Like the Biff Tannen alternate reality

We have been hosting a foreign exchange student. A few weeks before she went back to France, we took her up to my old stomping grounds in a city I worked as an intern in the Episcopal church before going to seminary. We happened to drive by my old parish near a local Air Force base. I had a great experience there as a Episcopal Youth corps pre-seminary formation year, circa 2003-2004. The priest was amazing and theologically very solid, dare I say even conservative. The congregation was healthy and active. They had a great youth group and a women's group that met for a bible study every week. It was truly a great parish-not huge but healthy. There was a lot of Air Force base families and those in the local community who lived there permanently. I loved the parish so much, I specifically requested the bishop to allow my Diaconal ordination to happen there when I got out of seminary. In a lot of ways, it was my home parish that sponsored me to go to seminary and not my actual home parish of record.  

The priest I knew has long since retired, and I didn't really know the priest that came to replace him but I heard it was fairly solid. I lost track of the parish after I left the Episcopal church for obvious reasons.But as I was in the neighborhood, I drove by and took a quick trip down memory lane. The building was not open when we drove by, as it was late in the afternoon. On the outside, it appeared to largely be the same parish building I had come to love almost 25 years ago. I said a prayer in passing, but did not think much as else about it as we drove away. 

Out of an abundance of sentimentality, I looked up the parish on social media to see what was shaking. I was aghast at what appears to have happened to the parish in the last 18 years or so since last I was there in the building. They had apparently hired an angry black lady priestess who was an opera major and apparently hated the US Military from what she had posted on both the parish Facebook page as well as her personal social media public pages. 

Of course, rainbow flags were on everything on the Parish websites. She leads Evening Prayer from her office, with a rainbow flag back drop. Rainbow flag appears to be on a poll next to the altar in the main church. I was truly horrified. 

I felt like that sequence in Back to the Future II when Marty McFly goes back to the alternate 1985 to find corrupt Biff Tannen is a gambling billionaire and runs everything. It was like truly a dystopian ecclesial nightmare scenario of "What's the worst that could possibly happen?" and it actually happened.     

 I am at a loss for words at how truly the mighty have fallen. It's like the Devil openly dances for the ruin of souls and does not even disguise himself anymore. 

Kyrie Eleison. 

 

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