Quote of the Day: No Halos without Sacrifice

It's a fitting thought for Holy Week: there can be no halos without sacrifice. Of course, it's Christ's sacrifice which wins us salvation, His suffering which wins us final freedom from sin. But then, He did tell us that we, too, must suffer--no servant is greater than his master--so we, too, must take up our crosses daily to follow Him.

The early apostles made the mistake of wanting glory without sacrifice. The coming of the Holy Spirit during Pentecost helped them overcome this vainglory.

Now the current generation repeats these errors, albeit often without reference to Christ:

Cruelly, the Lord of Social Justice wouldn’t grant us a cause, at least not an easy one. Sure, we could march against Roe v. Wade and defend the unborn. But opposing abortion would have required us to adopt sex lives consistent with that position. No more hookup culture, no more consequence-free sex, no more placing our own desires over the needs of children. Opposing Planned Parenthood would never be our cause. It would have cost us too much fun.

Likewise, fighting poverty couldn’t possibly be our Selma. The annoying thing about defending the poor is that the poor need money, and we had student loans to pay. And sex trafficking wasn’t any more attractive. To be holy, you need a cause no one else supports, least of all those wretched white Southern fundamentalists. While forcing women into prostitution is certainly bad, what’s the point of speaking against it if Jerry Falwell agrees with you?

...Once upon a time in social studies class, my generation learned that moral righteousness was found in opposing an injustice that nobody else opposed. And when we found that injustice, nobody was going to take away our long-desired holiness. So as we march on, don’t expect things to change. We will continue misleading, lying, and slandering. We will continue calling people bigots and klansmen, not because we’re actually debating them, but because those are the words of the spiritual songs we sing as we press toward glory and polish our LGBT halos.
Likewise, we will continue linking the civil-rights movement with the push for gay acceptance without pausing for a second to consider the comparison. We will continue diminishing the bravery of Rosa Parks by claiming a seat beside her as our reward for the one time we boycotted Chick-Fil-A for a month. We will trivialize the death of Medgar Evers by praising his blood for freeing gay couples to financially ruin a florist who hurt their feelings instead of walking one more block to find another purveyor of petunias who was happy to take their money.

In the Kingdom of Heaven, countless children of God will embrace the older saints who gave them lives of far greater dignity on earth by following Christ’s example and enduring insults, beatings, imprisonments, and even death for them. We know this and yet we will insist that we’re owed an equal measure of honor because we tweeted our support for every gay kiss on “Glee.”

I should add that one thing which the social justice warriors have managed to do is to ruin the very term "social justice." Where social justice once might have meant some combination of mercy with justice for the poor and downtrodden, it has now become just one more means of subverting actual justice. Mercy without justice is false mercy, and it thoroughly useless. Mercy requires that there be a debt to forgive, or a shortfall to make up, or a demand of justice which is too great; without these things, mercy is meaningless moral posturing.