Whatever

For better or for worse, everyone evolves, changes over life's years. Not just physically but views, attitudes, outlooks, tastes, loves, opinions. In my case cars, theology, liturgical preferences, Bible translations and understandings, certainties. Certainly certainties, that's fer sure, that's fer dang sure. General Convention 2018 is meeting as I setchere tippy typing, they used to give me hives as I watched grim church politics of vicious winners and stunned, shunned losers happening as an evolving process, but which in recent years (they meet triennially) I've watched and gone on with life and ministry, personally unscathed. Over my lifetime as an Episcopalian, I've not always appreciated or agreed with everything they've done at General Convention. 

At one point I left for a while, when General Convention revised the prayerbook, to join a breakaway sect that continued use of the 1928 BCP, along with a scattering of other folks, but I returned because my family did not leave with me and being with them is prime in my life, and also because of the bitter hatred of the Episcopal Church that I observed as a standing characteristic among others who also had left, I wasn't raised in a hating church and their hating attitude wasn't a good fit for me.

In 1993 a sizable group, mainly women, including a number of prominent Episcopalians including female priests one or more of whom were our seminary professors - - I don't know why they are not mentioned in the related article that I just resurrected on Wikipedia although the Methodists and Presbyterians are discussed - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-Imagining - met in Brazil in what was fashioned as a "Reimagining Conference" to reimagine and reimage God. (Is God objective reality, or is God whoever, whatever our imaginations conjure up?). Looking back, I have mellowed or even evolved, but at the time I was appalled, horrified, horrified. At their meeting they renamed God "Sophia," which is Wisdom (surely a delimiting demotion from Y'Vah, which is Being and signals that God is Whoever or Whatever God Says God Is, In and As God's Word, as opposed to whoever or whatever humans dream up). They studiously avoided the formula Father, Son & Holy Spirit and also, if my recollection is correct, the name Jesus. They celebrated Eucharist with milk and honey, strictly avoiding bread and wine. Spoke scathingly of the Cross. Later, back home, accused of heresy and acting beyond authority and expectations, one or more of the Presbyterian women executives were fired. Quite the contrary in our case, it seemed to set a course for the future that we are now living into.

Their move to rename God carries theological and biblical implications, including but not least that in renaming God (see Genesis, God renaming Abram and God renaming Jacob) they lay claim on God as belonging to them vice vice-versa; and also that God is whoever or whatever they conjure up, whatever they conjure God up to be, a product of their imaginations, as "created" as any block of wood carved into an image and worshiped.    

Mellowed, I have greatly mellowed. Over the years I have mellowed. General Convention is at work. I'm not overly concerned. Ain't nobody driving me out of my church for any reason, and there is room for everybody, every view, every attitude, every outlook, every taste, every opinion. I'm getting to like the diversity. A church with everybody just like me would be intolerable, at least to me.   


SORRY BUT THIS BLOGPOST IS INCOMPLETE, INADVERTENTLY I ERASED IT BUT THEN WAS ABLE TO GO BACK AND PARTIALLY RECOVER.

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