It has been a tiring week, and I want to be honest with you about that rather than pretend otherwise.
This week I was called a fake priest, again, by someone loudly insisting he is a good Christian, for the offense of calling out racism publicly. I will not spend this post relitigating the specifics of who said what. What I want to talk about instead is a pattern that has become impossible for me to ignore after 28 years in this work.
The people who most confidently declare that my priesthood is fake, that my faith is not real Christianity, that I have somehow failed the tradition by insisting the Gospel means something for the poor, the immigrant, and the person of color, are very often not people whose own lives bear any particular fruit of holiness. I am not speaking in the abstract. I have watched people with documented, serious failures of basic human decency, failures that would disqualify anyone from moral authority in any healthy community, position themselves as the defenders of true Christian orthodoxy against a bishop who has spent over two decades trying to build a place where people are safe.
That is exhausting in a very specific way. Not because the accusation itself carries weight. It does not. But because it takes energy to keep responding to noise, even noise that deserves no real response, and that energy is energy I would rather spend on this parish, on the people who show up here looking for something real.
I was also on the receiving end this week of a fresh round of attacks from people identifying as Roman Catholic, insisting that Old Catholic orders are not real, that my ordination is not valid, that everything this community does is therefore illegitimate. I have answered this question more times than I can count over more than twenty years of ministry, and I will keep answering it, but I want to name something plainly: questioning a bishop's legitimacy is a much more comfortable activity than actually doing the work of loving your neighbor. It requires no risk. It requires no vulnerability. It requires no actual engagement with the poor, the excluded, or the harmed. It is, in its way, one of the cheapest forms of religious performance available.
“By their fruits you will know them.” (Matthew 7:16, CPDV)
I keep returning to that verse this week, not as a weapon but as a genuine measure. Not: whose paperwork is in order. Not: whose ordination lineage passes inspection according to people who have appointed themselves gatekeepers. Whose life produces fruit that looks like the kingdom. Whose life produces fruit that looks like its opposite.
I know which fruit I am trying to grow here. I know which fruit this community has been growing, one Blessing Bag, one Pride booth, one Sunday of open welcome at a time, for over two decades. I trust that fruit more than I trust the loudest voices insisting from a distance that none of it counts.
A Word About Sunday
We continue our series The Kingdom Worth Everything this Sunday, and after a week like this one, I find myself especially glad for where the series has landed us.
We have moved through CALLED, SPEAK, CROSS, YOKE, GROUND, and PATIENCE. This Sunday we arrive at a word that feels almost designed for a week like this: WORTH.
I am not going to tell you here what the sermon says. But I will tell you that after being told, repeatedly, by people who have appointed themselves the arbiters of authenticity that I am not worth listening to, that this community is not worth taking seriously, the question of worth, who determines it, and by what measure, has stopped being an abstract theological topic for me this week. It has become personal in a way I did not expect when I first mapped out this series months ago.
Come Sunday. Bring whatever week you have had, whatever voices have told you that you or your love or your faith do not count. We will sit with a different measure together.
Thank you for the kindness so many of you have already shown this week. It has mattered more than you know.
Pax
et Bonum,
Bishop Greer