NO BLOG ON SATURDAY

 In the beginning the elohim created the heavens and the earth.

        Have a safe and happy Sabbath!

        I hope to blog tomorrow.  I can do that.  It's the Lord's Day.

        Blessings...

THANK GOD FOR MEDICAL SCIENCE

 In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

    One of my biggest beefs with my baby brothers and sisters in Christ is their insistence that we cannot be Jesus people unless we interpret the Bible literally, which is literally impossible to do.

    To interpret the Bible literally is to abandon all recognition of story telling elements.  The logic of literalism demands we believe human history began in a garden with a talking snake and magical beings live in the sky.

    Talking animals and sky dwellers occur frequently in stories not in the Bible.  When I culled around in Campus Crusade for Christ during my youth, the standard objection to taking nonbiblical stories literally was that they were too fantastical to be believed, but plain damn science if they were in the Bible.

    We hear legends, myths, fairy tales, and fables when we are children.  These stories are called fabula.  

    No one believes the animals in Aesop's stories actually talked.  I shouldn't have to write this.  Anyone reading this blog knows it to be true.

    However, evangelicals want to believe fabula is history if it happened in the Bible.  In that, and in other ways as we have learned recently in the Sleazy Don era of American politics, evangelicals are all too easily deceived.  

    Imagine remaining a child all of your life and believing a wolf miraculously grew a larynx and vocal cords and actually spoke Greek in one of Aesop's fables just because grownups, who are elder children themselves, said you must believe it.

    My second beef stems from the first.  Evangelicals unfortunately are the most public face of Christianity American Style. This has dire results for our faith.

    One result is virtually no scientific person will seek to be a Christian if they are convinced that they must believe nonsense.  Evangelicals believe science is nonsense because sin makes it appear to be true.  

    That lightening theory that natural law makes electrical bolts strike the ground, or blasphemers, falls away from our eyes and our hearts once we accept the evangelical light of supernaturalism.  

   But the word "science" means knowledge.  Knowledge is so true that the biggest lying, drunken, drug-taking woman or man-slut and brazen hypocrite on earth (or in office) should know the germ theory is true along with the most pious soul who ever existed. 

    And if it is not true, scientists will prove that to be the case. 

    Another result of evangelicals being the most public face of Christianity is the dire consequence that often follows their puerile thinking.

   Covid 19 is a good example of the latter, but first, a few other asinine examples: 

    Public evangelicals make Balaam-asses of themselves when they invoke angels from Africa to stop citizens from counting votes or when a dubiously sane television preacher avers that his god told him Donald Trump would win the election.  

    I reckon God lied to him.  Apparently, lying is no terrible sin nowadays in light of that nutty preacher's Trumpian dispensation theology.

    Ditto a congregation that believes Jesus will inoculate them from the plague because their preacher tells them so. That kind of believing didn't work for priests during the bad old Bubonic times.  It doesn't work now.  

    The plague is a force of nature.  It belongs in the same mix of natural events that includes storms, floods, earthquakes, solar flares, asteroid collisions, and extinctions.  Bad things happen in nature, and we would all do well to know bad can become genocidal if we do not use the knowledge we possess.  

    One reason why it is difficult to deal with a plague is because we don't like what our reason tells us.  Plagues feel distant and harmless...that is until we contract it or witness the demise of someone we love who has contracted it. 

    Let's face it and not run away from it.  God's ability to save believers and unbelievers from disease has vastly improved because of medical science.

    Think about when the world wide flu hit in 1918.  The germ theory was forty-seven years old.  Pasteur created an inoculation that cured anthrax in farm animals in 1881.  Thirty-seven years would pass before 1918 saw inoculations saving lives.

    Today, we have more knowledge and experience during this Covid 19 year of 2020.  If we rely on that, deaths will not be as bad as in the past. If we turn our backs on knowledge for some political or religious ideology (idolatry: same thing), we are choosing ignorance and the suffering that follows.

    Going back to the hurricane analogy, a plague can feel as distant as a hurricane does if we are living on a mountain in Tennessee and watching a Katrina or a Zeta smash New Orleans.  We see it happen in the news, but it is too distant to affect us.  Tell that to the Big Easy.

    However, a hurricane would feel really real if a storm knocked out our satellite grid so that we could not play Fortnite, or check our likes on Facebook, or hear a nutty preacher tell us that Jesus told him that he (or Jesus) would be playing in the next SuperBowl.  

    During times like this when truth feels right despite knowledge, we should rely more on reason.

    We will never hear a politician say about a hurricane, "It's just a breeze.  It's a hoax.  It will miraculously disappear some day. Go outside. Buy some KFC. If it gets too breezy you can hide under a tree.  Besides, it's not as if a little wind will blow your neighborhood off the face of the earth."

    But we might hear a Deuteronomist minded Christ-child say that a hurricane hit Haiti a hundred years after they liberated themselves from a French oppressor because God wasn't too happy slaves wanted freedom and got it.  

    If we're going to think that way, let's be consistent.  We could very well say Yahweh or Allah is punishing former confederate states, once again, for being terrible idolaters and systemic haters of humanity not of their color.  Except this time, GOD didn't send a federal army.  This time GOD sent storms, floods, earthquakes, and plague.  

    Are pharaohs governing Deep South states, now?

    That wack is as plausible as that Haitian theological Balaam-assinity (sic) that nutty ninety year old baby Christian espoused.

    It is crucial to shine the good lamp on doctrine.  If dogma turns shadow before the glow of our GOD of love that we proclaim, then leave those doctrines on the wall or on the ground or in Sheol where they belong.  

    Blessings...

  

    

   

WORKING ON MY ADVENT SKILLS, PART ONE

          In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

          Religious traditions (and Star Trek) speak often about being a better person. My own religious tradition, Baptist Christian, urges me to be a better man in principle, but I am often at odds with the ideal human being posited by that tradition.  

          I was raised to believe a better Christian is growing spiritually the more legalistic he or she is, the more magical his or her knowledge is, and the more ascetic is his or her spirit. 

          I truck not with that.  On the contrary, I’ve latched onto something else that seems more authentic.

          A truer faith urges me to believe a better Christian is growing spiritually the more loving he or she is, the more truth and fact based his or her knowledge is, and the more abundant is his or her spirit.  

          Allow me to be more specific.  Being kind, loving kindness, is essential to growing spiritually.  Seeking justice, which includes the knowledge and work that lessens suffering and defends those the world could not care less about is growing spiritually.  Making love incarnate so it overflows in my life and reaches those I love is growing spiritually.  

            I could go my entire life and never cuss, never take a drink, never miss a church service, never doubt life started out in a garden with a talking snake, never stop believing women are second class Kingdom of God citizens, never forget to insist self-righteously to everyone else that my interpretation of the Bible, my theology, and God's theology are identical--yes, I could do all that and still be mean as hell to others.

          I truck not in that.  That crap is way too easy, especially when you have the personality for it.  What's hard as quantum physics is believing all that Sermon on the Mount/Plains stuff is what Jesus intended us to be in this world...now...and not waiting until we get to Sky World.

          Advent proclaims this gospel.  Advent proclaims it with the hope that a new Emperor dwells among us, a son of God who is not a Caesar, but a Son of God who is a Messiah whose peace is not a Pax Romana enforced by violence, but a Kingdom of God enforced by love and justice.  

          Enacting that program is being a better human being and then some.  I so long to be perfect at that, but the plain truth is, I suck at it.

          You see, the problem is this: I might turn the other cheek a hundred times, and speak kindly to insolent others a thousand times, but one moment of meanness reveals to me how I’m no more steadfast than those pillars of Dagon that Samson caused to collapse.

          Next time, I’ll share the event that inspired this post.  The event itself was an Advent inspired good-deed-for-the-day exalting my inner Boy Scout until my big mouth screwed it up.

          Blessings…

ADVENT, SPACE, AND TIME

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Yesterday, I wrote about space and time.  Let’s think some more about that in relation to Advent.

All of us, when we die, may be remembered fondly for those things we say over and over again.  My family will remember me always for saying about any event in the past, good or awful, “If there had been a hair’s difference in the past, I never  would have met my wife.”

I say that because it’s a miracle I met her, and the greatest miracle of all: she agreed to go on a date. 

In the Bible, when space and time were experienced as sacred, the person gave the place a name and erected an altar.  All of us have places and times in our lives that are unforgettable to us.

Susan and I first met in a space, a teacher’s paper and supply store which was the right place.  We met after school, about 4:00 PM on a Wednesday, which was the right time.

Momentous events unfolded rapidly that transcended mere clock time.  Coincidences fell into place so naturally the word “synchronicity” comes to mind (note one of the root words for time embedded in that word). 

First of all, we never should have happened.  I hate shopping, especially after school, but I was in desperate need of dry erase markers. No dry erase markers meant no Essential Question on my dry erase board which meant all my instruction would have blown apart until such time I purchased dry erase markers--according to the educational fad of that time.

Indeed, being ensconced on my sofa, nullifying with movies or video games the object permanence of angry, defiant inner city students would have been normal chronos time for me. 

Second of all, when it did happen, it never should have happened.  I sported a mullet at the time. I thought it was cool. She did not.  Susan hated mullets.  But the kairos kicked in with good conversation and one synchronicity that made it all happen.

I happened to have in my back pocket at the time, a card that represented another space and a future time.  In that space, five ballroom dancing lessons awaited me.  I imagine anyone who knows how to Foxtrot experiences kairos as they glide across the floor.  But I had no partner until in that space and time Susan said, “Call me," after I asked her.

          That first date was kairos time too.  I knew then I wanted to spend all my time, any kind of time, with her. 

Ray Bradbury once wrote a science fiction story about a man who traveled back in time and stepped on a butterfly he should not have stepped on, hence “the butterfly effect,” and by doing so he changed the outcome of an election in the future from a democrat before he time-traveled to a fascist after he returned.

If I had stepped on other insects than I did, if I had been afraid and not ridden that horse that threw me off and broke my glasses, if my beloved sister had not died in a car accident, if I had become an atheist instead of a Christian, if I had joined any denomination other than Baptist, if I had taken a bus to seminary from Chattanooga to San Francisco instead of completing a third of the journey on my bicycle, if I had only read the King James Version of the Bible, if I had never drunk a beer, never smoked a joint, or if I had called AAA just once to change my flat tire which I was perfectly capable of changing myself, I doubt I would have met my wife. 

          Let me bring this to Advent.  Anyone who has ever been in a place where and during a time when the presence of God has elevated life to pure joy has experienced Advent.  Anyone who dreads a day, yet feels dread dissipate the second one remembers all our days belong to God knows the experience of Advent.

The stories tell us all about it.  Indeed, they do more than that.  They show us so we might experience Advent again every year.

I know the wonder of it all.  In a paper and supply store, my future wife and I made wonderful kairos together. 

          Blessings…

HEARD AT CHURCH

                         In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

            Welcome back.  Let’s talk about space and time.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which my pastor tells us is a season all to itself.  He began his sermon with a story about a 1974 encounter with a woman at Vanderbilt University who told him she had met a man who changed her life. 

So, I’m thinking she met her husband, or she met a doctor whose surgery saved her life, or she met a celebrity.

She had met Sun Myung Moon.  He would turn out to be the founder of the Unification Church.

          My pastor said he and a friend went to hear Mr. Moon that day.  The meeting place was not a mountaintop, not a stadium, not beside a river, and not in heaven, but in the Nashville Ramada Inn.  My pastor said it was the most remarkable two hours of his life.  I wish he had elaborated on the latter. 

          As the sermon unfolded, as indeed all sermons must at least do, the impression of the story was to illustrate how uneventful the first Advent would have seemed outsiders.  Furthermore, the event it proclaimed, Jesus’s birth, also would have all the excitement of a Ramada Inn religious gathering circa 1974. 

          Indeed, the Christian Bible suggests that Jesus’s birth was not so earth shaking.  Much about his birth is obscure.  We have the earliest Christian writer, Paul, never mentioning a nativity. Mark, the first gospel, contains no birth narrative.  The nativity is absent in the last gospel written which is John.  Only Luke and Matthew, who include a lot of their words and timelines of Jesus’s life from Mark, have birth narratives.  They are not the same.  Do they agree?

          Yes, they do agree.  Here’s where and when:  something wonderful happened for humanity in space and time. 

Space:  something wonderful happened where Jesus was born.  It happened locally to the shepherds and townspeople; it happened globally to itinerant Magi who visited from other nations; it happened politically within Judea, a conquered nation of the Roman Empire.

Time: something wonderful happened for humanity when Jesus was born.  We have one word for time.  The Ancient Greeks had two words: chronos and kairos.  We get our word chronology from chronos. Anyone who has ever recorded their plans on a calendar knows about chronos.  That word indicates clock time. 

We do not have a word for kairos, but we experience it.  Kairos means the right time, which we know in our experience in phrases like “Seize the day” or “Opportunity knocks.”  Kairos is the right time, the right moment that had to happen the way it did because it was supposed to happen the way it did given what preceded it.  Because it happened the way it did and when it did, then other events must happen the way they will and when they will. 

In Luke and Matthew’s birth narratives Advent proclaimed the birth of God’s Messiah in chronos time, which is the hour in history when Jesus was born; and in kairos time, which is that divine moment when Hebrew, Greek, and Roman history came together at that one birth--where and when events that would usher in God’s kingdom on earth were just beginning.

It would take decades before that "Nashville-Ramada-Inn" event would become meaningful to millions.  It would take centuries before it would become meaningful to me.

Blessings…

THEY WILL KNOW US BY OUR LOVE

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

          Welcome back. Let’s talk about Buddhists.

          It’s embarrassing to admit, but Buddhists appear to be the only people of faith who are kind, loving, and accepting. We Christians were meant to be such people of faith, but are we?

          We had it all at first. The carrion world reeked with violence, domination, imperialism, corruption, bigotry, and greed. 

          We Christians had our Lord and his gospel. Unto all the world we went with the message of the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, of love and peace, of common fellowship at the dinner table.  The Way must have come as a word too good to be true to those who heard it, for we were nothing like the world.

          Furthermore, we had our Lord’s presence, the spirit of the living God loving within us. We had a vision and philosophy of unconditional love, of forgiveness, of kindness, and of joy. 

         Having God we had everything and needed nothing.  

          I heard a seminary professor say that for the first two hundred years of its existence on earth, there has been no record of a Christian fighting in the Roman army. Turning the other cheek was looking past revenge toward something greater.

          Somewhere, somehow, it all frayed, then unraveled, leaving a few threads to hold the faith together. Believers fought among themselves about how to worship Jesus and forgot to be like Jesus.  Believers made worldliness about sex, pleasure, and—if you can believe it—the love of money and power.

          Sex and pleasure make it easier to endure the world when it turns to crap, but money and power drives everything indecent. 

          History shows us how money and power has turned many Christians into rapacious fiends like those European Christians who murdered millions of Native Americans for Jesus and gold. 

         That’s just one time.

         Moreover, the love of money and power drives indecent ministers into preaching that lucre and empire are signs of God’s blessings. These modern indulgences extol the virtue of war, torture, and the gospel of wealth.

          It was never supposed to be this way for us, the Christians.

          If we become a nation of ascetics and have not love, how are we different from the world?  We are the world and joyless too. Indeed, if for any reason we, the Christians, make others into strangers, and then treat them with vile cruelty--that’s the everlasting sin of all cultures and governments.

          What the world needs is love. It needs a faith that believes in the power of unconditional love. It yearns for a people of faith who pray for peace and work for justice. 

          Thank God, there is such a people of faith. I wish it were us.

          Nobody ever heard of a Jim Crow Buddhist, a radical Buddhist terrorist, a Buddhist empire, Buddhist lust for gold, colonial Buddhist missionaries, and when was the last time anyone saw a slasher Buddhist film?

          So let us, the Christians refuse to get self righteous on the Muslims. When we start following Christ, and the world knows us by our love, then we can whisper to God Almighty, “We’re as good as the Buddhists, Lord.”

          Indeed, if they know us by our love, we may not think that way anymore. We'll be too busy following Jesus.

          Next time I’ll write about Christian politicians.

          Blessings…

A WORD FROM THE VOID

FOR VICTIMS

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

          Welcome back. Last time when I ended my post, I shared that I would write about Christian politicians, but I must write about the Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual and Trans-gendered men and women who were murdered in Orlando on June 12.

          My heart, my mind, and my spirit have been in the void. That is the place where no words or thoughts stir. It is the place where the breath of God moves until God speaks.

          Do not be deceived. I can write a lot of words, and I will. I’ll talk a lot too. But I am compelled to not remain silent when a disaster occurs, so these words pour out of my mind, not the void.

          I’ve known the void before. It was a year ago on June 17^th. I could not believe my eyes would see and my ears would hear of such a massacre as what happened in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

          Nine of my Christian brothers and sisters were slaughtered by a young man who looked as old as the high school students I teach. He walked into their church, listened to their Bible Study and prayer, and murdered them.

          The void presented itself to me then; it presents itself to me now for Orlando.

          When an unspeakable tragedy happens, a shroud of inexpressible silence blanks the mind as if the cosmos has become such a place where nothing can ever be uttered again.

          For Christians, this is a dreadful nothingness. The word is everything to us. The Greek word “logos” is translated as “word,” and it points to that presence of God that created everything.

              “In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him. All that came to be had life in him and that life was the light of men, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not grasp.”

          No Word means no creation, no life, and no salvation.

          A lot of words will be said about Orlando. A lot are being said already about Orlando. Many words sound insincere, spoken for the sake of public bluster by those who have everlastingly fought or fretted for the rights of gun makers and owners, but who have habitually come up blank for LGBT people except to condemn them. Their words sound rehearsed. Maybe they are rehearsed. Maybe they’ve articulated their rote revulsion too often after young Americans, very young Americans, and all the rest are massacred.

          We can tell when someone speaks words that are authentic, and we know they are true when the emotional loss flows from their bodies as much as from their voices. 

          We also know their words are true when they are transformed by tragedy. So often words abound about “these heinous acts,” but I see no transformation among the proclaimers.

          I wonder if the void does not seize us all when, “blood and destruction become so in use, and dreadful objects so familiar.” It can be a long time before the inexpressible is forthcoming. The word lies in silent abeyance.

          So we must wait. The word when it comes will explode in a big bang or glide in a gentle breath. It will create from our hearts, from our scriptures, our wisdom, our worship, our hands and feet, our work, our God of love.

          The victims who died were dancers, singers, tour guides, retail sales people, managers, a McDonald’s worker, salon workers, business owners, a lot of students, an Army reserve captain, and a mother who went to The Pulse to show support for her son by dancing with him. 

          She is gone, and he lives.

          Let us multiply by forty-nine the number of years these victims might have lived before dreadful murder ended them. Calculate the thousands of life years lost—void.

          These words are all I have written. I wait for another word. It could be a long wait. My soul feels as broken up as Anderson Cooper’s voice when he told us the names and occupations of those massacred.

          Next time, I hope to write about Buddhists and Christian politicians.

          Blessings…