Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Tutu on gay priests

According to the Associated Press, Desmond Tutu has some strong words for the Anglican Church:

"In a 1998 letter to Williams predecessor, Archbishop George Carey, Tutu wrote that he was "ashamed to be Anglican." It came after the Lambeth Conference of Bishops rejected the ordination of practicing homosexuals saying their sexual relations were "incompatible with scripture."

Tutu also said he was deeply saddened at the furor caused by the appointment of openly gay V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. "He found it little short of outrageous that church leaders should be obsessed with issues of sexuality in the face of the challenges of AIDS and global poverty," wrote Allen. "


You can read the whole story here.
I am so grateful for Desmond Tutu's courageous voice on behalf of all.

2 comments:

Charles said...

So we're supposed to ignore sin just because there are other problems in the world? That doesn't make sense. The church (I'm not Anglican or Episcopalian, I mean the whole church) is standing to help the poor, the sick and the outcast. But that doesn't mean that in order to do so we have should ignore very real doctrinal issues.

Poverty is important, but it's existence doesn't make sexuality unimportant.

I'm not saying that homosexuals can't be faithful Christians or serve the church, but like any other Christian, they should resist sin and strive to follow Christ.

They may not be able to help their orientation, but they can definitely control their actions, just as an unmarried heterosexual can. It seems unfair in our modern sensibiilities, but who are we to question God's commands?

sevenofrhymes said...

In fact, there are a lot of things which are supposedly "sins" in the Bible which, like it or not, we DO ignore. We absolutely do ignore them because you know what? We know better today than we did then.

We know enough to look at the whole Bible and say, there are some things in this that are wrong. We actually don't think, for example, that we should put people to death for all the things that people were put to death for in the Bible. We actually don't think stoning is acceptable. We feel women ought to be able to have the kind of lives they want to have. And so on. You've heard this before.

Given this, what is the GIST of the Bible? What is the GIST of religion? Is it getting worked up about which adult loves which, and how they do it? I don't think so. I think the GIST is love. People working, living and being together. Surviving through difficult times together, and gaining hope from the idea that something larger than themselves is at work, looking after them.

The thing is that there are 2.5 billion people in the world who are not Christian, Muslim or Jewish. And a lot of the people who ARE Christian, for example, are only that because of violent colonialism. What does all this mean? Is it perhaps time to think a little more broadly about human experience?

In our political moment, homosexuality has become a hot button issue. But we owe it to ourselves, when someone asks us for something (like the right to marry), to really THINK about it. Do we have a good reason for saying no? A REALLY good reason that matters today as much as it did in the olden days?