Bless me, Ficus, for I have sinned

So this happened on Tuesday:

Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.

What do you confess to the plants in your life? pic.twitter.com/tEs3Vm8oU4

— Union Seminary (@UnionSeminary) September 17, 2019

I must admit, I don't confess to plants. I do, however, confide in them. I told an aloe vera yesterday, when I read this tweet, that I thought "progressive Christians" weren't quite right in the head.

When St. Paul wrote:

although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Rom. 1:21-25)

he had pagans and idolators in mind. I don't know whether he would have foreseen that a major Christian theological seminary would have followed in their footsteps. Union Seminary began life as a Presbyterian institution, then a non-denominational one, and now its mission is "training people of all faiths and none who are called to the work of social justice in the world. . . . Union actively reforms itself in response to the changing needs of the world and an evolving understanding of what it means to be faithful."

Put another way, Union Theological Seminary has abandoned the seminary's mission of training ministers of the Gospel in theology, and now conforms itself to whatever worldly thinking represents the spirit of the current age. The insanity of turning away from God and turning to earthly idols has taken many forms. Today, it means confessing to plants, which do not hear, cannot understand, do not care about, and will not grant absolution for, your sins. Only God can do that, and he is not in need of plants to do his work for him.