disappointment found in the bending of the cow’s knees

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

******Since writing this post, Lynn Abbott, whose husband owns and operates a
Chick-fil-A has reached out to me to set the record straight—
that the recent news regarding Chick-fil-A
is not the full truth…
Chick-fil-A is not cutting ties with The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and
The Salvation Army
Please read Lynn’s comment in the comment section and please see my following post
that includes Lynn’s informative clarification!

I’ve written many a post over the years in support of Atlanta’s local homegrown and crowd
favorite, bovine inspired, chicken sandwich shop–Chick-fil-A.

Those amusing and much beloved illiterate cows, who constantly
encourage folks to “eat mor chikin”, have helped to turn a once lone little restaurant,
on the outskirts of Atlanta, into a national institution.

The creation of the ‘original chicken sandwich, a restaurant,
lovingly dubbed the Drawf House, along with a sound Christian foundation were each
contributing factors that helped to turn one man’s small dream into a booming business.

The late Truett Cathy and his desire for feeding bodies, as well as spirits,
helped turn a dream into a business that is now ranked as one of the nation’s top
fast-food chains.

Mr. Cathy, a devout Christian, build his food empire on Biblical principles.
Even stating that the Bible was his “playbook” for operating.
With the foremost operating decision being that his restaurants close on Sundays,
the sabbath day for the Christian church.

With the Sabbath being that proverbial 7th day of Creation, of which is to be a day of
rest and worship, Cathy fought the mounting demands of an ever-growing
secular population to let go of an archaic notion and open his restaurants
7 days a week…
‘Just think of all the business, and in turn revenue, you’re missing out on’
folks would say…
But we know, just as Cathy knew,
that God will bless and honor those who bless and honor Him.

Cathy always refused the demanding pushback to his decision to close on Sundays
as it would allow his employees the opportunity of attending church with
their families should they so choose…
Just as it afforded Cathy the ability to honor God by marking the Sabbath as “holy.”

Since his death in 2014, his sons, who now own and oversee this mega food corporation,
have remained faithful to their father’s original guiding principals…
that is until…this week.

Those original guiding principles, those principles of traditional Christian values,
have been sorely tested over the past couple of years by an ever-increasingly rabid,
post-Christian, liberal society.

With the most recent example being the closing of Chick-fil-A’s first
franchised restaurant in the UK due to mounting protests from the LGBTQ_ _ _
(add in any other letters that you chose that I’ve forgotten)
community and its supporters over the fact that the Christian based foodchain
does not support same-sex marriage while it offers donations to various charitable
organizations that share their same Christian values and beliefs—
organizations such as The Salvation Army.

Really??!!

The Salvation Army???!!

The very organization founded on Methodist Christian principles in 1865
that has grown to be one of the largest global organizations to rush in to offer
aid and comfort to those ravaged by natural disasters or simply by hard times.
As taken from Wikipedia, the Salvation Army was formed as it
“sought to bring salvation to the poor, destitute, and hungry by meeting both
their “physical and spiritual needs.”

And so now Chick-fil-A is painfully discovering that it is no longer acceptable,
or better yet not tolerated, to disagree with something that the “left” readily endorses.
Just as it is no longer acceptable to support any charitable Christian organization that
shares the belief that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman,
or the desire to honor God’s words…let alone honoring any other Christian value.

Because if you do, you will be marginalized and maligned until you bend.

And so this week, the house that Cathy built, built on the foundation, words,
and promises proclaimed by the God of all Creation, caved in to the pressures
of a maniacal society.

And thus, the cows have been brought to their knees, bending.
Bending the very core ideals once instilled by their founder all in order to appease
an ever-increasingly intolerant society.

Genuflecting to the secular god of sexual perversion as such is now seen as the new normal.

And yet we’ve all known of this bending for quite some time have we not?

We’ve known, as we’ve painfully watched, that if anyone disagrees with a
radicalized society, any and all will be forced to agree or will either be
shut down or better yet, destroyed.

For when one decides to bend in hopes of forging a compromise…
hoping that that bend, that compromise,
will be enough to ward off the ideological demagogues…
it will become deadly and readily apparent that the rabid masses will not be appeased…
not until everyone in opposition not only bends but are more aptly broken.

Shame on Chick-fil-A.
They don’t even realize that their willingness to distance themselves from their
once strong allied charities, that being The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes—
their willingness to bend away from their once deeply rooted Christian principles will eventually
and most sadly lead to their demise…
becoming but a mere shadow of Truett Cathy’s original desire to honor God.

This is what the Lord has commanded.
If a man vows a vow to the Lord, or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge,
he shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth.
Numbers 30:2

Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name.
Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you;
for the LORD your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and his anger will burn against you,
and he will destroy you from the face of the land.
Do not put the LORD your God to the test as you did at Massah.
Be sure to keep the commands of the LORD your God and the stipulations and
decrees he has given you. 18 Do what is right and good in the LORD’s sight,
so that it may go well with you and you may go in and take over the good land
the LORD promised on oath to your ancestors, thrusting out all your enemies before you,
as the LORD said.
In the future, when your son asks you,
“What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the LORD our God has commanded you?”
tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt,
but the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.
Before our eyes the LORD sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on Egypt and Pharaoh
and his whole household.
But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the
land he promised on oath to our ancestors.
Deuteronomy 6:13-23

Standards…all kinds of standards– all equally powerful.

“When depravity and immorality appear more prevalent in society,
one of the main causes can be traced to silent or inactive Christians”
David Fiorazo

(The Queen’s Royal Standard flying over Windosr Castle courtesy the web)

The Royal Standard, otherwise known as the Royal flag, is flown only when the Queen of
England and that of the British Commonwealth is physically in a particular residence—
The flag is her very visible calling card.

According to Wikipedia,
“the Royal Standard of the United Kingdom is flown when the Queen
is in residence in one of the royal palaces and on her car, ship or aeroplane.
It may be flown on any building, official or private, during a visit by the Queen,
if the owner or proprietor so requests.
It famously replaces the Union Flag over the Palace of Westminster when the Queen visits
during the State Opening of Parliament.
The Royal Standard was flown aboard the royal yacht when it was in service and the
Queen was on board.
The only church that may fly a Royal Standard, even without the presence of the Sovereign,
is Westminster Abbey, a Royal Peculiar”

So whether the Queen is in Scotland at Balmoral, in London at Buckingham Palace,
in Berkshire at Windsor Castle or simply riding in her limousine–etc…
a flag bearing the royal colors and emblems denoting the House of Windsor
is flown allowing all who see the flag to know that the Queen is indeed present.

It’s how a tourist visiting London, wishing to see the changing of the Gaurd,
knows whether or not the Queen is at “home.”
However, it matters not to said tourist whether the Queen is home or not…
as chances are the Queen won’t be receiving visitors…
yet the flag remains… a powerful symbol of a powerful yet diminutive woman.

Yet the flag actually represents much more than a 92-year-old monarch…
despite her reign being the longest in British history…surpassing even that of her
great great grandmother Victoria, the British Standard is so very much more than simply
the Queen.

Flags, and or standards, are powerful symbols representing powerful ideals.
Think of battlefields…be they ancient or current…as long as troops have marched, rode
or even flown into the face of conflict, a flag has most always been leading the charge.

(Lady Liberty leading the People by Eugene Delacroix 1830 from the July Revolution /The Louvre)

Think of every coffin of any US serviceman or woman that is brought home from a foreign field
of battle—that casket is covered in the American flag.
It is a tremendously powerful and very moving image.

(a 2009 image of Amercian servicemen returning home after offering the ultimate sacrifice)

And so when our favorite rouge bishop, Bishop Gavin Ashenden wrote his day’s post regarding
the soon to be flying of a certain flag high over the tower of Ely Cathedral,
a powerful and most dangerous message is to be sent…
A message that has our friend sounding a grave warning to not only Christians but more
importantly to the Chruch herself.

I’ve actually cut the entire post and added it as simply listing the link does not
do enough to help echo Bishop Ashenden’s alarm.

For you see, I’m slowly making my way into the book The Cost of Our Silence by David
Fiorazo. And this post and this alarm being offered to us by Bishop Ashenden is
exactly what David Fiorazo is talking about.

Will we as Christians simply fade into the woodwork pretending this has nothing to do with
us, or will be willing to speak up and out?

My prayer is that we will find the courage to speak

Ely cathedral has promised to fly the gay rainbow flag this weekend.

Mark Bonney, the Dean of Ely explained.

“This weekend we will be proudly flying the rainbow flag in support of the first ever
‘Pride in Ely’ event.

I am very pleased that Chapter agreed to my request to fly the ‘Pride’ flag from the
Cathedral tower on 11 August when Pride in Ely holds its first festival.
I am pleased first of all to lend my backing to this community event because it
celebrates the breadth and diversity of the community in which we all live.
I am also very conscious that Christians have not always been perceived as being as
supportive and inclusive as some of us would wish, and so I am pleased to fly this
flag as a sign of the kind of inclusion that I wish to promote at the Cathedral”

The Dean of Ely has adopted the secular values of a culture that has set its face against
Christianity, and is waging a war against Judaeo-Christian culture.

Sexual ethics have always been at the heart of the Christian’s struggle with sin,
the world and the devil. But it seems the Dean of Ely is not overly concerned with either
sin, or the distinction between the Church and the world, or the struggle with evil.

But then more and more cathedrals see themselves as civic centres of spirituality,
wanting to embrace the secular.

Jesus warned that you could not more serve God and mammon than you could submit to
the temptations of the devil and still work for the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the case of Ely, the Dean is choosing the Leftist values of so-called
‘breadth and diversity’ (values found nowhere in the Christian Gospels) and wants to make
reparation for the fact that Christians have been insufficiently supportive of
non-monogamous and heterosexual sexual adventure
(code word ‘inclusivity’- another term found nowhere in the teaching of Jesus.)

In brief, why is this an act of apostasy and worse?

The flying of a gay pride flag above a cathedral is more than a
contradiction, it constitutes a blasphemy.

Distorted sexual identity and practice is diagnosed by St Paul as a symptom of idolatry
(in Romans 1).

He warns that the more a society turns its back on the living God,
the more people experience dis-ease and disintegration.
This expresses itself partially in a confusion of sexual identity and equally by an
absence of continence. By contrast, the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a journey into
a deeper sexual and psychological purity, set within the parameters of God’s created order.

The present cultural and ideological assault on the Church takes the form of an attack
on the conceptual integrity of both marriage and the family.

It particularly sets out to undermine the integrity of the given-ness of the ‘binary’
categories of man and woman coming together to co-create, as God’s agents.

Instead of resisting this assault, parts of the church have welcomed it.
By ripping a piece of St Paul out context they have made him say the opposite of
what he intended.

In Galatians 3 Paul explored the basic categories of mutual antagonisms embedded in
his culture. Jews against gentiles, men against women and the free against the enslaved.
Once anyone defined by these categories of adversity entered the new life in Christ,
this baptised life washed these antipathies away into a new identity.
“In Christ, there is no slave or free…”. This can best be summarised by saying that
no Christian can truly be a Christian if they place a defining categorising adjective
in front of their identity in Christ.

So there can be no black, tall, rich, old, feeble, or any other category to define ‘Christian’,
or it becomes a contradiction in terms.

And particularly, of all adjectives, the least desirable would be an adjective
denoting perversion of God-given identity, or a disorder of behaviour whose effect was
the sullying of sexual purity as enabled experienced and understood in the Holy Spirit.

But this is exactly what the gay pride movement has set out to achieve in the
redefining and undermining of Christian sexual ethics and theological identity.

It would be ludicrous to describe people as ‘straight’ Christians.
It is just as ludicrous to define people as ‘gay’ Christians.
Our new anthropology of the Kingdom bestows an identity that is ‘in Christ’.
How can a Christian withdraw that identity and relocate it in a spectrum of sexual
and genital attraction?
What kind of Christian, what kind of church would replace the ‘imago Christi’
with the romanticised stimuli of genitalia?
What kind of Church would replace the call to die to yourself with the psycho-sexual
narcissism of a call to sexual and romantic adventure with a same sexual partner?

The matter is not made any clearer by the observation that the very term gay is
too clumsy to act as a descriptor of the horizon of sexual incoherence that stretches
through the spectrum of LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA etc…

In flying the flag of gay pride from a Christian Cathedral,
the clergy have indicated their allegiance to an ideology of sexual identity that is at
complete odds with the faith that the Cathedral was built to teach and embody.

They have instead adopted the categories, language, and ethics of the enemies of Christ
and his kingdom.
They have betrayed Christ by raising the standard of surrender and offering their
allegiance instead to an over-sexualized, disordered and decaying secularism.

A church built on such a foundation, of ideological sand, is both under judgment
and built upon such shifting sand, that it will inevitably soon collapse.
Ely cathedral and the great apostasy

impossible seperation

“Wherever an altar is found,
there civilization exists.”
Joseph de Maistre

( guillotine located in the Museum of the Basilica of the Holy Blood / Bruges, Belgium / Julie Cook / 2011)

There is nothing like a good ol revolution followed by the feeding frenzy of the lopping off
of heads to turn one’s thoughts to say, a more conventional path to life….
Or so it seems to have been so for the author of today’s quote.

A life, shall we say, consisting of the anchors of morality sprinkled with a steady dose of
conservatism….particularly if one was previously giddy over a life of anarchy and wanton
enlightened liberalism.

Yet it seems that time and time again…
man precariously rides the ever swinging pendulum of time,
swinging both left and right….
as he works to swing himself ever closer to living life simply fast and furious
while claiming to be both footloose and fancy free…

However the pendulum will always come back to the elephant in the room…
that being…. man verses a Divine Creator…

Deny and decry as oft man does….
As ego and pride take center stage as the masters of all that is,
societies will continue going to hell in a hand basket.

All the while as everyone is busying themselves… trying to separate the notion of morality
from Western Civilization’s Christian / Judaeo lynchpin….
which is like trying to separate the moon from the night sky….

It has always seemed to me completely inconsistent that existentialism should deny the
existence of God and then proceed to use the language of theism to persuade men to live right.
The French writer, Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance,
states frankly that he represents atheistic existentialism.
“If God does not exist,” he says, “we find no values or commands to turn to which
legitimize our conduct.
So in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us.
We are all alone, with no excuses.”
Yet in the next paragraph he states bluntly,
“Man is responsible for his passion,” and further on,
“A coward is responsible for his cowardice.”
And such considerations as these, he says, fill the existentialist with “anguish,
forlornness and despair.”
It seems to me that such reasoning must assume the truth of everything it seeks to deny.
If there were no God there would be no such words as “responsible.”
No criminal need fear a judge who does not exist;
nor would he need to worry about breaking a law that had not been passed.
It is the knowledge that the law and the judge do in fact exist that strikes fear
to the lawbreaker’s heart.
There is someone to whom he is accountable;
otherwise the concept of responsibility could have no meaning.
A.W. Tozer