What’s that Smell?!

In the “Only In America” section of a recent issue of “The Week” news magazine, there is this:

A Massachusetts church is encouraging worshippers to bring
their dogs with them. The Rev. Rachel Bickford of the Pilgrim Congregational Church says the “woof ‘n’ worship” services will include the prayer, “Dear Lord, please make me the person my dog thinks I am.” Bickford said it won’t matter if the service ends with poop in the pews. “Dogs bring such hope in a world where we’re surrounded by such hopelessness,” she said.

I do not disagree with the diagnosis of hopelessness…but Fido as our hope? Dummy me, I thought Christ is our hope! (see Romans 5:1-2; 8:24; etc.) A congregation needs to bring in the dogs to have hope? What is being preached or taught in that congregation? Or, Who is not being preached and taught for the hopeless and tempest tossed? Something stinks here and it isn’t from Fido. Then I read recently that Bishop Gene Robinson of Vermont (you know: the Episcopalian who divorced his wife and left his family to live with his male lover and still is a pastor and a bishop) was ‘married’ to his male lover this past June. The Bishop said afterwards, “I always wanted to be a June bride.” I just don’t think that smells right. And so we too in our denomination are keeping up with the trends: the third, count it third, sexuality study is due to be released next year, in the current cloning of those studies (there were two before this series of three, if memory serves) for one purpose only: so we can encourage our sons to be “June brides”. (This news and insight courtesy of Fr. Neuhaus in a his recent column in 'First Things')

Something stinks here and it isn't from Fido!

All of this “stinks to high heaven” and so does, “…what we have done and left undone”. In faith, Christ Jesus through grace does what no can of ‘Febreze’ can ever do: cleanse us our souls from the stink of wickedness…and it is terrible to return to the stink, on purpose, in any form and not take a stand according to His Word alone. In the quote below, Paul states we are the “aroma of Christ”. Yes, it will stink to some and we will be in conflict. We are called to take our stand firmly in His love and hope alone. And so to others, Christ Jesus is the sweet incense of salvation:

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word; but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.

2 Corinthians 2: 16—17