From the Pastor’s Desk:
Our government, along with the Supreme Court, seems to want to rewrite 3000 years of the Jewish/Christian understanding of marriage, and morality. What is morality? I was taught, granted 39 years ago, that morality is the rightness or wrongness of one’s actions. Within our Jewish/Christian background our morality is guided by the 10 Commandments, the Bible, and 2000 years of Christian teachings. Much of the Western World seems to want to rewrite the guiding principles of morality today.
Many human actions, which may be freely chosen, will always be unacceptable. These actions are referred to as “intrinsic evils” and are immoral regardless of circumstance. “I did not want to hurt their feelings, so I told a little white lie.” First of all, lies are not colored, according to the 8th Commandment it is either the truth or not. A person in a sad marriage without any physical contact, having physical relations with someone not their spouse is committing adultery. The list and the examples can go on endlessly. If we would but follow God’s 10 Commandments, the world would be a much better place.
Morality itself is, by its very nature, a code of black and white. Fixed moral values must always guide our decisions. If we begin to play the game of “gray” areas, the whole fabric of society begins to unravel. Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, but the 7th Commandment says, “do not steal”, it doesn’t say except from the rich. In the eyes of much of the world’s population Americans are all rich, therefore, it would be ok to come to our country and take whatever they wanted.
In rewriting what is marriage, our court system, and our governmental leaders are setting Christianity, as well as Judaism, and Islamism to the sideline and are stating they know better than the major world religions. When governments seek to trump what the major religions of the world believe, teach, and have held from their foundation, then those governments are seeking to take the role of religion itself. Study history, the human race never seems to learn from the past, thus we repeat the same mistakes.
It took Judaism and Christianity many centuries to come to the understanding that marriage needs to be between one man and one woman. We cannot allow modern society to form our conscience. Neither can we allow politicians or even courts of law to form our conscience. All of these change as the winds of time blow. For years our society has been driven by the news media, and Hollywood. It has become a society that centers around the “me, myself, and I” attitude. We have become a society that has spent our children’s future so we do not have to go without. We do not need everything shown on television, we do not need to continue to have the biggest, fastest, and newest of everything.
Pope Francis has been criticized with his stance of CIVIL UNION for gay couples, notice, that is not marriage. That is simply legal union giving them rights under the law. Civil union has nothing to do with the Sacrament of Matrimony. Stated by Canon Law, marriage takes place between a man and woman with the possibility of producing children. In France a couple must have a civil union before they can have a sacramental church marriage (separation of church and state). I have been asked if the Pope’s statement causes me concern, “No because for 4,000 years of human history marriage has been between men and women, a civil union is a legality for two people as I understand it.”