Some of you may know that during the last five months there's been something of a tempest in a tea pot brewing in the Episcopal Church and it's not over where to dine for a decent Sunday brunch, which is how most people think of controversy in the nation's denomination of high culture. Rather it concerns the election of an open and practicing homosexual to be bishop of New Hampshire, one Gene Robinson. Actually, let's not mince words. The practice is rightly called sodomy, and the Bishop-elect of New Hampshire is a sodomite.

The election and upcoming consecration (Anglican bishops are consecrated, folks, not ordained) of Bishop-elect Robinson has actually succeeded in riling some Episcopalians and to my great relief, exposed the fact that there are some Episcopalians who actually believe the Bible. My good natured facetiousness aside, though, I've known all along that God has His elect even in the Episcopal Church. In fact, the church I attend is thoroughly Evangelical, led by a Biblically sound rector, in one of the most Evangelical dioceses in the country, the Diocese of Pittsburgh. I can even count on there being three or four Calvinists in the adult Sunday School class. (If you Episcopalians out there actually read your Articles of Religion, buried in the back of the Book of Common Prayer, you'll discover that you are all supposed to be Calvinists.)

There's been so much riling going on, that conservatives in the Church met in Dallas last week to plot a strategy for dealing with this open breach with Biblical authority. And what seems to be looming on the horizon, once the consecration of Bishop-elect Robinson goes through next month, is a not insignificant schism in America's church of correct etiquette.

The looming schism (which seems sure to affect other districts in the world-wide Anglican communion) already has some people asking, among Evangelicals as well as the liberals, "Why get so upset over a minor issue? After all, isn't this distracting us from the main mission of the Church, preaching the Gospel, feeding the hungry, and a hundred other ministries of love and reconciliation? The issue of homosexuality is certainly a minor side track, isn't it?"

It reminds me of that famous Rodney King quote, "Why can't we all just get along?"

So, it's important to stop and remind ourselves why this apparently minor issue, which supposedly does nothing to spread the Gospel, feed the poor, shelter the homeless, relieve the oppressed, is not at all minor. And that's because it touches on the deepest issue of all, deeper even than feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, and relieving the oppressed (or which fork is the correct one for desert, a mistake no Episcopalian wants to make). It's perhaps the deepest issue of all in the Gospel. It's the issue of "Who runs the world, God, or man?" It's sometimes known by the fancier theological phrase of "God's Sovereignty."

The issue comes about in the following way, and touches the deepest issues of human nature, the meaning of human existence, and our relationship to our Creator. The Gospel of Jesus Christ reveals to us more than just the liberals' warm fuzzy notion of the love of Christ (although, that's important, but in a way much deeper than liberals understand it). It tells us something about the world and human beings, namely, that we did not create ourselves, nor did we create the universe which we inhabit. But it doesn't end there. Because the world is not malleable putty in our hands, to make out of it whatever we want, in other words, because the nature of the universe is not a human creation, it is beset and structured by laws that give it its form and character. We don't even set the terms by which we get right with God, even though those terms are set forth in a "contract," the ol' timey word for which is 'covenant'. God makes the contract, and He's also the one who safeguards and keeps its terms, even for we who subscribe to it.

All this presupposes that there are limits on human life, nature and existence, limits we don't create, and limits that we don't transcend. If we could, if we did, we'd be self-created. In other words, there are laws written into the fabric of creation, by means of which God rules the world. Our own dependent and obviously limited life span is a testimony to that. The writers of the Bible, unsophisticated by current literary standards in the Episcopal Church, are able to express this point quite well. Here are just a few samplings:

He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end. Job, 25:10.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Job 38:4.

When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: Psalm 8:29.

From time to time we human beings get lucky and are able to recognize, discover, and use to our own purposes, the law structures that God has built into the world. More often than not, we display hubris, and think we know or understand more than we do. The result is usually disaster for us. One cosmic case in point is the Tower of Babel incident in the book of Genesis. There are, of course, many extra Biblical cases I could point to as well, such has the murder of perhaps 50 to 100 million human beings by the disaster of Marxism, which thought it had the power to create a totally new human being. You see, Marx was one of those people who thought that human character was infinitely malleable and that we actually create ourselves. He was so convinced of this, that in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, he even decries all questions about the origin of the human race as absurd and unintelligible. Even after 50 to 100 million deaths, human beings aren't quite convinced of the absurdity of Marxism.

Because we're so blind, or, let me be honest, pig-headed, God has to do more than just reveal to us how to be saved from our sins. From time to time he also reveals to us something about how He's structured the world and human nature. He does that in Scripture with specific reference to our sexuality (yes, sexuality--Only pronouns have "gender"). And now you can see the importance of that issue for any church that professes to be a bride of Christ. It's the top of the ice berg for the whole issue of whether God or man has created the world and the laws that guide, run, structure, or control it. Rejecting what God has revealed about the structure of the world, or, in particular, the structure of human nature, reveals, at heart, a rejection of the whole picture of a finite, dependent, created cosmos run by laws set in place by a power beyond our comprehension and from outside the created natural order.

It reveals, at heart, the apostate desire of man to be his own god. And if that's what you want to be, even pounding nails with Jimmy Carter doesn't make up for it, in God's eyes.