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himbo-the-clown · 3 years

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Okay yes I’m Jewish Father Brown posting again but I don’t yet have the time/energy to write my Jewish Inspectors fic and I want to project my Jewish Feelings onto these men so hear me out

Not only are all the inspectors Jewish, but they all deal with being Jewish in a heavily Catholic post-war small village in a different way

Valentine:

He’s kind of come to terms with the fact that antisemitism is just... part of his life. It’s gonna happen. He won’t actively antagonise anyone or flaunt that he’s Jewish, but he’s also not about to pretend to be xtian either

Yes he’s an atheist, yes he’s Jewish, no those two aren’t incompatible and he will be pissy about it if you ask him how he can be both. He’ll answer you, sure, but he’ll make it Very Clear he doesn’t appreciate it

Generally, he’s Not Here To Educate the xtians about Judaism

When he first meets Sullivan there’s a sort of moment of Recognition. He makes sure as he’s leaving to drop a hint that he’s also Jewish. Just so Sullivan knows that he’ll at least mostly be safe there

Okay so side tangent Sid headcanon that will become relevant: Sid’s Jewish. He was sent away during the Blitz (I’m estimating based on vague calculations that he was about 15 or so at the time) to an xtian family, and when his parents died he just sort of had to stay. So he was raised xtian and was never allowed to acknowledge that he was Jewish. I mean, most people can sort of tell and he gets stereotyped a lot for it, but he doesn’t know why because he’s just totally oblivious and the family he stayed with were Very Insistent that he was a good xtian boy and not a Jew and he ended up pretty much forgetting. He’s kind of heard hints of it from his grandmother when he gets to see her, but she wasn’t in a position to raise him and she thinks he’s probably safer not knowing

Anyway Valentine is very protective over Sid cause he sees this young Jewish guy who doesn’t even know that he has a whole culture, a whole family of people all over the country. A family who are collectively grieving. Sid doesn’t know what horrors have befallen his people (he knows what happened, but not that they’re His People). Valentine’s heart aches a bit whenever he thinks about it and he sort of vows to protect Sid in his own gruff way.

Valentine is proud of being Jewish but in a very quiet way. He’s not going to change himself to fit xtian society but also he’s sensible enough to know it’s a pretty bad idea for him to be Too Loud about it in Kembleford

Sullivan:

Oh this man fakes everything. He has never been authentic a day in his life. He pretends to be xtian, he pretends to be cishet, he pretends to be neurotypical. Nothing about how this man presents himself is authentic

He’s valid though, he knows the dangers of being different and he’s not about to give people a reason to hurt him

He’s from the East End of London, so he’s actually not used to hiding his Judaism as much. He’s from a heavily Jewish community and he was terrified when he got transferred to a small village

Why does he wear so much hair gel? Curls. Big springy Jewish curls. He can’t let people see them. He’s very very very strict about having hair gel in any time he leaves the house. Enough hair gel to keep his hair straight, which is a lot

He’s sort of... trying. To pretend to be xtian. But he’s really not very good at it. Like I said, he grew up in a heavily Jewish neighbourhood, he doesn’t know much about xtians other than, y’know, all the times they’ve oppressed the Jews. So he sort of goes to church when he remembers and tries to copy everyone else, but it doesn’t work very well. And he’ll pretend to celebrate Christmas but it doesn’t make much sense to him and he’s very uncomfortable

Most of his hostility towards Father Brown is because of the big alarm bells that go off in his head when he sees a priest in general. At all times he’s half expecting the Father to start talking about the “hypocrites in the synagogue” or some other equally thinly veiled antisemitism. He’s had Bad Experiences, he’s traumatised, and he’s having a Very Bad Time

He’s half envious of Sid and half pities him. Part of him wishes he was as ignorant of antisemitism and Judaism as Sid is, part of him wishes that Sid was as painfully aware of it as he is. But all of him feels a weird attachment to Sid because they’re both queer nd Jews, even if Sid doesn’t know it

He also sort of hates the Father for hanging out with Sid because he’s heard all the stories of priests stealing Jewish children to raise them xtian and while it’s not Quite the same situation with Sid, it’s a painful sort of echo of it, and he just desperately wants to save Sid, to teach him about who he is. And because of this mental association, seeing Sid do anything xtian feels like a punch to the stomach for him because it reminds him that Sid doesn’t know he’s Jewish

He got this sort of painful gut wrenching feeling when he saw Sid dressed as a priest. Like he felt physically sick even once he realised it was just an undercover job. It just hit way too close to home, especially with Sid not even knowing he’s not xtian

He’s calmed down a lot and is less jumpy by the time he leaves. He even thinks it’s a little funny when he finds out that the man taking over for him is also Jewish. He thinks about Valentine, he thinks about himself, he thinks about Mallory, and he thinks about how they’re sort of like a family. Almost like three generations, like being the Inspector is a family business. It makes him feel kind of warm and fuzzy in a way he hasn’t felt since his last Passover back in London with his whole family sitting around the seder table, and he can’t wait to have Passover with them again soon

Mallory (beloved bastard man):

He leans into it hard

Yeah, he’s Jewish, and what the fuck do you plan to do about it?

Durham has never really been known for it’s Jewish community, so he’s more than used to being the only Jew around

Part of why he’s such a horrible little bastard man is that he’s come to just accept Jewish stereotypes. His thought process is a little something like “if you’re going to accuse me of it anyway, I might as well do it”

He’s a stubborn guy, so he just decides to embody all the stuff people think he should be. Sure he’ll be annoying and rude and immoral and promiscuous and weak and all the other horrible things xtians think a Jewish man is

No he will not participate in xtian things if he can help it. He will not go to church, he will not celebrate Christmas unless he has to, he will not call Father Brown “Father”

He calls him “padre” because he refuses to call a priest “Father” it’s just too weird and xtian to him

He does NOT like Sid. He hates Sid a lot. He kinda blames Sid for not working harder to hold on to his Judaism (he’s Not valid for this, but it’s how he feels)

Anyway I’m not saying any of this is Good, but like.......let me have my Bad Jewish Representation

Also I like to think he speaks Yiddish :3

Anyway, one day I’ll write my Jewish Inspectors fic

#דיברתי #father brown #rabbi brown #I know there's probably an audience of like 3 Jewish father brown fans but I can and will subject the whole fandom to my bullshit #not to project my own Jewish traumas onto them but like... that's exactly what I'm doing #the Jewish Inspectors fic WILL be heart wrenching but I emotionally need to write it for my own sake tbh

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elizabethan-memes · 4 years

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Can you elaborate on Erusamus and the reformation please, or at least point me toward sources? Politics make more sense than philosophy to me, so I see the reformation through the lense of Henry VIII, or the Duke of Prussia who dissolved the teutonic order, or France siding with the protestants during the 30 Years War because Protestants > Hapsburgs

So sorry to take so long!

If you needed this answer for academic reasons, given that summer term is pretty much done I’m probably too late to help, but I hate to leave an ask unanswered.

HELLA LONG ESSAY BENEATH THE CUT SORRY I WROTE SELF-INDULGENTLY WITHOUT EDITING SO THERE IS WAY MORE EXPLANATION THAN YOU PROBABLY NEED

Certainly religion has been politicised, you need look no further than all the medieval kings having squabbles with the pope. Medieval kings were not as devastated by the prospect of excommunication as you’d expect they’d be in a super-devout world, it was kinda more of a nuisance (like, idk, the pope blocking you on tumblr) than the “I’m damned forever! NOOOOOOO!” thing you’d expect. I’m not saying excommunication wasn’t a big deal, but certainly for Elizabeth I she was less bothered than the pope excommunicating her than the fact that he absolved her Catholic subjects of allegiance to her and promised paradise to her assassin (essentially declaring open season on her).

I think, however, in our secular world we forget that religion was important for its own sake. Historians since Gibbon have kind of looked down on religion as its own force, seeing it as more a catalyst for economic change (Weber) or a tool of the powerful. If all history is the history of class struggle, then religion becomes a weapon in class warfare rather than its own force with its own momentum. For example, historians have puzzled over conversion narratives, and why Protestantism became popular among artisans in particular. Protestantism can’t compete with Catholicism in terms of aesthetics or community rituals, it’s a much more interior kind of spirituality, and it involves complex theological ideas like predestination that can sound rather drastic, so why did certain people find it appealing?

(although OTOH transubstantiation is a more complex theological concept than the Protestant idea of “the bread and wine is just bread and wine, it’s a commemoration of the Last Supper not a re-enactment, it aint that deep fam”).

I’ve just finished an old but interesting article by Terrence M. Reynolds in Concordia Theological Quarterly vol. 41 no. 4 pp.18-35 “Was Erasmus responsible for Luther?” Erasmus in his lifetime was accused of being a closet Protestant, or “laying the egg that Luther hatched”. Erasmus replied to this by saying he might have laid the egg, but Luther hatched a different bird entirely. Erasmus did look rather proto Protestant because he was very interested in reforming the Church. He wanted more people to read the Bible, he had a rather idyllic dream of “ploughmen singing psalms as they ploughed their fields”. He criticised indulgences, the commercialisation of relics and pilgrimages and the fact that the Papacy was a political faction getting involved in wars. He was worried that the rituals of Catholicism meant that people were more mechanical in their religion than spiritual: they were memorising the words, doing the actions, paying the Church, blindly believing anything a poorly educated priest regurgitated to them. They were confessing their sins, doing their penances like chores and then going right back to their sins. They were connecting with the visuals, but not understanding and spiritually connecting with the spirit of Jesus’ message and his ideals of peace and love and charity and connecting with God. Erasmus translated the NT but being a Renaissance humanist, he went ad fontes (‘to the source’) and used Greek manuscripts, printing the Greek side by side with the Latin so that readers could compare and see the translation choices he made. His NT had a lot of self-admitted errors in it, but it was very popular with Prots as well as Caths. Caths like Thomas More were cool with him doing it, but it was also admired by Prots like Thomases and Cromwell and Cranmer and Tyndale himself. When coming across Greek words like presbyteros, Erasmus actually chose to leave it as a Greek word with its own meaning than use a Latin word that didn’t *quite* fit the meaning of the original.

However, he did disagree with Protestants on fundamental issues, especially the question of free will. For Luther, the essence was sole fide: salvation through faith alone. He took this from Paul’s letter to the Romans, where it says that through faith alone are we justified. Ie, humans are so fallen (because of the whole Eve, apple, original sin debacle) and so flawed and tainted by sin, and God is so perfect, that we ourselves will never be good enough. All the good works in the world will never reach God’s level of perfection and therefore we all deserve Hell, but we won’t go to hell because God and Jesus will save us from the Hell we so rightly deserve, by grace and by having faith in Jesus’ sacrifice, who will alone redeem us. The opposite end of the free will/sola fide spectrum is something called Pelagianism, named after the guy who believed it, Pelagius, who lived centuries and centuries before the Ref, it’s the belief that humans can earn their salvation by themselves, by good works. Both Caths and Prots considered Pelagius a heretic. Caths like Erasmus believed in a half-way house: God reaches out his hand to save you through Jesus’ example and sacrifice, giving you grace, and you receive his grace, which makes you want to be a good person and do good works (good works being things like confession of sins, penances, the eucharist, charity, fasting, pilgrimages) and then doing the good works means you get more grace and you are finally saved, or at least you will go to purgatory after death AND THEN be saved and go to heaven, rather than going straight to Hell, which is what happens if you reject Jesus and do no good works and never repent your sins. If you don’t receive his grace and do good works, you won’t make the grade for ultimate salvation.

(This is why it’s important to look at the Ref as a theological as well as a political movement because if you only look at the political debates, Erasmus looks more Protestant than he actually was.)

There are several debates happening in the Reformation: the role of the priest (which is easily politicised) free will vs predestination, transubstantiation or no transubstantiation (is or isn’t the bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Jesus by God acting through the priest serving communion) and the role of scripture. A key doctrine of Protestantism is sola scriptura. Basically: if it’s in the Bible, it’s the rules. If it’s not in the Bible, it’s not in the rules. No pope in the bible? No pope! No rosaries in the bible? No using rosaries! (prayer beads)

However, both Caths and Prots considered scripture v.v. important. Still, given that the Bible contains internal contradictions (being a collection of different books written in different languages at different times by different people) there was a hierarchy of authority when it came to scripture. As a general rule of thumb, both put the New T above the Old T in terms of authority. (This is partly why Jews and Muslims have customs like circumcision and no-eating-pig-derived-meats that Christians don’t have, even though the order of ‘birth’ as it were goes Judaism-Christianity-Islam. All 3 Abrahammic faiths use the OT, but only Christians use the NT.)

1. The words of Jesus. Jesus said you gotta do it, you gotta do it. Jesus said monogamy, you gotta do monogamy. Jesus said no divorce, you gotta do no divorcing (annulment =/= divorce). Jesus said no moneylending with interest (usury), you gotta do no moneylending with interest (which is partly why European Jews did a lot of the banking. Unfortunately, disputes over money+religious hatred is a volatile combination, resulting in accusations of conspiracy and sedition, leading to hate-fuelled violence and oppression.) The trouble with the words of Jesus is that you can debate or retranslate what Jesus meant, especially easily as Jesus often spoke in parables and with metaphors. When Jesus said “this is my body…this is my blood” at the Last Supper, is that or is that not support for transubstantiation? When Jesus called Peter the rock on which he would build the church, was that or was that not support for the apostolic succession that means Popes are the successor to St Peter, with Peter being first Pope? When the gospel writers said Jesus ‘did more things and said more things than are contained in this book’, does that or does that not invalidate the idea of sola scriptura?

2. The other New Testament writers, especially St. Paul and the Relevation of St John the Divine. (Divine meaning like seer, divination, not a god or divinity). These are particularly relevant when it comes to discussing the role of priests and priesthood, only-male ordination, and whether women can preach and teach religion.

3. The Old Testament, especially Genesis.

4. The apocryphal or deuterocanonical works. These books are considered holy, but there’s question marks about their validity, so they’re not as authoritative as the testaments. I include this because the deuterocanonical book 2 Maccabees was used as scriptural justification for the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, but 2 Maccabees is the closest scipture really gets to mentioning any kind of purgatory. Protestants did not consider 2 Maccabees to be strong enough evidence to validate purgatory.

5. The Church Fathers, eg. Origen, Augustine of Hippo. Arguably their authority often comes above apocryphal scripture. It’s from the Church Fathers that the concept of the Trinity (one god in 3 equal persons, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit) is developed because it’s not actually spelled out explicitly in the NT. Early modern Catholics and Protestants both adhered to the Trinity and considered Arianism’s interpretation of the NT (no trinity, God the Father is superior to Jesus as God the Son) to be heresy. Church Fathers were important to both Catholics and Protestants: Catholics because Catholics did not see scripture as the sole source of religious truth, so additions made by holy people are okay so long as they don’t *contradict* scripture, and so long as they are stamped with the church council seal of approval, Protestants because they believed that the recent medieval theologians and the papacy had corrupted and altered the original purity of Christianity. If they could show that Church Fathers from late antiquity like Augustine agreed with them, that therefore proved their point about Christianity being corrupted from its holy early days.

Eamon Duffy’s book Stripping of the Altars is useful because it questions the assumptions that the Reformation and Break with Rome was inevitable, or that the Roman Catholic Church was a corrupt relic of the past that had to be swept aside for Progress, or that most people even wanted the Ref in England to happen. Good history essays need to discuss different historians’ opinions and Duffy can be relied upon to have a different opinion than Protestant historians. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s works are good at explaining theological concepts, he is a big authority on church history and he’s won a whole bunch of prizes. He was actually ordained a deacon in the Church of England in the 1980s but stopped being a minister because he was angry with the institution for not tolerating the fact he had a boyfriend. The ODNB is a good source to access through your university if you want to read a quick biography on a particular theologian or philosopher, but it only covers British individuals. Except Erasmus, who has a page on ODNB despite being not British because he’s just that awesome and because his influence on English scholarship and culture was colossal. Peter Marshall also v good, esp on conversion. Euan Cameron wrote a mahoosive book called the European Reformation.“More versus Tyndale: a study of controversial technique” by Rainer Pineas is good for the key differences in translation of essential concepts between catholic and protestant thinkers. The Sixteenth Century Journal is a good source of essays as well.

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pamphletstoinspire · 6 years

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The Church's Year - Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost

At the Introit of the Mass the justice and mercy of God are praised:

INTROIT Thou art just, O Lord, and thy judgment is right; deal with thy servant according to thy mercy. Blessed are the undefiled in the way; who walk in the law of the Lord. (Ps. CXVIII.) Glory etc.

COLLECT Grant to Thy people, we beseech Thee, O Lord, to avoid the defilements of the devil, and with a pure mind to follow Thee, the only God. Thro'.

EPISTLE (Ephes. IV. 1- 6.) Brethren, I, a prisoner in the Lord, beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation in which you are called. With all humility and mildness, with patience, supporting one another in charity, careful to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. One body and one spirit, as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God, and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all. Who is blessed for ever and ever. Amen.

ADMONITION Implore God continually for grace to accomplish and make certain your vocation by practicing these virtues, recommended by St. Paul.

INSTRUCTION ON THE ONE ONLY SAVING FAITH

One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. (Ephes. IV. 5. 6.)

These words of the great Apostle of the Gentiles show clearly, that it is not a matter of indifference, what faith or religion we profess. Yet in our times so poor in faith, we often hear the assertion from so-called enlightened men: “It is all the same to what religion we belong, we can be saved in any, if we only believe in God and live uprightly." This assertion is impious! Consider, ..my dear Christian, there is but one God, and this one God has sent only one Redeemer; and this one Redeemer has preached but one doctrine, and has established but one Church. Had God wished that there should be more than one Church, then Christ would have founded them, nay, He would not have preached a new doctrine, established a new, Christian Church; for the Jews also believed in one God. But Jesus cast aside Paganism and Judaism, promulgated a new religion, and founded a new Church. Nowhere does He speak of Churches, but always of one Church. He says that we must hear this Church, and does not add, that if we will not hear this Church, we may hear some other. He speaks of only one shepherd, one flock, and one fold, into which all men are to be brought. In the same manner He speaks always of one kingdom upon earth, just as there is only one kingdom in heaven; of only one master of the house and one family, of one field and one vineyard, whereby He referred to His Church; of one rock, upon which He would build His Church. On the day before His death, He prayed fervently to His Heavenly Father, that all who believe in Him, might be and remain one, as He and the Father are one, and He gave His disciples the express command to preach His gospel to all nations, and to teach them all things, whatsoever He had commanded them. This command the apostles carried out exactly. Everywhere they preached one and the same doctrine, establishing in all places Christian communities, which were all united by the bond of the same faith. Their principal care was to prevent schisms in faith, they warned the faithful against heresy, commanded all originators of such to be avoided, and anathematized those who preached a gospel different from theirs. As the apostles, so did their successors. All the holy Fathers speak with burning love of the necessary unity of faith, and deny those all claim to salvation who remain knowingly in schism and separation from the true Church of Christ.

Learn hence, dear Christian, that there can be but one true Church; if there is but one true Church, it naturally follows that in her alone salvation can be obtained, and the assertion that we can be saved by professing any creed, is false and impious. Jesus who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life , speaks of but one Church , which we must hear, if we wish to be saved. He who does not hear the Church, He says, should be considered as a heathen and publican. He speaks furthermore of one fold, and He promises eternal life only to those sheep who belong to this fold, obey the voice of the shepherd and feed in His pasture. The apostles were also convinced that only the one, true Church could guide us to salvation. Without faith it is impossible to please God, writes St. Paul to the Hebrews, (XI. 6.) and this faith is only one, he teaches the Ephesians. (IV. 5.) If the apostles had believed that we could be saved in any religion, they would certainly not have contended so strenuously for unity, they would not have declared so solemnly, that we should not belong to any other than to Christ alone, and that we must receive and obey His doctrine. As the apostles taught so did their successors and all the Fathers agree that there is no salvation outside of the true Church. St. Cyprian writes: "If any one outside Noah's ark could find safety, then also will one outside the Church find salvation." (De unit. eccl. c. 7.) From all this it follows, that there is only one true Church which insures salvation, out of which no one can be saved.

But which is this Church? The Roman Catholic, Apostolic Church, for she alone was founded, by Christ, she alone was watered with the blood of the apostles and of thousands of holy martyrs, she alone has the marks of the true Church of Christ, [see the Instruction for the first Sunday after Easter*] against which He has promised that the powers of hell shall not prevail. Those who fell away from the Church three hundred years ago do, indeed contend that the Church fell into error and no longer possessed the true, pure gospel of Jesus. Were they right, Jesus might be blamed, for He established this Church, promising to remain with her and guide her through the Holy Ghost until the end of the world. He would, therefore, have broken His word, or He was not powerful enough to keep it. But who dare say this? On the contrary, she has existed for eighteen hundred years, whilst the greatest and most powerful kingdoms have been overthrown, and the firmest thrones crumbled away. If she were not the only true and saving Church, founded by Christ, how could she have existed so long, since Jesus Himself said: Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. (Matt. XV. 13.) If she were not the Church of Christ, she would have been destroyed long ago, but she still stands today, whilst her enemies' who battled against her have disappeared, and will continue to disappear; for the gates of hell shall not prevail against her, says our Lord. He has kept His promise and will keep it, notwithstanding all the oppositions and calumnies of her implacable enemies.

*INSTRUCTION FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER EASTER - As in his gospel, so in his epistles, and especially in this, St. John proves the divinity of Christ which had been denied by some heretics. He says that Christ had come to purify all men from sin by water and blood, that is, by His blood shed on the cross for our reconciliation, and by the water of baptism to which He has given the power, the divine effect of His blood, and has thus proved Himself the divine Redeemer. This His divine dignity is attested by the Holy Ghost who lived in Christ and worked through Him with His fulness, and when sent by Him after our Lord's Ascension, produced most wonderful effect in the apostles and the faithful. As now on earth three, the Spirit, water, and blood, give testimony of Christ's divinity and agree in it, so also in heaven three, the Father, who calls Him His beloved Son, (Matt, III. 17.) the Word, or the Son Himself, who wrought so many miracles, the Holy Ghost, when He descended upon Him at the baptism in the Jordan, (Luke III. 22.) give testimony of His divinity, and these also agree with one another in their testimony. If Christ is truly God, then we must believe in Him, and this faith must be a living one, that is, it must prove fertile in good works, and this faith conquers the world by teaching us to love God above all, to despise the world with its pleasures, and to overcome it by indifference. Let us strive to have such faith, and we shall overcome all temptations and gain the eternal crown.* {End for instructions for the first Sunday after Easter]*

You see, therefore, my dear Christian, that the Catholic Church is the only true, the only saving Church; be not deceived by those who are neither cold nor warm, and who say: "We can be saved in any religion, if we only believe in God and live uprightly," and who wish to rob you of your holy faith, and precipitate you into the sea of doubt, error, and falsehood. Outside of the Catholic Church there is no salvation; hold this firmly, for it is the teaching of Jesus, His apostles, and all the Fathers; for this doctrine the apostles and a countless host .of 'the faithful have shed their blood. Obey the teaching of this Church, follow her laws, make use of her help and assistance, and often raise your hands and heart to heaven to thank God for the priceless grace of belonging to this one, true Church; forget not to pray for your erring brethren, who are still outside of the Church that the Lord may lead them into her, that His promise may be fulfilled: There will be one fold, and one shepherd.

GOSPEL (Matt XXII. 35-46.) At that time, The Pharisees came to Jesus, and one of them, a doctor of the law, asked him, tempting him: Master, which is the great commandment of the law? Jesus said to him: Thou shaft love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.

This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. And the Pharisees being gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying: What think you of Christ; whose son is he? They say to him: David's. He saith to them: How then doth David in spirit call him Lord; saying: The Lord said to my Lord, Sit on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son? And no man was able to answer him a word: neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions.

What is meant by loving god?

It means to find one’s pleasure, happiness and joy in God, because He is he highest and most perfect Good; to rejoice in His infinite majesty and glory; to direct one’s thoughts, words, and actions towards Him as our only end: to do His will in all things, an be prepared always rather to lose everything, even life itself, than His friendship.

What is meant by loving God with our whole heart, our whole soul, etc. ?

These different expressions all properly mean the same thing, namely, that we should cling to God with a true, sincere and heartfelt love, but by our heart our will may be understood, that power by which we wish God all glory, and desire nothing more than that He be known, loved, and honored by all men. The soul signifies the intellect by means of which we should endeavor to arrive at the knowledge and love of God, praise and glorify Him above all things. The mind may signify our memory, with Which we continually remember God and the innumerable benefits bestowed on us by Him, praise Him for them, thank Him, and always walk irreproachably before Him. Finally, we love God with all our strength, if we employ all the powers and faculties of our body in His service, and direct all our actions to Him as to our last end.

Is it true love, if we love God only because He is good to us?

This is grateful love, which is good and praiseworthy, but it is not perfect love, because the motive is self-love and self-interest.

What, therefore, is perfect love?

When we love God only because He is in Himself the highest Good, and most worthy of all love. In this manner we should endeavor to love Him; not through self-interest not through hope of reward, not through fear of punishment, but only because He, as the greatest Good, contains all goodness and, therefore, deserves to be loved only on account of Himself. Such love had St. Francis Xavier, which he very beautifully expressed in the following canticle, composed by himself:

O God, I give my love to Thee, Not for the heaven Thou'st made for me, Nor yet because who love not Thee Will burn in hell eternally. In dying throes on Calvary, My Jesus, Thou didst think of me, Didst bear the lance, the nails, the tree, Rude scoffs, contempt and infamy, And pangs untold, all lovingly, - The scourge, the sweat the agony, And death itself, -all, all for me, A sinner and Thy enemy. Why therefore, should not I love Thee, O Jesus, dead for love of me? Not that I may in heaven be, Not that from hell I may be free; Not urged by dread of endless pain, Not lured by prize of endless gain, But as Thou, Lord, didst first love me, So do I love and will love Thee. To Thee, my King, I give my heart, For this alone t hat God Thou art.

Can fear exist with love?

Servile fear cannot, but filial fear may. Servile fear is rather a fear of punishment than a fear of offending God. Where such fear exists, love cannot dwell; for in love, writes St. Augustine, (in Joann. Tr. 9.) there is no fear, for perfect love casteth out fear. ( I John IV. 18.) Filial fear, on the contrary, is the fear of offending God. This fear leads to love and is also an effect of love; it is the beginning of wisdom. (Eccles. I. 16.) Let us cherish this fear, for it will drive away sin, as sentinels expel thieves; (Ecclus. I 16.) it will replenish us with joy, and gladness, and obtain for us in our last moments divine blessings and a holy death. (Ecclus.. I. 27.)

How may we obtain a perfect love of God?

By meditating on His infinite, divine perfections, such as His almighty power, His wisdom, His splendor, His beauty, etc.; by contemplating His boundless love for us, in the incarnation, sufferings, and death of His only-begotten Son; by frequently practicing this virtue; by fervent prayer; and by making acts of love, such as are found in good prayer-books.

When should we practice the virtue of love of Gods?

As soon as we have arrived at the age of reason; when the world, the devil and the flesh, endeavor to withdraw us from God, by their apparent goods and pleasures; when we have separated ourselves from God by mortal sin; when we receive the holy Sacraments, particularly holy Communion; when we receive a particular grace from God; when we use food and drink and other lawful enjoyments; when we contemplate God's creatures; often during the day.; and especially in the hour of death.

[Concerning the love of our neighbor , see the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost].**

** From the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost - Why does Christ call His disciples blessed?

Because they had the happiness which so many patriarchs and prophets had desired in vain, namely: of seeing Him and hearing His teaching. Though we have not the happiness to see Jesus and hear Him, nevertheless we are not less blessed than the apostles, since Christ pronounces those blessed who do not see and yet believe. (John XX. 29.)

What, besides faith, is necessary for salvation?

That we love God and our neighbor, for in these two commandments consists the whole law. (Matt. XXII. 40.)

Who is our neighbor?

Every man, be he an acquaintance or a stranger, poor or rich, of our faith or of another; for the Samaritan did not ask the one who had fallen among robbers: Who and whence are you? but considered him his neighbor, and proved himself as such by his prompt assistance.

How should we love our neighbor?

As we love ourselves, that is, we should wish him everything good, and when in necessity do to him as we would wish others to do to us, and, on the contrary, not wish nor do to him anything that we do not wish to be done to ourselves. In this way the Samaritan loved his neighbor, and in this he was far superior to the priest and the Levite.

How can we especially practice love for our neighbor?

By the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. [See instruction for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost.]*** Besides which we must rejoice at the spiritual and corporal graces of our neighbor, which God communicates to him; we must grieve for his misfortunes, and, according to the example of St. Paul, (I Cor. I. 4.) have compassion for him; we must bear with the faults of our neighbor, as St. Paul again admonishes us: Bear ye one another's burdens, and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ. (Gal. VI. 2.)

***INSTRUCTION ON GOOD WORKS

What are good works?

All the actions of man which are performed according to the will of God, while in the state of grace, for the love of God.

Which are the principal good works?

Prayer, fasting, and alms deeds. These are especially inculcated in holy Scripture. (Tob. XIII. 8.) By prayer is here understood all religious services; by fasting all mortification of soul and body; by alms?deeds all works of charity.

How many kinds of charitable works are there?

Two kinds: spiritual and corporal.

Which are the spiratual works of mercy?

Those that are performed for the good of the soul: to admonish sinners; to teach the ignorant; to counsel the doubtful; to console the afflicted; to suffer injustice patiently; to forgive all injuries, and to pray for the living and the dead.

Which are the corporal works?

Those which are performed for the good of the body: to feed the hungry; to give drink to the thirsty; to clothe the naked; to visit and ransom the captives; to harbor the harborless; to visit the sick; and to bury the dead.

Can we be saved without good works?

No, for Christ expressly, says: Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut down, and shall be cast into the fire. The servant in the gospel who did not even waste the talent received, but only hid it in the ground, was therefore cast into outer darkness. How greatly do those err who hope to reach heaven, simply because they do no evil! Of this great mistake St. Chrysostom plainly says: "If you had a servant who was in truth no robber, no glutton or drunkard, but who sat at home idle, neglecting everything for which you had employed him, would you not pay him with the whip and send him off? Is it not bad enough to neglect that which duty demands?" Such a servant is the Christian who, doing neither good nor evil, makes himself thereby unfit for heaven which is the reward of work performed, and if no work has been done, no reward is to be expected.

SUPPLICATION O Lord, guard me from false prophets, heretics, and seducers, and grant me the grace, that according to St. Paul's instructions I may become fruitful in all good works. Inflame my heart, that I may adorn my , faith with them, thus do the will of the Heavenly Father, and render myself worthy of heaven.*** [End of Good Works Instructions]

Why should we love our neighbor?

We should love him because God commands it; but there are also other reasons which should induce us to do so. We are not only according to nature brothers and sisters in Adam, but also according to grace, in Christ, and we would have to be ashamed before animals, if we would allow ourselves to be surpassed in the love which they bear one to another; (Ecclus, XIII. 19.) all our neighbors are the image and likeness of God, bought by the blood of Jesus, and are adopted children, called to heaven, as we are; the example of Christ, who loved us, when we were yet His enemies, (Rom. V. 10.) and gave Himself for us unto death, ought to incite us to love them. But can we be His disciples, if we do not follow Him, and if we do not bear in us the mark of His disciples, i. e. the love of our neighbor? (John XIII. 35.). Finally, the necessity of the love for our neighbor ought to compel us, as it were, to it; for without it, we cannot be saved. He that loveth not, says St. John, abideth in death, (I John III. 14.) and he that loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God whom he seeth not? (I John IV. 20.) because he transgresses one of the greatest commandments of God, and does not fulfil the law. (Rom. XIII, 10.)

What is necessary to make the love of our neighbor meritorious?

It must tend to God, that is, we must love our neighbor only in and for God, because God commands it, and it is pleasing to Him. For to love our neighbor on account of a natural inclination, or self-interest, or some other still less honorable reason, is only a natural, animal love, in no wise different from the love of the heathens; for the heathens also love and salute those who love and salute them in turn. (Matt. V. 46.)

PETITION. O my God, Father of mercy! give me a loving and compassionate heart, which will continually impel me to do good to my neighbor for Thy sake, so that I may merit the same from Thy mercy.

What is understood from this day's gospel in a higher and more spiritual sense?

According to the interpretation of the Fathers, our father Adam, and hence the whole human race is to be understood by the one who had fallen among robbers. The human race, which through the disobedience of Adam fell into the power of Satan and his angels, was robbed of original justice and the grace of God, and moreover, was wounded and weakened in all the powers of the soul by evil concupiscence. The priest and The Levite who represent the Old Law, would not and could not repair this misfortune; but Christ, the true Samaritan, embraced the interests of the wounded man, inasmuch as He poured the oil of His grace, and the wine of His blood into the wounds of man's soul, and thus healed him, and inasmuch as He led him by baptism into the inn of His Church, and there entrusted him to His priests for further care and nursing. Thank Christ, the good Samaritan, for this great love and care for you, and endeavor to make good use of His blessings by your cooperation.** [End of - [Concerning the love of our neighbor , for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost].**

Why is the commandment to' love God and our neighbor' called the greatest commandment?

Because in it are contained all the other commandments, for Christ says, in it consists the whole law. He who loves God with his whole heart, does not separate himself from God by infidelity, does not practice public or private superstition and idolatry; he does not murmur against God, does not desecrate the name of God by cursing and swearing; he does not profane the Sabbath, because he knows that all this is displeasing to God. On the contrary, he hopes in God, keeps Sundays and days of obligation holy, and observes all the commandments of the Church, because God wishes that we hear the Church; he honors his parents, inflicts no evil upon his neighbor; does not commit adultery, doe's not steal, calumniates no one, does not bear false witness, does not judge rashly, is not envious, malicious or cruel, but rather practices the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; and all this, because he loves God and his neighbor.

What is the meaning of the question What think you of Christ?

Christ asked the Pharisees this question in order to convince them, from their own answer, that He was not only the Son of David, but that He as the only-begotten Son of God was the Lord of David and of all men from eternity. (Fs. II. 7.) , Unhappily, even today there are men who like the Pharisees deny the divinity of Christ, the Son of the living God, consider Him merely a very wise and virtuous man, and do not receive His doctrine, confirmed by so many miracles. Beware, my dear Christian, of these men who rob you of the peace of the soul, and the consoling hope of a future resurrection and eternal life, together with faith in Christ, the divine Redeemer. But if you believe Christ to be the Son of God and our Lord, Lawgiver, Instructor, and Redeemer, follow His teaching, and do not contradict indeed what you profess with your lips.

PRAYER O most amiable Jesus! who hast admonished us so affectionately to love God an& our neighbor, pour the fire of Thy love into our hearts, that all our deeds and actions, x,11 our thoughts and words may begin and end with Thy love. Grant, that we may love Thee with all the powers of our body and. soul, ,and thereby be so united to Thee, that, like St. Paul, no temptation, no tribulation, no danger, not even death, may be able to separate us from Thee. Grant us also, that we may love our neighbors, friends, and enemies as ourselves for Thy sake, and thus be made worthy to possess Thee as our Redeemer and merciful judge.

#seventeenth sunday after pentecost

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 6 years

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(This article is from 2016 and a great deal of the forest has since been logged)

Poland’s new far right government says logging is needed because more than 10% of spruce trees in the Unesco world heritage site of Białowieża are suffering from a bark beetle outbreak. But nearly half the logging will be of other species, according to its only published inventory.

Oak trees as high as 150 feet that have grown for 450 years could be reduced to stumps under the planned threefold increase in tree fells. Białowieża hosts Europe’s largest bison population and wolves and lynx still roam freely across its sun-mottled interior. Its foliage stretches for nearly 1,000 square miles across the border between Poland and Belarus.

Beneath its green canopy, sunlight filters down on to a panorama of skyscraper trees soaring as much as 180 feet into the air, swampy water pools dammed by beavers, and psychedelic fungi that sprout from tree trunks.

But a recently-passed logging law to allow work to begin on the old-growth forest has divided families, and led to death threats against campaigners and allegations of an “environmental coup” by state interests linked to the timber trade. The logging in Białowieża is expected to raise about 700m złotys (£124m), and pave the way for extensive and more lucrative tree clearances.

Sources say that internal government discussions have already begun on extending the new timber regime to the national park, which covers 17% of the forest and has been untouched by humans since the ice age.

Mirosław Stepaniuk says he was sacked as director of Białowieża’s national park shortly after Polish elections six months ago because of his support for turning the whole forest into a protected conservation area.

He told the Guardian: “An environmental coup is being staged here not just by the government, but by the national forestry authority. If they are successful, it could trigger a cascade, an avalanche of similar cases in other places.”

Last week, another 32 members were dismissed from the state council for nature conservation, an advisory body which had opposed the logging plan and has been accused of “inefficiency”.

“We were sacked because the new government needs scientists who will applaud increased logging, to convince public opinion that this insane idea is okay,” said Przemysław Chylarecki, one of the dismissed scientists.

Most of the new council member are foresters, or colleagues of the environment minister, he added.

but it may not be minded to challenge the logging plan. Its president, Prof Janusz Sowa, said in February: “There is [only] one method for managing forests: an axe.”

The Polish environment ministry declined requests for comment.

The new Law and Justice party government is already in conflict with the EU over issues ranging from climate change policy to constitutional interference in the country’s courts and media, which is widely seen as undemocratic.

Now, Brussels is weighing a separate court case over the law allowing 188,000 cubic metres of trees to be felled by 2021. The axe could fall on trees dotted around at least a quarter of the Białowieża forest area, excluding the national park, and possibly as much as two-thirds of it.

Katarzyna Jagiełło, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace, told the Guardian: “The struggle to protect Białowieża and make it a national park is our Alamo. This place should be like our Serengeti or Great Barrier Reef. What happens to the forest here will define the future direction of nature conservation in our country.”

Significantly, Greenpeace refuses to rule out direct action if the foresters move in. “Right now we are present in the forest,” Jagiełło said, “and whatever needs to be done to protect it, will be done.”

With the logging law now passed, the battle for its future could begin at any time.

The forest occupies a symbolic and almost mystical place in Poland’s national consciousness, and its fate stokes dangerous emotions, according to Joanna Łapińska, a 37-year-old librarian in a Białowieża group opposing the clearances.

“Friends and families have fallen out over this,” she said. “When we were out petitioning recently, a sympathetic woman said ‘I can’t let you in because I don’t want a fight with my husband’.”

“People connected with the foresters are very aggressive. They told us that we are eco-terrorists, paid by the Germans – it’s usually the Germans, Jews or Russians – and they even said that somebody should have killed some eco-activists.”

At a conference organised by the national forestry authority in December, a former forester and beekeeper close to Jan Szyszko, the environment minister, received loud applause when he said that environmental experts “should be beheaded or put in jail for 25 years. They should be deported for what they did against the forest”.

At the same meeting, Mikołaj Janowski, a councillor from Podlaskie, told environmentalists: “You are parasites. You get money for your incomprehensible, hostile scientific papers … You should be sent to Putin’s gulag for 10 years or more.”

Revulsion against environmentalists has reached the highest levels of government. Earlier this year, the foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, told Bild newspaper: “We only want to cure our country of a few illnesses ... a new mixture of cultures and races, a world made up of cyclists and vegetarians, who only use renewable energy and who battle all signs of religion.”

Sections of the Catholic and Orthodox churches have played a partisan role in the debate, with a passage from Genesis - “be fruitful, and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it” - often used to justify increased logging.

One orthodox priest from Hajnówka, Leonid Szeszko, recently called for scientific, environmental and NGOs which opposed the logging plans to be banned.

Szyszko, who has championed the logging law, is a regular guest on the ultra-conservative Radio Maria, a Catholic radio station, and appears at conferences with a priest garbed in a forester’s green uniform.

Foresters are revered in Poland as patriarchs, protectors and fire-providers and retain public support in surveys second only to police and fire officers.

Critics say though, that the national forestry authority is a state-run monopoly which suffers a conflict of interests between its twin mandates to protect trees while maximising profits from logging.

“It is a schizophrenic situation,” Stepaniuk said. “They are a regular profit-making company that deals in wood. They log and sell and make incredible money. If there was any pressure to increase their profits, they would not hesitate to sacrifice environmental protection, which they perceive as their least important duty.”

More than 90% of the national forest authority’s annual 7bn złotys (£1.2bn) earnings come from the firewood, furniture and pulp trades. Little of it is seen by the communities from which the timber was logged, which draw greater revenues from eco-tourism.

The forest’s 20,000 animal and plant species and Hansel and Gretel-style interior draw hordes of visitors every year, dazzled by its heterogeneous beauty and its clean reviving air.

Tourism has helped to make Białowieża wealthier than many nearby villages but as its young people leave in search of better prospects, backing for the foresters among the elderly who remain is iron-clad, stoked by an anticipated bonanza of cheap fuel.

Elżbieta Laprus, the president of Białowieża’s village council, said: “People who live here need firewood to heat their homes and [have] a good quality of life. They want to buy trees from here.”

A five-year long bark beetle outbreak has infected up to 1 million of the forest’s spruce trees, and forestry officials are adamant that “active” forest management is now needed to save the rest. This includes the logging of trees that are more than 100 years old.

Andrzej Antczak, the associate head forester in Hajnówka forest district, is a climate change agnostic, whose buildings are decorated with stuffed mink, deer and wild boar – a sign of the influence wielded by Poland’s hunting lobby which bridges the local community with politicians.

Sitting in his forest office, he said: “The best method to control bark beetle outbreaks is to cut down affected trees and take them out of the forest. But we are prohibited from cutting trees which are older than 100 years, or in nature reserves, wet woodlands or peat bogs. More than 35% of our territory is protected and it is a very big problem.”

Bark beetles outbreaks usually affect trees of more than 80 years old, and are associated with dry conditions and a drop in lowland water tables. Because spruce trees have flat root systems, they cannot soak up enough water to produce the quantities of resin they need to protect themselves. As the infestation spreads, the trees’ bark breaks off, further preventing water being circulated to its leaves. These turn brown and fall, before the tree finally dies.

The beetle eruption is a cyclical phenomenon that began earlier this decade and may now be nearing its end, according to park scientists. But it is the second worst outbreak in the last century and experts fear it may be a sign of worse and more frequent diseases to come as climate change takes hold.

Rafał Kowalczyk, the director of the Mammal Research Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences, argues that as temperatures warm and precipitation falls, boreal trees such as pine and spruce will naturally retreat northwards. Nature should be allowed to take its course in the forest as it has always done, he says.

Walking through a section of the woods hit hard by the outbreak, he snaps off a shard of decaying bark and exclaims: “Look at this dead spruce tree! It is probably more alive now than it ever was because so many creatures are now living on it. There are nearly 100 invertebrate species that it gives life to. Woodpeckers are searching the bark for larvae, and there is space for spiders and fungi. The tree is dead, but the forest is still alive and it will regenerate.”

Kowalczyk points to a tree trunk several metres away, lying like a toppled sentry. It has three new tree saps growing from its decaying husk. Dead spruce create light in which seedlings best suited to the conditions can grow, he says. They also carve out space for predators such as lynx and wolves to hide, house themselves, and hunt.

One is the predatory beetle, which feeds on bark beetles, according to Luc Bas, the director of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s European office, who argued that removing the dead wood would also remove the bark beetles’ nemesis.

Chopping down infected trees would be ineffective because “to stop the beetle attack in a managed way, at least 80% of the spruce trees would have to be removed,” he wrote in April. “This simply is not possible because the wider region of Białowieża is divided in several interconnected zones, including large reserves and park areas that may not be touched.”

The IUCN and Unesco, and many of the world’s environmental scientists, have thrown themselves into the debate with gusto. Last week, a letter sent to the Polish government by academics, including professors at Harvard and Oxford, said that the plan would destroy the forest’s ability to recover from the outbreak and mark a “drastic” break with international conservation rules.

[international conservation] rules. It will radically change the forest and will also impact the economic returns from tourism to the forest.” Any move to implement it would be “a very alarming and worrying sign for the international community.”

Poland’s government and forestry authority counter that Białowieża is not a predominantly natural forest. Logging by Germans in the first world war, the Soviet Union in world war two and, particularly, the British Century European Timber Corporation, led to significant replanting in the forest, Antczak says. The very word “spruce” in English comes from the polish “s” (from) and “Prus” (Prussia).

Białowieża’s “naturalness” has been interrupted by Polish kings and Lithuanian dukes who fed their armies on its animals, Russian tsars who turned the park into a hunting ground, and Nazi soldiers who executed and buried Jews and resistance fighters there.

But mass tree felling and replanting in Białowieża did not begin until 1920 and trees of 100 years or older – 41% of Białowieża’s total forest outside the national park – have been naturally regenerating for millennia, even if their surrounding habitat is now mixed.

Chylarecki said: “The animals need all of these valuable trees to survive. Lynx or bisons or three-toed woodpeckers will not survive long in national park and nature reserves alone. They need large forest tracts to roam in.”

A compromise agreement with the previous government in 2012 allowed an increase in local logging 50% above estimated local needs. Local people say this was not enough. But spruce wood is resinous and does not burn well, so the firewood they need would have to come from other trees.

“Everything the activists do they do against the local community,” Laprus said. “People who don’t live here want to change our lives without consulting us. If the European commission really wanted to help, they would help give us grants to change our heating from wood to gas.”

For Kowalczyk though, logging would threaten the tourist trade which employs far more people than Białowieża’s 100 local foresters. “Tourists come here to see primeval forest which is wet and wild and dark,” he said. “They are afraid of the forest but it is magical. Managed forests, you can see everywhere.”

As the sun goes down on Białowieża, a night chorus of frogs, nightingales and warblers pipes up under its clear and constellated skies. The forest is still thriving, despite the shadow of the axe.

#Białowieża #primeval forest #environmentalism #conservationism #conservation #poland

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madewithonerib · 4 years

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Our guest is a senior pastor & messianic rabbi at the Jerusalem Center/Beth Israel.

This is a prominent worship center in New Jersey for people from all walks of life. My guest is also the president of Hope of the World Ministries. Now it's time that I told you who I'm talking about.

He's my friend, Rabbi Jonathan Cahn.

He has been here 7 times before, this is the 8th, & it is always a delight to have you with us.

I think no one writes the kind of stuff you do, & because of the prophetic element of it, it's just fascinating to me.

Rabbi Cahn: Thank you. It is my honor always to be here. I grew up in my faith as a believer, even before I believed, I heard you, I knew of you. It's just an honor to be here. Dr. Dobson: Well, you grew up in a Jewish home, you are a Jew. Rabbi Cahn: I did. I am. Dr. Dobson: How is it that you were listening early on to a Christian? Rabbi Cahn: Well, when I was a teenager, I started seeking the LORD. One day I went into a Church & they said, "Oh, & don't miss the series, the film series of Dr. Dobson."

That was even before I was a believer, you know?

Then of course as a believer I would listen to you. So it's an honor, Dr. Dobson. Dr. Dobson: Well, one of the previous times when you were here, we told a little bit about your childhood & your story growing up. You decided that you were an atheist at eight years of age, being in a Jewish home. Was it an Orthodox Jewish home? Rabbi Cahn: No, reform. That's kind of the least of those who go to temple. So, I did go to temple, I went to Hebrew school my whole childhood. Dr. Dobson: So, how come you bailed ship at eight years of age? Rabbi Cahn: Well, because they showed us film strips on the GOD of the BIBLE, & I saw that GOD who was real and moving. Then I went to the synagogue & I didn't see any sign of HIM.

I just saw the liturgies.

It was kind of like an echo of what once was.

But the rabbi never got up & said, "Hey, the LORD really spoke to my heart today, & HE really led... "

It was like something that was ancient & it was religious, but I didn't see the signs, so I said, well, how do I know there's even a GOD?

And that's how it happened. That's how I became an atheist at eight. Dr. Dobson: Is that still true in that aspect of Judaism? Rabbi Cahn: In many. It's often a tradition for many Jewish people. They're Jewish by birth, & they're proud of that, or they know there's something.

But not so much a living faith. The Orthodox are a bit different. They're taking it more seriously.

But for many Jewish people, it's, we know we have to keep this going. We know we're Jewish, we know it's important.

But they go to synagogue, & like many people who are Catholic, they say the ritual, they say the liturgy.

I didn't see people when I was growing up, a Jewish person say, "Hey, the LORD, & HE changed my life."

It just didn't happen. Dr. Dobson: So at eight years of age, you decided GOD does not exist, & you didn't want any part of HIM.

Rabbi Cahn: Yes.

Dr. Dobson: But at 20 years of age, you changed your mind again.

Rabbi Cahn: GOD had HIS way.

Well, when I was about 12 I started saying, "This doesn't work.

There's got to be a reason behind everything. There's got to be some reason."

So that opened me up to start seeking what's the truth.

I started getting every book on everything I could. Science, religion, UFOs, Chariot of the Gods, remember back then?

Dr. Dobson: Yeah.

Rabbi Cahn: One day I picked up a book, I thought it was like a UFO book like Chariot of the Gods, because it looked like it.

It was The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey.

I was like, "Whoa, the BIBLE said this, & Israel," & I didn't know that. Nobody told me that.

The BIBLE prophesied was coming true.

I started telling all my friends about it.

I wasn't a believer yet, but I'm telling my friends, & I'm winning them to the LORD.

But I wasn't following GOD, but I'm winning them to the LORD, because I'm telling them, "You've got to see this."

Then I realized it wasn't just, JESUS is real & HE’s coming... I looked in the OT, it says HE's going to be born in Bethlehem, our Messiah is going to be, dying for our sins.

I thought, how did all this Catholic stuff get into the Jewish-

Dr. Dobson: You actually found JESUS in the OT? Rabbi Cahn: Yes, I did. Yeah. We had an OT in our house. Nobody read it. But I opened it up, I said, it's all there, you know?

So, I couldn't argue with it.

I knew then, listen, you can't just have it in your head. You've got to live it. You're in trouble if you don't.

So I said, "Okay, LORD," I made a deal with GOD when I was about 18 now. I said, "If you give me a long life, I will accept YOU when I'm on my death bed about to die." Dr. Dobson: You were bargaining with the LORD. Rabbi Cahn: It's a Jewish thing. So I did.

And because I thought if you follow GOD, you give up everything good, I have to join a monastery & that's the end of my life, you know? So I made that deal. Right after I made that deal, I was almost killed twice.

The second time was when I was heading to a train track at night & I saw a light, & it was a dangerous thing. No protection. People had been killed there.

I see a light, & it's a train, and it's coming. I didn't realize I'm on the track.

So I said, you know what? Let me just be safe. Let me try to back up. And now there's headlights at the back of me, so I could only back up about a foot.

But I thought I was just being extra safe. I'm waiting for the train. I'm in the path of the train.

The train comes. I'm in a Ford Pinto that used to- Dr. Dobson: You were 18 years old? Rabbi Cahn: No, now I'm 19, & it's the second time I'm almost killed. The car becomes like aluminum foil, & the train plows into the car, & all I could do was call out to GOD.

So I called out to GOD, & the car was destroyed, & I didn't get a scratch.

Dr. Dobson: You're kidding!

Rabbi Cahn: So I said, I said, "GOD, can we renegotiate?"

I said, "Here's a new deal. I'll accept you when I'm 20, just don't kill me until then." On my 20th birthday, like a man whose contract had run out, I said, "Okay. I gave my word."

I didn't know how to get saved.

But I remember from synagogue, from Hebrew school, I saw film strips of Moses on the mountain, Elijah on the mountain. I said, "I've got to find a mountain."

So I found a mountain at night, went to the top of it, kneeled down on a rock & gave my life to the LORD.

And that's how I came, you know, the BIBLE says Jews require signs. I required a train.

If it wasn't for that train, I probably wouldn't be saved today. So I thank GOD for the train. Dr. Dobson: Okay. At 20, you're really getting into the SCRIPTURE. Rabbi Cahn: I was born again, yes. Dr. Dobson: You're starting to see what is there. You saw JESUS there.

Rabbi Cahn: Yes. Well, I already knew for years JESUS was the Messiah.

I never had a struggle with being Jewish, because to me it's like, I was more Jewish now than ever.

What's more Jewish than following your Messiah? But I just didn't want to follow HIM.

But then HE made it very hard for me not to follow HIM.

Because I thought if I don't do this, I'm going to get hit by, it'll be a meteorite, something's going to happen.

That was two strikes, you know?

So, I gave my life to the LORD, & then my life started changing.

Doctor, I grew up with the book Green Eggs & Ham, you know, it says, "Would you eat this thing?"

And the guy says, "I'll never eat," & finally in the end, he eats it & he loves it.

Well, that's how it was.

I said, why was I fighting this for all... this was the best thing I ever did in my life.

Then I started studying the BIBLE, & people started asking me to teach early on, & then it just started.

The LORD interrupted my life. I was still in college, I was studying history.

HE interrupted my life to say,

"I've called you to full-time ministry." And then later on HE would fulfill that.

Dr. Dobson: Oh. When did the call to ministry occur?

Rabbi Cahn: I was in college.

It was right after I came to the LORD & I had to decide what to do with my life.

Do I go on to graduate school? What do I do?

It was just then that HE made it very clear that I was to serve HIM full time.

When I graduated college, there was nothing, it was a recession, it was the early eighties.

There was nothing there for ministry.

So I said, "LORD, what do YOU want me to do?" I said, "LORD, give me something YOU would do."

So I ended up working with disabled children for a few years & it was a humbling thing.

It was patience & all that.

While people asked me to teach a BIBLE study, so I was teaching a BIBLE study.

We were doing a ministry to the homeless in New York City, because we live outside New York City.

I was ministering, but the ministry didn't come, & then one day suddenly I was asked to help start a congregation called Beth Israel in New Jersey, so I did.

But I said, "I'm here for a little while, but one day I'm going to have to leave for the ministry."

He said, "Okay, do it. Help us out." So I did.

Then one day the leader left & they asked me to lead the ministry.

Suddenly overnight after the LORD brought me into ministry as the leader of Beth Israel.

That's how that started.

Dr. Dobson: When is the first time anybody called you rabbi?

Rabbi Cahn: 1988, because that's the position they put me in. Rabbi just means really teacher, pastor & teacher. Yeah.

Then it started growing, & then we moved into another building, then another building.

I was always teaching.

I was never thinking, I knew I had to write books, but I just never had the time for it.

Then I was at Ground Zero & I saw this thing, & the LORD said, "You have to write now," & that became The Harbinger.

Dr. Dobson: Isn't it interesting that HE wanted you... HE sought you out.

You thought you found HIM, but HE was looking for you.

Rabbi Cahn: It's humbling to think about & it's amazing with all this to think that...

HE was trying to get through to me for years, & what patience, & amazing, & I'm the least likely person.

Dr. Dobson: Well, Jonathan, you have become a very good friend to me, & vice versa.

I just really love you & appreciate what you've done. GOD is using you in a dramatic way.

The first of your books that I read was The Harbinger. That book, I think, somebody told me that it sold more than 3 million copies.

Rabbi Cahn: Around there, a few million.

Dr. Dobson: That's a lot of books.

Rabbi Cahn: It was crazy. That book pretty much wrote itself.

And I had never wrote a book in my life.

But I knew it was the LORD, & it just happened. I knew it was just HIM.

Dr. Dobson: Well, you have these other books that you've written, I want to reserve time for it.

But it's called The Oracle: The Jubilean Mysteries Unveiled.

You are, if not a prophet, You are heavily into prophecy, aren't you?

Rabbi Cahn: You know, I came to the LORD because of prophecy.

So I think the LORD sometimes, the way HE touches you, you touch others.

Religious people are a prophetic people.

We're reserved for the beginning & the end. We're a time piece.

So I think that's part of it.

Many Jewish people came to the LORD because of prophecy.

I didn't specifically say, "Hey, I'm going to do this," but it's kind of natural for me, that it's prophetic.

Dr. Dobson: Speak to our listeners who are Jewish, there are a lot of them out there.

I've made a lot of friends in the Jewish community.

Speak to them about JESUS in the OT or the Torah.

What did you see there that stood out for you?

Rabbi Cahn: Yeah. Well, there's nothing more Jewish than you can ever do than find the Messiah of the Jewish people.

I mean, I'm more Jewish now than I've ever been in my life. I'm not trying to be.

In fact, even people who are not Jewish by birth, the BIBLE says they become Jewish in spirit when they become born again.

The BIBLE gave us prophecies.

The Hebrew SCRIPTUREs say very clearly, this is what Messiah has to be & has to do.

One is HE has to be born in Bethlehem.

I don't know of anybody famous for being born in Bethlehem, only one person, JESUS, or Yeshua, HIS real name, Joshua.

Then it says HE will ride on a donkey into Jerusalem.

There's only one famous for doing that.

The Messiah of Israel has to come at an exact time before the destruction of the temple, before 7 AD, there's nobody except JESUS.

Dr. Dobson: Daniel spelled out the actual year.

Rabbi Cahn: Yeah, the actual years to HIS coming, & it goes right to HIS coming.

HE has to become a light to the Gentiles.

That was a stumbling block because you say, well, if all the Gentiles there can't be Jewish, it's the opposite. HE has to be.

In fact, one of the reasons why we were told we can't believe in JESUS is well, the Jewish people, we rejected HIM.

The prophecy says HE'll be rejected.

So if HE was accepted, HE couldn't be. HE'll be rejected by our people, but then in the end, we will come back to HIM.

That's now.

The other thing is, in Isaiah 53 it says HE will die for our sins. HE will be wounded, HE'll be crushed.

It talks about the death of the Messiah, one who dies for HIS...

I don't know anybody in my life who I ever heard dies for our sins except this one, JESUS.

There's no number two, Dr. Dobson. We don't have another candidate.

There's been about 40 pretty famous people in some ways who came as the Messiah of Israel in the last 2000 years.

Many rabbis said, "Okay, he's the one." None of them came to anything. There's no number two.

Is it an accident?

The one person in the world, HE's the most famous person, the whole world centers on HIM.

We write every moment of our life according to HIS birth.

I don't care if you're Jewish, atheist, communist, you're writing by the birth of this rabbi.

And there's only one person, & yet HE happens to be the same one who happened to fulfill all the prophecies of the Hebrew SCRIPTUREs.

I mean, GOD makes it pretty obvious to me.

And HE wasn't called JESUS, HE was called Yeshua.

Which means what? GOD is the savior.

I mean, it makes it very easy to identify HIM.

They call HIM, well, CHRIST isn't, well, CHRIST just means Messiah.

There's only one.

I mean, it's the greatest story on earth.

It's even prophesied, the Jewish people will be the first to believe in HIM, the apostles.

This is all Jewish, the disciples, they're all Jewish. All the first Christians were Jewish.

So much so that they didn't think the big controversy was, can somebody become a Christian if they're not circumcised?

I mean, that's how Jewish HE was.

And thank GOD, the door opened by GOD.

But the first shall be last, they'll come in at the end.

JESUS said, "I'm not coming again until MY family, MY people say [Hebrew 00:00:14:16], blessed is HE."

Dr. Dobson: Zechariah says they'll recognize HIM whom they pierced.

Rabbi Cahn: Yeah. Yeah.

They will look upon ME.

That's the great mystery, that GOD is ironic & mysterious. It's a wonderful story.

But the short answer is there's nobody else. There's only one. There has only been one.

Dr. Dobson: You know, Psalm 22 gives the actual words JESUS spoke on the cross.

It's all there.

What is that, 800 years before?

Rabbi Cahn: Yeah. The Psalms are from David, even before that. Yeah.

I mean, I mean who fulfills prophecy 700 years after they came?"

We don't have anybody like that.

It doesn't matter what happens in the culture.

JESUS is still there.

If I try to think about where I was 30 years ago & what I was thinking about, I don't know what was important to me.

I probably had an issue, thinking about something.

It's gone.

But JESUS is just as important now as HE was then.

HE's the only one. HE's the only thing.

It doesn't matter. 50 years from now HE's going to be just as important, because HEs the one.

Dr. Dobson: Yeah. Well, let's talk about your book, The Oracle. I know what an oracle is, but you tell us & explain why you have titled your book The Oracle.

Rabbi Cahn: Yeah. An Oracle really means someone who speaks for the divine.

You had the fake oracles & the pagan, but the BIBLE uses the word oracle actually quite a lot in the King James.

The oracle can be a revelation of GOD.

It can be the one who reveals it, like a prophet.

The Oracle, Dr. Dobson, is really the biggest mystery I've ever dealt with.

It is really so big that it includes everything from Moses to Mark Twain, from Jeremiah to Donald Trump.

Really, it's the mystery-

Dr. Dobson: You're serious about that?

Rabbi Cahn: Yes, totally. Mark Twain is linked to biblical prophecy.

The secret behind the past, the present, current events right now, the future.

It's really to me that master secret of the end times.

Where are we going? Where are we heading?

It is also the blueprint of our lives.

Our lives are linked to this Jubilean thing as well.

It is so big, but also very small in the sense that it's exact.

It gives exact dates, when things have to take place according to the BIBLE, according to biblical mysteries, & it's been happening again & again.

I'll put it this way, & this goes with one of the first questions you asked me, because when I became an atheist, it was because I didn't see the GOD of the BIBLE today.

The Oracle is saying, we say it's true, but it's showing you in black & white, the GOD of the BIBLE, who moved in history & intricately in prophesy, is just as real today behind everything.

It's affected all of our lives.

It has affected even the election. The rise of America is part of this mystery.

But also down to individual people, when they're born.

It's like clockwork. One of the streams, just like the overview, is the Jubilee.

Dr. Dobson: Yeah. Tell us about that, because that's kind of a centerpiece of your book.

Rabbi Cahn: Yeah, the Jubilee, the LORD gave it that, HE said on the 50th year they'll be set free, & if you lost your home, you lost your possession, you return home, you come home, you get it back.

Say you lost your land, you went into debt, you get it all back.

The Jubilee is the year of restoration.

It's the year of coming home. It's the year of returning. It's the year of coming back home.

Well, there's one nation on earth that lost its possession more than any other, & that's the Jewish people.

We lost our land, lost our home. We lost our city, Jerusalem.

In 70 AD, according to the prophecy that JESUS gave, HE says, you're going to be taken captive to all nations.

Well, it happened.

The Jewish people were scattered to the ends of the earth.

We had nothing. We lost everything.

But GOD says that in the end times, I will bring them back from the ends of the earth.

I will gather them, & I'll bring them back to Israel.

Well, HE did it.

That's again what led me back to the LORD.

HE did it.

But the amazing thing is the restoration of Israel which is part of prophecy, has to happen for JESUS to come again, is all following this mystery of the Jubilee the Jubilean mystery.

There's a mystery that happens that every so many years a gigantic prophetic event is going to take place from over 150 years ago, to right where we are right now under Donald Trump. . And it's also the future

Another mystery that kind of runs through it, the whole book, is called the mystery of the parashahs.

A parashah is, every week the Jewish people open the scrolls, & they have to read an appointed word that's been appointed from ages past for that day or that week.

The amazing thing I found as I'm looking at this, is that at key times they open up the scrolls & they chant the words all around the world.

As they do, the words are being fulfilled on that day or at that time around the world.

We're going to see it again & again & again.

Dr. Dobson: With reference to what?

Rabbi Cahn: To world events.

Dr. Dobson: What was the world event that you're talking-

Rabbi Cahn: We'll see it through many events.

Dr. Dobson: You're going to walk me through those seven doors, aren't you?

Rabbi Cahn: We're going through those doors, yes.

Through those who read The Harbinger, one other dimension to it is that I was led to bring these revelations through a story, like The Harbinger.

Basically in a nutshell, a man is looking for a man called the Oracle, & he finds him on a mountain, &

the Oracle is going to reveal these mysteries of GOD, one after the other, through these 7 doors of revelations-

Dr. Dobson: Who's the stranger?

Rabbi Cahn: The stranger is not fiction. The stranger's real, & that's in the first door.

Dr. Dobson: You want to go there now?

Rabbi Cahn: Sure.

Moses, before he dies, he gives a sermon, he gives his last words to Israel.

Dr. Dobson: Deuteronomy.

Rabbi Cahn: Deuteronomy.

He's the first one to speak about the end times, it's Moses. He says, "You'll be scattered to the ends of the earth, but in the end times, GOD will bring you back."

Moses is the one who said it.

But before he gives that first prophecy of bringing you back, he says something.

He says, "What's going to happen is, when you're gone, the land is going to become desolate.

The land that was milk & honey is going to become a wasteland.

Cursed, cursed." He says, "But a stranger will come from far away, a faraway land.

He will come to the land. He will bear witness of its desolation.

It's going to be hopeless.

After that, then GOD is going to start restoring you."

Okay. A stranger will come to the land.

Did that ever happen?

Amazing thing is, a stranger did come to the land from a faraway land when it was at its most desolate.

He came from America. He came from across the world. He arrived in the land in the year 1867.

That's a key year for this.

He goes there & he sees how desolate it is, & he writes a book of how desolate it is.

The stranger was Mark Twain, was Mark Twain.

Dr. Dobson: Really? He was not even a Christian.

Rabbi Cahn: He was a skeptic.

To me, that's even more powerful.

He is fulfilling biblical prophecy without even knowing that he's doing it, & he's fulfilling the words of Moses.

In fact, Mark Twain became famous for the book that fulfilled Moses' prophecy.

So American literature is based on this prophecy.

So, he goes to the land, & not only that, Dr. Dobson, Mark Twain, he actually says the same words that Moses says he will say.

Moses says, "He will say, nothing grows here. It's desolate." Mark Twain says it. "it's a scorching waste," Mark Twain says it.

Moses says he will say, "No grass grows here," Mark Twain says, "Not a blade of grass."

He's actually saying the words of Moses, or Moses is saying the words of Mark Twain.

And he actually goes through the whole land.

But on top of that, when he gets to the final destination, when he gets to Jerusalem, he's finishing the journey.

It's his final day & night in Jerusalem.

He's walking through Jerusalem.

On that day, it's the Sabbath.

That means there's an appointed word that we talked about.

The Jewish people are opening the scrolls all over the world, & they're proclaiming this prophecy.

What do they proclaim?

Appointed for that day, they are proclaiming around the world the prophecy, the stranger shall come to the land & he shall bear witness.

So Mark Twain is actually walking through Jerusalem, he's walking through the streets of Jerusalem.

They're chanting it, he's hearing Hebrew, they're chanting it about him & he's walking, he's walking, fulfilling it, & he has no idea, & they have no idea.

Mark Twain goes home & he writes the book.

Right after that, all sorts of things start happening.

This is 1867. This is going to be the first year-

Dr. Dobson: Two years after the civil war ended.

Rabbi Cahn: Right, yeah, to place it, yeah.

So at that moment, that year is going to be crucial, because everything's going to begin.

The restoration of Israel is going to begin.

All these strange things start happening in the land, starting with Mark Twain.

These strange signs that GOD is moving...

For instance, the land for 2000 years has been in the hands of enemies.

Now it's the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims.

That year the Ottoman Empire releases the land to be purchased, & the Jewish people are going to begin purchasing the land back, Jubilee.

They get their land back.

Everything begins in the year 1867, first jubilee.

There's a strange sign, a biblical sign called the man with a measuring line.

He appears.

I won't go into it because there's so much stuff I can only scratch the surface.

But all these signs start appearing, & then the Jewish people start coming back to the land in drips & drabs.

They start learning how to farm the land, right after Mark Twain writes his book.

It all begins there.

But there's more to the mystery.

For 2000 years the Jewish people are praying this prayer:

"LORD, hear our prayer. Be merciful & bring us back to the land. Hear our prayer, be merciful, & bring us back to the land." They're praying.

Mark Twain's real name of course wasn't Mark Twain. It was Samuel Clemens.

Samuel is Hebrew. It means the LORD has heard. And Clemens means & has been merciful.

Dr. Dobson: Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, I can't wait to hear the rest of this story, but we're going to be off the air in a few minutes because our time has gone.

We're going to pick up right here next time.

You've made this long journey.

I'm not going to let you go.

You may never get out of here, because I want to hear what you've got to say.

Rabbi Cahn: Oh, it'll be a joyful captivity.

Dr. Dobson: All right. Remember where we are now, because we're going to pick up right at this point.

Rabbi Cahn: This is just the first-

Dr. Dobson: First door.

Rabbi Cahn: We did the door knob of first door of The Oracle, that's the first door.

Or it's in the first door.

Dr. Dobson: My fellow believer, I love you.

Rabbi Cahn:I love you too.

Roger Marsh: Well, this is Roger Marsh, & you've been listening to Dr. James Dobson's recent conversation with Rabbi Jonathan Cahn here on Family Talk.

Their conversation today, tomorrow & Wednesday is centered around Rabbi Cahn's newest book called The Oracle.

This new title has already risen to the top 10 on Amazon with over 300,000 copies printed.

Visit our broadcast page at DrJamesDobson.org for more information about this popular book, or Rabbi Cahn's other works.

Again, that's DrJamesDobson.org, & then go to the broadcast page.

Well, unfortunately we have run out of time for this program. Be sure to listen in again tomorrow as Dr. Dobson continues his engaging conversation with Rabbi Jonathan Cahn.

Rabbi Cahn will explain how ancient prophecies predicted the Jews' long awaited return to the Promised Land.

He also shows how historical figures like Mark Twain & President Harry Truman were intricately involved as well, so be sure to tune in next time for this fascinating interview right here on Family Talk.

September 2019, drjamesdobson.org/broadcasts/transcript/2019/september/the-oracle-the-jubilean-mysteries-unveiled-part-1/

#Mark Twain #Samuel Clemens #Jonathan Cahn #The Oracle #messianic rabbi #prophetic #Dr. Dobson #parashah #Samuel = the LORD has heard #Clemens = has been merciful #The Innocents Abroad

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discoveringthebible · 4 years

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Looking for Hope

This morning my church during worship played the song “Cornerstone” by Hillsong United. The song has had me thinking all day about it and hope and what it actually means to live Hope out.

For those that do not know it, here are the lyrics:

V1: My hope is built on nothing less

Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness

I dare not trust the sweetest frame

But wholly trust in Jesus’ name.

(repeat)

Chorus: Christ alone, Cornerstone

Weak made strong in the Savior’s love

Through the storm

He is Lord

Lord of all

V2: When darkness seems to hide His face

I rest on His unchanging grace

In every high and stormy gale

My anchor holds within the veil

(Repeat Chorus 3 times)

V3: When He shall come with trumpet sound

Oh, may I then in Him be found

Dressed in His righteousness alone

Faultless to stand before the throne

Bridge: Cornerstone

Oh, yeah, in the Savior love

He is Lord

Lord of All

(Repeat Chorus)

We are living in a society that is quickly losing hope, and trying to desperately seek it wherever we can try and find it; whether that is through material things, or through relationships. But no amount of anything replaces that void people experience in their lives, because God is actually the only Being big enough to fill it.

As a Christian, I see a lot of hopelessness. I see a lot of brokenness, and this doesn’t just include those who do not profess to be a Christian, I see it in Christians too.

In North American society, especially that of the United States, there is a great focus on individualism, which has also crept into the Church. The focus has gone away from communal, to individual, meaning that a lot of people are taking the stance, “I’m a Christian. I’m going to go to heaven. I’m safe.”

Well, that actually isn’t Christianity at all, that is a perversion of Christianity. People think it’s Christian, but it actually isn’t. It’s not biblical either. There is nothing individualistic about Scripture, Old Testament or New Testament.

According to dictionary.com, hope is defined as, “to look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence” it also says, “to believe, desire, or trust.”

For many people, the future is a scary place. There is not only political unrest across the world, but there are also wars happening: countries are bombing other countries. There is also a lot of religious persecution. Not just Christians are being killed for their faith either. Even in the US, people are being killed for their religious beliefs, or their perception of people’s religious beliefs.

In the state of California, the Attorney General’s office actually does an annual report of hate crimes that occurred during a calendar year. (This is police reported data, this does not include matters that were not reported.) According to the report, in 2018, there were 201 separate events regarding religious hate crimes against individuals or groups. Of that, 126 of those crimes were committed against Jews. 10 against Catholics. 1 against Protestants. And 28 against Muslims. There were also 30 attacks of religious hate against other religions (that are not Christian or Islamic).

While we have come a long way from the first century, where Christianity began, Christians still face a great deal of persecution, especially that of other places around the world. According to Open Doors, in 2018, 4,305 Christians were murdered for their faith. 11 die on average every day.

Some ask, “So then, what do we have to be hopeful for? We’re gonna eventually die anyway, so we might as well do what we want.” (Or use the slang term, “YOLO!”)

However, there is so much more to living a life than just the material things around us. We are not only human bodies, but we also have souls and our souls continue, even after we die.

Isaiah 38:18 says, “For the dead cannot praise you [God]; they cannot raise their voices in praise. Those who go down to the grave can no longer hope in your faithfulness.”

Isaiah 51:5-6 says, “My [God’s] mercy and justice are coming soon. My salvation is on the way. My strong arm will bring justice to the nations. All distant lands will look to me and wait in hope for my powerful arm. Look up to the skies above, and gaze down on the earth below. For the skies will disappear like smoke, and the earth will wear out like a piece of clothing. The people of the earth will die like flies, but my salvation lasts. My righteous rule will never end!”

God’s salvation through Christ lasts forever!

Romans 5:6-11, says, “When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, so someone might perhaps be willing do die for a person who is especially good. But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. And since we have been made right in God’s sight by the blood of Christ, he will certainly save us from God’s condemnation. For since our friendship with God was restored by the death of his Son while we were still his enemies, we will certainly be saved through the life of his Son. So now we rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God.

When we as Christians really believe this, our whole perspective on life should change. We were sentenced to death because of our sin, but through God’s own son we are saved!

This Good News should permeate in our hearts and in our lives that we should tell others about it, and live our lives like it actually matters.

Mark 16:15-19 says, “And then he [Jesus] told them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone. Anyone who believes and is baptized will be saved. But anyone who refuses to believe will be condemned. These miraculous signs will accompany those who believe: They will cast out demons in my name, and they will speak in new languages. They will be able to handle snakes with safety, and if they drink anything poisonous, it won’t hurt them. They will be able to place their hands on the sick, and they will be healed.’ When the Lord Jesus had finished talking with them [the Christians], he was taken up into heaven and sat down in the place of honor at God’s right hand.”

All Christians are called to preach the Good News. ALL Christians. We should be so filled with God’s love, hope for restoration and filled with the Holy Spirit to be able to stand bold and preach to anyone who is willing to listen. And there are a lot of people willing to listen.

When we become Christians, we therefore are at peace with God as our sin is accounted for, because of Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:1-5 says, “Then, being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom, through faith, we also have access into this grace wherein we stand and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we also rejoice in tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings forth patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope; and hope does not humiliate. Because the holy Ghost [Holy Spirit], Who is given to us, drenches our hearts with the love of God.

Drenched with the love of God. Imagine if we took this to heart and we actually lived this way! This is how the first Christians lived. This is how the disciples lived when the Holy Spirit came upon them! (See Acts 2)

Are you a Christian? How is your faith?

Are you searching?

Have you once accepted Christ, but are now unsure of what it all meant?

God is waiting for you!

God loves you.

God wants to have a relationship with you.

Romans 5:17-19 says, “For the sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to rule over many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of righteousness, for all who receive it will live in triumph over sin and death through this one man, Jesus Christ. Yes, Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone. Because one person disobeyed God, many became sinners. But because one other person obeyed God, many will be made righteous.”

John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”

Want to explore more?

Still unsure?

Message me. :)

Want to learn how to become a Christian?

First thing to do is to believe that Jesus’ sacrifice for you. (See Matthew 26-28). Jesus was beaten, murdered on the cross, and that he died for you and your sins. And three days later rose again, bringing new life, paying off your debt to God.

Next, repent of your sins and commit to turning your life to God and following Jesus’ example of how to live. (See 1 John 1:5-2:17).

Once you have repented, then the next step is to confess those sins. (See James 5:7-20)

After Confession, find a church family and to become baptized. (See Acts 2:38-39).

And after that, I would highly recommend finding a mentor. Someone to come alongside you in your new journey of faith. To teach you how to live like Christ, as well as to help build on hope. I am not going to suggest this road will be easy. There is no such thing as easy Christianity. However, through all of life’s hardships, trials, tribulations, persecutions, etc., God will be there for you. :)

And because Jesus is God’s Son, God also knows what it’s like to be human. He knows what it’s like to hurt, to have pain, to live this life. Be comforted in that. (John 11:35)

And if you have decided to accept Christ. Rejoice and message me. I’d love to be able to share in that with you. :)

If you are still thinking about it, or continuing to search, please message me and I will answer your questions, and if I cannot answer a question, I can point you to someone who can.

May God’s peace, hope, love and blessings overshadow you

Cody Marie.

#hope salvation Jesus Christ JesusChrist restoration Christianity love

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catholiccom-blog · 7 years

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The Ten Most Common Misconceptions About Apparitions

Every day, it seems, the papers are splashed with another report of an angel appearing by a hospital bed, the Blessed Virgin’s image showing up in a window screen, or the face of Christ appearing on yet another tortilla. Many Catholics find these reports embarrassing. But then there are sites like Lourdes or Fatima, places that nobody would have heard of except for the reports that Mary appeared there and conveyed messages of hope and repentance. So, what’s the deal, when it comes to reported apparitions? Arguments break out; accusations and contradictions are slammed back and forth by both sides. There are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings, no matter where you look or whom you listen to. Here are the top ten contenders. 1. People who believe that stuff are crazy. Well, now, hang on a minute. "Apparition" just means that a heavenly being—Christ, Mary, another saint, or an angel—makes himself known to human senses. That being the case, pick up your Bible and check Genesis: The first apparitions were to Adam and Eve, when God walked with them in the cool of the garden. Then have a look at Exodus, when God appeared to Moses and spoke to him in the burning bush. Carry it through to the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Resurrection. Look at the Apocalypse, in which John describes his vision of the whole heavenly Jerusalem. The whole Bible is the transcript of one apparition after another. Every Mass includes Christ’s apparition among us—in the appearance of bread and wine. If it’s crazy to believe in apparitions, then every Jew and every Christian who ever lived would have to be crazy. 2. Real apparitions come only to exceptionally holy people. You’d be surprised. Bernadette was a remarkably sweet-natured child before Mary appeared to her, and she got even better afterwards, but at the time she was totally ignorant of her catechism and not unusually pious. Melanie Matthieu, on the other hand, was practically a feral child before the apparition at La Salette in 1848, and her teachers described her afterwards as a complete savage. She later became a vagrant, running all over Europe denouncing the Church for refusing to pay her saintly honors during her lifetime. To take a middle case, Marie Lataste (1822–1847) started life as a remarkably obnoxious little girl in Dax, France, but then Christ started appearing to her almost routinely after her first Communion. Her vices disappeared, her virtues grew, and those around her felt an abiding sense of joy, just from her presence, although she never went out of her way to impress them. (The surprising thing was that she wasn’t surprised at all of this; evidently she thought that’s the way religion works, and you have to admit she had a point. It just happened faster with her.) Anyway, it just goes to show you that God picks up his tools as he will, and that he doesn’t always pick the sharpest knife in the drawer (Judg. 6:15, Matt. 9:9–13, Acts 9:1–4). 3. People claim to see apparitions just to get in the spotlight. That one happens to be true. Not in all cases, though, but in most. Overwhelmingly, the two greatest causes of reports of apparitions are human fraud and human delusion; then, in terms of frequency, there are the diabolic high jinks that almost always help the frauds along. Least frequent of all is a genuine outreach by God, either directly from Christ or through Mary, another saint, or an angel as an intermediary. The genuine ones come, invariably, to people who didn’t want them before they happened, who later wish that they hadn’t had them, or who don’t want them at all, ever. The modesty of their conduct contrasts sharply with the posturings of the fakes and the deluded. Declining to pose as a divine messenger with more authority than Christ, or even refusing to claim to speak for him, is really about the barest minimum of humility a person can have, yet the overwhelming majority of self-declared mystics trip over that very low threshold. The minute you see self-proclaimed visionaries giving interviews to the press, dashing off reams of prophecies for all and sundry, asserting that they’ve seen Mary and that they have an urgent message that can save the world; the minute you see someone even permitting himself to be interviewed on such a matter; certainly as soon as you see a reported visionary routinely blessing people, "curing" pilgrims, or even receiving pilgrims at all—you can safely assume that the person is a fraud or, if you want to be particularly charitable, that the person is deluded, genuinely believing that what he said he saw was real. Either way, it’s not worthy of your attention. Here, as in so much else, John of the Cross is the best model. When dispatched to investigate a reported apparition, he walked cheerfully up to the woman and said, "Are you the lady to whom the Holy Spirit is appearing?" When she answered "Yes!," he bid her good day and reported to the bishop that the woman was either a fraud or delusional. Credit-worthy visionaries speak of "the Lady" or "the person," but they don’t even claim that it was Mary or Christ. 4. You can tell if a reported apparition is real because miraculous things happen around it. Miracles are distinct kinds of mystic phenomena, entirely separate from apparitions and not necessarily occurring anywhere near them. Incidentally, one thing that’s practically the hallmark of a false apparition is the report that a set of rosary beads has changed color. 5. I’ll see an apparition some day. Not likely, this side of Armageddon. It’s an outreach by God, and you can’t compel God. Thinking that he owes an apparition to you, that you’ve earned it, or even that you deserve it, is pride—a cardinal vice that puts a stop to even the possibility, not to mention to further personal growth. "I consider it certain," Teresa of Avila said, "that spiritual persons who think that they deserve these delights of spirit for the many years that they have practiced prayer will not ascend to the summit of the spiritual life," which is in line with Matthew 12:39 and 23:12 and everything else that the Church teaches. John of the Cross attributed the taste for these experiences to a "spiritual sweet tooth," a matter of unwholesome greed. It makes a person an enemy of Christ, he said. Or, as Bernard put it, a soul striving toward union with God "will be far from content that her Bridegroom should manifest himself to her in the common manner, that is, by . . . dreams and visions." The best advice? Stick to the sacraments and the normal spiritual discipline of the Church. Remember what Thérèse of Lisieux, one of the most influential of the Church’s mystics, said: "To ecstasy, I prefer the monotony of sacrifice." 6. People who don’t bother with modern apparitions just aren’t spiritually gifted enough to understand. No, they’re within their rights, and they’re doing basically what the Church hopes people will do. Belief even in events like Lourdes or Fatima is only enjoined, never required. No such event is necessary for salvation or for the business of the Church; like Christ’s own miracles, they only help bring people’s attention back to the faith (John 3:1–21). No latter-day apparition should be taken as the centerpiece of one’s ideas about what religion is all about. That’s because Christianity—a revealed religion—works with two different kinds of revelation. The revelation that came to us from Christ, through the prophets before him and the apostles after, is an unchanged body of teachings called the "deposit of faith," and it’s publicrevelation, so called because Christ said that it was to be given to all nations (Matt. 24:14, 28:19; Mark 11:17, 13:10; Luke 24:47). It’s the substance of our religion. Since the death of the last apostle, public revelation is closed. Everything that God needed to reveal about Christianity already has been revealed, so nothing needs to be added; Christ himself revealed it, so nothing has to be changed. "The Christian dispensation," Vatican II repeated, "as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away, and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ." But there’s also a phenomenon called private revelation. This is not part of public revelation, but just a reminder of some part of it, given by God, sometimes by way of an angel or a saint, to an individual person. It can be the answer to a simple prayer or a sky-splitting apparition—or anything in between. Whatever the form, it’s not essential to the faith. No genuine apparition is going to be anything other than private revelation; none will convey new or revised public revelation, so none is necessary to the substance of the faith. You’re supposed to take the reminder, if you need it, and then get to work increasing your devotion to public revelation. That’s why even spectacularly gifted saints can take apparitions or leave them. Louis of France looked up calmly when his servant burst into the room yelling about how Christ was appearing in the Eucharist in the palace chapel, and then the king turned back to his work. Margaret Mary Alacoque and Teresa of Avila went so far as to fight off their visions of Christ, begging him to leave them in the normal routine of their orders. If you stay at home when the next visionary claims that Mary is appearing in the back yard, you’ll be in very good company. 7. Bishops encourage crowds to flock to any reported apparition, no matter how nutty it is. Just about the last thing any bishop looks forward to is that late-night call about yet another hometown visionary. His efforts will be directed at keeping things orderly until an investigation can be made—if in fact the report warrants investigation. Usually, the thing is so far outside the spectrum of genuine mystic activity that he’ll respond only with silence, and silence from the local bishop is really a public proclamation that the thing deserves no notice. Even if it does turn out to be real, the most that any post-biblical apparition gets is a negative approval—an official declaration that there’s nothing in the report or in its implications that’s contrary to the faith, so that it’s "worthy of belief." That means that you can believe it or, if you aren’t interested, not. 8. Bishops discourage people from flocking to any reported apparition, no matter how wonderful it is. Wrong again. They know that only a tiny percentage of reports—maybe only one in a thousand, or really even fewer—turn out to have anything wonderful about them. To the average bishop, the overwhelming majority of reports are obviously, even blatantly fraudulent or delusional. There is an immense amount of spiritual treasure in the messages of genuine apparitions, a lot that can deepen and enrich your life in the Church through the sacraments. But it’s also true that fakes and delusional cases distract thousands of people from basic—and fully adequate—participation in those sacraments, and they draw them away from growing in the normal life of prayer. So the good of a real apparition is potentially overwhelmed by the evil from a myriad of fakes. Bishops have to be careful. Those reports that have enough substance to merit official examination are studied by panels of qualified experts—theologians, medical doctors, perhaps chemists and physicists—assembled by the local bishop, the only person authorized by law to investigate. They take their time. Time weeds out empty promises, and it may take a century or more before a final determination is announced. In the meantime, follow the lead of King Louis or of John of the Cross, who just turned back to reading his Bible when his brother friars called him to run into town to see a purported apparition. Maybe he was looking at Matthew 12:38–39. 9. If enough people go to see an apparition, the bishop will give it his blessing eventually. A genuine apparition is an outreach by God. The reality of it is not determined by voting and most particularly not by the voting of people unqualified to evaluate the matter. We tend to forget that mystic theology is a regular academic discipline—you can get a doctorate in it, at accredited Catholic universities. It’s sobering but safe to remember that the layman-on-the-street has no experience of genuine mystic activity, no book-learning about what it really is, and—judging by the numbers who flock after even the most preposterous reports—sadly insufficient knowledge about the basics of the faith. A little learning goes a long way toward winnowing out the nonsense. You’d be surprised how far it goes toward opening up the wonders of the apparitions that have been declared worthy of credit, wonders that are closed to people who rely on their emotions and won’t make the necessary effort to grow in knowledge and discipline. Most experts, undoubtedly, would just like to see a little more common sense in these things. Christianity does not change (Heb. 13:8–9), so certainly an apparition of a saint (Matt. 17:3) or an angel (Luke 1:11) is as possible today as it ever was. But there’s no biblical reference for the appearance of anybody’s face on a food item or flower petals. Lack of biblical precedent should be enough to turn anybody from the silliest reports, but there are also the writings of the great Doctors of the Church such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, which ought to settle any doubts the laity is likely to have about the value of a given report, pending official judgment—or official silence. By the way, continuing to fuss with a purported apparition that has been declared false by the local bishop is disobedience: a sin rooted in pride. 10. Apparitions can be photographed. Nope.

#CAMO #Catholic Answers #Kevin Orlin Johnson #Apparitions #Fatima #Lourdes #Medjugorje

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hjgale · 7 years

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Activism and Antisemitism in Seattle

I have been following the cluster-fuck that is the convergence of Omari Tahir-Garrett, gentrification, Seattle "radical" politics, antisemitism, and Seattle avoidance (aka "Seattle nice," passive-aggressive avoidance, etc.). There is a lot to struggle with here -- not in responding to the antisemitism, but in responding to others lack of proper response.

I have been an activist for a long time and, despite having spent 15-20 years each in NYC, Boston, and Seattle, it is only in Seattle that I have seen activists hesitate to condemn public displays of antisemitism in activist movements -- more on that later.

The silence and unwillingness to publicly criticize folks in the activist community is driven by many factors, some of which are exacerbated in, if not unique to, Seattle.

During the last 20 years I have been in Seattle I can only remember two occasions where I directly witnessed antisemitism being a significant problem on the left: on both occasions my trying to deal with it without going public and without shaming people mostly failed. That is why I applaud Sydney Brownstone’s (and here) and Ijeoma Oluo's courage to take this debate public. I am disheartened that only through public shaming do many folks on the left do the right thing when it comes to this (and other) issues.

Every public comment by activists -- save the ones noted above -- has involved some form of equivocation, including those from Cliff Cawthon for the first nine days ("We absolutely will not defend his statements"; confused much Clff? The targets of hate require defending and the perpetrators require condemnation). These equivocations utilize any one or combination of the following forms of sophistry:

(1) Hierarchy of Oppression: The belief that since one form of oppression is far worse than another, the lesser form of oppression can be ignored or "saved for another day." While there is a hierarchy of oppression -- worthy of academic study and analysis, and worth considering when strategizing certain actions -- it is not for any mortal to decide on any given day whose oppression comes first and whose can be ignored, certainly not when racist sentiments have been overtly expressed. There is also an aspect of antisemitism that exacerbates this belief in a "hierarchy of oppression": that Jews are immunized from the consequences of racism and hate, or possibly even deserving of it, since "they control so much."

(2) "They started it!": The belief that something worse preceded the antisemitism and explains or justifies it. If that notion doesn't work for kids it shouldn't work for adults.

(3) Trauma of the Oppressed: The belief that because of racism and oppression folks are traumatized and therefore lash out in seemingly irrational ways. As someone who grew up in, and has worked for years, in minority communities, this notion is both insulting, patronizing, and absurd when used to explain behavior like Omari's. Vast numbers of racists have probably been traumatized, or suffer from a mental illness, but I don't ever remember folks accepting such possibilities as anything beyond a factor that might mitigate the sanction or punishment meted out to the perpetrator.

(4) Only the non-righteous complain: The belief that those that cry antisemitism are racist themselves, they only take action when the racism is directed at them, or they are not true activists. Given that Jews make up an absurdly disproportionate percentage of social activists, the only proper response to anyone that might harbor that notion would be a "fuck you!".

Focusing on the specific individuals involved -- what Omari or Ian Eisenberg did or said -- also misses the point that the progressive community -- both those that were there and those who later heard about it -- have a moral responsibility to publicly and unambiguously denounce words which promote hate and are injurious to folks far beyond Eisenberg and the people present on April 1.

It should not have been difficult for people to parse four somewhat independent factors concerning the April 1 incident: (1) the specific words used by Omari; (2) the people immediately and potentially hurt by those words; (3) the wrong of allowing racism to appear tolerable by not immediately challenging it; and (4) Omari the person. Parsing those factors should have made it easy for folks to say something straightforward like:

Omari's words were hateful and hurtful, not just to Ian Eisenberg, but to all Jews in our community, and, hopefully, to non-Jews who struggle for justice. What preceded Omari's words is irrelevant. Further, we recognize that the lack of an immediate and public condemnation by those who heard the words adds to the hate and to the hurt: it makes these sentiments appear acceptable, and that the welfare and feelings of those hurt by these words are not worthy of respect and concern.

Omari as a person is someone who has a long history in Seattle's African-American community, he is... [here many thoughts could be inserted, ranging from "an important elder," to "a historical figure," to "one who has spent the last two decades bullying, disrespecting, threatening, and spewing racist rhetoric toward many"].

Somehow almost everyone who responded to this incident felt compelled to use this as an opportunity to return the focus to the original issues being protested, failing to recognize that Omari's behavior and words were what took public attention away from the original issues. It is not an apology if, when I hurt someone, I then proceed to explain how that hurt happened in the context of me doing something I believe was important: "I was rushing to the hospital to help a whole lot of people, so me hitting you isn't really important." Instead of focusing on Omari, his injurious behavior, and the people he hurt, the folks involved in the protest decided to bemoan those who were hurt taking focus away from the issue. Far too many people spent way the fuck too many words on what they believed to be the "important" issue, rather than on addressing and resolving the issue created by Omari.

There are many factors that lead to this sort of behavior, factors that also feed other dysfunctional behaviors among the left in Seattle. I'll note four obvious ones:

(1) Uncritical loyalty to a "principle" that folks from a dominant group must defer to the demands or actions of individuals from an oppressed group. This leads to a permissiveness for all kinds of fucked-up behavior, since this principle offers no guidance as to whose particular demands or actions we should accept, or how we should distinguish leaders from posers or provocateurs. Oftentimes this principle leads white folks to simply follow the loudest or most "radical" seeming person in the room. Many of us witnessed this during Occupy in 2012 when a "radical" People of Color (POC) caucus bullied their way into Occupy's (supposedly non-existent) leadership, nearly appropriating a six year tradition of May Day as a day for advancing immigrant rights, and trying to turn May Day into a confrontation with police. Of course the leadership of oppressed people must be central to any struggle for justice, but following the loudest and most provocative voice will often disrespect the voices of those who have been struggling the longest and hardest, and are often the more representative voice in the community.

(2) "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," where we make alliances with groups and folks we really shouldn't.

(3) Leaderless and coalitionless movements. The growing popularity of this style of organizing, which came to the fore in 1999 with WTO and has gained again in popularity since Occupy in 2011, exacerbates the two problems noted above. It allows for a single or a few individuals to reshape a movement, severely reducing its mass appeal and ultimately rendering it dysfunctional. In these cases you often hear folks remaining in the rump movement state "well, everyone here agrees," completely ignoring the fact that the de facto leadership, which isn't supposed to exist, has scared everyone else away and produced toxic groupthink.

(4) "Seattle nice", or an unwillingness to struggle openly and honestly with ideological and tactical differences. Combined with natural tendencies toward groupthink, this will often produce an unwillingness to confront shitty behavior and shitty ideas. This is not unique to the left in Seattle: it pervades all aspects of the social space here. It becomes easier to tolerate bad or offensive behavior rather than confront it. This exacerbates all the above issues.

I would be remiss to not recognize that antisemitism among the left has some unique underlying support in American society. The vast majority of commercial land on the four blocks surrounding the 23rd Avenue and E. Union Street intersection is owned, controlled, or developed by entities that have nothing to do with Jews or Ian Eisenberg, but rather by: private companies (Mount Baker, LLC and Lake Union Partners); city, state, and private non-profits (Capitol Hill Housing and Casey Family Programs); a protestant church (Mt. Calvary, with a homophobic pastor, owns five lots along 23rd Avenue, property tax free); and a Catholic family (the Bangassers). How is it that the one Jew, who owns one lot, becomes repeatedly publicly targeted? How is it that antisemitic rhetoric is heard, but not anti-religious, anti-Catholic, etc.?

(1) Pervasiveness of antisemitic stereotypes in American culture, especially the "positive" stereotypes

. One of the most unique characteristics of antisemitism is that some of its core tenets are, potentially, compliments. Recently someone told me "You guys (Jews) control banks, businesses, movies." When I started to object, they immediately interjected "No, no, no, that is a compliment, that is a good thing... look what you have achieved against all those odds!" It is extraordinarily rare for racist stereotypes to be based on achievement. This phenomenon is due to both the disproportionate success of Jews in a wide range of fields* and to the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion over 100 years ago in Russia (though conspiracy theories involving the secret control of banks and governments by Jews preceded this). This completely fictitious document purports to uncover the Jewish plot to rule the world, providing "evidence" of Jews scheming behind every institution of political, social and monetary control. Its first American publication was in 1918 and was originally distributed in US government circles. In 1919 Philadelphia's most popular newspaper published it (replacing "Jews" with "Bolsheviks", though few in 1919 believed there was a difference), then, through most of the 1920s, Henry Ford printed 500,000 copies (renamed "The International Jew -- The Worlds Foremost Problem" so no one would be confused as to what was claimed) while also publishing antisemitic screeds in his Michigan newspaper. Ever since, "The Protocols" has been republished and sold by a variety of neo-Nazi, white supremacist, nationalist, and religious fundamentalist organizations, most notably, in repackaged form by the Nation of Islam (more on that below). It was sold by Walmart in the early 2000s, and continues to be sold on Amazon, where dozens of different versions are available. For a hundred years now, versions of this Jewish conspiracy have been at the core of not just overt antisemitism, but in conspiracy theories involving Illuminati, the New World Order (and other "one world government" conspiracies), Free Masons, Khazars, David Icke's reptile people, and on, and on. There is almost no conspiracy theory concerning secret government control that does not, at some point, connect to Jews.

(2) The role of the Nation of Islam in fostering antisemitism over the last quarter century. In a 1991 speech Leonard Jeffries (an African-American professor of Black Studies at the City College of NY) claimed that "rich Jews" financed and dominated the African slave trade (and, of course, also controlled the American film industry). Jeffries cited as a source "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews" (1991), published by the Nation of Islam (NOI, which is now aligned with the Church of Scientology -- antisemitism goes better with more generalized forms of abuse and idiocy). Mainstream scholars consider the book nonsense, with noted Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. labeling the book "the bible of new anti-Semitism" and adding that "the book massively misinterprets the historical record, largely through a process of cunningly selective quotations of often reputable sources." The NOI is officially recognized as an organized hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

This book, along with two new volumes, remains available on the official NOI website, along with numerous other antisemitic publications (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here -- I'm sure I didn't catch them all). With at most around 50,000 adherents -- representing 0.12% of the African-American population -- NOI can seem insignificant, but their nine decade history, their high degree discipline and organization, and the fact that they often become involved with progressive causes and protests in the African-American community, give them outsized influence. NOI's quarter century of fostering a virulent variety of antisemitic narratives around Jewish control and exploitation of African-Americans, currently overwhelms any other historical tensions between African-Americans and Jews (which is usually facilely attributed to long-ago Jewish ownership of housing and businesses in African-American neighborhoods). Added on to the reality of a more generalized American antisemitism this can become particularly toxic.

(3) Israel and Zionism: All major mainstream American Jewish advocacy organizations (American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Congress, and American Israel Public Affairs Committee -- though this last one is more accurately viewed as an advocacy group for a foreign power), mainline synagogues, and local Jewish federations have increasingly, and intentionally, confounded antisemitism with critiques of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights. It is important to consider three examples I confronted in Seattle over the last 15 years.

In April of 2002 I was working with the Church Council of Greater Seattle to organize a rally at Westlake opposing the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the possibility of war in Iraq. The rally was to have speakers on those topics, as well as on a variety of domestic and international human rights issues. The rally was scheduled for Saturday April 20. Some days prior to the rally we received a call at the Church Council from Rick Harkavy, the director of the American Jewish Committee chapter in Seattle. Harkavy warned us that April 20 was Adolf Hitlers birthday and that it would be inappropriate, and viewed as antisemitic, to have rally speakers criticize Israel. Before that day in 2002 I had never known when Hitler's birthday was, nor, as a Jew, could I ever imagine it being something I would care about. Harkavy's call went beyond "advisory": he made it clear that if Israel were criticized at the rally he would reach out to the media to make this issue public. I was shocked, but proceeded to organize the rally in ways that had already been planned. The day after the rally Harkavy was quoted in the Seattle Times saying "For people who claim to be progressives, to have a day in which they're highly critical and perhaps may also call ultimately for the destruction of the state of Israel on the same day as Hitler's birthday, I'm appalled" (Seattle Times, April 21, 2002, page B1). It was an egregious attempt to slander a rally for peace and justice -- there was, of course, no call for the destruction of Israel.

In December of 2010 controversy erupted around already purchased and printed King County Metro Transit bus ads that said "Israeli War Crimes. Your Tax Dollars at Work" above a picture of a bombed Palestinian building. Metro Transit was deluged with complaints claiming the ads were antisemitic, and they received supposed threats of violence (virtually all of which were from local Jews who had provided a name and contact information with their threat). Days were spent at Metro Transit trying to insure that buses possibly carrying the ads would not pass by the Jewish Federation offices or any synagogues: it was considered obvious that these ads would be considered antisemitic and offensive to Jews. In the end, King County Executive Dow Constantine pulled the ads, citing both safety concerns and claims that these ads were offensive to Jews in the community.

http://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/03/23/a-jewish-man-investigates-king-countys-decision-to-censor-bus-ads

It remains uncertain why the bus ads were pulled, especially since my investigation revealed that almost all (rather minimal) threats came from known members of the local Jewish community and these threats were likely received after Dow Constantine made his decision to pull the ads. What is certain is that major local Jewish mainstream organizations put severe pressure on Constantine.

This past January, House Joint Measure HJM 4009 was introduced into the Washington State legislature. This is (it was reintroduced into the special session on April 24) a bill condemning the movement for promoting boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel -- a movement using the only non-violent tool left to promote Palestinian civil rights -- as antisemitic. The bill contains outrageous statements such as "The international boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement is one of the main vehicles for spreading antisemitism and advocating the elimination of the Jewish state." Numerous local Democratic progressive state representatives have sponsored this bill. I talked to many of them: for non-Jewish representatives they felt they had to unquestionably support their Jewish colleagues at a time of rising antisemitism, and for Jewish representatives they felt there was no question that BDS, and much Palestinian civil rights advocacy, was inherently antisemitic. Both groups of legislators came under pressure from mainstream Jewish advocacy organizations, organizations which clearly provided the language for this legislative measure (based on the extreme hyperbole of the language and the inability on any legislator to explain it). BDS, as a modern organized movement, has been around now for 15 years. The recent sudden increase in antisemitic incidents, along with other forms of racism, is 100% attributable to Donald Trump and the forces he has unleashed over the last two years, and 0% attributable to BDS.

What the above three incidents have in common is obvious: a cynical abuse of the concept of antisemitism in order to protect a nation state from criticism. Attempts such as these have two disastrous consequences for those concerned with real antisemitism: (1) It confuses non-Jews as to what antisemitism is, as it confounds racism with beliefs based on human rights for Palestinians or anti-nationalism (or anti-colonialism, or anti-imperialism, etc.). It allows non-Jews to trivialize antisemitism as anything that goes against Jewish interests, buying into the antisemitic notion that Israeli and Jewish interests are identical; and (2) It fuels the widespread belief the Jews have inordinate control of economic and political systems: How else to explain such unwavering support for Israel? How else to explain the first time in over 35 years that bus ads were pulled by King County?

By watering down and confusing the meaning of antisemitism, and by perpetuating the notion that "Jews get their way" (versus a narrow interest group that joins together Jewish nationalists, Christian Zionists, the arms industry, and geopolitical interests in the Middle East) these mainline Jewish organizations actually perpetuate antisemitism. They sacrifice the safety of Jews for the (mistaken) belief that they are helping preserve a nation state.

* It is worth noting that Jewish over-representation in a field does not necessarily correlate with control by individuals, nor does it correlate with some imagined group control. For example, in prior years at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, a Roman Catholic (Jesuit) school, a notably disproportionate number of department heads are Jewish, yet they are the ones who will often implement Catholic ethical directives (e.g., avoiding talking about or training in abortion services) the most zealously. Similarly, as Jews became dominant in Hollywood they would often carry out the majoritarian agenda of anti-communism, racism, portraying America as a Christian country, etc. It is a common phenomena throughout history that minority group members that achieve success often advocate more zealously for the majoritarian agenda.

It is also worth noting another curious consequence of this myth of Jewish over-representation and supposed control. The stereotype focuses on the entertainment and banking industries, yet completely ignores the area of greatest Jewish over-representation: Nobel prize winners, where 22% are Jewish despite only being 0.21% of the world population, 105 times the expected rate. You can stoke people's fears by imagining Jews controlling monetary systems, but it's hard to be scared of scientific discoveries that save lives and actually help explain how the world really works.

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dailybiblelessons · 5 years

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Tuesday: Reflection on the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

Roman Catholic Proper 21 Revised Common Lectionary Proper 16

Complementary Hebrew Scripture from the Latter Prophets: Ezekiel 20:18-32

I said to their children in the wilderness, Do not follow the statutes of your parents, nor observe their ordinances, nor defile yourselves with their idols. I the Lord am your God; follow my statutes, and be careful to observe my ordinances, and hallow my sabbaths that they may be a sign between me and you, so that you may know that I the Lord am your God. But the children rebelled against me; they did not follow my statutes, and were not careful to observe my ordinances, by whose observance everyone shall live; they profaned my sabbaths. Then I thought I would pour out my wrath upon them and spend my anger against them in the wilderness. But I withheld my hand, and acted for the sake of my name, so that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations, in whose sight I had brought them out. Moreover I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the nations and disperse them through the countries, because they had not executed my ordinances, but had rejected my statutes and profaned my sabbaths, and their eyes were set on their ancestors’ idols. Moreover I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the Lord.

Therefore, mortal, speak to the house of Israel and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: In this again your ancestors blasphemed me, by dealing treacherously with me. For when I had brought them into the land that I swore to give them, then wherever they saw any high hill or any leafy tree, there they offered their sacrifices and presented the provocation of their offering; there they sent up their pleasing odors, and there they poured out their drink offerings. (I said to them, What is the high place to which you go? So it is called Bamah to this day.) Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: Will you defile yourselves after the manner of your ancestors and go astray after their detestable things? When you offer your gifts and make your children pass through the fire, you defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. And shall I be consulted by you, O house of Israel? As I live, says the Lord God, I will not be consulted by you.

What is in your mind shall never happen—the thought, “Let us be like the nations, like the tribes of the countries, and worship wood and stone.”

Semi-continuous Hebrew Scripture from the Latter Prophets: Jeremiah 7:16-26

[God is speaking to Jeremiah.]

As for you, do not pray for this people, do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you. Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger. Is it I whom they provoke? says the Lord. Is it not themselves, to their own hurt? Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: My anger and my wrath shall be poured out on this place, on human beings and animals, on the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh. For in the day that I brought your ancestors out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this command I gave them, “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.” Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward. From the day that your ancestors came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day; yet they did not listen to me, or pay attention, but they stiffened their necks. They did worse than their ancestors did.

Complementary Psalm 109:21-31

But you, O Lord my Lord, act on my behalf for your name's sake; because your steadfast love is good, deliver me. For I am poor and needy, and my heart is pierced within me. I am gone like a shadow at evening; I am shaken off like a locust. My knees are weak through fasting; my body has become gaunt. I am an object of scorn to my accusers; when they see me, they shake their heads.

Help me, O Lord my God! Save me according to your steadfast love. Let them know that this is your hand; you, O Lord, have done it. Let them curse, but you will bless. Let my assailants be put to shame; may your servant be glad. May my accusers be clothed with dishonor; may they be wrapped in their own shame as in a mantle. With my mouth I will give great thanks to the Lord; I will praise him in the midst of the throng. For he stands at the right hand of the needy, to save them from those who would condemn them to death.

Semi-continuous Psalm 10

Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor— let them be caught in the schemes they have devised.

For the wicked boast of the desires of their heart, those greedy for gain curse and renounce the Lord. In the pride of their countenance the wicked say, “God will not seek it out”; all their thoughts are, “There is no God.”

Their ways prosper at all times; your judgments are on high, out of their sight; as for their foes, they scoff at them. They think in their heart, “We shall not be moved; throughout all generations we shall not meet adversity.”

Their mouths are filled with cursing and deceit and oppression; under their tongues are mischief and iniquity. They sit in ambush in the villages; in hiding places they murder the innocent.

Their eyes stealthily watch for the helpless; they lurk in secret like a lion in its covert; they lurk that they may seize the poor; they seize the poor and drag them off in their net. They stoop, they crouch, and the helpless fall by their might. They think in their heart, “God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it.”

Rise up, O Lord; O God, lift up your hand; do not forget the oppressed. Why do the wicked renounce God, and say in their hearts, “You will not call us to account”?

But you do see! Indeed you note trouble and grief, that you may take it into your hands; the helpless commit themselves to you; you have been the helper of the orphan.

Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers; seek out their wickedness until you find none. The Lord is king forever and ever; the nations shall perish from his land.

O Lord, you will hear the desire of the meek; you will strengthen their heart, you will incline your ear to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed, so that those from earth may strike terror no more.

New Testament Lesson: Revelation 3:7-13

“And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: These are the words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens:

“I know your works. Look, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name. I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but are lying—I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you. Because you have kept my word of patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. I am coming soon; hold fast to what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God; you will never go out of it. I will write on you the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”

Selections are from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings copyright © 1995 by the Consultation on Common Texts. Unless otherwise indicated, Bible text is from New Revised Standard Version Bible (NRSV) copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Image Credit: Licensed image from Shutterstock, Copyright: Pikoso.kz, Image ID:239072095

Year C Ordinary 21, Catholic Proper 21, RCL Proper 16: Tuesday

#C Ordinary 21 Tuesday #endurance #open door #defilement #stubborness

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romancatholicreflections · 5 years

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10th March >> Daily Reflection/Commentary on Today’s Mass Readings for Roman Catholics on the First Sunday of Lent, Cycle C (Deuteronomy 26:4-10; Romans 10:8-13; Luke 4:1-13)

WE HAVE NOW ENTERED the great season of Lent. For those of us who are old enough to remember, Lent in the past was not, in some respects, a time we looked forward to. Fasting and abstinence, not to mention other forms of penance, were in force and it was a serious business. Easter was looked forward to with real anticipation. Our attitudes to Lent tended to be on the gloomy and negative side. Perhaps nowadays we have gone to the other extreme where Lent hardly means anything at all. “You mean Lent has started already? Really, I had no idea! Easter will be on top of us before we know where we are and I haven’t bought a thing!”

Yet Lent has always been one of the key periods of the Church year and it would be a great pity if we were to forget its real meaning. In fact, that is what we ask for in the Opening Prayer just before we sit down to listen to the readings: “Father, through our observance of Lent, help us to understand the meaning of your Son’s death and resurrection and teach us to reflect it in our lives.” Really, the whole purpose of Lent is beautifully summarised in that prayer – to understand the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus and to live that out in our own lives.

An annual retreat

The period of Lent is six weeks to help us do precisely that. The Church provides Lent almost like an annual retreat, a time for deepening the understanding of our Christian faith, a time for reflection and renewal, a time to make a fresh start.

It was a pious custom in the past for people, as part of their Lenten observance to go to Mass every day during this time. This is even more meaningful now since the Second Vatican Council and the reformation of the liturgy, because we are provided with a magnificent set of Scripture readings from both the Hebrew (Old) and Christian (New) Testaments every day during the Lenten season.

In the First Reading of today’s Mass, Moses speaks to the Israelites at the end of their forty years wandering in the desert and he prepares them for their new life in the Promised Land. That is what the Lenten season is meant to do for us also.

Traditionally on this First Sunday of Lent the Gospel speaks of the temptations of Jesus in the desert. Jesus has just completed his forty days of preparation in the desert and he now faces one more test before he begins his mission. This incident takes place between the baptism of Jesus and the start of his public mission, beginning (in Luke’s gospel) at Nazareth.

A time of beginning

In the early centuries of the Church, Lent was seen as a time of beginning. It was – and again now is – a time for forming new converts, preparing them for their formal entry into the Church community by baptism and confirmation during the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection at the Easter Vigil. Today, in fact, is their day of Election. Our catechumens are entering the last six weeks of preparation for Baptism. Let us pray for them and be in solidarity with them during this time.

For those of us who are already baptised, it can equally be a new beginning. Often we prefer to stay with the known and the familiar, even though it does not give us great satisfaction. We can settle into a routine kind of Christianity that goes on basically unchanged from year to year. It is not very inspiring but we stick with it rather than risk the unknown that radical conversion can bring.

Forty days in the desert

The forty days of Lent correspond to Jesus’ own forty days spent in the desert. For him, it was a period of preparation for his coming mission. At the end of the forty days – as described in Matthew and Luke – Jesus had three encounters with the Evil One.

It might be worth noting that we may not be dealing here with a strictly historical happening, something which could have been video-taped or covered by television. The devil normally does not carry on conversations with people like this. Temptations to evil – and they can be many and frequent – usually come to us in far more subtle ways. (On this, read C.S. Lewis’ marvellously entertaining book The Screwtape Letters – a delightful read with a deadly serious message.)

Rather than just seeing them as three consecutive temptations happening almost simultaneously at a particular moment, we should perhaps see them as three key areas where Jesus was tempted to compromise his mission during his public life. They were not just passing temptations of the moment but temptations with which he was beset all through his public life.

Some real examples of these temptations can be found in the Gospel accounts: [The Pharisees asked Jesus] “to perform a miracle to show that God approved of him” (Mark 8:11). “Save yourself if you are God’s Son! Come on down from the cross!” (Matthew 27:40). After feeding 5,000 hungry people with an abundance of food, “the people there said, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who was to come into the world!’ Jesus knew that they were about to come and seize him in order to make him king by force; so he went off again to the hills by himself” (John 6:14-15). Clearly, in varying forms, these temptations of Jesus can come into our lives too.

Superstar

The first temptation (to change stones into bread) and the third (to jump from the top of the Temple) try to turn Jesus away from his role as the Servant-Messiah to become an eye-catching, self-serving superstar. “Follow me because I am the greatest.” The second temptation (to worship the devil who can give power and wealth) tries to entice Jesus away from the true direction of all human living – the love and service of God and his creation. He is being lured from setting up a Kingdom of love and service to controlling an empire of minions.

Luke reverses the second and third temptations from Matthew’s version in order to make Jerusalem the climax of the temptations just as it is the final destiny of Jesus’ mission and the starting point for the Church.

The forty days in the desert eating nothing reminds us of Moses doing the very same. At the end Moses received and proclaimed the message of God (the Law) just as Jesus will go on to make his mission statement in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-21). Also, the replies that Jesus gives to the Evil One are all from Deuteronomy (one of five books attributed to Moses) and his temptations correspond to those which afflicted the Israelites on their desert journey. The difference is that the Israelites succumbed but not Jesus:

– The Israelites grumbled about not having enough food. “It is not on bread alone that we live but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

– Israel constantly tended to chase after false gods (e.g. the golden calf) but Jesus recognises only one God. “You must worship the Lord your God and serve him alone.”

– Israel tested God at Massah and Meribah to provide them with water but Jesus refuses to manipulate God. “You must not put your Lord to God to the test.”

All in all Jesus shows himself totally faithful and trusting in God and thus qualified for his role as Messiah. And these temptations are made to sound all the more reasonable because the Messiah was expected to bring bread down from heaven, to subject other kingdoms to Israel and to perform a dazzling sign to prove his credentials.

Most dangerous temptations

When we think of temptations, we tend to think of sexual sins, telling lies, losing our tempers, gossiping about people’s (imagined) faults, getting angry, feeling resentment and the like. But the really dangerous temptations are to want material wealth for its own sake (the ability to turn anything into money [‘bread’]), to want status (everyone looks up to me), and power (I can manipulate people and things for my own ends), things which are seen as going with wealth, power and status.

These are dangerous because they reduce other people and even the material world to things that can be used purely for my personal gain. They are dangerous because they create a world and a society in which everyone has to compete to get as much for themselves as they can. In such a rat race world, a minority corners to itself a disproportionate amount of the world’s goods while the majority is left without what they need. Above all, such people are dangerous because they can create the prevailing creed of the society in which we live. They believe that undiluted happiness comes with winning millions in the lottery. They believe that the ownership of what they have acquired is absolute. But there is no absolute ownership of anything.

Values of the Kingdom

The world, the Kingdom that Jesus came to build, has a different set of values altogether. And it is those values we will be considering all during Lent. Many Christians are chasing the idols of wealth, status and power just as fanatically as their non-Christian brothers and sisters. But, in fact, these are non-Christian, even anti-Christian, ambitions. They are not the way of Jesus, they are not the way of the Kingdom, nor indeed are they the way to a fully human, fully satisfying life for anyone.

This is what today’s Gospel is about. This is what Lent means as a time of reflection and a time of re-evaluating the quality and direction of our lives. A time for reconsidering our priorities both as Christians and human beings. A time to re-affirm our conviction of the equal dignity of every single human person.

Says the Second Reading today: “Those who believe in him will have no cause for shame, it makes no difference between Jew and Greek. All belong to the same Lord who is rich enough, however many ask for his help, for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” It is a scandal and a crime then when some of us actively prevent brothers and sisters having access to the material, social and spiritual goods of God’s creation.

Endless battle

Finally, before we leave today’s Gospel, let us not overlook its final sentence: “The devil left him to return at the appointed time.” The battle with evil was not over for Jesus. It will occur again and again at various stages in his life, right up to and especially at those last hours in the garden and on the Cross.

For us, too, the battle against evil never stops. The selfishness, the greed, the anger and hostility, the jealousy and resentment, above all the desire to have rather than to share, to control rather than to serve will continually dog us. We and our children are caught up in the competitive rat race without even knowing it. Our only success in life can be what we achieve in building not palaces or empires but in building a society that is more loving and just, based on the message of Jesus, a message of truth and integrity, of love and compassion, of freedom and peace.

That is why we need this purifying period of Lent every year. If, in past years, we let it go by largely unnoticed, let this year be a little different. Let it be a second spring in our lives. Let it mean something in our discipleship with Christ.

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stevekarma-blog · 5 years

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John 4:1-26 A Samaritan Woman Meets Her Messiah

You're Not a Good Samritan - Your This One

C - This section is preceded by the conversation with Nicodemus and the Pharisees about baptism and the spirit and is proceeded by the Samaritan revival. Historically the Samaritans and the Jews were religious and ethnic enemies who hated one another and this discussion takes place at the Jacob’s well.

A - Look at the significance of wells and divorce in the first century.

p - Most people see her as the adulterer and not the abused.

T - Chrst gives to us that which sustains us and quenches the thirst from our souls. Main image is water.

O - Come to Christ for the life giving Spirit.

R - FCF Inner thirst an only be satisfied in Christ RHF Brings an end to the endless search for that which will never satisfy. For her it was a relationship and maybe kids.

Therefore, when the Lord knew

that the Pharisees had heard

that Jesus made

and baptized more disciples than John

2 (though Jesus Himself did not baptize,

but His disciples),

3 He left Judea

and departed again to Galilee.

Jesus did not want to give the Pharisees the satisfaction of undermining His or John’s ministry by setting them up as rivals in the same way that two churches in the same city setting up an Alpha course on the same night and the same time may negatively effect both and undermine both in the eyes of others. The fact that Jesus ‘did not baptise,’ Paul will later say that he ‘did not come to baptise,’ was probably so that people would not place too much importance upon it and believe that spiritual rebirth (the biblical term that is often used is ‘regeneration’) came about through baptism. It is an outward sign of public repentance, faith and entrance into the Church.

4 But He needed to go through Samaria.

Practically He did not need to ‘go through Samaria’ in fact, most law-abiding Jews would have noothing to do with the ethnic half-breeds and heretics that were the Samaritans. Nontheless, ‘He needed to go through Samaria’ as this would be the place of His encounter with the women at the well and would be the place of a religious revival.

5 So He came to a city of Samaria

which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground

that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

6 Now Jacob’s well was there.

The well belongs to Jacob or Israel and was an ancestor that was claimed by both the Jews and the Samaritans the fact that it takes places near a watering hole is not biblical warrant to drop by the bar to pick up girls in the name of evangelism though (and I have heard this text used in this way).

Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

Here we are reminded of Jesus’ full humanity. Jesus did not appear to be human, He did not pretend to be human and He was not half human. He was fully God and fully man in one person, this is like a glass that is full of oil and water. The components are seperate but contained within the one container. In the noon day sun Jesus, who was halfway through a 120 mile journey from the region of Judea in the South and the region of Galilee in the North, was exhausted.

7A woman of Samaria came

to draw water.

The reader is supposed to wonder why this woman was drawing water alone, since the women would draw water together and why this women was drawing water in the noon day sun, the hottest part of the day.

Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.”

8 For His disciples had gone away into the city

to buy food.

Jesus not only humbly served others but He humbly allowed Himself to be served by others. In the missionary world this is sometimes called reverse hospitality which is when the missionary is not the one providing all of the food and health care and education but also a recipient. This elevates the person providing hospitality like: Zaacheus, Mary/Marhta/Lazarus, Simon the Leper, Matthew Levi etc in the same way when the believer not only welcomes people to their home but allows them to bring something or help out with the dishes or will come to their home. This can be difficult for proud people, like me, who like to give but do not like to feel indebted to anyone for anything.

9 Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?”

For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

Relgious Jews had nothing to do with women or Samaritans in fact Jews and Samaritans hated one another in the same way that Sunni and Shia Muslims or Catholics and Protestants in NIRE in the 70s and 80s or Jews and Nazis in the 30s and 40s might.

10 Jesus answered and said to her,

“If you knew the gift of God,

Jesus was not only God’s gift to the Jews but to the whole world. That is that He was the long awaited Jewish Messiah but He was also the long awaited Samaritan Messiah and is the long awaited Messiah of all peoples. He is the Oliver Cromwell, the William Wallace, the Che Guerra, the Nelson Mandela, the George Washington, the Christian Ronaldo, the Ussain Bolt, the Gandhi that we have all been waiting for. In fact, the reason why their stories fascinate us is because they are mere shadows of something more significant that came through Him.

and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him,

and He would have given you living water.”

John does something interesting here he uses the idea of dead water (meaning water from a stagnant source, the spring from this well had probably ceased or this well had always been a well that collected the rain from the rainy season) and living water (which is water from a spring or flowing water from a river). He says that Jesus was comparing the dead water of life with the living water that comes from Him.

11 The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with,

and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? 12 Are You greater than our father Jacob,

who gave us the well,

and drank from it himself, as well as his sons

and his livestock?”

Yet again we see that Jesus is misunderstood by those who are overly literalisitic with His words. What if there were 2 ways to percieve the world, maybe that is too simplisitc too, but what if there was one way which was overly literlaisitic and one that was equally true but was more the langage of the poet or song writer and contained within it metaphor and word picture and symbol? Well in Chrit these two ways or lens need to be alligned so that we might read His word not in a literalisitic sense but in a literal sense recognising shades of meaning and not dismiss it as ‘arty farty.’ Ultimately to understand the things that are revealed, revelation, we need the illuminating light of the Spirit - illumination.

13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again,

14 but whoever drinks of the water

that I shall give him will never thirst.

But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

‘We are all baptised by the one Spirit’ which means that Christ fills us with the same Holy Spirit that filled Him and the apostles which mean that the power that dwells in the youngest and weakest believer is unfathomable. And that power is not just pragmatic, for the healing of the sick or so that one may be able to interpret dreams etc that power bubbles up in someone and becomes the source, or ‘fountain’ that leads to the life that is promised by Christ. Abundant life in the here-and-now and everlasting life in the bye-and-bye.

15 The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water,

that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”

This woman longs for this water as her shame and her string of failed relationships have never been able to satsify the inner thirst she has had she is like the gambler who thinks that the one big win or the drunk who will just have one more binge before giving up but no matter how much the one wins and loses and wins again and the other drinks and drinks and drinks nothing can satisfy the craving of their innermost being. Intectually, relationally, spiritually the thirst in our souls can only be fulfilled in Christ, when He and He alone is our single delight when if everything if stripped away would be nothing in comparison with His good pleasure.

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband,

and come here.”

17 The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.”

Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’

18 for you have had five husbands,

and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”

Although many preachers and commentaries would see this womn, in the words of Alister Begg as having had ‘5 husbands and a live in lover,’ I don’t think this is the case. I say that because in this day a woman caught in adultery would be stoned to death and it was only men who were able to iniaite divorce I think we have a woman who was always a good looking girl the stunner from Sychar. And not only was she physically attractive but she had a personality that made men like putty in her hands. Maybe she married her childhood sweetheart and then he died, she is till young and still has her looks and her charm and maybe her second husband leaves her for another woman and the fourth because of the hard time his friends and family give him and the fith because she can bare him no children. Until the final guy is happy to sleep with her or live with her but he is not marryng her. This is the young girl who served you at Boots, this is the one in your English lit lecturers, this is your cousin this could be you. Not so much immoral, though that is maybe a art of it and Christ saves the immoral, but the lost and oppressed who have tried to fill the Christless void with actual or imaginary romantic relationships.

If I can only find me a Justin Bieber or Scarlett Johanson.

If only if I had a little girl who I could take to pilates or a little boy who I could take to the football.

If only I had genuine friends and a Church that loves me.

Look! It is not that I grudge you this, I want you to have this but you ask the people who wanted the same things and who got what they wanted and they will tell you honestly that although it was awesome, though for some the dream became a nightmare, it was unable quench the inner thirst within them.

19 The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain,

and you Jews say

that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”

This woman does what we often do when the spotlight of conviction comes upon us by the Spirit she makes excuses. What she says here is the context of the conversation is stupid. This is the I would follow Jesus but I need to first figure out if I should be a Pentecostal or a Preysbetarian or if I perfer Gospel choirs or worship bands.

Some of you know enough by now to repent of your sins, place your faith in Christ, be baptised. Some of you know that you should make covenant and serving in leadership. And some of you should be training for the ministry, be setting up a Christian business, adopting or fostering or be on the mission field but you wont because you have excuses.

I heard of the American General Paton who was taking his men across a bridge while they being pursued by the enemy. Something was holding up the men so the general got to the front of the bridge and found out that it was a donkey that was not allowing people to pass. He took out his 9mm and blow the donkey’s brains out. That’s what you do with excuses you destory them before they destroy you or God’s plan for you.

21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain,

nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship,

for salvation is of the Jews.

23 But the hour is coming,

and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit

and truth;

for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.

God cares nothing about beautiful and ornate and well functioning buildings - these are good things but not when they become more important than people. So in some churches the philsophy is guard the church from young people and the local community or where the asethtics and the architecture becomes more important than the function. This why the Puritans smashed the stained glass windows and tore out the statues because the good things had become god things.

But your car and your desk at work or the weight section of Lancaster House Hotel gym is just as sacred as this building. Worship is nothing to do with the form but the person that you worship (God), the way that you worship (the spirit - one that is set ablaze by the Holy Spirit not bored and indifferent or mechanical) and the way that you worship (its true: it’s biblical, it is as revealed, it is the kind of worship that God delights in).

Not only are there some who do not worship God as the all-powerful all-loving God of the Bible but there are those that do not worship Him with their hearts abalze and their Bibles open.

You might be someone with a limited emotional spectrum. Your steady Eddie, your cool, your controlled or your Spock your analytical and rational. Well do the things that stir your affections. Listen to the preachers, get the CDs of the songs be around the people who strangely warm your heart for the things of God. Sit at the front so you do not have to put off by others, remember God looks on the outward appearance and God judges the heart and that Church is a place for people in all places in their spiritual journey and none. In fact, let me deal with the flag waving issue. Personally it is not my thing. Unless we could make them look like they belong to an underground resistance movement or military unit but can I tell you something it moves the very heart of God so you wave those bad boys.

Or you might be someone who is content to have a shallow and superficial faith. For goodness sake open your bible. Learn, develop, grow, take notes, ask questions, read, watch listen, study. The more you get to know of God the more your heart stretches and burns for Him. Theology is not the enemy of passion but the enemy of ignorance, immaturity and ineffectiveness. The more you love Him the more you will want to know Him.

24 God is Spirit,

and those who worship Him must worship in spirit

and truth.”

25 The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”

26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”

Not only where the Jews waiting for the Messiah but so where the Samaritans in the same way that Buddhists are searching from freedom from suffering (well Jesus gives life and life in its abundance), in the same way the philosophy student is looking for truth (He is the way, the truth and the life) and in the same way that the work-a-holic financial investor is looking for peace (He is the Prince of Peace) and He comes not only to her but to you but what will you do with His offer. Will you tear it up and throw it in His face or will you sign on the dotted line?

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pamphletstoinspire · 7 years

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Psalm 29 - Interpreted

Daily Plenary Indulgence

Per Vatican II, one of the ways to gain a daily plenary indulgence is to read Scripture for ½ hour per day. For Pamphlets to Inspire (PTI), the Scripture readings that inspire us the most are the Psalms. Reading the Psalms and understanding their meaning can sometimes be challenging. In an attempt to draw more individuals to not only read the Psalms, but to understand their meaning, PTI has found an analysis of their meaning by St. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. The method that will be employed is to list the chapter and verse, and then provide an explanation of that verse. Your interest in this subject will determine how often we will chat about this topic. The Bible that will be used is the official Bible of the Catholic Church and used by the Vatican, that is, the Douay-Rheims or Latin Vulgate version.

David praiseth God for his deliverance, and His merciful dealings with him.

1. I will extol thee, O Lord, for thou hast upheld me: and hast not made my enemies to rejoice over me.

1. “I will extol thee, O Lord, for thou hast upheld me: and hast not made my enemies to rejoice over me.” David, now established on his throne, after fortifying the citadel of Sion, and the city having been called after his name, finally, having built a most magnificent palace, and acknowledging God to be the author of so many favors, offers him the tribute of praise, saying, “I will extol thee, O Lord.” Exalted as thou art incapable of being more exalted; yet, to those who are not so fully cognizant of thy greatness, I will, as far as in me lies, by my preaching, “extol thee,” so that all may acknowledge thee to be the supreme Lord of all. “For thou hast upheld me,” raised me from nothing, from the lowest depths, even to the throne of thy kingdom. You have extolled me and I will therefore extol you; attributing my exaltation, not to my own merits, but to your greatness; you have exalted me, and I will humble myself in order to exalt you. “And hast not made my enemies to rejoice over me.” The consequence of such exaltation was, that his enemies, who were most numerous, and were for a long time seeking his death, got no reason to be glad of his death, which they most eagerly looked for; but, on the contrary, had much source of grief at his exaltation, which with all their might they sought to obstruct. In a prophetic sense, David speaks in the person of Christ; and of all the elect in general, as well as in particular, who, he foresaw, would be exalted in the kingdom of heaven, himself included. “I will extol thee, O Lord, for thou hast upheld me;” that means, how truly, O Lord, internally and externally will I extol thee, for my exaltation has led me to some idea of your immense sublimity; for, from the lowest earth, from the depth of misery, from mortality itself, thou hast raised me up and upheld me to the glory of resurrection and immortality, and thus to a heavenly and everlasting kingdom. “And hast not made my enemies to rejoice over me;” you have not indulged them in their impious desires of effecting my eternal destruction, a thing ardently sought for by the evil spirits in this and in the other world. The Jews, it is true, rejoiced when they exhorted the sentence of death against Christ from Pilate; and the wicked not infrequently rejoice when they can deprive their neighbors of their properties, their riches, or even their lives; but their joy is short-lived, followed by interminable punishment, so that it may rather be called the dream of joy than the reality of it.

2. O Lord my God, I have cried to thee, and thou hast healed me.

2. “O Lord my God, I have cried to thee, and thou hast healed me." No explanation given.

3. Thou hast brought forth, O Lord, my soul from hell: thou hast saved me from them that go down into the pit.

3. “Thou hast brought forth, O Lord, my soul from hell: thou hast saved me from them that go down into the pit.” The prophet brings to his memory how he was angustiated, previous to his getting possession of the kingdom, to show how true was his statement, that “His enemies were not made to rejoice over him.” “O Lord my God, I have cried to thee;” when I was in frequent danger of death, and sick at heart in consequence, you, O my God, have healed me, and so delivered me from impending death, as if you had taken me out of hell itself. “Thou hast saved me from them that go down into the pit;” means the very same, but that it is a little more obscure. The meaning is: You have raised me from the dead, which may with propriety be applied to David, who had suffered such persecution, and was driven to death’s door thereby. In a prophetic sense, it applies literally to Christ. “Thou hast healed me” of the wounds I suffered on the cross. “Brought my soul from hell,” from Limbo, and “saved me” by my resurrection. All the saints can equally exclaim on the last day, “Thou hast healed me,” most completely, in soul and body; “And brought my soul from hell,” for you have not let me into hell of the damned. “And saved me from them that go down into the pit,” inasmuch as you have given me salvation, and life everlasting. The same idea turns up in Psalm 102, “Who healeth all thy diseases who redeemeth thy life from destruction.”

4. Sing to the Lord, O ye his saints: and give praise to the memory of his holiness.

4. “Sing to the Lord, O ye his saints; and give praise to the memory of his holiness.” Looking at the innumerable temporal blessings David had received from God, and the everlasting blessings his saints had received, he thinks it unbecoming in himself alone to thank God, and therefore invites all who had received similar favors to join him in praise. “Give praise to the memory of his holiness” means praise his holy memory; just as “in his holy mountain” means the mountain of his holiness, by a Hebraism that uses the genitive for the ablative case; and the meaning is: Praise him, praise his holy memory, because his remembrance of you was a holy one, a pious one, a paternal one, bent on rewarding you instead of punishing you. And, in truth, it is owing to God’s great goodness alone, which we should ever gratefully bear in mind, that while we, who always need his help, so often forget him, he, who wants nothing from us, should constantly bear us in mind; which he did in a most singular manner, when he sent his only Son to become our Savior; and, therefore, no wonder David should exclaim, in Psalm 8, “What is man that thou are mindful of him?”

5. For wrath is in his indignation; and life in his good will. In the evening weeping shall have place, and in the morning gladness.

5. “For wrath is in his indignation; and life in his good will. In the evening weeping shall have place, and in the morning gladness.” He assigns a reason for having said that the holy recollection of God ought to be praised, because when God punishes us, he does so by reason of the “indignation” one’s sins provoke, that is, through a strict sense of justice; but in other respects, in his will and election it is to us life, not punishment. By anger then, we understand punishment and chastisement, called anger from its proceeding from anger. By indignation, is to be understood, according to Saint Basil, the just judgment of God, “In the evening, weeping shall have place, and in the morning, gladness.” He proves that God’s anger towards the elect is only temporary, because to the lamentation produced by castigation and penance, joy will immediately succeed; and praise and thanksgiving is always connected with forgiveness and reconciliation, for between the evening and morning, that is, between day and night, nothing intervenes. Observe the propriety of attributing grief to the night, joy to the day, because, when we fall into sin, the light of divine grace abandons us; when we get to be reconciled, it comes back to us. Again, our passage through this world, in which we are mourning for our sins, groaning and sighing for our true country, heaven, is our night, in which we have no glimpse of God, the sun of justice; but the sun of justice; but the life to come, which 1 Peter 1, describes as one in which we shall “Rejoice with an unspeakable and glorified joy,” will be our day, because we shall see God face to face. This was fulfilled to the letter in Christ, who in the evening died in pain and suffering, in the morning rose in triumph and joy.

6. And in my abundance I said: I shall never be moved.

6. “And in my abundance I said: I shall never be moved.” The alterations of anger and of life, of weeping and of gladness, alluded to in general by the Prophet in the preceding verses, are now explained in detail; the Prophet speaking sometimes in his own person, sometimes in that of the elect. First, speaking of himself, he says, that previous to his being put over the kingdom, such was his wealth, and in such peace did he possess it, that he thought his happiness should be everlasting. He would appear to allude to the time when, after having slain Goliath, he was in the highest favor with the king, the king’s son, and the whole mass of the people, to such an extent, that he was elected to be a tribune, and got the king’s daughter in marriage; and of that time he says, “In my abundance I said:” when I was so fortunate, and had such an abundance of everything, “I shall never be moved.” My happiness seems so firmly established that it must be everlasting.

7. O Lord, in thy favor, thou gavest strength to my beauty. Thou turned away thy face from me, and I became troubled.

7. “O Lord, in thy favor, thou gavest strength to my beauty. Thou turned away thy face from me, and I became troubled.” He assigns a reason for his having said, “I shall never be moved;” because you, O my God, givest “strength,” nerve, and power, “to my beauty,” to my happiness; “in thy favor,” because such was your will, wish, and decree. “Thou turned away thy face from me, and I became troubled.” Now come the reverses. In the midst of all the aforesaid happiness, “thou turned away thy face from me;” you allowed me to incur the king’s displeasure, “and I became troubled,” suffered banishment, had to fly, ran several risks of death, and many other misfortunes. All these risks and dangers are more applicable, however, to the elect, in their troubles and peregrinations here below. Any one of the elect can justly say: In my abundance, that is, while God favored me with much grace, and his spiritual favors, I said I will never be moved. So said Peter, one of his principal elect, when he said, “even though I should die with thee, I will not deny thee.” “O Lord, in thy favor thou gavest strength to my beauty;” that is, my strength was not my own but yours; for the whole beauty of my soul had its rise from the light of your justice and wisdom, and was kept up and maintained by your assistance. “You turned your face away from me.” To punish my presumption, you abandoned me, left me to myself; and, at once, I collapsed, fell, and “became troubled.” As regards Christ, these verses will apply to him, speaking in the person of his Church, his members, or even as speaking in his own person. For, as he said on the cross, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” so he could say, “Thou turned thy face away from me,” not because he was an enemy, but because he seemed to desert him in his passion; and then the meaning would be: “And in my abundance I said:” My human nature, having been endowed with the choicest graces, far and away beyond any other mortal, inasmuch as it was hypostatically united to God, the fountain of all grace, said, “I shall never be moved:” nothing can harm, hurt, or disturb me. “O Lord, in thy favor,” that means, to my beauty and my excellence, already superior to that of all men and angels, you have added strength and power; that is, the indissoluble tie of the Hypostatic Union, and that “in thy favor,” which no one can resist. “Thou turned away thy face from me.” Notwithstanding that indissoluble tie of the Hypostatic Union, and without injuring “the strength of my beauty,” you “turned away your face from me:” from defending me, but it was for the salvation of mankind; and you wished the cup of my most bitter passion not to pass from me, that I may free mankind; therefore, “I became troubled:” began to fear, to grow weary, and to be sad, and I exclaimed, “My soul is sorrowful unto death.” We are not to infer from this that Christ had to suffer anything he did not expect, or of which he had no previous knowledge, for nothing could have injured or have harmed him against his own will; but he suffered the persecutions freely, and thus “troubled” himself. And, as Christ said to his Father, “Thou turned away thy face from me,” so he could say to himself, I have turned away the face of my divinity from helping my humanity, and thus willingly and knowingly I have been troubled.

8. To thee, O Lord, will I cry; and I will make supplication to my God.

8. “To thee, O Lord will I cry; and I will make supplication to my God. No explanation given.

9. What profit is there in any blood, whilst I go down to corruption? Shall dust confess to thee, or declare thy truth?

9. “What profit is there in my blood, whilst I go down to corruption? Shall dust confess to thee, or declare thy truth?” These expressions are to be taken in the past, and not in the future tense; a thing not uncommon among the Hebrews. David then, in a historic sense, states that, in the time of his tribulation and danger, he cried out to the Lord, and, among other things, threw out to him, that his death would be of no use to the Lord, for, once dead, he could praise him no more. “To thee, O Lord, will I cry.” When I became troubled, by the aversion of your face from me, I did not despair of your mercy, but “I cried out to thee;” and in terms of deprecation said, “What profit is there in my blood?” That is, what will the spilling of my blood profit you, when my enemies shall have put me to death, and I shall have come to rottenness in the grave? Dust can offer you no tribute of praise. According to a prophetic and higher interpretation it means that Christ, in his passion, cried out and prayed to the Lord, which was fulfilled at the time he, according to the apostle, Heb. 5, “With a strong cry and tears, offered up prayers and supplications to him that was able to save him from death.” It was at that time he said, “What profit is there in my blood whilst I go down to corruption?” That is, how will my spilling my blood on the cross conduce to the glory of God or the salvation of mankind, if my body like that of all other mortals, is to rot and perish in the grave? For, as the apostle says, 1 Cor. 15, “If Christ be not risen again your faith is vain;” and Christ himself could not have returned to announce God’s truth to his apostles; nor could poor mortals, who are but dust and ashes, become spiritual, become children of God; to confess to him, and announce his truth to others, that is, the justice and the fidelity of God. These words may be applied to each of the elect, who, touched with sorrow for having fallen into sin, cried out to God for pardon, that they may be able to confess to him, and announce to other sinners how true he is to his promises.

10. The Lord hath heard, and hath had mercy on me: the Lord became my helper.

10. “The Lord hath heard, and hath had mercy on me: the Lord became my helper.” This verse clearly shows that the preceding verses should have been understood in the past instead of the future tense. The Prophet asserts here, both in his own person, that of Christ, and that of the elect, that his cry was heard by God.

11. Thou hast turned for me my mourning into joy: thou hast cut my sackcloth, and hast compassed me with gladness:

11. “Thou has turned for me my mourning into joy: thou hast cut my sackcloth, and hast compassed me with gladness:” Here is the effect of his having been heard. David, from a wretched exile, becomes a powerful king. Christ rises from the dead, thus gaining a victory over death itself. Every one of the elect, on arriving at their heavenly kingdom from this valley of tears, can most justly exclaim, “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into joy, thou hast cut my sackcloth, and hast compassed me with gladness.” You have changed my garb of mourning into that of joy, and you have not taken it simply off, but “hast cut” it, entirely destroyed it, as a sign that I am not to put it on again. The “sackcloth” means that wretched garb of mortality and misery that has been entirely destroyed, of no longer use to the saints, much less to Christ, who, “Rising from the dead, dies no more.”

12. To the end that my glory may sing to thee, and I may not regret: O Lord my God, I will give praise to thee forever.

12. “To the end that my glory may sing to thee, and I may not regret: O Lord my God, I will give praise to thee forever.” The final end of the glory of Christ and his saints is the praise of God: “Blessed are those who dwell in thy house, forever and ever they will praise thee.” Let my glory, then, not my groans, for fear of death or of sin, sing to thee.

End of Psalm 29

#psalm 29

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celticnoise · 5 years

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Yesterday, there was a painfully funny wee demonstration outside the City Chambers in George Square. It was by an organisation calling itself – and no joke folks – Scottish Protestants Against Discrimination.

Catchy name, and if it was Scottish Protestants actually protesting against discrimination in general I’d have been awed at their sense of civic duty and their astounding, perhaps even courageous, self-awareness. But of course, it wasn’t that at all.

These folks were protesting against what they perceive to be anti-Protestant discrimination in this city and in Scotland at large.

They are so much like the Trump supporters who believe that their country – which is ruled by a fat white bigot who looks and sounds just like many of them do – has been stolen from them that it makes you want to cry real tears.

Of laughter. At their complete lack of comprehension.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Peepul had a swagger about them. When they marched in July with pride and a sense of their place in the world.

When I was in my twenties I used to take a spell every weekend of the big Glasgow Green march on the door at the Tolbooth Bar down at the Gallowgate; the atmosphere was always tense, but one year it got particularly ugly. So a group of the regulars had a sit-down and decided to take some of the sting out of the following one by throwing a beach party.

As so it was that as they went by that day the following year blasting out their songs of hate the pub was filled with people in sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts, singing The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love. It remains one of the best days I’ve ever had.

Because it was the day I realised that everything they believed in was ridiculous, and that’s how we’d made it look.

I always knew there would be a day when they would realise that it was ridiculous too. What I hadn’t counted on was how tightly they’d hang onto all of it anyway.

That handful of loons who stood outside the Chambers yesterday believes this stuff, the most paranoid and out there of all the conspiracy theories. That this country, this religious state dominated by their church, ruled by their monarch and who’s customs are constructed around their faith, has been captured by the “enemy within.”

Catholics. Muslims. Jews. Non-Protestants.

Forget that all those groups, all those, people only have “rights” here at all because Britain is only a very minor form of theocracy instead of a fundamentalist regime.

Yet Britishness itself is wound tightly up in notions of the crown and the church; it’s unacknowledged, but it is there.

The whole backlash against immigrants is partially rooted in a fear of Islam, and when people on this island spoke of the immigrant, in a historical context, they meant the Irish. And they meant Catholics, although that, too, is barely acknowledged now.

I don’t know who those guys were who were standing outside the Chambers yesterday shouting about their rights and the people they think are taking them away, but I do know there were no Celtic fans amongst them. I do suspect they follow a certain Glasgow club, but it isn’t us. They are The Peepul after all, and that spells Sevco.

This stuff permeates their forums to a degree you have to see to believe. Follow Follow is a notorious breeding ground for this kind of lunacy. To be fair, there are a lot of their fans who know that lunacy is exactly what it is. But the idea has traction with more of their fans than is healthy for them.

And it is not receding, it is spreading.

One of the most effective campaigns that Celtic and its fans have ever embraced is the Glasgow’s Green And White one. It is stunningly effective in challenging the idea that this was ever a city with Ibrox at its centre. Not only is it an expression of our footballing supremacy, but of the Celtic family’s self-confidence and our central place in the power structures.

And that’s part of the problem for the Peepul.

Those goons who were outside the Chambers yesterday weren’t there because their own rights have been eroded; if you asked them they would not be able to give you a single example of how those rights have been eroded. They have not lost a single right they didn’t have ten years or twenty years ago. The difference is that we have a place at the top table now, and in some cases it’s our guys who are dominating the top table.

And they never expected that. Because they really do believe in this superiority of theirs, and so they perceive any power that isn’t their own as a threat. It means that the climate has turned against them, because how else could we assume any authority unless it had?

They are right of course; the world is changing and their stupid ideology is being driven back to the margins. Nobody outside their bubble cares about 17th century battlefields anymore. Scotland came within an ace of independence last time. Next time it will go the whole way, and that shatters the union from which all their authority comes in the first place.

Yet it is not the change to the cultural makeup of this country, and our strong position within it, or even the political situation going in a direction they don’t particularly like which has sparked their meltdown. That was prompted by what happened to their team.

In 2012, they saw something they never expected to see. They saw that their club, the monolith that had, in their eyes, dominated the game for decades, was teetering on the brink just a year after they believed a billionaire had bought it. And this was happening in front of a backdrop of Celtic sites telling them they were bleeding out and ready to go.

Worse followed. When their club was put into administration they expected Scottish society and the game itself to bail them out. When it became clear that the old certainties were done with and that the rest of the country was in no mood to help they realised that the miracle would have to come from within their own ranks. But that was okay, wasn’t it? Because surely the upper crust was just teeming with Real Rangers Men who would ride in to save the day?

Except nobody came.

And the closer they got to the edge of the abyss the more the realisation dawned that they really didn’t have the muscle they thought, or the wealthy friends. They realised that the state which they had worshiped was not sympathetic; worse, in fact, it was Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs which was holding the knife.

Nobody came.

Their club slipped into the grave and nobody came. The Real Rangers Men kept the money in their pockets as the ship went down, and even when it had sunk and all that was left was for someone to try and glue the broken pieces together it was a fly-by-night chancer named Green who came out of nowhere instead of “one of their own” who bought up the fragments and raised a club from them, with the Rangers name on it.

Evidence would later emerge which proved that he was a co-conspirator with Whyte, and in on the whole scam from the off, and it quickly became clear that he was a quick buck artist in and out for the money, filling his “big Yorkshire hands” with a fortune at their expense.

And all this had to be a conspiracy, right? This had to be a secret cabal working against them, a group of people dedicated to their overthrow, because the alternative was to understand that all their power had been illusory from the start. That their “greatness” was not an inherent thing but simply the larges of a bank and the ego of a chairman who had been able to indulge their whims and his own whilst that bank was giving him the money.

Because Rangers was more than a football club to them; it was the symbol of their supremacy, the clearest manifestation of their status as special. And if it could fall – and it did – then nothing they believed in was secure. Nothing they believed in was built on the foundations they had thought. They realised how weak they actually were.

And that is the feeling that drives them to their anger at the games, against their board, against the press, against the SFA, against all of Scottish football and, lately, against Scottish society itself. They burn with the knowledge that their arrogance and ego in the glory years turned people away from them. Their embrace of Britishness and militarism has never been tighter, even as the influence this country once had in the world recedes with every episode of Brexit: The Shit-Show that airs or is broadcast. And if their club can die, all of this can crumble.

Celtic is now the dominant footballing force in Scotland, and some of those who were telling them in 2012 that their club was on the brink of death have become prominent people on the media scene; you only have to look at the hatred the pour onto Angela Haggerty to see it. Some have gone on to be prominent on the political scene; the SNP earthquake followed on top of the independence referendum which they saw as another attack on their “way of life.” The bloggers have become so pre-eminent we’ve almost destroyed the mainstream media.

None of this happened by chance, but nor was it the conspiracy that they believe. Our people were once the put-upon and the frowned-upon and deliberately held back. The old “what school did you go to?” question was used to exclude us. But still we learned. We got education. We organised. We worked hard. All the rewards we have right now were earned.

They find that hardest to deal with of all.

As this season wears on you are going to see and hear more of this. The idea that we can reach eight in a row scares the Hell out of them, and beyond that they fear the ten and us going for the fabled “55” before the Ibrox operation gets there.

At the current rate it will take them about 55 years.

We can accomplish it in just six.

You can discuss this and and all the other stories by signing up at the Celtic Noise forum at the above link. This site is one of the three that has pushed for the forum and we urge all this blog’s readers to join it. Show your support for real change in Scottish football, by adding your voice to the debate.

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kathymommy · 7 years

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Be Prepared! (sermon)

No one can escape news about the myriad of natural disasters that have occurred over the last couple of months. Hurricane Harvey. Hurricane Irma. Hurricane Maria. Earthquakes in Mexico. Raging fires in the Western United States. And I’m not even talking about the horrific massacres, terror attacks, political upheaval, war, refugee displacements, contemporary genocide, and threats of thermonuclear war.

We see on television, and for some of us, first-hand, the devastation resulting from these disasters. Puerto Rico will be long gripped by its large-scale catastrophe. And as we observe people who have lost everything, we wonder how they’ll ever recover.

As we watch the news, trying to make sense out of what we see, at intervals we get advice or recommendations from experts on what we should do if such disasters should threaten us.

We’ve all seen these helpful hints. Social media is crawling with them. Some of them are probably pretty useful, depending on the circumstances.

Get plenty of fuel for your vehicle and (if you have one) your generator.

Fill your tub with water (or, rather, fill containers in the tub with water, or else it will probably leak down the drain).

Get out your shovels and ice melt before the snow starts.

Throw your outdoor furniture into your pool to secure it. This only works if you have a pool, I guess.

Keep an ax in your attic in case you need to chop through your roof.

Put your documents in your dishwasher! It’s waterproof (no, it’s not; don’t do it).

Have some cash on-hand in case the power is out for a while because ATMs need electricity.

Write identifying information on your arm with a Sharpie marker. It’s pretty grim to imagine a situation where this would be helpful to someone.

In addition to preparing for specific disasters, there’s readiness based upon simply being strong and resilient to begin with. This is especially important on community, institutional and government levels. To build sturdy, up-to-code structures (seismic considerations weren’t a part of building codes in New Jersey until 1974); to update old, fragile infrastructures (our local electric utility is in the midst of an reliability upgrade project); to budget funds for repairs and coping with loss of services (as our trustees have done with the last several years of snow removal estimates).

Another step to be taken in event of a looming crisis is to prepare a “go bag.” A “go-bag” should rightfully be called a “go-or-stay bag” because this is assembled in case you need to either evacuate or spend several days sheltering-in-place without your normal access to resources.

I have put together go-bags a time or two in my life. I did this for myself and children when Sandy approached five years ago. As I packed my go-bag, it was useful for me to think about what I felt I needed, if I could carry only one small bag, what I judged I could do without. What was important to our survival and comfort, and why were these things important? It was a valuable exercise.

Of course, it’s impossible to prepare for all emergencies, or combinations of disasters, but taking reasonable precautions to protect life, property and services is prudent.

Some in my family are pack rats. I am too, I admit. I can let-go of stuff I really don’t expect to use again, but it’s a little harder for some people to do that. A few years ago, my basement had a flood. And by flood, I mean raw sewage. And not the kind that leaks out from one’s own house, no. This was the kind that backs up from the town sewer under the street. It was most unpleasant. This disgusting flood affected three rooms in my basement, and, as I said, my family are pack-rats.

I guess you could say this was a mini-disaster. We had to throw-out lots of stuff. Or, rather, my daughter Susan and I did. Now, I have a confession to make. Lots of the stuff I threw away were things that I had wanted to get rid of for a long time, but certain pack-rat family members couldn’t bear to part with. Magically, several useless items, like a few old broken chairs I was never going to fix, somehow made it from other parts of the basement to the flooded rooms. And, somehow, they ended up on the floor. And, just those parts of the floor that were flooded. Oops. If there was a silver lining to this mini-disaster, it was that it gave me a perfect opportunity to dispose of surplus items...things that no longer served a positive purpose in my family’s life. Things that my family was holding on to for no good reason other than the fact that they had held onto them for a long time.

Today is Reformation Sunday, and, as anniversaries go, it’s a big one. Five hundred years ago, on All Saints Eve in 1517, Martin Luther reportedly hammered his “95 Theses” onto the church door in Wittenberg.

In traditional academic style, Luther invited, or perhaps demanded, a discussion about several practices of the church (and by church I mean the Roman Catholic Church, you know, “the” church in Western Europe in those days). Some of those practices included the long-established selling and buying of indulgences, or “forgiveness for a fee.” Other points concerned the Pope’s authority, issuance of writs of forgiveness, and, well, with 95 Thesis, there were many issues large and small.

Because the whole “indulgence” question was aimed at a very important part of the (then) Catholic Church’s economy (and prosperity), serious arguments against indulgences were also a serious threat to the Church’s financial status. I mean, somebody had to pay for all those big basilicas we like to visit in Europe. But, even more than the money, the status of the Church as the broker for salvation was called into question. And if salvation isn’t brokered by the Church, how would anybody be saved?

It was a radical concept when brought out for open debate. Questions and discontent had been simmering for years, but Luther’s arguments finally launched the upheaval that we call the Protestant Reformation.

Long-story-short: the Protestant Reformation was not just the great Catholic Church going through a change. Nor was it simply the church at a crossroads. No, the Protestant Reformation was a disaster for the Church. Luther’s movement broke Rome’s monopoly on Christianity in Western Europe.

Some would say that our own United Methodist Church is now at a crossroads. Though perhaps not as ultimately or as profoundly earth-shaking as the Protestant Reformation, I don’t think “at a crossroads” adequately describes our situation. I rather think the United Methodist Church is facing a more significant crisis.

In my opinion, our denomination is met with the challenge of negotiating our way through a flooded intersection. We can’t see where the lanes are, where the pavement is under the water, what kinds of hazards are lurking in our path. And, depending on how we proceed--and what may happen in an environment we can’t control--we’re about to slide into what could be a full-fledged disaster.

But Methodists have been there before. In 1844, the Methodists north and south separated for nearly a century because of disagreement over slavery; over Christians owning people as property.

Looking back, now, it seems absurd. How could our forebears not have seen their way through the flooded intersection that split them up and carried them away in different directions? I mean, isn’t it ridiculous that brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ would disagree over something so obviously abhorrent as slavery?

And then, in 1939, when the church “reunited,” it was only with abject segregation and the creation of a Central Jurisdiction made up of Methodists who happened to be black regardless of their location in the United States.

Aren’t we supposed to be the church of Christ where there is neither Greek nor Jew? In other words, distinctions of ethnicity or heritage shouldn’t matter, and most certainly shouldn’t be a barrier to the Kingdom of God. I mean, after all, the Kingdom of God has only one gatekeeper. Didn’t Martin Luther argue this 500 years ago? But it wasn’t until 1968 that this church in America officially desegregated as it formed the United Methodist Church we more-or-less know today.

So this morning, we can sit here, in our contemporary United Methodist Church, and feel a little smug that, although we’ve had our problems, we figured all that out, and have put all that close-minded slavery and racial segregation nonsense behind us. After all, “Open hearts, open minds, open doors.” Right?

Yet, here we are again; the denomination of the United Methodist Church, struggling with fundamental questions about justice, obedience and identity. Testing the waters at another flooded intersection.

Remember a little while ago I talked about tips for dealing with disasters? How, firstly, you could take specific steps to protect items which are valuable to you? And, secondly, how you could strengthen your overall resilience by building stronger structures and systems. And, lastly, when specific threats are identified--things like hurricanes or an out-of-control wildfire--you should assemble a “go-bag”?

Well, though all three of these approaches are features of disaster-preparedness, the last one, packing a “go bag” is, in a fundamental way, unique.

Think about it. The things we try to protect: our pictures. Our documents. Our antique furniture. The hymnals. The piano. The artifacts of our heritage, history and traditions. Our homes. Our comforts. Our rules. These things are important to us. And having those things be important to us is ok. It really is!

And maintaining a strong institution or home is important to protect not only our good stuff, but to serve our needs as we go about the work of being a family, a business, a church, a community; to get back-in-the-game as soon as possible. So we need insurance, good financial management, strong communication and support networks, and sturdy-up-to-code facilities.

But, as a church, do we ever think about our go-bag?

What do we bring when, the moment of cataclysmic disaster upon us, we can only bring what we can carry?

You remember the story of the Israelites leaving Egypt. They took all their stuff. They took the bones of Joseph. They plundered the Egyptians, taking gold and riches. And then they followed Moses out into the desert.

It wasn’t long before their trip started to look like a really bad idea. They cried-out, “This is a disaster! We’re going to starve here in the desert! We were better off as slaves in Egypt than dying in this wilderness!”

You know, the Israelites had protected their treasure, but hadn’t really thought about their go-bags. They started out okay--God had them make unleavened bread for the journey. But they weren’t prepared for the long haul in the wilderness.

Ultimately, God provided for their survival. But neither Joseph’s dead body, nor their gold and plunder, fed them when they were starving, or gave them drink as their parched, dry lips cracked for thirst. In fact, if you remember the story, knowing what they later did with all that gold, the Israelites would have been better off without it.

Christian churches sense a number of possible catastrophes looming. We feel the threat of our decreasing numbers. We feel the pressure of other religions and influences penetrating territory we assumed was “ours.” Traditionalists are alarmed at the cultural, linguistic and stylistic diversity carried to the table by people who do, at times, answer the call to follow Christ. We’d like to “make disciples of all the nations,” but we kind of want them to be folks just like us!

And, to bring some of this uncertainty and fear into focus, we United Methodists are in the midst of heated debates about the authority of the Book of Discipline and, in particular, denominational policies when it comes to questions about sexual identity. The waters are rising.

Maybe now is a good time to go through our metaphorical basement, asking: Are there things that Christian churches, and especially our denomination, are holding on to for no good reason other than the fact that we have held onto them for a long time?

And maybe it’s about time we look at why we’re maintaining strong, resilient institutions in the first place. Why do we have these practices, traditions, rules and structures? What and who is it that our church is serving? What is the point if we don’t have a clear understanding of what our mission is? At the end of the day, who is it that we’re here for?

And what about our go-bags? When faced with threats to survival, what does the church pack? What do you, in your heart, carry with you?

You see, this is why packing a go-bag requires a different approach than deciding what’s important to protect or save. We don’t put photo albums in our go-bags, right? We don’t try to bring our great-grandma’s best china to the hurricane shelter. We don’t bring our bookshelves. No. We try to provide protection for that stuff, yes. But do we grab those things when we are running out the door, perhaps fleeing for our lives? Or when huddling together as the winds rage around us?

No. The only things that should be in a go-bag are things we need to live, to cope, to provide minimum but required comfort in times of stress. It boils down to this: our go-bag has one purpose only: to keep us alive.

So, maybe the church is perhaps facing a crossroads, but, what if it turns out, this crossroads is actually a raging, flooded intersection? What will the church grab hold of as it runs for its life? What will you carry for your church? And, just as importantly, what will you leave behind?

Let’s not wait for disaster to strike before we affirm what we’ll put in our go-bag. And let’s realize that it is vital to not confuse our legitimate and reasonable attachment to valued artifacts of our lives in the church with what actually gives us life.

And what gives the church life? Mercy. Compassion. Justice. These things are found in the love of Jesus Christ as shared among each other, with our neighbors, and all of creation.

You see, whatever else we have or don’t have, all we really need to hold on to is Jesus.

Because it is wholly, and only, in Jesus, who gives us life, that we live.

### Message delivered to First United Methodist Church, October 29, 2017, for Laity Sunday. Copyright Kathy Mulholland 2017

#BePrepared #UnitedMethodists #laitysunday

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