Tag: National Cathedral

The National Cathedral, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Banning of the Confederate Battle Flag…”Lest Ye Be Judged.”

On By kingsjesterIn Christianity, PoliticsLeave a comment

untitled (75)And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28) – the favorite scripture of General Stonewall Jackson, Confederate Army

Yesterday was the 1-year anniversary of the horrible massacre in the AME Church in South Carolina, which gave Modern American Liberals the opportunity to do something that they had been attempting to do for years: ban the Stars and Bars, one of the flags used by the South in the Civil War, which has been labeled a symbol of hatred and racism by those who wish to rewrite and censor American History for their own purposes.

A little over a week ago, The Washington Post reported the following story, which I wrote an article about

Washington National Cathedral, one of the country’s most visible houses of worship, announced Wednesday that it would remove Confederate battle flags that are part of two large stained-glass windows honoring Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Cathedral leaders said they would leave up the rest of the windows — for now — and use them as a centerpiece for a national conversation about racism in the white church.

The announcement comes a year after the cathedral’s then-dean, the Rev. Gary Hall, said the 8-by-4-foot windows have no place in the soaring church as the country faces intense racial tensions and violence, even though they were intended as a healing gesture when they were installed.

The windows were installed in 1953 to “foster reconciliation between parts of the nation that had been divided by the Civil War,” Hall said last year. “While the impetus behind the windows’ installation was a good and noble one at the time, the Cathedral has changed, and so has the America it seeks to represent. There is no place for the Confederate battle flag in the iconography of the nation’s most visible faith community. We cannot in good conscience justify the presence of the Confederate flag in this house of prayer for all people, nor can we honor the systematic oppression of African-Americans for which these two men fought.”

There were differences of opinion in the past year among the cathedral’s leadership about how to move forward.

A task force created to look into the windows discussed various topics, including whether removing something controversial from a historical piece of art was productive. Members also discussed whether it made sense to remove the flag pieces from larger windows that honor the generals. On Friday the cathedral’s governing body, called the Chapter, decided to remove the flag sections.

The cathedral’s leadership is figuring out the timeline and cost for the removal of the flags, the cathedral said in a statement Wednesday. That will be paid for by private donors.

The broader decision was to use the rest of the windows — the flags are only a small part — as the centerpiece for a series of public forums and events on the issues of racism, slavery and racial reconciliation, the cathedral said in a statement.

“Instead of simply taking the windows down and going on with business as usual, the Cathedral recognizes that, for now, they provide an opportunity for us to begin to write a new narrative on race and racial justice at the Cathedral and perhaps for our nation,” said the Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas,  the Cathedral’s canon theologian and a member of the task force.

The program will begin on July 17 with a panel discussion called “What the White Church Must Do,” moderated by Douglas; the Rev. Dr. Delman Coates, senior pastor of Mount Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton, Md.; Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde; and other religious leaders.

The task force calls for the Chapter to revisit the question of “how the windows live in the Cathedral no later than two years from the date of this report.”

In the article I wrote on that story, I provided proof that General Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Confederate Army and General Stonewall Jackson, their most brilliant tactician, were both Christians, as were tens of thousands of those men who fought and died on the side of the Confederacy in the “War between the States”.

That being said, the following story troubles me greatly.

This past Tuesday Reuters News reported that

The U.S. Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution on Tuesday repudiating the Confederate battle flag as an emblem of slavery, marking the latest bid for racial reconciliation by America’s largest Protestant denomination.

The resolution, passed at the predominantly white convention’s annual meeting in St. Louis, calls for Southern Baptist churches to discontinue displaying the Confederate flag as a “sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ.”

The action came four years after the denomination elected its first black president, Fred Luter, a pastor and civic leader from New Orleans.

In 1995, a Southern Baptist committee issued a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for condoning slavery and racism during the early years of the denomination’s 171-year history.

The convention, currently made up of more than 46,000 churches nationwide, was established in 1845 after Southern Baptists split from the First Baptist Church in America in the pre-Civil War era over the issue of slavery.

The denomination now counts a growing number of minorities among its more than 15.8 million members and has sought in recent years to better reflect the diversity of its congregants and America as a whole.

“This denomination was founded by people who wrongly defended the sin of human slavery,” said Russell Moore, head of the convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “Today the nation’s largest Protestant denomination voted to repudiate the Confederate battle flag, and it’s time and well past time.”

The flag carried by the South’s pro-slavery Confederate forces during the 1861-65 U.S. Civil War re-emerged as a flashpoint in America’s troubled race relations after the massacre of nine blacks by a white gunman at an historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. The assailant was seen afterward in photographs posing with the flag.

The episode stirred a movement to eliminate the Stars and Bars flag – seen by many whites as a sign of Southern heritage, not hate – from South Carolina’s statehouse and many other public displays in the South during the months that followed.

Actually, last Tuesday’s action was a culmination of a call by Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, from one year ago, after the Charleston Massacre.

These attempts at censuring history, in the name of Political Correctness, “racism”, and “hurt feelings” are one of the biggest exercises in self-serving hypocrisy that this ol’ Son of the South has seen in my ever-lengthening lifetime.

I guess that it beats dealing with the reality that man is a fallen creature and the fact that the Civil War was not solely caused by the issue of slavery.

Or, perhaps it assuages guilt over the movement by some churches to leave “less affluent” neighborhoods for those “more affluent”.

(Oops, did I actually say that? Forgive me, Lord. And, be with all of the starving pygmies in New Guinea. Amen.)

On the wall beside my computer desk, hangs my family crest, which I shipped to my Daddy (Southern Colloquialism for male parental unit) in the summer of 1978, from the York Insignia Shoppe in England.This same family crest also hangs in the home of Jefferson Davis, distinguished Graduate of West Point Academy, and the President of the Confederate States of America.

I am a proud Southerner, who through bloodline, is related to General Robert E. Lee.

As a Christian American, I attend church on Sunday mornings (when not working) with my brothers and sisters in Christ, both black and white.

As I related before, American Progressives, both Democrat and Republican, have taken advantage of the horrible church massacre in Charleston, SC, to accomplish something that they have been trying to do for years: minimize the South’s political clout and erase our uniqueness as a region, through the taking away of a symbol of our heritage, and, any traces of the historical aspects of the Confederate Side of the Civil War, as exemplified by the mission began by Former Memphis Mayor AC Wharton and his minions on the City Council to dig up Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife, and move their bodies and a statue of the general, which all currently “reside” in a downtown park in the Medical Center. (Of course, the real reason is the fact that the University of Tennessee Center for the Health Sciences wants to buy the park, which sits in the middle of the Medical Center, for the purposes of expansion…but, no one talks about that.)

But, I digress…

Recently, there has been a movement within the Southern Baptist Church to also drop the word “Southern” from the denomination’s name, because it is supposedly “stifling the growth of the denomination”.

Shouldn’t we as Christians be more concerned about winning souls to Christ than we are about the prosperity of our individual churches and the denomination and about Political Correctness, a modern construct, which is hardly scriptural?

Which is more important? Being “in lockstep” with popular culture? Or, growing in our walk with Him as Christian Men and Women?

Finally, what makes us any better than those tens of thousands of Christian Men in the Confederate Army, sitting there, singing hymns and listening to their preachers tell them about salvation through Jesus Christ?

God’s Word reminds us

9What then? Are we any better? Not at all. For we have already made the charge that Jews and Greeks alike are all under sin. 10As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; – Romans 3: 9-10

Reconciliation between the races will not be achieved through the revision of history and the banning of flags.

That’s Political Correctness.

It will only happen if Christian Americans of all races follow the example of Christ and meet people where they are, and share the Good News about God’s Amazing Grace and the reality of the promise of Personal Salvation through Him.

Unfortunately, that requires a sacrifice which few seem willing to make.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

Gay Wednesday, or, How to Change the Fabric of American Society in One Fell Swoop

On By kingsjesterIn Christianity, Politics3 Comments

gay marriageIn my post yesterday, I warned that what the Supreme Court was about to do, could possibly change the fabric of our society.

God in Heaven, I hate it when I’m right.

The robed ones yesterday destroyed the uniqueness of the marriage bed between man and wife, and the sovereignty of a state’s voters, all in one fell swoop.

First, the Court ruled that the part of the Defense of Marriage Act denying equal benefits to homosexual “married” couples was “unconstitutional” in their eyes, so they struck down that codicil.

Now, homosexual couples who have been “married” in states which allow that doppelganger of a “sacrament”, are entitled to all the governmental benefits that normal married couples enjoy.

In the second ruling of the day, the highest court in the land ruled that the ruling by a Gay Appeals Judge, which negated the results of a popular vote on the  California Referendum on Proposition 8, would stand, basically pulling a Pontius Pilate, killing the sovereignty of Californians to decide their own fate, in regards as to whether or not to allow Homosexual Marriage in their state.

You see, the good citizens of California stood up on their hind legs and voted against allowing homosexuals to imitate the oldest sacred ceremony known to mankind.

And, Lord knows , we can’t allow Americans to decide for themselves, can we? If you think I’m joking, remember Chief Justice “Benedict Arnold” Roberts’ ruling on Obamacare?

Of course, the Prevaricator-in-Chief thought that yesterday was the most wonderful thing  he had heard, since his next door neighborhood Frank Marshall Davis used to regale him with tales of his pedophiliac conquests.

In fact, he called a homosexual couple to congratulate them on live TV.

Funny…just 18 months ago, ol’ Scooter was saying,

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them.

So, was Obama lying then, or is he lying now?

Yes.

Now, there are those who will argue that these are just small steps and what happened yesterday is no big hairy deal. There are also those who believe that yesterday was the greatest day in the history of the world.

Side note: It wasn’t. That day will be when we hear a trumpet sound above us…and, it won’t be Doc Severenson. But, I digress…

Normalization of this deviant behavior has already happened to our Brightest and Best, with the overturning of DADT.

Just the other day, the four-star idiots in the Pentagon declared that our country is now safer with openly gay members in our military.

Safer from what? Inter-service pregnancies?

Now that homosexual activists know that they can overturn the will of the people of a state, if the Liberal State Government does not support their citizens in a legal defense of sovereignty, all bets are off.

Like Gov. Moonbean (Jerry Brown) of California, all it takes is one Liberal weasel of a State Governor to overturn an anti-Homosexual Marriage Vote in any state in the Union, if the state’s gay activists are willing to take their action all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary.

Here is another thing that makes me wanna hurl, cry, and bang my head against the wall, all at the same time:

The National Cathedral in Washington, DC rang its steeple bells in celebration when the rulings were announced.

What part of God’s Word do they believe supports Homosexual Marriage? What book of the Bible is that found? 1st Babylonians?

Genesis 2:21-25 states:

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

We’ve come a long way, baby…and, it appears that our country is beginning a descent down the ol’ porcelain receptacle, a societal voyage not unlike the one Ancient Rome experienced.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 1, Verses 24-27, he writes, concerning the Roman Empire’s depravity,

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

That is where we stand, Americans.

Grab those who matter to you and hold them tight. I am afraid that there are dark times ahead…and we are well on the way to finding out why America is not mentioned in the Book of  Revelation.

Until He comes,

KJ

The War Against Christianity: Battleground: The National Cathedral

On By kingsjesterIn Christianity, Politics6 Comments

gay marriageAs all Americans are aware, one of the hot button issues for the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration, has been the “issue” of Gay Rights. At the forefront of their push is the normalization of gay marriage.

And now, their push has led  to the involvement of our nation’s National Cathedral.

Here is the history of the sixth largest cathedral in the world, courtesy of the National Parks Service:

On January 4, 1792, descriptions from President Washington’s disclosed plan for the “City of Washington, in the district of Columbia” were published in The Gazette of the United States, Philadelphia. Lot “D” was set aside and designated for “A church intended for national purposes, …, assigned to the special use of no particular sect or denomination, but equally open to all.” The National Portrait Gallery now occupies that site. A century later in 1891, a meeting was held to revive plans to build the church intended for national purposes. It was to be a Christian cathedral.

In 1893 the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation of the District of Columbia was granted a charter from Congress to establish the cathedral and the site on Mount Saint Albans was chosen. Bishop Satterlee chose Frederick Bodley, England’s leading Anglican church architect, as the head architect. Henry Vaughan was selected to be the supervising architect. The building of the cathedral finally started in 1907 with a ceremonial address by President Theodore Roosevelt. When construction of the cathedral resumed after a brief hiatus for World War I, both Bodley and Vaughan had passed away; American architect Philip Hubert Frohman took over the design of the cathedral and is known as the principal architect. The Cathedral has been the location of many significant events, including the funeral services of Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower. Its pulpit was the last one from which Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke prior to his assassination. The Cathedral is the burial place of many notable people, including Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, Admiral George Dewey, Bishop Satterlee and the architects Henry Vaughan and Philip Frohman.

ABC News reported that

The wedding bells will chime in the 106-year-old Washington National Cathedral as Rev. Gary Hall affirmed that, effective immediately, same-sex weddings may be celebrated at the Cathedral of the Episcopal Church located in the northwest quadrant of Washington D.C.

The National Cathedral has welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors and held both celebrations and funerals for U.S. presidents past.

In August 2012, the church approved the ceremonial use of a rite adapted from an existing blessing ceremony to acknowledge same-sex marriage. The Episcopal Church will be among the first to recognize marriage for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender couples.

“For more than 30 years, the Episcopal Church has prayed and studied to discern the evidence of God’s blessing in the lives of same-sex couples,” Rev. Gary Hall of the National Cathedral said. “We enthusiastically affirm each person as a beloved child of God—and doing so means including the full participation of gays and lesbians in the life of this spiritual home for the nation.”

The District of Columbia and Maryland (as well as eight other states) have adopted the legality of civil marriage for same-sex couples. The Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, whose Episcopal Diocese of Washington includes D.C. as well as four counties in Maryland, decided this December to follow suit expanding the sacrament of marriage to same-sex couples in her diocese as well.

But the decision to institute the same-sex rite at the Washington National Cathedral was ultimately made by Hall who serves as the Cathedral’s dean.

“In my 35 years of ordained ministry, some of the most personally inspiring work I have witnessed has been among gay and lesbian communities where I have served.”

Hall continued, “I consider it a great honor to lead this Cathedral as it takes another historic step toward greater equality—and I am pleased that this step follows the results made clear in this past November’s election, when three states voted to allow same-sex marriage.”

The same-sex weddings that will be conducted at the Cathedral will fulfill the same role as Christian marriages. Eligibility to marry in the National Cathedral follows the protocol of the Christian faith.

At least one of the members in the couple must have been baptized and the couple must be active, contributing members of the congregation unless otherwise specified by the dean.

Another one of our nation’s symbolic structures, the Chapel at West Point Academy,  is already hosting gay marriages.

Additionally, on December 7th, 2012, USA Today reported

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up the explosive issue of same-sex marriage, thrusting itself into a policy debate that has divided federal and state governments and courts, as well as voters in nearly 40 states.

The high court’s long-awaited decisions to hear challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage move the issue to the top of the national agenda following a year in which advocates scored major legal and political victories.

The court likely will hear the cases in March and rule by late June on a series of questions, potentially including one of the most basic: Can states ban gay marriage, or does the Constitution protect that right for all couples? It also will decide whether gay and lesbian married couples can be denied federal benefits received by opposite-sex spouses.

As all this is happening, the majority of “national” polls tell us that around 53% of Americans approve of Adam and Steve getting hitched.

However, you know what puzzles me? 

If that’s true, shouldn’t the majority of Americans have voted for it in previous state elections?

Instead, 41 states do not recognize gay marriages. Gays can only legally reside as husband and…err…husband, or wife and…ummm…wife in only 9 states.

Even California, a bastion of Liberal ideology, voted it down, only to have a Liberal judge overturn the voters’ decision.

First West Point, now the National Cathedral. I see a pattern of Political Propaganda and Government-backed and forced, secular Liberal ideology growing here.

Reminds me of Obamacare…and, we all know how that turned out.

Until He Comes,

KJ