A Tea Party radio host launched a vicious attack this week on an Episcopal Church minister in Virginia over a recent sermon regarding social justice.
The ultra-conservative WorldNetDaily is reporting that “Sarah Kinney Gaventa, associate rector at St. Paul’s church in Ivy, Virginia, was preaching last Sunday about Peter’s confession of Jesus Christ as the Messiah” and “declared in a sermon that God ‘became Michael Brown,’ the black teen who was shot and killed by a police offer in Ferguson, Missouri.”
“In our Gospel today, standing in a center of Roman power, a town named after Caesar, Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is. Peter gets the answer right – the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.
“The God we love came to disrupt the power structures of the world that tells us what we are worth. He is a living God, who loved us so much and was so grieved by our inability to love him and one another, that he was willing to become human.
“He became Michael Brown. He became the victim of our sin, so we wouldn’t have to sacrifice each other any more. His sacrifice should have been the last. His sacrifice was enough for us.”
Those remarks were part of a longer sermon in which Gaventa cited a number of recent shootings of black men by law enforcement officers.
“We don’t know exactly what happened between (officer) Darren Wilson and Michael Brown; we have not yet heard the full story. But the shooting has tapped into underlying feelings of injustice about how black men are treated by police all over our country and those concerns are certainly backed by data.
“I think the problem of racism is so deeply ingrained in us that we aren’t even aware of our bias. We shoot unarmed young black men, we suspend young black boys because deep down, we are afraid of them. Call it white privilege, call it systemic racism, whatever it is, we are infected.
Apparently those remarks inflamed Tea Partier Rob Schilling, who hosts “The Schilling Show” radio program on WINA in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he served from 2002 to 2006 as the last Republican City Councilor to sit on that body.
In a guest post published at Barbwire.com, Schilling wrote:
In her August 24 homily to the predominantly white assembled congregation at St. Paul’s, Gaventa launched into a racially hostile narrative about a white police officer shooting a young unarmed black man in 1943 Harlem, New York.
She then transitioned to present-day Ferguson, Missouri and in that context delineated a list of “unarmed black men who have been killed by law enforcement in the last month alone.”
[…]
While counter-claiming that we have “become one in Christ,” Rev. Gaventa continued her divisive screed noting “systematic” racist white behavior in education, social media, and law enforcement—chalking it up to an “infection” of “white privilege.”
Gaventa’s final remarks caused silent outrage, as she equated Michael Brown to Jesus, implying that Brown, like Christ, was a sacrifice for our sin.
Shilling goes on to add:
Sarah Kinney Gaventa’s confused contention that God became Michael Brown and other such false teachings of the social gospel were forewarned throughout the Bible […] The Sarah Kinney Gaventas of the post-modern American “church” are as dangerous as a brood of vipers. While diminishing the Great Commission, they instead promote divisive social policies that are contrary to Biblical Christianity and have a decidedly progressive political bent.
Those interested, Shilling provided a 30-second excerpt from the sermon you can listen to, below, and you can go here for a transcript of the entire sermon published on Gaventa’s website.
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