Posted on 05/26/2007 10:07:17 AM PDT by kiriath_jearim
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called on Africa's Anglican church to overcome its "obsession" with the issue of gay priests and same-sex marriages.
He said they should spend time on more pressing issues in the region.
Speaking to the BBC World Service, the South African bishop said Zimbabwe, HIV/Aids and the crisis in Darfur were not getting sufficient attention.
Zimbabwe's Anglican church also lacked courage to stand up to President Robert Mugabe's regime, he said.
'So many issues'
This was the 76-year-old Nobel peace laureate touching raw nerves for the Anglican church in Africa on very sensitive subjects.
In his usual forthright manner, Archbishop Tutu told the BBC that the Anglican communion was spending too much of its time and energy on debating differences over gay priests and same sex marriages - a subject, he said, that had now become "an extraordinary obsession".
He said: "We've, it seems to me, been fiddling whilst as it were our Rome was burning. At a time when our continent has been groaning under the burden of HIV/Aids, of corruption.
"There are so many issues crying out for concern and application by the church of its resources, and here we are, I mean, with this kind of extraordinary obsession."
For Archbishop Tutu, the crisis in Zimbabwe was one such issue that had been eclipsed by the sexuality debate.
He said he was saddened by the muted response other African governments had shown to the Mugabe regime.
Growing tensions
But he also said that leaders of his own Anglican Church in Zimbabwe had failed to show more courage in dealing with the Zimbabwean president.
"One seems to have to say they have kow-towed to President Mugabe. Certainly there's not been anything like the same kind of standing up to the evil and exercising the prophetic ministry that one would have expected from the church, and that has been very distressing."
There are growing tensions within the worldwide Anglican communion - pitching liberals against conservatives - mainly over the issue of sexuality.
But as Archbishop Tutu recognised, there are other points of contention that need to be resolved and other issues that the church, especially in Africa, needs to turn its attention to.
He just doesn’t get it!
I recall that Desmond was obsessed with the “Apartheid Issue”. That didn’t seem to inhibit his speaking out.
Tutu should be ino a rocker on the porch of a retirement home, right next to Jimmy Carter.
I would think that this is a pretty 'pressing' issue.
Gays are obsessed by the gay issue. When the sodomites try to change what’s in the Bible then people get upset. Too much is accepted in the name of a false heretical unity.
Maybe he just doesn’t get it often enough.
Tutu has drifted more and more to the left over the years...and he is losing ground on orthodoxy!
Tutu has spent too much time receiving the praise of American university faculties. It seems like they were all falling over each other to honor him, and not for fighting for Christian morality, either.
According to Tutu, this act of Jesus Christ set in motion a unity that knows no boundaries. In fact, although Christ is the one who initiates this unity, allegiance to Christ is apparently not a necessary prerequisite for entering into this unity. "Jesus, it appears, was quite serious when he said that God was our father and that we belonged all to one family, because in this family all, not some, are insiders. None is an outsider – black and white, yellow and red, rich and poor, educated and not educated, beautiful and not so beautiful, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, all belong, all are held in a divine embrace that will not let us go – all, for God has no enemies.""
From The Layman Online, 2/22/06
8"Behold, you are trusting in deceptive words to no avail. 9 Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery and swear falsely, and offer sacrifices to Baal and walk after other gods that you have not known, 10 then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say, 'We are delivered!'--that you may do all these abominations? 11 Has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight? Behold, I, even I, have seen it," declares the LORD. 12 "But go now to My place which was in Shiloh, where I made My name dwell at the first, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people Israel. 13 And now, because you have done all these things," declares the LORD, "and I spoke to you, rising up early and speaking, but you did not hear, and I called you but you did not answer, 14 therefore, I will do to the house which is called by My name, in which you trust, and to the place which I gave you and your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. 15 I will cast you out of My sight, as I have cast out all your brothers, all the offspring of Ephraim." - Jeremiah 7:8-15
The Lord God clearly doen not appreciate all faiths like Tutu does. The Bible promises severe punishment for those who turn people away from true faith and salvation in Christ. Tutu sneers at the Lord Jesus Christ by telling others there is salvation in other faiths that do not embrace Christ.
Jesus himself says of those like Tutu: "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in." - Matthew 23:13
The Gays are obssessed with the gay”issue”.
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