs, when she is near her time, so were we because of thee, O LORD; we were with child, we writhed, we have as it were brought forth wind.

ALLELUIA (Mark 4:39)
Alleluia
V. And he awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
Alleluia

TRACT (Lentan alternate. Job 6:26, 15:2)
Do you think that you can reprove words, when the speech of a despairing man is wind? Should a wise man answer with windy knowledge, and fill himself with the east wind?

SERMON HYMN
545 Lo, what a cloud

OFFERTORY (Num 22:28; 2 Pet 2:16)
Then the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she spake.... He was rebuked for his own transgression; a dumb ass spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet's madness.

OFFERTORY HYMN
572 Weary of all trumpeting

COMMUNION (Job 21:18, 27:21, 30:22)
They are like straw before the wind, and like chaff that the storm carries away... The east wind lifts him up and he is gone; it sweeps him out of his place.... Thou liftest me up on the wind, thou makest me ride on it, and thou tossest me about in the roar of the storm.

COMMUNION HYMN
314 Humbly I adore thee, verity unseen
424 For the fruits of his creation

RECESSIONAL HYMN
590 O Jesus Christ, may grateful hymns be rising
677 God moves in a mysterious way


The following reading may be substituted for the Old Testament lesson, should the Feast of St. Eromatic not fall upon a Sunday or other feast day:

Ezekiel 4:9,13,15,17 Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt, and put them into a single vessel, and make bread of them. During the number of days that you lie upon your side, three hundred and ninety days, you shall eat it... And the LORD said, "Thus shall the people of Israel eat their bread unclean, among the nations whither I will drive them... See, I will let you have cow's dung instead of human dung, on which you may prepare your bread... I will do this that they may lack bread and water, and look at one another in dismay, and waste away under their punishment."

(First posted on various blogs during Holy Week, 2008)