Oxymoron

Maybe it's just me, but isn't the term Conservative Christian a bit of an oxymoron? The Christ I know from the gospels was anything but conservative in regards to his treatment of others. In fact, when it came to love and charity, he was downright liberal!

Head in the clouds.

Something came up in a conversation yesterday than continues to bug me. At one point, the individual said "we have to get ready, because Jesus is coming soon. Hallelujah!"
Theologically speaking, I do not quite know where I stand as regarding the concept of a coming apocalyptic rapture. In truth, I do not spend much time thinking about it.
Upon reflection, however, there are a couple of things about that statement that really bug me:
There is a wealth of apocalyptic and eschatological prophecy in the bible, much of it in the Old Testament. Oftentimes there is a bit of a disclaimer attached to those prophecies, stating, in effect "this is a warning. You have another chance to get your act together, lest I pronounce judgment on you." It seems to me that the "imminent return" of Jesus is at best a pyrrhic victory. Granted, if the apocalyptic literature is true, those in the body of Christ will be taken up to join him, therefore it would be a victory for us. But what of those we are here to serve as a witness to? When comparing the Revelation of John to other apocalyptic literature, the final judgment contained in the former would seem to be occasioned by our complete failure in our mission to witness to Christ in our actions and words.
A further problem with this forward looking theology can be illustrated in the following story from my childhood:
I was nearing my thirteenth Christmas, and had cause to look for something in the spare bedroom my parents used for storage. (Ok, I'll admit it. I was looking for my Christmas presents) under the bed, I found a long, narrow box, which I gingerly opened so as not to leave any evidence of my presence. In the box I found a brand-new shotgun. (Let me interject here, than in the Deep South of my youth, a gift of a firearm was seen to be a rite of passage of almost mythical proportions) I was thrilled! I eagerly awaited Christmas, knowing that my father would bestow upon me on that day, the mantle of adulthood.
I do not remember what I received for Christmas that year; but the shotgun was not among my gifts. I was crestfallen. Upon reflection, I came to believe that it was to be intended as a birthday present instead. After all, a rite of passage such as that would be more fitting on one's 14th birthday, after all. So, I waited the five months until my birthday, looking forward to the coming gift.
My birthday came. My birthday went. No shotgun. Once again, I do not remember the gifts I received; only the one I did not. I think each successive gift-giving holiday, a part of me expected that gift, and the recognition that came along with it.
I never found out why that shotgun was there. Twenty-odd years later, I still do not know. What I do now know is that I wasted a lot of time, probably squandered a lot of gifts and opportunities, while waiting for the one that did not come.
It seems to me that those Christians who spend their time and expend their energy awaiting the coming "attaboy" of the rapture, have a lot in common with that Roger of twenty-odd years ago. That Roger had his head stuck so far into the future that he was of no earthly use in the present and was incapable of enjoying the gifts of the present or taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the present.
What if that is the point of the Revelation of John, and the other apocalyptic tales in the bible? Maybe they serve as cautionary tales to remind us to enjoy life's blessings as they come, and serve God to the best of our ability every day?


Peace,

I knew it...

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Very Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	High
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Very High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

Unity

I called my Mother today, to wish her a happy Mother's Day. During the conversation, as often happens; the conversation turned to matters of faith. My mother and I occupy widely diveregent positions on the the theological spectrum; as she adheres to a rather fundamentalist, charismatic expression of the faith and I, well...I'm an Episcopalian. During the conversation, many small, niggling points of disagreement came up, and I (and she, presumably) let them go by without comment.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good theological debate. The problem is that I know my sometimes heretical thoughts would cause my mother pain and worry. So, I stopped myself short of debate, and allowed the conversation to move along into common ground where we could again agree.
Toward the end of our conversation, I became aware of what I was doing and it struck me that that is what we should do, in order to preserve unity.

"The cup uf blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of that one bread." - 1 Corinthians 10:16-17

"I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there may be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose." 1 Corinthians 1:10

I wish that all of us (myself included) could see our way clear to focus on that which unites us, rather than the relatively small things which divide us.


Peace,

Homosexuality is contagious. Who knew?

This is sad...

"A choir invited to Columbus from St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Atlanta, which is led by an openly gay rector, will not perform for a June 15 Morning Prayer service at Trinity Episcopal as some had wanted.

"I felt like it would not be an appropriate space, given their history and Trinity's history," the Rev. Jim Yeary, Trinity's interim rector, said Thursday."


To quote Simeon-

"What are they afraid of ? Cooties ? The gracelessness of this beggars the imagination..."

Just checking.

I had to find out how much my wanderings have affected my vocabulary....

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

20% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Brothers

I am humbled. Not only to have friends like fru, but humbled yet more to be reminded that God is capable of using a broken vessel like me to teach someone, even one that I respect so much.

This episode teaches me another lesson still: When I emailed fru, it was completely without thought, without plan. I did not seek to choose my words carefully as I usually do, I just zipped off a quick email that (strangly enough) served to teach my friend a lesson. How many times does the same happen that I am unaware of? Either for good, or (more likely) ill. How many times do the unguarded words of my tongue hurt my neighbor without my knowledge?

Lord, please help me to guard my tongue.

Peace,

Diversity

(~) DIVERSITY THE LAW OF LIFE
address by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. March 29, 2005

Most of us have read the first few chapters of Genesis in the Bible.
Isn't there a veritable explosion of creativity.

God, it could be said, went on a real spree, almost one might say, an orgy of creativity - where there was chaos, darkness and disorder, now there was order, cosmos and light and what a kaleidoscope of diversity.

There were trees, there were stars, a sun and moon, rivers and seas,
fish and fowl and birds and trees and animals - and what a splash of
diversity amongst the animals, not just one sort but a whole range of different animals, giraffes, elephants, lions, tigers, monkeys, cattle, sheep, goats, and among the trees, would be oaks, beeches, etc. and we could go on and on, and then there was Adam.

Now, that seemed to change the pattern. He was all by himself and then God saw that it was not good for man to be alone. And then we have that lovely story of how Eve came about.

A solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. We say in Africa a person is a person through other persons. We are made for togetherness, for friendship, for fellowship. We are created to live in a delicate network of interdependence and we are different precisely in order to know our need of one another. I have gifts that you don't and you have gifts that I don't have, and God you could almost hear saying, "Voila."

No one can be totally self-sufficient, the totally self-sufficient
human being is sub-human.

Diversity is the law of life. A tree is not just leaves. It has a trunk and branches, and roots and leaves - none can survive without the others. They are interdependent and perform different functions for the good of the whole. If the leaves were to go on strike and refuse to be involved in photo-synthesis and all that, the tree would suffer and the leaves would discover they were really nothing without the branches and the trunk and the roots. And so also with the human body. We say, "I see", not my eyes see - "I hear", not my ears hear - and I am an organism precisely because of the diversity of my organs performing different functions for the good of the whole body. Without this diversity functioning harmoniously I would be nothing.

Diversity is the Law of Life

Now God created us different, some tall, others short, some black,
others white (?), pink, yellow and red. What a fantastic array of
remarkable difference and diversity, different languages, different
cultures, different ethnicities, different this, different that. God
wanted us to glory in our differences, to affirm our differences, to
celebrate our diversities and to know that we are so obviously
interdependent.

Even now no single nation however prosperous and powerful can really go it alone. We must trade with other nations. We may find we don't have this commodity but they have it in abundance but lack what we have and God says I made you to be interdependent, to want to cooperate, to share, to care, to know that an injury to one will end up being an injury to all.

Unfortunately as seems always to happen, we perverted a good, our
particularity, our peculiarity - some then used it as a reason to
justify hostilities. We have used our differences to mistreat one
another.

And so we had obscenities such as slavery where frequently one race
claimed to be superior to those who could thus be bought and sold like so many cattle when families were callously divided, wives from
husbands, mothers from their children and sold separately. They were
regarded as barely human and their dignity was trodden horrendously
underfoot. Even someone as smart as Aristotle declared that slaves were not persons. For him, and so many others, human personality was not a universal phenomenon possessed by all human beings without distinction.

Racism exalted differences that made some superior and others
inherently inferior and so we had the horror of the Holocaust when Jews were systematically eliminated in Hitler's Nazi final solution for being inferior to the Aryan and used as scapegoats to blame for Germany's parlous economic situation in the 1930s.

This kind of thinking justified the brutal and heartless massacre of
six million Jews and gypsies and homosexual persons. There have been other instances of genocide as of the Armenians, or of those who perished in the killing fields of Kampuchea (Cambodia) and more recently in Rwanda and then the so-called ethnic cleansing in of the former Yugoslavia, people being done in simply because they were different.

I come from South Africa which carried the opprobrium of the world for its vicious apartheid policy which was a blatant system of racist injustice and oppression.

In that land they saw nothing wrong with public signs reading, "Dogs
and natives not allowed" - natives meaning black people. There was no subtlety at all. In many other countries racism existed though perhaps in forms that were not quite so blatant and unashamed. In this country you spoke of separate but equal and everyone knew that it was really a fiction, since no white person would have willingly accepted to exchange places with those who were called Negroes, or more insultingly as Niggers, to enjoy the equal but separate facilities. We know the outrages and the atrocities perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan, burning churches where little girls perished or the several lynchings - it continues to some extent as when a black man can be dragged to an excruciating death behind a truck. Racism is well and alive in so many parts of God's beautiful earth - we know what the neo-Nazis have been up to in Germany, or the National Front in Britain, and France, led by Le Pen, etc.

And we know that racism is totally un-Christian without remainder. It is unmitigated evil and totally immoral.

Why? Because racism says what invests anyone with worth, with value, is something extrinsic, something biological, skin colour, ethnicity. What does the Bible say quite categorically ? It says our worth is intrinsic. It comes with the package. It is part of being human. It does not depend on who or what we are. It belongs to all without distinction. And it is the wonderful assertion that each one of us is created in the image of God. Fantastic. Each one of us is God's representative, God's viceroy. God's standin. Each one of us is a God-carrier, since we are each a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Each one - everyone, whether we are rich or poor, beautiful or not so beautiful, red, white, yellow, black, young, or old, clever, or not so clever, our worth is intrinsic, our worth is infinite. And to treat one such as if they were less than human is not only evil, which it undoubtedly is; is not only painful as it certainly
turns out to be for its victims.

No it is all these things but more, it is blasphemous for it is really spitting in the face of God and we who are believers have no option - in the face of this evil and blasphemy we cannot be even neutral. We are constrained by our faith to oppose it
strenuously, for we can't say that well, it is respectable. No, that
would be to acquiesce in the crucifixion yet again of our Lord and
Saviour for remember he is the one who said, "When I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked, etc", for he is forever to be found with the outcast, the victim of injustice, of oppression.

When someone is the victim of any form of injustice and oppression, look carefully at that person and you will see the features of Jesus, and would we stand idly by when Jesus is vilified and illtreated yet again?

And how could we even have imagined that skin colour really told us
anything worthwhile about a person - does it tell us that you are
intelligent, humorous, compassionate, can I know these things just by looking at you? Of course not.

In the bad old days of apartheid in South Africa they used to have universities reserved only for whites. The main entrance qualification was not academic but biological. So I would say
suppose we changed that and said that this university was for large
noses only. If you had a small nose then you had to apply to the
Minister of Small Nose Affairs for permission to attend that
university.

Totally absurd - it ought to have been something to dismiss with a loud guffaw, except of course that it was no laughing matter for its
victims.

God does not give up easily. God still believes that one day we will
get to agree with God that diversity is beautiful - that it is wonderful to have a garden made up of roses, but how much more wonderful one that has a whole array of different flowers, roses, daffodils, chrysanthymums, irises, etc - how wonderful when we see the rainbow in the sky and it is a rainbow precisely because it is made up of different colours.

And so are we surprised that God has a dream ?

On the Resurrection Day Jesus spoke to Mary Magdalene and said some strange words to her. He said, "Go tell my brothers", referring to those so-and-so's who had betrayed, denied and abandoned him - he called them brothers and he must have meant it because he went on to say, Athat I am ascending to my Father and to your Father; to my God and to your God." That is mind-blowing.

God dreams that we will come to realise that we are family, the human family, God's family, made up of all sorts and conditions of people.

I sometimes say I am glad I am not God. To think that God has to accept a Judas Iscariot, a Herod, a Hitler and a Bin Laden, a Mussolini and an Idi Amin as all his children. To say we are family is the most radical thing Jesus uttered, a family of glorious diversity where there are no outsiders. All are insiders.

Jesus said, I if I be lifted up will draw all, not some, all to me - black and white, red and yellow, rich and poor, Christian, Jew, Muslim, pagan, atheist, Hindu, all, old and young, male and female, gay, lesbian and so-called straight, all belong in his family. George Bush, Bin Laden, Sharon, Abbas, all belong, all are
loved, all. You know God has no enemies. Certainly my enemies are not God's enemies.

God dreams that we would realise that we are family caring for one
another as family, sharing with one another as family, concerned for
one another as family, appalled that members of our family could wallow in poverty and squalor without clean drinking water, and adequate health care, enough to eat when we have the capacity to feed them.

We have the means to ensure that all God's children, our brothers and sisters do have clean water to drink, enough food to eat and enjoy good education and adequate health care. Peace can come for all when we live as God's family.

And God says, "Please help me to realise my dream, please. . . .
please. . . . please. . . . .please."

Proud Father

I do not believe I have ever been prouder of my kids than since the bible study incident. In addition to the stand taken the last meeting, and in light of hearing of the proposed concentration on the subject of homosexuality in future lessons, My daughter resolved to go back to the bible study and present her feelings on the subject and interpretations of scripture. So, she and her brother are studying and plan to go back in order to present an alternative view of the subject.
I am so impressed by their strength of character, sense of justice and willingness to stand by their convictions.
I love you very much, guys!