VA Chaplain penalized for preaching Romans
Rusty Trubey, a chaplain at the Coatesville, PA VA Medical Center, found himself in hot water after a sermon he preached last June at the VA chapel.
Trubey, who served as an Army Reserve Chaplain and missionary, has been serving as a chaplain at the Coatesville VA Medical Center in Pennsylvania for nearly ten years. In June 2024, as part of his normal duties, Trubey led a worship service in the hospital’s chapel, where he preached a sermon from the first chapter of Romans.
Smith explained that the theme of the sermon was what happens when culture excludes God, in which he read from Romans 1 and explained, in accordance with his religious beliefs and in accordance with the teaching of his endorsing body, the Assemblies of God, what the Bible chapters is interpreted to mean. Fox News
Here are the offending verses. I’d bet that verse 26 is what tripped someone’s trigger.
23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. Bible Gateway
His lawyer, Erin Smith at the First Liberty Institute, had this to say:
Smith explained that the theme of the sermon was what happens when culture excludes God, in which he read from Romans 1 and explained, in accordance with his religious beliefs and in accordance with the teaching of his endorsing body, the Assemblies of God, what the Bible chapters is interpreted to mean.
“The specific text that he was reading was Romans 1 verses 23 through 32, so before he gave the sermon, he did explain that what he was going to say was going to be hard to hear or uncomfortable for people,” Smith said.
Sounds like a trigger warning to me. Despite that, some of the folks attending walked out of the sermon, and after the service Trubey was approached by the VA police who told him they had received complaints. Subsequently Trubey was suspended, “investigated” for several months, moved to a menial restocker’s position (aka “nurse jail”) and has been told his sermons now have to be pre-approved, by his supervisor, Chaplain Brynn White at VA. At least she has given up on his letter of reprimand.
“What’s more, the changes to the SOP allow Chaplain White and other supervisors to continue to discriminate against chaplains on the basis of their religious viewpoints simply because they find the viewpoint ‘divisive, cultural, or political,'” the lawyers state in their letter to Secretary Collins.
“‘If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,’” the letter said, quoting the Supreme Court case, United States v. Eichman. “Indeed, the Bible and other religious texts comment extensively on what some people could deem ‘divisive, cultural, or political,’ and chaplains would be hard-pressed to preach a sermon avoiding these topics and giving the viewpoint espoused by their religious text. Fox News
Info on Ms. White is a bit sketchy – she has apparently worked a whole 6 years in two jobs. Her profile on the Society for Shamanic Practice has been pulled but what can be seen says:”Brynn, an ordained minister, is a board-certified (mental health) chaplain who works professionally with veterans.” so I suspect is the same one. Her signature is on a letter about why Christian Nationalism is not Christianity due to its white nationalistic past. Pennsylvania Capital-Star Somehow she just doesn’t come across as very conservative.
Category: "Teh Stoopid", Religion, Veterans in the news
