CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – After five months of objections to making an openly gay man an Episcopal bishop, there will be two more at the Rev. V. Gene Robinson’s consecration on Sunday.

The ceremony traditionally provides an opportunity for objectors to speak, and two people – both representing larger groups – plan to do so.

Kathy Lewis and her daughter Jillian of the Church of the Redeemer in Rochester will be in a group of lay people, one of whom will read a written statement objecting to Robinson’s elevation.

“It is in direct violation of holy Scripture,” Lewis said in a telephone interview Friday. She said members of her group plan to stand for the objection and then leave for an alternative service two miles away in Durham.

Voicing the same basic objection for a group of U.S. and Canadian bishops will be David Bena, the assistant bishop of the Diocese of Albany, N.Y.

The objectors will not be disruptive, Bishop Kendall Harmon of South Carolina said in a telephone interview Friday.

“Our goal is just to witness to the truth and to do it in a loving way,” said Harmon, an Episcopal theologian.

But Harmon does not mince words about the harm he sees to his church.

“The Episcopal Church as we know it is dying,” he said.

Harmon said the issue isn’t about sexuality or about Robinson, who was elected by New Hampshire Episcopalians in June.

“This is really a debate about the shape of Christianity in the early 20th century,” he said.

In consecrating Robinson, who has lived with his partner for 14 years, the New Hampshire diocese is breaking with the longstanding Christian teaching that sex is for men and women joined in marriage, Harmon said. That teaching is fundamental not only to Christianity, but Judaism and Islam, he said.

Even if the Bible did not condemn homosexuality, “no one can actually tell me what the status of these relationships are,” Harmon said of same-sex unions. These are “relationships in search of theology,” he said.

Rev. Michael Hopkins, one of Robinson’s 13 “presenters” at the consecration, is past president of the Episcopal gay rights group Integrity. Hopkins called Harmon’s view blatantly unfair.

“You can’t tell us we can’t get married and then punish us for not being married,” he said.

With both sides saying they welcome gays in their churches, the disagreement about Robinson’s consecration centers on the definition of sin.

“Where we disagree is that I don’t consider Gene’s relationship with his partner as an expression of sin,” Hopkins said.

Both sides point to the words of Saint Paul, who in Romans (King James version) condemns women and men who go “against nature,” and who “burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly.”

Robinson and many of his supporters say there was no understanding of homosexuality as an “orientation” in biblical times. Anyone engaged in a homosexual act was presumed to be acting against their nature. “We’re asking the Bible to give us guidance about something it knew nothing about,” Hopkins said.

Harmon, however, said the Greeks and Romans knew plenty about homosexuality. To argue we know more now than religious leaders knew then is a form of “chronological snobbery” he said, borrowing a term from Christian writer C.S. Lewis.

“It’s an incredibly arrogant Western way of looking at the world,” Harmon said.

But Hopkins said Jesus knew mankind would continue to learn and grow, as the Gospel of John shows.

“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now,” Jesus said to his apostles in John. He promises the spirit of truth is come and “will guide you into all truth.”

Some of Robinson’s supporters say they don’t understand why New Hampshire’s choice of a bishop is considered an imposition on the rest of the Anglican Communion.

“I just don’t get it. I don’t feel we’re dictating anything,” Hopkins said. “I’m just asking it to respect where we are.”

Harmon disagreed. “When you elect a bishop, you elect a bishop for the whole church,” he said.

AP-ES-10-31-03 1719EST