Highgate Mission: This is going to be demolished.
Yesterday I ended up reading about the neomartyrs and righteous gentiles from the last century, They include three daughters of Queen Victoria: Elizabeth Fyodorovna, Alexandra Fyodoronova (both accounted as saints and Martyrs among the Orthodox) and Alice_of_Battenberg – who is accounted as Righteous among the Nations in Israel — an event witnessed by her surviving sons, who had fought on different sides in the second world war — and one of whom, Prince Philip is the consort of our current monarch.
They bred them tough and righteous in those days. How we have fallen. How much the left hated them. I note that the statue to Elizabeth in Moscow, placed after the communists fell, has but one word on it.
Repentance.
Now to the passage. I’m not sure if the idea that everything can be accounted as economics is marxist or if Marx borrowed it from the Scottish Enlightenment, but both the left and right think almost completely in materialistic terms, as if they were dialectical materialists, It is as if they are hammers, so account everything as nails.
And when people confront the right oligarchs about justice and the left kleptocrats about property rights (and both about over regulation and unjust precedent) they get confused. For there is something greater than economics, bread, or even power. And that is Christ, who was not afraid to clear out merchants from the house of our God.
12On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. 13Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. 14He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.
15Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; 16and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. 17He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written,
‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?
But you have made it a den of robbers.”
18And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. 19And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.20In the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. 21Then Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” 22Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. 23Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. 24So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
25“Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.”
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn noted that during interrogation you had to account yourself as dead because if you clung onto any part of your pride, your dignity, your bodily health, that would be taken from you. Beria, that manager of the meat grinder that oppressed the Russians for some thirty bloody years, employed people who enjoyed torture: the Soviets rejected those who looked to anything higher.
In the current time, we are faced with over regulation, the functional restriction of our speech to that which is appropriate, and (with the current regime in the USA) the end of the rule of law and the move to a rule by and elected sovereign. And it is worse, much worse, in the Islamic lands. The reformed, catholics and orthodox may be adding more martyrs to that roll: the Copts already are.
This is going to affect things.
Take, for example, the issue of who shall use a church to marry. The lawyers have advised my church that if we hire out our churches for marriage rites, we cannot discriminate. This issue is now live: gays can marry now.
Well, that’s simple. Don’t hire them out.
Simpler still, and quite locally, my congregation has made a clear call. We will demolish our church., We would have to rebuild it to meet current earthquake standards (there has been another cluster of earthquakes over the last couple of weeks in NZ) The new building will have a smaller footprint, will be easier to heat, will be able to deal with the three different worship styles and services we have, and will not be as pretty. I am fairly sure the pagans will take offence.
However, this is a consequence of our regulations. I know of some churches that are now homes — not because the congregation has died (it has grown) but because keeping Victorian buildings going when the very sandstone they are made of is crumbling is not cost effective. Our job is to proclaim christ and do good. We do not worship our buildings, we use them. ANd we will give all for Christ. Let the Unitarians marry the gays (for the mosques will not) and let the liberal churches crumble. For they try to meet this world within the progressive paradigms of this world.
But it’s time to break them. The best revenge is living, living well, despite the problems hat could happen. But let is pray that they are not, that we are spared from the time of trial, and that the Church will bear witness to Christ, not the economic and progressive shibboleths of this age.
