This is Life: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

John Chane: ECUSA's First Openly Jewish-Muslim Bishop

Here's an excerpt from Chane's Christmas sermon, illustrating what can only be called the most blatant example of willful patronizing of the adherents of the world's three great monotheistic faiths:

And what was God thinking... when the Angel Gabriel was sent by God to reveal the Law to Moses?

And what was God thinking... when the Angel Gabriel was sent by God to reveal the sacred Quran to the prophet Muhammad?

And what was God thinking... when the Angel Gabriel was sent by God to reveal the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God?

Were these just random acts of association and coincidence or was the Angel Gabriel who appears as the named messenger of God in the Jewish Old Testament, the Christian New Testament Gospels, and the Quran of Islam, really the same miraculous messenger of God who proclaimed to a then emerging religious, global community and to us this morning that we are ALL children of the living God? And as such we are called to acknowledge that as Christians, Jews and Muslims we share a common God and the same divine messenger. . . .

So, let me ask: Would the Orthodox Jewish community in Skokie, Illinois really think that the God they worshipped was the same as the one worshipped in the mosques of Saudi Arabia? Or at All Saints Orthodox Church in Chicago? What would one of those unemployed Muslim Palestinians, who prays daily to Allah, has no desire for war with Israel, and just wants to put food on the table for his family, think of Chane's equating of his God with the God of those Israeli's who keep blowing up his people in attempts to "get the terrorist leadership"?

Chane and his ilk are so full of themselves and their Gnostic heresies that they think just by endless bloviation they can assert their smarmy bovine scatology and make it so by flapping their gums.

Clearly Chane has not read the Qu'ran seriously, nor the Torah, and definitely not the Christian Scriptures. For if he had, he'd realize that he is patronizingly dismissing the claims of exclusivity that each of these religions make about themselves and the God they claim to worship. Now if Chane wants to simply ignore those contradictions and smilingly pat the heads of their respective adherents, nodding knowingly in an all-wise gesture--"But of course, what you really mean to say is . . ."--then so be it. But he's a fool's fool.

And his claim of tolerance and love is showed to be the lie that it is by his failure to tolerate the exclusive claims of these Jews, Muslims and Christians and treat them seriously. If this is ecumenism--the liberal affluent West dictating to the poverty-stricken, war-torn rest of the world what it really believes--then World Council of Churches and its North American bastard offspring deserve to oversee the emptying churches they do.

But then, men such as Chane, and churches which buy into his sort of religion, show themselves for what they are by their actions. James has something to say about them.