"...It was into this context (Royal commission into Child abuse) that the bishops and the senior pastors asked, “Why don’t your people live out Biblical family values?”
And he said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites. As it is written,
‘This people pays me lip-service,
but their hearts are far from me;
they worship me in vain,
for they teach human commandments as doctrine.’
You abandon the commandment of God, and wield human tradition like a sword.”
Then he said, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For as the prophets said, ‘You must care for the widow, the orphan, and the refugee: those who have no one to protect them.’” But you spout family values and say “Anyone who has sex before marriage, or a homosexual relationship, cannot be part of the kingdom of heaven.” You force people to lie about their relationships, or to suppress sexual expressions of faithful love, yet take no responsibility for the structures that enable sexual violence against women and children. Instead, you have protected religious officials, and worried about your own status.”
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile you. Nothing that anyone has done to you can defile you. No way that they have touched you can defile you. No act of sexual degradation, no act of violence, no scene of pornography that has been forced upon you, can make you unclean in my eyes. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that another person can do to you that can make you unfit for communion with me. The only thing that can get in the way of communion with me is using other people to satisfy your destructive desires, and failing to live in love. You may feel defiled by what other people have done to you, but in my eyes, you are not defiled. You are not defiled.”
Nathan Nettleton
http://www.laughingbird.net/
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