more and more alone…but we all know we are never alone…and she knows too!

“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”
George Bernard Shaw

“The strongest men are the most alone.”
Ibsen

(BBC)

Anyone who might have watched the funeral Saturday for Prince Philip,
or even caught a passing news story regarding his service,
undoubtedly saw the painful image of an elderly woman clad in black, stooped
with age, sitting alone in a cavernous and seemingly empty sanctuary.

Donning a black mask–attempting to breath, shedding tears, mouthing
the ancient words to an ancient faith…muffled and hindered–all adding
to the heaviness of grief.

It matters not that she just happens to be the current sitting Queen
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland along with
other realms, as well as head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith…

On Saturday, Elizabeth that elderly woman, was very much alone.

Elizabeth is the only ruling leader, from around this great big world of ours,
who is a part of that Greatest Generation…
She is the only remaining active leader who can personally remember the
time when a world was torn a part and a time when she,
along with the rest of her generation rolled up their sleeves,
doing what it took to fight tyranny and defend Western Civilization’s
democratic freedom.

I was deeply struck by that thought…
the only remaining currently active leader…

Awed by such a thought and yet I also was left feeling rather empty.

We are losing members of our Greatest Generation daily…
actually quite rapidly.

“According to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 325,574
of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are alive in 2020.”
nationalww2museum.org

Those who I have known and loved, those who served either in war or
at home, are now gone…all but my one remaining aunt who will be 96
later this year.

Before they were wed, Prince Philip served active duty in HMRN
(His Majesty’s Royal Navy) and while as a young princess, Elizabeth,
upon turning 18 in 1944, insisted on joining the women’s branch
of the Royal Army–the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS)

Despite royal lineage, they each chose the path of service.
It mattered not that their service would be precarious and even dangerous…
doing one’s part for the betterment of the whole was the only thing
that mattered.

And that is what troubles me.

Elizabeth is now alone—as in having lost those who lived that
previous time with her.
Those who knew peril yet persevered none the less.
They were stalwart.
They didn’t complain, they simply pressed on…ever forward.

No limelight, no self seeking attention, no apology tours, no
tell all books, no interviews of self complaints…
no “look, woe is me” placards worn around one’s neck…
there was nothing about self because there was no time to
think about self–there were too many others to worry over.

More or less, it was a stoic approach to a foreboding and
unrelenting storm.

And by the way, you and I, and all the generations behind us,
are the better for their generation.

But the thing that truly saddens me is that the following generations
don’t get it…they have no idea as to the sacrifice or lessons that
are to be gleaned.

I can only imagine the grief this woman feels in her heart.
Her family are all a rather fractured lot and now she has lost her
only remaining stalwart companion–
a man who had been by her side for 73 years.
That companion, that husband, that “stay” is now gone–leaving
a woman lost in her solitude.

Her grief, as witnessed in that picture of a lone figure bidding
her husband good-bye, is palpable…but I also know that Elizabeth
has a strong faith.

She and Billy Graham had a chance encounter decades ago.
A documented encounter that appears to have had a lasting effect
on Elizabeth’s faith.
So whereas Elizabeth is certainly feeling most alone today,
she actually knows that she really is not alone…not ever really.

She knows who her Savior is.

So whereas I am not worried that Elizabeth will succumb
to her grief–because she is a woman of duty and service who knows where
her true Hope lies—rather—I worry for us…
I worry for both you and I.

We are rapidly losing the leadership who understood what it meant to serve.
To put others ahead of self…putting others before their own self-centered
wants or needs.

No talk of self or selfish agendas…
No dalliance in to false ideologies.

Simply the defenders of both freedom and faith.

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus,
who will judge the living and the dead,
and in view of his appearing and his kingdom,
I give you this charge:
Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct,
rebuke and encourage—-
with great patience and careful instruction.
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine.
Instead, to suit their own desires,
they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say
what their itching ears want to hear.
They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.
But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship,
do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.
2 Timothy 4:1-5

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

The pleasure of your company is requested

“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.”
― Baltasar Gracián

(Compliments of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the UK Dailymail / Windsor Castle State dinner preparation)

The table has been lovingly set
The finest linen and china are on hand.
Your invitation was printed eons ago.
It’s an open invitation of sorts.
There’s no RSVP so no worries as to your response.
Nor is there any particular dress code, no black tie or formal wear required.
Come as you are. . .
It’s one of those sorts of events that will go on with or without you,
Yet the hope is that you will indeed attend.

It isn’t a fancy sort of fete.
Not a jovial or raucous party, but rather a somber sort of affair.
It’s a yearly gathering, a remembrance, of a time long ago.
The yearly marking of hardships and struggles of a different era.
A special dinner to recall what was with a slight nod to what may be. . .

Yet on one such annual occasion,
One of the yearly gatherings, something was unnervingly different.
There was a deeper heaviness than usual.
There was a sense that things would never really be the same.
Year in and year out the words, the ceremony, the food, had always been the same. . .
But not so on this one particular evening.

Everyone had gathered as requested.
All were present and accounted for.
The food and beverages were to be the same,
The ceremony the same,
The words, the prayers all the same. . .and yet, this time, it was different,
It was all very different.

Sorrow had already taken his seat at the table,
along with Betrayal who was dressed to the nines.
Whereas Sorrow was often mentioned as a past participant, this year,
he had actually arrived earlier than expected.
Betrayal seemed almost excited to be included this year.
Sitting off to the side, Denial and Questioning were in deep conversation.
Thankfulness took his rightful seat.

Humility arrived fashionably late, as he had been detained washing up.
Kindness, Graciousness and Empathy sat together, offering a gentle smile to all who entered.
Anxiousness paced around the table, as Doubt visited with each guest.
Greed rubbed his hands while Treachery made excuses for an early departure.
Love’s warmth filled the room
Sadness began to sing.

Each guest was offered new bread and wine,
as a parting gift before departing—
It was a taste of the labors and fruits that had been gathered by both Glory and Hope. . .

Only the Wise,
The Needy,
The Poor,
The Castaway,
The Forgotten,
The Humble,
The Mournful,
The Peacemakers,
The Hungry,
The Meek,
The Penitent,
The Sinful,
The Lonely,
The Obedient,
The Hopeful,
reached in to take the Gift. . .
as the others hurriedly raced off to the shadows. . .

On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Where do you want us to make preparations for you to eat the Passover?”

He replied, “Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The Teacher says: My appointed time is near. I am going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.’” So the disciples did as Jesus had directed them and prepared the Passover.

When evening came, Jesus was reclining at the table with the Twelve. And while they were eating, he said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.”

They were very sad and began to say to him one after the other, “Surely you don’t mean me, Lord?”

Jesus replied, “The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me. The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.”

Then Judas, the one who would betray him, said, “Surely you don’t mean me, Rabbi?”

Jesus answered, “You have said so.”

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”

Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.
Matthew 26:17-30