Responding to New York's decision to
legalize gay marriage, Pastor John Piper of the
Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis called the institution
“the new calamity.”
“My sense is that we do not realize
what a calamity is happening around us,” Piper
wrote in a blog post titled 'My Eyes Shed Streams of Tears' –
Thoughts on the New Calamity. “The new thing – new for
America, and new for history – is not homosexuality. That
brokenness has been here since we were all broke in the the fall of
man. (And there is a great distinction between the orientation and
the act – just like there is a great difference between my
orientation to pride and the act of boasting.)”
“What's new is not even the
celebration of homosexual sin. Homosexual behavior has been
exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia.
What's new is normalization and institutionalization. This is the
new calamity.”
The New York Senate approved a gay
marriage bill last week and Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the
legislation into law. Gay and lesbian couples can marry in the
Empire State starting on July 25.
Piper said he was writing about the
issue to “help the church feel the sorrow of these days.”
“Christians, more clearly than others
can see the tidal wave of pain that is on the way,” he said, and
suggested the wrath of God is coming.