Idiocy

I went on vacation. I’m back and I’m feeling particularly spunky.

So what am I feel spunky about?

How about Pope Benedict declaring all Protestant churches “defective” because somehow (he believes) we don’t fall in the line of apostolic succession? (If you don’t even know what apostolic succession is, that’s ok, cuz basically the rest of this blog is not about weighty doctrinal language but about poking fun at idiocy).

Articles and blogs have had Protestant leaders getting their underwear in a bunchy about the Pope calling us defective. Well, what’s so wrong with that?! We ARE defective! The point that my comrades missed about the idiocy of the Pope’s statement is that he fails to see how the Catholic Church is defective TOO! We are ALL defective.

It’s not that one church has it “right” and the other/s don’t. NEITHER of us, NONE of us do! You know that line in the Lord’s Prayer that goes “YOUR kingdom come, YOUR will be done…” No Christian or church has completely figured it out yet. That’s why when we talk about Christ’s second coming—it’s not here yet! Cuz if WE’RE to be the BODY of Christ, it’s not until we act fully as he would have us do that the kingdom will come! Jesus isn’t going to skateboard down on some cloud and zap everyone into good behavior someday. It’s up to us, his followers—who are fallible, often unknowing people—to try to live by God’s grace to be Christ’s body on this earth—to make the world, the “kingdom,” as God and Jesus would have it to be.

In sum,… I would have liked to have said (and thought) that we were a little closer to the kingdom coming before the Pope’s latest snafu. But looking at world-wide church leadership and its complete lack of self-awareness… Hmm… guess two thousand years since Jesus lived isn’t long enough for us to have figured it out. I’ll be optimistic: give us another thousand.