MEA CULPA

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let’s think about public disgrace.

Love does not disgrace others.  God is love.  Therefore, God does not disgrace others.  That is a bit of logic from 1 Corinthians 13.

With 24/7 channels devoted to bringing us accurate, reliable news from around the world, especially news to suit common tastes, and it often strings someone’s dirty laundry for all to see, we are never without gossip.  There’s a song about that isn’t there?

I remember when we just heard about Nixon.  Those were the good old days.  We saw a good president going disgracefully. 

Now, we hear about Walmart vigilantes, ice bucket malfunctions, and preachers on the run for sex crimes. 

We also live in a time where public disgrace is entertainmen.  I almost wrote “sport” since exertion often comes with it.  I’m thinking here of what Romans called the mea culpa.  That means “I screwed up.”

Think of Tiger Woods whose “I screwed up” was broadcasted internationally.  The world saw the residual puffiness of a beloved face gone bashed by a scorned wife.

And who can forget the governor from South Carolina who went hiking on the Appalachian Trail, not the one in the good old USA, but the one in Argentina where his soul mate dwelled?  Actually, I had to look up Governor Stanton’s name as well as the name of his wife whom the cameras showed leaving Mr. Trail Blazer’s mansion, the one he had borrowed from those good old family values tax payers.

Speaking of family values, they elected him to be their state’s senator.  So much for that age old question, “If you can’t run your home, how can you run the senate?”

Thanks to those 24/7 news channels we are never without gossip.  Just like you, I love talking about other people.  It seems so human.

Sometimes I wonder if God were such a god who had a sense of humor who has created a reality show called Fudds and Flubs…or something like that.

If God were such a being among beings, he would not need to disgrace any of us.  We do such a swell job on our own.

Our God of love is not that.  God loves us even when we disgrace ourselves. 

I'm going on holiday.  Get back on Tuesday.

Blessings…

GOD IS NOT OUT TO GET US

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about our God of love who is never mean.

The title of today’s post must sound like New Age crap to the ears of a fundamentalist.

The fundamentalist homunculus who dwells within me certainly believes that God is out to get us when we disobey his royal sky-godness.  Every bad thing that happens to us is a punishment for our disobedience even if it was really Adam’s disobedience or something we did long ago before god got around to beating on us for it.

Talk about Old Age crap…

No, God is not out to get us. Life happens. Life as it happens includes pain and suffering. We have nerve endings; we feel pain.

Were our God of love such a Supreme Beast that he made it his business to disgrace us every time we disobeyed; surely, it would happen in such a way even scientists could agree we’ve got something supernatural grinding on us all the time.

For example, I heard a preacher once ask, “What would you do if a movie screen followed you around wherever you went and broadcast before those whom you meet all your inner thoughts and desires?”

Indeed, what would he do? 

It’s funny that the judgment crowd does not believe that God shames people directly. Nope, they are God’s vehicles through whom God shames.

Hmm. Am I wrong in observing that many Christians seem most eager to be vehicles for God’s public humiliation, but not for God’s love?

It seems contradictory to me that God wants us to shame and love others. Indeed, it is contradictory for love does not disgrace. Love is not rude. Love does not act in an unseemly way toward others.

Our God of love is not such being-in-the-world. God is Being Itself. We, the fallible creatures from our God of love, are numbered among the instances in creation that God said, “It is good.” 

So let us try not to disgrace ourselves in public if we can. It’s bad enough our family members and friends know what screw ups we are.

Love loves no matter what. I hear good news in that.

Blessings…

GOD IS NOT MEAN

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let’s think about our God of love who is never mean. 

In 1 Corinthians 13:5, Paul writes, “Love does not act improperly,” according to the Holman Christian Standard Bible.

The Greek word ἀσχημονέω is transliterated as aschémoneó in 1 Corinthians 13:5. 

It has been translated as “being unseemly” (whatever that means) or “behaving unbecomingly” (just as imprecise), or “acting improperly” (uh—yeah). This looks like one of those words that require examples to illuminate what it means.

For example, I was taught that it was unseemly to pass gas in public.  I even avoided using the word “fart” in the last sentence because I thought it might be unbecoming of the tone of my blog.  However, if I am doing a certain scene in the movie Blazing Saddles I would be expected to engage in hardy flatulence, and I may even be required contractually to proceed with beans and rigor. 

Certainly, around certain family members and friends it is downright proper and hilarious to pass gas.  However, it would be improper and unseemly to do so during a parent/teacher conference with my wife, my step-daughter, and my gaseous self.

Sometimes in the Bible we are given a list of traits that are supposedly just awful in a person’s character without an explanation of what those words mean, why they are awful, and exactly what it a person is doing that qualifies them to be labeled with those words. 

When we look at further into the definition of the word, we see that in Strong’s Concordance it means “deformed” “like a bald man” and depending on the context it means to “prepare disgrace for her” (not him?)

So, love does not do anything to disgrace people. 

This one is a puzzle.  We could argue that Jesus disgraces Peter when he tells his student that he will deny him thrice.  However, in this case, Peter disgraces himself.

When we think about it, our God of love does not have to disgrace anyone.  We do a pretty good job of it ourselves. 

Disgracing people, that is, being rude for the sake of humiliating someone is downright mean.  I cannot conceive of a God of love who does that.

Blessings…

THE WISDOM BUCKET

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about a Wisdom Bucket.

Every morning I can, I go to the YMCA to lift weights. Placed by the entrance door is a bucket with multi-colored strips of paper that I call The Wisdom Bucket.

Before I depart, I take out a strip and read it. It is a Bible verse. So far, all the verses I have taken have been from the Jewish Bible.

The first time I took one out, I thought, “Neat!  I’ll make one of these for school.”  I’m still waiting for the money and time to do that.

Today’s verse was from the Psalms. The writer wrote that the Lord steadied him in times of trouble.

This got me to thinking about the poor 3^rd person of the Trinity—the breath or wind of God. She is also called the Holy Spirit of God.

In my church we still recite something that says, “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost…”  I struggle mightily trying to relate to that ghost metaphor.

I read once or twice that there is no Hebrew word for spirit. Maybe it’s the same for Greek too. In the former, the word translated “spirit” is the word for breath or wind as I mentioned above.

I doubt very seriously that God sends trouble our way just so God can steady us. This entire good-creation world is a mess of trouble. God does not have to lift a finger to get us into that trouble. Instead, I believe God’s connection to us through our being in this world steadies us.

What we call the spirit, is the breath within us that comes to us from our God of love. What we call the spirit points to God’s presence in our every waking and sleeping moment.

We do not receive the Holy Spirit. That breath from our God of love has us all. Those of us who become Christians realize that God has been with us always. It ever has been so. I will always be so.

That is what steadies us.

Blessings…

LOVE IS NOT PUFFED UP

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about being proud.

The Greek word for pride in 1 Corinthians 13:4 means being inflated. It has been translated as “puffed up,” “proud,” “arrogant,” and so on.

Love is not puffed up, Paul writes. God is love; therefore, God is not puffed up.

It seems silly writing that about God. Pride as a virtue or as a vice dwells within creatures that are not so sure of themselves.

Pride is a driving force in the economic class wherein I find myself. We of the middle class are driven by merit and recognition. Respect is earned among us in accordance with what we have accomplished. If I’m Billy Bob shooting mourning dove mating bows with a camera on a high wire one day, I’m nothing, but if I’m Billy Bob directing and acting in a blockbuster, I get to be a guest on the Colbert Show.

The upper class is driven by money. Those who rose from the ranks would be proud if they came from the lower classes, but those who were born in that class—I wonder if pride affects them at all. I imagine a son or daughter of wealth would not care what others thought of them because they have enough money to purchase adulation at some level. I imagine rich folks take pride in having more money than other rich folks.

The lower class is driven by relationships. They have an arrogance that says they are wonderful just as they are, and they do not need to change a thing about themselves.

Now, I’ve just shared the current sociological construction that defines the psychological profile of the economic classes. From the standpoint of individuals it is nonsense. From the standpoint of surveys and scientific analysis it has the sanction of wide acceptance until something new comes along.

It remains difficult for us to imagine our God of love having anything to do with pride. If God were some sky god who needed worshippers to grovel before him and kill animals so he could smell their burning flesh, then a suggestion that such a god was an arrogant, fiendish megalomaniac with no one brave enough to protest him.

Our God of love is not that. If our God of love had a consciousness, it would be comprehensible to us the way a  low density galaxy is comprehended by a tick or a neutrino is conceived by a whale.

In any case, love transcends pride everlastingly, so God does too. Indeed, love has nothing to do with pride. All love does is love.

Blessings…

MIXED SIGNALS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about ambiguity as a part of the Christian life.

On the way to the YMCA every morning I pass an elementary school. A yellow light flashes and the sign says, “25 MPH WHEN FLASHING.” 

A few feet farther on, another sign says:

25 MPH

7:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M.

2:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M.

I pass those signs every morning around 4:30 A.M. Talk about your mixed signals.

Do I slow down?  Well, yes, if I see a police officer; however, if I don’t and I get a ticket do I not have a reasonable argument that the directions were unclear?

If I do not see an officer, I do not slow down. I zip along at 35 or 40 MPH. The speed limit is 30.

A collection of ancient books as large as the Bible must contain mixed signals, but only if we insist that everything in the Bible is to be taken literally and authoritatively.

Thus, we read in some parts of the Bible that wine is a good thing; in other parts it isn’t so great.

When we read the gospels, we have a synoptic Jesus and a Johannine Jesus. Among the synoptics we have a secretive Jesus, a Jewish Jesus, and an intelligent, almost Gentile Jesus.

In fact, there is just about every kind of spiritual word for everyone in the Bible. I prefer the Wisdom Movement over the Apocalyptic Movement in the Bible, for instance.

The signals aren’t mixed in the Bible. They are bound together so we can find our God of love in their words.

Blessings…

HEARD AT CHURCH

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about God’s will.

I’m preparing to teach my students about the Puritan religion along with its Calvinistic underpinnings. I thought about that this morning when I heard my pastor quote a recently deceased theologian who said that sin, disease, and disasters were not God’s will.

Anyone who knows anything about John Calvin, the scientist burner, knows he believed that nothing happens without God’s preordination. Everything’s already decided and set in stone. We’re just waiting for time to unfold to the last chapter.

Yada yada.

People still believe Calvinism today. I know my hometown Chattanooga, Tennessee has a church, First Presbyterian, wherein many of its members believe it.

There’s a college built atop Lookout Mountain, Covenant College, wherein the faculty and professors believe it.

I remember some of their students taking a Paul Tillich class for credit at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The professor who taught that class, Dr. Weisbaker, studied under Tillich at the University of Chicago. Dr. Weisbaker was a Princeton man with a University of Chicago doctorate pointing us hillbillies to a God loftier and larger than Calvin’s concrete idol.

The Covenant students did not do very well. It must have been difficult for them to imagine a God who was more abstract than their concrete deity. They were nice Christians, however, and they sought to follow Christ. We agreed on what was necessary.

The idea that our God of love would send a disease to punish an individual is silly and baseless. Worse is the idea that God would write the story of history and put cancer into his story just to bludgeon his characters (whom he created) as a punishment for sinning in the way he decided that they would sin.

Sorta like Yahweh did with Pharaoh.  Moses tells the Egyptian king that Yahweh wants him to set the Hebrew slaves free.  Pharaoh refuses.  God socks him with plagues that cause suffering for him and his people.  Moses tells him Yahweh’s message again, but Exodus tells us that God “hardens Pharaoh’s heart” and thereby makes him disobey.

Ancient people thought that way, but only because they did not understand the nature of disease, disaster, and possibly even sin itself. To suggest that God sends a tornado to punish Pecos Bill for getting drunk on a Saturday night today deserves scorn and ridicule.

However, many who suggest such nonsense are our brothers and sisters, so we must never scorn them or ridicule them.

It is not our God of love’s will that any should suffer, and it most certainly is not God’s will that we treat each other unkindly.

Blessings…

HE SAID; I SAID

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let’s think about yesterday’s post.

Yesterday, I wrote about daring the universe.  I met a nice person, a retired navy man, fifty-something, who said, “I know when things started to go wrong in the public schools.  It was when the government got involved.”

I said, “I disagree.  Schools got better when the government got involved.  When I went to school, we were segregated, and they seemed more concerned that we learn the Bible rather than science.  In elementary school Mrs. Greenway came every Thursday and taught us to memorize Bible passages.  I managed to sail through my entire time in high school without taking a single science class.”

He said, “There was no segregation when I went to school.”

I said, “No segregation in North Carolina?”  He had told me he was raised in a small near mountain town in North Carolina.  I thought about Pat Conroy’s narration about the high school in South Carolina that celebrated when Dr. King was murdered.

He said, “We had some, but everybody was happy about it.”

I decided not to disturb the universe.  I said nothing.

Blessings…

LOVING THE DAY SHE WAS BORN

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about a wife’s birthday.

There’s something awe inspiring about a birthday. Today is my wife's birthday.

Amazement seizes me every time I contemplate her being in the world.

From the moment her genetic material entered the life stream, she began making her way to me. She started as a sperm cell swimming to where we would meet decades later.

I also started swimming toward her when I looked like a tadpole. I was in the world five years longer than she was, moving to that place where our relationship began before we fell in love and married.

If she had never been born, where would I be? 

This world can be a shitty place. In this world people of fanatical faith behead other people of faith. In this world depression robs great life forces of their vitality so that they snuff themselves out. In this world children flee their countries and their families to live in a strange place they heard was a land of freedom and opportunity. In this world cancer takes away everything a person has during a process of replacing life with suffering. In this world nations are held in the grip of superstition fixed in the minds of ignorant people so conclusively that superstition is considered more viable than science. In this world there is war and there is war. When war ends, there is more war.

Indeed, there is horror, yes, but there is also the woman I love who was born on this day five years before I was born.

She swam toward me, then crawled, then walked, ran, drove, lived…while in the world, with a head start, I lived toward her.

Loving somebody fertilizes this shitty world with grace.

Blessings…

DO I DARE?

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about the faces that we meet.

I go to the YMCA every morning to lift weights when I can. Yesterday, I talked to a man I had written about before. He’s a nice guy, retired Navy, from a small town in North Carolina.

We were talking about education. He mentioned that he worked with the local public school system in a school for excellence program sponsored by his mega-rich company. In fact, he was the contact the person at the school where I work now.

That was all well and good, but then he said that he stopped because of the disruptive kids.

And then he said, “You know where it all started going wrong, don’t you?”  I had my own ideas so I did not answer. “It’s when the government got involved.”

Do I dare?  Do I dare disturb the universe?

Well, I dared. I told him I disagreed with him, and then I wound into a historical argument that follows like meandering streets.

I was very cordial as always. So was he. However, sometimes, I just cannot let things go without saying something.

Blessings…

WHY LOVE BOASTS NOT

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about boasting.

When I played football, I loved defeating an opponent. If I could stick a quarterback or a running back so hard that they fumbled or whooshed when they fell backwards, I loved to stand over them and taunt them.

There are some of those I wish I could take back.

We who love do not boast. It’s one thing to boast in jest, as if we are acting out a tall tale about ourselves, but to exalt ourselves over others at their expense is most unkind.

I do not like situations where I am competing for a job or some kind of recognition with the result being someone else’s feelings get hurt.

I can take it. Last January I interviewed for a job that I desperately needed because the place where I worked really worked havoc on me.

During the interview, I tried to toot my own horn, as they say, even though I prefer situations where others brag about me. I had heard that another teacher who worked for the same company I worked for had also interviewed for this position.

Had I been a script writer for a cable show, I would have written myself as funny and ironic with a predilection towards ripping others to pieces for a good laugh. I would have written myself mentioning that other teacher in some clever way as a setup for pernicious criticism.

But I have never been a character on television. I knew that other teacher probably felt as desperate as I. I wanted the principal to choose between us based on our merits as teachers and his instructional need in his building.

As it turned out he hired neither of us, but a person of color in order to offset the racial unbalance in his English department.

Looking back on that, and having witnessed since that time the unethical response of the company I worked for towards another who sought to skedaddle, plus seeing where I am now, I believe providence put me in my current, much better place.

The love our God of love persuades us to avoid self exaltation especially when our being lifted up is at the expense of another.

Blessings…

THE FUNNY BONE SUFFERS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about Robin Williams.

I have been unable to write about his suicide. The horror of his felt loneliness, the image of the final result, the terrible suffering that compelled this great comedienne, accomplished actor, and brother in the work of Christ to end his life knocks the wind out of all my words.

His way in the world surely offended the pious, but he treated people with the same acceptance and kindness that I covet for myself, and I see in the life of Jesus.

His fame did not diminish one iota his connection to the hoi polloi of us ordinary Joes and Janes who live, and breathe, and traverse our being at great distances from the search lights of renown.

I, who adores life so much, cannot imagine a disease of the mind that steals away my profound connection to life. I have no clue what it would be like to end my life while not caring about the everlasting pain my death would cause my loved ones to feel. I cannot imagine not wanting to hang around to experience “what could have been.”

I who “rage, rage against the dying of the light” see that I have been blessed to have been spared depression…so far.

Such despair I cannot fathom. I pray that I, and the world, never will from the hour of his self immolation to forever.

Adieu, Robin Williams. I shall laugh until I die, but not nearly as much were you still alive.

Blessings to your family and us all…

A HUMBLE GOD

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about our God who does not boast.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13: 4 that love “does not boast.”

God is love; therefore, God does not boast.

The Greek word for boasting or bragging is perpereuomai.

The following ideas are associated with the word:

Bragging, boasting, showing off, vaunting oneself, self adulation using rhetorical embellishments, gushing exaggerations, and tall tales to praise another person or the self excessively.

If God were a supreme being with a voice and a brain who created everything there is, he would have every right to boast. We might expect him to appear on every radio and television channel simultaneously and broadcast to the entire world in every language that he knows how to cook up a universe.

Yes, he could boast. We have seen samples in the Jewish Bible of Yahweh being very pleased with himself. The book of Job certainly depicts a god inclined to boast.

Of course, Job is a gadfly mucking up the pure fluidity of Yahweh’s boasting. If the god who created the sea monsters was so great, why did he create sea monsters? 

William Blake puts it this way in this sample of from his Songs of Experience:

Tyger Tyger burning bright

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Our God of love does not have to boast. Our God is the Creator.  The creation makes its own lovely case for rhetorical embellishments and gushing exaggerations.

Blessings…

MY AUDIENCE

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about audience.

We who teach writing emphasize the importance of audience. Everyone who writes, appeals to an audience. Readers gather like rain and linger like pools of water before the lightening forked by great writers.   

Literature remains for centuries or more.  However, most popular writing is structured according to the interests, knowledge, and, yes, the entertainment expectations of an audience.

I am well into my second year writing this blog. The audience I have in my head is not really the audience I wanted to address when I started.

I wanted to appeal to anyone who is a brother and sister in Christ. I hoped to expand the faith of fundamentalists and evangelicals; to fortify the faith of those who would number themselves among us, if only they had not been convinced by fundamentalists that they had to believe the ancient world view of the Bible as if it were the gospel; and to assure the faith of brothers and sisters already preparing the way for the next millennium…and beyond.

I still have that hope. All are invited to join me, all people of faith are invited.  There is no Greek and Jew with me, no Muslim or Buddhist.  We are all children of God. I welcome anyone's ideas and comments on this blog site.

However, my blog title purports to be about Christianity for the next one thousand years. Those who want to carry the gospel beyond flat earth cosmology and sky god idolatry into the coming centuries are my audience. Those who are believers, yet believe they are not believers, are my audience also.

Indeed, anyone who loves as Jesus loved is my audience.

Fundamentalist, evangelical, conservative, liberal, progressive, and emergent:  if you love EVERY SINGLE PERSON as Jesus loved, you are my audience. If, for you, theology is interesting, but not as crucial as loving as Jesus loved, then you are my audience.

Blessings…

HEARD NOT AT CHURCH

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let's talk about church guilt.

I didn't go last week because I injured my foot. I decided to stay off of it since it was my first full week of school.  I so wanted to go because my pastor had been on sabbatical for a few weeks.  It was his first day back in the pulpit.

He's no faith healer, so I took a day off.

Today, I did not go for a different reason.  Last week was my first week of school.  Just about every public school teacher in the nation is already way behind right now, including yours truly.

I had so much to do to get caught up. I chose not to go today.

Of course, I felt guilty and a tad cross about missing church again. When I lived with my parents, we the children attended church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night visitation, and Saturday night youth group. Church was the center of all things social on Signal Mountain.

I so terribly miss it when I do not go for so many reasons. I love the people there. It's always nice to see people who are truly good and with whom I have a special connection.

About that connection, I have a story to share.

I surprised one of my fellow church members last Friday night. Some of the faculty members invited me to join them in their annual first Friday gathering.  It only happens once a school year, so I could not miss it.

They wanted to convene at a nearby pub to discuss the unbearable lightness of education. As I mounted the stairs, I saw my friend with his office group sitting on the deck. He did not recognize me at first. 

After I said, "Hello," he still could not place me. I grinned at him and said his name.  He recognized me then.  I have a distinctive way of grinning at people.

He introduced me to everyone. One well imbibed, gregarious bald man among his number commented on my University of Tennessee button down shirt.

"Think they'll be any good this year?" he asked.

Like I do every year, about this time, I predicted that they would be undefeated and win the national championship.  

They were all Georgia fans so they got a good dawg howl out of that.

We chatted for a while until one from my own group came out to the deck and tried to pull me away.  I patted my church friend on the shoulder. "I'll see you later, my brother," I said.

It felt truly special to say that to someone whom I barely know, yet is family to me.

That is what church is, and it can happen anywhere.

Nonetheless, there's nothing like being in a sanctuary with high ceilings, singing voices, and divine fugues blowing out of organ pipes...and then the homily. 

Blessings...

A SABBATH PRAYER

The tinsel river coruscated with light from the sun an hour before our planet’s rotation turned the veil of the horizon over its lustrous, yellow face.  The glittering water rippled with such luminance that I imagined it to be all of the reality we humans will ever know glistering within a river, an ocean, a planet, and space that for all its infinity is a mere molecule moving and abiding in God. 

So may the Lord grant you rest.

May the Lord bless your mind with clarity and wisdom.

May the Lord bless your body with spiritual strength that fortifies you when your physical strength falters.

May the Lord love you and may you know you are loved.

May the Lord accept you and may you know you are accepted.

May the Lord’s rest wash over you like cool glittering waters.

Bless the Lord for God is good. 

Bless the Creator for the creation is good.

Bless the Lord forever.

Blessings…

THE LITTLE CHIEF TRIALS OF LIFE

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about our most crucial struggles in life.

Recently, a local doctor, and member of the church I attend, wrote an article in the newspaper wherein he mentioned that he went to Camp Ridgecrest in Ridgecrest, North Carolina for several summers.

Camp Ridgecrest for Boys was a four week, Southern Baptist camp where young men learned how to live in the woods, how to travel by canoe on a lake and live on the islands, and how to have fun doing it.

My grandmother wanted me to go so she paid the fee. My parents were happy to be rid of me for four weeks.

At Camp Ridgecrest campers celebrated our God of love and Native American culture. When a young man first arrived, he began as a Scout, and then he could become a Brave, then a Buck, and finally, Little Chief.

If he was really good, he could be promoted twice in one session.

Now, I may be recalling this list badly. Maybe there’s a web site where I can look it up.

Anyway, camp staff always claimed that the hardest trial to pass was to be selected as a candidate.

The last year I attended, I was selected. I was awakened at 11 P.M. with three other campers. We were taken to a cabin where the test was explained to us.

We were given two matches which we had to use to start a fire and keep it burning all night until 6:00 A.M. After that we were driven to a local mountain. It seems the name was Mount Kitsuma, but I am not sure. We were to run up the mountain with Little Chiefs who were on staff leading the way. Once we arrived at the top, we shared a vespers service. The next test we wrote a fifteen hundred word essay about what Camp Ridgecrest meant to us. Finally, around three o’clock, we were to chop wood for the big, final Pow Wow that included parents on the last day of camp.

Little Chiefs received a certificate, a knife, and a name.

The hardest part of the test was the trial of absolute silence. Everything had to be accomplished without saying a single word. One utterance and the test was over. A camper remained a Buck. He might be selected to try again the next time he attended camp.

Anyone who knows me can attest that silence for me approaches a violation of natural law.

I had no problem with the fire. I am a pyro at heart. With one match I could have burned down the entire forest quite sufficiently, but that would not have been in the spirit of the test.

I remember waiting with another camper at the foot of the mountain. We learned that the other two campers could not build a fire. The other boy disqualified himself when he asked, “How far is it?”

The run was tough, but I did it. The paper, I wrote by hand, I wrote it. Even now I wish I could see that magnum opus. The wood I needed to chop, I chopped it.

The silence I was required to keep, I kept it. I’m proud that I was able to be silent. That was a big deal to me back then. I’m certain my family members would love for me to take that vow again and more often.

The greatness of such a test has always been the lesson that the trials in life we do not choose can be endured if we pass through those fires we choose in order to make ourselves strong. Often, the best way to endure them is with silence.

My Little Chief name that they gave me was Grinning Ox.

Blessings…

GOD IS NEVER JEALOUS

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about a God who is never jealous.

As I said before, God does not have to be jealous. God is not a being among beings who is jealous of others. God simply is what God is.

Even if God were such a Supreme Being, what rival makes God so insecure that he--this god is certainly peckerfied—wants to smash his unfaithful beloved and her love interest?

I know about all those verses in the Bible about the jealous god, but I have an answer to that. Can you guess what it is?

Can you?

Wait for it.

It’s obvious and easy to guess.

Jesus is our final judgment about God. No where have I seen in the gospels a single time Jesus manifested the slightest jealousy.

In fact, the earliest gospel writer has Jesus’ students complaining about a man who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name. Jesus says, “Don’t stop him!  After all, no one who performs a miracle in my name will turn around the next moment and curse me. In fact, whoever is not against us is on our side.”

What is interesting about that passage is Jesus never said it. The early church believed this about him so the gospel writer had him say it.

Who knows what jealousies existed among those first and second generation Christians?  We get a glimpse of some serious God-envy in Acts where Paul and the Jerusalem church butt heads. Paul’s letters contain passages that suggest rivalries existed from the very beginning.

So for the writer we call Mark to have written the passage above about Jesus suggests that he understood his connection to God well enough to imagine him divinely.

Our God of love is not jealous, ya’ll. Stop believing God is.

Blessings…