That's My Church!

Aaaw! Why do I go to all the bother of trying to make the case that the ECUSA is engaged in sneaky Gnostic eschaton immanentization when the PB Her Own Self just comes out and says so:

Our tradition has a rich heritage of prophets. Jesus speaks of himself as Wisdom's prophet in the gospels, and his deeds and words can perhaps be most creatively understood in a prophetic framework. His choice of companions, his parables, his cursing of fig trees and overturning of tables, are all ways of speaking for God about the dismal state of the world and the yet unmet possibilities of God's dream for creation. Even the scandals that we call the incarnation and the resurrection make more sense in a prophetic framework. They are God's response to those who "cry in the wilderness." That pattern of divine attention to crying in the wilderness underlies all of what we call salvation history – and it's important to recognize that it's not over and done with at the last page of Revelation. God hears and God responds by continuing to lure us into a world that looks more like eternity, more like a heavenly banquet, more like God is Lord and not we ourselves.

God's vision for this created world has a great deal to do with the aims of the Millennium Development Goals – with hunger, education, illness and lack of health care, with the full and equal dignity of all human beings, and with ongoing care and stewardship for all of creation. We are here talking about the MDGs because we affirm that we are involved with the lives of others, whether they live next door or across the world, whether they are Christian or Anglican or not, and even whether they are currently living or not. When we say we believe in the communion of the saints, it certainly includes those who have come before us, but it also at some level it must include those yet to breathe this air of earth. We are caretakers and caregivers of all of God's creation, both present and yet to come, and that is an important Christian recognition of the eschatological implications of the MDGs.

Those MDGs begin with a recognizably prophetic naming of the ways in which God's children suffer – the hundreds of millions of people who go to bed hungry each night, the reality of human suffering when children die needlessly and disease takes life without cause, of women who die in childbirth and the children who are born lacking the care that would ensure a healthy beginning and real possibility of abundant life. The MDGs hint at the kind of vision that prophets have always held out – a world where all have not only enough to eat, but abundance enough for feasting, where all children can expect to live out the full years of their lives in health, where no one is oppressed because of gender or disease or disability, where all can enjoy the abundance of orchard and vineyard. But the MDGs only begin to address that kind of eschatological vision. The first goal seeks only to cut in half the kind of desperate poverty that keeps people starving. It does not reach beyond to that vision of a heavenly banquet. The goals are a great start, but it will take the vision of faith, a vision rooted in God's intent for all creation, to keep us moving toward that kind of radically abundant life for the whole world.

Kinda like shooting a sitting bird.

By the way, do I correctly understand the PB to equate the United Nations with the Prophets? God help us all.

UPDATE: Mrs. P has more on the "Gnosty Church." And the latest Carnival of the Anglican Implosion is up over at the Cann WebElf Report. Note in particular the stories about the apparent sinking of the effort to confirm the election of the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence to be Bishop of South Carolina. His crime? Too conservative. Keep that in mind the next time you hear a Palie Lib going on about "inclusiveness."