It’s not easy being a pastor today. People dislike your sermons. You have to work hard to raise money. The local media won’t praise you.

Unless you’re the Rev. Peter Beeson, pastor of St. Matthew Trinity Lutheran Church in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Last year, Beeson announced that she was really a transgender “he.” On February 11, a bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America re-christened the former Rose Beeson as Peter.

Cue the hallelujahs!

Disfiguration Sunday

The Jersey Journal reported: “After giving a sermon on what is known in the church as Transfiguration Sunday, the Rev. Tracie Bartholomew, bishop of the New Jersey congregation, held a ‘renaming ceremony’ where Beeson will now be called Peter.”

The church’s website said, “This renaming liturgy affirms transgender individuals who take on a new name and remember their baptism.” It added Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (NIV)

Forget that no serious Bible student would read this verse in that way. Beeson’s church does, and that’s all you need to know.

Luther Wept

“In the 501st year since Martin Luther shook up the Catholic Church, a quiet, determined Hoboken priest is challenging Christianity’s understanding of gender and morality,” wrote Rev. Alexander Santora in a piece for NJ.com.

New York City television station WABC-TV trumpeted Beeson’s “support from the community.” It aired nearly two minutes of praise on an evening news broadcast. Many thoughtful Christians would take issue with a renaming service. But WABC reported Beeson’s dismissal of dissenters as “trolls.”

Regular readers of Dr. Michael Brown’s articles will recall his reports of numerous attempts to “mainstream” what was once considered deviancy. Today, following a 2015 Supreme Court ruling redefining marriage, dissenters appear as speed-bumps to be driven over.

Ironically, WABC-TV was the 1950 birthplace of a Christian television program called Faith for Today. It has aired on various outlets ever since. Now, this longtime television station’s news broadcast endorses religious behavior far outside the Christian tradition.

Faithful Christians can only gasp — and perhaps quietly weep — as the press calls evil good, and goodness evil.