One of the things that I find comical about extemporaneous prayer is that the person praying sometimes yields to the temptation of telling an apparently absent-minded God what he is like, who he is, what he thinks, what he likes, what he dislikes and what he should do, rather than humbly laying petitions before him.
It could be worse, though, and in Primate Fred Hiltz’s case, it is.
In the case of the soon to be held Primates’ Meeting which has filled Justin Welby with an excitement exceeded only by that of teenage girls attending a Justin Bieber concert, Hiltz has somehow contrived to leave God’s will out of his prayers entirely.
Rather than, for example, praying for insight into whether or not it’s in God’s plan for two marry to men, he asks for “patience with one another in continuing conversations about same sex marriage”, as if patience for an incorrect view is the guiding principle for theological understanding.
Similarly, the rest of the prayers are largely given over to nudging God into Correct Thinking on the fashionable preoccupations of the day: a shameless attempt to co-opt God’s support for the leftist, intolerant, power-hungry juggernaut that replaced the Anglican Church of Canada some years ago, a speaking of power to Truth, delivered in the pious trappings of prayer. The good news is nobody cares what Anglican leaders think. Including God, I suspect.
From here:
Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, offers his prayer for next month’s Oct. 2-6 Primates’ Meeting in Canterbury.
Please pray…
Pray that we have patience with one another in continuing conversations about same sex marriage.
Pray for perseverance in our commitment to honor the Calls to Action from Canada’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission. These calls revealed the horrible suffering endured by Indigenous People through the Residential Schools System established to enforce a colonialist policy of assimilation.
Pray for God’s continuing guidance as we work together in supporting the emergence of a truly Indigenous Church.
Pray for our commitment to eradicating the crime of human trafficking.
Pray for our Church’s response to the Communion Wide Call to a Season of Intentional Discipleship.
Pray for the Primates that at our gathering we have a heart not only for the unity of the Church but for the peace of the world. Pray that we be humbled and graced to be a prophetic voice speaking into the suffering of the poor, the enslaved, and those forced to flee from their homelands.
Quite right, David!
Fred Hiltz and his cohorts care nothing about the Church and their sole interest is to further their personal agenda. This entire exercise is only further proof that the appointment of the ABC should NEVER be subject to the approval of the civil government as it has no interest whatever in the Gospel and seeks to worship the “god of political expediency. Fred Hiltz and his cohorts clearly fall into that category.
“is it weakness of intellect, birdy, I cried
Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?”
The disconnect from reality of these deluded people is more or less complete: disallow
a largely native diocese’ choice of bishop and at the same time foster indigenous church life, teach misogynistic homosex which privileges the male orgasm and imagine that you’re working against trafficking, rebuke wickedness in high places while toadying to immoralists in your own jurisdiction, never read anything while seeking to instruct the worldwide Church. Sub-education is too polite a term, lack of mental training too kind an explanation, split personality too positive a label.
It is very nearly fourteen solid years since my late husband and I composed and sent this to the Lambeth Commission:–
“It is never wrong to love another human being; but we all know that particular expressions of that love may be wrong, and that the wrongness is independent of the depth, intensity and permanence of love. That some kinds of genital expression, for instance between parent and child, two siblings, close friends of the same or different sex, are displeasing to God is the united witness of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Old Greek version (which adds an allusion to lesbian relations in Ez. 16), the Intertestamental literature, the Fathers, the Reformers and all Jewish and Christian ethicists until perhaps thirty years ago. The differentium of same-sex ‘unions’ and of Gene Robinson’s relationship with his close friend is a case in point. In biblical Greek and language derived from it (for instance in Philo) such kinds of physical expression are frequently called porneia (rendered “fornication” in older English versions): at least twice in the Lord’s teaching according to Matthew, in I Cor. 6-7 and in Gal. 5 (where it stands at the head of the list of the ‘Works of the Flesh’) it is made clear that porneia in all its forms is gross sin, persistence in which has transcendental and eternal consequences. Abstention from mild forms of it, probably transgressions of stricter Jewish conceptions of prohibited degrees, was at issue at the Council of Jerusalem; incest at Corinth provoked the strongest possible apostolic reaction. No argument for the goodness and beauty of same-sex physical relations can be made on Scriptural grounds which does not apply equally to, say, child-molestation, incest, adultery and so forth.
Absolutely pivotal are Our Lord’s own teaching and example. That the Lord both taught and lived fully within the Old Testament sexual ethic is certain. We may indeed know His attitude to same-sex genital relations. No case can be made for the modern notion that there was or could have been any Dominical silence or ambiguity about them. His attitude is actually quite plain from the porneia references in Matthew, where His teaching is represented by the Evangelist as Jesus-Torah, and Himself as the new Moses. It is certain that if anyone in His time and place had had the temerity to produce a challenge to Him as teacher along the lines of that about divorce, He would most certainly have replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” By analogy, He would if anything have sharpened the moral demand for His disciples. There would have been no qualifications at all, no mention of pastoral provision for failure, there being none in Leviticus or elsewhere. This was a closed question: it is not open to us to attribute to Him historically impossible attitudes.
Not only is the language unambiguous, we must also come to terms with Jesus as our pattern, here as elsewhere. Any compromise on His part would have produced an immediate challenge to the validity of His ministry, and that challenge must have left some trace in the record. Some want to ignore Him as example of perfect First Century Jewish sex-ethics, while using Him as a stick to beat the rest of us into other more fashionable attitudes. The idea of Him as the best of husbands and fathers, even (just about) as the best of wives and mothers, is possible; but not the idea of Him curled up in bed with John the Beloved Disciple at any stage. The man in Melbourne who has just got a PhD for arguing that case deserves at least one for ingenuity, but none at all for scholarship.
Many things may be Christian but not Anglican. But unless something may be Anglican which is not Christian, we must understand that to call right what the Lord Himself called wrong, and to do what appalled Him, is to part company with essential Anglicanism, endangering not only the souls of those who teach this untruth and wickedness, but in many cases the very lives of little children, young girls, young men, women and all the sexually weak and vulnerable wherever they may be, now and for the foreseeable future. It is to say that the right to the physical expression of love trumps all the obedience we may owe to the one we call Lord. As ethicists we know that there is no human right to orgasm at any cost. We need to hold onto the subtler truth, that there is no Christian right to redefine love in the face of the God Who commands and supplies it.”
I will not add what were our biblical, theological and philosophical qualifications, or state how many degrees we had between us or from which great and ancient universities, but say simply that our undergraduate studies and our earned doctorates were all in directly relevant subjects. My husband was a distinguished Byzantinist, I am a Septuagint specialist with pioneering work to my name.