You couldn't make it up dept no.87: the sermon will not be televised

[fpb]

From www.floridatoday.com:
A church giving sermons about sex may have to find a new home. Brevard Public School District's risk-management department has threatened to boot New Hope Church out of Sherwood Elementary because of a worship series titled "Great Sex for You."

Church leaders mailed 25,000 fliers, asking residents "Is Your Sex Life A Bore?" The three-week program kicked off inside the school auditorium. Pastor Bruce Cadle had said the Christian church has been "shamefully silent" on the taboo topic.

Mark Langdorf, the director of risk management, says the mailers generated complaints, were not appropriate for elementary school children and shouldn't be used to advertise the sermon in the school.

Langdorf says the church's lease contract is under review.

Comments

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Deleted my own earlier self-reply. I guess what I'm trying to get at is this: let's try not to personalize the disagreement, and I particularly don't want to drag in the Irish conflict, by the end of which both sides had an awful lot to answer for.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I was irritated by one statement, or more accurately by one small part of one statement, and hit back.

However I am not meaning to drag in the Irish conflict into this in any tit-for-tat, or blame game way - the conflict had almost nothing to do with theology. And I suspect that most of the active 'combatants' had little understanding of the teachings of their Church.

I mention it only because I am trying to put in context the misinformation that I was given about the beliefs of the Catholic Church.

I hope I have never criticised anyone else's belief, or their understanding of any belief I may hold.

My purpose in joining these discussions is to learn something, precisely because the view I was given of the beliefs of the Catholic Church growing up are so out of line with what I have heard on Fabio's Journal.

I did get irritated at the comment "This is pretty much exactly what I meant by "not having a true grasp of sacred space," lol" Mainly because of the lol, but that was an emotional response after a bad, bad week at work, I took the comment, perhaps incorrectly, to be mocking and it made me angry.

To be more sensible about it, I do take issue with the statement and with your defense of it "Given mutually exclusive positions (i.e. whether sacredness is objective, with its basis in divine sanction, or subjective, with its basis in popular assent), one or the other must be true."

I don't take issue with what you say, it is a logical statement, but to my mind does not get to my probvem with the original statement.

To say of someone who holds a different position to yours, that they do not have a true grasp of sacred space, or any other issue, is, in my mind at least, arrogant. They may well fully grasp the concepts and the ideas and have reached different conclusions. Saying - you don;t understand can only be a way of avoiding discussion.

By the way, mentalguy, I was in no way irritated or made angry by anything you said, so I hope it does not appear that I was personalising anything I said in response to your comments.

(I am now interested in knowing what your deleted reply said...)

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

(I am now interested in knowing what your deleted reply said...)

It was a reference to the Irish conflict which I seriously doubt you would have found offensive, but which constituted a rabbit hole in the discussion I really didn't want to start down. I only mentioned deleting it since (if anyone noticed its disappearance), I wanted to be clear that I had removed it and not Fabio.

By the way, mentalguy, I was in no way irritated or made angry by anything you said, so I hope it does not appear that I was personalising anything I said in response to your comments.

That's good to know. I didn't take anything you said personally. Mainly I was concerned that you might have taken dustthouart's comment more personally than necessary.

I did get irritated at the comment "This is pretty much exactly what I meant by "not having a true grasp of sacred space," lol" Mainly because of the lol, but that was an emotional response after a bad, bad week at work, I took the comment, perhaps incorrectly, to be mocking and it made me angry.

To be honest, I had much the same reaction she did; at least in my case (and I strongly suspect in hers) it wasn't so much mockery as frustration. During the 60s and 70s in particlar, a large swath of the Catholic world internalized a number of Protestant ideas in this area which over the ensuing decades utterly devastated the Church, leading to monstrosities which I expect even a lot of Protestants would be appalled by. Some regions were more affected than others, hence the knowing comments above regarding the Netherlands and Austria; my impression is that Ireland was comparatively untouched. (Of course, as fpb noted, that isn't to say that all the Catholic problems are the consequence of Protestant imports.) At this point, we're just beginning the long task of picking up the pieces and putting things back together. So there is a certain underlying frustration there. Then there's the issue that what your minister described isn't even what many people consider the term sacred to mean, so it's kind of like ... where to even begin?

(I'll give it a shot in another reply, though.)

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

To say of someone who holds a different position to yours, that they do not have a true grasp of sacred space, or any other issue, is, in my mind at least, arrogant. They may well fully grasp the concepts and the ideas and have reached different conclusions.

On the basis of what he said, I don't think your former minister did grasp the concept. (Not that the fault lies with him in particular; it is something that goes back all the way to the Protestant Reformers.) But you do deserve an explanation of why I think so.

In one respect, the issue is much broader than Christianity specifically. At least in the West and near East, outside of Protestantism and movements descended from Protestantism (e.g. neopaganism), a sacred person or thing is one which is understood to belong to or be given to God (or a god, in pagan contexts) and is therefore set apart from common life. This sense is still reflected in some dictionaries, at least the ones I consulted online.

In a specifically Christian context, see for example the imposition of hands mentioned in the first and second letters to Timothy, or the various practices of the ancient Churches (not just the Catholic Church) which are called consecration. Of course there is also the consecration of Samuel in the Old Testament, and of the Temple, and so on.

The Reformation represented a break from that basic understanding of the sacred; no longer were objects blessed or priests or bishops consecrated with the laying on of hands in a line all the way to the Apostles; new church buildings were no longer consecrated. The break is not entirely absolute; some Protestant groups will still "dedicate" (but not consecrate) a building, just as most Protestants still bless food before they eat it. But as Luther put it, in his view three things made a church building: the assembly of Christians, the hearing of the Word, and the reception of the sacraments (as he understood them). That is, the building is set apart because of what Christians do there, not because it has been consecrated to God, as such. (Unsurprisingly, Luther also added a characteristically unnecessary caution that the building must not be approached as a medium salutis.)

At any rate, to be sacred means to belong specifically to God. Rejecting the possibility of such consecration by definition excludes an understanding of the sacred. This is reflected in the progressive loss in the Protestant world of even intuitive distinctions in this area, epitomized in the United States by the rise of megachurches which employ almost entirely secular and commercial forms.