St Matthew in the City, Auckland is at it again with its Christmas billboards. This time they have decided that Baby Jesus may have been gay. He may not of course.
Similarly, the Reverend Glynn Cardy, rector of St Matthew in the City, may be subject to bouts of schizotypal personality disorder during which he bites the heads off stoats. He may not, of course.
From here:
Jesus may have been progressive in more ways than one, according to a new billboard in Auckland.
The St Matthew in the City billboard, which is released each Christmas, this year depicts the baby Jesus in his crib surrounded by a halo of rainbow colours.
“It’s Christmas,” the billboard reads. “It’s time for Jesus to come out.”
Reverend Glynn Cardy said the sign was about trying to lift the humanity of Jesus.
“The fact is we don’t know what his sexual orientation was.”
[….]
More importantly the billboard was meant to ask whether Jesus’ desires in the bedroom would make a difference for those of faith.
“Would it make a difference if he was gay? Would that change the picture for you? Would it mean what we revere about him changes?”
It’s Christmas. Time for St Matthew’s to be sensationalist.
In the source article we read: ‘Cardy said that homosexuality was not even a word until the 19th century. Any mention of it would therefore have been a mistranslation.’
Okay, then, St Matthew’s should cease being coy and euphemistic, and mistranslating to boot, and say instead …
‘It’s Christmas. Time for us here at St Matthew’s to come out and say we are more concerned with being a trendy internet presence [because ageing Baby Boomers turn into the sagging flesh and old bones we are immediately upon being be forced to surrender the limelight], than a parish church engaged with difficult matters. And we like to think Jesus may have been a sodomite.’
Didn’t St. Paul mention homosexuality in a few of his letters? Just because that particular WORD wasn’t mentioned, he still – in Greek, from what I understand – spoke against it.
I suspect old Glynn’s trying to trick us into thinking people back in Bible days were thick as planks, prejudiced too, when it comes to sodomy.
But now we’re all informed and inclusive. Dude. And righteous about it too.
The joke’s rather on him though, I think, because he’s the one with no feel for the past.
And how.
I was told that with virtually every seminary class throughout history, there is always one student who will sometime during the academic year, raise his or her hand and ask some professor this age old question: “did Jesus have a sex life?”
When I was in first year seminary class, the poor sap who asked this question for our class that year was a guy name Stewart, a now twice divorced Lutheran pastor presently serving in Saskatchewan.
On the receiving end of the question was the late Rev. Dr. Walter Freitag. To paraphrase his answer to Stewart: “there is neither any biblical nor non-biblical evidence to either suggest or refute the idea that Jesus was sexual… and besides, if he was IT IS NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS.”
Well. Fifteen seconds thought will tell you that He was sinless and he wasn’t married, so that pretty much answers the question.
Is this in the Christmas spirit, St Matthew’s? Matthew 7:15.
It’s inflammatory, for reasons of fame-seeking egotism. It reduces the message of a transcendent truth for humanity to the shrill and childish fad of identity politics. It is disinformation, promoting the idea people are ‘born gay’ which is pretty much pure propaganda.
People are not born Christian either.
True that. But the one is not an analogue of the other.