This week, the Lutheran Church held a vote at their convention regarding the place of married gay people in the clergy. The measure failed 503 against to 490 in favor.
Earlier in the day of voting the Church voted 851-127 to keep the church unified in spite of a serious split concerning the role of gay people in the church.
I am constantly distressed by what I see to be the pharasitical movement in the church constantly taking precedence over what I believe the church is really supposed to be about. Jesus walked with the unclean, he healed the sick and unworthy, he tried to refocus the direction of people's spirituality from one of law and rules (as exemplified by the Pharisees in the Bible (yes, I know that current scholarship does not bear out them being such heartless hard-headed pricks, but I'm going off of the accepted archetype right now)) to one of love and caring and compassion and faith.
To put it another way, it is common to see protesters gather at Mormon events decrying them as unchristian and doomed to spend eternity in hell. When Brennan Hawkins went missing in the mountains of Utah while on a Boy Scout trip, the Mormons in the area cancelled church, and gathered en masse to find him. They put aside the legal way of thinking (I better get to church or I'm not worthy to go to heaven) to find someone who was in great peril. Now, I am the last to applaud the culture or actions of the LDS most of the time, but I think that if Jesus were here now, he'd tell the pharasitical dickheads protesting out front of the Mormon churches to put down their placards, put on their hiking boots, and follow him up the hill with the Mormons to find that boy.
