St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians is a tough read for a lot of people. So much so that a lot of people who regard themselves as Christians skip it, and quite a few more will excuse themselves from its provisions. Maybe almost all Christians do. Not all to the same extent of course, but to varying degrees, a lot sure do.
It's also a letter that's somewhat truncated in the translation from the original Greek in part because at least one of the terms used for an item of conduct is translatable, but it's unique to Paul. Translations tend to condense the list of sexual sins he lists and group them into smaller categories, which is also probably because, at least in the case of English, that's how things tend to work. Greek might have several words that are very specific, where we have one which isn't.
Which takes me to Luke.
The Gospel reading for last Sunday was as follows, from Luke.
Great crowds were traveling with Jesus,
and he turned and addressed them,
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters,
and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.
Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me
cannot be my disciple.
Which of you wishing to construct a tower
does not first sit down and calculate the cost
to see if there is enough for its completion?
Otherwise, after laying the foundation
and finding himself unable to finish the work
the onlookers should laugh at him and say,
‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’
Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down
and decide whether with ten thousand troops
he can successfully oppose another king
advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?
But if not, while he is still far away,
he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms.
In the same way,
anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions
cannot be my disciple.”
Luke, Chapter 14.
Well, that's a little distressing, too. It certainly doesn't fit into the American "health and wealth" Gospel. Luke talks of following Christ right up to, and over, the point of death.
And note this, Luke states that at this point Christ was already indicating his own fate that was coming up: "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple."
A lot of people are pretty comfortable with other people carrying crosses, but not so much their own. Indeed, we tend to excuse our crosses away. Which takes us back to Paul, who was definitely in the no excuses category.
Which takes us to the German "Synodal Way".
A lot of Apostolic Christians, Catholic in particular of course, have been watching in absolute horror as the German Catholic Church went on its Synodal Way which seemed, particularly in regard to long held Apostolic Christian beliefs, set to toss out 2,000 years of defined teaching as, basically, too hard, or maybe just too hard for modern people. Essentially it seemed as if the German Bishops were going to opine that maybe some things that have always been regarded as crosses ought not to, making it a lot easier to be a Christian, which is interestingly something that Christ certainly didn't promise to be easy.
I quit worrying about what the German Bishops were doing a while back, although I'm not sure why. The Church in Germany is in bad shape but very wealthy, which is a really bad combination. Its wealth gives it the chance to be destructive and well as beneficial, and the fact that it's in bad shape means that it can either engage in retrospection and seek to address it, or it can try to take the same path a lot of Protestant churches have and just define away things that are pretty clearly set.
Because Pope Francis is regarding as a "progressive" or "liberal" in some quarters, although I think he's misunderstood in that regard, many have been wringing their hands that he was secretly hoping for the Synodal Way to overturn Christian morality, and then he'd follow and adopt their path. There's no reason whatsoever to believe he'd do that, but that's been a common assumption.
What may have been missed is that really savvy observers of the German Church have noticed that it tends to march right up to the brink of something, and then something will officially prevent it from taking the position it was going to, giving it an excuse that, well, it can't do anything about it. I didn't know that, but I wasn't worrying about what they were doing any longer. I think the reason why was that at some point, as a Catholic, it seemed to me that they wouldn't leap, no matter how much they might wish to.
And they didn't.
It required 75% of the Bishops to vote in favor of a text that wished to alter certain items of sexual morality in the Church. 61% voted for it. Not enough. It won't be adopted.
There are piles of yelling going on about this now, but the vote was taken and over. Things will continue to occur, but now the German Church needs to return to the fold, and it will do so. It has a lot of work to do.
Part of what should be done, I'd note, is that it ought to ask the German government to end the Church tax which funds it. It's not fair in the first place. No religion, anywhere, should be funded by the government. The supplying of money in that fashion always creates an unrealistic concept within any institution. American institutions of higher learning provide a good example. Cut off from German federal funds, they'll have to find their own way to be funded, and that will have to be directly tied to the spiritual needs of their flocks. The same is true, I'd note, for the German Lutheran Church.
That won't be easy, but it's already been shows that the path they were taking wasn't working, and but for 39% of the German Bishops, they were set to go even further down that path. It seems, at the end of the day, people really know that they need to carry their cross and don't want to be told they don't need to do it.
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