Kendall Harmon: Honesty or Obfuscation in New Orleans?
Posted by Kendall Harmon
September 20, 2007

If you read the Bible carefully, you may observe that the prophets reserve some of their strongest condemnations for lack of honesty—before God and before others. These people honor me with their lips, Isaiah says, but their hearts are far from me. The God of reality wants his people to face the reality about God, our world and ourselves, and we do nearly everything in our power to avoid it.

All this brings us to the central question facing the House of Bishops meeting this week in New Orleans: Is the leadership of the Episcopal Church going to be honest about what they really believe and are doing or will they hide behind an institutional and verbal smokescreen?

Again and again in Minneapolis in 2003 we heard that God is doing a new thing and that the gospel of justice demanded that we must change our teaching to say that persons in non-celibate same sex unions are appropriate models for Christian leadership. But now that the Archbishop of Canterbury is coming to town and there might be serious consequences, a number of bishops are coming to the meeting like Monty Hall seeking to play "Let's Make a Deal!!" Instead of owning the new theology they have embraced, they are going to hide behind words and phrases which say one thing while a number of them believe and do something else.

the rest at TitusOneNine