The darkness pervading the corners of our denomination.

Sometimes those who will not believe the word of God do believe the strange words of humanity. Sometimes this happens on a sophisticated level, like rejecting the Lordship of Jesus Christ while holding on to the ethics and lifestyle of Buddha. But sometimes, and this is happening far too much in contemporary America, all the sludge of the shadows begins surfacing above the unbelief. And some start hanging around, in their minds, with devils. Metaphorically speaking.

Oh they don’t think of them as devils, but rather as heroes. They are considered the answerers to humanity’s problems. But one posting, War, Drugs, Collapse, the Usual, leads to another blog, I Run My Own Damn Thinktank, (Twelfth Bough) which has these words written as truth:

“It would be very useful for people to understand the wide variety of brutal and unethical practices explicitly approved by the Talmud. When we say that someone like Michael Chertoff, for instance, is a Talmudic Jew, that means he has been formally instructed through religious indoctrination to lie to, deceive, steal from and kill non-Jews: approximately 97% of the population of the United States. Attorney General Mike Mukasey -- same thing. It's not like the difference between Episcopalians and Catholics; it's the difference between following a religion or following a secret plan for murderous racism.”[1]

There are other references to the Jewish people and Israel with this kind of awfulness-but this statement sums it up. Now the Presbyterian pastor who linked to “I Run My on Damn Thinktank” of course didn’t know this man was a rabid anti-Semite. But he liked the posting he pointed to because it accused United States leaders of being at war for the sake of drugs and profit. And he found that part of the article was written by Michel Chossudovsky whom he also likes.

And if you check out Chossudovsky you will find that he is a truther, as is the pastor. And Chossudovsky also has huge amounts of other kinds of conspiracy theories by many different writers on his web page. A truther is someone who believes that leaders of the United States government arranged for the destruction of the towers on 9-11. The pastor has another web site on his blog, 9-11 Truth.org.

Why am I pointing this out? Go back to the beginning of this posting. The sludge keeps building up. For the pastor it seemingly began with a conspiracy theory about 9-11 and went on to pull in an anti-Semite. But truthfully it began with a rejection of God, and redemption, and the blessedness of the resurrection. It began with the Lord of the Church standing outside a heart, a church, a presbytery, knocking to come in.

The darkness beginning to pervade the corners of our denomination is frightening. And it is happening because we have rejected God’s word, our Confessions and the Lordship of Christ. Conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism are just a beginning, if we do not turn our hearts back to the Lord of the Church.

[1] See There is a perfectly good explanation for all this. and scroll down