Really hard to believe category

Here are four statements. Which is true?

a) God loves everyone and Christians (even hot-heads who are fighting for the soul of their church) are called to love God AND their neighbor.

b) I am one angry crustacean and I write really pissy jabs at public officials who hold eccelsiastic office in the ELCA and ECUSA.

c) I do not hate gays.

d) I love my church.

Well, all three are true of course. And since things are going to heat up soon much more than pre-Orlando 2005 (back then we held out the hope that people would obey the rule of law once the eternal (well, OK, four year-long) Journey Together (hardly) Faithfully ran its course, well, I expect we will have a few more visitors and some will be people who self-identify as one of the alphabet in GLBT, you really need to hear this: WE LOVE YOU.

We, of course, love you so much we do not want you to participate in heresy. Yes, I (and a few million others) believe that you need to get your butt off the throne and let Jesus back on. To read the Bible with scissors in hand like Thomas Jefferson is not a sin, it is THE BIG SIN, Numero Uno, you shall have no other Gods before you sin.

To say this does not make me a fundamentalist. It is very Lutheran. Think about it, you are putting your eternal future in the hands of who? You? You are going to be the arbitrator?

The GLBT sympathetic chief Lutheran theologians (who have nothing but a "silly shellfish argument" (or here is one of the classics [look for Wm Witt's]going for them. Call it "contextual" if it makes you happy, but it is hardly a hermeneutic theory, much less a valid one. Don't get me wrong, they are really nice people, I mean, I know Ralph Klein and Barbara Rossing, really nice Lutheran people, love God and family and all that stuff, but they might as well have Asherah poles in their sacristys for the good they are doing their church right now.

The latter is true for all the theologians of the ELCA, the college and seminary professors, the pastors and especially the bishops who are not speaking up. You are more afraid of peer-pressure than you are of God, and your belly (financial well-being, pension, mobility, whatever) is your God.

So, just so you know, before the going gets rough, it may not sound like it, but not only am I not a really mean, fundamentalist, homophobic ranter, I am someone who has chosen to express tough love in a church polemic while we still have an Evangelical Lutheran here in America called the ELCA. Polemical, yes, crude at times, sorry, needs to be, we want the church to wake up.