Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe gave a controversial sermon at the Washington Cathedral this week. In it, he claimed that immigrants, refugees, and trans people are central to the gospel. The service was intended to confirm Rowe as the head of the liberal mainline Protestant denomination. This controversy came just a few weeks after Bishop Budde, another Episcopal official, nagged President Trump in a viral sermon.
“In God’s Kingdom, immigrants and refugees, transgender people, the poor, and the marginalized are not at the edges, fearful and alone. They are at the center of the Gospel story,” Rowe posited. He preached from Luke 2:22-40 and opened his remarks by saying that Christ advocated for an “upside down” social order and then proceeded to offer a series of progressive platitudes to thunderous applause.
“We struggle with how to make sense of what all that means,” Rowe preached. “Because we are beset by the powers and principalities of the world that don’t see it the way Jesus does. We’re told by the kings and the rulers of the day that the rich shall be first.” He went on to say that politics has overly affected this message and then ironically ranted about liberal issues.
He says ‘society’ tries to convince us “That, somehow, compassion is weakness. That fealty to political parties — and here, I mean either one or all of them — is somehow paramount. That differences of race, class, gender identity, human sexuality are all divisions that must somehow separate us.” He added, ” And that we should regard migrants and strangers and those among us whom we don’t understand with fear and contempt.”
“Those divisions are not of God,” he orated. “Those who have been considered at the margins are at the center. They are the bearers of the salvation of the world. Their struggles reveal to us the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom about which Jesus speaks is upside down. It’s reversed, it’s inverted, it’s counter-cultural.” The bishop seems unaware of the irony that this ‘counter-cultural’ message is parroted by every major corporation and government agency.
He said, “The enemy is bound and determined to sow division among us, to make us forget who we are and what kingdom that we belong.” He concluded his remarks with a call to “greet with a sign of peace those who voted for the candidate we couldn’t stand and to be in the communion line alongside people who don’t live like us or look like us or even love like us.”
In January of this year, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, another Episcopal leader, lectured Trump to “have mercy” on immigrants and transgender children. In the time since, then, Budde has confirmed that she will not apologize and denies she is part of the “radical left.” “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said during her sermon at the National Cathedral.
Watch Bishop Rowe’s Woke Rant Here:
“I am not going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.” The bishop confirmed. “I hope that a message calling for dignity, respecting dignity, honesty, humility, and kindness is resonating with people. I’m grateful for that,” added the ideologue. She said she was “saddened by the level of vitriol that it has evoked in others, and the intensity of it has been disheartening.”
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