Just over a year ago, I left the Episcopal Church for a new parish of the Anglican Church in North America.
It was a very difficult decision for me because I loved my parish church. However, the national church was headed in a direction I could not follow.
Today I came across yet another reason why mine was the right choice: anti-Israel sentiment, here expertly skewered by Christopher Johnson:
[quoting Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori] “Could Mary and Joseph even get into Bethlehem today? Their donkey would undoubtedly be stopped, examined for explosives, and probably turned away because of its subversive cargo. Today Mary would likely give birth in another cave beyond the city and outside the wall, once again forbidden home and the shelter of family. Yet that very wall is an enduring reminder of human fear and the frantic quest for safety, not unlike Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter.”
For pure, unadulterated stupidity coupled with mind-blowing offensiveness, I can’t remember ever reading anything better. Certainly, Frank Griswold needed entire sermons to be as idiotic and insulting as that one, single paragraph.
Kate? If Mary and Joseph, who were both Jews last time I checked, approached Bethlehem today, who would be the ones stopping them? Who would examine their donkey for explosives? Who would end up turning them away and forbidding them “home and the shelter of family?”
You guessed it.
I hate having to keep going over this but Mary and Joseph weren’t “forbidden home and the shelter of family” because they didn’t live in Bethlehem, you dolt. They were only there because a big, centralized government, the kind you seem so enthusiastic about, ordered them to go so that they could be enrolled for tax purposes.
Ironic, isn’t it?
You say “the wall is an enduring reminder of human fear and the frantic quest for safety” like that’s a bad thing, Presiding Bishop. What is wrong with wanting to keep your family or your friends from harm? Don’t you do that yourself? Except that the people wanting to protect themselves are…you got it.
Once again, that wall was a last resort. An understandable last resort given the 60 plus years of your neighbors periodically trying to wipe you off the map or kill as many of your citizens as they possibly can as gruesomely as they possibly can.
Dead Jews don’t matter to you at all, do they, Kate?
