"Who can stand to hear it?"

I take my text :-) from John 6:60 (Amplified Bible)

I haven't been back to Starlight Cathedral in about three weeks. The last service I attended really did a number on me. I said (see below) that it aroused "memories of far too many years of legalistic church life." That was something of an understatement.

Mother Hughes said of the Church, "This is the hospital." Healing and curing are not the only things that happen in hospitals; there is also pain, trauma, fatigue, and the prospect of mortality.

Medicine does not always work easily, painlessly, or "naturally." Medicine includes surgery, bone setting, and chemotherapy. Nobody looks forward to any of this. Nobody looks forward to pain.

Medicine also includes misdiagnosis. There are many diseases, once thought to be common and treated aggressively, which are now known not to exist. There are whole classes of treatment which are now known to be ineffective.

Maybe there is such a "disease" as "sin." That doesn't mean it can't be misdiagnosed. That doesn't mean that treatment for it can't be mis-prescribed.

I know most people need some kind of "fixing." But I also know -- from experience -- that to the pure, all things are pure.

Now, I realize that the scripture I just cited is about not overthrowing "the work of God" for the sake of physical pleasures. But I'm not sure it's that easy to overthrow the work of God, or disconnect from -- you know, a phrase like "the love of God" just isn't strong enough! But that's another Sermon I'll Never Preach :-)

What I mean to say, at least this time, is that there are other ways of overthrowing the work of God in the name of preserving it. ("We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Or, to put it biblically, "Let no one defraud you by acting as an umpire and declaring you unworthy and disqualifying you for the prize, insisting on self-abasement.")

To put it bluntly, my life has convinced me that many of the things that even the Bible calls "unclean" may be beneficial. I realize that when the apostle Paul said that "to the pure, all things are pure," he was talking about the Holiness Code of the Old Testament. He did not have in mind gay rights, medical marijuana, or religious pluralism, any more than America's Founding Fathers had those things in mind when they wrote the Constitution. But I believe history has proven that those things are latent in the Constitution and in the Bible.

I don't know how to develop this any further, not today.

It's all about the law of Love, people.