Can someone briefly summarize what precisely Father George Maxwell, Diocese of Georgia, is saying?

I think my best take on it is that the people of Peter’s day were naive to what God was doing, and incredulous or untrusting (including Peter) but we are not naive because we have their testimony in scripture and see the fruits of what God accomplished through Jesus and relations with the Gentiles through the millennia. The priest affirms miracles both then and today, so I think there is not an attempt to scientifically deconstruct here. I think the whole sermon is about seeing other people in church as God sees them, as brothers and sisters in Christ, in spite of our human tendency to like or dislike this or that person. But maybe I missed something.

I was tempted to say that “he says nothing, couched in cant.”  But I suppose what he is really saying is “it was different back then.” 

In other words, it is the same old song and dance we’ve heard a thousand times.

Yes, poor ole Peter. Couldn’t see the world before God’s eyes. Truly sad. How could he have gotten it so wrong? If only God could have somehow spoken to him. Sigh…

He is the canon at Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta. According to the website, before he went into the priesthood, he was a lawyer. More of his writing is here:

http://www.stphilipscathedral.org/sermons_Maxwell.html

This George Maxwell Sr. He is the former rector of Christ Church, Savannah and active in the remaining TEC group. In recent years he has become a Jungian and is influenced by its world view which is quite different from that of Simon Peter.

So in other coded words, Maxwell+‘s god has cleansed same-sex unions, so we Wicked, Wicked Conservatives are no longer to call them unholy?

I think Adam12 has it right. Fr Maxwell is saying, essentially, that we must look beyond the natural world and see people as God sees them, and we must be willing to overcome our prejudices and preconceptions. We must be open to sacramental interpretation of events around us, and thus be open to see when God is doing a new thing.

So far, so good; but where I part company with Fr Maxwell is the implication that God is doing a new thing in regard to homosexuality. No one has yet been able to show me any convincing signs that God is doing a new thing. To me, it simply looks like The Episcopal Church decided that since God is love (He is), God must love homosexuals (He does), therefore, homosexuality must not be a sin. Never mind that the Bible is pretty clear about all that, because those who have been to seminary know that the Bible is not really to be trusted, since God was unable to find a way to give us the plain, unvarnished truth. He was forced, poor old fellow, to rely on unreliable human writers and depend on undependable means of preservation and transmission of His Word, having expended almost all His meager energy creating the Universe from nothing.

I believe Robert Gagnon has pretty definitively shown the bankruptcy of the revisionist arguments regarding the Biblical texts dealing with the homosexuality issue.

Interesting that Fr Maxwell should refer to the judgment passage in Matthew 25:31 et seq.: when his Presiding Bishop visited Savannah a couple of years ago, in response to a question about that passage she said she did not believe there would be any goats at the last judgment, or words to that effect.

Having led many archaeological tours, one of the most common comments received is, “Back then they lived a simple life, were rather stupid and didn’t know how to do anything.”  “Naive and gullible,” is what the preacher was trying to say in more sophisticated language than those following me around a site.  No, sir!  Back then people were just as complicated, and sinful, as today, the governments just as interfering and the people had the same spiritual needs as today.  Moreover God will move as He did then, if one would let Him….
(Moldova using Jack Tavy’s computer)

Look, its not really that hard… A long time ago, before the internet, some people wrote a book, and in the second part of the book, there was this fisher-person named Peter.  He and some other fisher-person friends of his, and a tax collector took to following this carpenter.  Now, the carpenter, for a carpenter, was a pretty smart guy, but he was, after all, just a carpenter, even though the whole second part of the book is about him, he didn’t have a fancy degree in theology like a bishop or a cathedral dean does now-a-days. It’s not like he studied with Socrates or something.  And while we were getting those degrees, we hung out at coffee shops and wine bars with people getting degrees in lots of other things, like biology and economics, so we obviously know more than the carpenter.  And carpenter spent a whole lot of time talking about stuff his Father told him, like he thought his Father was even smarter than the bishop or the dean.  But let’s be realistic, how could a carpenter in ancient times and his dad know more about religion that people in the modern day who have Masters and PhDs in theology or ministry or divinity?

TJ, you said it so well. That seems to be how it is these days among those who hob-nob with the movers and shakers…sadly the greatest percentage of TEC, UCC, UMC clergy. Now I am beginning to sound like my parents - and my grandparents before them. And I don’t apologize one little bit.

“Peter lived in a naive, miraculous world.”

For the simple pewsitter this translates into: And we, having tasted of the the fruit of the tree of modernity, reject Peter’s world for this new, stark, dry wasteland. A world devoid of miracles and of the God who shows them to us. Won’t you come and worship with us?

It looks as though the sermon has been taken down, because the link seems not to be working.  I hope Stand Firm archived it.