Author Archives: David

What Love is This?

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A song I wrote for Lent:

What Love is this                                                      David Jenkins
To come from glory to this world of sin and suffering;
To die upon the cross of shame, to give your life for me:
Oh what love is this whose power can hold the planets in their course.
Oh what love is this that’s strong enough to break upon the cross.
What love is this, oh what love.

To live a life of sacrifice, a King without your crown;
To be punished by the world that through your word was born:
Oh what love is this whose agony will put an end to pain.
Oh what love is this whose blood pours out in suffering for our gain.
What love is this, oh what love.

To know the end before your birth, still you chose to come;
Divinity to live as man: the Father’s only Son.
Oh what love is this that’s overcome the tyranny of sin.
Oh what love is this that broke death’s bonds to free you the third day.
What love is this, oh what love.
© 2003 David Jenkins

Bishops battling racism

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Bishop Jenny Andison is the Diversity Officer for the Diocese of Toronto – I’m certain there was fierce competition for this position – and, as such, has been given the job of purging racism from the empty pews of the diocesan sanctuaries. As Bishop Kevin Robinson points out, “what about the storm of systemic racism that continues to beat down on our Church and society” What about it indeed. No doubt during the heyday of South African apartheid, racism was as a gossamer web floating on a light summer breeze compared to the remorseless pummeling we are currently experiencing in Canada.

Jenny Andison to the rescue:

In December, Bishop Jenny Andison, the diocese’s Diversity Officer, announced that the diocese would be embarking on anti-racism and anti-bias training for all clergy and staff in the diocese. “We are starting this journey” she says, “so we can build up capacity in the Church to begin to dismantle the barriers that are preventing us from reaching all people with the good news of Jesus Christ.”

[….]

The training will address issues of racism and bias at both a parish level and at the structural level of the diocese. It will help promote gender, racial, sexual and ability diversity and inclusion in parishes and in the leadership of the diocese. It will do so using an intersectional lens and biblically inspired approaches.

If you have time, whip out your intersectional lens to view Bishop Anna Greenwood-Lee’s opinion on the subject. Personally, I am very grateful to Bishop Anna for her tireless efforts to make me laugh until I cry. No systemic dismantling for this bishop; she is dismantling systematic racism instead:

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Carbon Wednesday

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This Ash Wednesday, Green Anglicans are beginning Lent by smearing carbon on their foreheads in order to find out what their carbon footprint is. The answer, of course, is: a littler higher than it would have been if you hadn’t set fire to palm leaves and plastered the carbon residue on your head.

For the non- green Anglicans among us, here is a song:

It doesn’t get dafter than this

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I’ve been waiting to say that for some time.

It will, of course, but we have to draw the line of irredeemable idiocy somewhere, so here it is. Most of us have not come to terms with the angst caused by our white privilege, and now we have that most heinous of all privileges to cope with: straight privilege.

Bishop Mariann Budde and Washington National Cathedral Dean Randy Hollerith have apologised for letting Max Lucado speak at the cathedral. The devil didn’t make them do it, straight privilege did. Much the same thing, I suppose; at least they were not personally responsible, that’s the main thing.

The problem is, Max Lucado does not insist that homosexual acts and same sex marriage are in accord with Christian beliefs. This is not only unAnglican but it has caused pain. I know it has caused me pain: mostly from laughing too hard at the absurdity of it all.

From here:

Washington Bishop Mariann Budde and Washington National Cathedral Dean Randy Hollerith issued parallel apologies late Feb. 10 for allowing popular evangelical pastor Max Lucado to preach during the cathedral’s Sunday service, despite facing outrage in advance over Lucado’s past statements against homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

Budde and Hollerith both spoke of the pain the decision had caused many members of the LGBTQ community. Budde, in her statement, quoted with permission from a dozen of the people who wrote to her in protest. Hollerith said people had reached out to him as well, and he acknowledged he had erred in not listening to their calls to rescind the invitation to Lucado.

“In my straight privilege I failed to see and fully understand the pain he has caused,” Hollerith said. “I failed to appreciate the depth of injury his words have had on many in the LGBTQ community. I failed to see the pain I was continuing. I was wrong and I am sorry.”

Anti-racism and equity officer rethinks darkness and light

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The United Church’s anti-racism and equity officer, Adele Halliday, is unhappy with our thinking of sins or evil as black or dark, and goodness as white or light. It hurts and is damaging to the soul. The Bible is full of such imagery, of course, but we should try to read such passages “through an anti-racist or racial justice lens”, and we must remember that “Biblical writers themselves had their own biases.” As I am sure you realise by now, Adele Halliday has no bias at all.

I have been going through my well-worn copy of Lord of the Rings and replacing “Dark Lord” with “D**k Lord”. I like to do my bit.

Read it all here. I should warn you, gentle reader, that the article does assume Adele’s gender and repeatedly refers to zir has “she” and “her”. Upsetting I know: please write to The Anglican Journal to voice your complaint.

Adele Halliday still remembers conversations from a church she attended years ago. The congregation constantly associated whiteness with purity and goodness, and darkness with evil. They talked about people being “washed white” from the blackness of sin.

Language is an important part of Christian worship traditions, whether in Scripture, song, liturgy or prayer. But when this language is unexamined, the result can be alienating—or worse, perpetuate longstanding prejudices, Halliday says.

At the time, Halliday says, “I didn’t feel I had enough personal power to speak up and say, ‘Can you please stop saying this, it is hurting me, it is damaging to my soul.’” Eventually she “voted with [her] feet” by leaving and joining another worshipping community. “But for some people it means leaving [church] completely.”

Halliday is the anti-racism and equity officer for the United Church of Canada, and has been working at the United Church’s national office since 2004 in various capacities, though always related to anti-racism or inter-cultural work.

The United Church’s work on these language issues is based in its anti-racism policy, developed in 2000, Halliday says. One major focus is discouraging the use of “dark” or “black” as synonyms for evil, and words like “light” or “white” as equivalent to goodness.

Canadian Anglican archbishops sign anti-conversion therapy declaration

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One day a Canadian Anglican archbishop will do something that surprises me: today is not that day.

Also unsurprising is the fact that the archbishops seem to enjoy antinomy so much that they have not expunged the “T” from “LGBTQ+”. Probably because it is now a hallowed acronym of canonical veracity that has risen to the status of core doctrine and cannot be tampered with without shaking the fundamental heresies that underpin the entire Anglican Church of Canada. Nevertheless, we should remember that the Ts demand conversion therapy, even though it is biologically impossible and has been responsible for ruining the lives of thousands of children and, no doubt, thousands more before our civilization finishes its unravelling.

The archbishops are as spineless as jellyfish when standing up for the fundamentals of the faith they are paid to defend but, to make up for it, their resolve in sacrificing children on the altar of their unhinged ideology is as firm as can be.

From here:

An international interfaith commission has called for an end to violence against and criminalization of LGBTQ+ people and a global ban on conversion therapy.

The declaration by the Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives, which launched Dec. 16, 2020, was signed by around 400 religious leaders from more than 35 countries.

Among the launch signatories of the declaration were Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada; Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of Ontario Archbishop Anne Germond; and Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of BC and Yukon Archbishop Melissa Skelton.

[….]

“Our baptismal covenant calls us to respect the dignity of every human being,” Nicholls said when reached for comment by the Journal.

Among the statements contained in the declaration are: an affirmation “that all human beings of different sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions are a precious part of creation and are part of the natural order”; an acknowledgment that religious teachings have perpetuated violence against LGBTQ+ people; a call for all nations to “put an end to criminalization on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity”; and a call “for all attempts to change, suppress or erase a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression—commonly known as ‘conversion therapy’—to end, and for these harmful practices to be banned.”

A Prayer of Woke for our World

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Sorry, that should have been hope.

I vaguely remember a day, long long ago, when the church used to pray for people, often for their salvation. Today the church prays for the planet and its salvation. Such is the price of progress.

This is a prayer from the Lambeth Conference:

Forgive us for our insensitivity and carelessness with the environment, instigate us to fight for socio-environmental preservation and for the end of the climate crisis, taking care and woking (sorry working my keyboard is misbehaving) for the preservation of species and the maintenance of life on earth, as living proof of our conversion to the way of Jesus Christ.

I can see the next Lambeth conference is going to be a woke (sorry a lot, dratted keyboard) of fun.

Justin Welby criticizes Canada for over-ordering COVID vaccine

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From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has criticised Canada for massively over-ordering supplies of coronavirus vaccine, hindering the rollout of jabs to the world’s poorest nations.

The Most Rev Justin Welby told Parliament the North American country had in the pipeline more than five times what it needed for its 38million citizens.

The government of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has reportedly secured 76million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and up to 56million of the recently-approved jab developed by US firm Moderna.

Meanwhile, here he is being injected with a COVID vaccine dose that he could have donated to someone in one of the world’s poorest nations:

Canon lawyer declares Canada’s same-sex marriage local option invalid

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After the defeat of the same-sex marriage vote at the 2019 general synod, the Anglican Church of Canada scrambled desperately to find a way to do the very thing that they had voted not to do. Their ingenious canon lawyer, David Jones, came up with the bright idea that, since the existing marriage canon didn’t prohibit same-sex marriage, there was nothing stopping dioceses performing them. This is known as the local option. The existing canon doesn’t say the ACoC can’t marry someone to a sheep, either, but we won’t go there.

The ever-tenacious Anglican Communion Alliance has enlisted the support of another canon lawyer – Professor Mark Hill from the CofE – to offer his opinion. He says Jones’ memo on the subject is “inaccurate and misleading” and anyone performing same-sex marriages should face disciplinary charges. Duelling canon lawyers.

I admire the ACA for their stamina in resisting the tsunami of heretical tripe erupting from the ACoC but will it make any difference? None whatsoever. If Canadian Anglican clergy admitted that same-sex marriage was not marriage at all, half of them would have to get a divorce.

The document from the canon lawyer can be found here, and a useful summary here.

FOR SOME TIME now several diocesan bishops within the Anglican Church of Canada have been allowing – and even sometimes personally performing – same-sex marriages and have authorized liturgies for such rites. They have based their right to do so on a Memo issued in June 2016 by Chancellor David Jones Q.C., the top legal advisor to the Primate.

Now a top canon lawyer in the global Anglican Communion has filed a 10-page Legal Opinion that not only argues that the Chancellor’s Memo is “inaccurate and misleading” but goes much further, stating that disciplinary charges under Canon XVIII currently could be brought against any cleric who solemnizes a same-sex marriage or any person who purports to authorize a liturgy for such a rite.

Baptising my new pronouns

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The Diocese of Niagara has a new liturgy to celebrate the renaming of a person who decides to behave as if he is the opposite sex to the one imposed on him by such trivia as his chromosomes.

The diocese hastens to point out that this is not exactly a re-baptism – that would be most unAnglican – rather, it “sacralizes” the whole experience. Just speaking personally, I think I would need a little more incentive before agreeing to have my genitals chopped off. That’s just me.

According to Canon Penny Anderson, the mastermind behind this initiative, there are a “growing number of people in our diocese” who are not in the least bit deterred by the prospect of this barbaric practice. We live in strange times.

From here:

Bishop Susan Bell has authorized for use in the Diocese of Niagara an interim rite to enable clergy to better respond to the pastoral needs of transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive parishioners.

The rite is called ‘Affirming the Newly Named’ and celebrates and affirms those who are claiming a new name and set of pronouns as part of their journey to fullness of life in regard to their gender identity.

“I am so grateful to have this pastoral rite available for use in parishes as it names and sacralizes the experience of trans and non-binary people who are beloved of God,” says Bishop Bell about the new liturgy.

Canon Penny Anderson, who helped to craft this liturgy, says that “feeling free to live their authentic gender identity is central to the faith journey of a growing number of people in our diocese.