Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput issued new guidelines to reiterate Catholic teaching on those in relationships outside the sacrament of marriage — including those in same-sex relationships, the divorced, civilly remarried and unmarried couples living together should abstain from sex in order to receive communion.
It has been the long-standing policy of the Catholic Church to refuse the sacrament of communion to people openly living in sin and not the teachings of the church.
This did not sit well with the Catholic Mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenny, who tweeted out: “Jesus gave us gift of Holy Communion because he so loved us. All of us. Chaput’s actions are not Christian.”
It is plain that Mayor Kenny confuses people with their sin because that is the false teaching of this world, that a person is defined by their sexuality.
The truth is that we all sin or miss the mark but that does not have to be how we are perceived or how we are identified. People are more than their sin or their sexuality. Believe it or not we can do other things that have sex. In fact, sexual activity makes up the smallest fraction of our lives.
But keeping the standard of God does matter. The Lord has given us His commandments to make our lives meaningful and He desires that we have good lives that are grounded in Him.
We all have sins that we struggle with, from drunkenness to drug abuse, unrighteous anger to lying and of course sexual immorality and we are called to repent of these wicked ways and follow God.
Tweet ThisIf we allow the enemy to define us by our sin then we perceive that the Lord hates us because He hates our sin, when really He hates our sin and calls us to return to a right relationship with Him.
That is the goal of the Catholic Church in denying communion to those living in open sin, a return to a relationship with God. So the church is calling on heterosexuals to abstain from their sexual sin in order to receive communion and the homosexual as well.
Most Protestant churches do the same thing when calling on its members to deal with their sin before taking part in the Lord’s Supper. We are not attacking the person but their disobedience to God.
The mayor of Philly is attacking the Archbishop for dealing with sin that the mayor believes identifies the person, this is because like many people have been wrongly taught the mayor thinks that a person is born this way and has no free will regarding sexuality, sad really.
We may be born or taught with certain predispositions but we are not born being sexually immoral, rather we are born in sin and once we have tasted certain sins return to them and even identify with them but we are given a free will.
The enemy would prefer us to believe that we have no free will and that we do not have a choice but that is truly not Christian.
We are free to reject our sin and choose the Lord and His free gift of salvation or we are free to reject the Lord and embrace the darkness but we do have a choice.
