It's "No Person's Liturgy Is Safe" Time Again

I'm going to start by saying that I have little interest in opining on the various calendar additions, subtactions, divisions and multiplications. It was one thing back in the day when there was a proposal to include a bunch of non-Christians, but thankfully that urge seems to have passed, and the rest is extreme inside baseball in a church where for the past few years my options for attending an Ascension Day eucharist have been severely limited. If you care to consider them, Scott Gunn goes though the lot, but I have other things to deal with.

And one of those things, I'm afraid, is the ongoing drive towards bowdlerization in the name of inclusion. Let me start with the depressing observation that it doesn't work anyway. And even if it did, the current reductionism of people to identities is (a) not loving, and (b) not coherent and likely to change considerably over the decades.

Let me start with gender/sex/sexuality. Here I am met with the stark contradiction that it is supposed to not matter, and that it is all-important. No amount of earnest 'splaining is getting me past that, and I say that as part of a household in which our adherence to Traditional Gender Roles is laughably poor. But we still can't get free of the urge to edit the Father out of the trinity, and this urge is wedded to some of the worst gender stereotyping around. All of this was evident poorly thought-through neutered versions of the Rite II liturgies, which by the way we have a resolution to apply this to Prayer C this time. It still stinks of "Moms are loving and nurturing and dads are cruel disciplinarians" thinking, but it's going to pass and it will give me one more thing I will have to check when I go church-visiting, because I do care about the theology being put in my mouth.

And now it has been decided that we have to fret about ableist language. Now we are getting into matters where I have skin in the game: over the last year I have had to deal with a knee injury which pevents me from walking normally, and I have had terrible nearsightedness since I was in kindergarten. If the devil showed up today with promises to fix both, I would at least have to read the terms and conditions. I'm sorry, but this sound as though it comes from people who have never read the gospels, as there are just too, too many episodes of Jesus healing for anyone to accept being blind, being crippled, having to live with birth defects and with injuries as identities. And to be blunt, the resolution reads as having been written by someone who never had to really suffer these handicaps. I do not authorize them to take offense on my behalf, and that is what they are daring to do.

The bigger issue, howeve, comes with the move to tamper with the Good Friday passion text. I will be blunt: we have no business making up our own version of the gospel passage which is not what the Greek actually says. In my parish, I am literally the person who reads this in our parish, year after year, and I say the whole exercise baldly ignores how our liturgical practices determinedly cast us as the Jews. Year after year we sing,

Who was the guilty? Who was it denied thee? Alas my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.

And must I point out that the really "problematic" passage isn't in this gospel? It's in Matthew: "His blood be on us and on our children!" And yet one can readily explain the irony of the passage, in that Jesus' blood is upon them and us and every person who has lived or will ever live. Have we so little faith in our preaching? It's the same issue that shows up with EoW's bad institution narrative: we can't say the wods of scripture, so we rewite it to make it more palatable to us. For of course, this would/will not move the world one iota away from antisemitism. No does any Jew I know actually care, as long as we personally do not burn their homes and drive them away.

So once again, the effect is to exclude those who aren't signed on to this version of an ineffectual gesture at a problem over which we don't have much influence. Only this is far worse than passing resolutions about politics, because this hits people in the place where they do care about their church. Look, we don't cae about actual inclusion; all we care about is mouthing the right words about inclusion so our secular peers don't take offense. I can go down the road to Our Savior Hillandale (Maryland) and step into a parish which is actually inclusive, being a motley agglomeration of African and othe immigrants who do a very formal, serious, by-the-book liturgy. My only problem with inclusion there is that they want me to stay for their lavish, delicious potluck lunch, which I tend not to have time for.

Meanwhile, we have a resolution which makes the whole revision process even more vague. Yes, I agree: we do need to do a revision. But not this way. The very avoidance of revision suggests quite stongly that most people don't want it, and I personally don't want it not so much because I think the present book is ideal, but because, as I've said for decades now, the main force fo change is obtaining the approval of a secular subcultue which actually doesn't care.