accommodating whom?

“If you accommodate others, you will be accommodating yourself”
Chinese Proverbs


(The Mayor helping emptying the dishwasher / Julie Cook / 2019)

Ok…so I’m still struggling between feeling better and being zapped of all energy…but that
didn’t seem to keep my mind from racing from thought to thought during the course of the
past week.

I’d see this or that irony or idiocy and would make a mental note that a
future post would be in order.

Then I’d feel the fervery chills again or the Mayor would be racing off willy nilly toward
something alluring, putting her life at risk, and those thoughts would quickly dissipate.

But the passing of a rural church’s sign last evening helped to jog my memory.

However, let’s back up a tad.

Let’s consider a word.
The word being–
Accommodating

A word that means a willingness to please: that of being helpful, obliging.

Obliging, in turn, meaning indulgent.

Indulgent then in turn meaning a willingness to allow excessive leniency.

I think we see where this is going…

It is going to the notion of making life, or that of another’s existence, as easy peasy as possible.

It is something our culture is honing to a high art form…

Making everything easy peasy…while offering leniency for all as we indulge everyone and anyone.
Matters not your desires nor choices…

Oh, no wait….it does matter…
It matters only if you are a Chrisitan, a Jew, a conservative or a moralistic individual…
because we simply cannot accommodate those who hold such mindsets…
But if you want anything outside the circle of a Judaeo /Christian mindset, we’ll accommodate you til
the cows come home.

And this thinking came from a drive last night when I passed by a sign outside of a church
that proclaimed “We Now Have Saturday Church”

At first look and read, that little advert seems great.
Saturday Church for those who can’t “make” Sunday Church.

But this seemingly benign offering got me thinking.

How much has The Church—each and every denomination of the Christian Church,
gone in order to accommodate the masses?

Praise rock bands to draw in the young.
Coffee house settings to draw in the casual laid back.
Video theatrics to show our cutting edge use of technology.
Gay clergy to make the fringe members feel accepted.
Preaching openness and love to show our all-embracing nature.
Removing the ideas of sin, hell or consequence from our actions because we are love and love only.
Gay marriages to express our inclusion.
Petitions to change the wording of the Bible to show we are progressive…
God as the God-dess.

On and on we go because the numbers show that the Church is losing.

It is losing to a deeply divisive yet progressive secular culture that
has no room for what Christianity has stood for over the past two thousand years.

It hasn’t helped that the clergy has almost singlehandedly cast a heavy
veil of mistrust…with many heinous acts of predation, across denominational lines,
leaving many of the faithful with deep wounds and now disgust for the Church as a whole.

So in desperation, The Church lets out all the stops.
Desperate to accommodate any and all…
just please don’t go…
please just come…
back…

And yet it is The Bridegroom who has never changed.

He, the Godhead, has remained the same since the creation of our existence…

He was before such and He will be long after such…

He will never change, be changed, bend, beg, accommodate or oblige.

He gave everything He could give on a fateful day of betrayal and death…
He offered redemption.
He offered hope.
But He will not bend nor will He be changed…
despite our bending over backward for anything and everything other than God.

God is not human, that he should lie,
not a human being, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
Does he promise and not fulfill?

Numbers 23:19

the importance of an oral tradition

The apostles have preached the Gospel to us from the Lord Jesus Christ;
Jesus Christ [has done so] from God.
Having, therefore, received their orders…
and thus preaching through countries and cities,
they appointed the firstfruits [of their labours],
having first proven them by the Spirit,
to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe.
Is it any surprise if those in Christ who were entrusted with such a duty by
God appointed those [ministers] before mentioned,
when the blessed Moses also…noted down in the sacred books all the injunctions
which were given him, and when the other prophets also followed him,
bearing witness with one consent to the ordinances which he had appointed?

Clement of Rome


(Trajan’s Market complex, Rome, Italy / Julie Cook / 2018)

Only 1 out of 10 in the Roman Empire was literate.
9 out of 10 were illiterate and couldn’t read!
To build the Church upon a book would’ve been a stupid idea if that was all that there was.
We’re already now into the fourth and fifth century and nobody had this book to even read.
Where did they hear it?
In the Mass.
Think about this: if you were in these first generations and you didn’t have this book,
think about how you would listen to the readings at Mass differently than you do today!
Those were words of gold for you because you couldn’t read them for yourself.
You would listen and you would memorize what you were hearing because you might
never hear those words again in your life.

Steve Ray
from Finding the Fullness of Faith